By BristolBound

*This BDSM fantasy is a work of fiction.  All characters are adults*

Chapter 1: Half Time

I’d like to say I saw it coming. I’m a clever lad, I’m on track for a 2:1 and have a reputation for quick banter, and I still managed to talk myself into the most humiliating hour of my life so far with one badly judged joke.

We were 1-1 against Durham at half time, and the changing room smelled like it always does: Deep Heat, wet grass, and eleven guys’ worth of sweat soaking into the walls. It was one of those old pavilion rooms, long and echoey, with benches round the edge and a steel support pole bang in the middle, floor to ceiling, painted the same institutional green as everything else. Somebody’s kit bag was hanging off a hook, and a couple of spare hockey sticks were resting on the benches.

Callum, our captain, had pulled me off with ten minutes to go before the break. My touch had gone to shit, he was right, and I knew it. “Second half you’re out, Eric,” he said, not unkindly. “Go and warm down in the shower. We’ll talk tactics.”

So I did. I stood under the hottest water the pavilion could manage, which wasn’t very, and sulked in a dignified way. Through the wall I could hear Callum drawing on the whiteboard and Dev arguing about the left channel. By the time I came back out with my towel round my waist, they were nearly done, and the lads were retaping sticks and neck-deep in the post-mortem.

I should have kept my mouth shut. But I was still sore about being dropped. Not angry, he was right, I knew he was right, just sore, in the way that wants to poke something to see if it gives. So instead I flopped onto the bench beside my bag, stretched out my legs and said, “Honestly, lads, I’m fine with it. Nice quiet second half. Feet up. Might just have a nice slow wank here while you lot run yourselves into the ground.”

I expected a groan. I got a groan. Jonno threw a sock at me. But I wasn’t exactly subtle about my reputation. I’m the out one, I’m the one who’s been dropping hints about rope and chains into the banter since freshers’ week, and the team had gradually, affectionately, decided to find that funny. And then Tom, who was rooting through my bag for the tape I’d nicked, went quiet and said, “Oh. Oh. Lads.”

He held up the handcuffs.

I’d forgotten them completely. They lived in a shoebox under my bed with the rest of my kit, and I’d taken them out for a solo Saturday night three weeks ago and done a lazy repack into the side pocket of my bag. Proper ones too, not the fluffy sort: steel, heavy, double-locking, the kind that come with two tiny keys on a ring.

“Mate,” said Jonno, with enormous joy, “why have you got these?”

“Those are… for a project.”

“A project.”

“It’s not what it looks like.”

“It looks like you were planning to wank in here while we do all the work,” Dev said, “and you’ve brought equipment.”

“I was joking!”

“Callum,” Tom said, still holding them up. “Is it fair that Eric gets to relax while we work?”

And Callum, God love him, tilted his head like he was giving it serious thought. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think it is.”

I know exactly what the next bit looked like from the outside. I could have stood up. I’m five foot ten, nearly eleven, and I play centre-half. They’d have let me go. What actually happened was that Jonno and Dev took an arm each, quite gently, steered me up off the bench, and walked me across the room, and I let them.

I protested all the way. That’s the honest bit. “Lads. Lads, it was a joke. Seriously, come on.”

“Was it fair, though?” Callum asked, coming up beside us. “Your joke. Be honest.”

“It was a bit unfair.”

“A bit.”

“It was unfair,” I admitted, and somewhere in the back of my head a small, traitorous voice said oh, you are going to enjoy this, aren’t you. “Okay? It was unfair.”

“And you want us to win.”

“Of course I want us to win.”

“So you’ll do what helps the team,” said Callum, “and the best thing you can do is wait right here.”

“Here” was the pole.

Jonno pulled my arms round behind it, one on each side, and I felt cold steel against my spine through the towel, then cold steel at my wrists. Callum had the cuffs. He stopped before he clicked them shut, and I want to be clear that he did this, because it matters to me. He leaned in close, so close I could smell the gum he’d been chewing, and said, very low, so only I could hear: “I was going to ask if you were good, but I think I’ve got my answer,” as his eyes fell to an increasing bulge in the front of my towel.

I looked at him, and all my bluster kind of dropped through the floor. I could have protested, but I didn’t.

“I’m good,” I said. It came out a bit hoarse.

He nodded once, and smiled the smallest smile, and click.

It’s a particular sound, a cuff going on. People who haven’t done it think of it as one noise, but it’s actually three: the ratchet whisper as the arm swings through, the little bite as it tightens, and then the lock itself, a clean, final tick. He did the left one. I heard it, and felt it, and then a few seconds later I heard the second one, and the whole sequence ran again, and by the end of it my wrists were pinned behind the pole, locked together on the far side, and the steel was cold enough to make me hiss.

