The Demon's Daycare

I locked the doors myself. That is the part I keep circling back to, the part that makes my face go hot even now. Sabine did not drag me here. I drove. I parked in the lot behind the old brick building with the cheerful painted sign, DEMON’S DAYCARE in looping pink letters, and I walked in on my own two feet because a woman with black eyes had whispered a promise into my ear three nights ago and I had not slept since.

I am thirty-one. I run a logistics floor. I sign for half a million dollars of freight before lunch and men twice my size call me sir. None of that helped me in the doorway when Sabine looked up from her chair and smiled like she already owned the deed to my body.

“There he is,” she said. Not a question. She never asked me anything.

The room was warm and smelled like vanilla and something underneath the vanilla, something with teeth. Soft mats on the floor. A long padded table against the far wall with leather cuffs bolted to the corners, and I knew what that table was for the second my eyes hit it. My stomach dropped. Lower than my stomach went tight and warm, and I hated that, I hated the speed of it.

“Come here, Cal.”

My feet moved. I told them not to and they did it anyway.

Up close she was taller than me even in flat shoes. Her hand came up and cupped my jaw, thumb dragging across my bottom lip, and a sound came out of me that I did not give permission for. Small. Embarrassing. The kind of noise you make when something you have wanted for a long time finally touches you.

“You drove all this way,” she said, soft, like she was proud of me, and the proud part landed somewhere deep and shameful and made my cock thicken in my slacks before I had even decided to be here. “Such a long way for a man who keeps telling himself he is just curious.”

I opened my mouth to say I was leaving. The lie sat right there. I could feel the shape of it. Then her thumb pressed down on my tongue and the lie died and what I felt instead was the wet heat of my own mouth closing around her finger like it had been waiting its whole life for instructions.

This is insane, I thought, and it was not the clean panicked thought I wanted. It came wrapped in want. The man I am at work, the one with the clipboard and the voice that ends arguments, he was screaming somewhere far back behind glass, and the rest of me had already turned the volume down.

“On the table.”

I went. God help me, I went, climbing up onto the padded surface while she watched with her arms folded, and the leather was cool through my shirt and the room tilted into something I had no map for.

She took her time with the cuffs. Wrist, then wrist, then she walked to the foot of the table and did my ankles, spreading them, and the spread of them put me on display in a way that made my ears burn. I was hard. Obviously, ridiculously hard, tenting the front of my pants, and she looked right at it and then looked at my face so I would know she had seen.

“Already,” she said. Just the one word. It undid me more than a whole sentence could have.

“Please,” I said. I did not know what I was asking for.

“I know, baby.” She came up the side of the table and brushed my hair off my forehead, slow, the way you gentle something that is shaking. “I know exactly what you need. That is the whole trick of me. I am very, very good at knowing.”

Her other hand found my belt. Worked the buckle open one notch at a time, no rush, while I lay there strapped down breathing like I had run up six flights. The metal teeth of the zipper. The cold air of the room on my skin when she peeled the front of me open and freed my cock and let it slap up against my belly, flushed and leaking already, a bead of it shining at the tip.

“Look at that,” she murmured. “Look how honest your body is. Your mouth lies to me. This never does.”

She dragged one fingertip up the underside, root to tip, and my hips jerked against the cuffs hard enough to bruise. A wet thread of sound came out of me. Begging without words. I have never in my life been the one who begs.

“You think this is the worst of it,” she said. “You think I am going to stroke you and let you finish and send you home pretending it was a strange afternoon.” She leaned close. Her black eyes had no bottom to them. Up close I could see the faint red brand-mark of a sigil already darkening on the inside of my own forearm, the place she had touched me three nights ago, the place that had itched and burned ever since. I had told myself it was a rash.

It was not a rash. It was a receipt.

“That is not why you are here,” she said. “You signed for more than that. You just have not read the fine print yet.”

From the shelf beside the table she lifted something. Silver, slim, with a rounded head and a dial along the side. She turned the dial and it woke up with a low purr, and that purr went straight through me, because I knew, even brand new to all of this, exactly where a thing like that was meant to go.

“No,” I said. My voice cracked on it.

“There he is,” she said again, delighted, and pressed the head of it flat to the base of my cock.

The vibration climbed up me like heat off a road. My whole spine arched off the table. I pulled at the cuffs and they did not give and the not-giving made it worse, made it better, made the line between the two go blurry and then disappear. She held it there, patient, watching my face for the exact second my hips started chasing it on their own.

“There,” she said when they did. “There is the real you. Not the man with the clipboard. This one. The one who humps the air for me with his wrists tied down.”

I want to say I hated her. I want that on the record. What I actually did was sob out a yes, a hideous grateful yes, while my balls drew up tight and the pressure built into something with a shape and a deadline.

She lifted the toy away one inch from the edge.

The howl that came out of me did not sound like a grown man. It sounded like something younger, something stripped of all its dignity, and the horror of hearing myself make that sound rolled straight into the worst and best fact of the afternoon, which was that it turned me on more. Being heard like that. Being reduced to that.

I’m not this, was the thought that flailed up out of the dark, useless and late. I balance a floor. People depend on me. And under it, quieter, truer, the part of me that had driven across town and locked the doors: yes you are, you always were, she just found the lock first.

“Good boys count,” Sabine said. She set the toy back against me, lower this time, and the dial clicked up a notch, and the whole room narrowed to that one buzzing point. “We are going to do this a long time, you and me. You are going to lose track of how many. You are going to forget the man who walked in. And when you finally beg me to keep you, when you ask me out loud to never let you leave this room, that is when I will give you what you actually came for.”

She braced one knee up onto the table between my spread legs. I felt the mattress dip, felt the heat of her, felt her free hand slide down past my aching cock to somewhere lower, somewhere that made every muscle in me lock up at once with a fear that was not all fear.

“Now,” she said, mouth at my ear, her body settling over mine, the brand on my arm flaring white-hot under her palm as she pressed it down. “Let’s begin.”