Chapter 18: Texts of Submission
The hum of Alex’s office was a low, constant drone, a sound meant to be neutral but which now felt like the white noise of his own disconnection. Spread across his dual monitors were schematics for a composite wing joint, lines and angles that usually demanded his entire focus. Today, they were just shapes. His body still hummed with the memory of her weight, the sting on his skin, the terrifying truth of her words: I love you more right now.
His personal phone, face-down on the glass desk, vibrated.
A single, solid buzz. Not a call. A notification.
His heart, which had been beating a steady, technical rhythm, stuttered. He left it there for a full minute, watching the light from the corridor refract through the desk onto the ceiling. He took a sip of cold coffee. He adjusted a decimal point on the schematic. The phone was a dark, silent monolith.
He flipped it over.
A message from Annie. No text. Just an image.
He tapped it. The photo loaded, pixel by pixel, and his breath left his body in a quiet rush, as if he’d been struck in the solar plexus.
It was her. Annie. On her knees, in what looked like a tiled room—a gym bathroom, maybe, or a locker room. The lighting was harsh, fluorescent. Her blonde hair was swept over one shoulder. Her eyes, those brilliant blues, were looking directly into the lens. They were glazed, unfocused, wet at the corners with the strain. Her lips, usually so quick to smile or tease, were stretched obscenely around the thick, ruddy base of Marcus’s cock. It filled the frame, a brutal invasion. You could see the tension in her jaw, the way her throat was already working. A string of saliva connected her lower lip to a vein running down the shaft.
The caption came through a second later: He had a rough morning. Client canceled. Needed to relive some stress. Couldn’t say no to my favorite cock, could I? x
Alex’s hand trembled. He looked up, a frantic, paranoid sweep of the open-plan office. No one was looking. They were all in their pods, wrestling with their own calculations. He was alone inside a glass bubble, holding a detonator.
His own reaction was immediate, a thick, shameful pull in his groin. He shifted in his ergonomic chair. The schematics on the screen blurred into meaningless lines.
Another buzz. Another photo.
This one was a closer shot, from the side. Her cheek was hollowed with effort. Her hand was wrapped around what her mouth couldn’t take, her fingers not meeting. The sheer scale of him was anatomical, devastating. You could see the tip pressing against the inside of her cheek.
No caption this time.
Alex let his head fall back against the headrest. The ceiling tiles were porous, acoustic. They absorbed sound. They would absorb a scream. He could hear the silence of the photo. He imagined the wet, gagging sounds she must be making. The grunts from Marcus. He imagined Marcus’s big hand on the back of her head, those trainer’s fingers tangled in her perfect hair.
A third buzz.
A different angle. From slightly above, maybe Marcus’s point of view. Looking down at her. Her eyes were up, looking at him, watery and submissive. It was the look that undid Alex completely. It was real. This wasn’t a performance for the camera, not entirely. In that slice of a second, she was just… his. The caption flashed: He’s so deep. Can you tell?
Alex’s knuckles were white around the phone. He typed, deleted, typed again. Is he? he finally sent. A pathetic, hungry query.
The response wasn’t text. It was a five-second video.
He fumbled for his wireless earbuds, his fingers clumsy. He plugged them in, tapped play.
The sound was a muffled, rhythmic choking. A deep, male sigh. And Annie’s voice, ragged and distorted around the fullness in her mouth: “Mmmph… god… you’re gonna make me…” Then a wet pop as she pulled off, gasping. The camera swung, showing a blurry sink, a mirror, then focused back on her flushed, slick face. Marcus’s voice, off-camera, bored and commanding: “Don’t stop. You’re not done.” Her lips, red and swollen, parted in a silent “okay,” and she went back down, out of frame.
The video ended.
Alex was painfully hard. He was also nauseous. The two sensations swirled in his gut, inseparable. This was different from the curated scenes in their bedroom. This was stolen, midday, raw. She was at his work. While Alex sat in his own work, a world away made of math and cool glass.
The photos kept coming, a slow, torturous drip-feed over the next forty minutes.
Her hand stroking him, her tongue lapping at the tip. A close-up of her lips, glossy and stretched. A selfie of her with her cheek pressed against his thigh, looking dazed, a strand of hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. The captions were sparse, devastating.
His taste is everywhere.
Think he’ll finish in my mouth?
You should see how he looks at me after. Like I’m a machine he just used.
Each one was a puncture wound. Each one filled him with a dark, heavy heat. He gave up on the schematics entirely. He opened a meaningless spreadsheet and stared at it, a prop for his performance of normalcy, while his entire consciousness was in that tiled room.
The final photo came just after noon.
It was her, fully dressed again, in her form-fitting athleisure wear. She was in a car, the bright San Diego sun washing out the background. She’d reapplied her lipstick. She looked radiant, fucked-out, and utterly pleased with herself. A selfie. The text read: All done. He came on my tits. Had to use his gym towel to clean up. Now I’m all sticky and smell like him. Going home to shower. Think about that while you eat your sad desk lunch. Love you.
Alex sat in the sterile silence. The frantic arousal was ebbing, leaving behind a deep, resonant ache. It wasn’t jealousy. It was something more profound. A loneliness so specific it had its own texture. She was living a full, vivid, secret life inside their life, and she was sending him postcards from the epicenter.
He thought about her going home, showering. Washing Marcus off her skin. The scent of his soap replacing the scent of him. The mundane act of cleaning away the evidence.
He opened a new message to her. His thumbs hovered. He didn’t ask for details. He didn’t tell her how hard he was. He typed three words, sent them before he could think better of it.
Did you swallow?
He put the phone down, screen-up. He watched it, waiting. The three dots appeared almost immediately. They pulsed. They disappeared. They pulsed again. A full minute passed.
Her reply was simple.
No. He wanted my tits today. Next time maybe.
Next time. The words were a promise and a verdict.
Alex leaned back. The afternoon sun slanted across his desk, illuminating motes of dust dancing in the air. He had a meeting in twenty minutes. He should prepare. He looked at the wing joint schematics, the elegant solution to a problem of stress and force. He understood it perfectly.
He looked back at his phone, at her final photo. Her smiling, knowing eyes.
He didn’t understand any of this. Not really. He just knew he was waiting, already, for the next postcard.