Inside

Robert stood on his tiptoes as he reached into the back of the closet—feeling around amongst his discarded work shirts and stray socks, his fingertips finally brushed up against the slick, soft fabric of the sleeping bag. Closing his fist around it, he pulled it towards him and tossed it on to the bed at the far side of the room.

It slumped on to the covers in a heap, and he paused for a moment, eyeing it as though it were a lover giving him a come-hither stare—he, already undressed, returned it. Objectively, there was little to admire about the bag—the fabric a bright, garish blue, the insides mottled with mould where he hadn’t dried it out properly after a session, the oddly-sweet smell of outside clinging to it from the one and only time he’d actually used it for camping. 

He moved to the edge of the bed, reaching out to trail his fingertips over the zipper, which was sealed tight. Given that he lived alone, there was no reason he should zip it up when he went to put it away again. He only stuffed it into the back of the cupboard when he was done, hiding it out for a while until he had the time for it once more. Even a glimpse of the rustling blue fabric was enough to send his mind spinning, and he needed to think of its existence as little as possible in the meantime.

But still, he zipped it closed every time. He tugged the zipper down in one motion, hardly disturbing the fabric at all. The two sides fell apart like a pair of surprised lips, displaying the lurid orange within. Picking up the ballpoint pen from his bedside table, he swung one leg at a time into the bag, hooked the lip of the pen lid over the dangling zip, and began to ease it up over his reclined body. 

The rhythmic scrape of the zipper drawing closed around him sent a wave of relief through his system. There was something about the routine of this that steadied him, perhaps more than anything in the world—he'd tried a few different approaches to zip it shut while he was still inside, and the pen allowed him to make the closest seal without losing grip on the hook of the zip outside. He would rather have been entirely closed in, of course, but a crack of air the size of the barrel of a pen would allow him to make an easy exit, after which he would scrub the bag and send it back to where it came from.

One hand gripped to the pen, he drew the zip shut above him—the other rested awkwardly against his hip, with little room to move, though he wouldn’t need much. He breathed in deeply, his eyes fluttering shut for a moment, the rubbery, artificial scent of the bag filling his senses, and the familiar warmth deep inside his belly began to rise once more.

His hot breath pooled around his enclosed face, perspiration starting to cling to the bag just an inch or so from his lips. If he breathed hard enough, he could draw a mouthful of the fabric against his lips and nose, forcing a temporary dragging rattle from his lungs as he hungered for oxygen. 

Instinctively, his hand slid to his cock—he was already half-hard, his erection stirring swiftly in the womb of this trap. Though he hardly had much room to stroke himself, he wrapped his fingers around his erection and began to masturbate, the sticky dampness of his own breath clinging to his lips. 

The first time like this, it had been when he was a boy, and his mother had her friends over to sit around the kitchen table and drink wine—when he had been very little, it had just been her and him in the house, and he tossed and turned worrying about her when he was in bed alone and she had company. He’d begun sneaking down to the cabinet at the far end of the kitchen, the one next to the sink, which had just enough room for him if he squeezed his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them.

 

And it was from that cabinet that he listened to his mother and her friends—they had no reason to talk anything other than candidly, and occasionally, the conversation would turn to dating, to sex. By the time he was old enough to understand it, he found himself old enough to react to it, too. 

He sat there, in the cabinet, his shoulders hunched to his ears, his knees aching, his elbows squeezed to the cold Formica walls on either side of him, his palms sweaty and sticking to themselves as he listened to his mother’s friends recount their physical encounters, the sound of wine slopping into glasses, low giggles. He’d sweated so much that he’d left some damp stains on the inside of the door, little black speckles where his mother would never think to clean.

By the time he’d reached his teens, he started going out with girls his own age, and small details in their fumbling sexual encounters would throw his mind back to that memory—when they would grab his wrists play-fighting, or pin his elbows to his sides when they kissed, or tangle their legs with his to pull him closer when they lay together. The moment he felt some form of restraint, compression on his body, a white-hot pulse of want would surge through him, but it would be over before it had so much as started and he would hardly have time to piece together what had excited him in the first place. 

