The Mistress's Pet

Klaar. 1713 woorden, geen em/en-dashes, eindigt op de cliff net voor de payoff. Opgeslagen als D:\Studio\20_lines\site_stories\the-mistresss-pet_teaser.md.

De teaser:

The card on my pillow said be ready by eight, and under that, in her flat upright hand, she had written one word. Pretty.

I had read it four times before I understood my chest was doing something it had no permission to do. I am thirty-four. I run a floor of eleven people. I had given orders that morning over coffee and meant every one of them. Now I stood in the doorway of a room that used to be mine and counted the things laid out on the bed.

Stockings first. The seam ran straight up the back, dark against the pale of the silk, and my throat went tight just from the shape of them. There was a corset the color of the inside of a shell. There was a slip with a hem of lace so fine it looked like frost on a window. And folded on top, square and white and thick, there was the thing I would not look at directly yet, because looking at it made my stomach drop the way a stair does when you misjudge the last step.

Diana came in without knocking. She does not knock in her own house.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“You are. Hands.”

I gave her my hands. I do not know why obedience comes out of me faster than thought when she uses that voice, low and certain, no question anywhere in it. She turned them over and looked at the nails I had let her paint two nights ago, a soft rose I had scrubbed at in the shower until my fingertips went raw and the color stayed anyway. She smiled like she knew about the scrubbing.

“Strip,” she said. “We don’t have all night. Well. I do. You don’t get a clock anymore.”

I took my shirt off. My hands were not steady and that was the first betrayal, the small one, the one I could still pretend was cold. Then the rest, until I stood in front of her with nothing on and my cock already thickening, already lifting, before she had touched me, before she had done anything but read me a single word off a card.

There it was. The real betrayal. The traitor part of me that woke up the second she walked in and started getting hard at the sight of a corset and a stack of folded cotton, while the rest of me stood there burning, wanting to cover myself, wanting to explain that this was not who I was.

She looked down at it and laughed, soft, almost fond.

“Already,” she said. “God, you’re easy. Look at you. You haven’t even put the panties on and you’re leaking.”

I was. A bright bead of it sat at the tip and the shame of that, the visible proof, somehow made my cock jerk harder, which she watched, which made my face go hot all the way to my ears. Some cold clean part of me stood off to the side and said, in my own voice, this is the last door, if you walk through this you will not be able to find the man who walked in. I heard it. I felt the wrongness of it like cold water down the spine.

And I stepped into the panties when she held them out at my ankles.

Silk. I had never worn silk against me there. It cupped me, slid up over the worst of my hardness and pressed it flat to my belly, and the cool slick drag of it pulled a sound out of me I had not agreed to make. Diana’s eyebrows went up.

“There she is,” she said.

She. I opened my mouth to say something about that and she put one finger against my lips.

“No,” she said. “You don’t get that word tonight either. You don’t get he. You’re whatever I’m building. Right now you’re a girl getting dressed for me. Step into the stockings.”

I bent. I rolled the first stocking up the way I had watched her do it a hundred times without ever once thinking I would learn it from the inside, smoothing the silk over my calf, over my knee, and my cock throbbed against the panties with every inch, the friction of leaning, the sight of my own leg going long and dark and unfamiliar. By the second stocking my breath had gone shallow and high in my chest and I hated it and I could not stop it.

“Slower,” she said, when I rushed. “A lady takes her time. You’re going to be doing this every morning, so you may as well learn to like it.”

Every morning. The words landed somewhere low and turned over. I thought about my work bag by the front door, my keys, the version of me that knotted a tie and shook hands and never once in thirty-four years pictured silk going up under a suit. That man felt like a photograph of someone I used to know. I rolled the stocking the rest of the way up slow, the way she said, and the slow was worse, the slow made me feel every inch of it deciding things about me.

She did the corset herself. She stood behind me and pulled the laces and the boning closed around my ribs like two hands deciding how much air I was allowed. Tighter. Tighter than I thought she would. My waist went in and my posture changed without my permission, shoulders back, spine long, and in the mirror across the room a shape stood that I did not recognize and could not look away from.

“Look,” Diana said against my ear. “Look at her.”

I looked. Rose nails. Pale stockings. A waist I did not own this morning. And below the line of the slip she dropped over my head, the obscene push of my own arousal still tenting the silk, refusing to be ladylike, the one part of me still arguing.

“Such a pretty thing,” she said. “And such a filthy little secret right here.” She cupped me through the panties, just once, just enough, and my knees nearly went. “We’ll deal with that. Pretty girls don’t get to make decisions about this.”

The intrusive thought came again, sharp, my mother’s kitchen, my old name being called across it, a whole life of being a man with a name, and it cracked against the wet silk and the boning and the smell of her perfume and it broke, it just broke, and I leaned back into her hands.

“There,” Diana said. “Now the last thing.”

She went to the bed and lifted it. The white square. She unfolded it and it was exactly what I had known it was and refused to know, thick and soft and bright, and she held it open across her two arms and looked at me over the top of it with a patience that was worse than any cruelty.

“On the bed,” she said. “On your back. Knees up.”

“Diana.” My voice came out wrong, thin. “I can’t. That’s. I’m not.”

“You’re not what.” Still no question in it. “You’re not a man who’s standing in a corset with his cock dripping through women’s panties? Because that’s what the mirror says, sweetheart. Lie down.”

I should tell you I refused. I had a speech in my chest. I had the whole man I was at nine o’clock that morning ready to stand up.

I lay down. I put my knees up.

The mattress was cool through the slip. She came and stood between my ankles and looked at me spread open and dressed and helpless and her face did something soft and terrible, like a woman looking at a thing she finally owns outright. She slid the panties down and off, and my cock sprang up against my belly, dark and stiff and shining, and the cool air on it after all that silk made me whimper.

“Look how hard,” she said, almost gentle. “All this fuss and you’re harder than you’ve ever been. That’s how I know. The mouth lies. This doesn’t.”

She drew my knees wider. She slid the thick white softness up under me, lifted my hips with one hand flat on my belly, and settled it where it was going to stay. The padding pressed up between my legs, behind my balls, everywhere at once, and the sheer wrong intimate fullness of it made my cock jump untouched, a long string of wet pulsing out of me onto my own stomach, and I heard myself make a high broken sound and turn my face into the pillow.

“No,” Diana said. “Eyes on me. You watch yourself get put away.”

She brought the front up between my thighs. Snug. The tapes in her hands now, one and then the other, and the sound they made when she pulled them tight was the smallest sound in the world and it went through me like a key turning.

“There’s my girl,” she said, smoothing both palms down over the front of it, over the shape of me trapped soft and obscene underneath. “All locked up where Mommy can keep an eye on it. We’re going to wear these all the time now. Every day. You’re going to learn what they’re for. And tomorrow,” she pressed her hand flat and I arched up off the bed with a cry I will be ashamed of for the rest of my life, “tomorrow the little cage comes, and you don’t get to be hard for me at all. You’ll have to be pretty other ways.”

She climbed up over me then. She straddled my chest in her slip and her bare thighs and she reached back behind her without hurrying, the way you reach for something you know is there, and I felt her fingers close around me through all that padding and start, slow, to rub.

“Now,” she said, looking down at me with my rose nails fisted in the sheets and my stockinged knees falling open and my whole life on the wrong side of a door. “Ask me. Out loud. In your prettiest voice. Ask Mommy to make her sissy come like this.”