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 4: The Final

I should explain about the wanking.

I’d done it every day since I was a teenager. Not as a hobby or a statement, just as a fact of life, like brushing my teeth. I’d done it through freshers’ flu, through first-year exams, through glandular fever (briefly, and with regret), and over Christmas on a family holiday in Wales, quietly in a caravan, in a rainstorm, with my older brother in the next bunk. In all that time I had missed, by my own reckoning, about eleven days. It was the one routine I’d never once had to think about.

By Tuesday I’d stopped being a person and become a sort of walking argument with my own groin.

Nobody tells you how much of your day a cock takes up. I’d assumed it was a specialist, occasional sort of concern. In fact, it turns out, it has opinions about everything. It had opinions at 6.40 on Sunday morning, when I woke up to the usual stiff, friendly ache and the cage said no with a small, polite, unarguable retort. It had opinions at three in the morning on Monday, when it woke me up, rock hard and straining at nothing, and I lay there in the dark with my hips rocking against the mattress, getting absolutely nowhere, and eventually said “Fuck,” quite loudly, to the ceiling.

It had opinions about the Metro: a stranger’s backpack against my thigh, and I was a hot, pathetic mess against a plastic shell that gave me roughly four millimetres of room to be anything else. It had opinions about lectures: Dr Hollis at the front, talking about supply chains, and I could have told you nothing about supply chains, because I had spent sixty minutes working out whether the guy two seats down was wearing aftershave or just clean. It had opinions in the shower. God help me, the shower. The first time, I got hard in the cage, and it was like being slapped in the middle of a prayer.

I tried things. Of course I tried things. I tried cold water. I tried thinking about my grandad’s allotment. I tried pressing the heel of my hand against the plastic, and then, a bit later, with a growing sense of dignity lost, I tried the edge of the kitchen table. I tried lying on my front with a pillow. I tried a long, thorough, scholarly examination of the cage itself, with a torch and a magnifying glass from my flatmate’s model-making kit, looking for a flaw. There was no flaw. Matt’s friend had done a good job. It was transparent, so I could see exactly how hard I was, and the lock was a tiny, smug, perfectly sealed little brass thing with a key that lived in Callum’s pocket, next to the key to my collar.

On Wednesday I found myself rubbing up against a door frame, in the corridor of the library, with a textbook for my politics elective held up in front of my face, and I stopped, and stood very still, and thought: I am climbing the walls. Literally. I was close to climbing the actual walls.

And I was stupid. That was the real horror. On Wednesday Jonno asked if I’d do his washing, as a favour, and I heard myself say “Sure, yeah, no problem,” before I’d even worked out why he was smiling. On Thursday Tom told me to stand up straighter in training and I did it so fast he laughed. I was thinking, I realised, with something that was no longer in my head.

They didn’t touch it. That was the other thing. Callum had the key, and Callum never mentioned it, and he never so much as glanced at my crotch, and every time I caught myself looking at him, he’d give me this small, mild, interested look that made the shell go tight all over again.

I’d been caged for five days, and I’d have sold a kidney to be released and given thirty seconds with my own hand.

On Thursday night he turned up at my flat.

I’d just got in. I was in a T-shirt and boxers, eating cereal out of the box, and when I opened the door he was standing there with a carrier bag and a very serious face.

“Can I come in?”

“You can,” I said, “but I’m not dressed for company.”

Callum stepped in. “Actually, I’d say you are overdressed for mine,” he smirked. “Take it off.” A pause, and a slightly raised eyebrow. “Now.”

I only hesitated for a second. I’d never been shy, and my flatmate had seen me naked plenty of times. I stripped, leaving my clothes in a pile in front of me. I took the cereal box into the lounge. He followed.

He sat on the arm of the sofa. I sat on the floor, because it felt right. He had the carrier bag between his feet, and he didn’t open it.

“We’ve got a plan for Saturday,” he said. “It’s big. It’s the biggest. We’re taking you to Bath, it’s a long way, and we’ve got a few things we want to try.” He watched me. “I told you I’d let you have some say. So here’s your say. What do you not want?”

I’d been waiting for the question without knowing it.

It was strange, being asked straight. I’d had a thousand negotiations like this, in chat windows, with strangers, but this was different. This was a man I’d been naked in front of every week for over a year, who’d made me come on a chair with a plug up me, asking me gently what he mustn’t do.

“No photos,” I said. “Nothing with my face. I’d actually die.”

I didn’t say that there was already one out there, on a stranger’s phone, with my chin tucked down. I’d had one bargain, and I’d made it in the dark outside a vet’s. I didn’t think I’d be getting another.

“Done.”

“Nothing permanent. Nothing that scars. Wrists are fine. Mondays, I’ve got lectures.”

“Done.” He hesitated, and for the first time all evening looked a little less sure of himself. “I should tell you now, then, because I’d rather you said no tonight than in the middle of it. We’re going to shave you.”

“Shave me.”

“All of you. Chest, arms, legs. Everywhere.” The corner of his mouth went. “Matt’s idea. Raj says the sensors work better on bare skin, and he’s not wrong. But it’s also because it makes the leather feel different. Apparently. I’ve been told it’s quite something.”

“Everywhere,” I said.

“Everywhere. Hair grows back, Eric. Six weeks, maybe eight. Nothing about it’s permanent.”

I thought about it. I tried to find the no in it. I wanted to find the no in it, for decency’s sake.

“Head?”

“Head.”

“…Eyebrows?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. The cereal box was very loud in my hands.

“Eyebrows,” said Callum, quietly but firmly. “If it’s no, it’s no, and it’ll still be a very good weekend.”

I thought about Monday, and lectures, and a lad who’d already asked me about a padlock. I thought about my own face in the bathroom mirror, naked, and my stomach turned over, and under it, steady as a pulse, came the thing that always does. Everyone would know. Well, everyone would look, and wonder, and not know.

“…Fine,” I said. “Yes. Do it.”

“Say it properly.”

“I want you to shave my hair off, Callum. All of it.”

“Good lad.” He nodded slowly. “And nobody outside the team touches you. I’ve said that already. I’d like to hear it from you.”

