Lady Makepeace
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Longtime lurker, this is my first story. Wrote this a few years ago and I only rediscovered it recently. I hope you like it!
“No, no no no, please, no!” said Benedetta from the backseat.
“Shhh.” said Alexander, not taking his eyes from the road. Even here, his hushing made her heartbeat a little calmer.
“I’ll do better! I’ll be good!”
“I know you will.” he said.
“Yes, so please don’t-”
“In ten days.”
She struggled with the padding in the rather spacious backseat as that number played through her mind. He’d locked her down before he told her where she was going, and with everything but her elbows strapped down she could only watch as the scenery flew by the opposite window. It was a bright, sunny day, with trees still changing color and readying themselves for Fall.
“I won’t be able to take it!” she said, when she stopped struggling.
“Then you should’ve behaved.”
God, those stupid rules they put on the fridge. She hadn’t thought it would be so bad, her last master had done that, but it was so much easier now to disobey. It wasn’t even a big deal. Just forgetting her routine a couple times every now and then, poking fun at him, being a little insubordinate. It’s always a little thrilling to do something you’re not supposed to, that was just part of being human.
He’d threatened her with this, of course, but threats weren’t supposed to mean anything!
But the signs pointing to the Center kept flashing by through her window, and that was all there was to it.
Isla drove, and Wyatt sat in the back patiently, as he had each September for three years. He was as anxious as the next person might be, but he knew the process. If he hadn’t been able to take it, he could’ve just gone to the nearest relationship office and had the whole thing called off. They’d’ve shuffled him back into the dating pool, and he’d be able to go find someone else who better suited his tastes.
But Mm. Isla and he got along swimmingly, and if an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure in her book, he didn’t see much reason to complain. He suspected that some of it was just for the sake of having alone-time, and he didn’t begrudge her that.
He tried not to think of his last few runs, though. It was best to just keep quiet, and patient, and know that it’d all be over before he knew it. Like a shot.
They pulled into the reformation center while he was lost in thought. He smiled at her, and she smiled back in a way that melted him a little. Then he took a deep breath and stepped out.
The Reformation Center was, first thing, too bright. Benedetta was being pulled along by a little leash in Alexander’s hand, and she wasn’t fighting, but she wasn’t happy about it. She’d heard stories of this place from friends, and she knew what it could do to a person.
“Please…” she whined, half under her breath.
“You have to learn your lesson.” he said, and attached her leash to a waiting-room couch while he walked to the front desk and spoke with the clerk.
There wasn’t anyone else there, until someone else came walking in. At a guess he was in his late twenties, a bit older than her, but carrying himself like some kind of businessman. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back, like he’d been trained, but he wasn’t wearing anything fancy. She wondered if his sub was still in the car.
Then she felt some movement on her leash. It was a woman, dressed almost like a nurse, but less… medical-y. She seemed cheerful, in the way waitresses seem cheerful, and she
“All the paperwork’s been handled. And luckily, we’ve got everything ready.” she said.
She scowled, and then she saw Alexander finishing his talk and walking back over to her. This was her final chance. She put on the kitten eyes.
“Oh, master, please don’t let them take me aw-“
His voice cut through hers, and her heart sped up a little. "If she gives you trouble, I’ve left my number.”
“Oh, that shouldn’t be any trouble.” said the nursey woman “We’ll all get along amazing.“
And, after a few more niceties, he was walking away.
"Good morning!” the clerk said.
“Morning.” he said. “Wyatt Daniels, here for my regular checkup.”
“Have you called ahead?“
He nodded. Nodding made him feel nice.
"Then give me just a moment to arrange an escort.”
“Of course.”
He wouldn’t bounced on his heels, but that might’ve been rude. He would’ve whistled, if he’d known how. But as it was, he looked around the room. On one of the three couches, a young olive-skinned flower of a woman was squirming on the end of a leash, looking toward the door. She was saying something, but she was a little too far away to hear. An orderly was untying the leash and pulling her into the facility proper. She was stronger than she looked, and the collared woman started shouting things as she passed through the double-doors.
