Chapter 50: The Quiet Weekend
The following morning, Tuesday, the black leather collar was still around Ken’s throat when he woke. He’d slept fitfully on the floor at the foot of Pete’s bed, the chain locked to a heavy floor bolt. The first thing he saw was Pete’s cheerful face leaning over him, a small key in his hand.
“Morning,” Pete said, his voice soft with sleep. The click of the lock was loud in the quiet room. The collar came off, leaving a faint, indented line on Ken’s skin. “Shower’s all yours. Five minutes. We can’t be late.”
The week from Tuesday until Friday passed so fast Ken’s life repeated like a loop.
Each morning, he stood naked next to the monitor in the S&F department’s tutoring annex, explaining his workflow step-by-step to his peers. The air conditioning was always set a degree too cold. His skin prickled with goosebumps. His hard cock, a required state, felt oddly detached from the rest of him, a separate piece of equipment.
His peers—Leo, Todd, Marcus, David—still wore their weekly designated clothes: very revealing crop tops that covered just above their nipples and super-elastic thongs that clearly revealed their cock shape and size. They sat in a semi-circle, legs spread wide on the low stools, hands behind their heads. Their eyes tracked his pointer on the screen, but occasionally—always—their gazes dropped to study his naked form. He was the lesson and the lecturer.
“So you batch the queries before the API call,” Ken explained, his voice calm, professional. “It reduces server load by forty percent.”
“Is that why you’re positioned like that?” Leo asked, a sly grin on his face. “To reduce load?”
The others chuckled softly. Ken kept his eyes on the code. “It’s the required posture for tutorial instruction, Master Leo.”
“Right, right. Just checking.”
In the afternoons, all S&F employees separated to serve other departments upon requests while Ken took the private elevator to the 5th floor. Pete’s office. The doors hissed shut, sealing him in a world of glass, sleek white desks, and a deep gray rug he knew the precise texture of with his knees.
The private tutor session was for the strategic planning for next quarter, Q4. Ken would kneel by Pete’s desk, Pete’s polished shoes within inches of his face, and they would dissect market projections. Pete, for all his teasing, was frighteningly sharp. He asked incisive questions, challenged assumptions, and Ken’s mind, always desperate for a problem to solve, would catch fire. For minutes at a time, he’d forget he was naked. He was just Ken, the strategist, solving puzzles.
Then Pete would lean back, twirl his pen, and say, “Okay. Now tell me about the day I failed my calculus midterm. The day you stayed until midnight in the library with me.”
And the floor would drop out.
The shamed, humiliated, and embarrassed feeling from Monday night—from serving Karn, Por, Mew, Leng, and Tul—remained in Ken’s mind like a persistent stain. Recounting his past with Pete made it fresh. He’d have to speak, his voice growing quieter, while completely naked and kneeling on the floor, exposing everything to his own tutee.
“You were frustrated,” Ken would murmur, staring at the rug fibers. “You said you’d never get it. I told you to break the problem down. To see it as a series of steps, not a wall.”
“And now?” Pete would prompt, his voice gentle.
“Now… I am the series of steps, Master Pete.”
“Good.”
Yet, Ken didn’t realize that deep down he was quite fond of being seen. The proof was in his body’s stubborn, unwavering compliance. It was in the way a part of him noted the exact shade of interest in Leo’s eyes, or the approving nod Pete gave when a quarterly forecast was perfectly articulated by a kneeling, naked man. The humiliation was a acid bath, but it left something behind: a terrible, gleaming clarity. He was useful. His exposure had a purpose. The more he was seen, the more essential he became.
Friday evening bled into the quiet, hollow time after work. Ken finished in Pete’s office, was dismissed with a casual pat on the head, and walked back to his department. The main floor was deserted, lights dimmed. The silent workstations looked like abandoned monuments.
He found the locker room empty. His peers had all gone home. The silence was different here—echoing, final. He opened his locker. His street clothes hung there, soft cotton and denim, artifacts from a different life. He dressed slowly. The feeling of fabric on his skin was alien, almost abrasive. He caught his own reflection in the polished metal of the locker door. For a fleeting second, his hand rose, not to adjust his shirt, but to touch the spot on his neck where the collar had been. He dropped his hand, shocked at himself.
