Day 13

Day 13 - Tomb Raider - Coregasm, Predicament Bondage

Lara intentionally let her feet dangle instead of planting them on the toeholds of the climbing wall. Supporting herself just by her fingers made her hands scream in agony, made her forearms strain and burn. She closed her eyes and took one deep, slow breath and then another. She wasn't heavy. Despite her curves, she weighed between ten and eleven stone most of the time, which wasn't bad at all for a neat one hundred and eighty-five centimeters. There was a lot of strength in her body, and when her expeditions promised to be more physical, she was capable of putting on more muscle. Then just as capable of shedding it again when the need arose. She had arrived at a very neat, workable equilibrium. Which was why, lately, she'd been focusing on functional strength more than lifting weights or running laps.

Well, half of why. She'd also completely eaten it during one of her recent excursions doing what should have been routine and was still smarting a bit about it, both figuratively and literally, as the fading bruise on one side of her ribcage could attest.

She eyed the handhold just a hair down from where her right was and made up her mind. Taking another breath, Lara let go with her right hand and hung by just her left for a moment. She had to bite her tongue to keep from crying out in exertion and discomfort. The bruise was mostly faded, but there was still a lingering soreness below the ribs that irked her. It slowed her down just slightly. But she manged to push through it and grab onto the handhold she'd picked out, then she let go with her left hand and did the same thing. Slowly, she worked her way down. From a position nearly thirty feet off the floor of her gym, she moved down to just above ten feet off the ground.

"Shall I come back later, mum?"

Lara hadn't realized just how much she'd been in a state of flow until Winston broke her out of it. There was no music in her gym today, no ambiance but her own grunting and straining. Without looking over, she let go of both handholds and winced a bit as her ankles hit the floor, but she let her butt keep falling and rolled back over her head. As soon as her feet touched the matting below her again in her backwards somersault, she beat her feet hard against the ground and pushed off, getting herself airborne enough to do another aboveground flip before landing perfectly on her feet, her arms out to either side like she was walking a balance beam. When she turned to face Winston, he was perfectly just out of her arm's reach, having seen her do this all before and apparently remembering a safe distance from his combined near-photographic memory and the trauma of one too many meals spilled on the gym floor.

"Oh no, Winston, I was about done with the climbing wall." Lara commented dryly as she took another step forward, reached out and grabbed the glass of water from the lunch tray. He'd made exactly the kind of meal she was looking for on days like today, but she really wasn't hungry. After her drink, she picked a handful of fruit out of the fruit bowl and looked at the wrap sandwich longingly.

"About done with your exercise then?" Winston asked without audible emotion.

"No," Lara answered, then took another sip. "I have an entire gym, I intend to use the whole of it."

"Appreciating your frugality mum," Winston replied sarcastically as she grabbed another handful of fruit. "I simply wonder if you might be pushing yourself somewhat hard."

"Winston, have you ever known me not to push myself?" Lara really wanted that wrap, but she had, in fact, been putting herself through the kind of paces today where she wasn't sure she'd hold it down.

"The mistress does push herself harder than anybody else these humble eyes have ever seen." Winston had a fantastic way to keep his tone totally flat no matter what he was saying. "It's merely that mistress seems to push herself the hardest when recovering from an injury."

"This is not an injury, not really." Lara raised her arm enough to draw attention to her bruise. "If bruises are serious injuries than snogging is a pregnancy risk."

"I make no comment on the nature of mum's snogging, as it would be oedipal," Winston replied wistfully. "But did you ever confirm that your ribs hadn't been cracked?"

"No," Lara replied a little testily. "But they stopped hurting when I breathe, so I have to conclude they were never cracked in the first place."

"As you say," Winston offered her the tray a little more insistently, and Lara finally took one of the cookies off of it.

"Thank you, Winston." Lara placed it in her mouth and turned back to her work.

"If you should need anything, simply call for me." Winston said behind her back. "Whether that should be a late lunch, to help hold your hair back, or to drag you to a cold tub."

"Fanks, Wimfum." Lara repeated, muffled.

She waited for him to leave before heading over to where she had her climbing gloves. As she did, Lara couldn't help but see herself out of the corner of the eye in one of the mirrors. Stopping, she took a large bite of the cookie.

Perhaps she was pushing herself quite hard. Her dark hair was back in a single, segmented ponytail but a few stray hairs were poking out and had been plastered to her forehead. She was almost cherry-red with exertion, the veins of her neck and shoulders sticking out like tree roots diving below the sod. The water weight was long gone, and her abs strained against her stomach strongly enough to look like a rocky riverbed. What had been a teal sports bra now only had small spots of the original color mixed in with the near-navy shade that the sweat-soaked lycra had taken on. Her black compression shorts showed no signs of exertion, but now that she was paying attention she couldn't help but notice how they squished and clung wetly with all of her moves. Her body was, literally, dripping with sweat. The only reason she wasn't panting and gasping, or that she hadn't collapsed, was her truly insane level of physical conditioning.

