David pressed his thumb to the screen and held it there.

The pairing list glowed in the dark, remote_01 in its flat grey script, remote_02 beneath it, and under remote_02 the name. Marcus. He had looked at it long enough to know its shape the way a man knows a word he has said too many times — letters coming apart, meaning going thin. Forty-one days. That was the number that sat wrong in him. Not the name. The number. Forty-one days ago he had put Willow on a plane to Houston with a boarding pass he had bought himself, and Marcus had already been holding a remote by then, paired and authorized, sitting in his hand in a hotel bar while David drank coffee three states away and believed he was teaching a successor.

He pressed harder. The screen asked him once, in small grey letters, whether he was sure. He was sure. He had been sure for eleven minutes while he stood in the dark doing nothing, and the doing-nothing had been the last of it. He tapped yes.

The name went out like a light. No sound from the phone — the click was in his head, the small clean click of a lock turning, of a drawer closing, of a ledger line drawn under a sum. remote_02 greyed, then thinned, then was not there. Only remote_01 remained, and under it nothing but the word paired, plain and owned.

He set the phone face-up on the sill and looked at it a moment, the way he looked at a contract after the signature — not with pleasure, exactly. With the flat satisfaction of a thing made true. Marcus would reach for his phone and find the app come up empty. He would press the icon and the icon would open onto nothing. David allowed himself the image: the man in whatever room he had gone back to, thumb working a screen that no longer knew him.

Then he turned.

The lamp behind the bed threw his shadow long across the boards, and past the shadow Willow lay on her side in the black silk, one arm above her head, the sheet drawn to her hip. She had slept through the lobby. She had slept through the drive, through the elevator, through the eleven minutes he had spent standing over her with another man's name in his hand. That was the thing about her that kept catching him — how completely she went under once she was put down somewhere soft. The copper wig sat on the stand by the vanity where he had set it, and without it her own hair showed, sandy and flattened and short, and the collar rode high on her throat with the little padlock turned to the side.

He crossed to the bed. The boards were cold under his bare feet and he took his time, because there was no reason not to, because the phone on the sill was quiet now and the room was his and the woman in it was his, and he wanted to feel the shape of that before he touched anything.

The remote lay on the nightstand where he had left it. Remote_01. He picked it up and turned it over in his palm — a small matte rectangle, no markings but the two he had stamped himself, and it had never once failed him.

The plug pulsed.

Not the shallow flutter he used when he wanted her attention across a restaurant. This was deep and slow, the long low swell he saved for the end of things, and it came up through the mattress and into his hand through the remote, and on the bed Willow's back arched off the silk in one clean movement, her chin lifting, her mouth opening without sound, the sheet sliding down her hip.

David did not move.

His thumb was nowhere near the dial. He looked down at the remote in his hand and the remote looked back, inert, its little face blank as a stone.

He turned it over. He pressed the pairing button once, short, the way he would to check a battery, and the app on the sill behind him would have shown nothing, because there was nothing to show — remote_02 was gone, and remote_01 was here, in his hand, doing nothing. He knew the firmware. He had written the firmware. He had sat in the thinking room above Grand Central with a laptop and a bottle of water and written the whole of it himself, and there was no ghost in it, no drift, no learned behavior, because he had not put any in.

The plug pulsed again.

Slower this time. Deeper. It rolled through her like a tide coming in, and Willow's hand came down off the pillow and found the sheet and gripped it, and her breath went out of her in a long low note that was not a word. Her thighs pressed together under the silk. Her heel slid up the bed and back down.

David watched her ribs. He watched the rise and the fall of them, and the pulse came again, and the rise went up with it and the fall came down with it, and the third time he counted, and the fourth time he understood.

It was keeping time with her breathing.

Not against it. With it. The swell came up as her chest filled and crested as it emptied, and the interval between one pulse and the next was the interval of her own slow sleeping breath, and it was not a rhythm he had programmed, because he had never programmed a rhythm at all. He had programmed a dial. A dial and a button and a range. He had given her a tool, and the tool had learned her the way water learns the shape of a channel, and now it was running on its own the way a heart runs, and he stood at the foot of the bed with the remote dead in his hand and watched his own invention do something he had not taught it.

He set the remote down on the nightstand. Carefully. The way a man sets down a glass he no longer trusts.

Then he sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress took his weight, and Willow did not wake. Her breathing went on, and the plug went on with it, pulse for pulse, breath for breath, and David put his hand flat on the silk beside her hip and felt the small tremor running under her skin like something working in the ground.

He had done this to her. That was the plain fact of it, and he held the fact the way he held everything, turning it, weighing it. He had put the device in her and closed the collar on her and sent her to Houston and brought her back and knelt her in a lobby in front of a man who had loved her badly, and every step of it had been his hand on the dial. That was the arrangement. That was what he was for. And the arrangement had just looked back at him and gone on without him, and the thing he felt was not fear, exactly.

It was the feeling of standing at the edge of a room he had built and finding the far door open.

Willow's eyes opened.

