By BristolBound

*This BDSM fantasy is a work of fiction.  All characters are adults*

*This story must be read in order, starting from Chapter 1 of the original series “Season”*

Chapter 2: The Quarter-Final

I made it as far as the hallway.

I got the door shut, got my back against it, and that was the end of my self-control. I didn’t even make it to my room. I stood in the hall of my student flat, in a jockstrap, with the radiator ticking and my flatmate’s trainers lined up by the wall, and I grabbed my dick and nearly wept with relief as I came.

It took about forty seconds. I’d like that on record, for the sake of honesty. Forty seconds, after the best part of three hours of being hard. I replayed the whole thing as I went: the three sounds of the cuff, the tick of the chain on the pole, Matt’s two fingers on my towel, Callum’s pat on my cheek. The white flash going off twice against the vet’s wall. Good boy. The way Tom had said he’s enjoying this, without judgement, like he was talking about the weather. I came with my forehead against the door and my knees going, and it was so much I had to put a hand on the wall.

Then I slid down it and sat on the lino, breathing, and I laughed out loud.

A hundred times I’d done the home version of that afternoon, ice and spare key, and not once had it put me on the floor of my own hallway.

I’d be thinking about that for years. I knew it sitting there, with my own mess cooling on my stomach.

I just hadn’t expected them to be thinking about it too.

They kept me out of the next two games. Officially it was form, and I took it like a man, but the team was behaving weirdly. Conversations stopped when I came into the changing room. Tom and Dev had a whispered discussion by the vending machine that ended the second I walked past. Matt looked at me for a long moment at training on Wednesday, then looked away with a small, private, infuriating smile. It was the same look he’d given me when he’d “accidentally” shouldered me into the nettles behind the astro and then spent a very long time inspecting the stings, apologising continuously.

We drew one and lost one, 2-1, a daft late goal. I watched from the touchline with my hands in my pockets, wondering what everyone was up to.

Then the quarter-final of the inter-uni cup came round, and on the Thursday before it Callum pulled me aside after training.

“You’re in the squad Saturday,” he said.

“I thought I was out of form.”

“You are.” He didn’t smile, which was somehow worse. “Come anyway. Bring your kit, and nothing else.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means turn up, Eric,” said Callum, and walked off.

The ground was out near Gateshead, a big sports centre with proper facilities, and the changing block was the first surprise.

It wasn’t one room. It was a long, low building divided into team bays by walls of heavy steel mesh, floor to ceiling, thick wire woven into a grid you could get your fingers through but not much else. Ours had a bench, a row of pegs, a drain in the floor, and a door in the mesh with a big hasp and a padlock. It looked like a kennel designed by a prison architect. Next door was empty. Down the corridor was an office, a vending machine and a very bored man with a mop.

“Nice,” said Jonno, rapping on the wire, rattling the whole section. “Very sturdy.”

I looked at him. He didn’t look at me.

The lads were quiet as they changed. Too quiet. No banter, no stick-taping, no half-hearted attempts at tactics. Just twelve pairs of eyes sliding sideways every few seconds, and somebody breathing a little too carefully. I had my bag on the bench, but my shirt wasn’t out of it, because Callum had said bring your kit and nothing else, so I hadn’t known what to do.

“Eric,” said Callum.

“Yeah?”

“Get undressed.”

I laughed. “I’m not even playing.”

“Get undressed.”

“What’s going on?”

“Get undressed,” Callum said again, in exactly the same tone, and a ripple went through the others like they were holding in a laugh. Nobody smiled. Nobody spoke. They just waited, all twelve of them, in a half-circle, in the middle of the cage.

I’d done it a hundred times. I knew how the mechanics went: hoodie, tee, shorts, boxers. But under that wire, with every eye on me and an unspoken thing hanging in the air, each item that came off felt like a decision. By the time I pulled my boxers down I was clammy, and by the time I stood up, bare, with my arms hanging at my sides, I wasn’t just unprepared. I was aware. The air through the mesh was cold. The bench felt a mile away. My cock was stirring, thickening, and I did what anyone would do. I put my hand over it.

“No,” said Callum, mildly. “Hands by your sides.”

I looked at him. He looked back.

I moved my hand.

“Good,” he said. “Right. Eric, we’re going to ask you a couple of questions. Take them seriously.”

“Okay.”