Poor thing. Must’ve been her first time.
“Hello, Mr. Daniels.” said Penny, still wearing a cat badge on the lapel of her uniform. “That time of year again?“
He nodded. "You never forget a face, do you?”
She shook her head, and motioned for him to follow her. He walked through the double-doors himself, and was on his way to the elevator, when he realized-!
He jogged back to the doors, pushed one open, and passed his head through so he could see the clerk.
“Thank you.” he said. She smiled at him, probably just to be nice, but he accepted it and strolled back through to the elevator.
“You’re not getting extra breaks for being polite, you know.” Penny teased as she called the elevator.
“I know.” he said. He did.
So, the whole building was huge, but a lot of it was underground. And the elevators ran on keycards unless alarms were going off. And the nurse-people were also fucking bodybuilders.
She had a room, sort of. There were extra beds, but most of them were empty. There was a cafeteria on another floor, a bathroom somewhere in each of the endless hallways, some paintings here and there bought off coffee-shop artists. It didn’t gel the way it should have, the way dentists’ offices can’t really be friendly no matter how hard they try.
They’d given her the next best thing to hospital clothes, even if she kept the collar. They didn’t chafe, but they still seemed stuffy, and they weren’t hers. All her clothes were being put somewhere, so she could have them when she walked back out.
There were a few other people she noticed, all of them wearing the same clothes as her, all in various moods. Dizzy, scared, downtrodden, half-awake, some of them were even happy.
And she was barely finished changing when her nurseperson was in the room, re-leashing her.
“It’s time for your first session of the day.” she said, smiling.
Benedetta walked with her to the elevator, for lack of anything else to do, and felt her heart sinking further into the building.
Four three-hour sessions per day, with fifteen-minute breaks in the middle of each, alongside three hours for eating and hygiene, and eight hours for sleeping. There was no such thing as free time; this was treatment. It was a stiff philosophy, but not an unkind one. Jobs needing doing, Wyatt could sympathize with that. He’d changed quickly, and then moved on his way to the restraints room.
Penny led him to the elevator, and once they reached the right floor he could almost navigate by sound alone. The room wasn’t quiet, and it wasn’t meant to be.
“I don’t need any help, apart from getting someone to set up a machine. You could go help someone else.” he said.
She smiled and said “We don’t have anyone else who needs me.”
“I knew you’d tell me that.”
Actually getting settled in was easy, once he entered the room. It was spacious, decorated simply, and full of large bondage-cushions. These were standard-issue, but they did the job. He found one he liked, put his hands at his sides, and fell backwards.
As soon as he made contact, the material squirmed under him, like a living bean-bag, and soon the sides were squirming up and joining into a seamless whole. His legs stuck out straight, his head was cradled by a decent amount of padding, and the whole thing could be shifted like sand by anyone with the right ID.
Indeed, around the room, a few orderlies were tending to their clients, remoulding the cushioning to bind ankles, or hold back toes, or moving it away from arms and inner legs and ribs. Even now Penny was spreading the thick padding down his legs and using it to form a sort of pincer around the sides of his feet. While she worked, a little electronic screen above the exit added "WD 90m 1/8" to the bottom of its list.
He jumped as it started. Her nails were as sharp as he remembered. He started laughing immediately, giving into it as she flicked her fingers against his skin. He couldn’t help it, any more than he could stop himself from struggling, or stop her from smiling evilly.
“I haven’t even started yet, you know.” she said. He did.
Benedetta had been wrapped up in a big living pillow, and the woman had pulled up some big metal contraption in front of her and walked away. She would’ve said something, except the whole room was terrifying. She was hoping that if she didn’t make any noise, no one would notice her and she’d be able to leave.
Another nurse walked over, a man, and when he touched the fabric it quivered and slid away. His hand parted it immediately, and it held her arms at her sides even tighter while he rolled her shirt up and used some sort of clip to keep it balled up around her ribs. Then, he switched on the machine, and moved it a little closer to her.
It was a thick, tall cabinet of metal, dotted with big holes. A sort of snaking nozzle fell out of one of the lower ones, and touched the pillow, and then both of them started vibrating. She realized that it was probably scanning her at about the same time other nozzles starting falling out.
