What Abby had decided was this: that Lea would come tonight.

She said it in the car, eyes on the road, the way she might have mentioned a dinner reservation. “Day eighty. You’ve earned it. Okafor’s signature is worth one.”

Lea, in the passenger seat, didn’t answer. She didn’t believe it. She would remember that later — the total, flat, animal disbelief. She had stopped thinking of it as something that could happen. It had become a country she’d lived in once, long ago, whose language she’d forgotten.

“You don’t look grateful,” Abby said.

“I don’t — I don’t trust it.”

Abby smiled at the windshield. “Good. You shouldn’t.”

The bedroom. The drawer. Abby took her time; of course she did.

Wrists first, the heavy cuffs, chained above her head to the ring at the headboard. Then ankles — chained wide to the foot corners, wider than ever before, so wide her thighs ached at the hip. Then something new: a broad leather strap across her hips, buckled down to either side of the frame, pinning her pelvis to the mattress. Lea pulled and found she could not lift her hips even an inch. A second strap went across her thighs, just above the knees, buckled tight.

“So you can’t move away from it,” Abby said, buckling. “Or toward it. You’ll take exactly what you’re given, exactly where it’s put.”

The collar was already on; it was always on, now, at home. Abby clipped a short chain from its front ring to the headboard as well, so that Lea’s head was held flat to the pillow.

Then she held up a ring gag — a steel ring padded in rubber, on a leather strap — and Lea’s breath caught.

“You’ll want to say things,” Abby said. “Please and stop and wait. I don’t want to hear them tonight.” She pressed the ring between Lea’s teeth and buckled it, and Lea’s jaw was held open, wide, her tongue loose and helpless behind it. “You’ll make noise. That’s fine. Noise I want.”

The bell. Pressed into her right hand, chained above her head, fingers closed around it one by one.

“The rule hasn’t changed,” Abby said. “Drop it and everything stops. Tonight too. Tonight especially.” She leaned close. “But understand what you’d be stopping.”

No blindfold. “You’ll watch,” Abby said. “I want you to see who does it.”

The key. The click. The second click.

The shield came away — the plug stayed docked; the app had refused her three times since the lab — and for the first time since the lab Lea saw herself: swollen and flushed dark, glistening, the insides of her thighs wet to the knee. Abby looked down at her for a long time with an expression Lea had learned to fear more than any other. It wasn’t tenderness. It was the look of someone assessing something she’d built, and finding it worked.

“Look at that,” Abby said. “Eighty days.”

She didn’t edge her. Not once. That was its own cruelty, Lea would understand later. After eighty days her body had learned to expect the stop, to brace for it, and the bracing ran so deep in her now that when it didn’t come, she didn’t know what to do.

Abby turned on the wand and laid it directly on her clit, on high, and held it there.

Lea came in under ten seconds. It hit her like a car. Eighty days of Wednesdays and sixteens and cushions and closings and hoods and strangers’ voices, eighty days of baseline climbing, all of it crashed down through her in an instant and her body seized against the restraints — the hip strap creaked, the chains snapped taut, her back tried to arch and couldn’t — and she screamed. Through the ring gag it came out raw and open and animal, and she could not stop making it. It went on and on, wave on wave, her cunt clenching around the plug and around nothing, her thighs shaking so hard the chains rang against the frame.

Abby did not take the wand away.

That was the next thing, and it was the thing Lea had never imagined. She’d thought — the small part of her still capable of thought — that when it was over it would be over, the way it had always been over, a slope down into nothing. But the wand stayed. It stayed right through the crest and down the far side and into the place where it started to hurt — the raw, over-bright, too-much place — and Lea writhed and couldn’t writhe, the straps held her flat, the chains held her open, and she begged, eh-eh, eh-eh, pleh — nothing, just vowels through the ring, drool running down her cheek into her ear — and Abby slid two fingers into her and curled them and pressed the wand down harder.

“You wanted this,” Abby said. “Eighty days, you wanted this. Have it.”

