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 3: The Semi-Final

In the two weeks between the quarter-final and the semi, I decided to say no eleven separate times, and I wore a padlocked collar to every one of them.

That was the first problem. Callum had the key, and Callum, when I asked, said “Semi-final”, mildly, and that was that. So I wore it. I wore it to the Metro, under a scarf, until the scarf started to look like a cry for help. I wore it to a lecture on supply chains, where a lad behind me leaned forward and said, “Is that a padlock?”

“Hockey thing,” I said.

“What’s the hockey thing?”

“It’s… a bet. I lost a bet.”

“What was the bet?”

“It’s complicated,” I said, and he gave me a look of such pure, patient pity that I thought about transferring to Durham.

The team were worse. Jonno took one look at it in the changing room on Monday and said, with enormous sincerity, “Mate, is that a pet tag?” and Dev had to sit down. Tom told three separate people I’d lost a bet on the football, and each time the bet was different. By Wednesday I had apparently lost a bet on the rugby, a bet on a pub quiz, and a bet involving a goat. I said “It’s a hockey thing” so many times that it lost all meaning, like a word you say until it dissolves.

And here is what I couldn’t tell anyone. Every time I touched it, every time it shifted against my throat in a lecture, or the little brass padlock knocked against my collarbone on the stairs, I felt a small, warm, ridiculous buzz. It went down my spine and settled low in my belly. It was the smallest thing in the world, and it never wore off. Somebody else had the key. I carried the lock. It was the only thing I’d ever worn that only one person could take off, and I was walking round Newcastle in it, telling lies.

I decided to say no eleven times. I decided it in the shower, where my arse was still faintly tender on the third day. I decided it in the queue at Greggs, with a hand at my throat. Every time, I felt very mature about it. I’d had my experience. I’d been brave. I’d come harder than I had in my entire life, and a sensible person would bank that and walk away.

And every night, without fail, I’d lie in bed and replay it. The chains. The dark. Good boy. The click of the padlock at my collar. And I’d have to stop, because I’d gone hard enough to hurt.

Callum sent the message on the Monday. Not in the team chat, just to me, which I noticed.

Semi’s Saturday. Leeds, neutral ground. Come if you want to. Nobody will say a word if you don’t, and I mean that.

I read it forty times. I typed no and deleted it. I typed what are the ideas and deleted that too. I thought about the fact that he’d said I mean that, and that I believed him, and that it was exactly why I couldn’t hide behind they made me. I touched the collar. It was still there. It had been there the whole time, and the key hadn’t moved.

On Saturday morning I got on the minibus, and sat at the back, and Callum looked at me as I passed, a long, steady look, and gave me the smallest nod. His eyes dropped to the padlock and came back up. I nodded back. Nobody said a word the whole way down the A1, which for a bus of hockey players is a miracle on the scale of loaves and fishes.

The ground was a neutral one, out past the ring road, with the sort of changing block that’s built to survive students: breeze block, lino, strip lights, a smell of bleach fighting a losing battle. We had the visitors’ bay, a long room with benches and a row of showers. But at the far end, past the last peg, there was a door I hadn’t expected. Heavy, steel-faced, with a bolt on the outside.

“Kit store,” said Callum, following my eyes. “Nobody’s been in it in years. We asked nicely.”

I didn’t ask who he’d asked, or how nicely.

I went to change in the main room with everyone else, in a silence that rang. When I pulled my kit out, Callum said, quite calmly, “You won’t need that.”

I stopped, with my shirt half out of the bag.

I want to say what happened next carefully, because I’ve thought about it a lot since. Nobody told me to strip. Nobody touched me. I stood there, and I looked at him, and I put the shirt back in the bag. And then I took off the rest of what I was wearing, folded it, put it on the bench, and stood up straight with my hands at my sides, in a collar, in front of twelve men.

