It comes over her as a hard, restless urgency: get going. Now. Somewhere, it doesn’t matter where, she just has to move. From wherever she happens to be. To feel herself in motion. Let the destination work itself out along the way.

 

After that, things start to just happen. Doors open and close; a cab shows up, or maybe a train. She gives out an address she doesn’t recognize, she hands someone a card or a key she didn’t know she had. She doesn’t have to do anything. A journey stages itself around her and she watches the world change shape to enact it, like magic, like in a movie.

 

Some trips last longer than others. None of them seems very long. She doesn’t think she’s ever left the city. It wouldn’t matter though. In theory she has a life to get on with, responsibilities, relationships, but none of that has any substance. She can’t even care that she’s not caring about things. It all fades underneath the glare of that sole imperative of getting there.

 

There isn’t a place. It’s a rush of warmth and a moment of stillness, and no more urgency. Somewhere out of the way, usually: a vestibule, an empty corridor, a disused industrial yard. It happens almost between one step and the next: the air seems to glow with a sense that it’s ready for her, that this, here, is the space she was meant to fit in. Her whole body sings with the new calm. 

 

Sometimes she needs to get naked to make herself fit. To feel that it's perfect. Sometimes there are clothes, on a chair or a table, and she won't fit till she's put them on. And then, at some point, a voice calls her name. A woman's voice. Not the name she knows herself by but a secret name, a whore name. The name of a girl whose only purpose is to be used. She waits for the touch she knows is coming, the one that gives her no option or wish but to surrender.

 

The aftermath is a darker magic, a journey without stages or duration. It deposits her home wrapped in a cocoon. She remembers in vague, discontinuous images: perfect was being blindfolded. It was being naked on all fours on concrete with a butt plug teasing her ass. It was backed up against a wall under a spotlight, fucking herself hard with her hand, sweating for release. A woman ordering her to shove her tit into her mouth and bite the nipple.

 

Make it hurt, she shouts. There’s an echo.

 

She tries to hold on to those flashes between times. She strings them together in her mind like talismans, like beads on a chain. She tells the string whenever she masturbates, and she masturbates a lot now. She makes up little dramas of submission and degradation around them.

 

Sometimes she thinks regretfully about how much of herself this thing she’s into—she doesn’t even know what to call it—has started to consume. Maybe she could step back a bit, de-emphasize it. But she can never forget the grateful, broken sense of being used and discarded that survives in her when she’s brought back to herself, to her straight life. The thing she feels a flicker of whenever she gets near to coming. She never stops yearning for the next time.

 

She never stops wondering if maybe next time they just won't send her back.

 

She can’t even orgasm on her own anymore. That’s not why she masturbates. She masturbates to please a woman she’s never met:— to beg Her favor, to make herself nothing in Her eyes, to strain and cry for a finish she can never reach; knowing a girl like her wasn't meant to come except at someone stronger’s command.