The first thing was the smell. Wet concrete, cold and mineral, the smell of a basement that had never quite dried out, and under it something older, something like pennies. Tyler surfaced into it slowly, the way a swimmer comes up through heavy water, and the dark behind his eyes gave way to a gray half-light that had no source he could find at first.

The second thing was the collar.

It sat high on his throat, stiff canvas gone soft with somebody else's wear, and every breath he took pressed his windpipe gently against it. He swallowed and felt the buckle move against his Adam's apple. He tried to lift his hand to it and the strap at his wrist pulled taut before his fingers got halfway, and he heard the buckle clink against the arm of the chair, and then he remembered everything at once.

"Okay," he said. His voice came out thin and scraped. "Okay. Hey."

Nobody answered. He turned his head — it moved, at least, they hadn't strapped his head — and the room turned with it. Low ceiling, close enough that he could have stood and put his palm flat against it. Bare concrete walls, unpainted, with the seams of the forms still showing. No windows on three sides. On the fourth, high up, near the ceiling, a window the size of a shoebox, and through it a color he knew: the gray-blue of a morning that hadn't decided yet.

And in the window, moving slightly, the tops of trees. Pine. A branch of something deciduous with its leaves still dark against the sky. Not the parking lot. Not the strip of asphalt and the dead streetlight and the laundromat across the way. Trees, and beyond the trees, gray, and nothing else he could see.

He pulled at the wrist straps again. The chair didn't give. It was steel, bolted, and when he shifted his hips the whole thing stayed exactly where it was, and that was when he felt the rest of it — his ankles, spread wide, strapped down into stirrups that came up out of the floor on either side of the chair, canted outward so his knees fell open and there was nothing he could do about it. The canvas jacket was still buckled around his chest, straps crossing at the back, his arms sleeved down to the wrist cuffs. His bare feet were cold.

He was still hard. He didn't know when that had happened, whether it was the drug or the dream he couldn't remember or the simple animal fact of being spread open and strapped down, but he was, and the canvas hung loose enough at the hips that there was no hiding it.

Above him, a stair creaked.

He went still. The creak came again, and then a third time, and then he heard a voice, Renata's voice, muffled through the ceiling, moving from one room to another up there, saying something he couldn't make out — a question, maybe, the rise at the end of it. Then a door. Then the heels.

The heels were the part that made his stomach drop. Slow, deliberate, one stair at a time, each step a small hard click that came down through the concrete and into the chair and into his bones. He watched the stairwell at the far end of the room, a black rectangle cut into the wall, and the light changed in it as she came down, and then Dr. Mack stepped out of the dark into the gray with a steel tray held level in both hands.

She was dressed the way she always was. White coat, silk at the throat, hair pulled back so tight it looked painted on. The tray caught the window light as she turned and set it on a cart beside the chair, and Tyler saw the row of instruments laid out on it, spaced evenly, the steel of them holding that gray morning like water.

"Good morning, sweetheart," she said. "You slept well."

"Where am I."

"You're in a basement." She adjusted the tray a quarter inch, lining it up with the edge of the cart. "You're under a house. My house, technically. The deed's in a name that isn't mine, but it's mine."

"There's trees."

"There are." She looked up at the high window as though she'd forgotten it was there and was pleased to be reminded. "Fifty acres. The nearest neighbor is a mile and a half east and he's eighty-one and deaf in the good ear. You could scream down here for an hour and the only thing that would come is the dog."

"I'm not going to scream."

"No," she agreed, and something in her flat voice turned over, a stone rolling. "You've been very good about that." She drew the cart closer. Her heels clicked once on the concrete. "That's why we brought you here instead of leaving you in the chair. The chair is for the ones who need the chair. You're past that."

He pulled at his wrist again, and this time he did it hard, twisting, and the strap creaked but held and the steel arm of the chair bit the underside of his forearm. "You can't just—"

"I can." She said it without heat. She was looking at the instruments, not at him. "You said yes four times. In the exam room, at the side door, when you laid down in the chair, and then you stayed when I gave you the last chance to walk out with your molar and your money. Do you remember that? I gave you a door."

He remembered. The pale fluid, the soft dimming, the way the room had tilted. "That wasn't—"

"It was." She turned back to him and her eyes came up to his and held there, pale blue and steady as a level. "You don't get to say it again. That's the whole point of the yes. It's said once and then it's mine to spend."