Nobody said anything. But I felt them notice. Jonno actually breathed out. Tom’s mouth went soft, like he was trying to look neutral and not managing. And I heard myself think, with a clarity that scared me a bit: I did that. Nobody made me. I did that.

“Good,” said Callum. “Then I’ll ask once, properly. You don’t have to do this. You can put those back on and play sub, and nobody thinks any less of you. But it’s going to be harder than Gateshead. We’re playing last year’s champions. If it’s harder for us out there, it’s harder for you in here. If you come through that door, it’s because you want to.”

“I know,” I said.

“Say it.”

“I want to.” A pause. “I need to.” And it was a stupid, small voice, and it was entirely true.

Callum nodded slowly. He didn’t smile. He reached out, instead, and straightened the collar at my throat with two fingers, and let his thumb rest for a second on the padlock.

“Then I’ll tell you why,” he said, quietly, so the others couldn’t hear. “It’s three things. You’re doing it for yourself. You told me, in the Free Trade, third pint in, about the chains and the ice cube and the key. You’ve been chasing that feeling on your own for a long time, Eric, and doing it to yourself isn’t the same. You’re doing it for the team, because the second half at Durham was the best we’ve ever played, and you know it. And you’re doing it for me.” He held my eye. “Because I want to watch you do it.”

“I was drunk,” I said, faintly.

“You were honest.”

I looked at him, and I couldn’t speak. I looked, helplessly, down, and then I looked away again, fast, but not before I’d seen the shape in the front of his tracksuit bottoms. Thick and obvious and not even slightly hidden.

I liked that, he’d said, on the bench, with the towel round my shoulders. I’d like to do it again. I’d thought, then, that he’d meant it politely.

He had not meant it politely.

“Eyes up, Eric,” said Callum, gently, and I felt my face burn, and I looked up, and the corner of his mouth went.

“Then let’s go and show you the plan.”

The kit store was a bare, high-ceilinged box, with a drain in the floor and a single window up near the roof, painted over, so the light came through the colour of weak tea. There was nothing in it but a chair.

It was a heavy, functional, serious chair. Steel frame, a seat of dark padded leather, a high straight back, bolted down through a thick plywood board to the floor, so that it couldn’t tip, couldn’t slide. There were no arms at all, only a bar across the back with rings welded to it. Chain pooled round the legs. And on the seat, standing up from the centre of the leather like a small, smooth, wickedly patient thumb, was a plug.

I looked at it for a long time.

“Matt built it,” said Tom, with enormous pride. “Engineering project. Over the last two weeks.”

“It’s got a load rating,” said Matt.

“A what?”

“I tested every part of it myself. Properly. I’m not an idiot.” He folded his arms, and went a little pink round the ears. “Look, I’m just saying nothing’s going to snap. Or tip. Or be a nasty surprise. That’s the one bit I’m going to be a bit insistent about.”

It was the most sincere thing anyone had said to me all day, and I was weirdly moved by it.

“The rest of it,” said Callum, “is a surprise.” He held up something black and soft. A hood. Leather, close-fitting, laced at the back, with holes at the nose, an opening at the mouth, and none at all for the eyes. “Put this on in a minute. And you’ll want to know about the rest of the rules, because the rules are different today.”

“Different how?”

“Sunderland doesn’t work with a gag in.” He said it very gently. “We’ve thought about that. So here’s what you get.” He nodded at Dev, who stepped forward and opened his hand. In it was a little brass bell, the kind you’d tie on a cat. It had a loop of black ribbon. “That goes round the middle finger of your right hand. Ring it, properly, and everything stops. Straight away, no argument, nobody gets in trouble.”

“Okay.”

“And it’ll be heard.” Callum held up a small white plastic camera, smaller than his palm, the sort you’d buy for a nursery. “This goes on the shelf, pointing at the chair. Wills has the screen on the touchline. It’s got sound. If you ring, he’ll hear it, and he’ll see you. But you should know the store’s right by the path to the pitch, and the Leeds bench is right next to him. If he has to come in for you, he’s coming in through that, with a key in his hand, in front of half their squad.”