“And… nobody outside the team touches me. Seeing is… maybe. But not touching.”

“Done,” Callum said. His voice had gone a little soft. “Anything else?”

I thought about everything I’d felt since Durham, a staircase going down, each step darker, each one more right.

“No,” I said.

“Then there’s one more thing,” said Callum. “From me.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at me the way he looks at the other team’s back line.

“I’ve been paying attention, you know. Especially to what you said at Leeds. Everyone can see you love the bondage. A blind man could see that. But it isn’t really the cuffs, is it? It’s not getting to decide. It’s handing it over.” The corner of his mouth went. “You hated a third of it, you said. I’ve been thinking about that third ever since.”

I didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything safe to say.

“So I asked Matt for something you won’t like. Not the shave. Something you’ll properly hate. You might hate every minute of it. I’m not promising otherwise. But I don’t think that’s the only question, with you.” And then, for the first time all week, he looked down at the cage. “Is it?”

It wasn’t. The shell was suddenly far too small, and something went down my back that wasn’t quite a shiver and wasn’t quite dread. It was both, taking turns.

“What is it?”

“I’ll tell you now, if you want. Same as the shave.” He waited.

I opened my mouth to ask. Then I thought about knowing: lying awake tonight with it, turning it over, finding its edges, working out how I’d get through it. My clipboard would have had a lovely evening.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t tell me.”

Callum looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly, like a man checking a sum and finding it came out right.

“Same rules as ever. Sunderland, for when you’ve got a mouth. The bell, if you haven’t. I mentioned Raj, he’s coming too. He’s got the first-aid training, and he’s the one who’s been helping Matt. He’s got final say on anything medical and he’s already told Matt off twice.”

“Raj is in on this?”

“He’s very thorough. He’s also, I think, a bit of a fan of yours.”

I put my head on my knees. “Raj counts,” I said, into them. “As team. If he’s the one Matt listens to, he counts.”

“I’ll tell him. He’ll want it in writing.”

“I’m going to die.”

“You’re going to be fine,” said Callum, and stood up, and came and crouched in front of me, and put his hand on the back of my neck. It was warm. It was steady. “You’re stronger than you think, and we’re all going to be right there. All right?”

“All right.”

“Good boy.”

He left. It took me a whole twenty minutes to uncurl, and when I did, the carrier bag was still on my sofa. Haribo, and a note in his slanting hand: Eat something sweet. C.

Friday morning, they came for me like a removals firm.

Dev drove. He’d hired one of those sixteen-seaters, the sort with a tail lift and a lot of beige, and he’d taken out the back rows and put in a gym mat and a row of ratchet straps, which I thought was optimistic, until I saw what they were carrying up the stairs.

It wasn’t the sack. That came later, in the arms of Jonno and Wills, wrapped in a bin bag like a body. What Tom and Matt brought first was a sort of aluminium scaffold, in sections, which they assembled in the middle of my front room with the quiet competence of men who’d practised.

“Tension pole,” said Matt, to the carpet. “Floor to ceiling. Like at Durham, but with a crossbar. It’s got padded plates so it won’t mark your landlord’s ceiling, and it’s load-rated for two hundred and fifty kilos.” He tightened something with a spanner, and the whole frame gave a small, satisfied tock. “I tested it with Dev hanging off it. And Tom. At the same time.”

“It was fine,” said Tom and Dev in unison.

“It was fine,” Matt agreed, with deep satisfaction.

A short, neat lad I’d never seen before had followed them in, carrying a very clean holdall and wearing a hoodie that said BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING. He looked about twenty-two, with kind eyes and a calm, level voice. You could tell he had read every manual cover to cover and expected others to as well.

“Hi, Eric. I’m Raj,” he said, and shook my hand, which, given I was standing in my boxers, was somehow the most surreal part of the morning. “I’m going to say a few things before we start, and I’m going to say them loudly, because I don’t like surprises. I’m not a doctor, but I’ve done the first-aid and lifeguard courses, and I’ve got a very good doctor on my phone. If anything I see is wrong, I will stop it, and these gentlemen will let me.” There was a pause, and a chorus of mumbled yes, Raj. “And for the shave, everyone works under my supervision, and Tom doesn’t get a razor. I saw what happened in practice.”

“Strip,” said Callum.

I stripped.

I still did it, you see. That was always the strange thing, even then: that I did it myself. Nobody had to tell me twice. I took off my T-shirt and boxers in my own front room in front of six lads and a very polite biomedical engineer, and stood there with my cage hanging between my legs like a medal, shell full, locked tight, so swollen it must have been a deep, shameful shade of purple.

“Look at that,” said Jonno, with great respect.

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying it’s impressive.”

“Hands,” said Callum.

I held them out. Tom put the leather cuffs on me, my own, the black ones, smelling of saddle, and as the second tick went I breathed out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. Then Dev clipped a chain to each D-ring, and ran the chains up and over the crossbar, and drew them in, link by link, until my arms were stretched up above my head and my heels were barely flat on the carpet.

I tried my weight on it. The frame didn’t move. It was, I thought, hysterically, an exceptionally well-made piece of equipment.

“Right,” said Callum. “Everybody got a zone?”

“Legs,” said Jonno and Dev, together, with unbecoming eagerness.

“Back and arms,” said Wills, who had arrived with the sack and a Tupperware of sandwiches, and who looked as if he’d been dragged into a very different sort of morning than he’d planned.

“Chest and underarms,” said Tom, trying not to grin.

“I’m doing the, ah, the delicate areas,” said Raj. “With a trimmer, and a lot of care. Matt’s friend’s cage has a very small gap at the ring, and I don’t intend to find out what happens if there’s a nick.”

“I’m on supervision,” said Matt. “And lighting.”

“Head,” said Callum, and picked up a pair of clippers.

The next hour did something to me I hadn’t expected.

The head was first. It started with a buzz, a low, hornet-fat drone beside my right ear, and the cold touch of the guard against my temple, and then a long, slow, scraping pass from front to back. Hair fell across my shoulders. It fell on my chest, like very fine, dark snow. I watched a lock of it spiral down past my face, and land on my foot, and I thought, with a drop in my stomach, that’s mine. That’s been there for twenty years.