Lara moved on.

With the cookie ingested and her climbing gloves on, Lara took a moment to swing her arms in circles and across her chest, then pulled one over her head and the other behind her back for alternating, taking a moment to both try to lower her body temperature just a bit and to loosen up her muscles. She tried to shake the acid out of her forearms before she grabbed a climbing rope with both hands and placed her feet one and then the other on the bottom knot. Quickly, she climbed the way she'd always been taught to, since a child. Looping the rope around one wrist and steadily moving her feet up the rope, pressing them together to form a link of contact to match the one with her hands. She took the rope up with her as she went, but she reached nearly fifty feet into the air doing this in a matter of seconds. Then she went back down like this fairly easily. Now, she let her legs dangle as she had before on the climbing wall and forced herself to climb the rope with only one hand over the other, like she might have to do if she was trying to carry a great amount of weight out of a cavern with her. Lara, naturally, had done that a few times now. Her limit was around three stone, she had found that out the hard way.

The problem, perhaps, was that Lara's core was the strongest part of her. She wasn't looking for boulder biceps, and while she liked having a round butt and toned legs, she didn't see much use in squatting weights in the five hundred kilogram range. Since she did a lot of body-weight exercise, a lot of climbing and a lot of lifting with her whole body, she had an exceptionally strong core by necessity. That and an exceptional grip strength, but that was only ever so useful when she wasn't on the job. But as a result, all of this climbing was very easy to her. It was important to keep in practice, but there were only so many ways to mutate the practice of dangling and hanging and hauling. She kept looking for new challenges, but there just weren't many.

At the same time, the ease of these exercises confirmed to her that there was something off with her. It wasn't that she was struggling, but there was definitely a little more weakness than usual in her abs or her groin or somewhere around that area. Naturally, she suspected it was the big nasty bruise on her side, the one that just barely bled over onto one of her abdominal muscles. As Lara reached the top just using her arms, she brought her feet back to hang there for a second. She could definitely feel it in her core, not her shoulders or her legs.

What she could also feel, what she was finding harder to ignore, was her sports bra. She wished Winston had never come in and broken her flow state, because now that she was aware of how sweaty her gym clothes were, Lara was finding it impossible to become unaware of it again. The flow state kept eluding her in part because she would feel a little pinch, a little chafe, or a wet stickiness that made her shudder just slightly. Being sweaty wasn't a problem, it was even a good feeling. Wearing sweaty clothes was abominable. But the shorts weren't much of a problem, it was the damn bra. It just didn't fit quite right, and she wasn't sure why. Maybe she was down a little weight, maybe she was up a little. But one size fits all rarely fit any well, just all acceptably. And when you added in sweat to the equation…

Lara sat at the top for a minute. The weakness in her core was making her shakier than she normally would have been. She could feel her abs trembling and quivering like she was pushing them to their absolute limits, despite not pushing them a quarter of the way there. She tucked the rope into one elbow and then slipped one of the bra straps off with her free hand. Then she did the same thing the other way around. Pulling her sports bra up off of her finally, Lara tossed it to the mats of the gym with a wet slap that was almost embarrassingly loud. The only person liable to walk in on her was Winston, and he'd changed her damn diapers, as well as taken care of her when she was actually injured enough to need the help. Her breasts being free wasn't exactly convenient from a workout standpoint, but so long as she wasn't doing cardio, they would only ever be mildly more in the way than they were when she was wearing a sports bra.

Reaching out, she moved from the rope to a set of small hoops set into the gym ceiling. She let herself hang freely from those for a moment, drawing in her breath as best she could. Her core was shaking like crazy, which made it less relaxing than gymnastics usually were for her. Considering she'd grown up on gymnastics, Lara should have been able to hang like this for the better part of an afternoon. Usually while sulking about a boy, or about how Winston hadn't let her have all the desert she wanted.

Trying out her muscles, Lara pressed her ankles together and slowly raised her legs upward perpendicular to her body. She let out a nervous, laughing sigh at the full-body shakes it produced. Like her body was trying to wriggle its way out of the exercise it hadn't consented to. But she did it again, and then again. The burn in her core was intense, all-consuming, and as it built up the shaking at least diminished slightly. She kept feeling like the soreness and the weakness were both just things to be stretched and shaken out of her, maybe she'd found the exercise. But this wasn't deep enough. Like all the other things that had felt like a solution, there was some greater burn she was chasing.

