One night with the key

I put the key on the table next to his plate while he was setting dinner in front of me.

He saw it before he sat down. Small, steel, on the same ring as always, except that it usually hangs at my neck instead of lying on the tablecloth. He didn’t pick it up. He looked at the key, then at me, and dropped his eyes to his plate.

“Tonight,” I said. “You remember the condition.”

“I remember, Mistress.”

“Say it.”

“Clean up after myself. With my tongue. All of it.”

He said it evenly, the way you recite something learned by heart. He had been locked for five weeks, and after five weeks any condition sounds easy. I know that, and I count on it. The condition isn’t tested when he repeats it over dinner. It’s tested an hour later, when he no longer needs anything.

We ate. He asked about my meeting, I answered. The key lay between us, and he never once looked straight at it, only his fork stopped halfway a couple of times. I didn’t hurry. I finished, pushed the plate away, took the key and stood up.

“Dishes later. Shower, then come to me.”

The lock

He came into the bedroom wet, a towel over his shoulder, and stood by the bed. I was sitting on the edge in my robe and told him to come closer. I always open the cage myself: he is not supposed to know how that key turns. I took the padlock in my palm. The steel was warm from his body. The key went in, turned, the shackle clicked, and I slid the ring and the tube off him slowly, because in five weeks he had forgotten what that feels like.

He breathed out as if he had been holding it since dinner. The skin under the steel was pale, with the mark of the ring on it, and the air alone had him hard within seconds. I held him in my hand and felt him fill. His arms hung at his sides. He didn’t raise them: no touching without permission, and he keeps that rule even unlocked.

“On your back.”

He lay down. I took off the robe, straddled him without letting him in, and watched him watch me. Not my breasts — my face. That is how I taught him: until I say otherwise, he looks me in the eye. I lowered myself onto him all at once, all the way, and he groaned, couldn’t help it. I didn’t punish that. After five weeks, allowed.

I moved slowly and evenly, the way I wanted, and he lay under me gripping the sheet, because touching me was not allowed. He breathed through his mouth. After a minute he asked:

“May I use my hands?”

“On my hips. Only to hold.”

He put his palms on my hips and held them still, as I had told him. His fingers were hot and trembled a little. I came the first time looking down at him, then stopped to catch my breath, and he lay inside me hard and didn’t move, because I hadn’t said. That is what I love most about an open cage: he is free, and he still waits.

“You may now,” I said. “Tell me before.”

I started moving again, faster, and a couple of minutes later he breathed out “now, Mistress,” and I nodded, and he came inside me with his eyes shut and his mouth open, without a sound. I felt him pulse and felt the whole of him let go, from his shoulders to his fingers. The palms on my hips went loose. Five weeks left him in ten seconds.

The condition

I climbed off him and lay down beside him on my back, legs apart. It was wet between my legs, his and mine, warm, already running onto the sheet. And I waited.

That minute is the reason I am writing this. While he is locked, he will agree to anything, and that costs nothing. While he is hard, he will agree to anything, and that costs nothing either. The condition is tested in the first minute after, when the wanting is gone and all that’s left is me, the sheet, and what he has just left inside me. A man’s body in that minute wants one thing: to turn over and sleep. That is where you see who he is.

He lay there for about ten seconds. Breathing. I said nothing, only put my hand on the back of his head, not pressing, just so he could feel where it was.

Then he turned, moved down, and knelt between my legs, face down.

The first stroke of his tongue was short. I felt him freeze — the taste, the smell, his own, still warm — and felt his shoulders tighten. One second. In that second I wasn’t sure he would go on. My hand on the back of his head didn’t move a millimetre.

He went on. Slowly, broadly, from the inside of my thigh where it had run, then higher, then in. He gathered it with his lips, swallowed, gathered again. I could hear him swallow. He didn’t grimace, but I could see his throat work and see that he had to push himself through it. Through it is the point.

I came a second time from his tongue, quieter and longer than the first, with my hand in his hair, and he didn’t stop until I pushed him away. The sheet under me was damp, my skin clean. Everything he had left, he had taken back.

“Enough. The lock.”

He fetched the ring and the tube from the nightstand himself and stood while I fastened them. He hadn’t gone fully soft yet and the tube went on tight; he flinched, and I waited until he could. Click. The key back on the chain, the chain back on my neck. An hour earlier I had taken it off, and there it was again. He looked at the lock and asked nothing. Five weeks were before; now the count starts over, and he knows it.

“Thank you, Mistress.”

“For what?”

“For the key. And for the condition.”

I didn’t ask what he meant. You don’t ask those questions at night.

Morning

He made coffee, as always, by seven. Set the cup down, sat across from me and waited.

“What was the hardest part?”

“The first second. Then it stopped mattering. Even…”

“Finish.”

“Then it felt right. That I was still in my place, even unlocked.”

I nodded. That was what I wanted to hear: not at night, when the hormones talk, but in the morning, over coffee, locked. The key hung at my neck and he could see it. He washed last night’s dishes and we left for work.

The condition stays. Next time I will repeat it over dinner, he will say “I remember” again, and again it will mean nothing. What will mean something is the second after.

• Name the condition before the key comes out, at dinner, and make him say it back. Not in bed.
• After he comes, don’t give orders. Put your hand on him and wait: the first move has to be his.
• In that first second, don’t help and don’t push. That second is the test.
• Take your own pleasure after he has cleaned you. The condition is the middle of the evening, not the end.
• Lock him the same night. A husband left open until morning is a different husband.