“Lea,” said Pauline. “Your wife.”

“Ex—” It came out of Craig in a gasp, reflexive, the way you’d correct a waiter. His eyes were still rolling. He didn’t understand. “Ex-wife. What — why—”

“What is the one thing,” said Pauline, close to his ear, softly, clearly, every word placed, “that would make Lea walk out on someone?”

In the dark, Lea stopped breathing.

She heard it with her whole body. She heard it the way she’d heard Abby, may I come up? through the hood on the stage — not as words, but as a hand closing on the back of her neck. What would make Lea walk out. Not what does Lea like. Not where did she grow up, not what’s her mother’s name, not what’s she afraid of. Pauline hadn’t asked what would hurt her. Pauline had asked how to get her out.

Out of what, Lea thought. Out of where.

Beside her, Abby’s hand had gone still on top of hers. Not shaking now. Utterly, completely still.

On the table, Craig was blinking up at Pauline. Some of the fog had cleared out of his face. Not much. Enough. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Why would — why do you want to—” He tried to turn his head; the forehead strap held it. “What’s that got to do with — with this—”

“Nothing at all,” said Pauline. “I’m curious. I’m a curious person. Answer the question, Craig, and we’ll carry on.”

He lay there, breathing hard. Lea watched his face. She had nine years of that face. She watched the question go down into him and reach something and stop.

“No,” he said.

Pauline waited.

“No. I can’t.” His voice cracked. “I can’t — not that. That’s — that’s hers. That’s not mine to — no. Ask me something else. Ask me anything else, I’ll — not that.”

That’s hers. In the dark, something turned over in Lea’s chest so hard she put her free hand flat against her sternum. He knew. He knew exactly what the answer was, and he knew it was hers, and he was lying strapped open on a table with steel through his cock and a probe in his ass and a stranger’s glove twelve inches away, eleven edges deep, and he was saying no.

For one second — one — she saw the man she’d married. The one who’d have handled it.

Pauline straightened up.

She didn’t argue. She didn’t repeat the question. She didn’t threaten. She simply stood, and looked down at him the way she’d looked at the dome in Lea’s office, for one second, and turned back toward the velvet chair, and said, over her shoulder, mildly, to the room:

“Resume.”

Priya’s finger went to the key. The ring began to hum.

And Ms. Ostrova unclasped her hands, and reached for him —

“WAIT—”

The glove hadn’t landed. It was an inch above his cock. Lea saw it — saw the black fingers stop, open, hovering, a breath away from the swollen, purple, leaking flesh, and saw Craig’s whole body convulse toward it and away from it at once, every strap creaking.

“Wait — wait wait wait — okay — okay — I’ll tell you — I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you, please, don’t — not again, I can’t, I can’t do it again, I’ll tell you—”

He was sobbing. Not crying — sobbing, great dry heaving gulps of it, his chest straining against the strap.

It had taken him less than two seconds. He hadn’t even let the hand land.

Pauline stopped, halfway back to the chair. She turned around. And for the first time all morning, something like warmth came into her face. It was the most frightening thing Lea had seen yet.

“Good boy,” said Pauline.

She came back. She stood beside his head again. She looked down at him with that warmth, and Lea, behind the glass, felt it land on him the way Abby’s good girl had landed on her, the first time, on the bedroom rug — like something you’d been starving for and hated yourself for wanting.

“You’ll have your release,” Pauline said, “once you’ve told me.”

Release.

Lea heard it. She heard it as clearly as if Pauline had said it into her own ear. Not orgasm. Not you can come. Release. The same soft, product-friendly, perfectly ambiguous word that sat in grey letters under the big white number on Lea’s phone every night. Releases: 3. Full: 2. Ruined: 1.

Craig didn’t hear it. Lea watched him not hear it. Watched him hear come. Watched the relief go through his whole wrecked body like warm water, his face crumpling — “Thank you — thank you — yes — thank you—”

Pauline glanced at Ms. Ostrova. Lifted one finger. Made a small, slow, circling motion with it in the air.

Slower.

The black glove closed round him.

It moved slowly. Very slowly. A long, even, unhurried stroke from the base ring to the anchor and back, perhaps one every three seconds — not enough to push him over, not nearly; just enough to hold him there, right at the top, right on the lip of it, where he couldn’t think about anything else. The ring hummed low at his root. The probe thrummed, faint, deep.