“So there’s an exit,” I said.

“There’s an exit,” said Callum. “It just costs you.”

I looked at the bell. I looked at the camera. And I looked at the chair, with its patient little plug, and I thought: somebody has really thought about this, and it made my throat go tight.

“The thing is,” said Callum, “we don’t want it to feel safe. But we need it to be safe. You see the difference?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I really do.”

“Good lad.” He gave me the hood.

I turned it over in my hands before I put it on, because I always do. I check the kit. It’s a habit, like checking the exit.

It wasn’t mine.

It was a good hood. A very good hood. Thick, close-grained leather with a faint sheen, tight double stitching along every seam, a proper brass lacing eyelet at the back. The nose holes were reinforced with little rings. The inside was lined with something soft. Nothing I’d ever owned came near it. I had a cheap rubber one from the internet that smelled like a tyre fire. This was a hundred-and-fifty-quid hood, at the very least, with a maker’s mark pressed into the neck.

And it had been worn.

I could see it in the lining, a faint, shallow darkening round the mouth where somebody’s breath had been, and a slight, pleasing softness in the leather that only comes from being laced on, and laced off, a good many times. This hadn’t been bought for me. Somebody had bought it for themselves.

I looked up. Twelve faces looked back at me, with great, studied, innocent interest in the ceiling.

Eleven of them, anyway. The twelfth was looking hard at his own shoes, and his ears had gone the colour of a postbox.

“Matt,” I said.

“It’s… a general-purpose hood,” said Matt, to the floor.

“It’s yours.”

“It’s team property.”

“It’s got a maker’s mark.”

“Look, I had a busy summer, all right?” said Matt, in a rush, and Tom made a small noise like a kettle starting up. “Just. Don’t get it dirty.”

I stood there, holding the hood of the quiet lad who’d built me a chair with a load rating, and I thought about every careful, apologetic, “Sorry, sorry” and every “Nothing’s going to snap,” and I thought: all season I’d been the one with the reputation.

“Put it on, Eric,” said Callum, with no expression whatever.

I put it on.

It went over my head and was snug, and smelled of leather and warm skin, and of something else, faint and not mine, and then Dev was lacing it at the back, a long tug up the length of my skull, and the world went out.

I’d done blindfolds. This wasn’t a blindfold. A blindfold you can feel the edge of; a blindfold is a thing someone’s put on you. The hood was round me. It pressed on my ears, pressed on my cheeks, shut out everything but the rush of my own breathing, which came in hot and close and a little too loud. I tried to turn my head, and there was no edge, no gap, no light.

A hand on my jaw. A thumb at the corner of my mouth.

“Open.”

It was Matt. I knew it, even before he spoke again, low, close to the leather over my ear, so that only I could hear. I opened, and the gag went in, a soft rubber ball, firm enough that my jaw had to stretch round it. A strap went round my head, and a buckle clicked.

“I’ll tell you something,” Matt murmured. “I don’t need to hear you complain. Not when I can see how hard you are.”

I made a sound into the gag. It was half a protest and half something else entirely, and I could tell, from the soft, pleased breath against my hood, which half he’d heard.

“Right,” said Callum. “He’s going to love this. Well… some of it anyway.”

I realised later that they all grinned. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it, a ripple of satisfaction through the room, and I felt myself harden further, hot and unmistakable, as though my body wanted them to be sure.

Hands took my arms and walked me forward. Five steps, six. The lino was cold under my feet. A hand on my chest, stopping me, and then another at the back of my neck, pushing gently down, and I understood exactly what was in front of me and where it was going.

I’d seen it. I knew. And it was still a shock.

