The train did a lot to her.

She stood, because sitting meant the shield pressed up into her with her full weight on it, and standing meant the strap shifted with every lurch of the car and dragged a slow, slick line between her cheeks. Somewhere under the river the train braked hard and she grabbed the pole and the plate rocked against her clit and she bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted copper. A man in a Patagonia vest glanced at her. She looked at the advertisement over his head — a dental implant clinic, a smiling woman — and read it nine times.

At home she texted, Home. The reply came back before she had her shoes off.

Abby Ninety-eight at Clark Street. One-oh-four at the brake. You held your breath for eleven seconds. Shower, then go to bed. Leave your hands outside the covers. I’ll know.

She showered. The device was waterproof — of course it was — and she stood under the water and washed around it, and her fingers kept finding the edge of the shield where it sealed against her skin, and running along it, the way a tongue finds the gap where a tooth used to be. There was no gap. There was a smooth, warm, unarguable seam and behind it, a quarter-inch away, everything she wanted.

She slept with her hands on top of the duvet. She dreamed of the lock.

It had features. Abby explained them on the third day, over a video call that Lea took in her office with the door shut and the blinds half down, as if anyone on thirty-one could see through her skirt.

“The sensor array’s the same as the sleeve, plus internal temperature and a pressure grid on the lining. So I’m getting a lot more resolution on what you’re doing to yourself in there.” Abby was at her own desk, glasses on, a whiteboard behind her covered in something that looked like circuit diagrams. “Second, there’s a haptic element. Small. Low-power. It’s in the top of the ridge.” She didn’t need to say which ridge. Lea had felt it every waking minute for three days. “It sits right where you think it sits.”

“You’re joking.”

Abby didn’t answer. She looked down at something off-screen and moved her finger.

It was not a buzz. It was smaller and more precise than a buzz — a single soft pulse, like a fingertip tapping once, directly on her clit through the lining. Lea’s whole body jerked in her chair. Her knee hit the underside of the desk. A cup of pens went over.

“Third,” Abby said, as if nothing had happened, “the lock is electronic as well as mechanical. There’s a physical key, which I have, and there’s an authenticated release on my phone, which I also have. If the device detects tampering — force on the hinge, a shim in the lock, anything — it alerts me, logs it, and the release locks out for seventy-two hours. Even for me.” She smiled faintly. “I built that in so I couldn’t be talked out of things.”

Lea was holding the edge of the desk. “Do it again.”

“No.”

“Abby—”

“You don’t ask for that. That’s the first rule. You’ll get it when I want you to have it, which will be at moments that are inconvenient for you.” Abby took her glasses off. “Second rule. Every night at ten, you report. How many times you wanted to come. How many times you wanted to get your fingers on your clit, or inside yourself, or grind your cunt against something until you got off. Where you were when it happened. How wet you got. What you were thinking about. In full sentences. I’ll check it against the data, so don’t bother lying, but I want to hear you say it. Third rule — you come to me Wednesdays and Sundays to be unlocked and cleaned. Not before. If something’s wrong, medically wrong, you call me and I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Anything else, you wait.”

“And when do I—” She couldn’t finish it.

“When do you come?” Abby put her chin on her hand. “I haven’t decided. I think it would be bad for you to know. I think you’d count.”

The haptic tapped her again — twice, quick — and Lea made a noise she had never made in an office in her life, and Abby ended the call.

The reports were the worst part. Lea had expected the device to be the worst part, and the device was bad — the constant faint pressure, the slickness that never fully dried, the way she had started to be able to feel her own pulse down there at all times, a small second heart she could not reach. But the device was just a fact. The reports were something she had to do.

At ten each night she sat on the edge of her bed with her phone and typed. The first few nights she typed short and clinical, like a time entry. Wanted to three times. Train, a.m. Conference room 31C, approx. 2 p.m. Bed.

Abby wrote back: Try again. Full sentences. What were you thinking in 31C.

She tried again. It took forty minutes. I was in the Hadley meeting. Mark was presenting the indemnity schedule and I was supposed to be following it. I wasn’t. I was thinking about you holding my skirt up while you fitted it, and about you saying “not one thing, not ever, until I decide.” I crossed my legs and the plate moved and I had to put my pen down because my hand was shaking. Mark asked if I had comments on clause 14 and I said no. I hadn’t read clause 14.

Better, Abby wrote. You’re going to read clause 14 tomorrow. Goodnight.

She found that she wrote the reports in her head during the day. That was the trap of them, and she saw it, and saw that seeing it didn’t help. Every time the want came up — at her desk, in the elevator, in line for coffee — some part of her was already composing it, turning it into sentences for Abby, which meant she was paying attention to it, which made it worse. She had been a person who didn’t think about sex. Now she thought about it in full sentences, with timestamps.