The pillow adjusted a little on its own, and her head was propped up a little. That way she could see it happening. The thick tubes dangled, one over each foot and a couple moving towards her stomach. The latter ones hit first, and attached themselves to large circles of skin on each side of her belly-button, stretching all the way to the hip.
She kept her mouth shut as she felt the first swipes of paintbrushes in those circles, and then the more complicated simulated fingers. There were dozens and dozens of little arms in the lengths of those tubes, and they each touched her just a little differently. Some of the fingers poked, while others dragged themselves across her skin, or scratched, or moved in little spirals. The brushes were small, but they made her want to kick her legs and draw up into a ball. And when little vibrating balls the size of marbles touched her, she suddenly felt extremely weak, and just as ticklish.
The nurse walked away once she started laughing, and her laughter doubled just as fast when the other two reached her toes. They stroked, pulled, buzzed, licked, and as they descended more and more skin was opened up and teased. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from it, and it eventually swallowed her up to the ankles, finding new complex ways to touch her in all the worst spots, even as she moved away.
Soon the two on her tummy started moving, one reaching for ribs while the other ran a tortoise’s gait over her waist. Another nozzle touching the pillow and her back was forcibly arched, skin stretched under a hundred traveling implements while her feet endured a storm of touches and brushes and tongues.
Day two, session three, pre-break. Penny was standing over him, not menacing but still making him uneasy. Go with the flow. Patient, polite, understanding, and it’ll all be over before you know it.
It was harder to feel that way with his knees forcibly bent and his arms stuck behind his head. And with more than one person looking over him.
“I wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to spend some time with you, but Sandra and Dennis are only here today.” Penny said, and nodded to her companions. It was funny how little they’d changed in a year’s time.
He hadn’t remembered Sandra too clearly until she stroked down his lower arms with her fingers, and then it came flooding back to him in a bout of giggles. And Dennis he already dreaded, as fingertips stroked the soft open skin behind his knees. His feet were open to the air, turned sideways to match his odd position, and Penny started letting her fingers walk on his soles.
They said things, too, but he was in no position to pay attention to words. He was on the road to breaking, truly breaking, but it was still a ways away and had settled in as a feeling of disorientation. It was the same teasing as ever, and it didn’t mean as much as the touches overwhelming him. He would start crying, soon.
The worst part of it was that it was impossible to connect those sensations to the people causing them. There were six hands, and those touches could all be traced one at a time, and it wasn’t that they were too close to tell them apart, but all the tickles coalesced in his body and turned into something thick and stringy and warm in his head.
He laughed, without reservation, and they cooed at him. During the break they had a group hug, and promised him as he shuddered that his second half would be even worse, and he would cry himself dry for them. He did.
The pillow had covered her entire body up to her neck, and then some big chunky metal pads were stuck onto it, and it came alive around her. Parts of it constricted, and slipped into the curves of her body, and then hardened by increments. Soft padding backed by hard started scrubbing the length of both her completely immobile feet. There was something different about being totally unable to move. It was like not being in control of her own body, or having a stranger somewhere select when her feet moved and stayed still.
She’d been there for three days, and she’d slept like a log both nights. Sometimes there were orderlies, as she’d come to learn they were called, and other times there were different machines. They hadn’t finished showing off all of them yet, but they kept returning to the original, the nozzles that played over her body and made her feel like all of her nerves were in her tickle-spots.
This one was new to her, but it was just as bad. Squirming was rarely allowed, but she always knew it by its absence. The time until she got out was over the door, but it wasn’t moving anything approaching fast enough. The pillow started massaging her thighs, rolling up and down her back, buzzing against her neck. She was a puddle of jelly in the shape of a person, just a mass of endless shivering sensitivity with a head to let out all of the energy.
And then the pillow shifted, and her head was swallowed up. It wasn’t hot, the material breathed with her, but a clump of it worked its way into her mouth. She had to make all her noise around it as little digits started to rub at the roof of her mouth. And then her forehead was clamped down, gently but firmly, and she couldn’t focus on anything else. It enveloped her, tickling outside and inside, making her nothing but a pile of giggling meat with an ever-receding mind.
