Chapter 10: Training Begins
The house felt different when Margot returned. It wasn’t just the silence—it was the quality of it. Thick, expectant, like the air before a lightning strike. She dropped her keys in the ceramic bowl by the door. The clink was too loud.
Derek was in the living room, pretending to read a photography magazine. He’d showered; his hair was still damp. He didn’t look up, but his shoulders were rigid.
“Hey,” she said, toeing off her shoes.
“Hey.” His voice was careful. “How was Lena’s?”
“Enlightening.” Margot walked to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of water. She could feel his eyes on her back. She took a long drink, then turned, leaning against the counter. “We need to talk.”
He closed the magazine slowly. “Okay.”
She didn’t move from the kitchen. The island between them felt like a courtroom barrier. “The journal,” she began. “I read more of it.”
A faint pink flush crept up his neck. He stared at a point on the rug.
“The things you want… they’re not vague, Derek. They’re specific. They’re extreme.” She kept her voice flat, observational. “You want to be a prop. You want to be locked away. You want to be nothing while someone else satisfies me.”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I know.”
“Why?”
He finally looked at her, his eyes wide and painfully earnest. “Because when I saw you with him… when I tasted it… it was the most real thing I’ve felt in years. It wasn’t about me. It was just… you. Your pleasure. It made me feel useful. In a way nothing else does.”
Margot absorbed this. He was handing her the blueprint to his own dismantling, and calling it purpose. Lena was right. He was already gone.
“Okay,” she said, pushing off the counter. She walked into the living room and sat in the armchair opposite him, not next to him on the sofa. The distance was intentional. “If this is what you need, then we’re going to do it properly. Not as some dirty secret we play at on weekends. As a structure.”
Derek leaned forward, a nervous energy humming off him. “What does that mean?”
“It means rules,” Margot said, hearing Lena’s coaching in her head. “Non-negotiable ones. Starting now.”
She held up a finger. “One. You do not touch me sexually unless I explicitly tell you to. You don’t grope me while I’m doing the dishes. You don’t try to initiate sex with a back rub. My body is not for your casual gratification. Understood?”
He nodded, quick, eager. “Yes.”
“Two. Your orgasms belong to me. Every single one. You will not masturbate without my permission. From this moment on, you are in chastity.”
The word hung in the room. Derek’s breath caught. She saw a complex flash in his eyes—dread, excitement, profound shame.
“I… I don’t have a device,” he stammered.
“I ordered one. It’ll be here tomorrow.” She hadn’t, but she would the second she went upstairs. Lena had sent her links. “You will wear it whenever you are not supervised by me. It comes off only when I allow it, for cleaning or for specific tasks I assign.”
He was breathing through his mouth now, a shallow rhythm. “Okay.”
“Three. You will have daily tasks. Acts of service. Acts of humility. They will remind you of your place. The first one starts tonight.”
“What is it?” The question was a whisper.
“You’re going to make dinner. Then, you’re going to eat it off the floor. On your knees. Like a dog.”
Derek’s face went pale, then flooded with color again. He looked down at his hands, clenched in his lap. The silence stretched. Margot didn’t fill it. This was the first test.
“Okay,” he said, the word barely audible.
“Okay what?”
He glanced up, confused.
“You don’t just say ‘okay’ to me, Derek. Not anymore. You acknowledge the command. You say ‘Yes, Margot.’ Or ‘Yes, Ma’am.’ Your choice. But you say it clearly.”
He blinked. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Yes, Margot.”
“Good. Go make dinner. Something simple. Pasta.”
He stood, moving like a sleepwalker, and shuffled to the kitchen. Margot stayed in the chair, listening to the familiar sounds of him filling a pot, opening the fridge. The normalcy of it clashed violently with the scene she’d just orchestrated. Her heart was hammering against her ribs. This was real. She was really doing this.
She pulled out her phone and, with steady fingers, ordered the chastity device—a sleek, black silicone model Lena had recommended as a starter. She selected overnight shipping.