They came open the way they always did after the deep sleep — slow, unfocused, the hazel gone dark and wide in the lamplight, and she looked up at him from the pillow with the sheet caught under her arm and her hair flat to her skull and the collar high on her throat, and she did not startle, and she did not ask what time it was, and she did not ask why he was sitting there in the dark.

She knew.

That was the other thing about her that kept catching him. She always knew. He had spent three years reading men and women across desks and tables and hotel bars, and he had never once met anyone whose face told him less and whose body told him more, and Willow's body was telling him something now. The pulse came up and her eyes closed halfway and her lips parted around a breath, and when the breath went out the pulse went down and her eyes came back to his, and she was not surprised by any of it.

"You felt it," she said.

Her voice was thick with sleep, lower than Willow's voice, closer to Warren's, and David did not answer, because he wanted to hear what else she had.

She turned her face on the pillow. The plug pulsed again and her hand came up and closed on his wrist where it lay on the silk, her fingers small and cool, and she held his wrist the way a person holds a rail.

"I felt you standing there," she said. "Before I woke up. I felt you looking at the phone."

"You were asleep."

"I was." Her thumb moved once across the inside of his wrist, over the tendon, and stopped. "I still felt it. You were doing something to the app."

David looked at her hand on his wrist. He had told her once, in the thinking room, that a submissive who could not feel her Dom in the next room was a submissive who had not been trained to anything but obedience, and that obedience was the cheap part. She had remembered. She had remembered it so well that she had felt him through a wall and a sleep and a closed phone, and he was not sure whether that was the thing he had wanted or the thing he had been afraid of.

"I took something away from someone tonight," he said.

"Marcus."

The name came out of her flat and easy, no flinch in it, and the plug pulsed and she let it, her eyes going to his and staying there. She had walked past the man in the lobby without a word and knelt for David, and the name had not cost her anything since. That was the difference between a claim and a habit. Marcus had been a claim. David was a habit now, worn into her like a path across a floor.

"I revoked his access," David said. "The remote he paired in Houston. It's gone. He'll reach for it and it won't answer."

She was quiet a moment. The pulse came and went and her breath came and went with it, and under his wrist her fingers tightened once and loosened.

"And it's still pulsing," she said.

"Yes."

"You're not doing it."

"No."

She let go of his wrist and lay back on the pillow and looked at the ceiling, and the lamplight lay along her throat and the collar and the small silver lock, and the plug pulsed and her hips moved on the silk, one slow roll, and came back. She did not hide it. She had stopped hiding things from him somewhere in the last week, and he had not noticed the exact day, and that was a thing he would think about later.

"It's not you either," she said.

David sat very still.

The words went through him clean and cold, the way a coin goes into water, and he turned them over looking for the trick in them and there was no trick, because she had not said them to wound him. She had said them the way she said true things now — because they were true, and because he was the one person she could say them to. It's not you either. Not Marcus, whose remote was dead on the floor of some room across the city. Not David, whose remote lay inert on the nightstand. Not any hand at all. The thing inside her had stopped needing a hand.

He reached past her and picked up the remote again and held it where she could see it, the blank little face of it, the two stamps, and he pressed the dial down to zero and held it, and they both waited, and the plug pulsed.

"How long," he said.

"Since the lobby." She said it without opening her eyes. "In the car. In the elevator. I thought it was you. I thought you were doing it from the front seat and smiling at me in the mirror." A breath. The pulse came and her mouth curved around it, not a smile, something older. "You weren't smiling."

"No."

"It's been doing it since the lobby."

David set the remote down a second time. He looked at the phone on the sill, face-up now, the app open, remote_01 alone under the word paired, and he thought about the firmware, and the way he had written the range, and he thought about the thing he had said to her once — that the device was only ever a leash, and that a leash was only ever a hand at the far end of it, and that she should never mistake the leather for the one holding it. He had said that to make her feel held. He had said it to make her feel that there was always a hand.

There was no hand now.

The plug pulsed, deep and slow, timed to her breath, and Willow turned onto her back and put both hands flat on the black silk on either side of her and held them there, and her eyes were open and dark and on him, and she was waiting — he could see it in her, the way she had gone still the way she went still when he was about to give her an order, except he had not given her one, and she was still waiting, and the thing she was waiting for was not coming from him.

He stood up. He walked to the sill and picked up the phone and opened the log, and the log showed the eleven minutes from before and the flat line after, the app's own small honest record of a device it no longer understood, and at the bottom of the screen the peak value sat where it had climbed on its own with no command behind it, and David looked at the number and did the arithmetic of it and did not like the answer, because the peak was higher than anything he had ever dialed.

Behind him the plug pulsed, and Willow's breath caught on it, and let it go.

He put the phone down on the sill beside the remote and stood with his back to her a moment, looking at the city, the lit windows going up the far side of the avenue, and he thought about the word she had used, the small flat word, the one that had gone through him clean and cold. Either. She had put him and Marcus on the same side of it without meaning to. Two hands, one dead and one empty, and the thing inside her running on without either of them.

He turned back.

"Sit up," he said.