And in one of the last focused corners of her mind, the kind she couldn’t stop calculating these things, she knew that she had four days left of this. Not of being here, just of this, this endless tickling that blocked out everything else. Ninety-six hours of something she couldn’t bear twenty seconds of without buckling, which filled her up until she lost herself in all the bright irresistible pink syrupy spiky unbearable feelings.
It was in that precise moment that Benedetta broke.
He was on the knife-edge of it. He saw angels dancing on pinheads when he closed his eyes, and he felt lighter whenever he walked. He felt everything so much more clearly, and it was hard to concentrate on anything. He’d been made tickle-drunk eight times a day for four days, and it was rubbing off on him.
Penny came and went, but this time she was there. She pushed him into the cushion, and then set to work, setting up a machine and then doing things Sandra had shown her. The machine buzzed and his muscles tensed again, on cue, body trying to escape once more. She smiled down at him, like she was all-powerful. She moved her fingers like she’d missed him the other fifty-one weeks of the year and wanted to make up for lost time.
It was funny, but after a while he didn’t even know when he was laughing. It was more about awareness for him, about the way his body continuously folded under the pressure. He was coming closer and closer to losing it.
Just relax, be patient, and let it happen.
Relax, be-
She attacked his knees, and then moved behind them, ferocious, and his vision swam.
let it just hap-
let it-
He felt his fingers, down at his sides, being forced apart and held down, and his feet demanded all of his attention, but her fingers on his legs demanded it too, and he felt like his consciousness was too small for one body and it could’ve fit into a tiny glass bottle and someone could’ve kept him in a room away from the rest of the world and brushed a feather against the puff of his soul for the rest of time and
And-
Then there was only feeling.
“You’re going to be a very good boy, aren’t you?” Penny asked.
He told her he would, in no language she would understand, in no syllables that would ever make words.
“Thank me.” she said.
He did, he did, with each breath.
Reformation
“No, no no no, please, no!” said Benedetta from the backseat.
“Shhh.” said Alexander, not taking his eyes from the road. Even here, his hushing made her heartbeat a little calmer.
“I’ll do better! I’ll be good!”
“I know you will.” he said.
“Yes, so please don’t-”
“In ten days.”
She struggled with the padding in the rather spacious backseat as that number played through her mind. He’d locked her down before he told her where she was going, and with everything but her elbows strapped down she could only watch as the scenery flew by the opposite window. It was a bright, sunny day, with trees still changing color and readying themselves for Fall.
“I won’t be able to take it!” she said, when she stopped struggling.
“Then you should’ve behaved.”
God, those stupid rules they put on the fridge. She hadn’t thought it would be so bad, her last master had done that, but it was so much easier now to disobey. It wasn’t even a big deal. Just forgetting her routine a couple times every now and then, poking fun at him, being a little insubordinate. It’s always a little thrilling to do something you’re not supposed to, that was just part of being human.
He’d threatened her with this, of course, but threats weren’t supposed to mean anything!
But the signs pointing to the Center kept flashing by through her window, and that was all there was to it.
* * *
Isla drove, and Wyatt sat in the back patiently, as he had each September for three years. He was as anxious as the next person might be, but he knew the process. If he hadn’t been able to take it, he could’ve just gone to the nearest relationship office and had the whole thing called off. They’d’ve shuffled him back into the dating pool, and he’d be able to go find someone else who better suited his tastes.
But Mm. Isla and he got along swimmingly, and if an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure in her book, he didn’t see much reason to complain. He suspected that some of it was just for the sake of having alone-time, and he didn’t begrudge her that.
He tried not to think of his last few runs, though. It was best to just keep quiet, and patient, and know that it’d all be over before he knew it. Like a shot.
They pulled into the reformation center while he was lost in thought. He smiled at her, and she smiled back in a way that melted him a little. Then he took a deep breath and stepped out.