Wednesday she went to Abby’s after work. Abby met her at the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt, barefoot, and said, “Back room,” and Lea didn’t know what that meant.

Abby walked her down the hall, past the bedroom, to the door at the very end that Lea had always assumed was storage, or a second office — a door she had walked past a hundred times in six years and never once seen open. Abby put her thumb to a small pad beside the frame. Something clicked.

“In.”

The room was not what Lea’s mind had been bracing for, and that was the first wrong thing about it. It was warm. The floor was the same wide honey-colored oak as the rest of the house, and there was a thick wool rug, and a low lamp in the corner with a linen shade that threw soft amber light up the wall. There was a framed print — a botanical, a fern, beautifully done. The air smelled faintly of eucalyptus and clean cotton. It could have been a guest room in a good hotel.

Except.

In the center of the rug, under a second, harder light on an articulated arm, stood a table. Not a bed — a table, padded, upholstered in black leather the color of the cuffs she would come to know, at hip height, on a brushed steel base with a hydraulic pedal. Its foot end split into two padded sections, each on its own hinge. And everywhere, at every place a body might be — wrists, elbows, upper arms, waist, thighs, knees, ankles, and one wide padded band at the head end, for a forehead — there were straps. Thick, buckled, fleece-lined leather restraints, open and waiting, the buckles polished, laid out neat and symmetrical along the table’s edges like instruments on a tray.

Along the far wall the oak gave way to large pale tile, and the tile held a glass-walled shower with a handheld wand on a steel hose, a toilet, and a deep square steel-and-porcelain sink under a long mirror. Beside the sink stood a steel cabinet with glass doors, and through the glass Lea could see neatly folded white towels, rows of bottles, sealed packets, things in grey foam cutouts she didn’t let herself look at. A rolling steel tray sat by the table. On it, a folded washcloth, a bottle of lube, and a box of nitrile gloves.

A guest room in a good hotel. With a doctor in it. Warm and wrong.

Lea stood just inside the door and could not make herself take another step.

“What is this.”

“This is where you come on Wednesdays and Sundays.” Abby shut the door behind them. It closed with the soft, sealed sound of a fridge. “I had it done in the spring.”

The spring. Lea turned to look at her. Abby looked back, and didn’t explain, and didn’t need to.

“The table—”

“Isn’t for today.” Abby ran her hand along the edge of it, idly, over one of the open wrist straps, the way you’d stroke a horse’s neck. “Today you’re getting cleaned. You’ll be on it eventually. Not today.” She let the strap fall back into place. “Strip.”

She did. All of it, because Abby didn’t say otherwise, folding her clothes onto a small wooden chair by the door because it seemed important to do something ordinary with her hands. She stood on the warm rug naked except for the gunmetal shield and its straps, with her arms at her sides, and the strapped table at her back like a held breath, and Abby looked at her the way she’d looked at the graph — slowly, all of it, a long while.

“Over there. Hands on the edge of the sink. Feet apart. Don’t move them.”

The tile was cold under her feet after the rug. The mirror gave her back to herself: flushed, naked, locked, with the table and its open straps behind her, framed perfectly in the glass. She understood that the room had been arranged so she would see that.

The key was on a chain around Abby’s neck. Lea hadn’t noticed that before. Abby lifted it over her head and crouched and there was a click, and then a second click from somewhere in the electronics, and the shield came away.

The air hit her. That was all — air, warm eucalyptus-scented air on skin that had been sealed for four days — and her hips bucked forward as if she’d been touched and her hands nearly slipped on the porcelain. Abby made a soft sound, almost sympathetic.

“Look at you. Look down.”

Lea looked down. She was swollen and flushed dark and wet down the insides of both thighs, glistening under the hard white light, obscene. Her clit stood out from the hood, red, visibly throbbing.

“Four days,” Abby said. “That’s four days.” She ran the tap in the deep sink, testing the water with her wrist, and snapped on a pair of gloves. “Stay there.”

She washed her with a soft cloth and warm water. She did it thoroughly and without hurry and with exactly the clinical care she’d used to fit the sleeve, front to back, the creases of her thighs, everywhere the shield had sat, and every pass of the cloth went over Lea’s clit, lightly, incidentally, the way you might brush past something on the way to somewhere else. By the third pass Lea was making sounds. By the fifth she was rocking her hips into it and Abby stopped and stood back and waited, cloth in hand, until she stopped.

“You can stand still,” Abby said, “or we can do this every Wednesday for an hour.”

She stood still. It took everything. Abby finished, and patted her dry, and then, with Lea still bent over the sink, slid two fingers into her without warning, slowly, all the way.