“Look at you,” Callum murmured, behind me. “Hold still.”

I held still. I’d have held still for anything.

Raj had put a mug of tea on the windowsill, and put Matt in charge of it. Every ten minutes or so Raj would say, “Fluids,” without looking round, and Matt would hold the mug to my lips and tip it, a careful sip at a time, like a man watering a rare plant. “It’s in the protocol,” said Raj. “Weak, one sugar, no arguments.”

Then the others. It’s a funny thing to be done by a team. Seven pairs of hands, all of them professionally absorbed. Jonno had my left leg, Dev my right, and they worked up from the ankle with a razor and foam, in long, attentive strokes, and every time one of them reached my inner thigh I heard my own breath catch. Tom, who had been issued clippers and a look from Raj, did my chest, a long, buzzing pass and then another, and I felt every single hair come off, a crisp, whispering rasp I felt in the soles of my feet. He lifted my arm higher to do my armpit, and said, in a conversational tone, “Tickle,” and I yelled, and the chains clinked, and Wills said, “Whoops,” behind me, and kept going down my spine.

“Hold still,” said Raj, kneeling at my hips, his voice absolutely level. “I have a very steady hand and I don’t want to be surprised.”

“I’m trying,” I said, through my teeth.

“I can tell. Your pulse is two or three beats higher than it should be, and so is… never mind.” He went on, with great delicacy, with a hum and a gentle drag of the trimmer around the base of the ring, and I looked up at the ceiling and counted the cracks in the plaster, and tried to will my cock back into a quiet life inside its cage. It would not be willed. It strained against the shell with every touch, every breath, every soft, scrupulous brush of Raj’s gloved fingers, and the lads all saw, and nobody said anything, and that was so much worse.

“Nearly there,” said Raj, mildly. “You’re doing very well. You’re the best-behaved client I’ve had.”

“You’ve had other clients?”

“Not as such. But I have a template.”

“Fluids,” said Raj, and the mug appeared at my chin again, in Matt’s hand, and I drank, obediently, arms chained over my head, to the hum of a trimmer. It was not my first. Nobody was counting but Matt.

When they’d finished, Raj ran a warm, wet cloth down every inch of me, from throat to ankle, and I stood there, dripping, trembling, my arms over my head, and I realised something. I’d never felt air like that. It moved over my chest like a hand. It moved over the backs of my knees, and between my thighs, and across my bare, shining scalp, and every cell I had seemed to stand up and say hello. It was like I’d never felt real sensation from my skin before.

“Right,” said Callum. He had come round to the front. He was holding a safety razor, and a little tin of foam, and a very small, very steady smile. “Last thing. Look at me.”

I looked at him. At the kind brown eyes, the little smile, the dark, steady, absolute attention.

He put one hand on the top of my head, lightly, the way a barber does. With the other, he brought the razor to my left eyebrow, and I felt the foam first, cool and strange, and then the small, precise tug of the blade. It went through the first third of it, a clean, soft, final stroke. A tiny dark curl fell past my eye.

“Good boy,” he breathed.

The second, then the third. Then the right. I kept my eyes on his face the whole time, and I saw him watch the thing happen, and I saw something in him go very still, and very warm, and very pleased, and then he wiped my face with the cloth and stood back.

“There,” said Callum.

Wills had gone into the bathroom, and he came back with the little mirror off the cabinet, and held it up in front of me, a bit shyly, as if presenting a certificate.

I did not know the person in it.

A pale, smooth, startled-looking egg. Naked from skull to shin. A face with nothing on it, no brows to frame it, wide, round, strangely vulnerable eyes, as if somebody had taken the sentence out of it. A collar at the throat. A cage between the legs. Every muscle laid out, shining and clean, so that I looked like something that had been prepared.

“You look like a boiled egg,” said Dev.

“A very sad, very turned-on egg,” said Jonno.

“Ten out of ten,” said Tom, with feeling.

My cock leapt in the cage so hard I felt it in my teeth.

They unclipped me from the frame, and I stood there swaying, with my wrists tingling, and Tom unbuckled the cuffs and put them in the holdall with the same quiet respect he’d had when taking them out. “Not for the sack,” said Matt, to nobody in particular. “Cuffs don’t go in the sack. Arms are internal. It’s a whole thing.”

It was the biggest, blackest, heaviest leather bag I’d ever seen, longer than I was, a sort of long, tight, shapeless sleeve with two long zips down the front, one running up from the feet and one down from the throat, buckled straps in rows, and a hood sewn onto the top end like the head of a very sinister caterpillar. Jonno and Wills got it unwrapped, and Matt carried the hood end, red-faced.

“It’s a sleepsack,” Matt said, to the carpet. “It’s called a sleepsack. Raj and I checked the stitching, the breathing holes, the airflow. It’s built for long stretches.”

“How long a stretch?”

“Long,” said Matt. “Especially if we keep you properly hydrated.” There was a smirk in his voice.

“Hydrated—”

“Before the hood,” said Callum. “Look at me.”

I looked up at him, at the kind brown eyes and the little smile.

“This is what’s going to happen. Mostly you’re going to lie there. You’ll have a gag and a hood and we’ll talk to you but you won’t talk back. You’ll be fed, you’ll be given water. You will pee. You’ll be given something to do about that.” His smile deepened. “I told you you weren’t going to like it. Matt’s put a lot of work into it, so you will let him explain.”

“Oh God,” I said.

“It’s an external sheath,” Matt said hurriedly. “I want to say that, because Raj insisted I say that. It’s the soft kind they use in hospital. Nothing goes in. It’s just a bag, essentially. A… tube. And the tube goes up to the gag.” He was looking determinedly at the wall. “The gag’s got two ports. One’s for water, so you can drink, from outside. And one’s the… return.”

I stared at him.

“Whatever goes down comes up,” said Wills, from the door, holding his Tupperware. “It’s the circle of life.”

“I’m sorry, you’re going to make me drink—”

“You’re going to be a recycler,” said Jonno happily. “Closed-loop system. Eco-friendly. Zero waste.”

“We’ve fed you tea,” Tom added, “and we’re going to feed you beer.”