“Are you committed to helping this team win? Any way you can?”

“Yes. Obviously.”

“Even if that’s physically uncomfortable?”

I frowned. “I mean, it’s sport. It’s always uncomfortable. I’ve played with a cracked rib.”

“That’s not what he means,” said Dev, from behind me.

“Is that a yes?” said Callum.

“Yes. Of course it’s a yes. What’s going on, Cal?”

He ignored me. “Do you trust us? Not just to be decent, but to not really hurt you. Not to do anything that’ll cause you actual harm.”

And that was the odd bit, because it was a question I’d answered before, a thousand times, online, to men I was never going to meet, and I’d never once been caught off guard by it. I looked at them, at Callum and Jonno and Dev and Tom and Matt, in a half-circle of muddy faces, all watching me. And I realised, standing there naked in a cage, that the answer was so obvious I hadn’t needed to think.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

“Good,” said Callum.

Two of them moved at once. Jonno took my left arm, and Dev took my right, and the grip was firm, and gentle, and absolutely not negotiable. Behind them, Tom had pulled a big black holdall out from under the bench and unzipped it, and I heard the clink. Leather. Chain. The soft, heavy slither of metal on metal.

“What the fuck is that?”

“We talked,” Callum said. He was almost kind about it. “After Durham. About why the second half went the way it did. And we think it was you.”

“Me.”

“Knowing you were back here. Stuck and suffering, while we were out working our arses off. Just in a different way. It stayed with us.” He tipped his head. “As Tom put it, it’s the best motivation we’ve ever had. So we’ve decided to repeat it. As an experiment.”

“An experiment.”

“Strictly scientific,” said Tom.

I was fully hard by then. I want to say it was a surprise, but it wasn’t; it was like standing in a river and watching it rise. Cold air on my cock. Hot hands on my arms. The sound of a buckle. I tried to look indignant, and I looked across at Matt, and Matt just raised one eyebrow in a way that said really?

“You’ll suffer,” said Callum. “We’re not going to pretend you won’t. There’ll be bits you hate. You’ll probably want it to stop.” He nodded at my cock, which twitched, treacherously, in agreement. “But you’re going to be fine with that, aren’t you? Because you’re into the idea.”

“That’s not—”

“Eric.”

“…Maybe a bit.”

“A bit,” Callum said, and the corner of his mouth went. Then he stepped in close, like at the pole, and said, low and clear, just for me: “There’s one word that stops this. It’s not ‘red’, because you’ll shout that in a minute for the hell of it and I won’t know. It’s Sunderland. Say it and we stop, instantly, no argument, no questions. Anything else is just noise. Understood?”

I let out a laugh I didn’t mean to. “Sunderland.”

“You’d never say it by accident.”

“I’d never say it in my sleep.”

“Exactly,” Callum said, and patted my cheek. “Good boy. Say it back.”

“Sunderland stops it.”

“Right.” He stepped away. “Get him in.”

I want to describe how it went, because the memory has never left me.

First the wrists. Jonno had my left arm out to the side, and Tom crouched with a wide, soft, black leather cuff, thick as my palm. He wrapped it round my wrist and drew the strap through, one hole, two, three, and I looked down at it, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

I knew that cuff.

It had a scuffed edge on the left, where I’d dropped it off the bed last winter. It had a repair stitch near the buckle, done by me, badly, with the wrong thread. Brass D-ring on the outside. The smell of saddle, which wasn’t new at all, because I’d had it since first year, and it was mine.

“That’s—” I said.

“Mm?” said Tom, not looking up, threading a padlock through the buckle. A small brass one. With a coloured tag on the key ring. I’d done the colour-coding myself, the week they arrived, with a Sharpie.

Tick.

“Those are mine.”

“Are they?” said Callum, who had been watching me work it out with an expression of the deepest interest. “I did wonder.”

“Where did you—”

“Tom.”

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Tom, hands in the air. “Your flatmate let me in. It was in a shoebox. We were very respectful. We didn’t touch the, er, the more technical stuff.”

“You went through my stash.”

“We went through your shoebox,” said Dev, from behind me, in a tone of great moral clarity.

I stood there, with one arm held out, being padlocked into my own cuffs by a man who had burgled my bedroom, and I opened my mouth to tell them exactly what I thought of them. And what came out was nothing at all.

