Chapter 3: Four Numbers, No Trade
The wand stayed flat on his thigh for a count of four before she clicked it off. The hum died out of it and left a ringing in the room. Diego's leg kept jumping at the boards even after it had stopped, one small twitch he couldn't put down.
Gabriela stood there a moment with the dead wand in her fist, looking down at the top of his head. Nobody moved. He thought the flat of it was coming back down on him and he'd set his jaw for it.
Then she turned and walked back to the bed.
"What are you doing?"
Gabriela didn't answer her. She picked the phone up off the mattress and tilted it to her own face. Her thumb scrolled the little white note once, the way you check a list before you go out the door.
"Third is six," she said. "Second is two. First is four. In the order you gave them."
"Gabi."
"Six, two, four, zero."
She said the numbers flat and easy and did not look at the bed at all. Then she crossed the room and knelt down behind Diego's shoulder, and he heard the small brass wheels turning.
The shackle over the top of the cage did not move.
Joan pulled both arms down against the cuffs and the chain jumped off the headboard rail and hit wood. "No. No, don't. Gabriela, don't."
"Six, two, four, one."
The wheels again, three little clicks like a lighter being struck. The steel sat over the full length of him, warm now from a whole morning holding him, and the ache went back into his balls in a slow wave he had to breathe through. Two guesses. He counted them because counting was the only thing left in his hands.
"You can't do it like that," Joan said. Her voice had climbed. "It's not in that order."
"It's in the order you gave it." Gabriela's thumb rolled the second wheel. "You gave me six before I ever put my mouth on you. You gave me two after. You gave me four with a toy in you and your legs shaking. I wrote them down as you said them. If you wanted them scrambled you should have said them scrambled."
"I'll give you the rest of the day."
"You've got about four hours of day left in you and then you'll be raw." She readjusted the first wheel. "Six, two, four, two."
"It's not that."
"Then it's the next one."
Joan's heels dug into the sheet and both her knees came up and dropped. The toy inside her hadn't stopped once during any of this, the steady flat hum she'd bought back with a number, and every wild pull of her arms only worked it deeper.
"Next weekend," she said.
Gabriela looked up from the lock for the first time.
"You can't give me what you haven't won."
Diego heard the wheels again. He had his eyes on the floorboards in front of his knees, the pale grain, one bent nail in the board by his left foot. His cock was thick against the inside of the cage and the ring sat tight behind his balls and had been sitting there since the morning. It had gone from hurting to something worse than hurting. Anything that touched it now, even air, would be too much. He counted three clicks, and the steel did not open.
"Six, two, four, three."
"Stop it. Stop it, Gabi, please."
"Six, two, four, four."
Each guess was three clicks and a breath and no movement at all. He counted them in his head the way you count down from ten in cold water. His thighs had slicked themselves against each other. He could feel the tip of his cock pressed flat and shining against the end of the cage and he had stopped trying to keep it clean an hour ago.
"Six, two, four, five."
"Please."
"That's five. Eight more after it and then I start on the ones you didn't give me."
Joan started to say something else and it broke in the middle. Her whole body stiffened on the bed, spine arched off the sheet, and the clamps on her chest went up with it and the little chain swung. The toy had rolled. Diego watched her come down and her mouth stayed open.
"Six, two, four, six."
"Gabi." Her voice had gone small.
"Six, two, four, seven."
"Don't."
"Six, two, four, eight."
The shackle sprang.
It came off with a click so small and bright that Diego didn't believe it for half a second. Then the two halves of the steel swung apart on their hinge and Gabriela's hand was there, lifting the whole thing away from him in one piece.
His cock came up out of it swollen and furious and dark at the head. The shaft was ridged red where the cage had pressed it, and the tip was glossy and stuck to itself, and it stood off his belly and would not lie flat, and it hurt in every direction when the air got to it. Nothing touched him. He made a sound out the back of his nose anyway.
Gabriela looked at it a moment, unhurried, the way she'd looked at everything else today. Then she closed her hand around the base of it, firm and dry and nowhere near enough, and Diego's whole body flinched and his hands stayed flat on the boards like he'd been told.
"Breathe," she said.
He breathed. It shook.
She let go and stood, leaving him there hard and open to the room, and carried the cage across the floor on her flat palm. She crossed back to the bed and set it down on the mattress beside Joan's knee, open, both halves apart, the little shackle still swung wide.
Joan lay on the wet sheets and looked at it. Her arms were stretched above her head and she couldn't reach it. The tablet of the cage sat eighteen inches from her hip and might as well have been in the hall.
Gabriela walked over to her clothes on the chair.
She didn't put them on. She stood at the chair with one hand resting on the back of it and looked at the two of them, the boy kneeling hard in the corner and the girl cuffed and open on the wet sheet, and she left her clothes where they lay.