Lea’s head went down between her arms. She heard herself say oh God oh God oh God in a voice like someone else’s. Abby’s fingers stayed there, still, buried, and her other hand came to rest on the small of Lea’s back.

“Here’s the thing about edging,” Abby said conversationally. “Everyone thinks it’s about the stopping. It isn’t. It’s about the arithmetic. Every time you get close and don’t go over, your body files it away. It doesn’t forget. It adds them up.” She curled her fingers, once. Lea’s knees bent. “So the next time you get close, you’re starting from higher. And the next. Until there isn’t any lower to go back down to. Until close is where you live.”

She began to move her fingers. Slowly. Crooking them forward each time against the swollen, ridged spot on the front wall of her cunt, the one that made Lea’s vision shiver. Her thumb found her clit and rested there, not moving, just present, just weight.

It took less than a minute. Lea felt it coming like a wave lifting a boat — the tightening, the heat climbing her belly, her thighs starting to shake —

“Tell me.”

“I’m close I’m close I’m—”

Abby took her hand away.

It was like missing a step in the dark. Lea’s whole body lurched toward a thing that wasn’t there anymore. Her cunt clenched on nothing, again, again, a desperate empty rhythm, and the orgasm stood just beyond the edge, so close she could feel the heat of it on her face, and did not come. It hung there. It began, impossibly slowly, to recede.

She was crying. Real tears, dripping off her nose into the sink.

“That’s one,” Abby said, and slid her fingers back in.

She did it six times. She counted them aloud each time, that’s two, that’s three, in the same pleasant voice. By the fifth Lea’s legs had gone and Abby had to hold her up with an arm around her waist, pinned against the sink, and Lea could feel Abby’s breasts against her back through the T-shirt and Abby’s breath on her neck and it made everything so much worse. By the sixth she was begging without words, just please and please and please in a voice scraped raw.

“Hands,” Abby said, after the sixth. “Back on the sink. Feet apart.”

The shield was in her other hand. She’d had it the whole time.

“No,” Lea said. “No, no, Abby, please, I can’t, I can’t go back in it like this—”

“You can. And there’s an addition.” Abby set the shield on the steel tray and took something else from the glass-fronted cabinet, out of its own grey foam cutout: a tapered plug in the same gunmetal finish, its flared base machined with a ring of tiny teeth. “Rear module. It docks into the keeper on the strap — you’ve been wondering what that socket was for. Core temperature, pelvic floor contractions — every time you clench, I’ll know. Every time you almost, I’ll know it before you do.”

Lea stared at it. “No.”

“Bend over further.”

“Abby, no, I’ve never — I don’t want that.”

“You didn’t want the shield either.” Abby uncapped a bottle of lube and coated the plug slowly, without looking at her. “You know the word that stops this. You’ve known it since the first night: you walk out the door. It’s right there. Nobody’s holding it shut.” She looked up. “Or you bend over further.”

Lea stood with her hands on the sink and looked at herself in the mirror — flushed, wet-faced, naked, shaking — and looked past her own reflection at the table with its open straps, and at the door beyond it.

The door is right there. She thought it in her own voice, the deposition voice, level and reasonable. Nothing is holding it shut. She’s told you so. You can straighten up, pick up your clothes from the chair, walk out, and she will let you. You have walked out of rooms far harder than this one.

Her body did not move.

She noticed that the way she would have noticed a witness failing to answer. Why aren’t you moving. No answer. Her hands stayed flat on the porcelain. Her feet stayed apart. Her cunt, open and swollen and dripping onto the tile between them, clenched on nothing — once, hard — at the sound of the cap coming off the lube, and she felt that happen and was humiliated by it and could do nothing about it, and that, she understood, was the answer. Her body had already testified. Her mind was still drafting objections to a ruling that had come down a minute ago.

All right, she thought. Then bargain. If she let this happen, Wednesday was over sooner. If she let this happen, Abby would be pleased, and pleased Abby was — she didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t like where it went. If you let this happen, said the deposition voice, coolly, you will have let it happen. There’s no version of tomorrow in which you didn’t.

Slowly, hating herself, she bent further.

It was cold. That was the first thing, and her mind seized on it gratefully, the way you grab a railing: cold, it’s only cold, lube is always cold. Then pressure. Steady and patient and unrelenting, Abby’s other hand flat on the small of her back holding her down, and the railing was gone.

She tried to think about clause fourteen. She actually tried. She had read it, finally, that morning, as instructed — indemnification for third-party claims arising out of — and the words came up obediently and then dissolved, because something was opening her, slowly, a millimetre at a time, and there was no sentence in the English language long enough to stand between her and that. Arising out of. Arising out of. Her breath came in short broken pieces. Too much, she thought, and then said it, “too much, too much,” and heard Abby make a small soothing sound and not stop, and some part of her that was still a lawyer registered with total clarity: she heard you. She heard you and decided.