It touched first, cold and smooth, at the place where I couldn’t see or stop it, and a hand held me there for a second, patient, and I heard someone, Tom, I think, breathe out. Then pressure. A slow, gentle, relentless pressure as they lowered me onto it. “Don’t worry, we pre-lubed it,” said Jonno. I groaned into the gag, a long, shaking, helpless sound, and felt the seat take my weight, and felt it fill me, and I was sitting. Sitting, impaled on something I couldn’t have escaped if I wanted to, with twelve guys watching.

“There,” said Jonno, breathless. “See? Easy.”

My hands were pulled behind me, round the back bar, and I felt the cuffs go on, the soft familiar leather, my own, the little tick of each padlock. I didn’t even flinch. I just breathed. Then my ankles, one at a time, dragged apart and clipped out to the chair legs, wide, the same stretched, exposed position as the cage, only this time sitting, and held. And then a chain, cold and heavy, slithered round the back of the chair and ran between my wrists and ankles, and was clipped, so that every time I pulled one the other pulled back. I tried it. I couldn’t help it. I pulled my arms, and my legs jerked wider, and when I tried to close my knees the chain at my wrists tightened and dragged them back.

I was a puzzle with only one solution. I was fixed in place.

Click, said a padlock, with an air of finality.

And then I felt a hand on my cock, and I jumped so hard the chair creaked.

“Steady,” said Matt. “Don’t fight it. You’ll like this.”

I didn’t like this.

It started with cool, clinging pressure, carefully, round the base of my cock. A soft band, snug but not tight. Something similar round my balls, and a dab of cold gel, and the tiny rasp of velcro. A pair of pads, then. And wires, thin and light, tickling my thighs as they ran back to something I couldn’t see.

“It’s an electro kit,” said Matt, who couldn’t help himself. “Proper one. Reputable supplier, all the safety features, I read the whole manual twice. The normal setting’s tolerable. You’ll feel it, but it’s no more than a firm tingle. It runs in waves, so it builds, and it drops, and it builds again. And if you’re a good lad, the waves’ll do something quite nice, eventually.”

I made a sound into the gag.

“Oh, and there’s a catch,” said Callum.

I’d forgotten he was there. He crouched down beside the chair, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him through the leather.

“Wills has the app, which Tom wrote over a weekend and finished during a lecture on algorithms, and it goes two ways. If they score, he presses a button, and for a short time the setting goes up to a much higher level. It’s the highest we’ve got. Matt’s tested it on his own leg, and I can promise you it’s not nice.” He let that sit. “But if we score, that’s different. The baseline goes up. One notch. It doesn’t come back down. Not until the whistle.”

I felt it land. I felt the whole shape of it, all at once, as the trap closed.

“So you’ll want us to win,” said Callum. “But you won’t, will you? Every goal we score makes the rest of the match worse. And every goal they score is a bad ten seconds, and then it’s gone.” A pause. “Have a think about which you’d rather.”

It was horribly, perfectly clever. I could hear the grin in his voice. I felt myself strain against the band, helpless, honest, and Callum made a small, delighted sound.

“There’s a cap,” said Matt, quickly, from somewhere behind. “On the notches. I want to say that. It tops out well below anything properly dodgy. I set it myself.”

“He’s very proud of the cap,” said Tom.

“I am proud of the cap.”

“He’s twitching,” said Tom, from the doorway.

“I know,” said Callum. “It’s a sign of respect.” Then, closer, so only I could hear: “You’ve got the bell. You’ve got the camera. You’ve got every one of us out there, thinking about you. Good luck, Eric.”

A hand ruffled the hood. Then boots, and voices, and the door, and the bolt, and the sound of footsteps going away.

I was alone.

It started so gently that at first I thought they’d forgotten to turn it on.

A faint prickle, round the base of my cock, as if something very small was walking over it. Then a slow, warm, sparkling hum, a tide coming in, with that low buzz under it I could feel in my teeth. It rose and rose, up my shaft, through my balls, deep into the muscle behind them, and I moaned, a long, stuffed, drowning sound into the gag, because it was good. It was horribly, shamefully good. The wave crested, and held, and slid away, and left me gasping.