The smell of garlic and olive oil filled the house. It was Derek’s go-to comfort meal. He was making the food he’d cooked for her a hundred times after long days, during anniversaries, on quiet Sundays. Now it was just a prop in his humiliation.
He served it on two plates, beautifully arranged as he always did. He brought them to the dining table, setting one at her usual spot.
“Sit,” she said, nodding to her chair.
He did. She remained in the armchair.
“Now, put your plate on the floor. Right there.” She pointed to a spot on the rug beside the table.
His hands shook as he picked up his own plate. He hesitated, looking at the meticulous swirl of pasta, the sprinkle of parsley.
“Derek.”
He lowered the plate to the rug. The ceramic made a soft thud on the thick pile.
“Now. Get down there.”
He slid out of his chair and knelt beside the table. He looked up at her, his expression a shattered mosaic of emotions.
“Eat.”
He picked up his fork, hand trembling, and took a clumsy bite. The pasta threatened to slide off. He had to crane his neck awkwardly.
“Use your hands if it’s easier,” Margot said, her voice devoid of mockery. It was just a statement.
He looked at her, horror and something else warring in his eyes. Then he set the fork down on the plate and, slowly, picked up a cluster of spaghetti with his fingers. He shoved it into his mouth, sauce smearing his chin.
Margot picked up her own fork and began to eat from her plate at the table. The food was delicious. He was a good cook. The contrast was almost surreal: her, dining like normal; him, kneeling, eating like an animal, the slurping sounds obscene in the quiet room.
She watched him. The shame was radiating off him in waves, hot and palpable. But beneath it, coiling tight in the line of his shoulders, was a terrible, undeniable arousal. She could see the bulge straining against his jeans. He was hard. While eating pasta off the floor.
Lena’s words echoed: He needs to be broken down, rebuilt, and conditioned to associate pleasure exclusively with your dominance.
This was the first brick.
“When you’re finished,” she said, dabbing her mouth with a napkin, “you will clean the kitchen. Spotless. Then you will shower. You will not touch yourself. You will come to bed. You will sleep on your back, with your hands above the covers where I can see them.”
He nodded, his mouth full, a string of pasta dangling from his lips. “Yes, Margot.”
She finished her meal, savoring the taste, the power, the bizarre normalcy of it all. When she was done, she stood and walked upstairs without a backward glance, leaving him alone in his kneeling silence.
In their bedroom, she changed into a silk camisole. Her nerves were jangling. She could hear him moving downstairs, the running water, the clatter of dishes. The routine sounds of their life, now underpinned with this new, dark rhythm.
An hour later, he entered the room. He smelled of soap and toothpaste. He stood at the foot of the bed, waiting.
“Get in,” she said, reading on her tablet.
He slid under the covers, lying stiffly on his back, his hands resting on his chest.
Margot put the tablet away and turned off her light. The room was dark. She lay on her side, facing away from him. The space between them in the king-sized bed felt vast and charged.
“Margot?” His voice was small in the darkness.
“What?”
“Thank you.”
The words were like a soft blow to her stomach. She closed her eyes. “Go to sleep, Derek.”
She lay awake for a long time, listening to his breathing eventually even out into sleep. Her mind replayed the image of him on the floor, the sauce on his chin, the desperate ache in his trousers. She felt a lurch of nausea, then a pulse of wet heat between her own legs.
She reached for her phone on the nightstand. The screen’s glow lit her face in the dark.
She typed a text to Lena: Step one is done. Device arrives tomorrow.
The reply came almost instantly, as if Lena had been waiting. How did he take it?
He said thank you.
Lena’s response was a single emoji: a flame.
Margot put the phone down. She stared at the ceiling. The house, her life, the man sleeping beside her—it was all the same, and it was all utterly, irrevocably changed. The framework was built. Now they had to live inside it.
Tomorrow, the cage would arrive.
Tomorrow, it would become real in a new, tangible way. And after that… the scene with Jake. The training. The full, deep ruin.
She finally drifted off, her dreams a chaotic blend of laughing with Lena and the cold, clinical click of a lock.