Because this was the bit where I was supposed to say I’m not into this. I’d been saying it for ten minutes, one way or another. I’d said it with my face, and I’d said it with my hand over my cock. And now there was a box of my own equipment being unpacked by my teammates, one buckle at a time, with the tag colours matched to the right locks. You can’t protest innocence when they’ve got your shoebox.

My cock gave a long, slow, shameless twitch. Everybody saw.

“Shut up,” I said.

“We didn’t say anything,” said Jonno.

“I could hear you.”

The right cuff, the same, and by the time it clicked I realised I was breathing in short pulls through my nose. My arms were out to the sides like I was about to hug somebody, and my wrists were wearing my own leather, and the locks were cold against my skin. I pulled, a tiny test, and the cuffs held with a soft, creaking give.

Then my ankles, Callum kneeling to do them himself. Same leather, same buckle, same lock. He cinched each one a notch tighter than I’d have done, and looked up at me as he did, and said, “Still good?” and I managed a nod. Tick. Then the other. Tick.

Then they brought the chains.

Four lengths, heavy, with big clip hooks at the ends. Matt held one up, lazily, so I could see, and then walked over to the mesh wall and clipped it to the wire at head height. The link slid against the wire and settled with a clink. He tugged it, and the wall barely trembled.

“Left arm,” he said, and clipped the other end to my D-ring.

I felt it go. A tug at my wrist, and my arm was pulled out and slightly back. Then Jonno did the right side, on the opposite mesh, and the chains came up taut across my shoulders. They moved me, between them, into the centre of the cage, and then Tom and Dev dropped to either side and clipped my ankles to the floor-level wire, one on each side, pulling them out and out until my legs were wide.

The chains rattled. The leather creaked. I was standing in a big X, arms out, legs apart, every chain pulled to the same tension. I tried to bring my knees together and they didn’t move. I tried to lower my arms and they didn’t move. I pulled, and hauled, and strained, and the cage creaked and nothing gave at all.

“One more notch,” Callum said, and Matt took up a link of slack on the left wrist chain, then the right, so I came up onto the balls of my feet, stretched, absolutely taut, my chest thrown out, my whole front on display.

It was the moment of no return, and my whole body understood it before I did.

Because I’d been here before, in my head. At the pole, with my wrists behind me, I’d been pinned. This was something else. At the pole, there had been a bit of me left to hide. I could turn a hip. I could shift a thigh. Here there was nothing. I was stretched out like something on a map, every inch laid open to the room, and I couldn’t turn, couldn’t cover, couldn’t even tilt my hips away. The air moved over my chest and ribs and stomach. It moved over my balls, pulled forward by the stretch, and my cock stood hard against my belly with nothing to hold it back, nothing to be modest behind, and twelve guys looking.

Every time I thought about it, it got worse. I’m spread out in a cage in front of my whole team, and a bead of wet slid down my cock. I’m in my own cuffs, and they know about the shoebox, and I pulsed, hard enough to feel it in my ears. I did this to myself. I ordered the buckles, I paid for the leather, and I handed them the key without knowing it. I couldn’t stop it. The harder I tried to think about something else, the harder I got. It almost hurt. I could feel my own pulse in it, a thick, slow, insistent thud, and the lads could see it too, every beat, the whole sorry, magnificent, honest thing, and my face went hot and my stomach swooped and somewhere in my head a small clipboard-holding part of me said, you agreed to this before you knew what it was, and a larger part of me said, yes, and look at you.

“Look around,” Callum said. “Take it in.”

I looked. The wire, the bench, the pegs. Jonno’s face, pink with the effort of not grinning. Tom, with his arms folded, utterly absorbed. Dev, who couldn’t meet my eye. Matt, with a hand resting casually on the chain. I looked at all of them, and I was aware of how the light fell, and of the cage, and of the draught on my skin.

“Remember what you can see,” said Callum softly. “It’s the last time you’ll see it for a while.”

Then he held up a strip of black leather, wide and padded, and I knew that too. My blindfold. The one with the size adjustment I’d perfected myself. He slid it over my eyes and the buckle clicked behind my head.

The dark was total.