Oh, I thought. That isn’t fair.

Another one came, and it was a little higher.

I tried to count. I’m a methodical person, and counting is what I do when I’m frightened, and for the first five waves I managed it. By the sixth I’d lost the thread. The plug had started to join in, every shift of my hips grinding it deeper, every pulse making me clench round it. The leather was sticking to the backs of my thighs. Somewhere under the chair the drain breathed up a thin draught of old bleach, and it was the only cold thing left in the room.

My right hand, behind me, had wrapped around the bell. I realised, with a sort of distant astonishment, that I’d got my fingers clamped round the clapper so tight that it couldn’t ring at all. I was holding it so I wouldn’t drop it. Or so I wouldn’t ring it by accident. Or because it was the only exit I had, and I couldn’t let it go.

I could ring. Wills would hear. He’d come. He’d walk in, in front of the Leeds bench, with the bolt rattling and the key in his hand and a very particular kind of embarrassed face. They’d see this. All of this. The hood and the gag and the chair, and the wires, and the plug, and me, hard and flushed and utterly obvious, at the centre of it.

It should have been the thing that kept me from ringing. And it was. But it wasn’t only that. Somewhere in the back of my head, a very small voice said, you want them to see. And I shut it up, hard, and was ashamed, and went even harder.

Out on the pitch, the whistle went. I could just hear it, tiny and tinny through the walls. The game had started.

I don’t know how long the first goal took, but it was theirs.

I knew because of the click. It came in the middle of a wave, a long swelling one, and I’d been riding it, hips jerking, breath whining through my nose, so close that I could taste it. Then something changed in the current. The tide went from a hum to a shriek.

I screamed. It didn’t sound like a scream, behind the gag. It sounded like a long, flat, tearing roar. Every muscle in my body fired at once, my back arched off the leather, the chains yanked me back into the seat, the plug drove in, and for six, seven, eight seconds there was nothing in the world but white-hot current wrapped round the most sensitive parts of me. And then, a click, and it was gone, and I was slumped in the chair, shaking, my whole body still jumping in aftershocks.

They’ve scored.

And, oh, God, how grateful I was. It’s over. That’s the worst of it and it’s gone. The waves came back, slowly, innocently, as though nothing had happened at all, and I sagged into them, weak with relief.

Then, a long time after, there was a roar.

It was a different roar. A louder one, ours, a great wild shout that carried right through the wall, and I knew, with a sort of sinking, fluttering horror, exactly what it was. I held my breath. I waited for the click.

There was no click. There was nothing at all, for a long, long second. And then the current stepped.

It wasn’t a spike. It wasn’t a shriek. It was a quiet, soft little lift, as if somebody had put a hand under the floor and pushed the whole tide up an inch. The same wave, the same hum, the same sparkle, only a notch brighter, a notch closer to the bone. I felt it at once. I felt my cock swell into it, and the plug throb, and my hips begin to rock, helplessly, before I’d even decided.

We scored. We scored. Oh, you bastards.

I loved it. I hated it. I loved it for about a minute. And then I understood, slowly, with horror, that it wasn’t going to go back down.

The waves came on, bigger now, and closer together. The old baseline had been a firm tingle. This was a hot, rolling, relentless pressure, every wave sitting on top of the last, and I was riding higher and higher into a thing I couldn’t get off. I was so hard I ached, leaking down my own belly, my balls tight and heavy. I knew, with sudden dreadful clarity, exactly where they were taking me.

They’re going to make me come, I thought. They’ve built a machine to make me come.

And I came.

It wasn’t like the quarter-final. It wasn’t a sudden, violent explosion. It crept up on me, the way the waves had, a slow, dizzying, shuddering roll that started deep in my belly and spread and spread until I was groaning into the gag, my hips bucking, my back arching, my hands clenched so hard round the bell that my knuckles ached. I felt myself pulse, and pulse, and pulse. I felt the wetness, hot and sudden, on my stomach.

