She buckled the collar on me in the hallway at ten past nine on Saturday morning and then she handed me my shirt like nothing had happened.
“Button it to the top,” Rae said.
“It’s going to show.”
“The edge of it is going to show. That’s the point of the edge.” She flicked the top button closed herself, tugged the collar of the flannel straight, and stepped back to look at me the way you look at a picture you just hung. “Black leather, half an inch of it. Anybody who’s looking is gonna know what it is. Anybody who isn’t looking is gonna wonder why you’re sweating.”
I was already sweating. The collar wasn’t tight, that was the awful part, it was exactly snug enough that every time I swallowed I felt it move with my throat. Like being reminded I had a throat. Like being reminded who it belonged to.
She had a list. Of course she had a list. She’d written it on the back of a gas receipt in her terrible handwriting and she folded it into my shirt pocket and patted it flat over my heart, which was going like I’d run there.
“Home Depot. Eleven items. You get every one of them, you don’t skip any, you don’t come home with a substitute. I’ll be texting you. You answer in under a minute or you lose something. Understood?”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Louder.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” In my own hallway, in my own socks.
“Good boy. Go on. Truck’s out front.”
It’s a forty minute drive to the big one off the highway. I could have gone to the little True Value ten minutes away where the guy knows me, and that’s exactly why she picked the big one. I drove with both hands on the wheel and the collar rubbing every time I checked a mirror and I was hard before I got out of our neighborhood. Just from the buckle. Just from knowing. Pathetic.
My phone buzzed in the cup holder at a red light.
Rae: pull the collar out from under your shirt. all of it. flat on top of the flannel.
I read it at the light. Looked around. A woman in the next car was eating a granola bar and looking at nothing.
me: Not till I park?
Rae: now. 58 seconds left
I did it. One-handed, thumb hooked under the leather, pulling it up and out and flattening it over the collar of the flannel so the whole band showed, black against the red plaid. The buckle sat right at my throat. There was a little steel ring on the front, I’d stared at that ring for a week when she bought it, and it swung and tapped against my collarbone.
me: Done
Rae: picture
me: Rae I’m in traffic
Rae: at a light. picture. now it’s 40 seconds
I held the phone up at arm’s length with my face red and my dick pushing at my jeans and took it, and the light turned green and the guy behind me leaned on his horn and I almost cried laughing and sending it at the same time.
Rae: mm. that’s my boy. keep it out. you take it off, I’ll know
I kept it out.
The parking lot was packed because of course it was Saturday, every guy in the county buying mulch. I sat in the truck for a minute with the engine ticking and looked at myself in the rearview. The collar looked even worse in daylight. Glossy. Deliberate. Like a thing a person owns.
Rae: item one. out of the truck. 2 minutes
I got out.
The first thing is the automatic doors, the cold air that smells like cut lumber and rubber, and the second thing is realizing everybody in an orange apron is looking at your neck. They weren’t. I know they weren’t. Some of them probably were. A kid unloading a pallet by the front glanced up and glanced down at the ring and then very carefully glanced away and that was the worst, the carefully. I felt my ears go hot and it went straight down my spine and into my cock like a wire.
Item one on the list was twelve feet of chain, the heavy galvanized kind sold by the foot. Aisle 24. I found the guy at the cutting station and he was maybe fifty, thick forearms, a name tag that said Dale, and I said I needed twelve feet of the three-eighths chain and my voice cracked on chain.
Dale looked at me. At the collar. At me.
“Twelve feet,” he said. “Three-eighths. You want a quick link on the end?”
“Sure. Yeah. Please.”
“Dog?”
I swear to God my whole body stopped. “Sorry?”
“The chain. Big dog?” His face didn’t change at all.
“Yeah,” I said. “Big. Dog. He pulls.”
“They do,” Dale said, and measured out twelve feet with a clank that I felt in my knees, and when he handed it to me over the counter, heavy and cold and coiled in my arms like something alive, he said, “Hope he behaves.”
“He’s trying to,” I said, and I could have died, and he just nodded and went back to his bolt cutters.
My phone went off against my hip.