It’s strange how quickly the other senses jump in. I could smell leather and sweat and the faint chlorine tang of the sports centre. I could hear their studs on the concrete, a dozen boots, scraping and shifting, and then a rustle and a scrape that I eventually worked out was Tom and Dev hanging towels and a tarp along the corridor side of the wire. Then voices: Callum, giving the team talk, low and urgent, the clink of boots as they filed out. Then the door in the mesh, rattling, and a heavy padlock closing with a sound I felt in my stomach.

“Wills is staying,” said Callum’s voice, close, through the wire. “Not in here. Outside, by the main door, with the Gateshead subs. He’s been told to keep them chatting, and he’s very good at being boring. If you need him, really need him, you shout his name and he’ll come. But the Gateshead subs will be standing right next to him. They’ll hear, they’ll follow him in, and then they’ll have a look at you too.” A pause. “So have a think about how much you need him.”

“Wills?” I managed. “The reserve keeper?”

“Don’t worry,” said Callum. “He’s very discreet.” Pause. “Mostly.”

Then he went too.

I stood there, and I thought: I agreed to this.

Not to this, exactly. To a couple of questions that sounded like a pep talk. But it was too late to be indignant, because I was so hard that my cock was bouncing in the draught, and every nerve in it was shouting the truth.

I pulled at the chains. They rattled lightly. I pulled again, and again, and they held, absolutely, every time, and every time they held I felt it all the way down to my toes. The leather bit into my wrists. The chains dragged at my shoulders. My arms burned, a dull, spreading ache, and my calves were already trembling from the stretch. And through all of that, bright and sharp as a wire, a thin, rising thread of pure want.

I could stop it. I could say the word. It was right there, in my mouth, ridiculous and tiny and perfect. Sunderland. And that thought alone made me throb, because I wouldn’t. I wasn’t going to. I was going to stand here, in the dark, and take whatever came, because I’d said I would and because it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

And then, because my brain will think about anything rather than where it actually is, it snagged on *not ‘red’*. He hadn’t even said the word *safeword*. He hadn’t needed to. He’d known the usual one, known why it wouldn’t work with me, and had a better one ready in his pocket. I only knew what a safeword was from the internet, where it was almost always red. Callum hadn’t got it from hockey.

So either he’d gone away after Durham and looked it all up, specially, for me. Or he hadn’t needed to.

I stood there in the dark and couldn’t decide which of those made me harder.

The first ten minutes were awful. The next ten were worse. After that I stopped counting. I only knew where Wills was by his voice, drifting in from the main door a long way off, laughing at something a Gateshead sub had said, and every time it came I thought: that’s the exit. Thirty yards away, with half the other team standing round it. Once, somebody walked right past the tarp, close enough that I heard the scuff of their shoes, and stopped, and I stopped breathing. Then they moved on, and I let out a breath that I told myself was relief.

I could feel sweat run down my ribs. My cock was aching, painfully hard now, and nothing touched it but the air. Every shift of my weight sent the chains whispering, a tiny song of no, no, no, no.

They came back at half time like a storm.

I heard them coming, a clatter of studs, the bang of the door, a mess of voices all talking at once. Somebody was laughing. A hand smacked my shoulder. “Two-nil,” Jonno bellowed, “two-nil, mate, and you can stay right there, you’re a legend.”

“We want more,” said Callum, near my ear. “Extra boost. For the second half. Matt?”

“Got it,” said Matt.

I heard the click of a lid. Then a sharp, sweet, menthol smell struck my nose, and I knew it at once, because it was the smell of every changing room I’d ever been in. Deep Heat.

“No,” I said. “Lads, no, come on, that’s—”

“Is that the word?” said Callum.

I stopped. My heart was going so hard I could hear it.

“No,” I said, quieter. “No. It’s not.”

“Good lad,” said Matt, and I felt his fingers on my chest.

It was cool at first. Just a thin, slick smear, rubbed slowly in a circle round my left nipple, and then the right, and my breath caught, because for a second it felt almost nice. Then the heat arrived. Slow, then fast, a creeping fire that spread across my chest in two bright coins. I hissed. I hauled at the chains. Matt’s thumb went round and round, patient and thorough, and I gasped, “Fuck, fuck, that’s—” and he said, “I know,” in an almost tender voice.

“It’s… it’s fine,” I choked.

“Brave boy.”

The next was lower. I felt two fingers, a lot lighter than I’d expected, a slick brush between my cheeks and over the tight ring there. My whole body jerked. I was spread so wide there was nothing to hide, nowhere to move, and the heat bloomed, a hot, prickling, humiliating warmth. I swore, and bit my lip, and heard someone laugh gently.