“Weak tea first,” said Callum, over the top of them, still looking at me. “To get things moving. Then a couple of cans, at the services. Nobody’s making you drink anything you can’t. There’s fresh water on the line, and Raj has put a limit on the total.” A pause. “And if you ring, anywhere, any time, the whole thing stops. All right?”

I should have at least tried to protest. I really should have. It was the single most degrading thing I’d ever been told, and I’d had a very full month.

“…Fuck,” I said, and heard my voice go thin and felt my cock pulse.

It went on legs first.

It’s a tight, deep, cool darkness that comes up around your legs, a long, slick sleeve, and your toes touch the end and curl, and you go in up to the thighs, to the waist, and oh. That was what they’d meant.

I’d been shaved from the scalp down. I’d been in the open air for an hour. Every inch of me had gone soft and shining and raw, and the leather was slick and cool, and it touched everything. It had no hair to snag on, no fuzz to cushion it. It slid up the backs of my calves like a long kiss, and I felt each fold of it, each tiny seam, each ridge of stitching running up my inner thigh like a finger. I made a noise. I couldn’t help it. It was the sound a cat makes, stretching.

“Oh,” said Raj, “that’s quite a reaction. Skin’s very sensitive for the first few hours. Anything uncomfortable?”

“No,” I whispered. “It’s… no. It’s just everything.”

“Good. Tell me if that changes.”

“Arms,” said Callum.

The arms were the point. The cuffs weren’t needed, because the sack had sleeves. Inside it, running down each side, were two long, tight leather tubes sewn into the lining, and Callum fed my left arm into the first, down past the elbow, past the wrist, until my hand slid into a soft, padded mitten at the end. Then the right. Raj put something small and cold into the mitten, and closed my fingers round it, and I knew, by the brass weight, by the loop of ribbon, exactly what it was. The bell.

“There’s a catch in the mitten,” said Raj. “You can squeeze it through the leather, and it’ll ring. Loud enough for anyone in the building.”

“Thanks,” I said, faintly.

They laid me back on the carpet, and the rest was done from the feet up.

Matt took the legs, kneeling at my ankles with the tip of his tongue between his teeth. The lower zip went up in one long, rasping run, over my shins, my knees, my thighs, and stopped just below my groin. It could have gone all the way, Matt said, and met the other one, and closed the whole sack over me. Today it wouldn’t. Then the straps: ankles, knees, thighs, the last one right beside the end of the zip to stop it creeping, each one drawn to its notch and tried with two fingers, the way Callum tried my collar. “Sorry,” Matt said, every time one went tighter, and every time my legs were a little less my own. By the last I couldn’t have parted my knees by a centimetre.

That left the gap, and in the gap my cage: the clear shell, the little brass padlock, six days of nothing, framed in black leather like something in a shop.

“Gift-wrapped,” said Dev.

“Now,” said Callum, crouching beside me. “A bit of a treat.”

His fingers, steady and brisk, found the padlock. Cool air got in at everything the shell had been sitting on, bare, hairless, defenceless, and I could see all of it, which was worse. Then a tick.

It came off.

I’d been caged for six days, and the first thing I felt, in the stunned, helpless, honest second after the shell came away, was a pure, blinding rush of relief. It was so strong I nearly sobbed. And then I felt myself rise.

I rose fast. I’d been waiting six days, and I felt it fill, swell and lengthen and ache, until I was so hard I could feel my pulse in it, standing straight up out of the gap in a leather sack with nothing on earth to do with it. No hands. No friction. Nothing but air and the thin brush of leather and the hot, hot, hot burn of nerves that had no idea what they were being offered. It felt enormous. It felt naked in a way it never had before, no hair, nothing, just bare, hot, flushed skin in the open.

“There,” said Callum, softly. “Isn’t that better?”

I groaned.

“Good boy. It’s all yours. You just can’t touch it.”

The sheath went on next. It was cool and snug and slightly clinging, like a very soft sock, and Matt said “Sorry, sorry, sorry” under his breath while he fitted it, and Tom said “Give him a moment, he’s enormous,” and I wanted the floor to take me. Matt ran its tube up inside the sack along my hip and clipped it at my ribs, out of the way, for later.

Then the upper zip came down from the hollow of my throat, over my chest, my ribs, my stomach, and stopped just above my groin, leaving a gap between the two zips with everything that mattered in it. Then the upper body.

The first buckle went across my stomach, snug, right beside the end of the zip to keep it from creeping, and then another across my ribs, and a third over my chest, and by the fourth, a broad strap over the tops of my arms, I could feel the whole thing taking up the slack. My arms were pressed to me, absolutely pinned inside their sleeves. I couldn’t have lifted a finger higher than my hip. And everywhere that leather touched me, it burned, in the slow, hot, wholly delicious way of skin that had been stripped of every defence.

“Open.”

The gag went in. It was a different one, a firmer ball with a hard rim, and the strap went round my head, over my bare scalp, and the leather bit cold against the new smoothness, and when Dev unclipped the return line from my ribs and fitted it and the water line into the ports, I felt both lie against my chin, a small, cold, ridiculous weight. A faint dribble of cool water ran over my tongue, by way of a test. I swallowed.

Oh my God. I’m going to drink my own—

And then the hood.

I’d had Matt’s, in Leeds. That had been round me. This one was me. They put earplugs in first, then the hood went on over my head and down to the collar, over the padlock, laced, tight, smelling of leather and, faintly, of something warm and human and familiar, and it took me a minute to work out what it was. They’d pinned a pad of fabric just beside the breathing holes, not over, but near, so that every breath came in sharp with it.

Jonno’s kit. Dev’s kit. Callum’s old training top. The whole squad, from the laundry basket in the pavilion.

I breathed in, and the whole team went through me.

My cock, which hadn’t softened once since the cage came off, ached in its sheath with nothing to push against, and I made a sound into the gag that I hoped nobody heard.

Somebody gave the lacing a last tug at the back of my head. The sack drew tight in every direction, and I lay there, mummified, with a helpless, fully ready cock poking out of the gap in the front, and a hood full of my teammates’ sweat, and a tube in my mouth that would, in very short order, be doing the thing Matt had said.

