The Living Toy

The cage clicked shut before I could change my mind, and that small cold sound did more to me than any touch had all night.

I stood in the middle of her dressing room with my hands at my sides like she told me. The mirror was three panels wide, so there was no angle where I could not see myself. A grown man. Thirty-four. I ran a company with my name on the door, signed the checks, fired people who showed up late. And here I was bare from the waist down with a clear plastic cage locked around my cock, and the steel of it was already warm because I had gotten hard the second she walked in.

That was the part I could not forgive. She had not even touched me yet. She had just walked in holding the little pink box, and my body had jumped ahead of my brain like a dog that heard the leash.

“Look at you,” Vale said. Not mean. Worse than mean. Pleased. “You leaked before I opened the box. We both saw it.”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said, and my voice came out thin.

“I know, sweet thing. That is the whole point. You do not get to mean things anymore.”

She set the box on the velvet bench. Mistress Vale was not loud. She never raised her voice the whole time I knew her. She wore a gray silk blouse buttoned to the throat and her nails were short and red, and she moved through the room like she owned the air in it.

She lifted out the first thing. Panties. White, with a band of lace at the top and little stitched roses, the kind of soft that has no business near a man like me. My jaw went tight. Some old animal part of me reared up and said no, this is the line, you have a name and a desk and a mortgage, you are not the man who steps into this.

Then she held them open at the floor, two fingers hooked in the waist, and waited.

I stepped into them.

I do not have a good reason. My foot went up on its own and the silk slid over my ankle and up my calf, and when she snugged the lace around the cage my breath caught in my chest like a hook had gone through it. The fabric pressed the plastic right against me. Cool and tight and there. I shut my eyes and the dark behind them was worse, because in the dark there was nothing to look at but how much I wanted the next thing.

“Eyes open,” she said. “You watch. That is your job now. You watch yourself become her.”

Her. The word landed in my gut and rolled around.

Next came the thing they put in the title of the book she had read to me, the reason I was here, the reason I had answered her ad in the first place with a fake name and a real ache. The padded pants. Thick and white and quilted, made for an adult, made to swallow a grown man’s hips and hold him helpless in his own softness. She powdered me first with a big soft puff, and the smell of it filled the room, and I hated that I knew that smell would live in my head for weeks now.

“Lie back.”

I lay back on the bench. Me. On my back, knees up, while a woman in silk taped a padded crinkling thing around my hips like I was hers to manage. My face went hot all the way to my ears. The shame of it sat in my throat. And under the shame, lower, the cage strained and there was nowhere for it to go, and the no place for it to go was the entire trick, I understood that now, she had built me a body that could want and want and never finish.

“There,” Vale said. She patted the front of the padding twice, light, and the give of it pressed everything tighter and my hips jerked up off the bench before I could stop them. “Oh. Did you like that?”

“No.”

“Say it again with your hips down.”

I could not. That was the answer and we both knew it. I lay there shaking with my knees in the air and my cock crying in its little jail and I could not hold my hips to the bench, and a sound came out of me that I had never made in my life, high and thin, a sound I would have paid money to take back.

She smiled. She did not say anything cruel. She just let me hear it again in my own head.

The corset came next. She sat me up and stood behind me and looped the silk and lace of it around my ribs, pink ribbon, real boning, and she pulled the laces and the whole world got smaller around my middle. Each pull rocked me back against her. My breath went shallow and high. I had to take little sips of air, and every little sip made me lightheaded, and lightheaded made everything she did feel like it was happening to someone softer than me, someone with a smaller waist and pretty shoulders and no say in anything.

“Breathe at the top,” she said against my ear. “Good girls breathe at the top.”

Girl. There it was again. And the worst, the thing I will carry, is that some small starving part of me leaned toward the word like a plant to a window.

She turned me to the mirror. All three panels.

I did not know the person in the glass. Cinched waist, lace at the ribs, the padded pants making my hips wide and round and soft, the cage a hard bright knot under white silk. My chest heaved. My mouth was open. My own eyes looked back at me wet and wide and asking for something I could not say out loud.

“Pretty,” Vale said. She said it the way you confirm a fact. “You fought me on the phone. You told me you were doing this on a dare. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Was it a dare?”

I looked at the man in the lace. There was no man in the lace.

“No,” I said.

“Good. The first true thing you have said all night.”

She went back to the box. There was one more thing in it and I had read about it, I had read every word of that book three times in the dark with one hand, and knowing what it was did not slow my heart, it sped it.

The pacifier. Not for a child, never that, this was a thick ring of pink rubber sized for a grown mouth, with a smooth round bulb behind it, and a little black switch in the handle. Battery operated. She held it up and turned the switch and it buzzed in her hand, a low steady hum, and the sound of it went straight down my spine and pooled hot in the cage.

“You do not get words for the rest of tonight,” she said. “Words are how you argue. You are done arguing. Open.”

My jaw locked. The last of me, the desk and the door and the name, all of it stood up at once and dug in. This is a gag, said that part. Once it is in, you cannot call it off, you cannot say the word, you are handing her the last key you have.

She did not push it at my mouth. She just held it there, humming, an inch away, and she waited, because she knew. She had known since the leak. My body had been answering for me all night and it answered now.

I opened.

She slid it past my lips and the bulb filled my mouth and settled my tongue down flat, and the hum poured straight into my teeth and jaw and up into my skull. I bit down soft around the rubber. My eyes rolled half shut. I could not talk. I could not ask. I could only breathe through my nose in those high little corset sips and make that sound again, muffled now, smaller, hers.

“Hands behind your back.”

I put them there. She bound my wrists in something soft, silk again, a bow I could feel her tie, and the bow undid the last of me more than rope would have, because a bow is a thing you put on a present.

Then she laid me down on the wide bench on my side, knees drawn up, padded and laced and caged and humming, and she stood over me and looked at her work for a long quiet while.

“Now,” she said. “The toy in your mouth is not the only one with batteries.”

She reached down to the front of the padded pants. There was a shape in there I had not let myself think about, pressed flat against the cage, against the lace, against the part of me with nowhere to go. Her red nail found a second little switch through the quilting.

“You have a cage so you cannot get hard the way you used to,” she said, soft, almost kind. “But you can still feel everything. That is the new rule of your body. All of the want. None of the way out. Unless I give it to you.”

Her thumb rested on the switch.

“Count the buzzes for me. You cannot speak, so you will count by going still. Hold perfectly still each time it stops, and I will know you are counting, and I will know you are mine. Move before I say, and we start over at one. We have all night. I have nowhere to be.”

The pacifier hummed against my tongue. My wrists pulled at the silk bow and held. I lay there in the lace I swore I would never touch, in the padding I swore was a joke, and I have never in my life wanted anything the way I wanted her thumb to come down.

She leaned close. Her breath moved the hair at my ear.

“Here is one,” she said.

And she pressed the switch.