Watching Through the Bars

The bars were white and they were cold, and I had counted them twice already because there was nothing else to do with my hands.

Forty-one bars. The crib was built for a grown man, my man, the one Mommy Vane had spent a year unmaking, and tonight she had set it in the middle of the living room so every guest who came through the door would have to walk past me first. I sat on my heels on the padded floor of it. The diaper was thick between my legs and it crinkled when I shifted, and I had learned months ago not to shift.

“There he is,” somebody said by the door. A woman’s voice, warm, the kind you use for a dog. “Oh, look at him.”

I looked at my knees. The heat came up my neck and my ears went hot, and lower, where I did not want it, the same heat pooled and pulled and started to fill me. Not now. The thought arrived sharp and useless, a hand slapped away from a stove. A year of this and my body still answered her guests before it answered me, like it had stopped taking orders from the part of me that used to sign for the mortgage.

Mommy Vane crossed the room in her dark green dress. The hem moved against the bars when she crouched, and her perfume came through, clean and sharp, the smell that meant inspection.

“Knees apart,” she said. Not loud. She never had to be loud.

I opened my knees. The padded front of the diaper pressed up and there was no hiding what was already happening under it, the swell, the strain against the plastic, and a man near the couch laughed low into his drink.

“Already,” Mommy Vane said. She slid two fingers between two bars and pressed the front of the diaper, flat, testing, the way you’d press a fruit to see if it was ready. “He does this every time we have people. One year and he still can’t keep himself decent for company.”

The pressure of her fingers went straight through the padding and my hips wanted to push up into her hand. I held them down. My jaw ached with holding them down. There was a sound coming out of me that I clamped behind my teeth, and the holding only made the want worse, made it climb, because she knew I was holding and she pressed a little harder to watch me lose.

“Color,” she said.

“Green, Mommy.” My voice came out cracked.

“Good boy.” She withdrew her fingers. She wiped them on a cloth from her hip, slow, while she looked at me, and the wiping was for the room. They all watched her wipe me off her hand like I was a mess she’d checked on. My face burned. My cock throbbed against the plastic, harder for the burning, and the part of me that hated this hated most that the two had stopped being separate things.

A woman in a white coat came out of the kitchen. Cole. Mommy kept her on a retainer the way other people keep a cleaner. She carried the bag I had learned to dread, the soft black one with the clasp, and she set it on the side table and snapped on a glove with one practiced pull.

“Anniversary checkup,” Mommy Vane announced to the room, rising, smoothing her dress. “We do a full one every year. I think it’s important to document the progress.”

Somebody clapped. Two people. The clap made it real in a way nothing else had, that there would be a checkup and they would all stand and watch the checkup, and my stomach dropped while everything below my stomach pulled tight and ready.

Cole knelt and opened the side of the crib. It folded down with a clack. The cool air of the room reached me and I felt how exposed the open side made me, how the bars had at least been something to hide behind.

“Lie back, sweetheart,” Cole said. Her voice was the worst kind, kind and bored at once, a voice that had done this to a hundred grown men. “Hands above your head. You know how.”

I lay back on the padding. I put my hands above my head and I crossed my wrists because that was how, and a strap I hadn’t seen came down over them and cinched, and now my arms were a thing I no longer had a vote in. The diaper crinkled loud in the quiet. Eyes everywhere. The ceiling light was too bright.

“He’s leaking already,” Cole said to Mommy, not to me, peeling the tapes. “Look.”

The cold of the room hit me bare and I shut my eyes. The tapes ripped one by one, that tearing sound, and the front came away, and I was open to the whole room with my cock standing up off my belly, wet at the tip, twitching every time anybody breathed. A glove closed around the base of me. Cool latex, firm grip, clinical, no warmth in it at all, and that was somehow what undid me, the no-warmth, the way she held me the way she’d hold a thermometer.

“Steady,” Cole said, because I had jerked. “We’re just measuring.”

She did something with her thumb under the head and my whole spine arched up off the floor of the crib and a noise tore out of me that I would have paid money to take back. Laughter again, soft, a ripple of it around the room. I was the entertainment. I was the thing they had been invited to come and see, and my cock did not care, my cock pushed up into her clinical glove and begged, and the shame of it rolled down through me and turned, at the bottom, into more.

“Volunteers like him,” Mommy was saying somewhere above, to a guest. “When I found him he ran a department. Forty people under him. Now look how good he holds still.”

I knew better than this. The thought knifed up through the fog, the old voice, the one that used to be in charge: get up, you are a man, get up off the floor. It had no legs anymore. It said its piece and the glove slid up my shaft and the voice drowned, and what was left just wanted her to not stop, wanted it so badly that wanting it was its own punishment.

“He’s close,” Cole reported. She let go. The cold air rushed the wet of me and I sobbed, actually sobbed, hips lifting after a hand that wasn’t there. “That’s enough. He’s calibrated.”

“Good.” Mommy Vane stepped over me. She looked down the length of me, my strapped wrists, my bare straining cock, the open diaper still under my hips. Her face was calm, the way it always was, the calm that ran the whole house. “Now he’s ready to watch.”

That word reached in and pulled everything tight. Watch.

She turned to the door and lifted her hand, and a man came forward out of the crowd of guests. I knew him. Dean. Mommy’s, in the way I used to be hers, before she decided what I was for. Tall, easy in his body, his sleeves already rolled. He had been here a year ago too. He had been here for the first one, the night they put me in the cage, and I had told myself for twelve months that the memory was bigger than the thing.

It was not bigger than the thing.

Mommy reached up and touched his jaw and turned his face down to hers and kissed him, slow, deliberate, in front of all of them and a foot from my head. I could hear it. The small wet sound of her mouth on his. My cock jerked against my belly, untouched, traitor, and the heat in my face went all the way to scalding because I was hard from watching her kiss him, I was hard from my own erasing.

“Eyes open, baby,” Mommy Vane said against Dean’s mouth, not even looking at me. “You don’t get to close them tonight. You earned a front row. One whole year of being good earns you the very best seat.”

Cole’s gloved fingers came to my temples and held my head still, aimed, so I could not turn away even if the last of me tried. Dean’s hand went to the zip at the back of Mommy’s green dress and drew it down, one long pull, and the fabric loosened off her shoulders.

I strained up against the wrist strap. Not to get away. I had stopped being able to lie to myself about which way I was straining.

The dress slid to the floor and she stepped out of it and reached back for him without once glancing down at the man caged at her feet, and Dean’s hands closed over her hips, and the whole bright room leaned in to watch them start.