And I waited for it to stop.

It didn’t.

For perhaps ten seconds I sat there, coming down, floating, thinking, right, that’s done, waiting for the next wave to be a low one, a gentle one, a kindness.

The next wave was exactly the same as the one before. And it was higher.

It’s not going to stop.

I tried to scream. It came out as a thin, wet whine. My cock, raw and oversensitive and utterly spent, was being squeezed and tingled and pulsed by a machine that had no idea of, and no interest in, what I’d just done. The current rose, and my body jerked away from it, and there was nowhere to go. The chains caught me. The plug held me. I thrashed, and the chair didn’t move.

It wasn’t pain. It was too much, a sparkling, scalding brightness that ran down every nerve I owned, and my body wanted to flee from it and couldn’t, and my brain kept saying stop, stop, enough, and the machine kept going.

My fingers were slick with sweat on the bell.

Ring it.

I could. I knew exactly how: loosen my grip, give it a shake, a small, bright, ridiculous ting. Then the door, and the Leeds bench, and me as I was now: sitting in my own cum, hooded, gagged, blubbing, on a plug-in chair.

I didn’t ring.

I’d love to say it was pride, or stubbornness, or a deep and noble trust in my teammates. It wasn’t. It was this. Under the horror, under the too much, under the sob in my throat and the fire in my nerves, under everything, there was still a thread. A tiny, bright, disgusting, undeniable thread of want. Of need. My body was shouting stop, and a deeper part of me was saying please don’t.

I let go of the bell, and clamped my fingers back round it, and held on.

Time stopped being a thing.

There were waves, and gaps between the waves, though the gaps got shorter. In the gaps I could hear the crowd, dim and rolling, like a sea heard through a wall. Sometimes it swelled, and I’d tense, and nothing would happen, and I’d go limp with relief. Sometimes it swelled, and there was a click, and the world went white, and I’d come back, shaking and gasping, to a tide that was still somehow bigger than before. And sometimes it swelled, and there was no click, and the floor lifted, quietly, one more notch.

Then I learned to listen for it. That was the worst part. I’d sit there, ribs heaving, straining at the wall with the whole of my ears, and I wanted them to win and I wanted them to lose and I couldn’t tell which. Every cheer was a prayer and a threat. I’d start to beg inside the gag, a long, wordless, sodden mumble, please let it be theirs, please let it be theirs, please, not ours, and I knew, even then, even in the hood, that it was the most appalling thing I’d ever wished against my own friends.

At some point there was a long, slow, steady stretch, and I think it must have been half time, because I heard voices outside. Voices I didn’t know. Laughing, and footsteps, and then, horribly close, a hand on the door.

The bolt rattled. The handle turned, and stuck.

“Locked,” said a stranger’s voice, puzzled.

I stopped breathing. My heart was slamming. The current was still running, higher now, sparkling and relentless, and my hips were still moving, and I couldn’t stop them.

“Oh, that one’s out of order,” said a voice I did know. Wills. Light and bored. “Cleaning stuff. Honestly, don’t bother. Come on, I’ll show you where the loos are, there’s a decent set round the back.”

Footsteps, going away. My own pulse, hammering.

I came again about ninety seconds later, silently, pathetically, to the sound of a stranger’s laughter disappearing down the corridor.

I came a third time, near the end. I’m not sure how. I’d gone somewhere past sense by then, raw and hollowed-out and strangely quiet, a place where there was only the wave and the plug and the dark and the chains. By the time the last cheer went up, a fat, distant, delirious roar, I couldn’t tell the waves from each other at all. It was one long, bright, humming flood, and I was a thing in a chair, and my thoughts had shrunk to one or two words. Please. Please. To whom? I didn’t know. To the machine. To them. To myself.

My jaw ached round the gag. My wrists and ankles throbbed with the dull ache of leather held too long. My cock was so sensitive that even the lightest pulse felt like a hot wire, and I was still, God help me, hard, or hard again, or hard in some dazed, mechanical way that had nothing to do with me.