His thoughts, unbidden, spiraled to Boom and Kla. Boom and Kla had told him just after the onboarding activity that they would be away for a business trip for 7 weeks. It meant they would be back on the following Monday.
A cold, slick tension coiled in his stomach. He got a little bit nervous thinking about what he should do if they found that he had to work completely naked in the company. They were his former peers, his rivals, now his managers. But before all that, they had been his best friends since university. They had known him when his brilliance was a crown, not a trigger for undressing.
He zipped his jeans, the sound loud in the empty room. He murmured to himself, the words barely a breath. “I have to nakedly serve 2 CEOs during next week as the last week of my 56 days punishment…” The end was in sight. A finite point. “…I do hope that Boom and Kla wouldn’t find me in the company during next week.”
He shouldered his bag, the weight unfamiliar. He switched off the light and walked out into the gleaming hallway, his footsteps the only sound.
Otherwise, he would be much more humiliated than being naked in front of Master Pete, his previous closed tutee. Pete’s gaze, for all its ownership, held a kernel of that old admiration. Boom and Kla’s gazes would hold something else entirely. The memory of who he was to them would make the sight of who he had become utterly intolerable. Their laughter would have a different, crueler pitch. Their commands would carry the weight of a shared history being defiled.
The elevator descended. Ken watched the numbers tick down. He pictured their faces—Boom’s calculated smirk, Kla’s cold, serene assessment—finding him on his knees, hands behind his head, utterly exposed. The image didn’t bring the dark flutter of relief. It brought only a hollow, dread-filled chill.
The doors opened to the empty lobby. He walked out into the twilight, the automatic doors whispering shut behind him, locking away the loop for another two days. But the loop was breaking. Next week, the variables changed. The thought followed him all the way to the subway, a silent, pacing shadow.
The thought followed him all the way to the subway, a silent, pacing shadow. It stayed with him through the rattling ride, up the stairs to his neighborhood, and through the keyhole of his apartment door. It watched him as he ate a microwave meal standing at the kitchen counter, staring at the equations on his wall. The brilliant, half-finished proofs now looked like cryptic accusations.
He tried to lose himself in a textbook. The symbols blurred. His mind kept supplying a different script: Master Boom, Ken is ready for service. He slammed the book shut. The apartment felt like a museum of a dead person. Him.
Sleep was a shallow, restless thing.
Saturday morning, Ken wakes late, the morning light filtering through his blinds. He lies in bed, replaying the week's events—the daily tutoring sessions with Pete, the constant exposure, the lingering shame from Monday night with Pete's friends. The memory of his forehead against Karn’s shoe surfaced, vivid and wet. He squeezed his eyes shut against it. His phone buzzed on the nightstand.
He grabbed it. A message from Liam: “Hey ghost. You alive? A bunch of us are grabbing beers later at The Draft. Be normal for 2 hours. Come on.”
Ken’s thumbs hovered. He typed, “Maybe. What time?” He stared at the words. The normality of them felt like a costume he’d forgotten how to wear. He deleted the message. He tossed the phone aside, face down. It thumped softly against the duvet.
He felt a strange emptiness without the routine of work and service. The structure of shame had been a grueling, full-time job. Now there was just… time. And silence. He pushed the covers back.
As he pads to the kitchen naked, he catches his reflection in the window and pauses, studying his own body. The lines of it were familiar, yet the context had been stripped away. This body wasn’t his anymore; it was a tool for facilitation, a site of protocol. The pale stripe on his neck from Pete’s collar had faded to a faint memory.
The clarity of it was a punch to the gut. He physically recoiled, stepping back from the window. He shook his head, disgusted, and forced himself to shower and dress. The water was scalding. He scrubbed his skin until it turned pink, as if he could scour the idea away.
He spent the afternoon in a fugue state. He cleaned the already-spotless apartment. He reorganized his bookshelves by genre, then by author, then by color. Nothing required his kneeling. Nothing demanded his hands behind his head. No one looked at him. The isolation was a vast, quiet room, and the seed in his mind began to put down roots. You are only essential when you are exposed. The corporate logic was perverse, but it was logic. It had a terrible symmetry.