Joan watched her from the pillow. Her arms were still stretched over her head and the chain had gone slack along the rail.
"You know what you still owe me," Gabriela said.
"I gave you three."
"You gave me three and I opened the cage with them, so you didn't pay a thing for the last one." She crossed the room slowly. "You never ate the cost of that. I want it."
Joan's knees came together a few inches and stopped. The toy in her was still humming flat and steady and she'd stopped being able to hold her face still around it.
"I don't have anything left."
"You have the rest of today and you have a mouth." Gabriela sat down on the edge of the mattress by her hip. "So here's what's happening. You owe me one number's worth. I'm going to let you pay it to him instead. He's been kneeling there all day with his hands on the floor, watching you get worked over, and he never once got up, so he's earned something."
Joan's eyes went to the corner and stayed there.
"What do you want me to do."
"I want you on the floor with your mouth around his cock." Gabriela reached up and worked the two clips off the headboard one at a time, unhooking the chain without unlocking the cuffs on her wrists. "Slow. Slower than you want to. Every time you rush it I turn the toy up."
"He's been in that cage all day."
"Then be good to him." She took Joan's wrist and pulled her up off the pillow by it, and Joan came with her onto her knees on the floor, both cuffs still on and the little chain swinging between them. "Crawl. They're right there."
Diego had heard all of it. He had his eyes on the floorboards and his cock stood off his belly dark and swollen and shining, and the ring sat tight behind his balls, and every word out of her mouth had gone straight into him. His hands were flat on the boards and his arms were shaking at the elbows.
Joan crossed the floor on her knees. The boards were warm from the morning sun and rough under her shins. She stopped between his knees with her cuffed hands hanging in front of her and looked up at him once, and he looked back down at her and his throat moved.
"Take him," Gabriela said from the bed.
Joan leaned in and put her mouth on the head of it.
The first touch nearly took him off the floor. He'd been caged since the morning and the tip was so raw that even her lip on it burned bright, and a noise came out of him that he hadn't planned on and couldn't pull back. His hands stayed flat on the boards. His whole leg trembled.
"Slower," Gabriela said.
Joan pulled back and did it again, just her lips, closing around the head and holding there without moving. He looked down the length of her and the wet sheen of her mouth and the little chain lying on the boards.
"Jesus," he said.
Gabriela sat on the bed with the phone and watched them, and she thumbed the toy up one setting. Joan's back arched mid-motion and her mouth came off him.
"I said slow, not off."
Joan put her mouth back on him.
She worked him with her tongue flat and low, taking him an inch at a time and coming back off, and Diego watched every stroke of it. His ex-girlfriend with her hands chained and her ass in the air in front of him, mouth wrapped round his cock, wet down both thighs from a whole morning of being fucked with a machine, and he had never been harder in his life and there was nothing he could do about it. His hands were on the boards. He could not touch her.
"Down further," Gabriela said.
Joan took him into her throat and stayed there and breathed through her nose. He felt the back of her throat open around him and the ache in his balls went white behind his eyes and his hips bucked an inch and she took it.
"Good," Gabriela said. "Now hold that and look at me."
Joan turned her eyes sideways, mouth full.
"This is what you bought with your three numbers." Gabriela turned the phone over in her lap. "You gave me a digit for every hole and then I took the last one off your boyfriend's cock. So this is the part where you get nothing." She looked at Diego. "You can put your hands on her head."
Diego's palms came off the boards.
His palms came down on the back of her head and Joan made a low sound around him and did not pull off.
She was wet at the mouth and taking him an inch at a time, and Diego held her there and worked her on his own, slow, the way Gabriela had told him to. His hands shook against her hair. The little chain between her cuffs swung and clicked on the boards every time he moved her.
"That's it," Gabriela said from the bed. "Like that. Don't rush her."
He got a minute of it before he couldn't hold the pace. A whole day in the cage had left him so raw that the first real friction took him fast. His hips snapped twice and then he was coming down her throat with his fingers knotted in her hair, and Joan choked on it and swallowed and stayed on him, because coming off him wasn't hers to choose any more.
Gabriela let it run to the last twitch. Then she said, "Off."
Joan pulled back and sat on her heels with her hand still cuffed to her other hand and her chin wet to the collarbone. She wiped her mouth on her shoulder.
Diego leaned back against the wall with his hands loose at his sides and his chest heaving. The ache was still there, low and deep, but it had gone quiet for the first time since the morning.
"Debt's paid," Gabriela said. "Get up."
He got up off the floor. His knees popped. He stood there with his cock still half hard and shining and did not bother to cover it, because nobody in the room was pretending about anything.