When the final whistle went, I didn’t hear it.

I only knew because the waves stopped.

It wasn’t a click this time. It was a slow, steady fade, a tide going out, and the buzz and the sparkle and the rolling heat all drained away. I sagged. The chains took my weight. I breathed, in, out, in, and each breath hitched and caught on the gag, and I felt, absurdly, grateful.

A long time later, the bolt scraped. Boots. A great, noisy, triumphant crash of men, who all stopped at once.

“Okay,” said Callum. “Eric? Eric, it’s me. Game’s over. You did it. We won, four-three. You did it, mate. I’m going to take the gag off now.”

The gag came out first, and I coughed, and drool ran down my chin, and I couldn’t make a single word. Then the laces on the hood, long tugs down the back of my head, and the light hit me like a brick, and I flinched and shut my eyes, and somebody said “Sorry, sorry,” and a hand cupped my face, shielding it. The hood came away, and a pair of careful hands took it from Dev, turned it right way out, and held it against a chest as though it might bruise. Matt. He didn’t say a word about it. He just checked the lining, once, and tucked it under his arm.

“Water,” said Callum.

It was Tom who held the bottle. Dev was crouched at my ankles, undoing the chain, and Jonno was at the wrists, and when my hands came free they hung like dead things. Matt put the hood down and went straight to the control box, I could hear him at it, a little muttering click, and then he came back and knelt in front of me, and took the pads off with a care I wasn’t ready for.

“We’ve got you,” said Callum, kneeling in front of me, one hand steady on my shoulder. “I’ve got you. Come on. We’re going to lift you off this thing. One, two, up.”

They did it between them. The plug came free with a wet, shameful sound, and I made a noise I’ll never repeat, and then I was wrapped in something, a towel, a hoodie, a blanket, and lowered gently onto the floor against a wall, with my knees pulled up, and somebody’s arm round my shoulders.

I don’t know how long I sat there. I think I was shaking. I think I cried, in the unselfconscious, shuddering, ugly way that you only do when every single wall you’ve got has been taken down, and nobody laughed, and nobody left. Callum sat with me the whole time, one hand in my hair. Every so often he said “Good boy,” under his breath, and every time something in my chest unclenched.

“Was that all right?” he said, eventually.

I tried to speak. It came out cracked. “I don’t know how to feel. I hated about a third of it.”

“Which third?”

“The goals.”

Callum’s mouth twitched. “Even ours?”

“Especially ours.”

There was a pause, and then somebody snorted, and then Jonno was laughing, and then they all were, a loose, helpless, relieved sort of laugh, and I found I was laughing too, a ragged, broken thing that turned into a cough.

“You didn’t ring,” said Dev, in a small voice. “Wills said the monitor was dead quiet. He said you didn’t ring. Not once. He said, I mean, he was a bit worried, but you were…” He floundered. “The screen. You looked…”

“Like what?” I said.

“Like you were having a really, really intense time,” said Dev, and went scarlet.

“I was,” I said. “I was.”

It sounded stupid. It was entirely true. And the scary thing was that a small part of me was thinking about how I’d feel one day doing it again.

They gave me a hoodie. Only a hoodie, and a towel. I sat on the bench in the main bay with a bag of crisps and a can of Lucozade and the rest of the squad, and listened to Tom’s blow-by-blow of the match, and every few minutes I’d realise someone was looking at me, and I’d look back, and they’d smile, slow and warm and complicit, and look away.

I’d never been so tired. I’d never felt so held.

Matt came and sat beside me, and for a while he didn’t say anything. Then he handed me a Twix.

“You did good,” he said.

“I came three times.”

“I know. I saw the screen.” He winced. “Sorry. That sounded wrong. I mean, Wills was supposed to be watching, in case. I got the highlights. It records, by the way. Face never in shot, I made sure. Only me and Tom ever see it.”