And Craig talked.

He talked to the ceiling, with his eyes squeezed shut and his hips shuddering against the strap on every stroke and his voice breaking up into pieces between breaths. Lea heard every word. The ceiling speaker caught all of it. Every breath. Every wet sound of the glove.

“She — she can take anything. You have to understand that. She — ah — she can take anything. Hours. Pressure. My — I was a mess, I was — oh God — I was a mess for years, I was drinking, and she took it, and she never — she didn’t complain, she just — she handled it, she handled everything, she was—”

“Not what she can take,” said Pauline. “What she can’t.”

“Lying.” It came out of him almost as a scream; the glove had reached the head on the word. “Lying. She can’t — not the thing you did, not the — the lie. She — fuck — fuck, please—”

“Slower,” said Pauline. Ms. Ostrova slowed. “Tell me about the lie, Craig.”

He told her.

Lea sat in the dark with Abby’s hand on hers and listened to her ex-husband tell a stranger the worst night of her life, with a stranger’s glove on his cock.

“There was someone. At my office. Jen. I was — eight months. Eight months. And every night I’d come home and Lea would ask — not even ask, she’d just say you okay? the way you do — and every night I’d say — ah — yeah, fine, long day. Every night. Eight months.” He was crying now, real tears, running sideways into his hair under the forehead strap. “And she found out. A Thursday. She found a — doesn’t matter. She found out on a Thursday night, and she didn’t scream, she didn’t throw anything, she just looked at me, and I said it’s not what you think, I can explain, I can handle this—”

I can handle this.

“—and she went in the bedroom and she packed a bag. That night. And she slept at her sister’s and on Friday she came back with boxes and by Friday afternoon she was gone. Gone. A day. Nine years and she was gone in a day.” He was gasping. The glove kept moving. Slowly. “And I tried — I tried for months, I — and later, at the lawyer’s, at the — the mediation — she said — she said—”

He choked.

“Go on,” said Pauline.

“She said, I could have forgiven you for her. I can’t forgive you for every night.”

The speaker hissed faintly. The glove moved. The ring hummed.

“Every night,” Craig said. “That’s what she couldn’t — it wasn’t Jen. It was every night. Every night I looked at her and said fine.” He was sobbing. “If you lie to her — if she finds out you’ve been lying to her, to her face, every day, she’ll — she won’t fight. She won’t argue. She’ll just — go. That’s it. That’s the thing. That’s — that’s all of it, please, I told you, I told you, please—”

Pauline straightened.

“Thank you, Craig,” she said. “That’s very helpful.”

In the dark, Lea could not move.

She had never told anyone that. Not Dana — Dana knew there’d been a woman, but not every night. Not her mother. Not the therapist she’d seen twice and then stopped seeing. Not Abby. Especially not Abby. She’d said it once, across a conference table, at a mediation, to a man who’d lied to her face for eight months — and he’d kept it. Two years he’d kept it. And he’d just given it away, strapped to a table, for a slower glove.

And Pauline Ward had it now. The one thing. Folded up and put away behind those pale, unhurried eyes, as neatly as the reading glasses on their cord.

Why does she want it, said the deposition voice, slowly, as if from the bottom of a well. What does she need to get you out of.

Lea turned her head.

Abby’s hand had come off hers.

Lea didn’t know when. She’d been holding on to it — she realized it now, with a sick lurch — she’d been gripping Abby’s fingers through the whole confession without knowing it. And at some point, Abby had taken her hand back. It was in Abby’s own lap now, beside the tablet. Flat. Still.

Abby was staring through the glass. Her face was white. Not the cold white of composure. The other one. The dinner-table white.

“Abby,” Lea whispered.

Abby didn’t look at her.

On the clipboard, line eleven. Keyholder interview (participant). Lea looked at it. She’d seen it. She’d witnessed it. That was all the box asked.

She picked up the pen on its beaded chain and initialed it. LC. Two letters, in a hand that was not shaking anymore. It had gone past shaking. It was steady and slow and nothing like her, the handwriting of someone filling in a form in a waiting room after the doctor has come out and said the word.