Upstairs, a floorboard groaned. Renata's voice again, closer now, at the top of the stairs. "Steph? You want me to bring the—"

"Not yet," Dr. Mack called back without turning her head. "Watch first."

A pause up there. Then, quieter, almost fond: "Okay."

Dr. Mack's hand came down on Tyler's thigh. Her palm was warm and dry and she laid it flat on the canvas, over the strap that crossed his leg, and she looked at him the way she looked at a tooth she was deciding how to approach. "You're hard," she said. "You've been hard since you woke up."

"It's the—"

"It's not the drug. The drug's out of you. It's that you're strapped down with your legs open and your cock out and somebody came down the stairs to look at you." She slid her hand up along the strap, unhurried, and stopped at the top of his thigh, and her thumb pressed into the muscle there, hard enough to make the whole leg jump. "That's not a thing I'm doing to you. That's a thing you are."

He didn't have an answer for that. His mouth was dry and his heart was going and the collar pressed on his throat every time he swallowed, and none of it was making him softer.

She unbuckled the jacket's lower straps. Not the chest, not the wrists, just the two that ran across his hips, and she folded the canvas back and his cock came out into the cold air, standing up off his belly, and she looked at it the way she'd looked at the tray. "There," she said. "Now we can be honest."

She hitched her skirt — she was wearing a skirt under the coat, gray, wool, and he hadn't noticed it before — and she was bare underneath. He saw the pale inside of her thigh, the dark hair, the shine of her already wet, and she stepped out of her shoes and put one knee up on the chair beside his hip and then the other, and she was over him, straddling him in the stirrup chair with her skirt bunched at her waist and her hand reaching down between them.

"Look at me," she said.

He looked. He couldn't do anything else. Her fingers found him, closed around the base of his cock, and she guided him up against her, and he felt the wet heat of her cunt against the head of him, a shock of it after the cold air, and she held him there. Not pushing. Just holding the two of them pressed together, her slick opening against the tip, and watching his face.

"Tell me what you want," she said.

"I don't—"

"You do. You're strapped down in my basement with my hand on your cock and my cunt against it and the sun coming up. Tell me what you want, and be specific, or I'll put my skirt down and go make coffee."

The words came out of him before he could weigh them, low and scraped and honest in a way that turned his own face hot. "Put it in."

"Put what in."

"Your—" He shut his eyes. Opened them. "Put me inside you. Please."

"Good boy," she said, and it was Renata's phrase, and hearing it in Dr. Mack's flat clinical mouth did something to him that he would think about later, at length, and not be able to explain. She came down on him.

Slow. She took him an inch at a time, her cunt opening around him and closing again, wet enough that there was sound, a soft slick give with every inch, and she watched his face the whole way, and her own face didn't change, and that was somehow worse than if it had. Down and down until her hips met his and she was seated on him with her skirt bunched between them and her hands braced on the arms of the chair on either side of his strapped wrists, and he was inside her to the root, and the canvas collar was tight on his throat and his ankles strained in the stirrups and there was nowhere for any of it to go.

"There," she said. "That's what you wanted."

She moved. Not fast — she rode him at the pace she'd come down the stairs, deliberate, one stair at a time, her hips rolling forward and back and her cunt gripping him on the way up like she was drawing something out of him. He heard himself make a sound he didn't authorize. The chair took his weight and gave nothing back; when he tried to push up into her the stirrups held his legs and the wrist straps held his arms and all he could do was lie there and be ridden, and she knew it, and she kept the pace exactly where she wanted it.

"You're going to come," she said. It wasn't a question. "Not yet. When I say."

"I can't—"

"You can. You've been doing it all week." She leaned down over him, and the silk of her blouse brushed his chest, and her face was close enough that he could see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the only thing about her that admitted to time. "You came twice on the drill and you didn't die. This is easier than the drill."

She rode him harder. The slick sound of it filled the low room and the chair creaked and her breath started to come uneven, the first crack in the flatness, and above them, at the top of the stairs, Tyler heard Renata's voice, soft, saying something to herself or to the room. He couldn't make out the words. He didn't need to. She was up there in the gray light watching him get fucked in a basement, and the fact of her watching was its own hand on him.

"Now," Dr. Mack said.

