Anticipation, as it happens, is no easier to handle than boredom.

I’m finding it impossible to focus on work this morning, and it’s only day two. Ugh, I hate how uncooperative my brain is, sometimes.

I’ve done everything that is usually propitious to a productive morning of work. I’ve woken up at the right time, had caffeine at the best time to stimulate my mind, ate a light breakfast so as not to feel drowsy, listened to the right music. And yet, my mind keeps wandering to what will happen when the clock finally hits 5pm.

You can take a horse to water, but…

"It's the last orgasm you'll have without my permission for the rest of the week," Raymond said yesterday.

Well, we'll see about that. I'm not some desperate little submissive who'll break down after a day or two of denial. I know what he's trying to do, and knowing is half the battle.

Even if he was equally skilled with his fingers and his words…

Once again, my eyes glaze over from boring work, and I find myself surreptitiously squeezing my thighs together.

I could just take care of myself right now. Maybe lock myself in the bathroom for a 'shower'. He'd never know…

But I stop myself. That would be cheating, and I don't cheat. I’d certainly be pissed if he tried a trick like that during my week on top, and I am going to have that week, because I won’t end this week mewling like a kitten at his feet.

I'm going to win this challenge fair and square, and then I'll make him regret ever thinking he could break me.

The rest of the day crawls by. I stare at my laptop screen, but the words and numbers blur together. All I can think about is the great game. What will he do when work hours are over? More teasing and denial, or something else?

Will he try to make me beg?

By four, I've given up any pretense of working. Instead, I try to reason with myself. What's the worst that could happen? So I get aroused. So what? It's not like I'm going to suddenly forget who I am, forget that I'm a domme by vocation. Physical response doesn't equal submission.

Of course, I did agree with his explanation that female control of male arousal is the best weapon in a woman’s sexual arsenal… so am I contradicting myself? Is it wishful thinking? Or am I accidentally positing that women are better equipped to handle sexual arousal than men?

Now I’m thinking in circles. Fortunately, the clock relieves me of the vexation, and even though I’m surely about to be tested again, I welcome it.

Action is exactly what I need right now.

Shortly after the clock strikes the hour, Raymond emerges from his office, stretching. He catches me watching him and smiles, slow and knowing.

"Well," he says, his voice low and smooth, "I believe our workday is officially over."

"Yes," I manage, my own voice sounding strange to my ears, "it is."

He holds out his hand. "Come here, Amber."

I rise from my chair, crossing the room to him, and taking his hand in mine… although really, his hand is huge, large enough to hold both of mine if he wanted to. Which does make me shiver, just a little bit.

Let the games resume.

***

I never thought I'd be in this position.

Literally.

I like putting my submissives in it, sure. There’s a lot of symbolism going on in being spread-eagled. It maximises the surface area of your body that’s exposed to a dominant’s ministrations, and it deprives you of control of your limbs.

Can’t reflexively close your legs or squirm away while I deftly edge you. Can’t flinch away when I whip you. Can’t run off when I tickle you.

It’s not an especially original set up, but it’s nice. And now, for the first time in my time as a kinkster… I’m experiencing it from the other side.

Raymond kneels on the mattress between my spread thighs, fully clothed in dark jeans and a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms. His confidence is infuriating. He hasn't even bothered to undress, like he doesn't need to be naked to break me.

"Now what?" I ask, attempting to sound bored rather than breathless. "Finally going to fuck me?"

His smile widens at that, a predatory gleam in his eyes. "Is that what you want, Amber? Does the big bad domme need some cock to pacify her?"

I refuse to give him the satisfaction of an answer, but my body betrays me—a subtle shift of my hips, seeking contact.

"I told you yesterday," he says, his voice low and measured, "that's not how this works. If I fucked you now, it would give you power over me. Over my pleasure. And I'm not going to make that mistake."

He trails one hand up my inner thigh, slowly inching higher.

"You said it yourself. Most men would be eager to stick their cocks in me right about now."

"I'm not most men," he says simply.

"Yes, yes. Water over stone. I remember your little metaphor. Never made you for an abstract kind of dom, Ray."

"As for me… I seem to remember you orgasming while I was delivering that metaphor. And playing with your cunt, of course."

His fingers reach the apex of my thighs, and I brace myself for his touch, but he veers away at the last moment, tracing patterns on my hip bone instead. The bastard.

His smile is not menacing or cruel. It's calm. Assured. Like he knows something I don't. "Is that what you’d like me to do now, Amber?"

I clench my jaw, refusing to answer.