“Right,” said Callum. “Let’s go to Bath.”

I can’t tell you how long the drive took. It’s the first thing that went.

I was carried down the stairs by four lads like a rolled-up rug, and I heard Mr Patel from number nine say “What’s that?” and Tom’s voice, bright and instant, say “Kit bag! Hockey stuff! Big match!” and I almost died. They put me on the mat in the back of the van, on my side, and ratcheted me down, so I couldn’t roll, and I heard the sliding door bang, and the engine.

Then the dark.

I’d had hoods. I’d had a Darlex sack, once, for an hour, in my own bedroom, when I could unzip it open from the inside. This was nothing like that. It was heavier, and tighter, and I was going somewhere. The van rocked and swayed. Every bump went through the leather and into my body, and into every bare, newly sensitive inch of skin, where the lining slid and clung and dragged on me like a hundred small, slow tongues. I lay there with the smell of the team in my nostrils and the weight of the straps across my chest and the tiny, insistent, ridiculous tick, tick, tick of the tube against the gag, and I thought: I’ve got no say in where I’m going.

An hour in, somebody poured tea down the line. It was lukewarm, weak, faintly sweet, and I drank it, because there was nothing else to do. A good while later, I felt the first pressure.

I tried not to. I really did. I clenched, and fought it, and it grew, and grew, and then Tom’s voice said, somewhere above me, “He’s squirming,” and Jonno said, “Is he? Is it time?” and Wills said, “Give it a minute.”

I let go.

It’s a strange feeling. It’s warm. It runs down, unexpectedly gentle, and then the tube catches it and carries it, and a moment later there’s a soft, shocking trickle at the back of my own throat. I jerked. I gagged. I swallowed, because I’d no choice, and the taste, the warm, salty, mortifying taste, flooded across my tongue.

“He’s doing it!” Jonno howled. “He’s a recycler!”

I made a long, despairing, muffled noise into the leather and felt my face flame inside the hood. I was drinking it. I was lying in a van on the A1, tied up in a sack, with my own piss going down my throat while my mates gave a running commentary. And the awful, shaming, undeniable thing was that I was so hard it hurt.

I thought, I’ll never be able to look at them.

And then I thought, I’ll have to look at them on Monday, with no eyebrows, and that was the thing that did it. That thought, that old, bright, filthy thought, tore up my spine, and I went rigid inside the leather, hard and helpless in the sheath.

“Oh, look,” said Tom, with a sort of wondering delight.

Somebody fed me beer at Wetherby. They’d cut it with water. I drank it anyway, a little at a time, through the line, and I stopped being able to count. They talked above me for hours, about nothing, about the match, about a lad in Dev’s tutorial. Matt, who had the seat by my head, said almost nothing. Whenever the van lurched, a hand would settle on the leather beside my face and stay there until the road smoothed out, and it wasn’t Callum’s, because Callum’s always came with a word. Every so often, when it was time, a hand would pat the leather over my chest and Callum would say “Good boy,” and then there’d be another trickle. Another swallow. A little shame, a little more, a little more.

It became a rhythm. That was the trouble. It became a thing my body knew how to do.

I’m being used, I thought, somewhere around Birmingham. I’m being used as a bit of equipment. A bag. A machine for turning tea into piss, and piss into more piss. It should have felt degrading. It did. And I’d never been so quiet inside.

The hotel was a Premier Inn on the edge of Bath, because the university doesn’t pay for anything with a spa. They’d booked a ground-floor room near the fire exit, and they carried me in through a side door at ten at night, to the sound of Dev saying, loudly, “Heavy kit, mate, don’t ask.”

They put me on the floor between the beds, on a thick folded duvet. They took out the gag. They gave me water, proper water, and a few bites of a sandwich, and Raj’s rule, Callum said, was that I got overnight to breathe. I coughed, and swallowed, and croaked.

“I can taste it,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Callum.

“For hours. It’s in my… it’s in my teeth.”

“I know.”

“I hate it,” I said, and my voice cracked, and I realised that there was something very wet inside my hood that wasn’t water. “I hate it. It’s the worst thing anyone’s ever done to me.”

“Do you want to stop?”

I didn’t answer.

Callum waited. He was good at that. He sat down on the floor next to me and put his hand on my chest, over the leather, steady and warm, and I felt the weight of it, and I breathed. In, out. In.

“No,” I whispered.

“Say it.”

“I don’t want to stop. Fuck.”

“Good boy,” said Callum. “You’re doing so well.”

They didn’t put the gag back. Matt took the return tube off it, and screwed the end into the cap of a plastic bottle, which he stood on the carpet by my hip with enormous care.

“So you can sleep,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dev, from one of the beds. “You won’t miss out. You can have that for breakfast.”

“A glass,” said Callum. “Raj’s rule. Not the bottle.”

Then Matt knelt at my feet, and I felt the first buckle give.

Ankles. Knees. Thighs. One after another, a notch, two, three, the leather sighing as it let go, and blood I hadn’t known was waiting went fizzing back into my legs. Then he worked his way up the other side: the broad strap over my arms, my chest, my ribs, my stomach. My arms came away from my sides. Only by an inch, but after a day like that, an inch was a continent. I could bend my knees. I could flex my fingers inside the mittens.

And for one stupid, soaring second, I thought: that’s it. They’re letting me out.

I lay there and waited for the zips.

The zips didn’t come. Matt sat back on his heels. Nobody reached for my throat, or my feet. The hood stayed laced, and the two long runs of teeth down the front of me stayed exactly where they were. I pushed, carefully, with everything I had, and the sack moved with me, roomy and warm and absolutely shut, like a sleeping bag somebody had sewn me into.

“This isn’t really a kindness, Eric,” said Callum, from somewhere near my head. “You’ll need some sleep. For tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. I’d forgotten there was a tomorrow. There was a match in it, and Raj, and whatever he and Matt had built that needed a protocol.

“Oh,” I said. It came out very small.

“Yeah,” said Callum.

So that was that. I let my head go back against the duvet, and something in my chest that had been braced since the morning finally let go too. It’s a strange way to be told you’re not going anywhere. It was also, and I’m not proud of this, lovely.