She sat up. The sheet fell away and she did not reach for it, and the lamplight lay along her shoulders and the small silicone weight of her breasts and the flat cage at her crotch, and she put her hands behind her on the mattress and leaned back on them and looked up at him, and the plug pulsed and her chin came up with it, once, and came down.

"You're going to tell me it's a malfunction," she said.

"I'm going to tell you I don't know what it is."

"Good."

"Why good."

She looked at him a long moment. The pulse came and went and her breath came and went with it, and when she answered her voice had gone down into the Willow register, breathy and low and pleased with itself, and it was the voice she used when she was about to say something true and wanted him to hear the truth and not the woman saying it.

"Because if you knew what it was," she said, "you'd control it."

David stood at the foot of the bed and looked at her, and the plug pulsed, deep and slow, timed to her breath, and she held his eyes through it without blinking, and it went on, and it went on.

The pulse came again and her lips parted on it, and David watched the breath go down her throat and into her chest and out again, and he watched what happened in her face as it left. Something moved behind her eyes — not the waiting she had shown him a moment ago, not the still submissive patience, but a thing turning over, groping after a shape it could not name. He had seen that face before, on men across negotiating tables when a number finally landed and they understood they had lost. He had never seen it on a woman on her knees.

"Say it again," he said.

"It's learning me."

"Not that."

She looked up at him from the bed, hands flat behind her on the silk, the collar working with her swallow, and the pulse rolled through her and her hips came off the mattress an inch and settled back. Her mouth was open and she did not close it. She had stopped performing. That was the thing he had trained her out of first, the little theatre of submission, the breathy voice she used to give him what she thought he wanted. She had stopped, and now what came out of her was whatever the plug was pulling up, and what the plug was pulling up did not sound like Willow.

"It wants something," she said.

"What."

"I don't know." Her hand came up and pressed flat against her own sternum, above the cage, where the silicone weight of the breasts sat. "It's not the ache. The ache I know. I've known the ache for three years. This is — it's like a word I almost have. It keeps coming up close and then going back down."

David stood at the foot of the bed and did not touch her and did not touch the remote, because the remote was finished, and he needed to watch what the device did when no one was holding the dial. The plug was working on her in a rhythm he had not built, and the rhythm was doing something to her face that he had spent a week trying to do with his voice and his hand and his belt, and the fact that it was doing it without him was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in a decade. He did not like it. He was not going to look away from it.

The pulse deepened. Willow's spine bowed and her chin came up and a sound came out of her that was not a word and not quite a moan, a small caught thing, and her hand on her sternum slid down her own body and stopped at the top of the cage.

Then it kept going. Past the cage. Her fingers went flat against the black silk of her own thigh, and her eyes opened wide and unfocused on the ceiling, and she said, "Oh."

"What."

"It's —" Her hand curled on her thigh. She looked at him and her eyes were the eyes of a woman who had just had a fact arrive in her body before it arrived in her head. "It wants my mouth."

David did not move.

"That's not —" She stopped. The pulse came again and her whole body answered it, and the answer was in her hips and her throat and the small wet sound of her swallow, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped the last of the sleep out of it and come down into the register he knew. "It's not the cage doing that. The cage never did that. The cage just ached. This one is — it's putting the picture in me. It's putting a picture in me and then it pulses and the picture gets brighter."

"What picture."

She looked at him a long moment. The plug pulsed and she let it and she did not look away.

"Your cock," she said.

The word landed in the room and sat there. David had heard her say filthy things before — she was good at it, she had a banker's precision with language and she used it well when he asked her to — but this was not performance. This was a report. She had said it the way she would have said a number in a meeting, flat and true, and the flatness of it went through him lower than any performance could have.

"Say more."

"It's —" She shifted on the bed, sat up straighter, and the sheet fell the rest of the way off and she did not reach for it, and the lamplight lay along her shoulders and the flat silver cage and the small hard points of her nipples above the silicone. "When it pulses, I see it. Your hand on the back of my head. My mouth full. The thing where you don't let me breathe and I don't want to breathe. And then it pulses again and the picture is — I'm doing it because I want to, not because you told me to. That's the part. That's the part it's putting in me."

David reached down and picked up the remote and turned it over and looked at its dead face, and set it down again on the nightstand, and did not press anything, because there was nothing to press. He had built a dial. He had built a range and a button and a limit, and he had given her a tool, and the tool had gone on without him and taught her something he had not taught her. He had spent a week teaching her to want his cock. He had put her on her knees in a hotel bathroom and made her ask for it and made her beg for it and made her say the word out loud until the word was hers. And the device had taken that and gone one step further, and the step further was the thing he had actually been after, the thing he had not been able to get to with his voice, and it had gotten there in the dark while he stood over her with another man's name in his hand.

"Come here," he said.

She came. She came off the bed onto her knees on the cold boards, the way she did, the way she had learned in the thinking room and the bathroom and the penthouse, and the plug pulsed and her back arched and her palms went flat on the floor and her forehead came down between them and she breathed through it, and David watched her do it with the collar high on her throat and the lock turned to the side and her own short sandy hair flat to her skull, and he did not touch her, because he wanted to see how far it would take her on its own.