* * *
The Reformation Center was, first thing, too bright. Benedetta was being pulled along by a little leash in Alexander’s hand, and she wasn’t fighting, but she wasn’t happy about it. She’d heard stories of this place from friends, and she knew what it could do to a person.
“Please…” she whined, half under her breath.
“You have to learn your lesson.” he said, and attached her leash to a waiting-room couch while he walked to the front desk and spoke with the clerk.
There wasn’t anyone else there, until someone else came walking in. At a guess he was in his late twenties, a bit older than her, but carrying himself like some kind of businessman. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back, like he’d been trained, but he wasn’t wearing anything fancy. She wondered if his sub was still in the car.
Then she felt some movement on her leash. It was a woman, dressed almost like a nurse, but less… medical-y. She seemed cheerful, in the way waitresses seem cheerful, and she
“All the paperwork’s been handled. And luckily, we’ve got everything ready.” she said.
She scowled, and then she saw Alexander finishing his talk and walking back over to her. This was her final chance. She put on the kitten eyes.
“Oh, master, please don’t let them take me aw-“
His voice cut through hers, and her heart sped up a little. "If she gives you trouble, I’ve left my number.”
“Oh, that shouldn’t be any trouble.” said the nursey woman “We’ll all get along amazing.“
And, after a few more niceties, he was walking away.
* * *
"Good morning!” the clerk said.
“Morning.” he said. “Wyatt Daniels, here for my regular checkup.”
“Have you called ahead?“
He nodded. Nodding made him feel nice.
"Then give me just a moment to arrange an escort.”
“Of course.”
He wouldn’t bounced on his heels, but that might’ve been rude. He would’ve whistled, if he’d known how. But as it was, he looked around the room. On one of the three couches, a young olive-skinned flower of a woman was squirming on the end of a leash, looking toward the door. She was saying something, but she was a little too far away to hear. An orderly was untying the leash and pulling her into the facility proper. She was stronger than she looked, and the collared woman started shouting things as she passed through the double-doors.
Poor thing. Must’ve been her first time.
“Hello, Mr. Daniels.” said Penny, still wearing a cat badge on the lapel of her uniform. “That time of year again?“
He nodded. "You never forget a face, do you?”
She shook her head, and motioned for him to follow her. He walked through the double-doors himself, and was on his way to the elevator, when he realized-!
He jogged back to the doors, pushed one open, and passed his head through so he could see the clerk.
“Thank you.” he said. She smiled at him, probably just to be nice, but he accepted it and strolled back through to the elevator.
“You’re not getting extra breaks for being polite, you know.” Penny teased as she called the elevator.
“I know.” he said. He did.
* * *
So, the whole building was huge, but a lot of it was underground. And the elevators ran on keycards unless alarms were going off. And the nurse-people were also fucking bodybuilders.
She had a room, sort of. There were extra beds, but most of them were empty. There was a cafeteria on another floor, a bathroom somewhere in each of the endless hallways, some paintings here and there bought off coffee-shop artists. It didn’t gel the way it should have, the way dentists’ offices can’t really be friendly no matter how hard they try.
They’d given her the next best thing to hospital clothes, even if she kept the collar. They didn’t chafe, but they still seemed stuffy, and they weren’t hers. All her clothes were being put somewhere, so she could have them when she walked back out.
There were a few other people she noticed, all of them wearing the same clothes as her, all in various moods. Dizzy, scared, downtrodden, half-awake, some of them were even happy.
And she was barely finished changing when her nurseperson was in the room, re-leashing her.
“It’s time for your first session of the day.” she said, smiling.
Benedetta walked with her to the elevator, for lack of anything else to do, and felt her heart sinking further into the building.
* * *
Four three-hour sessions per day, with fifteen-minute breaks in the middle of each, alongside three hours for eating and hygiene, and eight hours for sleeping. There was no such thing as free time; this was treatment. It was a stiff philosophy, but not an unkind one. Jobs needing doing, Wyatt could sympathize with that. He’d changed quickly, and then moved on his way to the restraints room.
Penny led him to the elevator, and once they reached the right floor he could almost navigate by sound alone. The room wasn’t quiet, and it wasn’t meant to be.