Then he kissed the top of the hood, quite lightly, the way you’d kiss a loved one at bedtime.

I lay in the dark, in the sack, with my heart slowing and my cock softening slowly, helplessly, in its sheath. Nothing else touched it. I could shift now, a little, draw my knees up an inch, but I couldn’t scratch an itch, or cover myself. The leather had warmed against my skin by now, and it clung, and breathed, and slid with every tiny rise of my chest, and I’d never been so aware of the whole of my own skin. Somewhere above me Jonno was snoring. Wills was reading something on his phone, the blue light just a faint glow through the leather. The radiator ticked. And Callum, on the floor beside me, in a sleeping bag, rested one hand on the sack, and left it there, warm and heavy over my ribs.

I woke up twice in the night. Both times, his hand was still there.

I drifted off feeling like the whole world was a hand, holding me still.

Morning was the curtains going back on a sky that hadn’t bothered getting light yet, and Dev saying “Breakfast,” far too cheerfully.

They had me out for twenty minutes. A stretch on the carpet, every joint popping. A wash in the tiny bathroom, with Wills holding my elbow and looking hard at the shower curtain. And a very awkward breakfast, which was one glass, as promised, with the whole room watching me drink it. I’ll spare you.

Then back in. The sheath, cool again. The zips, up and down to their gap. The return line back on the gag, the gag buckled in. And then Matt knelt at my ankles and did the straps.

He took them to yesterday’s notches. I could feel each one going back into the shiny crease it had worn in the leather, into the hole it already knew. Ankles. Knees. Thighs. The night’s inch went first, then the room I’d slept in, then the idea that there had ever been room at all. Stomach. Ribs. Chest. The broad strap over my arms went last and pinned them to me, and that was it. I was kit again.

And my skin hadn’t forgotten a thing. Overnight the leather had gone soft and warm and forgiving, and now it was tight, and everywhere it gripped me it was yesterday all over again: the slow, hot burn of bare skin with nowhere to hide, every inch of me reporting in at once. Worse than yesterday. Yesterday I hadn’t known what it would feel like.

“Sorry,” said Matt, at the last buckle.

The hood came last, and the team’s laundry with it, in every breath. Callum did the laces himself.

“There,” he said. “Now you’ve slept.”

Saturday was Raj.

He turned up at the ground at nine, having come down separately the night before. I knew him by his voice. By then I’d been driven across Bath, carried in like kit, and laid out on a padded bench in what smelt like a physio room. I had been the best part of a day in leather. My whole body hummed with it.

“Hello again, Eric,” Raj said. “I’m going to say a few things again, because they’re important, and I’m going to say them loudly.” He did. “One. If anything I see is wrong, I will stop it. Two. Your pulse, your temperature, your sats are all fine, and I’m going to check them regularly. Three. There’s a valve on the return line now. I’ll be draining off about half of whatever comes down it, and measuring it, and you’ll have the rest. That’s in the protocol. Four. This device…”

He patted something. I heard a faint, expensive, plasticky tock.

“…is a prototype. Matt and I made it. It’s got a sensor array, which reads the early signs of what we’re going to call ‘approach.’ You know. The physiology. And when it detects that you are, in the technical term, about to, well, cum, it sends a short, sharp, high-level stimulus to interrupt the process. It has a hard limit on output, which I set myself, and which Matt is not allowed to touch. And then it waits. And then it begins again.”

My stomach turned over, and my breath went short and shallow in the hood.

“It’ll work better on bare skin, by the way,” Raj added, with some pride. “Contact’s much cleaner. You’re a very good conductor.”

“He’s blushing,” said Matt, from somewhere.

“You can’t see him blushing, he’s in a hood.”

“I can tell.”

“It will do this,” said Raj, “for as long as we tell it to. Which, right now, is the length of the match.”

“Seventy minutes,” said Matt, hoarsely. “Plus penalties. If there are penalties.”

“There’d better be,” said Jonno.

“I’m going to put the sensors on now,” Raj said, with great kindness. “I want you to know that you can squeeze the bell and I’ll stop it. I will think no less of you. I’d actually think more of you. But I’ll also tell you now that I’ve seen the notes on what happened at Leeds, and I think you’ll be fine.”

“There weren’t notes—” Callum began.

“Wills described it very thoroughly,” said Raj serenely, and I heard Wills choke.

They ran both zips back a hand’s width, top and bottom, and I felt the air on me again. Raj left the sheath where it was, and his small, tidy, clinical hands began to work round it. A soft band, snug, round the base. A second, higher. Cool gel. A little pad. Another, behind, in a place I wasn’t going to think about. Wires, thin as hair. And a sort of strap, over my hips, holding all of it in place.

Sensors, I thought. They’ve put sensors on me. Instruments. I’m being measured.

“There,” said Raj. “Matt?”

“Powering on,” said Matt.

A faint, high, almost-musical tone. A tiny click. And then the first touch of it, the baseline current, a soft sparkling hum right at the root, like the first prickle of a limb coming back from sleep.

It was so kind. That’s what got me. It wasn’t the waves of the chair. It was a gentle, patient, expert sort of tickle, right where I most needed it, and my whole body arched into it, and the sack creaked, and my breath went short in my nose.

“We’ll leave you to it,” said Callum. “Be good.” A pause. “Not that you’ve got much option.”

“Win it for you,” said Jonno. “Come on.”

A door shut, and I was alone with the humming.

Being edged by a machine is nothing like being edged by a person.

It doesn’t tire. That’s the first thing. A person gets tired, or kind, or bored, or lost in a rhythm of their own. A machine doesn’t. It reads you. It reads the exact tension in your thighs, the catch in your breath, the tightening in the deep part of your belly that you couldn’t name even if you tried, and it takes you right up to the lip, with a sort of tender, merciless precision, and then it stops you.

The first time, I was ready to be furious. I’d been climbing for twenty minutes, whining into the gag, my hips straining off the physio bench against the straps, and I could feel it coming, a great, rushing lift, a heartbeat away, and I thought yes, oh yes, finally—and then there was a click.