"You can stay silent, if you like. But remember that you’ll have to ask permission, if you want to cum. And I’ll get you there, eventually."

"If you’re not going to fuck me, what are you going to do, now that you have me like this? Read me some poetry?" I ask, trying to sound snarky, and not entirely succeeding.

Raymond's smile widens. "I'm going to continue your education."

He reaches over to the bedside table and picks up a tablet. After a few taps, he sets it down on my chest, so I can see the screen. It's a video. A man and a woman. She's hogtied, and it looks like he’s going to facefuck her like her mouth is a fleshlight.

"I want you to watch this," he says, pressing play. "And I want you to pay close attention to her face. To the exact moment when she stops fighting and accepts her place."

The video starts playing, and I feel his hand between my legs again, this time directly on my sex.

"I'm going to show you what it feels like to be desperate. To want something so badly you'd do anything for it."

He begins to stroke me, gentle yet insistent.

"Already wet, I see. Nice."

"Basic biology," I say, trying to maintain my composure. "It doesn't mean anything."

"Of course not," he agrees too readily. He literally wets his fingers with my cunt’s lubrication, before moving them to my clit. "Just like these little sounds you make don't mean anything either."

I hadn't even realised I was making sounds.

On the screen, the woman’s lips are making contact with the man’s cock for the first time. I’m not one to often watch this type of porn - naturally, since it’s clearly framed as femsub - but I have to admit there’s compelling symbolism, a certain significance, in the way his cock looms over her face.

The way she looks up at him with a mix of defiance, desire, and above all, resignation to her fate.

The way her lips part to take him in.

"I've been thinking about what would be most effective," he says conversationally, as if we're discussing the weather rather than him methodically working me toward an orgasm I know he won't let me have. "And I realised something important about you, Amber."

I shouldn't ask. I shouldn't engage. But curiosity gets the better of me. "What's that?"

He lowers his head and gives me one long, slow lick from entrance to clit. The sensation is electric, and I can't stop the small gasp that escapes me. Then he pulls back again, denying me more.

"It became obvious once I started paying attention to you at the club," he says, his finger resuming its maddening, barely-there touches. "You're always so composed, so in control. Even when you're aroused, you never let it consume you. Never let yourself be at the mercy of your desires."

"How’s that… different from you?" I say, gasping as his tongue works me over. "Your entire plan for breaking me is predicated on the idea that you’re self-disciplined about your own pleasure… ahh…"

"It’s precisely because we’re similar that this test of willpower is so thrilling," he says. "Peer competition. Contest with an equal… until one of us is equal no more."

Another lick, firmer this time, his tongue flat against my clit. My hips try to rise to meet him, but the restraints prevent it.

"Time to make you feel what it’s like to just let go. To be nothing but raw sensation. Like rock exposed to the howling wind and the pouring rain. Slowly, but inexorably being eroded…"

The woman on screen is making muffled noises around the cock in her mouth, her eyes watering slightly. The man has both hands in her hair now, controlling the pace entirely.

The combination of sound, sight, and oral sex is a multi-pronged assault on my senses. It’s making it hard for me to think straight. It’s… it’s…

On the screen, something is indeed changing in the woman's expression. The defiance is fading, replaced by something else. A kind of surrender that isn't quite submission yet, but moving in that direction. Her struggles become less pronounced.

"Her body is winning the argument with her mind," Ray says, lifting his head momentarily. "Just like yours will."

I want to snap back at him. But then his tongue presses firmly against my clit for one glorious moment before retreating again, and all I can manage is a strangled gasp.

The woman in the video has stopped struggling entirely now. Her eyes have taken on a glazed quality, and her body has gone pliant. The man is using her mouth more aggressively, and she's accepting it—welcoming it, even.

That’s when Ray sticks a finger inside my cunt.

There’s an odd, gentle and methodical quality to his finger-fucking. Like he’s trying to prove a point with just one finger. It seesaws back and forth, back and forth, occasionally curling up and making my breath catch.

Augmenting that assault, his tongue returns to my clit. He’s good at it, too good. I bite my lip to keep from moaning too loudly.

The woman on the screen is fully in subspace now. Her eyes have rolled back slightly, and she's making these little hungry noises around the cock in her mouth. The man grips her hair tighter, forcing himself deeper into her throat.

She takes it all without resistance.

There’s something hypnotic about watching another woman's submission unfold while I'm being systematically worked over. The parallel isn't lost on me.

Is this what I look like right now? Eyes half-lidded, lips parted, breath coming in short gasps?