“Ms. Ostrova,” said Pauline. “Stop.”

The glove left him.

Craig howled — a long, high, hopeless sound — and his cock jerked in the empty air, so close, so swollen it looked painful, purple and slick and throbbing on its rod. “No — no no — you said — you said once I told you — I told you, I told you everything—”

“And you’ll have it,” said Pauline. “In a moment. There’s one more step first.” She sat back down in the velvet chair. Crossed her legs. “Doctor. Item twelve.”

Dr. Anand didn’t move at once.

Lea saw her hesitate — saw her stand at the tray, with her hand above the second, smaller fold of blue cloth, the fist-sized shape under it, and look across at Pauline. A long look.

Then she drew back the cloth.

Craig had lifted his head the inch the strap allowed. He saw it.

“What’s that?”

It was steel. Bright, polished, contoured. A short, curved tube of open steel bars — five of them, slender, running lengthwise, joined by rings — closed at one end in a rounded cap with a slot at its center, and at the other end, a heavy flanged collar with a locking stud. It was small. That was the first thing anyone would see. It was small. Lea knew the numbers; she’d read the order form Pauline’s office had filed under Configuration B. Interior length, fifty-five millimeters. Interior diameter, twenty-eight. Shorter than Lea’s thumb. Five and a half centimeters, for a cock that had measured eight point four lying soft and fourteen point six standing. Twenty-eight millimeters across, for a shaft that had taped at ten point two around the base — thirty-two and a half across. Narrower than it had been when Dr. Anand measured it soft.

“What is that,” said Craig. His voice had gone very quiet. “What is that. That’s not — nobody said anything about — that wasn’t in the—”

“Configuration B enclosure,” said Pauline. “Section seven.”

“I didn’t — that wasn’t — I read it, I read it, it said ring and the — the rod thing, and the — it didn’t say cage, it never said—”

“Including but not limited to,” said Pauline.

In the dark, Lea’s lips moved with hers. She didn’t mean them to. She heard herself whisper it, exactly in time, the way you mouth the words to a song you hate — including but not limited to — and she felt Abby turn and look at her, finally, in the dark.

Lea had written that sentence. In his packet. In all twelve. She’d known it was there and known what it covered and initialed his packet complete, steady, on a Wednesday morning.

She was the only one in either room who wasn’t surprised.

“It’s sized under flaccid,” said Dr. Anand. Her voice was very even. “Thirty-five percent under on length, fourteen on diameter. He’ll have to be fully detumescent. That takes time. I’d recommend we wait, or use cold compresses, and fit it in ten or fifteen—”

“No,” said Pauline.

“It’s the standard—”

“It’s the keyholder’s discretion. Section seven, paragraph three.” Pauline didn’t raise her voice. “I’d like it fitted now. As he is.”

Dr. Anand looked at her.

“You can note your objection,” Pauline said. “Priya, note the doctor’s objection. Craig—” and she turned her head, and looked down the length of the table at him, at his spread and strapped and shaking body, at his swollen, purple, rod-threaded cock — “you still have your word. It still works. It’ll still work in ten seconds and in ten minutes and in ten days. Say it, and Dr. Anand takes everything out of you, and you go home, and you never see me again.”

Silence.

Lea watched him. She watched him with everything she had.

His mouth opened. Withdraw. She saw the shape of the W start on his lips. Saw his eyes go to the cage. To Pauline. To the mirror. Back to the cage.

I can handle it.

His mouth closed.

He didn’t say it.

“Good,” said Pauline. “Corrective. Level two.”

The current hit the inside of his cock and he screamed, and the scream went on and on, his body bowing against every strap at once, the table rattling on its steel frame — and when it stopped, and he dropped, his cock had collapsed. Not soft. Shocked. Half-down, sagging on the rod, swollen still but beaten, the blood stunned out of it.

“Now,” said Pauline. “Before it comes back.”

Ms. Ostrova picked up the cage.

She threaded the slot in its cap over the flared end of the rod where it stood out of the tip of his cock, so the rod passed through the cap like a key through a lock. Then she took his shocked, half-swollen cock in her black glove — and pushed. Down. Into the bars.

It didn’t fit.

