He tried to sit up. The cuffs caught him at the wrists and ankles, leather biting into the tendons, and he got about two inches of lift before his own weight hauled him back down onto the cracked leather seat. His chest was still heaving. His stomach was wet and cooling in the draft from somewhere he couldn't see, and the come was starting to tack against his skin, pulling at the fine hairs.

The drill had stopped. That was the first thing his body registered as wrong — not the cuffs, not the cold, but the quiet. After the grinding, the room felt stuffed with cotton. His ears rang a thin high note, and under it, somewhere, the wet click of his own throat swallowing around the bite block.

Renata's hand was gone. He turned his head as far as the strap let him, and she was already at the tray, wiping her fingers on the folded towel with small, unhurried strokes, one knuckle at a time, like she was cleaning up after a meal. She didn't look at him. She hummed — three notes, under her breath, the same three she'd hummed while she strapped him in.

Dr. Mack hadn't moved. She stood at his left shoulder where she'd been standing since the handpiece first touched the tooth, and she was holding the longer instrument up into the lamp, turning it slowly, watching the light travel down the thin steel shaft to the burr at the tip.

"You thought we'd let you up," she said.

It wasn't a question. Her voice had the same flat clinical register she'd used to tell him the cost of a root canal, the same one she'd used to say the last one screamed and she had to stop twice. She said it the way you'd read a chart aloud.

Tyler pulled at the cuff on his right wrist. The bracket was bolted into the arm of the chair, old iron, painted over so many times the paint had gone soft and gummy where hands had worried at it. He got his thumb under the strap and dug, and the leather gave maybe a quarter inch before it found the buckle and stopped. His thumbnail bent. He stopped.

"I—" The bite block turned it into a wet vowel. His tongue worked against the acrylic, and he could taste it now, the latex of the strap and something under it, copper and salt, his own mouth. He tried again. "I thought—"

"You thought it was over." Dr. Mack lowered the instrument and looked at him. Her eyes were the same pale blue they'd been the first morning, when she'd told him he had a cavity and he'd believed her, and there was nothing in them now that hadn't been in them then. "They all think it's over. It's the endorphins. The body gets what it wants and it decides the rest can wait."

She set the instrument down on the tray with a click, and picked up the handpiece again, and thumbed the switch. It spun up with that rising whine, and Tyler's whole jaw answered it — a deep throb under the dead tooth, in the bone, like the bone itself had been waiting for the sound.

"The tooth is still open," she said. "You can feel it, can't you. The hole's still there. I only went in as far as the pulp chamber. There's a canal under it, and a canal under that, and they go down further than people like to think."

Renata came back around the chair. She didn't say anything. Her fingers found the strap behind his head — the one buckled at the back of his skull, holding the bite block in — and she ran two fingertips along the webbing, from the buckle to where it disappeared into his hair, slow, the way you'd stroke a cat that had finally stopped struggling.

"Almost tender," he thought, and the thought came out wrong in his head, because it was tender, and that was the part that made his stomach turn over. Her nails were short and clean. She smelled like mint and the sweet thing underneath it, and she was touching the strap that held his mouth open like it was something she'd made.

"Don't," he said, around the block. It came out doh.

"Shh." Renata's breath warmed the shell of his ear. "You're doing so good. You did the hard part already."

Dr. Mack leaned in over his face, and the lamp came with her, throwing her shadow down across his chest, and the thin burr caught the light and threw a bright bead of it back into his eye. He flinched, and the cuffs held, and she watched him flinch the way she'd watched him come — the same flat attention, no pleasure in it, just the record of a thing happening.

"This is the part where you learn what staying means," she said.

Then her free hand came down on his jaw, two fingers and a thumb, and pressed his head back into the leather headrest until the crown of his skull met the wood and couldn't go further. The bite block pressed his tongue down. He could feel his own pulse in his gums, in the roof of his mouth, everywhere the acrylic touched.

The burr went in.

It was different from the first time. The first time had been the crown of the tooth, the wide flat top of it, and the drill had been a pressure, a grinding, something happening at a remove. This was inside. This was down the shaft of the tooth into the root, and the sound wasn't coming through the air anymore, it was coming through his own skull, conducted straight through the bone into the inside of his head, and it was so loud he couldn't hear Renata humming, couldn't hear his own breathing, couldn't hear anything but the burr and the wet tick of it cutting.