As Lara looked around her gym, she had a stupid idea, a very very stupid idea. But one that nobody was going to stop her from having, she realized. Making her way back over to the rope, and then to the ground, she grabbed a pair of resistance bands. Throwing them over her shoulder, Lara made her way back up to the hanging hoops and hung upside-down from her knees. Her breasts hanging down nearly into her face made her roll her eyes slightly, but she managed to crane and crunch her way into getting the hooks on one end of the bands secured to the hoops. Then she did the same with the other end around her ankles before cinching the bands fairly short. They were serious, specialty equipment. She had literally used them to practice snatching things off of the ground in a bungee situation. If she wound up dangling by them from her ankles, she wasn't in any danger. In fact, she trusted them more than her gym shoes. But that didn't make how she was about to use them any less stupid.

Getting herself back upright proved a little tricky with Lara's now-aching core, but Lara finally had her feet just barely in the hoops and her hands clinging to either side of them, danging like a bat. Then she quickly pulled her legs out and kicked them in front of her. Gravity did the rest.

Rather, it did half of the rest. Lara was suddenly gripping the hoops and holding her body weight in that grip, as well as the bands. Her knees were up to her chest, and as she extended her legs out, they were raised up higher than they had been when leg lifting a moment ago. Then she pushed down with all the might in her core and lower body, forcing her legs to pull the bands taught and extend downward, until she was hanging in a perfectly straight line.

"Oh fuuuuuuck," Lara whimpered.

The amount of force it took to get back to a 'normal' position against the bands was tremendous. Orders of magnitude more than it had been to raise her legs upward while hanging. Her stomach burned like hellfire, as did her thighs and backside. It was probably a stupid, dangerous kind of exercise with a dozen things that could go wrong, but Lara couldn't argue with the results. As Lara pushed her legs downward against the resistance once more, she let out a deep, guttural groan that bounced off of the gym walls. When she was straight, her panting bounced off just as loudly. She could feel the sweat inside of her climbing gloves, though it was hard to focus on compared to the agonizing burn in her stomach. But it was the right kind of burn. A burn that cleanses, the fire of a proper, full-force workout. Using one hundred percent of the power inside of her, leaving nothing out there but needing nothing more, crossing the finish line with the knowledge that a single pound more of resistance would have been too much.

She wanted to say she was entering another flow state, but it was more accurate to say Lara wasn't thinking about anything other than the sheer righteous pain of the burn followed by the hollow, shaking cooldown of the retraction. Her core was shaking so much now that each push downward became as much of a battle against chaos theory as it was against resistance. Lara was incredibly thankful that her hands blistered easily, because it had forced her not to climb without gloves years ago. And she wouldn't hae been able to hang on for shit right now between the sweat and the shaking without her tacky climbing gloves.

Once more she pushed down. It was so intense right in her core and groin that Lara felt for a moment like she needed to go to the bathroom. Then as she lifted her legs again it passed. It must have been pressing all kinds of nerves against all kinds of other nerves.

And then she was cumming without any warning.

Lara's mouth dropped open in surprise midway through another downward push, her stomach shaking and giving out as her pussy throbbed suddenly and intensely. She heard her own gasp bounce off of the walls, and then a squeaky moan. There was a gut-deep churning coming from her core, an orgasm that ignored her clit and everything but the deepest parts of her body, like the endpoint of an intense, hours-long rutting. The first shockwave had been so sudden and so mixed with pain and exertion that it almost hadn't registered. The second knocked Lara on her ass. A wave of heat blossomed out from her groin and through her body, pushing pleasure out in front of it that lodged thick in Lara's brain. There was no longer any possibility of flow state or even concentration. The dumb, animal part of her brain fully took over, and Lara squirmed and humped the air, suddenly desperate for any kind of direct stimulation or hands on somewhere sensitive.

At some point, one of her hands either slipped or she took it off the bar without thinking, and then Lara was in freefall. It was surprising at once how sobering that was and how sobering it wasn't. Lara kept squirming and cumming as she fell, pulled the resistance bands taut with her weight, and then dangled bobbing in the air for a moment. By the time she had her wits back about her, she had stopped bouncing.

Lara sighed happily in the post-orgasm glow. Unsure what had brought it on or if she'd ever be able to replicate it, but it had been a fun, unique experience. All the bouncing and dangling had made her breasts ache ever so slightly, and she was regretting the fact that her bra was now near-directly below her and about twenty feet out of reach.

She reached up to get out of her predicament, but couldn't so much as bend halfway. Lara let out a concerned grumble as she tried not even to pull herself folded, but just to do a basic crunch. Nothing. It was like she had burned every iota of energy in her abs and they were now limp and strengthless. She grumbled again, a little louder, as she tried to crane and contort in any way that could get her to a position where she could free herself. She couldn't even reach her toes, no matter how she bent her knees or tried to bend at the hips. Lara was stuck, well and truly, dangling by her ankles from her gym ceiling, with a distinctly warm wet spot in her crotch to go along with the cooling wetness of the rest of her shorts, and with her tits hanging out nearly into her face.

"Ah… Winston?" Lara called. "A little help?"

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