Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

By the time the cage came off, I was already helpless. Mistress had seen to that first: wrists fixed beside my hips, ankles spread and secured, a broad strap across my waist and another across my chest. Then came the hood, thick leather over my face with earplugs underneath. Sight disappeared, conversation disappeared, and the room itself seemed to vanish.

Only then did she unlock me.

The cage came away. Temporary access, not freedom.

Before the hood had gone on, Mistress had told me what I was there for. Training, but not mine. I was the training aide. That was all I needed to know.

I don't know when the class began. Perhaps some of them were already there; perhaps they arrived later. It became impossible to tell. For a while there was nothing, and then there were hands.

The first touch was almost clinical: fingers around my cock, a thumb across the head, a pause, a change of grip. Then nothing. Another hand arrived, or perhaps the same one returned. There was no way to know.

That was when I started trying to follow the lesson in my head. Slow. Pause. Firmer. Stop. Perhaps Mistress was demonstrating. Perhaps someone else was trying. Perhaps a hand was being corrected. I had access to none of that, only the result.

Someone found a rhythm that worked quickly. Pleasure began to build; my breathing changed and my stomach tightened as I felt myself getting close. Then the hand vanished.

Gone.

My hips couldn't follow. The restraints made sure of that. All I could do was lie there and feel the sensation recede. A demonstration, I thought. A lesson.

Another hand came eventually. Smaller, perhaps, or maybe that was just the angle. For a moment I tried to imagine the person attached to it: short nails, no rings, maybe. It didn't matter for long. The hand knew what it was doing, or Mistress knew what she was teaching. Again, I had no way to distinguish between the two.

The stimulation built slowly this time, more controlled and more patient, then stopped at exactly the wrong moment. Or the right one, depending on whose interests mattered. Mine clearly didn't.

Time became difficult almost immediately. Without sight or conversation there was nothing to attach it to, no obvious beginning or end to any interaction. There was only contact and absence, building and receding. Sometimes the technique changed abruptly enough that I was certain the person had changed; sometimes it changed gradually enough that I couldn't tell. A different grip, a different pace, a different hand. Maybe.

I tried counting edges instead.

One. Two. Three.

The third took longer, unless it was still the second. Did it count as a new edge if I hadn't fully come down from the last one? Apparently I needed rules. Nobody seemed interested in giving me any.

At one point a hand returned that felt warm, confident and familiar. I thought I recognised it, surely the same person as before. The grip was the same, the rhythm too, and then something changed. Maybe not.

I realised I had no reliable way to know whether the same woman had been touching me for twenty minutes or whether half a dozen had taken turns. How many were there? Three? Five? Ten? Had Mistress introduced me? Had she told them my name?

I hoped not.

“This is the training aide.”

That felt more appropriate.

The hand around me stopped when I was closer than I'd realised. My cock pulsed uselessly in the sudden stillness, and another hand settled against my stomach. Not sexual. Observing. Feeling the tension there.

I wondered if that was part of the lesson. Watch his breathing. Feel how tight his stomach gets. Notice the twitch. Know when to stop.

I imagined a room full of Mistresses looking down at me while my body supplied the examples. My breathing was information. My pulse was information. My cock was a gauge. Everything involuntary became useful.

That thought pushed me closer all by itself, and the hand disappeared almost immediately.

Someone had noticed.

After that, the edges blurred together. Hands appeared and disappeared without warning. Sometimes they were patient, sometimes almost cruelly efficient. Once I was taken from barely interested to desperately close so quickly that I wondered whether Mistress had been demonstrating something specific. Then nothing, long enough that I softened slightly, followed by touch again with a different technique.

Or perhaps the same one.

I didn't know.

At some point the frustration stopped feeling like a sequence of separate events and became the background state of my body: hard, close, denied, waiting.

Eventually even speculation became tiring. I stopped inventing people and trying to work out who was touching me. I stopped wondering whether a hand belonged to Mistress or one of her students. They were just hands. They knew what they were doing, or they were learning. Either way, I was what they were learning on.

That was enough.

Another edge built slowly and carefully, long enough that I had time to become certain this one was deliberate. The stimulation stayed just below what I needed, then increased slightly. My breathing deepened and my whole body tightened against the straps.

Closer.

Closer.

For one astonishing moment I thought they had misjudged. Or perhaps the lesson was finally over. Perhaps Mistress had decided I'd been useful enough. Perhaps this time I was actually going to be allowed—

Nothing.

The hand vanished. My body strained against the restraints, but there was no movement available, no hands of my own, no way to chase what had just been taken away. I lay there breathing hard into the hood, feeling the orgasm retreat one infuriating fraction at a time.

Then a hand touched my stomach lightly, almost appraisingly, and disappeared again.

I waited.

Nothing came.

Time drifted. Thirty seconds, five minutes, twenty. I had no idea.

Eventually hands returned, not to stimulate but to handle me. Fingers at my cock, something cold against the base, then the familiar pressure of the cage. For a moment I didn't understand, and then I did.

The cage slid back into place while I was still hard, still aching, still not quite settled. Mistress worked patiently, with no hurry and no accidental freedom, until the lock closed with a tiny click I felt more than heard.

Only then did the restraints begin to loosen: chest, waist, ankles, wrists. I could move again, but there was nothing left to reach for. The hood remained on and the room was still absent.

I had no idea how many women had used me, how many times I'd been brought close, or who had learned what. I only knew what I had been for: a demonstration, a gauge, a training aide. Useful precisely because I could be brought close and stopped.

The cage pressed around me.

I almost laughed.

Close only counts...