Lea had known it wouldn’t. She’d read the spec. Sized under flaccid. And he was not flaccid; he was swollen and bruised and half-hard and engorged from an hour of edging and a ring that had been squeezing the blood into him all morning, and the cage was narrower than he’d been at rest, and Ms. Ostrova simply pushed. Steadily. With her whole gloved hand. Folding him. Compressing him. Forcing the thick, swollen, purple flesh down into the slender steel bars, an inch at a time, the bars biting in, the flesh bulging between them — and Craig shrieked. Not a scream. A shriek. A sound Lea had never heard come out of a human being. His head slammed against the forehead strap. His fingers clawed at nothing. His thighs fought the stirrups so hard Dr. Anand stepped in and put her hands on his knees.

“Stop — STOP — oh God oh God it’s — STOP, it’s — you’re breaking it — you’re BREAKING it—”

“You’re not breaking anything,” said Pauline, from the chair. “It’s designed for this.”

Ms. Ostrova pushed. The cap came down over the head of him, the rod sliding through its slot, the anchor ring seating into a recess at the tip. The bars closed round his shaft, crushing it. The flanged collar met the base ring.

Ms. Ostrova pressed the stud home.

Click.

The same sound. The small, final sound. Every lock.

Craig lay on the table and screamed and screamed. His cock — what Lea could see of it — was crammed into the steel, bulging dark and swollen between the bars, the whole cage locked to the ring at his root and the rod inside him and the anchor through his head. He couldn’t get hard in it. He couldn’t get soft in it — not yet, not for a long time; the swelling had nowhere to go. It just sat there, crushed, in its bars. Locked.

Dr. Anand bent over him. She pressed her gloved thumb against the dark flesh bulging between two bars, held it, released it, watched the color come back. Did it again. Checked the tip, around the anchor.

“Perfused,” she said. Flatly. She stepped back. “Under protest.”

“Noted,” said Pauline. “Thank you, Doctor.”

In the dark, Lea initialed twelve.

The pen tore through the paper.

It was two or three minutes before Craig’s screams turned back into words. When they did, they were very small.

“Is it — is it done? Is it done? Please say it’s done.”

“Nearly,” said Pauline.

She stood up from the velvet chair. She walked over to the table. She looked down at him — at his wet, ruined face, his heaving chest, his crushed cock in its steel — and she smiled. The warm smile. The good-boy smile.

“Now,” she said, “it’s time for your release.”

Craig’s face —

Lea would remember his face for the rest of her life.

It opened. Everything in it. All the pain and fear and humiliation of the last two hours went out of it at once, like a tide, and what was left was pure, naked, helpless gratitude. The face of a dog when the door opens. “Oh — oh God — thank you — thank you, thank you, thank you—” He was crying again. Different crying. “Thank you — I’m sorry — I’m sorry I said no, I’m sorry, thank you, thank you—”

“You’re welcome,” said Pauline. “You earned it.”

She stepped back.

“Rear module. Sixty.”

The probe woke up inside him.

Not the slow thrum. Something else. A hard, deep, rhythmic pressure — Lea could hear it, the motor’s pitch changing through the ceiling speaker — pulsing against his prostate, again, again, again. And Craig’s whole body seized. His hips jerked. His caged cock strained — Lea saw it strain, tried to rise, swelled against the bars, the flesh pressing out dark between the steel — and couldn’t. He howled.

“Oh — oh fuck — it — I can’t — it’s—”

He climbed. He climbed with nothing on his cock at all — nothing could touch it now; it was sealed in steel — climbed from the inside, from the probe alone, the way he’d climbed at the seventh edge, but harder, faster, the prostate driving him up while the cage crushed him down so that every surge of arousal turned to pain at the bars. His face was a knot of it. Pleasure and agony and gratitude and hope, all at once, all on top of each other. “Thank you — oh God — thank you — I’m — I’m close — I’m close—”

“Stop,” said Pauline.

The probe went silent.

He wailed. He’d been right there.

“Again.”

She edged him three more times. Hard. With the probe alone, at sixty, at seventy, at eighty, through the cage, so that each time he reached the top he was straining so hard against the bars that he screamed with it, and each time she stopped him there — once with nothing, twice with corrective, the current cracking through the rod inside his caged, crushed cock — and each time he begged, and thanked her, and begged.