His feet, moving without his conscious instruction, carried him to the clear space in the center of his living room rug. He stood there. The silence hummed. Almost experimentally, he lowered himself to his knees. He spread them. The position was as natural as breathing. He laced his fingers behind his head, elbows out, chest arching forward automatically.
He held the pose. His heart thudded, not with shame, but with a dreadful, confirming rhythm. Here, in his empty apartment, he was ready for service. The posture was an anchor. It made sense of the void.
A choked sound escaped him—part laugh, part sob. He unfolded his legs. He stood up on shaky limbs. He had to get out. He needed air that wasn’t charged with his own unraveling.
He pulled on a jacket and left, walking aimlessly through the city streets. The Saturday crowds were loud and colorful, a chaotic ballet of ordinary lives. He felt like a ghost among them, his internal reality a stark, silent film of kneeling and directives. He bought a coffee he didn’t taste. He nodded at a neighbor he barely recognized. His phone buzzed again in his pocket. He didn’t check it.
As dusk bled into evening, he found himself outside a familiar upscale bar. The neon sign buzzed. The Draft. Laughter and music spilled out the door every time it opened. He could see the backs of his old friends, Liam and others, crowded around a high table. They were gesturing, leaning in, their faces alive with a joke he couldn’t hear.
His hand was on the door handle. The cold metal seeped into his palm. He could push it open. He could say, “Hey, sorry I’m late.” He could try to be normal for two hours.
The image of Boom and Kla materialized in his mind, not as managers, but as those same friends around a different table years ago. Their laughter then had included him. Now, their laughter would be about him. It would dissect him. If they saw him on Monday, it would be a different kind of ending.
He couldn’t walk into this bar. Not with the seed inside him now, whispering its dark truth. He turned away from the light and the noise. He walked home in the deepening dark, the emptiness now filled with a single, sharp point of anticipation. The weekend was a barren corridor leading to a door. On the other side of it waited the end of his punishment, the return of his former friends, and the terrifying realization that a part of him didn’t want any of it to stop.
On the other side of it waited the end of his punishment, the return of his former friends, and the terrifying realization that a part of him didn’t want any of it to stop. He spent Sunday morning mechanically scrubbing the grout in his bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, the compulsive precision a feeble stand-in for the week’s structured demands. His phone, face-down on the closed toilet lid, vibrated once. Then again. A specific, pulsing rhythm that signaled a company email.
He dried his hands, his heartbeat a dull thump in his ears. He picked up the phone. The sender was Pon, HR. The subject line: FINAL WEEK PROTOCOL & CEO SERVICE SCHEDULE.
Ken sat on the cold bathroom floor, back against the tub, and opened it. The text was brutally clear.
Ken, be advised. Tomorrow, Monday, at 0900, you are to be present in the main meeting room on the 40th floor. You will assume the standard kneeling posture, unclothed. This commences the final week of your 56-day disciplinary term. Throughout this week, your sole duty is to provide naked service to two CEOs. They will collect you from the meeting room each morning. Once the secretary outside signals their arrival, you must bow forward, chest and forehead to the floor. Do not look up until expressly permitted. Acknowledge receipt.
He read it three times. The words ‘final week’ pulsed on the screen. A sharp, clean breath he didn’t know he was holding escaped his lungs in a rush. His shoulders slumped against the porcelain.
“Finally,” he whispered to the empty bathroom. The sound was thin, stripped of real joy. It was the quiet report of a countdown timer hitting zero. “Just one more week. Just pass through it.”
He scanned the email again, his analyst’s mind latching onto a crucial detail. The two CEOs would pick him up. He would be with them, off-site presumably, all day, every day. A separate, more profound relief flooded him, warm and silencing.
Boom and Kla were due back today. Their seven-week trip was over. They’d be in the office tomorrow. But if he was whisked away by nine in the morning… he would be gone. They would not see him. They would not find him kneeling in the S&F department, or tutoring peers, or navigating the halls in a state of humiliating transparency. He was safe. For this last, critical week, he was insulated from the two people whose recognition carried the unique power to unravel him completely.