Then my balls, cupped in a gloved hand, a thin careful smear, and then my cock, and someone held it steady, and ran one slick fingertip all the way up the underside.

I shouted. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t pain exactly. It was too much heat, too much attention, a burning that made every nerve ending stand up and shriek, and the worst thing, the thing I’d never forgive them for, was that I got harder. I felt myself swell in their hands. I heard Callum say, in a tone of vast satisfaction, “Would you look at that.”

“Oh my God,” Dev said. “He’s actually, like, more.”

“It burns,” I said, and my voice cracked. “It fucking burns.”

“I’ll bet,” said Matt.

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t.”

I didn’t. That was the awful truth, because I was shaking, and sweating, and burning in all the places I’d least have chosen, and I couldn’t escape any of it, and I didn’t want to. The sensation pooled and pulsed and throbbed. My legs shook. I pulled until my wrists sang, and the chains rang, and I realised that I was moaning, a low, steady sound in the back of my throat, and I could do nothing about it.

“Right,” said Callum, patting my thigh. “Let’s go. We’ll be back.”

We won, three-one.

I know because they told me, when they crashed back in, a roar of noise, shouts and stamping and people jumping up and down. The heat had faded by then to a sullen glow. I’d lost all track of time. I was exhausted, aching, soaked in sweat, and hard enough that I’d stopped being able to feel anything else.

“Semis!” Jonno howled. “We’re in the semis!”

“You did that,” said Tom.

“I did nothing.”

“You did everything,” said Callum, in a low, warm voice, and I felt a hand stroking sweat-damp hair off my forehead. “Good boy. Well done.”

I sagged, and the chains took my weight.

“Right,” said someone else. Matt. There was a sort of mischievous lift to his voice, and I could picture the look that went with it: the one from Durham, when he took my towel. “You know what I want to try?”

“Matt,” said Callum, warning.

“I’m just saying. We saw how he took the Deep Heat.” A pause, and a creak of wood, and a soft thump on a palm. “I found this in the rec room.”

I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t see. I heard the thump again, light, rhythmic, and I understood just before the first one landed. A table-tennis bat.

Smack.

It hit my left buttock, and I yelped. Not from pain, exactly, though it stung, but from sheer shock. Hard, flat rubber, sharp and bright. I jerked forward and the chains snapped me back.

Smack.

“Ow! Matt, what—”

Smack.

“Matt! Stop it, that hurts—”

“Is that the word?” Callum asked, from somewhere to my left.

I opened my mouth. I closed it. I breathed.

“No,” I said.

Smack.

I howled. I can’t pretend I didn’t. It was a clean sharp shock each time, then a hot spreading glow as the rubber rebounded, and the skin where he’d been already felt swollen. Another. Another. I swore, and begged, and kicked futilely against the chains, but he kept going, left, right, left, and I realised, quite clearly, that there was nowhere for any of it to go. I couldn’t curl. I couldn’t turn. I couldn’t clench. All I could do was take it, full on, and feel it.

Somewhere around the eighth, I stopped flinching away from it.

I knew pain. I’d done pain, in the careful, measured, optional way you do at home, a bit of sting with a safe hand on the release. This wasn’t that. This was a sensation with no edges. It was a big, white, roaring thing that filled my whole arse and spread down the backs of my thighs and up my spine, and it wasn’t hurting, exactly. It was simply so much. The pain had stopped being an alarm. It had become a sound. A colour. A weather.

And in the middle of the weather, something started to glow.

Smack. The heat flared. Pause. It softened, and ran down into the heart of me. Smack. And my cock, which had been hard for ages, kicked, hard enough that I felt it, a deep, sweet pull low in my belly, as if a string had been tugged. He’d found a rhythm, a steady, unhurried, ruthless tempo, and my body had started to wait for it. Each blow drove me forward into the chains, and the chains held me, and the pain, the heat and the helpless sway ran together into one bright, drowning feeling that I recognised, from somewhere very far off, as pleasure.

Oh, I thought. Oh, no.

It wasn’t that it hurt less. It hurt exactly as much. It was that the hurt had changed sides. It wasn’t something happening to me any more. It was something I was leaning into. I heard myself make a long, low, wavering noise on the pause, and when the next one landed I pushed back into it, as far as the chains would allow, which wasn’t far, and the sound I made was not a protest.