I tested them. Obviously I did. I pulled forward and the chain snapped taut against the pole, and nothing moved. Not a millimetre.

Fuck.

“Comfortable?” Dev said.

“Not remotely.”

“Good,” said Jonno. “That’s the idea.”

They were all gathered round now, a half-circle of muddy kit and amused faces, and I noticed with a drop in my stomach that the towel was the only thing between me and the whole team’s attention. And not even much of it, because my towel was the cheap thin one, and my body hadn’t got the memo that this was meant to be embarrassing.

“He’s enjoying this,” said Tom, with great and unsurprised interest.

“I’m not.”

“Your face is doing a thing.”

“My face is doing nothing.”

“Eric,” said Callum, “is this the bit where you tell me you’re not into it?”

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

Matt, who hadn’t said a word until then, reached out with two fingers, took hold of the corner of my towel, and drew it away. It dropped to the floor with a soft, wet slap.

I’d been naked in front of these lads a hundred times. More than that. Every Saturday, every Wednesday, every away game, we shower together, we change together, we’ve seen each other at our best and worst. I’d never thought twice about it. There are lads my age who’ll show their abs to four thousand strangers online and then get changed under a towel in front of their own team, and I’ve never understood them. It’s a body. Mine worked, I was happy with it, and I’d no more hide it from the lads than I’d hide my elbows. But this wasn’t that. Standing naked because you’re about to get dressed is one thing. Standing naked because someone’s taken your clothes, with your hands locked behind you and nowhere to put your eyes, is something else. The air felt different on me. The room felt bigger. Every one of them was looking, and I couldn’t turn away, couldn’t do a single thing about it.

And I was hard. Properly, undeniably hard, standing straight up in front of eleven guys in muddy kit, with nothing to hide behind.

Naked in that room was nothing. Hard was the problem.

Nobody laughed straight away. That was almost worse. There was a pause, a real one, and then Jonno let out this long, delighted breath and said, “Oh, mate.”

“Shut up,” I said, but my voice cracked on it.

“Right,” said Callum, grinning now, properly, the way he does when he scores. “We’ve got a second half to play. Eric, you stay put and have a think about your attitude.” He patted my cheek, once, lightly, and I swear my cock jumped. “We’ll be back.”

They went out in a clatter of studs. The door banged shut. The room went quiet.

Here’s what goes through your head.

First: this is fine. Callum would stop it in a heartbeat if I kicked off.

Second: oh, fuck.

I said it out loud, to the empty room. “Fuck.” Then again, louder, because it felt good to hear it. “Fuck!” It bounced off the green walls and came back at me, and my cock, which had flagged a little in the commotion, stood up like it had heard its name.

I pulled. Harder. The cuffs bit into my wrists and the pole didn’t care. I tried to bring my knees together to cover myself, and that was no use either. My cock bobbed in the cold air, hard and flushed and entirely unashamed, and the more I fidgeted, the more aware of it I became.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all that pulling, it came back to me that I did have an exit. I could shout. Eleven lads were twenty yards away, and someone would come.

And then whoever came would see me like this: hard, and cuffed to a pole, with an “it’s not what it looks like” that nobody on earth would believe. One of the lads, pulled off the pitch mid-match to sort me out. Or worse, someone who wasn’t. I knew, the way you know your shoe size, that I’d rather stay here than be found.

No shouting for help.

Because I do this. Not this, but the first half of it. I’ve been tying myself up for pretty much as long as I’ve been wanking, starting with a dressing-gown cord in halls, knotting my wrists and then working out how to get out of them, then climbing rope and later chains from the hardware shop, and I’m good at it now. I have a system. A block of ice in a plastic cup, with the key frozen into the middle. Depending on the room, I get an hour, maybe ninety minutes, before the water drips through and the key drops into my waiting, desperate hand. Spare key taped under the shelf. Blunt-nosed shears within arm’s length. I test the exit every single time before I trust the rest.

It’s careful. It’s safe. It’s also, if I’m honest, a bit like doing a fire drill for fun. I can lie there in agonies of helplessness, shaking, begging the ceiling, and some small, smug part of my brain is standing to one side, saying forty minutes left, mate, it’s fine. The timer is mine, the ice is mine, even the panic is mine, because I set it up.