“Safe,” he murmured, testing the word. It felt like a pardon. He pushed himself up from the floor, his body feeling lighter. The grim anticipation that had coiled in his gut since Friday began to loosen. He could do this. He could kneel in that meeting room, bow to the floor, and serve two strangers. It was a script. A final performance. Then the punishment box would be checked, and his life would… what? Return to normal?
He walked to his bedroom, phone still in hand. He looked at the clear space in the center of the rug where he had instinctively knelt the day before. That dark, confirming rhythm was still there, a silent pulse beneath his ribs. He ignored it. He focused on the practical.
He needed to be impeccable. This was the final audit of his compliance. He laid out his clothes for the morning on the bed: simple grey trousers, a black t-shirt, slip-on shoes. Nothing that would complicate undressing. He set three alarms. He drank two glasses of water and forced down a piece of toast, his stomach fluttering.
As evening drew in, the relief began to fray at the edges. A technical question surfaced. The two CEOs. Who were they? The email didn’t say. Were they like Kenjiro, calmly smiling while dismantling you? Or like Pete’s friends, buzzing with a shock that curdled into casual ownership? His mind, desperate for parameters, tried to build models without data. It kept defaulting to the worst-case inputs: Boom’s smirk, Kla’s cold eyes. But they wouldn’t be there. He repeated it like a mantra.
He took a long shower. He studied his body in the steam-clouded mirror, not with disgust now, but with a grim assessment. It was a tool for one more week. The faint line on his neck was gone. The marks from Pete’s collar, from the rug burns, from the memory of five pairs of hands—they were all just ghosts under his skin.
He went to bed early. The silence of the apartment was a vacuum. He missed the faint, metallic sound of a chain being clipped. He missed the weight of a stare. He turned over, pressing his face into the pillow. Sleep came in fits and starts, his body tensing as if waiting for an alarm that wasn’t due for hours.
When the first alarm did blare at 5:30 AM, he was already awake. His eyes snapped open. The dread was there, a cold, familiar companion. But layered over it was a sharp, clinical focus. This was a problem to be solved. A final series of steps to execute.
He dressed in the clothes he’d laid out. He skipped coffee. He left his apartment while the sky was still a deep indigo, the streets quiet and washed clean. The subway car was nearly empty. He counted the stops. His posture was perfect, spine straight, hands resting on his knees. A man on his way to a normal job.
He arrived at the Fah Rung tower at 7:45 AM. The morning security guard nodded, bored. Ken took the elevator directly to the 40th floor. The executive level was a tomb of sound-absorbing carpets and hushed, indirect lighting. The door to the main meeting room was a slab of polished dark wood, slightly ajar.
He pushed it open. The room was vast, cold, and empty. A single, long onyx table reflected the ceiling lights like a still black lake. The floor was some pale, polished stone. In the exact center of the open floor space, a single grey kneepad had been placed. That was his mark.
Ken closed the door behind him. The click echoed. He stood there for a full minute, listening to his own breathing. Then he walked to the center of the room. The air conditioning bit into his skin through his clothes. He stood beside the kneepad. He looked at the door. He looked at the empty, towering chairs.
With deliberate, unflinching motions, he began to undress. He folded each garment neatly, placing the pile against the wall. The cold of the stone floor seeped into his bare feet. He stepped onto the padded kneepad. It offered no real comfort.
He lowered himself. Knees spread wide on the cool surface. The position was a sigh his body had been waiting to release. He laced his fingers behind his head, elbows out, chest forward. His spine aligned into the flawless, required curve. He took a long, slow breath in through his nose, out through his mouth. His gaze fixed on a faint seam in the stone floor about three feet ahead.
He was ready. It was 8:02 AM.
For the next fifty-eight minutes, he did not move a muscle. He became an exercise in static endurance. He monitored the slight burn in his thighs, the tension in his shoulders. He regulated his breathing. He focused on the seam in the floor, a lifeline. His mind, that brilliant, racing engine, cycled down to a single, repeated phrase: Chest to floor on the signal. Do not look up.