He came. It went through him from the base of his spine and out through every strapped-down part of him, and he heard himself say something that wasn't a word, and his hips bucked up into her as far as the stirrups would let them, and he emptied into her with his eyes open and his mouth open and the collar pressing on his throat. She didn't stop. She rode him through it, slow now, drawing it out, and her cunt clenched on him at the end and she made a low sound low in her chest and her fingernails dug into the leather of the chair arms beside his wrists, and then she was still.

For a moment neither of them moved. His chest was heaving under the canvas. He could feel his own pulse in his jaw, in his wrists where the straps were, in the softening cock still inside her.

"There," she said again, quieter, and lifted herself off him, and he felt the wet slide of it and the cold air where she'd been. She stood on the concrete in her bare feet and pulled her skirt down and smoothed it, and her face was flat again, and she looked up toward the stairwell and raised her voice. "All right. Your turn."

The stairs creaked. Renata came down them into the gray light, and she'd taken her ponytail out, and her red hair was loose around her shoulders, and she was carrying nothing, and she was looking at Tyler the whole way down with an expression he couldn't read — not the warm one, not the flicker he'd seen in the chair, something in between, something hungry and careful at once.

"He's still hard," Dr. Mack said, over her shoulder, from where she'd gone to the cart to straighten her instruments. "Or he will be. You've got about a minute before he decides to be tired, so don't waste it."

"I won't," Renata said. She stopped at the foot of the chair and looked down at him, and her green eyes were bright in the gray, and she reached down and touched his face, her fingertips light on his jaw where the collar met it. "Hi, honey," she said. "You doing okay?"

He laughed. It came out of him wrong, cracked and high, and he didn't know why he was laughing except that the question was so gentle and the situation was so far past it. "No," he said. "Yeah. I don't know."

"That's the right answer," she said, and she stepped out of her scrubs.

Then she was over him, her knees up on the chair, her thighs warm and freckled on either side of his hips, and she reached down and took his cock in her hand, and he was still slick with Dr. Mack and she used it, stroking him back up with her own fingers, and he felt himself harden again under her hand, sore and oversensitive and getting hard anyway, and she felt it too and smiled.

"There he is," she said. "Good boy. I knew he had another one in him."

She put him inside her. Her cunt was hotter than Dr. Mack's and tighter and she came down on him in one long push, no patience in it, a gasp at the end of it, and then she started to move immediately, fast, the way she did everything, her hips working and her hands braced on his chest through the canvas and her hair swinging loose.

"God," she said. "God, you feel—" She didn't finish it. She bit her lip and rode him harder, and the chair creaked under the both of them, and behind her, at the cart, Dr. Mack stood with her arms folded and watched.

"Look at me," Renata said, and he did, and she caught his face between her hands and held it, and her green eyes were close and bright and her breath was coming in short bursts against his mouth. "Don't you look away. You look at me while I take it."

He looked. He was sore and spent and strapped down and he looked, and she rode him with her hair swinging and her mouth open, and the gray light in the high window grew slowly brighter behind her, and the trees outside came up out of the dark one branch at a time.

"I'm close," she said. "Honey. I'm close, come with me, come on—"

He came. It hurt this time, a deep ache at the base of him, and it went on longer than it should have, and she came down hard on him and held and her cunt clenched around him in waves and she made a sound that was almost a sob and then bit it off. Her nails were in the canvas over his chest. Her forehead dropped to his collarbone. For a moment she just breathed there, her hair covering both of them.

"Okay," she whispered, into his chest. "Okay. There we go."

Then she lifted her head and looked at Dr. Mack over her shoulder, and her face was flushed and her eyes were bright and she was grinning, actually grinning, the girl-next-door grin, and she said, "Told you he had it in him."

"You did," Dr. Mack said. She came back to the cart and picked something up off the tray — Tyler couldn't see what, the angle was wrong, the light was behind her — and she looked down at the two of them, Renata still seated on him, both of them breathing hard, the morning coming up gray and cold through the little window. "Get yours," she said. "I'll need him clean and quiet in ten minutes. The rest of the day's already spoken for."

"Ten minutes," Renata said, and she didn't get up. She looked down at Tyler and her grin changed into something else, something slower, and she smoothed her hair back from her face with one hand. "You hear that, honey? Ten minutes."

Dr. Mack turned back to the tray, and the room went quiet except for the chair, and the three of them breathing, and the sun coming up over the trees.