Rae: i can feel you blushing from here. did he say something
me: Asked if it was for a dog
Rae: and what did you say
me: That he pulls
Rae: ahhh. good. I’m so proud of you. next. you’ll hate it
Item four was a package of the zip ties. Item five was the rubber mallet, which she hadn’t explained, and I decided not to wonder about. Item six was a thing called a screw eye, six of them, heavy duty, and I stood in aisle 31 in front of four hundred drawers of tiny metal parts trying to find the right bin with a chain over my shoulder like a convict, and every few minutes someone passed with a cart and slowed down.
A woman about my mom’s age, cardigan, reading glasses on a cord, stopped next to me to look at the same wall of drawers. She looked at the chain. She looked at the collar. She did that thing with her mouth where she’s not smiling but she’s thinking about it.
“Finding everything okay?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” I said.
I heard it come out. I heard exactly what I’d said and who I’d said it for. My face went white and then red and she took one very small step to the left and said, “Well. Good manners,” and pushed her cart on, and I stood there with my forehead against a drawer labeled 5/16 LAG and my cock leaking so much I could feel it in my underwear.
Rae: you stopped moving. why.
me: I called a customer Ma’am
Rae: HA
Rae: oh my god. baby
Rae: ok that’s worth two points. you’re at four. you get something later for that and you’ll hate that too
I had the list in my pocket and I took it out to check and my hands were actually shaking, and the receipt had a stain on it that might’ve been coffee. At the bottom, under item eleven, in smaller writing: and the last thing is a surprise. Dale will know.
I stared at that for a long time.
Item ten was a pair of bolt snaps and item nine was a tape measure and I did all of them in a kind of fog, turning down aisles, doubling back, the chain growing heavier. At the self checkout I had to scan the chain, and the machine didn’t know it, and a teenager in an apron came over to help me with the key code and looked at my neck and I said “It’s for a dog” before he could ask, and he said “Cool” and I wanted the floor to open up. The leather had stuck to my skin with sweat. I could feel my pulse against the inside of it.
I didn’t have the surprise yet. I went back to Dale.
“Back again,” he said.
“There’s a, um.” I held the receipt out. He took it. He read it. I watched his eyes get to the bottom and I watched a small, patient, entirely not surprised smile move across his face.
“She left something for you,” he said. “Hold on.”
He went behind the counter and came back with a brown paper bag folded over three times at the top, stapled. My name was on it. My real name. In her handwriting.
“Lady came in yesterday and paid for it,” Dale said. “Said you’d be along.”
“She came in here yesterday?”
“Real nice. Real clear on what she wanted.” He pushed the bag across the counter. “You two have a good one.”
I took it. I couldn’t look at him. I walked out of that store holding a paper bag against my chest and twelve feet of chain looped over my shoulder, in the collar, past the kid with the pallet, who didn’t look away this time, and I don’t know what I looked like but I know my knees were not working right.
Rae: truck. now. don’t open the bag
I sat in the driver’s seat with the bag on my lap. My phone lit up.
Rae: open it
Inside was a ball gag. A red one, the rubber kind, with a black strap, and wrapped around it a little note: Put it in. Buckle it on. Drive home the long way. Don’t take it out until I tell you.
I read it three times.
“Rae,” I said out loud, to nobody, to the windshield. My cock was so hard it hurt against the zipper.
I put it in my mouth. It was bigger than I thought. It filled my whole mouth and pushed my tongue flat and I fumbled the strap behind my head one-handed and got it buckled, and the second it clicked I knew my voice was gone, and that was it, I was done, I had to touch myself, I had to. I got my hand on my jeans and I was shaking and drooling already down my chin onto the collar.
My phone buzzed.
Rae: hands on the wheel
I looked up. Through the windshield, past the lot, past the line of carts. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. But I looked anyway, over and over, because she’d told me once that if she wanted to she’d follow me, and I was suddenly absolutely certain she’d followed me.
I put my hands on the wheel.
Rae: that’s my good boy. drive.
I drove home the long way. Forty-five minutes of it, the whole river road, with the gag in and spit running down my neck and a damp spot spreading in my jeans, every red light making me whimper through the rubber, the chain clinking in the passenger seat. I came close, twice, just from the bumps in the road. I held it. I don’t know how.