"Fuck," I breathe, unable to stop myself. The restraints bite into my wrists as I instinctively try to reach for him, to grab his head and force him to make me fucking cum already.

"Do you want to ask permission, Amber?" he asks, his voice maddeningly calm despite what he's doing to me.

I press my lips together firmly. I will not beg. I will not give him that satisfaction.

He shrugs, seemingly unbothered by my silence, and returns to his methodical assault on my senses. The woman in the video is now fully compliant, her throat relaxed as the man pushes deeper.

The gagging sounds coming out of her sound so accommodating, like she’s reshaping her throat into an ergonomic holster for his cock. She sounds so… defeated.

It's like watching a sculpture emerge from a block of marble. The unnecessary parts chipped away until only the essential remains.

Essential? Why did I think of it that way?

"She sounds absolutely amazing, doesn’t she?" Ray says, briefly pausing his oral ministrations. "I have this video bookmarked for a reason. I’ll send it to you when we’re done. I bet you’d like that."

I don't answer. Can't answer. His fingers have found a particularly sensitive spot, and I'm too busy trying not to moan.

The minutes stretch into what feels like hours. Ray's mouth and hands work in tandem, bringing me to the edge again and again, only to deny me release each time. My thighs are trembling now, my breathing ragged. I can feel sweat beading on my forehead, between my breasts.

On screen, the man pulls out of the woman's mouth and comes on her face. She looks up at him with an expression of such perfect submission that I have to look away. It hits too close to home somehow, watching her in this moment while I'm spread open and helpless.

"Ah, ah," Ray says, noticing my averted gaze. "Eyes on the screen, Amber. This is important."

Reluctantly, I look back. But with the video now over, autoplay triggers the next entry in the playlist. Another blowjob - looks like this is an oral centric playlist.

This video is somehow even more aggressive than the first. The woman is held upside down, her head hanging off the edge of the bed as the man uses her throat like a toy. Her face is turning red, makeup running down her cheeks.

She looks like a cheap whore.

Raymond's tongue and fingers are still working their magic between my legs. I'm so close to the edge, teetering on the precipice of release, when he suddenly pulls away. Again. I can't help the frustrated groan that escapes me.

"Mmm," he says, sitting back on his heels and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'm getting a bit tired of this position. Let's change things up."

He reaches over to the bedside table again, but this time he picks up… a vibrator?

He turns it on, and lowers it between my legs.

The first touch of the vibrator against my clit makes me jerk in my restraints. It's intense, almost too much after all the teasing. Raymond watches my face carefully as he applies just enough pressure to drive me wild, but not enough to push me over the edge.

"You're so responsive," he observes, his voice clinical despite the intimacy of what he's doing. "I wonder how long you can hold out before you're begging me to let you cum."

"I don't beg," I manage to say between gritted teeth.

"Of course not," he says, focusing on the vibrator. "That just wouldn’t do."

I want to tell him to fuck off, but my body is betraying me. My hips are moving of their own accord, trying to increase the pressure of the vibrator against my clit.

Just as I feel the familiar tightening that signals an approaching orgasm, he pulls the vibrator away. I can't help the whimper that escapes me.

"Please," I whisper, the word slipping out before I can stop it.

Raymond smiles, a slow, satisfied curve of his lips. "What was that, Amber? I didn't quite catch it."

I clench my jaw, furious at myself for that momentary weakness. "Nothing."

"Hmm." He taps the vibrator against my inner thigh. "I thought I heard you say something. My mistake."

He returns the vibrator to my clit, but with less pressure than before, a featherlight touch that's somehow worse than nothing at all. On the screen, the second video has ended, and a third begins—a woman on her knees, collared, at the feet of her master.

She doesn't just look defeated this time - she looks utterly devoted to his cock. Her eyes never leave it as he slaps it against her face, her tongue darting out eagerly to taste him whenever he allows it.

"You know what fascinates me about erosion?" Raymond says conversationally as he works me with the vibrator. "It's that the process is entirely natural. Water doesn't need to force its way through rock. Time and persistence do all the work."

My breath hitches as he increases the pressure slightly, then decreases it again when I start to respond too enthusiastically.

"The same principle applies here," he continues. "I don't need to force you into submission. Your body will do that for me. It's already betraying you, isn't it? Responding to stimuli despite your best efforts to remain detached."

"The female body is an interesting study in contradictions," he says, moving the vibrator in slow circles. "So powerful in its capacity for pleasure, yet so vulnerable to manipulation…"

Once again, I wonder if he’s being performatively sexist, to further my deconstruction, or if he genuinely believes this stuff. And the danger implied by my uncertainty somehow makes all of this… hotter, for some reason?