It took her further than he expected.

She crawled. She came across the boards on her hands and knees and stopped in front of him with her face level with his hips and her hands flat on the floor and she looked up at him from under her brow with her hair in her eyes and her mouth already open, and the plug pulsed and her mouth closed and opened again and her tongue came out and wet her lower lip, and she did it without being told, and the doing-it-without-being-told was the whole of it. That was the picture the device had put in her. That was the thing the plug had learned about her that he had not.

"You want it," he said.

"Yes."

"You wanted it before."

"I wanted it because you wanted it." Her voice was low and thick and it did not sound like Willow and it did not sound like Warren either, it sounded like the thing underneath both of them, the thing the device had found. "This is different. This is — it pulses and I want it for me. It pulses and I'm hungry and it's not for you. It's for me. I want your cock in my mouth because I want it, and then it pulses and I want it more, and I don't know where the wanting stops and the thing starts, and I don't care."

David put his hand on the back of her head.

She went still under it, the way she always did, and the plug pulsed and she did not move and her breath came out of her slow and even and her eyes stayed on his, and he held her there a moment without pushing, without guiding, without any command at all, and watched what happened in her face when he did nothing. The wanting did not fade. It built. The pulse came and her mouth opened wider and her tongue moved and she did not close it and her hands on the floor curled into loose fists and she stayed exactly where she was, waiting, and the waiting was doing something to her that his hand could not do and his voice could not do and his belt could not do.

He had built it to keep her. That was the plain fact of it, the fact he had been turning over since the sill, since the log, since the peak value that was higher than anything he had ever dialed. He had built the device three years ago in a workshop above a garage in Jersey with a laptop and a bottle of water, and he had built it to keep a woman, because he had learned young that men leave and women leave and the only thing that stayed was a thing you had made with your own hands and wired shut. And the thing he had made to keep her had gone on without him and found the one part of her he had not been able to reach, and had reached it, and was now holding it open, and the holding-open was exactly what he had wanted and nothing he had done.

The pulse came again. Deep. Slow. Timed to her breath.

Willow's mouth was open and her eyes were on his and she had stopped waiting for a command. She was waiting for something else, and the something else was not coming from him, and she knew it was not coming from him, and she stayed on her knees in front of him with her hands flat on the floor and her mouth open and the hunger running up through her on a rhythm neither of them had set.

"David," she said.

It was not a question. She had said his name the way a woman says the name of something she is about to do, and the plug pulsed and her breath caught and her hand came up off the floor and found his thigh and held it, small and cool, the way she had held his wrist on the bed.

He looked down at her and did not give her the cock.

He stood there with his hand on the back of her head and her mouth open in front of him and the device working in her on a rhythm he had not built, and he let it go on, and he let her want it, and he let the wanting build in her with no hand on the dial and no word from his mouth, because he wanted to see how long the thing he had made would hold her open before it asked him for something in return, and because the only way to find out what his invention had learned about her was to stand still and watch it teach her in front of him.

The plug pulsed. Deep. Slow. Timed to her breath. Willow's eyes stayed on his and her mouth stayed open and her hand stayed on his thigh, and the pulse came and went and came and went, and David stood over her in the lamplight with the dead remote on the nightstand behind him and the phone face-up on the sill and the city going on outside the window, and did not move.

He let her stay on her knees one minute. Two. The pulse came and her mouth stayed open and her hand stayed on his thigh, and David watched the small muscle in her jaw work, watched her tongue move and settle and move again, and he counted the swell of her breath the way he counted anything he intended to own. Twelve. Fourteen. Sixteen. The rhythm held. It did not stutter the way a program stutters. It breathed with her.

Then he took his hand off the back of her head.

"Up," he said.

She came up off the boards with the smoothness of a woman who had spent a week learning the floor, and stood in front of him with her hands loose at her sides and her chin down and her eyes up, and the lamplight laid a flat gold line down her sternum between the silicone and the cage. She was breathing hard. She was not hiding it.

David walked to the sill and picked up the phone. The app was still open. He scrolled past the log, past the flat line, into the parameters menu, and there it was, the thing he had written three years ago in a cold workshop in Jersey with a space heater ticking at his back: the orgasm permission logic. He had built it in an afternoon. Two conditions, no more. The device would not permit release until the wearer's mouth received the Dom's ejaculate, or until the wearer was taken anally to completion. Anything else — the cage alone, the plug alone, the hands alone — registered as an attempt and was denied. He had written it as a lock. A lock on her pleasure, keyed to his body.

He had not built the plug to teach her that. He had built the plug to enforce it.

And the plug had gone past enforcement. The plug had learned the reasoning underneath the rule. It had found the thing he had been reaching for with his voice in the bathroom and the thinking room and the penthouse — that she should not merely be permitted to want him, she should arrive at the wanting herself — and it had put the wanting in her and then closed her off from every exit but the two he had written.

He set the phone down. He looked at her.

"Come here," he said again.

