Existence

By the time Mistress had finished arranging me, I had stopped thinking of the bench as something I was lying on.

It was more like something I had been fitted into.

My back was bent over it, shoulders supported, arms secured somewhere behind me where I couldn't use them. My legs were held apart and down, leaving my caged cock and balls thrust obscenely upwards and forwards, presented without being useful.

My head was fixed at the other end.

Cushions pressed against either side of my face, holding it in place. I could turn it perhaps a fraction, no more. Enough to feel that movement was possible. Not enough to achieve anything with it.

The hood had already taken my sight.

The earplugs had taken almost everything else.

There was nothing to see and almost nothing to hear. Just the dull internal sound of my own breathing and the occasional vibration through the bench when somebody moved nearby.

My mouth was the only part of me that had been deliberately left accessible.

That, apparently, was what I was here for.

Mistress had explained the rules before putting the earplugs in.

Not many rules.

I wouldn't be spoken to. There was no point. I wouldn't have been able to hear clearly enough anyway.

Instead, the collar around my balls would tell me what was required.

One pulse: more.

Two: gentler.

A longer pulse: stop whatever I was doing and wait.

And if I tried to anticipate instead of following instructions, there was another setting for that.

She had demonstrated that one.

I remembered it quite clearly.

“Don't try to be clever,” she'd told me. “You aren't here to decide what anyone wants. You're here to provide it.”

Then she'd put the earplugs in.

Now there was only waiting.

I had no idea who else was in the room.

I didn't even know whether Mistress was still beside me.

For a while, nothing happened.

Or perhaps things happened that I simply couldn't perceive.

That was the strange part. People could have been walking around me, looking at me, discussing me. Someone might have been standing inches from my face and I wouldn't have known.

I had only touch.

Smell.

Taste.

And whatever Mistress chose to tell me through the collar.

The first warning I had that someone had approached was scent.

Perfume.

Floral, I thought. Something sweet underneath it.

I tried immediately to place it.

Someone I knew?

Maybe.

There were people whose perfume I recognised without ever having consciously realised that I knew it. Perhaps this was one of them.

Then something brushed my cheek.

Fabric.

Smooth.

Nylon.

My mind jumped ahead of itself.

Stockings.

Tights.

I couldn't tell which. Not yet.

The fabric moved across my face again, closer this time, and I felt the warmth of a body through it.

I tried to imagine who was standing over me.

Height was impossible to judge from this position. Build wasn't much easier. All I had was pressure, scent and the occasional fleeting contact with my face.

A hand touched my chin.

Fingers.

Short nails, I thought.

No rings that I could feel.

The hand tilted my face as far as the cushions allowed.

Then I felt the first pulse against my balls.

I obeyed.

Afterwards, when the person moved away, I immediately began cataloguing what I knew.

Sweet perfume.

Nylon.

Short nails.

No obvious jewellery.

Was that enough?

Of course it wasn't.

But I had nothing else to do.

The next few blurred more quickly.

Warm perfume. Vanilla, perhaps.

A ring scraping lightly against my jaw.

Long nails.

Short nails.

Smooth nylon.

Something rougher.

Different hands positioning my face in different ways.

I tried to turn all of it into people.

This one had to be someone Mistress knew.

That one smelled familiar.

Surely I'd felt those fingers before.

Perhaps the woman with the ring had come back.

Perhaps the floral perfume belonged to someone I'd met outside this room.

Every time I thought I had worked one of them out, some tiny detail contradicted me.

Wrong perfume.

Wrong nails.

A ring where I didn't remember one.

No ring where I was certain there had been one before.

The whole game was impossible.

But I kept playing it.

Then there was one I thought I could be certain about.

The first thing I noticed was the scent.

Citrus.

Faint, but distinctive.

Then the nylon against my face.

And then, as she settled closer, something small and hard brushed against my lip.

Metal.

A piercing.

I couldn't tell exactly what kind. A ring, perhaps. Something through her labia or clitoral hood.

But it was there.

Distinctive.

Impossible to mistake.

I fixed it in my memory.

Citrus.

Soft nylon.

The tiny touch of metal.

That one I would recognise again.

I was sure of it.

Time became difficult after that.

There were pauses between people, but I couldn't tell how long they lasted. Sometimes I thought nobody was near me, only to feel fingers suddenly settle against my jaw.

Sometimes scent arrived first.

Sometimes touch.

Sometimes the first thing I knew was the pulse against my balls telling me that I was already expected to respond.