His heels came up off the footrest. The ankle cuffs caught them. His hands made fists around nothing and the leather creaked and he heard himself make a sound that wasn't a word, a low animal noise that came up his throat and died against the block.

"There it is," Dr. Mack said, close to his ear, and she didn't stop. "That's the canal. You feel that? That's not the tooth. That's the nerve that used to be in the tooth. It's dead, but the bone remembers where it was."

Renata's hands came down on his hips.

Both of them, palms flat, thumbs hooked into the hollows at the front of his hipbones, and she pressed him down into the chair — not hard, just firm, just enough that when his body tried to arch away from the drill it couldn't. She held him there, and her ponytail swung forward over his belly, and he felt the ends of it drag across the come drying on his skin.

"Stay still," she said. "You'll make her slip."

The drill went deeper. The pitch dropped — a lower note, a heavier cut — and the pain wasn't pain exactly, not anymore, it was something bigger and stranger, a pressure that filled his whole head and pushed out against the inside of his skull, and under it, threading up through his groin from somewhere he didn't want to name, his cock was filling again.

He felt it happen. He felt the heat come up into it, the thickening, the way it lifted off his thigh and stood, and he couldn't do anything about it, couldn't close his legs, couldn't get a hand down there, and Renata saw. Of course she saw. She was holding his hips; she felt the twitch run through them.

"Look at that," she said, soft, delighted, and she didn't touch it. She just left it standing there in the lamplight, wet at the tip from the last time, and went back to holding him down.

"It's the drill," Dr. Mack said, without looking up. "Vibration. The mandible's wired into the same nerve bundle as the pelvic floor. They come from the drill and they think it's desire. They all do it." She changed her grip on the handpiece and bore down a fraction. "The last one came four times. He kept apologizing."

"Did he scream?" Tyler got out, around the block, and it came out mangled but she understood it, because she paused — just a beat, the burr still spinning, not cutting.

"He screamed at the end," she said. "You won't. You're already past that."

She went back in.

This time Tyler felt the canal open. There was a give, a release of pressure deep in the root, and a taste flooded his mouth — not blood, something sharper, something like a struck match, and he understood without being told that she'd gone through into the space under the tooth, the place where the nerve had lived before it died, and that the hole was deeper now than it had been, deeper than a tooth should be, and she was still going.

His back came off the leather. Renata leaned her weight onto his hips and pushed him flat, and her breath was at his ear again, and she was saying something, a low steady stream of it, good, good, that's it, stay, stay, and her thumbs were rubbing small circles into the hollows of his hips, and the drill was grinding and the lamp was hot on his face and his jaw was cranked open and his cock was standing straight up off his belly, leaking, untouched, and he was going to come.

He didn't want to. He wanted to hold it, hold on to the one thing in the room that was still his, and he clenched everything he had against it, his thighs, his stomach, his fists around the cuffs — and Dr. Mack felt him clench, because she looked up, finally, and met his eyes over the handpiece, and bore down harder.

"There," she said. "Right there. Don't fight it. Let me see it."

It came out of him in three long pulses, no hand on it, nothing touching it, just the drill in his skull and Renata's thumbs on his hips and Dr. Mack's flat pale eyes holding his, and it hit his chest and his throat and the underside of his own jaw, and he felt every separate rope of it leave him and land, and he heard himself make a sound that was almost her name and almost nothing.

The drill kept going.

She didn't pause for it. She didn't slow. She let him shudder through the whole thing with the burr still turning inside the root, and the aftershocks ran down his legs into the cuffs and back up, and his eyes were wet and he didn't know when that had happened, and the room smelled like come and latex and the match-strike smell of cut tooth.

Renata straightened up. She looked at the mess on his chest the way she'd looked at the mess on her fingers — with the small pleased attention of someone checking their work — and then she reached for the folded towel on the tray cart and dabbed at his collarbone, one stroke, and left the rest.

"He's got more in him," she said to Dr. Mack. "He always does."

"I know," Dr. Mack said. She hadn't taken the burr out. She was holding it steady at the depth she'd reached, and Tyler could feel it there, a thin cold line running down inside the bone of his face, and he understood that this was the rest of the night, that the hole was still open, that she had only just found the bottom of the first canal and there were others, and that she would not stop until she had been down every one of them.

She looked at him over the handpiece, and her eyes were flat, and fixed on his face, and she said, "We're not close to done."