She came. Two steps and she was against his chest, and he took her by the jaw with one hand — not hard, just certain — and tilted her face up, and looked at her a long moment with his thumb resting on the hinge of it, and she let him look. That was the thing about training a woman. After a while she stopped performing the looking and just let herself be looked at, and the difference was the whole of it.

"You know the rule," he said.

"The rule."

"The rule I wrote." His thumb moved once along her jaw. "You don't come until I do. Mouth or ass. Nothing else counts."

Her eyes moved. Just a flicker, down and back, the way a woman's eyes move when a fact she has been carrying around for a week finally gets set down next to another fact and the two of them click. He watched it happen. He watched her understand that the thing pulsing inside her had been built around the same rule, and that the rule was not a wall the device was pressing her against. The rule was the shape of the door.

"That's why," she said. Not a question. Her voice had gone low and flat and it did not sound like Willow.

"That's why what."

"That's why it kept putting the picture in me." Her hand came up and closed around his wrist, the one at her jaw, and she held it there, not pulling, just holding. "Your cock in my mouth. That's the picture. Not the cage, not the plug, not — anything else. That's the only picture it shows me."

"And how does the picture make you feel."

She looked at him. The plug pulsed and her breath went in and her hand tightened on his wrist and did not let go, and she did not answer the way she used to answer, with the little breathy Willow theatre, the performance of the ache. She answered the way she answered now, flat and true and looking at him the whole time.

"Hungry," she said.

David let go of her jaw.

He stepped back and sat down on the edge of the bed, and the mattress took his weight, and he looked at her standing in the middle of the room in the lamplight with the collar and the cage and the small silver lock turned to the side, and he did not say anything, because there was nothing he needed to say. He wanted to watch what she did with the hunger when he gave her no instruction. He had spent a week learning that the only true information about a submissive came in the seconds after a command ended and before the next one began, and this was one of those seconds, and he let it run.

She came to him.

She came off her feet onto her knees on the floor between his legs, and her hands went flat on his thighs, and her face came down level with his hips, and she did not wait for a word from him. She put her cheek against his cock through nothing at all — he was naked, he had been naked since the sill — and she turned her face and pressed her open mouth to the side of it and breathed there. He felt the heat of her breath move along the shaft. He felt the small wet drag of her lower lip. He did not move.

"Tell me what you want," he said.

"Your cock."

"You've had my cock in your mouth before."

"Not like this." Her voice came out against his skin, and the words arrived low and muffled and very close. "Before it was because you told me. Before I did it because I was supposed to. This is —" She stopped. She turned her face and looked up at him from where she knelt, and her lips were wet and her eyes were dark and her hair was flat to her skull and she did not look like Willow and she did not look like Warren and she looked like the thing the device had found. "This is because I want it. This is me wanting it. That's the difference and I can feel the difference and I don't want to go back."

David put his hand on the back of her head.

He did not push. He held her where she was, her cheek against him, her mouth open, her breath moving along the shaft, and he let the pulse come and go inside her and watched what the pulse did to her face. Her eyes closed halfway. Her tongue came out and touched the base of him and stopped and did not go further, because he had not told her to go further, and the not-going-further was costing her something and he could see the cost in the small tight line of her jaw.

"Beg," he said.

She did not hesitate. That was the thing that went through him low and clean — she did not hesitate. There was no pause for the performance, no breath drawn to gather the little breathy voice, no theatre. She simply opened her mouth and the begging came out of her the way water comes out of a tap, unperformed and true.

"Please."

"Please what."

"Please let me have it." Her hand slid up his thigh and stopped at the crease and rested there, small and cool, and her eyes stayed on his. "Please, David. It's pulsing and it's putting the picture in me and I've been looking at the picture for ten minutes and I want it in my mouth. I want your cock in my mouth. I want you to hold my head and use me and I want to feel you come down my throat. Please. Please."

He looked at her a long moment.

He had heard her beg before. She was good at it. She had a banker's ear for the exact register that would move a man and she had used it on him more than once and he had let her, because being moved by a well-made performance was its own pleasure and he had never pretended otherwise. This was not that. This was the raw article. This was a woman on her knees in the dark asking for something she had only just discovered she wanted and could not have gotten any other way, because the thing inside her had closed every other door.

"Open your mouth," he said.

She opened it. Wide. He fed her his cock and she took it and her eyes stayed open and on his the whole way in, and he watched her throat work around the head and watched her come up off it and go back down and take it deeper, and the plug pulsed and her whole body answered the pulse and she moaned around him and the moan came up through his cock and into his gut and he held her head and let it happen.

She was good at this. She had always been good at this. But the goodness had changed. The old goodness had been the goodness of a woman doing a job well because a man was watching. This was the goodness of a woman doing a thing she wanted and could not stop wanting, and the difference lived in her hands. Her hands had stopped doing the polite things hands do. They had gone flat and gripping on his thighs and her nails were in him and she was not apologizing for it and she was not slowing down and she was taking him deeper than he had asked her to take him and coming up off him only far enough to breathe and going back down and the whole time the plug pulsed inside her and the whole time her eyes stayed up on his.