A flat, white slap of current, sharp and quick as a ruler across the palm, and it cut straight through me. All of it. Everything. Everything dropped away with a roar and I sagged, gasping, and the whole bright climb collapsed in on itself, and I lay there in the leather, shuddering, with nothing, nothing, left in my body but a raw, hollow ache.

No, I thought. No, no, no, you can’t just—

The machine didn’t care. It waited. And then, a little later, in its own good time, it began again.

By the third time, I’d begun to understand. By the fifth, I was begging. I was saying words into the gag that I couldn’t possibly have meant, a long, sodden, wordless mumble of please and please and let me, and the tube in my mouth was dribbling, and I was swallowing, and I didn’t care. I was sweating through the leather, and the sweat made it worse, because it made the lining cling and slide on my bare skin, hot and slick and insistent, on my chest, my thighs, the back of my neck. I could taste salt and bitterness and beer. My hips were rocking uselessly against the straps, pulling, pulling, and the buckles bit, and the sack held me, and I was so hard. So hard it wasn’t even pleasant. It was a bright, unrelenting want, with no way out.

The machine took me up again. And took me up, and took me up. And dropped me.

I had my right hand curled round the bell in its mitten, and I’d got it so tight that it left a mark in my palm, and I knew, quite clearly, in the one corner of my head, that Raj was out in the corridor with the monitor. I could ring, I thought. Find the catch, squeeze it through the leather, and he’d come, and I’d be out of the sack and none of it would matter.

I went looking for the catch. It was in the lining somewhere, a small hard stud, and I pressed where I thought it was and nothing happened. I slid my thumb along the seam and tried again. My fingers were slick and swollen and clumsy inside the mitten, and every time I thought I had it the machine took me up and my whole hand clenched round nothing. Somewhere in the third attempt I understood that I wasn’t trying very hard, and that the feeling spreading through my chest, as the stud slid away from me again, was relief.

I didn’t ring.

I couldn’t explain it, even to myself. It had stopped being about courage a long time ago. It had stopped being about anything. It had gone down into some much older, much quieter place, a place with no questions in it, where all the useless extra parts of me had burned off. There was only the climb, and the stop, and the long ache, and the climb. There was only the next one.

I think I lost most of the match.

I remember, faintly, the roar of a crowd. A fuzzy, rolling, far-off shout that came and went. At one point, Raj came in. I know because he said, cheerfully, “Hi, Eric, just checking your sats,” and I felt a clip on my finger, and then his hand, briefly, on my hood, where my forehead was. “You’re doing great. They’re 1-1.”

He went. The machine took me up and dropped me again.

Win, I thought, out of habit. Win, win, win. I said it a few more times, the way you press a bruise, and waited to mean it. I didn’t. Somewhere in the last climb the score had slid out of my head, and when I went looking for it, it wasn’t there, and I found that I didn’t care as much as I should. The match had become a noise on the far side of a wall, and the only thing in the world with any weight was the next time the machine took me up. That was all I was, I realised. The thing in the changing room. The thing they thought about.

The machine slowed, for no reason, as if it knew. I heard a different, sustained roar. A long way off, a whistle. Full time.

Some time later, the door slammed.

“Penalties,” Jonno was bellowing, “it went to penalties, Eric, and Wills saved three, Wills saved three—”

“I’m a legend,” said Wills, from a great distance, with a wobble in his voice. He only had the gloves because our first-choice keeper had broken a finger on Tuesday, and he still didn’t sound as if he believed it.

“We won,” Dev said. “We won, mate. We won the final.”

And then Callum was there, on his knees, his hands on either side of the hood. “Eric. Eric, it’s me. We won. It’s the first time. The first time this uni’s ever won anything at hockey. You did it. You did it, mate.”

I was too far gone to say anything. I made a sound. It wasn’t a word. I felt Callum’s thumb under my chin, and his lips against the hood, right where my forehead was.

I waited for him to say switch it off.

“Table’s booked,” said Callum.

I didn’t understand.

“One o’clock,” he went on, a little breathless, a little shaky, but clear. “The Italian by the abbey. A dozen of us. We’ve got a trophy to carry, and Wills has promised to cry into the tiramisu.” His voice dropped, close to the hood, so only I could hear. “And you’re not finished. You don’t want this right now. I know.” A breath. “But I want it. That’s all the reason there is.”

I made a noise. I don’t know what it was. I think it was no.

“Is that the word?” said Callum, gently.

I lay there, in the dark, with the machine humming at the root of me, and a hand on my face, and my whole body singing with three hours of wanting. I thought about the word. It was right there. Sunderland. I couldn’t have said it. I had a gag in. I had a bell in my fist, and I held it, and I held it, and I did not go looking for the catch.

“Thought not,” said Callum. “Raj stays with you. He’s got a dissertation to write and nobody to talk to anyway. We’ll be back by half four. Matt’s got the override.” A pause, and I heard him stand. “Think about us.”

The door shut, and the noise went out of the building, and for the first time in my life I understood the word abandoned.

I could hear them leaving, the clatter of studs, the bang of the main door, the roar of the minibus starting up in the car park. A long way off, somebody started singing. And then it was quiet, and there was just the hum, and the tick, tick, tick of the tube against the gag, and my own breath.

The machine took me up. It dropped me.

“Hello, Eric,” said a voice, close by, and a chair scraped. “I thought I’d stay in here. I’ve brought my laptop. I’ll be quiet.”

I made a small, wretched noise that I think meant thank you.

“Pulse is a bit high. Quite understandable.” A pause, the clink of a bottle. “I’m going to give you some water. Don’t swallow too fast.”

It was a long, long afternoon.

I’d thought the match was the hard part. It wasn’t. The match had a shape. It had a whistle at the start of it and a roar at the end, and every cheer was a rope to hold on to. This had nothing. There was no game to listen for, no half time, no whistle at all. Only the climb, and the stop, and a quiet man in a plastic chair tapping at a keyboard, and the minutes dragging past like lorries.

I tried to count them, and every time I got near a number the machine took me up again, and I forgot. So I begged. I begged Raj, with no words. I begged the ceiling. I begged the machine, which had no more feeling than a thermostat, and which took me patiently up to the edge of the world, and sat me there, and took me back.