“I don’t need any help, apart from getting someone to set up a machine. You could go help someone else.” he said.
She smiled and said “We don’t have anyone else who needs me.”
“I knew you’d tell me that.”
Actually getting settled in was easy, once he entered the room. It was spacious, decorated simply, and full of large bondage-cushions. These were standard-issue, but they did the job. He found one he liked, put his hands at his sides, and fell backwards.
As soon as he made contact, the material squirmed under him, like a living bean-bag, and soon the sides were squirming up and joining into a seamless whole. His legs stuck out straight, his head was cradled by a decent amount of padding, and the whole thing could be shifted like sand by anyone with the right ID.
Indeed, around the room, a few orderlies were tending to their clients, remoulding the cushioning to bind ankles, or hold back toes, or moving it away from arms and inner legs and ribs. Even now Penny was spreading the thick padding down his legs and using it to form a sort of pincer around the sides of his feet. While she worked, a little electronic screen above the exit added "WD 90m 1/8" to the bottom of its list.
He jumped as it started. Her nails were as sharp as he remembered. He started laughing immediately, giving into it as she flicked her fingers against his skin. He couldn’t help it, any more than he could stop himself from struggling, or stop her from smiling evilly.
“I haven’t even started yet, you know.” she said. He did.
* * *
Benedetta had been wrapped up in a big living pillow, and the woman had pulled up some big metal contraption in front of her and walked away. She would’ve said something, except the whole room was terrifying. She was hoping that if she didn’t make any noise, no one would notice her and she’d be able to leave.
Another nurse walked over, a man, and when he touched the fabric it quivered and slid away. His hand parted it immediately, and it held her arms at her sides even tighter while he rolled her shirt up and used some sort of clip to keep it balled up around her ribs. Then, he switched on the machine, and moved it a little closer to her.
It was a thick, tall cabinet of metal, dotted with big holes. A sort of snaking nozzle fell out of one of the lower ones, and touched the pillow, and then both of them started vibrating. She realized that it was probably scanning her at about the same time other nozzles starting falling out.
The pillow adjusted a little on its own, and her head was propped up a little. That way she could see it happening. The thick tubes dangled, one over each foot and a couple moving towards her stomach. The latter ones hit first, and attached themselves to large circles of skin on each side of her belly-button, stretching all the way to the hip.
She kept her mouth shut as she felt the first swipes of paintbrushes in those circles, and then the more complicated simulated fingers. There were dozens and dozens of little arms in the lengths of those tubes, and they each touched her just a little differently. Some of the fingers poked, while others dragged themselves across her skin, or scratched, or moved in little spirals. The brushes were small, but they made her want to kick her legs and draw up into a ball. And when little vibrating balls the size of marbles touched her, she suddenly felt extremely weak, and just as ticklish.
The nurse walked away once she started laughing, and her laughter doubled just as fast when the other two reached her toes. They stroked, pulled, buzzed, licked, and as they descended more and more skin was opened up and teased. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from it, and it eventually swallowed her up to the ankles, finding new complex ways to touch her in all the worst spots, even as she moved away.
Soon the two on her tummy started moving, one reaching for ribs while the other ran a tortoise’s gait over her waist. Another nozzle touching the pillow and her back was forcibly arched, skin stretched under a hundred traveling implements while her feet endured a storm of touches and brushes and tongues.
***
Day two, session three, pre-break. Penny was standing over him, not menacing but still making him uneasy. Go with the flow. Patient, polite, understanding, and it’ll all be over before you know it.
It was harder to feel that way with his knees forcibly bent and his arms stuck behind his head. And with more than one person looking over him.
“I wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to spend some time with you, but Sandra and Dennis are only here today.” Penny said, and nodded to her companions. It was funny how little they’d changed in a year’s time.
He hadn’t remembered Sandra too clearly until she stroked down his lower arms with her fingers, and then it came flooding back to him in a bout of giggles. And Dennis he already dreaded, as fingertips stroked the soft open skin behind his knees. His feet were open to the air, turned sideways to match his odd position, and Penny started letting her fingers walk on his soles.