"That's the key, I think," he says. "The path to breaking a domme isn't through pain or humiliation—though those can be effective tools. It's through pleasure. Specifically, pleasure that she can't control."

He keeps tinkering with the vibrator’s speed, switching it up every time I start to adjust to one or the other.

The videos keep playing. A parade of women being reduced to their most basic function—a receptacle for male pleasure.

But it’s his words that have truly sunk their claws into my mind.

Pleasure that she can’t control.

That’s when it dawns on me, what’s really happening here. This isn’t just orgasm denial. It’s not simply about edging me and wearing me down through frustration, until I’m desperate enough to beg. There’s a deeper level to it. He’s… he’s…

Rewiring my brain.

That’s just the power of association. It’s conditioning. Like I’m one of Pavlov’s dogs.

He’s establishing a link in my mind, an association between my increasing need to cum, and the sights and sounds of women being subjugated by male sexual power.

We literally started this thing by talking about habituation, and of course, because I’ve never had a kink for maledom, I don’t have habituation to this stuff. It feels raw, and new, and powerful. My dopamine receptors aren’t used to it yet. He’s giving me a whole, new, shiny, brand new kink. He’s patiently inserting it into my subconscious.

He’s… he’s… a real opponent, strong and cunning and dangerous and so masculine…

"You're making those little sounds again," Raymond observes, his voice clinical despite what he's doing to me. "Those little whimpers that tell me exactly how close you are."

I try to stop, to control my breathing, but it's becoming increasingly difficult. My body wants what it wants, regardless of what my pride demands.

"I wonder," he continues, "if you're starting to understand the lesson here. How you’re being deconstructed."

I close my eyes, trying to break the visual connection, but Raymond immediately withdraws the vibrator.

"Eyes open, Amber," he says, his voice firm. "That's part of the exercise."

Reluctantly, I open my eyes again, and he rewards me by returning the vibrator to my clit.

"Good girl," Raymond says, and something inside me responds to those words in a way I've never experienced before. A warm glow.

I realize with a jolt of horror that I'm starting to enjoy being praised by him. That "good girl" felt… nice.

This is bad. Very bad.

I need to get a grip on myself. I can't let him know how much this is affecting me. I force my face into what I hope is a neutral expression, trying to hide the tremors running through my body.

But it's getting harder with each passing minute. My thighs are slick with arousal, my clit throbbing beneath the vibrator's relentless stimulation. The restraints bite into my wrists and ankles as I unconsciously strain against them, seeking more contact, more pressure, more anything.

On the screen, a fourth video has started. This one shows a woman being thoroughly dominated by two men. They’re spitroasting her.

And I can't look away.

Raymond suddenly withdraws the vibrator, leaving me trembling on the edge of release. The abrupt absence of stimulation is almost painful—a hollow ache spreading through my core as my body screams for completion. For a moment, I can only lie there, spread-eagled and panting, my mind struggling to process the denial.

"That's enough for today," he says, his voice infuriatingly calm as he sets the vibrator aside. "I think we've made excellent progress."

Progress? Is that what he calls this cruel game of bring-me-to-the-edge-and-leave-me-hanging? I want to scream at him, to demand he finish what he started, but I bite my tongue. I won't give him the satisfaction.

He begins to undo my restraints, one limb at a time. First my right ankle, then my left, then each wrist in turn. The whole time, he's humming softly to himself, like this is just another mundane task in his day. The casualness of it is somehow more devastating than if he'd been gloating.

The videos continue to play on the tablet beside me.

"You can turn that off now," Raymond says, nodding toward the tablet. "Unless you'd like to keep watching?"

There's a challenge in his eyes, a knowing look that says he's well aware of how those videos have affected me. I reach for the device with a hand that isn't quite steady and tap the screen to stop the playback. The sudden silence feels tense.

"I told you," I manage, my voice rougher than I'd like, "I don't beg."

He smiles at that, a slow, patient smile that sends an unwelcome shiver down my spine. "Not yet," he agrees. "But we still have five more days."

Five more days. The thought lands like a lead weight in my stomach. Five more days of this exquisite torture. Five more days of being brought to the edge and left wanting. Five more days of having my mind slowly rewired to associate my own pleasure with submission to male dominance.

As difficult as it is to handle, I may have to admit something to myself. I…

I may have underestimated him.

TO BE CONTINUED