Mittens

My name is Nina Bailey, and for the past few years I've had a growing crush on my best friend, Samantha. This is the story of how we became lovers, after a tipsy conversation in which I revealed a little too much about my bedroom habits - but that's not the interesting part.

I should tell you that Samantha is the only real, actual, no-kidding-around genius that I've ever known. She's an electronics engineer by day, mad tinkerer and occasional inventor by night - a bespectacled, crazy-haired, absent-minded scatterbrain whose house smells of solder and stray voltage. She is beautiful, intimidatingly intelligent, unnervingly strong, and perhaps more than a little eccentric. She is in love with me, and wants to do whatever will make me happy.

I know, right? Lucky Nina, smug and grinning. But wait - it gets better. And a good bit weirder, too.

What makes me happy is physical and psychological torture. I love to be scared, bared, smitten, bitten, stripped, whipped, deprived, depraved and degraded - but what I love most of all is to be frightened. I mean serious, bone-deep, fight-or-flight terrified. My biggest erogenous zones are my adrenal glands, and Sam sure as hell knows how to make them squirt.

So, what happens to poor, frightened little Nina, when she has a full-time mad scientist constantly figuring out wonderfully twisted and inventive punishments?

Mad things. Scary things. Things I wouldn't have thought of in a thousand years. Things that would never have crossed the minds of anyone but Sam.

Things that are wickedly, deliciously cruel.

Things that make me ecstatic just to be alive.

Things involving mittens.