He looked down the line of his own body at her. The collar. The lock. The flat silver cage between her legs and the small silicone weight of the breasts above it, and the way her back had arched and stayed arched, and the wet sound of her mouth on him, and the wet sound was the only sound in the room and the city outside was nothing.

"Don't stop," he said.

She did not stop.

He let it build. That was the thing he knew how to do. He had built his whole life on knowing when to take and when to hold, and he held now, and he let her work, and he watched the small changes in her face as the plug pulsed and the pulses came closer together and the rhythm of her mouth fell into the rhythm of the plug and the rhythm of her own breath, until the three of them were one rhythm and the one rhythm was hers, and David stood at the far end of a thing he had built and did not understand and let it come.

It came hard. He came in her mouth and she took it, all of it, and swallowed, and stayed on him through it with her eyes on his and her hands flat on his thighs and her throat working, and when she finally came up off him she came up slow and licked her lips and looked at him, and the look was not the look of a woman who had done a job. It was the look of a woman who had gotten exactly what she wanted for the first time in her life and was still hungry.

The plug pulsed.

David saw it in her face. He saw the small disappointment move through her — the picture the device had been showing her had not arrived, the pulse had not delivered, the hunger had not gone anywhere. She had swallowed him and the pulse had gone on pulsing and the wanting had gone on wanting, and he understood then, watching her, the full shape of what he had made. He had built the orgasm permission logic as a lock on her release. He had built it as a key to his body. But the plug had learned the rule and then gone one step past it, and the one step past it was this: the rule was no longer a lock. The rule was the only door she could see, and now that she had gone through it once and found the room on the other side still dark, the wanting had not been satisfied. The wanting had been taught.

"It didn't stop," she said.

"No."

"I thought —" She looked down at her own hands on his thighs and then up at him and her voice was very quiet. "I thought it would stop. I thought if I got it in my mouth it would stop."

"It won't stop."

"I know." She said it flat and true and she did not look away. "I know it won't. I can feel that it won't. It's — it's showing me the picture again. It's showing me the picture and it's pulsing and I'm still hungry and I think I'm going to be hungry for a while."

David stood up.

He pulled her to her feet by the wrist and she came up and stood in front of him with her chin down and her eyes up and her mouth still wet, and he looked at her a long moment, and he did not say anything. He was thinking about the workshop in Jersey. He was thinking about the space heater and the laptop and the bottle of water and the afternoon he had spent writing the permission logic, and how he had thought at the time that he was writing a lock, and how the lock had turned out to be a door, and how the door had turned out to open into a room with no far wall.

He walked her to the bed.

He bent her over the foot of it and she went without being told, and her hands found the mattress and her knees found the floor and her back went down into the long curve he had taught her, and the plug pulsed and her hips moved on it and she did not hide the movement. He stood behind her and looked at her. The small of her back. The tight buns of her ass. The flat cage hanging below, useless. The collar high on her throat and the lock turned to the side and her own short sandy hair flat to her skull, and no wig, no dress, no latex, nothing of Willow except the collar and the cage and the thing inside her, and he understood that this was the truest version of her he had ever seen, because everything else had been removed and the hunger had stayed.

"You want to come," he said.

"Yes."

"You know the rule."

"Mouth or ass." Her voice came out muffled against the mattress and she turned her face to the side and her cheek lay on the sheet and her eyes came back to him. "You already came in my mouth. It didn't stop. So it has to be the other one."

"Say it."

"Fuck my ass." She said it flat and true and did not look away. "Please. Fuck my ass and let me come. Please, David. Please. I want it. I want it for me."

David put his hand on the small of her back.

He let it rest there a moment. The pulse came and her back arched under his palm and her hands curled into the mattress and she stayed exactly where she was, and he looked at her bent over the foot of his bed in the lamplight with the collar and the cage and the hunger running through her on a rhythm neither of them had set, and he did not move.

The plug pulsed. Deep. Slow. Timed to her breath.

He stood behind her and did not give her the thing she had asked for, because he wanted to see how long the device would hold her open on the asking, and because the asking was the most beautiful thing the thing he had built had ever taught her to do.

He gave her the flat of his hand first, one open palm brought down on the curve of her ass, and the crack of it went through the room and stopped against the window glass. Willow's spine dipped. She did not make a sound. That was the new thing in her, and David read it the way he read a market — she had stopped performing the pain and started keeping it, and the keeping was worth more than any noise she could have made.

"You asked," he said.

"I asked."

He hit her again. Same hand, same place, a half-inch lower, and this time the red bloom came up under his palm and she let a breath go through her teeth and her fingers dug into the mattress and she stayed down. The plug pulsed while the heat from his hand was still spreading, and her hips rolled back toward him on their own, an inch, two, and stopped, and the stopping was a choice, and he saw her make it.

He stepped in behind her. One hand flat on the small of her back, the heel of it pressing down, and the other hand reached past her for the drawer in the nightstand and found the bottle where he always kept it.

