‘I’m ready,’ I say, my voice calm and steady even though I have no idea if it’s true. Suddenly I have this urge to break out of my bonds and wrap my arms and legs around him, to pull him onto me, into me, as close as possible. I want his reassurance that I’m still his, even as he turns me over to those who most decidedly aren’t him. I don’t say anything, though, just wait for him to read my mind, in that expert way he seems to do. It’s why we don’t use a safeword, because I trust him to know what I need better than I do, and he’s never let me down. He rolls on top of me, crushing me with his weight, my favourite position of all. I’m a little ashamed to admit how much I love not being able to move, how much I think about being right here when we’re apart. When I slide beneath other men’s bodies, they feel puny compared to his heft, like I could push them off merely with a roll of my hips. Even unbound, there’d be nothing I could do to push Ned off me if he didn’t want to move.

‘You’re going to be my whore today, aren’t you?’ he asks quietly. I look up at him and nod, dead serious. I feel a shudder run through me even as I am again tempted to tell him to call things off, to take it back to the realm of a hot fantasy we whisper about in between him whipping me and shoving me onto my knees to take his cock between my lips. Does it count as being close to him if I let the people he’s picked out come inside and fuck me? Will he watch, or will he walk away and leave me at their mercy? What has he told them about me? Has he actually charged them money for the chance to have me as their plaything? I don’t know any of those answers, just that I want to make him happy. Well, that’s not all, of course. There is something freeing in being so open, so helpless. I’d stopped seeing anyone else, save for, technically, my husband, in the last six months because no one else had come close to giving me what he gave me, but I’m not really a one-man woman, and I’m curious to see who would be joining us, whose cock would be entering me. Would it look like his, wide and thick, the perfect size for taking deep down my throat? Would it be so long that it intimidated me? Would he be circumcised? Would he even be a he? There are so many questions I have, all that I keep to myself, not because Ned doesn’t like questions – I’m sure he’d have loved to hear the fear in my voice – but because I don’t really want to know. I want to leave the mystery in the air for as long as possible, to taste it on my tongue when I open my mouth, hear it echo in my mind as he stares me down.

I can feel his hard cock between my legs, but maybe because he knows just how badly I want it, he doesn’t enter me, doesn’t even let me suck him off before our first guest arrives. ‘If you do a good job,’ he says, ‘I’ll let you have my come. And if you don’t, I’ll make you watch from right here while I give it to another girl.’

‘Oh god,’ I say, torn between wanting to be the very best whore I can be, and between wanting to watch him overpower another girl, watch his cock sink in and out of her sweet little mouth. By now I know his type, can eyeball a crowd and tell which one(s) he’d want to play with, which women would make him reach for his belt and make him purr a little. I like this knowledge, even as a part of me doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to go there. I wonder if he ever has those moments, if he liked it when I told him about other guys I’d been with, if he misses that, if he’s going to watch me get fucked today and jerk off.

I earn another handful of slaps across the cheek for the look on my face. ‘You want that, don’t you? You want me to bring home another whore and make her take my cock.’

‘Yes,’ I say, because it’s partly true, though ‘home’ is relative for us. I do want to see that, as long as she knows exactly where she belongs in our little universe, as long as she respects who I am in the sexual chain of command.

Then his fingers are stuffed inside my pussy, stretching me. ‘You better be ready. Your pussy has a lot of work to do today.’