“You’re making an awful lot of noise,” Raj observed. “Your heart rate’s up.”

I made a long, sobbing, wordless howl.

“Right.” The click of a pen. “I’ve written that down.”

Somewhere in the second hour my phone started going, in my kit bag on the floor. Raj reached for it. I heard the rustle. “It’s Jonno,” he said. “He’s sent you a photo of the pizza. I won’t describe it. He says it’s ‘a bit of a work of art.’ Dev’s said something about the wine. Tom’s written wish you were here, mate with six crying emojis, and Wills has typed, in capitals, WE ARE ALL THINKING ABOUT YOU.”

I think I screamed.

“I’m so sorry,” said Raj, with obvious sincerity. “That’s quite cruel. I’ll turn it off.”

He did. And then, a minute later, quietly, almost to himself, he said, “Though it is nice, isn’t it? That they’d think of you. I mean, they’re out there having the best day of their lives and you’re the thing in the middle of it.” He cleared his throat. “Sorry. That sounds odd. I’ll go back to my chapter.”

It didn’t sound odd at all. I held on to it. I’m the thing in the middle. The machine took me up, and I thought yes, and then it dropped me, and I thought yes, and I did not think of anything else for what felt like days.

A while later Raj’s own phone buzzed on the desk, and buzzed again. “Callum’s asked how you are four times,” he said, not looking up. “I’ve said fine four times. He doesn’t believe me.” A pause. “He hasn’t touched his tiramisu.”

I turned that over while the machine took me up and dropped me. A table full of lads and a trophy and the best day of their lives, and Callum under the tablecloth with his phone, not eating. It went into me somewhere the machine had never reached.

It’s a strange kind of hunger, the kind that comes after the angry hour and the desperate one: a long, flat, shaking calm. I stopped fighting the straps. I stopped begging. I lay there, hot and slick in the leather, and let the machine do what it liked, because there was nothing else to be.

“Four hours since they left,” said Raj, at some point. “Give or take. You’ve been very good.” The scrape of a chair. “They’re on their way back. Matt sent me a text. He’s very excited. He’s, um, running.”

The door banged open.

“How is he doing?” That was Callum, out of breath, a lot closer than I’d expected.

“Pulse is high. Temperature’s fine. Sats are good. Hydration’s good.” A pause. “He’s been very patient.”

“Eric,” said Callum, on his knees, his hands on either side of the hood. “Eric, it’s me. We’re back. You were incredible.”

I made a sound. It wasn’t a word.

I’d been stopped, and stopped, and stopped. I was hard, still, a shaking, sodden wreck, with the sensor straps cutting into my skin.

“Do you want it?” said Callum, very low, close to the hood.

I nodded. I’d have given him anything. *Anything*.

“Matt?”

“I… I’ve got the, er, the override,” said Matt, in a voice that had given up on dignity. “It’ll let you go. It’ll let you, if you, um. Eric? It’s on a different setting. It’ll let you… finish.”

It started very softly. A hum. A tickle. Then a warmth, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, spreading slow and golden, and nothing stopped it this time. Nothing clicked. I rose and rose and rose, with the whole team round me, with the hood and the gag and the tube and the sack, and the whole sweating, aching, beautiful weight of the day behind it, and when it broke, it broke me.

I don’t remember it properly. I remember arching. I remember a sound that came out of me through all that leather that was nothing like any sound I’d made. I remember coming, and coming, and coming, shaking, with my toes curled and my mouth open and the sack creaking, and a voice, very close, saying “That’s it, that’s it, good boy, let it go” and that every last muscle in my body let go at once.

When I came back, I was crying again, laughing too. I felt Callum’s face against mine through the leather, wet, I realised.

“Fuck,” I said, into the gag. It came out as a long, ruined, grateful vowel.

“Yeah,” said Callum.

They got me out slowly. A buckle at a time, a strap at a time, a long, careful unwrapping, with Raj at my head checking my pulse every few minutes and saying “Slowly, slowly.” The hood came off last. The light was almost orange by then. The sun was going down over the sports hall, and I lay there on the physio bench, naked and sodden and shaking, hairless as a stone, and every single one of the team was there. They were all there, in their kit, covered in mud and glory, medals round their necks, looking at me.

“Water,” said Callum, and it was Jonno who knelt and held the bottle to my lips, Jonno, who had never held anything for longer than a pint glass, with his other hand flat between my shoulder blades as if I might tip. I drank, and it was just water, cold and clean and plain, and I couldn’t stop. He didn’t make a joke. When I choked he waited, and tilted the bottle again.

“Did you say we won?” I croaked.

“We won,” said Dev.

“Properly?”

“Four-three on pens,” said Jonno, “and Wills—”

“Don’t,” said Wills.

“—saved three, Wills, you saved three—”

“I was thinking about you,” Wills said, rather quietly. “You know. Back there. In there. I thought, he’s getting through that, I can get through this.” He went a very deep shade of red. “Nobody tell anyone I said that.”

I laughed, and drank, and let Jonno wrap me in a towel, and then his own big dry hoodie, which came down to my knees, and then the whole squad, one by one, came up, and put a hand on me. On my shoulder, my arm, the top of my bare, smooth head. They didn’t say anything. They just touched me, for a second each. It was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen.

I was nearly asleep when Raj leaned in, and said, in my ear, with enormous gravity, “For the record, I’d like to say that was the best-behaved test subject I’ve ever had, and I’m going to be citing you in my dissertation.”

“Anonymously,” said Callum.

“Obviously,” said Raj.

I slept all the way back in the van, on the mat, in a hoodie, under three jackets. I woke up in my own bed on Sunday afternoon, with the sheets cool and strange against my smooth skin, and a note on the pillow, in Callum’s slanting writing: Rest. Eat. Recover. Big day next week. C. My phone was on the bedside table with one message waiting: Next Sunday’s the parade.

What parade?

See you later.

Cal, what parade?

He didn’t answer. I had a feeling he was smiling.

I put my hand up to my face, slowly, to where my eyebrows weren’t, and I felt the smooth, bare skin, and I lay there, in the half-dark, with my heart going, and wondered what on earth I was going to say on Monday.

To be continued …