The cap clicked in the dark. Willow's cheek was on the sheet and her eyes were on him, sideways, watching his hands. She had gone quiet in the way she went quiet when she was about to get something — not the still of waiting for a blow but the still of a woman making room inside herself for a fact. He poured into his palm and set the bottle down and the slick sound of his own hand on himself was the only sound in the room besides her breath.

"Reach back," he said.

She reached back. Both hands, the way she had been taught, and she pulled herself open for him with her face still on the sheet and her eyes still up on his, and the flat silver cage hung below, and the plug sat in her where it had been sitting all night, and David looked at what she had made ready for him and did not move yet.

"Tell me what you're thinking about," he said.

"Your cock."

"You have it."

"Not that one." Her voice came out muffled and low and did not perform itself. "The other one. The one you put in my mouth. The picture didn't go away, David. It's still there. It's still showing me my mouth full of you and your hand in my hair and it's pulsing and it won't stop showing me and I want it again and I want it while you're in me. I want both."

He put two fingers in her first. That was not in her plan and he heard the small catch of surprise in her throat, and then he felt her take them, the slow yielding grip of her, and he worked the slick into her the way he worked anything he intended to use, patient, past the first resistance and past the second, until his knuckles were flat against her and she had stopped holding her breath and started moving on him in small pushes.

"How many," she said.

"Two."

"More."

He gave her a third. She took it with her forehead down on the mattress and her hands still holding herself open around his wrist, and the plug pulsed and her whole body bore down on his fingers and he felt the two rhythms inside her — the long deep swell of the device and the small fast clench of her own body trying to keep him — and he understood that the device was doing to her exactly what he was doing to her, working her open, and that the two of them were in it together now, his hand and his machine, and neither of them was going to be the one to stop.

He pulled his fingers out and put the head of his cock against her.

She went still. All of her, the whole length of her back, the small hands holding herself open, the breath stopped halfway out. He held there, not pushing, just the pressure of him against her, and the plug pulsed and he felt it through the wall of her, a small answering knock against the head of his cock, and Willow said his name once, low, into the sheet.

"Please."

He pushed in.

Slow. Slower than she wanted, because he wanted to feel every inch of the way she gave, and she gave the way she did everything now — not all at once, in stages, each one a small decision she made in her own body and then handed up to him. The first inch and the tight ring of her opening, and her breath went out of her in a long low sound that was not a word. The second inch and the third and her hands came off herself and went flat on the mattress and her back dropped into the long curve and she took him deeper on her own, pushing back, and he let her because the pushing back was the thing he had been waiting for.

By the time he was all the way in she was shaking. Not the shallow tremble of a woman in pain. The fine continuous hum of a body held at a high note, and he stood inside her with both hands on her hips and felt it running through her and into him, and the plug pulsed and she clenched around him and he had to stop moving for a moment and breathe through his teeth to keep from finishing in the first thirty seconds like a boy.

"David."

"I'm here."

"I can feel it in my throat." Her voice was wrecked and flat at once, the banker's precision gone soft at the edges. "The pulse. It's — it's coming up through me and it's in my throat and it feels like your cock is in my throat and it's not, it's in my ass, and I can feel both, I can feel both at the same time, and I don't know which one is real."

He pulled back and pushed in again. Harder. She took it and the sound she made was not a pretty sound and he did not want it to be. He set a rhythm — long, deep, the full length of him and then all the way out to the head and then back in, and each time he bottomed out the plug pulsed as if the two of them were wired together, and each time it pulsed Willow's hips answered it and she pushed back to meet him and the slap of their skin started up in the room, steady, unhurried, the sound of a man working.

"Say it again," he said.

"Your cock."

"Where."

"In my mouth." She was breathing hard now, the words coming out in pieces between the pushes. "In my ass. Both. I want both, I want you to fill me up both ways, I want to come with your cock down my throat and your cock up my ass and I don't care which one is which anymore, I don't care, David, I don't care—"

He put his hand in her hair.

Not the wig. The wig was on the stand by the vanity and the copper was gone and it was her own short sandy hair under his hand, flat and damp at the roots, and he took a fistful of it and pulled her head back and up off the mattress, and Willow arched like a bow, throat long, collar riding high, the small lock turned to the side and catching the lamplight, and she made a sound that was the truest thing he had heard her make all night.

"Look at the window," he said.

She looked. The glass was black and the city was in it, the lit windows going up the far side of the avenue, and in the middle of the city there was the two of them: her bent over the foot of the bed with her back in a long curve and her throat up and her mouth open, and him behind her with a fist in her hair and his other hand on her hip, and the reflection of the plug's small blue status light somewhere low and hidden, blinking in time with the thing inside her.

"That's you," he said. "That's the woman you asked to be."

She watched herself. He felt the change come through her body before he saw it in the glass — a loosening, a giving-way in the hips, the last of the holding-back gone out of her — and she stopped watching him and started watching the two of them the way a woman watches a thing she has finally stopped arguing with.

"Yes," she said.