In the dark, Lea’s body was doing something.

She felt it before she understood it. The pelvic floor wave — her own — clenching. In rhythm. Not with a glove now. With the probe. With the sound of it, the motor’s pulse through the speaker, the beat of it against him. Her cunt was clenching in time with it, on nothing, between her bar-spread thighs, and her clit was throbbing against the triangle, and her nipples ached in their rings, and she was climbing — climbing, untouched, sitting perfectly still in a black chair in the dark watching her ex-husband being edged through a cage — she was climbing, toward something, impossibly, from nothing but the sound and the sight and the rhythm —

No. No. Not this. Not watching him. Please. Not—

At the top of her, deep, the platform fired.

The twinge. The old one. Not a ruin — nothing so elaborate. The wall. Sharp, electric, internal, a hard bright crack of current from the ring that threw her pelvic floor out of rhythm like a hand slapped flat on a drum, and blanked her clit in a white, ringing flash. Passive mode. Untouched. Automatic. The platform had detected her climbing and stopped her, the way it had stopped her sixty-three times in the dark in March with her own hand between her legs.

She gasped. Out loud. In the dark. Her body jerked in the chair against the bar.

Abby turned and looked at her.

“I didn’t,” Abby said. Quietly. “That wasn’t me.”

“I know,” Lea whispered.

She did know. And it was worse. It was so much worse. Nobody had done it to her. She’d done it herself, watching. Her body had tried to come, watching this — and the thing inside her had stopped it, on its own, without anyone asking. The way it would stop her forever. Whether anyone was watching or not.

“Milk him,” said Pauline.

The probe changed again.

Not a pulse now. A press. Deep, steady, unrelenting — Lea could hear the motor drop to a low, grinding, continuous note — a slow, crushing, rhythmic massage, pushing, pushing against his prostate and not letting up. And Ms. Ostrova stepped in and laid two fingers of her black glove flat against the skin behind his balls, below the base ring, and pressed upward, in time.

Craig’s body went taut. He gasped. “Oh — oh yes — oh God — here it — here it comes — thank you, thank you—”

He waited for it.

Lea watched him wait for it. His whole body poised. Every muscle braced. His face screwed up, eyes shut, mouth open, waiting for the crest, for the surge, for the explosion he’d been begging for for two and a half hours —

Something came out of the end of the rod.

Not a spurt. A drop. A thick, white, slow drop, welling out of the hollow tip of the steel where it stood through the cap of the cage. It hung there. It fell. Ms. Ostrova had a small plastic specimen cup in her other hand, already; she held it under the tip of the rod and caught it.

Another drop. Another. A slow, steady, thin white drip, out of the end of the rod, into the cup. Draining. Out of him. Through the hollow steel inside his cock.

“Wait—” said Craig.

The probe pressed. Ms. Ostrova’s fingers pressed. The drip went on. Thicker for a moment. Then thin again. A long, slow, white thread.

“Wait — wait, what — that’s — I’m not — wait — I’m not — that’s not—”

He couldn’t feel it.

Lea knew. She knew exactly what he was feeling, because it was the thing that had been happening to her since March — except worse; because at least her body went through the motions. His didn’t even get that. There was no contraction. No surge. No crest. Nothing. The probe was simply pushing it out of him, mechanically, like pressing paste from a tube, and his body wasn’t coming — his body didn’t know anything was happening at all, except a deep, strange, dragging ache, a pressure, a draining — while everything he’d been holding for two and a half hours ran out of the end of the rod, drop by drop, into a plastic cup, and took nothing with it.

“No—” said Craig. “No. No, no. Wait. Stop. That’s not — I didn’t — I’m not coming, I’m not — stop, it’s going, it’s all going, I can feel it going and I’m not — you said—”

“Keep going,” said Pauline.

The probe pressed. The drip ran. On and on. A minute. Two. Ms. Ostrova’s black fingers pressing in rhythm, her face blank, the cup in her other hand slowly filling — a quarter-inch, a half — and Craig straining against every strap, his caged cock bulging in its bars, his hips bucking against nothing, chasing it, trying with his whole body to make it into something, to feel anything — and failing, and failing, and it ran out of him anyway.