I started counting customers.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Then someone approached and almost immediately I smelled citrus.

My mind raced.

Her.

Nylon brushed my cheek.

And then I felt it.

The metal.

I almost smiled.

She'd come back.

I knew her.

Not her name.

Not her face.

Not anything useful about her at all.

But I knew that tiny piece of metal.

For some reason that felt like a victory.

After that, the details began to accumulate faster than I could organise them.

Perfume.

Rings.

Nails.

Nylon.

The shape of a hand against my jaw.

The particular way someone tilted my face.

I kept trying to classify them.

The woman with the vanilla scent.

The woman with the ring.

The one with the rougher stockings.

The citrus woman with the piercing.

Sometimes I thought I recognised someone and then doubted myself almost immediately.

Was that the vanilla perfume again?

Maybe.

The hand felt wrong.

Had the nails been longer before?

Another person smelled floral.

The first one?

I thought so.

Then I felt a ring.

No.

Unless I'd missed it the first time.

Another pulse.

More.

I obeyed.

There wasn't really room in my head for both things anymore.

The game and the service.

At first I had been able to do both. Catalogue every detail while still responding to whatever was demanded of me.

Now every signal dragged my attention back into the moment.

Touch.

Scent.

Taste.

Respond.

Someone left.

Someone arrived.

I stopped counting.

I wasn't sure when.

I only realised after another person had moved away that I couldn't remember what number they had been.

Seven?

Eight?

Had I reached ten?

Had some of them come back three or four times?

I tried reconstructing it from the beginning.

Sweet perfume.

Vanilla.

Citrus.

Metal.

Then—

Nothing.

A muddle of hands and nylons and perfume and warmth.

There had been rings.

Several rings, perhaps.

One person had long nails.

Or two of them had.

Someone had worn stockings that felt slightly rougher against my cheek.

I couldn't remember who.

But the piercing.

That was the one thing I still knew.

I would recognise her.

I held onto that.

Eventually someone approached, and almost immediately I caught citrus.

My mind stirred.

Her.

Then nylon against my face.

I waited.

There.

Metal against my lip.

I knew it.

The citrus woman.

She had come back again.

Except—

Was it the same place?

The metal I remembered had touched slightly lower.

Hadn't it?

Maybe this was a ring rather than a bar.

Or perhaps my head was sitting differently between the cushions.

I tried to remember exactly what I had felt the first time.

Had it been on the left?

Had there even been enough information to tell?

Could there simply be two women here with piercings?

The collar pulsed.

I obeyed.

The question disappeared.

When it came back, I couldn't remember what conclusion I'd reached.

That was new.

I had been so determined to know.

To build people out of the tiny pieces they gave me.

Perfume meant one person.

A ring meant another.

The texture of nylon.

The shape of fingers against my face.

A tiny flash of metal against my mouth.

Little identities assembled in the dark.

Now they were falling apart again.

Another person approached.

I smelled something familiar.

I didn't even try to place it immediately.

A hand touched me.

The collar signalled.

I responded.

There was nylon against my cheek.

Soft.

Warm underneath.

Perhaps I'd felt it before.

Probably.

Did it matter?

Someone else came later.

Or perhaps it was the same person returning.

I couldn't tell.

There was a scent.

There were fingers.

There was the warmth of a body.

There was the signal.

I obeyed.

For a moment I caught myself trying to decide whether I recognised the perfume.

Then I wondered why.

Knowing wouldn't change anything.

I couldn't see her.

I couldn't hear her.

I didn't know her name.

Perhaps I'd met her a dozen times.

Perhaps I'd never met her at all.

Perhaps tomorrow I would stand next to her at a bar and have a perfectly ordinary conversation without ever knowing how intimately familiar her scent had once seemed.

The thought should have bothered me.

Instead, it drifted away.

Someone touched my face.

I waited.

The collar pulsed.

My mouth opened.

There was no need to wonder who.

Another body.

Another scent.

Another taste.

Another signal.

At some point even those stopped being separate things.

They were simply the world.

The world had become very small.

Cushions against my face.

Tension in my bound body.

The cage pressing uselessly around my cock.

Warmth approaching.

Touch.

Smell.

Taste.

The collar.

Obey.

I no longer knew whether the next person had been there before.

I no longer knew whether I recognised her.

Eventually, I realised I wasn't even trying.

For the first time since Mistress had placed me on the bench, there was nothing left to solve.

No customers to count.

No identities to construct.

No little clues to preserve.

Someone was there.

That was enough.

The signal came.

I existed.