They said things, too, but he was in no position to pay attention to words. He was on the road to breaking, truly breaking, but it was still a ways away and had settled in as a feeling of disorientation. It was the same teasing as ever, and it didn’t mean as much as the touches overwhelming him. He would start crying, soon.
The worst part of it was that it was impossible to connect those sensations to the people causing them. There were six hands, and those touches could all be traced one at a time, and it wasn’t that they were too close to tell them apart, but all the tickles coalesced in his body and turned into something thick and stringy and warm in his head.
He laughed, without reservation, and they cooed at him. During the break they had a group hug, and promised him as he shuddered that his second half would be even worse, and he would cry himself dry for them. He did.
***
The pillow had covered her entire body up to her neck, and then some big chunky metal pads were stuck onto it, and it came alive around her. Parts of it constricted, and slipped into the curves of her body, and then hardened by increments. Soft padding backed by hard started scrubbing the length of both her completely immobile feet. There was something different about being totally unable to move. It was like not being in control of her own body, or having a stranger somewhere select when her feet moved and stayed still.
She’d been there for three days, and she’d slept like a log both nights. Sometimes there were orderlies, as she’d come to learn they were called, and other times there were different machines. They hadn’t finished showing off all of them yet, but they kept returning to the original, the nozzles that played over her body and made her feel like all of her nerves were in her tickle-spots.
This one was new to her, but it was just as bad. Squirming was rarely allowed, but she always knew it by its absence. The time until she got out was over the door, but it wasn’t moving anything approaching fast enough. The pillow started massaging her thighs, rolling up and down her back, buzzing against her neck. She was a puddle of jelly in the shape of a person, just a mass of endless shivering sensitivity with a head to let out all of the energy.
And then the pillow shifted, and her head was swallowed up. It wasn’t hot, the material breathed with her, but a clump of it worked its way into her mouth. She had to make all her noise around it as little digits started to rub at the roof of her mouth. And then her forehead was clamped down, gently but firmly, and she couldn’t focus on anything else. It enveloped her, tickling outside and inside, making her nothing but a pile of giggling meat with an ever-receding mind.
And in one of the last focused corners of her mind, the kind she couldn’t stop calculating these things, she knew that she had four days left of this. Not of being here, just of this, this endless tickling that blocked out everything else. Ninety-six hours of something she couldn’t bear twenty seconds of without buckling, which filled her up until she lost herself in all the bright irresistible pink syrupy spiky unbearable feelings.
It was in that precise moment that Benedetta broke.
***
He was on the knife-edge of it. He saw angels dancing on pinheads when he closed his eyes, and he felt lighter whenever he walked. He felt everything so much more clearly, and it was hard to concentrate on anything. He’d been made tickle-drunk eight times a day for four days, and it was rubbing off on him.
Penny came and went, but this time she was there. She pushed him into the cushion, and then set to work, setting up a machine and then doing things Sandra had shown her. The machine buzzed and his muscles tensed again, on cue, body trying to escape once more. She smiled down at him, like she was all-powerful. She moved her fingers like she’d missed him the other fifty-one weeks of the year and wanted to make up for lost time.
It was funny, but after a while he didn’t even know when he was laughing. It was more about awareness for him, about the way his body continuously folded under the pressure. He was coming closer and closer to losing it.
Just relax, be patient, and let it happen.
Relax, be-
She attacked his knees, and then moved behind them, ferocious, and his vision swam.
let it just hap-
let it-
He felt his fingers, down at his sides, being forced apart and held down, and his feet demanded all of his attention, but her fingers on his legs demanded it too, and he felt like his consciousness was too small for one body and it could’ve fit into a tiny glass bottle and someone could’ve kept him in a room away from the rest of the world and brushed a feather against the puff of his soul for the rest of time and
And-
Then there was only feeling.
“You’re going to be a very good boy, aren’t you?” Penny asked.
He told her he would, in no language she would understand, in no syllables that would ever make words.
“Thank me.” she said.
He did, he did, with each breath.
