The Vitruvian Woman

by Wayne Mitchell

SAMPLE CHAPTER

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Chapter One

I don’t know why I do this.

Why do I let my husband, James, tie me up and display me in public like this?

I am bound naked in a public place... well, sort of naked, but it is definitely a very public place. And I am held tightly in more or less an X shape hanging inside a big, bronze circle.

There are motors in the circle which keep opening and closing my legs and bringing my arms from straight out alongside me to directly over my head. The motors move at different speeds so I am a constantly changing display of lewdness.

I can’t see anything. My eyes are sealed shut... but my ears are open. I can hear people all around me. I can hear what they say about my beautiful body. I can also hear them say, “This statue is obscene.” or “This makes this woman look like a pure slut.” One even said, “Whoever posed for this statue had to be a whore.”

They don’t realize they are talking about me and I can hear them.

Occasionally I can feel someone reach out and touch me. They can’t quite feel me through the thin layer of latex and I can’t really feel them, but I feel the pressure of their fingers against my skin.

Why do I do this?

Perhaps it goes back to my childhood.

I have always liked to be the center of attention. When I was little, Mom called me a show off. As I got a little older, my sisters called me a spoiled brat. But I wasn’t spoiled. I didn’t misbehave. I didn’t get away with things that they didn’t. I just wanted people to look at me... so I did things that my sisters couldn’t bring themselves to do... like run naked through the sprinklers on the front lawn.

As we got older, both of my oldest sisters became sports stars. That wasn’t surprising. They always wanted to win at any cost in whatever we did. One of them almost always was the one who won at Monopoly or other family games.

Unlike my sisters, I was never very competitive. I didn’t care about winning. I didn’t care about being “Number One!” Maybe that’s why I really never cared much about sports in general... except being a cheerleader.

Some people thought it was strange that I didn’t like sports, but I loved being a cheerleader. That wasn’t strange at all because, for me, being a cheerleader had nothing to do with sports. It didn’t matter to me what the game was... or who won. It was nice when our team won. But I was a cheerleader because I loved standing out in front of the crowd in a skimpy outfit knowing that everyone was looking at my legs– and more– as I jumped up and down and waved my pompoms.

In high school I got voted “Miss School Spirit” because I was always so active trying to get the crowd to cheer for our team. Actually, I was just trying to make more people look at my legs or bounce my little cheerleader skirt up so they could see my bloomers.

In college I was on one of the cheerleading squads. From my first year on, I was part of the eight person “Game Squad.” There was a larger group of women– and men– who were the “Performance Squad” cheerleaders. The members of the Performance Squad were the ones who competed in the cheerleader tournaments and came out onto the field during breaks in the game to do very complex, very athletic, gymnastic routines.

There was a time that there was only one squad of cheerleaders even at major universities, but cheerleading routines have become so complicated and dangerous that cheerleading is now considered a sport unto itself at the college level. And just like the football players, the cheerleaders of the Performance Squad need time to prepare. Besides, with the dangerous throws and jumps they attempt with no padding beneath them in almost every routine, they can’t risk their muscles being cold or tight when they take the field. That’s why for football games, the Performance Squad was often down under the stands in a nice warm dressing room watching the game on television while the “Bimbo Squad,” as they called us, froze our asses off out in front of the crowd doing really simple routines.

I didn’t care what they called us. We were the ones that the TV crews showed closeups of when the game got boring. I always recorded the games and went back to see how often I was on TV. I was on more than any of the other girls because I had figured out that if I cut my uniform just a little shorter than the others and made it just a little tighter, the cameras would be on me– especially when we were doing kicks.

One of the other cheerleaders noticed that I had modified the bloomers we wore under our short skirts... and that I wasn’t wearing underwear under them. That combination guaranteed that at least once each game there would be an incident of accidental flashing.

“Why don’t you just do your routines naked?” she asked sarcastically. “Or if you really want to strut your stuff, just go downtown and become a stripper in one of the clubs?”

“I can’t dance,” I said slowly, looking at the floor. Then I truthfully added what I was really thinking, “... and they’d arrest me if I left everything off.”

She laughed and smiled at me. Then she said, “If you really want to show off your whole body and not get arrested, why don’t you volunteer to be a model for the art department. You get to stand around naked for hours with your fellow students staring at you... and you even get paid for it.”

I know that she meant it as a joke, or perhaps as a put down, but I saw it as salvation. I went over to the art department the next Monday and applied for the job. After that, three times a week for four to six hours in the afternoon, I got to stand around naked... or sit around naked... or lay around naked... and let young men– and women– look at me. They would even tell me how to move or how to stand or sit or lie so that they could see me better. It was as if they were in total control of my naked body and I was just there to be looked at.

I was in heaven.

The art department is where I met James. He was a senior art major with a minor in engineering. That seems like an odd combination, but he wanted to make art that moved. He was very into what he called, “the mechanics of art.” He would say things like, “Without the genius of Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, the Statue of Liberty would be just a painting... and the Paris skyline would be very, very boring.”

He was also very much into BDSM, specifically bondage. For all my exhibitionism as a young girl, I was still rather naive about such things. I had heard the terms, but I had never really investigated it. And unlike a lot of my sisters at the university, I didn’t go out on the net looking at porn. I think that’s because I don’t enjoy watching naked bodies. I enjoy being the naked body that others are watching.

James was an extremely talented artist and his senior art project combined all three of his passions– art, engineering, and bondage. It was a mobile he called “Futility.” He had a very detailed drawing of it in colored pencil showing bound, naked figures hanging from a series of beams. Each of the bound figures was tied up in different ways, but it was obvious that none of them could get free. They were trapped there forever, thus it was futile to attempt to escape... “Futility.”

I had just posed for an introduction to drawing class. They didn’t let the first year students do nudes, so I was wearing a thin, pink leotard that covered everything from wrists to ankles when he stopped me on the way back to my dressing room.

We were standing in the short hallway which connected the studio to the dressing area and he was sort of blocking my way. I wasn’t sure what he wanted, so I was a bit afraid at first.

Then he held up the drawing of his design and asked, “Would you be willing to pose for this?” He pointed to one of the figures and said, “None of the other models are willing to let me tie them up like this.”

I looked at the drawing and felt myself gasp and then hold my breath.

“Can you picture yourself hanging around like this while I do the clay models?” He asked with a smile.

I don’t know why, but when he said that to me, I shuddered and suddenly my leotards felt damp.

“Would it hurt?” I asked.

“Only if you want it to,” he answered with a laugh.

I shuddered again and quickly looked down to see how badly the flowing dampness showed on the front of my leotard. The area around my crotch was a much darker pink, and the dark spot was spreading down the fabric of the legs.

I looked back up and found myself staring right into his steely blue eyes. He looked back at me. Then his voice suddenly became much softer as he said, “I think you might be that very special person I have been looking for. You might even enjoy something like this.”

He stood with his shoulders leaned back as he looked up and down my body, pausing to examine the wetness between my legs while I shuddered once again and reddened in shame and embarrassment.

His eyes met mine once again. Then he added, “And I promise I will never do anything that you don’t agree to in advance.”

END OF SAMPLE CHAPTER