Then her thinking began to go simple. She felt it go, the way you feel yourself start to fall asleep. Whole sentences went first. Then clauses. By the widest part there was nothing left in her head but single words with long white spaces between them — open — full — can’t — Abby — and the shocking, shameful, unmistakable fact that underneath can’t, her clit was throbbing against the cool air so hard she could feel her pulse in it.

Then the widest part was past and it seated itself with a soft obscene give and she was full in a way she had never been, and her already-screaming body clenched around it, and the clench sent a shock straight forward into everything else, and the last coherent thought she had for a while was not a protest at all. It was, appallingly, oh.

“There,” Abby said. “Feel that? That’s the first contraction I just logged.” She clipped the base to the strap. “Now. The shield.” She crouched. “That’s the whole point. You go back in it like this. Every Wednesday and every Sunday you go back in it like this. You’ll be higher every time.” The plate pressed up against her, cool metal and soft lining, and the ridge found its place again — nudging just between her swollen lips, settling there, riding up to rest on her soaking, screaming clit — and Lea sobbed. “And one day you’ll be so high that you’ll come just from me saying your name. And I still won’t let you.”

Click. And the second click, electronic, final. Then a third sound, behind her — smaller, a soft mechanical tick — as the plug’s base seated into the keeper at the fork of the strap and the teeth caught. Lea felt the whole assembly lock into a single thing, front and back, and understood she would be walking out of here full of it.

“Listen, because this part matters.” Abby peeled off one glove. “It won’t be in all the time. That would be bad for you, and I don’t break things I’m using. The app decides. Some mornings it’ll tell you to insert it, and you’ll do it yourself, in your own bathroom, and dock it, and it’ll log the time. Some days it won’t ask at all.” She peeled off the other. “Once it’s docked, the keeper holds it. It doesn’t come out until the app releases it. When you need it out — and you will, you’re a person — you ask the app. It has rules. I wrote them. Sometimes it says yes in a minute. Sometimes it makes you wait. Everything you ask, and how you ask it, and how long you wait, comes to me.” She met Lea’s eyes in the mirror. “And I can always override it. In either direction.”

Lea stared at her. “You can’t be serious. At work—”

“Especially at work.” Abby tapped her phone. “And it does more than sit there.”

Something happened inside her. Low, deep, behind everything — a slow heavy thrum, like a cello string, that went through the base of her spine and forward into the plate, into the ridge, into her clit from the inside. Lea grabbed the sink. Then the thrum stopped, and something worse began: a slow, patient fullness, the plug swelling, a few millimetres, no more, stretching her around it gently and inexorably until she gasped — and holding there.

“It expands,” Abby said. “Not much. Enough. For when you’re being difficult.” She tapped again, and it eased back, and Lea sagged. “And it reads you earlier than anything else. Your body tells the plug you’re about to come four seconds before it tells you. I’ll want that later.”

Abby stood, and stripped off the gloves, and dropped them in a steel bin with a foot pedal, and washed her hands, and dried them. She looked at Lea in the mirror — naked, locked, shaking, wet-faced — and something moved in her expression that was not cruelty, exactly. It was closer to hunger. To ownership.

“I’m going to order Thai,” she said. “Put your clothes back on. Stay for dinner.”

Lea stayed for dinner.

The first request was at 10:52 the next morning.

She was at her desk with the Hadley schedules when she understood that she needed it out, and then, five minutes later, that she needed it out now. She opened Halo. There was a new button under the pulsing white light, small and grey: Request release — rear module. She pressed it.

Request received. Pending.

She waited. She read the same indemnity clause four times. At 10:58 she pressed it again.

Request received. Please do not submit duplicate requests. Duplicate requests extend wait times.

At 11:06 she was in the disabled stall on twenty-nine, the one nobody used, fully dressed, standing, with her phone in both hands. The plug sat in her, docked, immovable, utterly indifferent to her body’s opinion. She typed into the little free-text field she had not noticed before, under Reason (optional):

Lea I need to use the bathroom. Please.

Halo Pending.

Lea Please. I’m at work. Please release it.

Halo Pending.

She leaned her forehead against the cool partition and breathed through her nose and typed, with fingers that were not steady: Abby please. I’m begging. I’m in the stall. Please.

The screen changed.

Request approved. Rear module released. Re-insert and dock by 11:40.

Below it, a moment later, a message — not from the app. From Abby.

Abby You asked nicely the third time. The first two were rude. See you at ten for your report.

That night, in her report, Lea wrote it all down, as instructed, in full sentences, including what it had felt like to beg a piece of software in a toilet stall on twenty-nine. She did not get to the end without having to stop, twice, because writing it made her so wet that the ridge slid against her when she shifted in her chair.