Gabriela went to the chair where her clothes lay. She didn't take them. She took the canvas bag off the floor under it instead and set it on the mattress, and pulled the zip open one-handed.
"What are you doing?" Joan said from the floor.
"You've been on that bed all day giving me numbers." Gabriela lifted something out of the bag, black, folded in tissue. "You gave away three digits and a mouthful of your own boyfriend to keep a fourth one, so I figure you like being the one who pays. I'm going to let you keep paying."
She shook the tissue out. It was lingerie. Black lace, sheer as a window, a bodysuit with the whole front cut away and straps running across the ribs and nothing at all where the tits went. The crotch was open in a long split like a mouth.
"That's the one I brought for you."
"You brought that for me?"
"I brought it this morning." Gabriela held it up by the shoulder strap and looked at it. "I picked it before you gave me anything. I thought about it all the way over here."
Joan got off her knees and stood. Her legs had gone unsteady and she put a hand on the bedpost and then took it off again.
"Arms out," Gabriela said.
"You want to help or you want to stand there?" This was to Diego.
He came off the wall. Gabriela undid the left cuff first, slipped the wrist through the strap of the bodysuit, and clicked the cuff back on her. Then the right. Then she pulled the whole thing up Joan's body and worked it up over her hips and settled the straps over her shoulders. The lace caught on the clamps and she had to lift them out of the way one at a time and set them back down on top of the fabric, and the little chain lay across the black with nowhere to hang.
Joan stood with her arms out while it went on and said nothing. Her nipples had gone hard against nothing and the split in the front of the thing ran from her navel down.
"There," Gabriela said. "Now the chair."
Diego pulled the chair out from under the table and set it against the wall. It was the same chair he'd been chained to all day, the same chain, and Gabriela picked the padlock up off the floor and held it while Diego walked Joan over.
"Same chain?"
"The same one. Turn around."
Joan turned. Diego put a hand between her shoulder blades and walked her the last three steps to the chair, and she stood with her back to it while Gabriela pulled both wrists down behind her and laid the chain across the lower rung. The padlock clicked shut. There was maybe six inches of chain left over, so Joan could stand upright with her arms behind her back and lean, and that was all.
She tried it. She pulled once and the chair skidded two inches along the skirting board and stopped.
"Sit down and it strangles you," Gabriela said. "Stand there."
She went back to the bag and came out with a red ball gag. Two inches across, silicone, on a leather strap with a buckle on the side.
Diego looked at it.
"You ever buckled one of these on anybody?"
"No."
"Then hold her head."
He stepped round in front of Joan and took her by the hair at the crown and tipped her face up. She looked at him with her mouth already open, because the gag was going in whether it was or not, and he saw her decide it halfway through.
Gabriela set the ball between her teeth and pushed it in past the front ones, and Joan's jaw opened around it and stayed open. She buckled the strap behind her head and pulled it tight, two holes past snug, and the silicone pressed her tongue flat.
Joan said something. It came out as a noise.
Gabriela wiped her thumb on the strap and stepped back to look at her.
Black lace, red ball, arms behind her, standing in a stranger's apartment with her boyfriend's come on her chin. The wire off the toy inside her ran down the inside of her thigh and lay against the lace, and the little blue light on the end of it glowed through the black like a coal.
Gabriela picked the phone up off the mattress. She unlocked it and turned the screen so Diego could see the row of settings with the dot lit.
"Steady's what's on it now," she said. "She bought that back with a number this morning. It's got eleven more settings and about two hours of battery."
She put the phone in his hand and closed his fingers over it.
Joan watched him from behind the gag. Her wrists worked once against the chain and the chair leg and got nowhere.
Diego looked at the screen, then at her, and thumbed the slider up two.
The toy answered before his thumb had come off the glass. Two steps up from steady, and Joan's whole body came off the skirting board with a sound that wasn't words and wasn't quite a scream.
Gabriela took the phone out of his hand without hurrying.
"Nobody said you could hold that."
"No, ma'am."
"Go sit down." She nodded at the floor by the wall. "You've had your turn."
He went and sat. His knees were still wet from the boards.
Joan rode it out standing, arms pulled behind her, the chair leg dragging an inch and stopping. The bodysuit's front split hung open down her middle and the little blue light on the toy's wire glowed against the black lace like something burning underneath. When it finally leveled, she sagged and her forehead touched the wall.
Gabriela let her breathe. Then she went to the canvas bag.
She pulled the low table over first, the one with the coffee ring on it, and slid it across the boards until it sat square in front of the chair. Then she started laying things out.