There was no ice here. There was no spare key. The only clock in the room was a game of hockey I couldn’t see, being played by people who had the keys in their pockets. If I wanted out, I’d have to ask, with my own voice, in front of eleven people, and they’d decide whether I was ready to be released.

I had never been so exposed. And it had never felt so right.

It was like putting down a bag I’d carried for years without noticing the weight. My heart was going, my mouth was dry, my stomach was somewhere near my knees, and under all of it, steady and warm, a voice that said there you are. There you are.

I tried to tell myself it was the cold. It wasn’t the cold.

And then a worse thought, sidling up while I wasn’t looking. Why did you say it? Not the joke; anyone might have made the joke. Why say it there, in a towel, to Callum, ten minutes after he’d dropped me, in that voice? I’d been sulking, and I’d pushed, the way you lean on a door to find out whether it’s really locked. The cuffs, honestly, I’d forgotten. But I hadn’t forgotten who was in the room.

I decided not to know the answer.

I could hear the game starting through the walls: the whistle, the shouts, distant and tinny. A cheer went up and I had no idea whose. I realised I was straining for it, listening, desperate, as though my own fate was out there on the grass. Which, according to Callum, it sort of was.

You want us to win.

I did. That was the awful, perfect, humiliating part. I wanted them to win, and I was stuck here, and somewhere out there the whole team was running harder because of me.

Then there was Monday. That was what really did it. Not the steel. When I’m tied up at home, nobody knows. It’s a secret I carry back out into the day. This would be seen. These were people whose faces I’d see in lectures, in the pub, in the showers, who now knew exactly what I looked like at my most helpless, and who would pass me in the corridor and say alright, Eric? and mean something else. They hadn’t reacted to my erection with more than curiosity and merriment. I’d been scared they’d run a mile, but instead here I was.

My shoulders ached already, where my arms were pinned back. Every small movement made the cuffs tick and rattle against the pole, a tiny reminder. I’d go quiet and stare at the door, and then my body would remind me where I was, and I’d pull again, just to feel it hold.

I don’t know how long it was, in the end. Twenty minutes, thirty. Long enough that the cold went out of the cuffs, and time started doing laps. At home, the time is the point. Here, it was the one thing I couldn’t see, and the not-seeing turned my whole head into one long, low hum of wait. I stopped being able to tell whether I wanted the door to open or not. At one point I heard footsteps outside and my whole body locked up, heart hammering, and then they passed, and I let out a breath that was half relief and half something a lot more disgraceful.

I was hard for nearly all of it. I’d go soft for a minute, and then the whole situation would crash back over me, and there I’d be again.

When they came back, they came back loud.

I heard it from the corridor first: the shouting, the chanting, somebody singing something filthy about Durham. The door banged open and in they poured, red-faced and soaked with rain and absolutely buzzing.

“Four-one!” Jonno bellowed. “Four-one, Eric!”

“We battered them,” said Dev. “Second half was unreal.”

“Hat-trick for Callum,” Tom added, “and he got the last one with this massive grin on his face, and you know why?”

“Why?”

“Because he was thinking about you, mate,” said Tom, delighted. “Honest to God. We all were. It was the best motivation I’ve ever had, knowing you were stuck back here like that.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I’m not sure what you do when eleven men tell you your humiliation won them a game. I said, “Glad I could help,” and it came out about ten times shakier than I wanted.

They didn’t let me go. Obviously they didn’t. They stripped, they showered, they laughed and sang and flicked towels, all within about six feet of me, and I stood there, still locked to the pole, still naked, still very obviously interested, while eleven wet, naked, victorious men ignored me with extreme thoroughness. I watched them. I couldn’t not. And every time someone glanced my way, I felt it all over, like a hand.

It took ages. They took their time getting dressed, fully, down to the hoodies. Callum even did up his shoelaces slowly, looking at me, until I wanted to scream.

Only once the last of them was done did he finally pick up the key.

“Turn round,” he said.

I turned as much as I could. He unlocked the left cuff, and then the right, and the blood rushed back into my hands like fire. I brought my arms round in front of me, and they were stiff and heavy and tingling, and my wrists had two red bands on them that I knew would last till tomorrow. I realised, rubbing them, that I’d been smiling for a while.

“Good boy,” Callum said, quietly, so only I could hear. “You alright?”

“Yeah.” I breathed out. “Yeah I am.”

“Good.”

Then he tossed something at me. I caught it on reflex, and looked down.

A jockstrap. Mine, from the bottom of my bag.

“Bus leaves in five,” said Callum. “Put it on.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Callum, it’s November.”