“You said—” He was screaming now. “You said! You said I could — you said once I told you — you said I could come—”

“I said release,” said Pauline.

She didn’t raise her voice.

“That’s your release, Craig. Look.”

Ms. Ostrova lifted the cup. Held it up, at the level of his eyes, where he could see it through the strap. White. Cloudy. Graduated in black down the side; it read just under four milliliters. Everything he’d had.

The probe stopped. The drip slowed. Stopped.

He was empty.

And then Craig went mad.

There was no other word for it. Lea had seen men angry — she’d been a litigator for twelve years; she’d seen men throw chairs across conference rooms, seen a client put his fist through a glass partition. She had never seen this.

He roared. A sound that didn’t have words in it, not at first — just rage, pure, animal, enormous, ripping up out of his chest — and he threw himself against the straps. All of them. At once. Again. Again. The table shook. The steel frame rattled and rang. The chest strap creaked. His wrists twisted and wrenched in their cuffs until the skin went white and then red. His thighs bucked in the stirrups so hard the hinges screamed, and Dr. Anand stepped back from him, and Priya half-rose from her bench. “HR one eighty-two,” Priya said, sharply. “One eighty-five.”

“YOU FUCKING — YOU LYING FUCKING BITCH — YOU FUCKING — YOU SAID — YOU SAID — I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU — LET ME UP — LET ME THE FUCK UP — I TOLD YOU — I TOLD YOU EVERYTHING — I GAVE YOU HER — I GAVE YOU HER AND YOU — YOU FUCKING—”

He ripped at the straps. He ripped and ripped. His caged, emptied, crushed cock bounced on its steel between his spread thighs with every heave, locked, useless, done. The probe sat silent in him, swollen, pinned by its link, not moving no matter how he heaved. The rod sat in him. The cage sat on him. He was screaming at the ceiling, at the light, at the woman in green.

I gave you her.

He’d heard himself. Lea heard him hear himself. In the middle of the rage, it came out, and he heard it, and something even worse came into the roaring after that.

Pauline didn’t look at him.

That was the thing. That was the thing Lea would never get past. Pauline didn’t flinch, didn’t step back, didn’t answer, didn’t watch. She didn’t even turn her head. She had already turned away from him — the moment the cup came up, the moment the drip stopped, she’d turned, as if he’d stopped existing when he stopped being useful — and while he screamed and ripped at the straps behind her and the table rang and rattled on its frame, she took a small black key fob from Ms. Ostrova’s outstretched glove, without looking at it, and dropped it into the pocket of her green dress.

14. Keys transferred to keyholder.

Lea didn’t initial it. She couldn’t. She looked down at the clipboard and her hand wouldn’t do it. The pen lay on the shelf on its little beaded chain and her fingers lay beside it.

Abby reached across, in the dark, and picked up the pen, and initialed fourteen for her.

AM.

Small. Neat. Perfectly formed.

Pauline walked toward the mirror.

Slowly. The green pumps soundless on the vinyl. Behind her, Craig was still screaming — hoarser now, cracking, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, you fucking — and the table was still rattling, and Priya was still calling numbers, and Dr. Anand was bent over his wrists, checking the cuffs. None of it touched her. She walked through it as if through an empty room.

She stopped at the glass.

Close. A foot away. So close that, from the dark side, Lea could see the fine lines at the corners of her pale eyes, the reading glasses on their cord, the faint dust of powder on her cheek. So close that Lea, without meaning to, pressed back in the black chair — as far as the bar between her thighs would let her — away from the window, away from the face on the other side of it.

Pauline couldn’t see her. Lea knew she couldn’t see her. It was one-way glass. Lea had drafted the spec. ASTM. One-way glazing. On Pauline’s side it was a mirror. She was looking at her own reflection.

Pauline looked straight into Lea’s eyes.

She held it. One second. Two. Three. Longer than she’d looked at the dome. Longer than she’d looked at anything.

Behind her, the screaming broke, and became sobbing.

Pauline smiled — not the warm smile, not the good-boy smile; something smaller and colder and older than either — and lifted her gaze, very slightly, just above Lea’s head, to where Abby was sitting in the dark.

“Abby,” she said. “Shall we talk about numbers?”