“He’s loving it,” said someone, and I think it was Jonno.

“I’m not,” I gasped, and then the bat came down again, harder, and my voice broke on a note I’d never heard from myself.

I was so close. It arrived all at once, with a cold, clear, horrified sort of delight: I was going to come. I was hanging in a cage in the middle of a sports centre, in front of my whole team, blindfolded, in chains, with my arse on fire, and I was going to come, and there was nothing, nothing, I could do. I couldn’t touch myself. I couldn’t hide. I couldn’t even close my eyes, because they were already closed. All I could do was stand there and let it happen to me in front of everyone, and the sheer, burning, delirious embarrassment of it made my head swim. My face was on fire. My whole chest was flushed. And on the heels of the embarrassment came the other thing, huge and bright and absolutely unstoppable, a wave of pure, ridiculous exhilaration, as though I’d stepped off a cliff and found out I could fly.

“Lads,” I managed. “Lads, I’m going to—”

“Is that the word?” said Callum, near my ear.

“No,” I sobbed. “No. It’s not. Fuck, it’s not.”

“Then go on,” he said.

Smack.

And I came.

It hit me like a train. It started somewhere behind my eyes and tore through me, all the way down, wrenching every muscle, a long, shuddering, endless pulse that went on and on and on, until I was sagging in the chains, sobbing for breath, wrung out and emptied and so raw that I couldn’t have told you my own name. I heard them all go quiet, the way a crowd does when a penalty goes in. I heard myself, helpless, babbling something that wasn’t words. It was the most intense orgasm of my life. By a distance. I’d have said so then and I’ll say so now.

When I could think again, I was hanging in the cuffs, my head lolling against my chest. My arse felt like it was glowing, as if someone had stood me too close to a bonfire. And the whole room had gone silent.

“Well,” said Callum, after a long moment. His voice was a little unsteady. “That’s a result.”

They unclipped me carefully. Dev held me up while Jonno took the chains off my wrists, and Tom knelt to do my ankles, and they all handled me like something that might break. When the leather came off my arms the blood returned in great rushing pulses and I would have sunk to the floor if they hadn’t held me. Somebody put a towel round my shoulders. Somebody else held a bottle of water to my lips, and I drank, shaking, and had to stop to breathe.

Only then did Callum slip the blindfold off.

The light stabbed. I squinted, and the lads swam into view, a ring of flushed, anxious faces, all peering at me, all braced for something. “You alright?” said Callum.

“Yeah,” I croaked. “Yeah. I think so. Fuck.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously.” I tried to laugh and it came out as a cough. “I came all over the floor and nobody told me they’d be filming it.”

“Nobody filmed it.”

“I’m joking, Callum.”

“I know,” he said, and gave me a look that was all relief.

Matt came over first. He still had the bat in his hand, and he looked, for the first time all day, not smug but a little shy. He crouched down in front of me, close enough that nobody else could hear, and said, “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“That alright?”

“I told you to stop,” I said. “About nine times.”

“Yeah,” said Matt. “You did.” He smiled, small and rueful. “But you never said Sunderland. And I could see what your dick was saying. It’s a hell of a lot more honest than your mouth, mate.” He held my gaze. “In future I’m paying attention to that. Not to what you tell me. Is that okay?”

I’d have said no. That’s the truth. I’d have said it because it was the sort of thing you say. But I was sitting there with the taste of water in my mouth and my arse on fire and my legs like string, and I looked at him, and I knew exactly what he was asking, and I knew what the answer was.

“…Yeah,” I said. And I meant it.

Wills came in after that, a Twix in each hand and the faintly haunted look of a man who has spent two hours making small talk with the Gateshead subs. He gave me one without looking at me and ate the other, standing very straight, like a man at a funeral. “Quiet, wasn’t it,” he said, to nobody. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

The others drifted off to the showers, still in a daze, and for a minute it was just me and Callum on the bench, with the towel round my shoulders.

He didn’t say anything for a bit. Then he leaned in, so that nobody else could possibly hear.

“I should tell you something,” he said. “I liked that.”

I looked at him.