She was waiting in the driveway. Sitting on the tailgate of her own car, bare feet, in the long gray T-shirt she wears to bed, nothing else. She got up as I pulled in and walked to my window and opened my door and looked at me.
“Oh, look at that,” she said. “Look at you. You’re a mess.”
I tried to say her name and it came out wet and broken through the gag. She laughed, delighted, and took my face in her hands and ran her thumbs through the drool.
“Out. Let’s go.”
She didn’t let me take the gag out. She didn’t let me take the chain out of the truck either. She clipped one of those bolt snaps I’d bought right onto the ring on my collar and led me inside by it, up the stairs, into the bedroom, and I followed with my hands curled at my sides and my cock a dark hard line down my thigh.
“On your knees,” she said, and I dropped.
She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled up the T-shirt. Nothing underneath. She was wet already, I could smell it, and I whined into the gag.
“You want it,” she said. “You want to take that thing out and put your mouth on me. Nod.”
I nodded so hard it hurt.
“Eleven items,” she said. “Minus a point for the first thirty seconds in the parking lot, plus two for the Ma’am. Dale told me you did good.” She reached behind my head and undid the strap. The gag came out with a string of spit and I gasped for breath and she grabbed my hair. “Dale called me, dummy. Did you really think I’d send you in there blind?”
“Rae—”
“Eat.”
I put my face between her thighs and she wrapped the chain around her wrist, the end of it, the part still hooked to my collar, and pulled me in. She tasted like salt and heat and I licked into her, sloppy, desperate, my whole face wet with her and my own spit, and she rocked against my mouth and told me what she thought of me. That I’d stood in front of a woman old enough to be my mother and called her Ma’am. That I’d told a stranger my dog pulls. That I was a leaking, shaking, dripping thing who’d drive an hour with a gag in just because she said to.
“Slut,” she said, tender, and yanked the chain, and came with her hand fisted in my hair and her heels digging into my back, shuddering against my tongue for so long I thought I might pass out.
She dragged me up onto the bed by the collar and pushed me on my back.
“Look at this.” She pulled my jeans open and my cock jumped out, drenched, purple, a long glistening string stretching from the tip to my belly. “Hardware store. In public. You did this in public.”
“Please,” I said. My voice was destroyed. “Please, please, Rae, please, I need it.”
“Say who you belong to.”
“You. You. Just you.”
She climbed on me. She sank all the way down in one slow slide and I screamed, actually screamed, and she put her hand over my mouth and her other hand on the ring at my throat and held on to it like the reins of something.
“Don’t you dare come,” she said. “Not till I say. You earned it but you’re gonna earn it harder.”
She rode me hard. Wet, slapping, her thighs shaking against my hips and her breath coming in huffs and her whole weight on the collar so every thrust pulled it tight across my windpipe and my vision swam. I could feel everything, every inch of her around me, hot and slick and clenching, and I was crying, I realize now, a little, tears running into my ears, because it was too much and not enough and she was looking down at me with her hair in her face like she’d built me.
“Rae. Rae. I’m going to. I can’t.”
“Not yet.”
“I can’t.”
“Look at me.” I looked. “Now.”
I came so hard I thought something tore. Up through my whole body and out of me into her in long, thick, aching pulses, my back arching off the mattress and her hand tight on the ring and her name leaving my mouth in pieces. She kept grinding through it, milking every last drop, until I was sobbing and whimpering and flinching under her, oversensitive, begging her to stop, and she finally did, and fell forward onto my chest with both of us panting.
For a while neither of us said anything. The room smelled like us. Down in the driveway the truck door was probably still hanging open.
She undid the collar slowly and kissed the red mark it had left. Then the other side of my neck. Then my mouth, which was a disaster, spit and salt and her.
“Hey,” she said, quiet, in her normal voice, the one I know best. “Hey, you. You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You were so good. I mean it. That woman in aisle thirty-one, I’m never going to be over that.”
I laughed, and it came out wobbly. “I thought I was going to die.”
“I know. I almost drove in and got you.” She pulled the blanket up over us. “Stay here. I’ll go get the chain out of the truck in a bit. Dale said to say hi, by the way.”
“I’m never going back to that store.”
“We need more screw eyes,” she said, and kissed my forehead, and I had a feeling she was right.