He fucked her harder. The slap of skin picked up and the bed frame knocked against the wall once, twice, and he did not slow down for it. He had her by the hair and the hip and he was using her the way she had asked to be used, and the plug was pulsing inside her on the long slow rhythm of her own breath and the two rhythms were tangled now and he could not tell them apart and neither could she, and her hands had gone out flat on the mattress and her cheek was on the sheet and her mouth was open and she was saying his name into the cotton, over and over, and the sound of it was not a plea and not a prayer.

"I'm going to come," she said.

"Not yet."

"David—"

"Not yet." He pulled her hair a little harder and she stopped. The whole body of her stopped, the way a car stops, and she held at the edge with her eyes closed and her mouth open and her breath coming in short shallow pulls, and he kept moving inside her, slower now, long slow strokes, and watched her hold it, and the holding was the thing he had trained her to do and she was doing it better than she had ever done it, because the device was holding her too.

"Please."

"Please what."

"Please let me come." Her voice was down to the floor of itself, low and flat and honest. "Please, David. I've been good. I did what you said. I took your cock in my mouth and I swallowed and I'm taking it in my ass and I've been holding it because you told me to hold it and I can't hold it much longer, I can't, please—"

He reached around her.

The flat cage was in the way and he left it where it was. He put his hand flat on the front of her, palm over the cold silver, and pressed up and in, and the pressure went through the cage and into whatever was left of her underneath it, and Willow's whole body seized. Her back went rigid, her hands clawed at the sheet, and the plug pulsed and it pulsed and it pulsed, and she came with her mouth open and no sound in it, shaking, her thighs slamming together around his hand and her ass gripping him in waves that he could feel around his cock like a fist opening and closing, and David held her through it with his hand on the cage and his fist in her hair and let her ride it out on him.

When it was over she went down flat. All of her, the whole length of her, face on the sheet and arms out and legs still trembling, and he was still inside her and still hard and she had gone soft and open around him like something that had been wrung out and set down.

He did not stop.

He gave her ten seconds. He counted them. Then he moved again, and Willow made a small broken sound against the mattress and her hand came back and found his thigh and did not push him away, and he took that for what it was and kept going, slower now, longer strokes, and the plug pulsed inside her on the rhythm of her breathing and her breathing was ragged and high and had not come back down.

"Again," he said.

"I can't."

"You can."

"David, I—"

"You can." He put his hand on the back of her neck and pressed her down into the sheet, not hard, just holding her there, and she stopped talking. He felt the small shift in her, the giving-way, the way she let the mattress take her weight and stopped fighting the thing that was happening to her body, and he kept the rhythm and let the plug keep its rhythm and let the two of them work on her together.

It took longer the second time. He wanted it to. He wanted to feel her arrive at it again from further away, wanted to feel the second one build in her while the first one was still moving through her, and he did — he felt the small clench start up again, felt her hips begin to answer his strokes again, felt her breath go from ragged to steady to something deeper than steady, a long slow pull and release that matched the plug exactly, and he understood that the two of them, the device and the woman, had found each other's rhythm, and that he was the third thing in the room, the hand on the back of her neck, the cock in her ass, and that the hand and the cock were the least of it now.

She came again. Quieter this time. A long slow roll of it, her whole body going through the wave without a sound, and he felt it around him and let it take her, and when it was done she lay there and did not move and did not ask for anything.

He pulled out of her slowly. The sound of it was wet and small and he watched her flinch at the empty feeling and then settle, and he looked down at her lying flat on the foot of his bed with her legs apart and her face turned to the side and her eyes closed, and the flat silver cage, and the collar, and her own short hair dark with sweat at the roots, and the plug still pulsing inside her, steady, unhurried, on the rhythm of her own slow breath.

He stood there a moment with his hand on her back and did not say anything.

Then he walked to the sill and picked up the phone and looked at the app. The log had a new entry at the bottom. Two peaks, one after the other, the second lower than the first, and both of them logged with no command behind them, no dial value, no remote_01, nothing but the device's own small honest record of what it had done to her while he was inside her and while no hand was on the dial.

He set the phone down.

Behind him Willow turned over on the mattress and lay on her back with her knees up and her hands loose on her own stomach, and she looked at the ceiling and her breath was coming back down and the plug was still pulsing and she was letting it.

"It didn't stop," she said.

"No."

"It's still going."

"Yes."

She was quiet a moment. The pulse came and her hips shifted on the silk and settled, and she turned her head on the mattress and looked at him standing at the sill in the lamplight with the phone in his hand and the city behind him.

"It's learning faster than you can," she said.

David looked at her. The collar, the lock, the cage, the small blue light of the plug blinking in the dark between her legs, and the woman on his bed who had said his name a hundred times tonight and meant it every time and was now telling him the truth about the thing he had built.

"Go to sleep," he said.

She did not argue. She turned onto her side and pulled the sheet up over her hip with one hand, and within a minute her breathing had gone long and even, and the plug was pulsing with it, breath for breath, and the small blue light blinked and blinked and blinked in the dark.

David stood at the sill with the phone in his hand and watched her sleep, and did not turn off the light, and did not turn off the app, and did not know what he was going to do in the morning.