The wand went down first, cord looped over the edge. Then a second egg vibrator in a bag, keeping. Then the clamps, cleaned, set side by side. Then the harness with its rings and buckles collapsed flat. Then a black dildo, thicker than the one she'd had in her hand all morning. A plug, small, steel, cold. Lube in a pump bottle. A leather paddle the length of a forearm. Rope, two coils. The ball gag strap she'd just used, wiped on the tissue it came in.
She squared the row with two fingers. Everything spacing the same. The way you'd set a table.
"Look at it," she said.
Joan looked. She was standing three feet from the table and could not touch a thing on it, and the row of it went from the wand at one end to the rope at the other and she read every item twice.
Gabriela turned the phone over in her hand.
"You met the bride," she said to Diego.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Where's her number."
"In Joan's phone."
"Of course it is." She picked it up off the mattress, then walked it over to the chair and held the screen up to Joan's face. "Open it."
Joan's jaw worked around the ball. She couldn't say it, so she turned her head and the screen unlocked on the second try.
Gabriela scrolled until she found a name, tapped it, and put it on speaker. It rang twice.
"Joan? Hey."
"It's not Joan."
A pause on the line. Somewhere behind the bride there was a television and a kettle going.
"Who's this?"
"Gabriela. You don't know me. I'm the one holding the phone."
"...Okay."
"You remember the party. Three weeks out, present in the middle of the room, blindfold." She looked at Joan while she said it. "You came back for him after two."
The kettle noise stopped.
"I remember."
"Your friend Joan put something together for you." Gabriela walked the phone over to the table and set it down next to the wand. "She's in the chair. She isn't going anywhere. Everything's laid out in front of her and that includes the accessories."
"Accessories."
"You want the list?"
"Go ahead."
Gabriela read it off the table without touching anything. Wand. Clamps. Harness. Two dildos. Plug. Paddle. Rope. She said each one flat and moved down the row with her eyes.
The bride laughed once, short, more air than sound.
"Is this a joke."
"It's an invitation. You've got two hours. You can bring whoever you want with you. You had a whole room of friends last time and Joan didn't say a word about it."
"You're giving me Joan."
"I'm giving you the present, and the present comes with the box. She's paying off something and she agreed to the price." Gabriela looked at the chair. "Didn't you."
Joan made a noise and nodded, once, with the ball in her mouth and her wet chin moving.
The bride was saying something else, a question about directions, but Gabriela thumbed the call dead without answering it. She set the phone down on the table next to the wand and looked at the row of things she'd laid out, then at Joan standing against the chair with the ball in her mouth and her chin still wet.
"You've got about an hour and a half," she said. "She seemed interested."
Joan made a noise behind the gag. Her wrists worked against the chain once and got nowhere.
Gabriela walked over to her clothes on the chair. She pulled on her jeans and stepped into her boots, then shrugged a loose black shirt over her head and didn't bother tucking it in. She picked up her keys from the table, glanced at the canvas bag, and left it where it sat.
"Diego."
He got up off the floor by the wall. His knees were stiff from kneeling and he came up slow, and he looked at Joan standing chained to the chair with the black lace split open down the front and the little blue light glowing through it, and he didn't know what to do with his face.
"Come on," Gabriela said. "You're done here."
He crossed the room and stopped in front of Joan. She looked up at him through the gag. The strap had pulled the corners of her mouth and there was a shine on her lip from where she'd been working her tongue against the silicone.
"You good?" he said.
She couldn't answer him. She nodded. It wasn't much of a nod and the ball pulled at her jaw when she did it, but she nodded.
Gabriela was waiting at the doorway with her keys in her fist.
"Say goodbye later," she said. "You'll be back."
He touched Joan's jaw once, light, his thumb against the strap, and then he turned and walked out.
Joan stood chained to the chair with her mouth full and watched them go. The door closed behind them and the latch clicked and the apartment went very quiet around the low hum of the toy inside her. She rode the steady pulse with her arms behind the chair leg and her forehead against the wall, counting nothing.
The door opened again.
Gabriela came back in. She'd gotten as far as the stairs and come back, and she crossed the room without talking and stopped behind the chair. Joan felt her there before she saw her, the weight of her shadow on the back of her neck.
"Enjoy the party," Gabriela said.
Her palm came down flat and hard across the bare ass under the open crotch of the lace. The sound cracked the quiet room. Joan's whole body jumped against the chair and the gag caught the sound and turned it into something muffled and animal, and her hips bucked into nothing.
Gabriela stood there a second, looking at the red print of her hand rising on Joan's skin.
Then she turned and left, and this time the door stayed shut.
Joan stood chained to the chair with her knees shaking and the toy humming flat and steady inside her and her ass stinging warm where the hand had landed. The blue light glowed against the black lace. The phone lay dead on the table. And somewhere out in the city, the bride was getting in a car.