“Matt.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” I took a bite of Twix. “It was properly well made.”

He went pink to the tips of his ears. “Thanks. It’s the load rating, honestly.”

“The hood’s not bad either.”

He went a deeper pink, and looked at his shoes, and I saw him very nearly smile.

“I’ll tell you about it sometime,” he said, to the floor. “If you want.”

“I want.”

I was nearly asleep when Callum came to sit on my other side. He didn’t say anything for a while either. The bay was emptying, lads drifting out to the minibus, the last of the light going orange in the high windows.

“Final’s next Saturday,” he said at last.

I looked at him.

“I’m not going to ask you tonight,” he said. “You’re done in. But you should know it’s coming. And I thought, this time, you might want some say. Tell us what you’d want. Or we surprise you again.” A very faint smile. “Entirely up to you.”

I thought about all of it. The chains, and the dark, and the click of a bolt. The bell I’d held so tight my fingers still ached, and hadn’t rung. The third of it I’d hated, and the two thirds I’d have given a kidney to feel again.

“Surprise me,” I said.

Callum smiled properly then. The slow, certain, privately amused smile I’d been seeing in my head for a month. “Then there’s one thing we do first.”

He put his hand in the front pocket of his hoodie and brought out something small and clear and cold.

It took me a second. It was a cage. Lightweight, transparent, a little ring and a curved shell, and a tiny padlock hanging open from it like an earring.

“Cal.”

“Matt’s friend prints them. It’s a good one, it’s been tested, he’s sending you cleaning instructions.” He tipped his head. “You’re in no state to argue, and I think you know that’s the point.”

“Is that a safeword question?”

“If you want it to be.”

I looked at it. I looked at the lads watching me with the same carefully neutral faces, and Matt at the back, scarlet to the ears, and I was so wrung out that I was soft, tender and raw and entirely helpless, and the one thing in the world my body was already doing was wanting.

“…No,” I said.

“Thought not.”

It went on gently. The ring first, a cool circle at the base, then the shell closing round me with a faint click, snug, absolute, with nothing whatever to be done about it. Then the padlock. Tick.

I knew that sound. By now I’d have known it in my sleep.

Callum slipped the tiny key onto the same ring as the collar key and patted his pocket. “Final’s next Saturday,” he said. “You’ll have this till then.”

“A week?”

“Sunderland?”

I thought about it for almost a full second, then shook my head wordlessly.

“Good boy,” he said.

They took the hoodie off me at the door of the minibus.

“Bus rules,” said Callum. “Same as last time.”

“It’s November.”

“It’s a nice warm bus.”

So I got on, and walked down the aisle in the golden evening light, wearing a collar, and a small clear cage, and nothing else. All the way up the A1, with the leather cold against the backs of my legs and the whole team grinning at the front.

Naked would have been simple. Naked was just naked, nothing hidden, nothing in the way. Last time, I’d had my kit bag and my dignity, or at least the idea of it. But this was different. The cage was worse. It said something. It was a small, bright, blatant announcement that somebody else had decided what my body was for, and everybody could see it, and everybody could see how hard I was trying to get hard inside it, and failing. The shell was tight. It was pitiless. It held me down.

Somebody caught my eye in the aisle, and nodded at it, and Jonno said, helpfully, “I’d say it’s the cage, mate,” and Dev said, “No, he wants it to be the cage,” and Tom said, “He doesn’t know,” and they argued the point, cheerfully, in front of me, for most of the journey.

I sat there, and I couldn’t decide, and I touched the collar, once, and then I felt the cage, and then I stopped touching anything, because I’d gone hard and the shell had said no.

They dropped me at the end of my road again. Same place. Same hiss of the doors. A collar, a cage, my door key, and a hundred and fifty metres of pavement I now knew very well indeed.

I thought about saying no for about a second.

“See you Monday, Eric,” shouted Tom.

And I walked.

To be continued …