The second one came out of the hurting. It was worse — better — she had no words for it. It was dragged up out of her.

Abby did not stop.

The third broke something. Lea was sobbing — not misery, not anything she could have named — and her whole body was jerking against the straps in hard, helpless spasms, and the wand was a white-hot nail driven into her, and she could feel the bell in her fist, round and slick and brass. She could open her hand. That was all it would take. She could open her hand and it would fall and ring on the headboard and Abby would stop, instantly, as she always had.

She thought about it. Through the third and into the fourth she thought about nothing else.

She did not open her hand.

“There you are,” Abby said softly, watching her fist. “There you are.”

The fourth went on so long it stopped being a peak and became a place — a high, white, endless, ringing place where Lea had no edges at all, where she was only the wand and the fingers and the straps and the open gag and the eyes watching her from above. When Abby finally lifted the wand away, Lea didn’t come down. She just went slack in the restraints, twitching, every muscle still firing at random, staring at the ceiling, breathing in huge ragged gasps through the ring.

Abby turned the wand off. The silence was enormous.

She unbuckled the ring gag and eased it out. Lea’s jaw would not close. Abby put two fingers under her chin and pushed it closed for her, and held it.

“Whose?” she asked.

Lea’s voice was gone. It came out as a thread.

“Yours.”

“Whose was the eighty days?”

“Yours.”

“Whose is the next eighty?”

Lea closed her eyes. Tears ran out from under the lids.

“Yours.”

“Say thank you.”

“Thank you.” And then, because it came up out of her the way the orgasms had, dragged, unbidden: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you—”

“That’s enough,” Abby said, and Lea stopped.

Afterward Abby unchained her ankles and unbuckled the straps and rubbed the blood back into her legs, briskly, the way Priya had in the lab. She brought water and held the glass. She cleaned her with a warm cloth, thoroughly, the way she did on Wednesdays, and Lea cried a little more without knowing why, and Abby let her and didn’t comment.

She did not unchain the wrists from the headboard. She did not unclip the collar.

When she was done she picked up the shield from the nightstand.

Lea watched her. She didn’t protest. She found, looking at the gunmetal curve of it in Abby’s hand, that she didn’t want to — and she found, too, that this frightened her more than anything Abby had done all day. More than the lab. More than the strangers. She had been waiting for it the whole time, under everything, the way she used to wait for the haptic at her desk.

“Day eighty,” Abby said, and fitted it to her. Cool plate on raw, wrecked, oversensitive flesh; Lea gasped and her hips jerked against nothing. Click. The second click, electronic, final. “Which makes tomorrow day one.”

“Day one,” Lea repeated.

“New baseline.” Abby lay back on her own side of the bed, not touching her, and picked up her phone and looked at it — the dashboard, Lea knew, the lines, still lifting. “Look at that. Two hours ago you came four times. Your pulse is already back up to eighty-one.”

Lea could feel it. Down there behind the metal, already, the want starting again — faint and patient as a pilot light.

“It never goes away now,” Abby said, scrolling. “Not really. Does it.”

“No.”

“Good.”

The lamp went off. In the dark, Lea lay with her wrists chained over her head and listened to Abby’s breathing, and to her own pulse, and thought about March. About Okafor’s dry voice saying Well. About the regional sales meeting, and a room much larger than the lab, and how many chairs there would be.

“Abby.”

“Mm.”

“The second product. What is it?”

A long silence. Long enough that Lea thought she was asleep, or pretending to be. With Abby it was always very hard to tell.

“You’ve been building it with me since October,” Abby said finally. “Every time that insert was inside you, it was learning you. Where you are. How you’re made. What you do four seconds before you come.” A pause in the dark. “The shield is something you wear, Lea. The insert is something I put in you and take out.” Another pause, longer. “The second product isn’t either of those. It doesn’t come off. Go to sleep.”

On the nightstand, out of reach, her phone lit once in the dark. She didn’t need to see it.

1.