“Not the way you did,” he said, and the corner of his mouth went. “Obviously. I’m not sure anyone’s ever liked anything the way you just liked that. But I liked watching it. I liked hearing you. I liked being the one who got to ask.” He tilted his head. “I’d like to do it again.”

And then he smiled. Not the smile he does on the pitch. A different one. Slower. A smile that knew things. It reached right down to the place that had just given up everything it had, and I felt a quiet, shameful, secret thrill settle there.

It won’t be the last time.

“Okay,” I heard myself say. Barely a whisper.

“I haven’t asked anything.”

“I know.”

“Good boy,” said Callum, and my face went hot all over again.

He stood up. He was holding something I hadn’t seen him pick up. A strip of black leather, as wide as two fingers, with a heavy steel buckle, and a tiny brass hasp.

It was a collar.

It wasn’t mine. It was good leather, thick, soft at the edges where somebody had taken trouble, and I knew, with a peculiar flare of dread and delight, that it wasn’t a joke. It was the kind of object that isn’t made for a night. It was made for a person.

“Stand up,” said Callum.

I stood. My legs shook. He stepped round behind me, and I felt the leather go round my throat, cool for a second and then warm, and the strap draw snug through the buckle, one hole, two, three. He didn’t hurry. He took his time. He came round the front again and looked at me, straight at me, with those kind, steady brown eyes, and put two fingers under the collar and tugged, gently, to check the fit.

“Tell me it’s not what you want,” he said.

It wasn’t a threat. It was a request. A challenge, perhaps. I opened my mouth. I’d had years of habit. It’s just a bit of fun. It’s a hockey thing. I’m not like that.

Nothing came out.

I stood there, naked, shaking, with my arse on fire and a collar at my throat, and I looked at him, and I found out that I couldn’t say it. Not because I was afraid. Because it would have been a lie.

Callum waited. The silence went on, and on, and I felt it fill the room.

“No?” he said, softly.

I didn’t answer.

He nodded, once, like a man closing a book. He took a small brass padlock out of his pocket and threaded it through the hasp, and I felt the weight of it settle against my collarbone, and then, quite deliberately, he closed it.

Click.

It was a small sound. It was the smallest sound in the world. But it went through me like lightning.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” said Callum, and slid the key into his pocket, and patted it.

They didn’t give me my clothes.

That was the first thing I noticed, in the car park, with the light going grey over the sports centre and the cold finding me in all the places I’d left bare. Twelve lads in tracksuits and hoodies, climbing onto the minibus, and me, in the middle of them, in a towel that Callum took away from me at the door.

“Bus rules,” he said, mildly. “Towels stay in the changing room.”

“Callum, I’m naked.”

“You’re wearing a collar,” said Callum. “I’d say you’re fine.”

I got on the bus. I sat on the very back seat, where the seat is warm from the engine, and the leather stuck to the backs of my thighs, and I held my kit bag over my lap and tried to look like a man doing a perfectly normal thing. Everyone was very nice. Somebody gave me a can. Somebody else gave me a Twix. Dev draped a coat over my knees, and then, as we left the car park, took it back off again.

“Hands where we can see them,” said Tom. “It’s a team bus.”

I put my hands on the bag. And the whole way back up the A1, in the orange dark, with the collar warm at my throat and my arse still glowing against the seat, I felt every single glance from the front, and the passing lights, and the lorry drivers who looked down from their cabs as we overtook them, and not one of them saw anything. And I was so hard I could barely sit still.

I thought about it, the way you do when you’ve been through something and want to get the story right. I hadn’t enjoyed the pain, not as pain. The Deep Heat was a horror. The paddle was a horror, right up until it wasn’t, and I still didn’t understand where the line had been. But the rest of it? The chains, the cuffs that were mine, the dark, the helplessness. I had never in my life been so turned on.

“Semi-final’s in two weeks,” said Callum, low, from the seat in front.

I didn’t ask what the plan was. I just touched the collar, with two fingers, once, and felt the padlock.

They dropped me at the end of my road again. Same place. Same hiss of the doors. Tom lifted the bag off my lap as I stood, tucked it under his arm, and smiled at me. This time, no jockstrap, no clothes, nothing to hold in front of me. Just a collar, my door key, and a hundred and fifty metres of pavement. Fuck.

I thought about saying no for about a second and a half.

“See you Monday, Eric,” shouted Tom. And I walked.

To be continued …