“You’ll live,” he said, and smirked, and walked out.

Riding home on a minibus with the rest of the lads is one thing. Riding home with a jockstrap on, and nothing else, and nothing in your lap to hide behind, is quite another. They’d taken the rest of my clothes, kit bag included. I only found that out when I looked for them. Every single one of the lads had a perfectly innocent expression and absolutely no idea where any of it had gone.

I sat at the back. Somebody started a sing-song. Somebody else passed me a can. And the whole way home, as the lights of the A1 slid past the window and the heater ticked and the guys got more and more rowdy, I could feel the pouch of that jock against me, and the cold leather of the seat, and every time the bus turned a corner I’d feel myself harden a bit more.

Just before my stop, Callum reached across from the seat beside mine and put my front-door key in my hand, on its loop of string, without a word. It was the only thing they’d left me to hold on to, and I held on to it like a ticket.

They dropped me off at the end of my road, where the bus always stops. The door hissed open. Tom leaned forward from his seat and shouted, “See you Monday, Eric! We’ll look after your kit bag for you!” and there was a roar of laughter behind him.

I stepped down onto the pavement. The cold hit me. The minibus pulled away, and the last thing I saw through the rear window was a row of grinning faces, and Callum, at the back, lifting one hand in a slow, lazy wave.

And then I was alone on the street, in a jockstrap, with a hundred and fifty metres of Newcastle pavement between me and my front door.

I took a breath, and I walked.

It’s not far. I’d done it a thousand times. But I’d never done it with my arse out and my breath smoking in the streetlight, and every step felt like a small, shameful decision. The first forty metres were fine. A car went by and I didn’t look up. The cold bit my thighs, my shoulders, the backs of my knees, and my cock strained against the thin pouch, hard as it had been all afternoon.

Then I heard voices.

Round the corner by the chippy: a group, loud, laughing, coming my way. Lads, six or seven, on a Saturday night out. I did the only thing a rational man could do. I dived sideways behind the big green bin outside the vet’s, and crouched in the cold, heart hammering, in a jockstrap, behind a bin.

They passed about four feet away. One of them was telling a story about a kebab. I could smell the vodka on them. I held my breath, and I stayed perfectly still, and I thought, with the particular clarity of the very cold and very hard: this is the stupidest thing I have ever done.

And, God help me, I was thoroughly enjoying myself.

They’d nearly gone past when someone said, “Hang on.”

The laughter stopped. “Is that… is there someone behind the bin?”

“Don’t be weird, Jack.”

“There is. Oh my God. Hello?”

There’s no dignity in that. I stood up. I did it slowly, and a torch from somebody’s phone swung across and found me, and for a second the whole street went completely silent. As a body, I had no complaints. As an explanation, it needed work.

“Alright,” I said.

“Oh my God,” said Jack.

“Rag week,” I said. “Hockey. Lost a bet.”

There was a pause, and then somebody wheezed, and then they were all howling, a loud, warm, hysterical drunken noise, and a lad in a Newcastle shirt actually bent over and held his knees. “Mate,” he gasped. “Mate. You’re in a jockstrap. It’s, like, two degrees.”

“I’m aware.”

“We need a photo,” said Jack, already lifting his phone. “Please. Please. It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

“No,” I said, quite fast. “No. Absolutely not. Nothing with my face.”

“We won’t put it anywhere!”

“You will.”

“We won’t tag you.”

I was shaking. Not just from the cold. A little group of strangers was looking at me, close, bright-eyed, delighted, and I was standing in the dark in a jockstrap with every nerve in my body awake. And the thing I wanted most in the world, absurdly, shamefully, was to say yes.

“Face out of it,” I said. “Neck down.”

“Deal!”

They arranged me against the vet’s wall like a prize. The flash went off twice, white and blinding, and somebody said “Legend” in a voice full of admiration, and somebody else said “He’s going to freeze,” and somebody gave me a very tender pat on the shoulder, like you would a horse.

“Thanks, mate,” said the one in the Newcastle shirt. “You’ve made my night.”

“Happy to help,” I said, because my mouth was no longer entirely in my control.

They went off down the road, laughing, scrolling through the pictures, and I stood there for a long moment under the streetlight, with my heart going. Then I walked the last sixty metres at something close to a sprint, and fumbled the key at the lock with shaking fingers, and knew, absolutely knew, that someone I’d never met now had a photograph of me. And that on Monday I would see all of those other faces again.

I couldn’t wait.

To be continued …

Metal would like to thank the author, BristolBound, for this story and welcome him to the Prison Library