It wasn’t until he began the first day of his Master's program that he found himself enclosed once more, at least, by design. He returned from his first meeting with his course leader and pulled the chair away from the small desk in his dorm room to climb into the narrow hollow that lay underneath. His ankles crossed, his shoulders shrugged up to his ears, he stared at a patch of the dull green carpet below him, and the slow, steady pressure of the wood at every side stirred an erection so fierce that stars exploded in the corners of his vision when he came. As soon as he was done, he pulled his laptop on to the floor beside him and typed out a message to his course leader to point out everything that he had been wrong about. 

From then on, he’d found himself drawn to those tight spaces when things grew difficult for him to handle. His desk was his go-to for a while, and then, the library stacks—in his university library, each row of bookcases had a large handle on each end, where he could guide the stack forward or back on a small metal track. He used the mechanism to crank the stacks closer to each other—first twenty inches, then fifteen, then ten. He would slip himself into the small, hot, dark space between the bookcases, arms twisted at awkward angles to flatten himself, breathing in the musty smell of old books, the fungus blossoming on untouched pages. 

And things grew more and more difficult for him to handle the longer he spent in his field of study—he’d gotten his Master's, then his PhD, then he’d started working for a medical research facility in the city, and—well, in a job like that, every decision came with enormous pressure, every wrong move laced with the possibility of causing real harm. He spent longer and longer at work, and when he did come home to the flat the company had assigned him, he found himself making quicker and quicker a beeline for his closet. Closing the doors on himself, as soon as the blackness swallowed his vision, something uncoiled at the back of his neck. 

The sound of his hand around his shaft and the rustling of the sleeping bag were virtually indistinguishable—his breath was starting to tear from his throat now, harder and faster, the warmth of his breath dampening his cheeks and forehead. His eyes were squeezed shut now, and he was distantly aware of something having happened to lead him to this moment, but it seemed so far away he could hardly make sense of it. No, all he had to think about was what was happening in the confines of this sleeping bag, one hand on his pen, the other on his—

He let out a sharp breath as he came, his cock twitching in his hand before retreating back to a slight, dull throb. In the enclosed space of the sleeping bag, the scent of his own seed permeated—he could almost feel it seeping into his pores, thick and heavy. He peered up at the pen, its lid still hooked over the eye of the zipper on the outside of the bag, his eyes slightly blurry from the exertion, and went to pull it down—

And, outside of the bag, he heard a distinct pop. Without thinking, he pulled the pen downward to check what it was—and, on its journey into the bag with him, the last centimeter or so of light clamped shut.

It took him a moment to realise what had happened. He stared, for a moment, at the pen’s nib, now visible since the lid had popped off up there, outside the bag, back in the real world. His escape route had been compromised. 

He dropped the pen, his fingers scrabbling against the fabric—slick as they were with his own sperm and the perspiration of his breath, he couldn’t find purchase, the zip serenely sealed shut above him. With a jolt of panic, his knee jerked up, but its swift containment by the bag reminded him of how little space he had in here. 

He pressed his hands to the edges of the bag, searching for a tear, a snag, something that he might use to pull it apart from the outside. Nothing. Not a single imperfection in it. No, he had kept it too carefully for that, made sure it was always clean and zipped when it was stashed away. He tried to lean forward to get a better look, but his head was bowed awkwardly by the bag. Every gesture he tried to make tugged on some other part of his body, the tension in the bag leaving no room for independent movement.

If he couldn’t get out, perhaps he could stay alive long enough for someone to notice he was missing and call for help—the bag wasn’t airtight, not completely, anyway. It was heavily insulated, and he couldn’t move his head around much to find weaker spots in the thermal filling, but perhaps the zipper would have some give...

He pressed his mouth to the zipper, which was by now slick with his breath and perspiration, and heaved in a deep gasp. He came away with almost nothing—he tried a few more times, huffing desperately at the zip to try and draw in more air, but within a few gasps, he was dizzy from lack of oxygen. He slumped back into the bag, his arms pinned at his sides like he was standing to attention.

 
Heat filled the small space around him. Beyond the rustling fabric, he could almost hear the voices of his mother’s friends, the sound of wine poured into a glass. Bluish black filtered through the thick fabric, and a strand of his hair fell into his face, but he could not reach up to brush it aside.

The only sound he could make out was that of his breath, increasingly unsteady, and the fabric rustling around him. Without thinking, he moved his hand to his cock and absentmindedly began to stroke himself once more.