The whistle goes at 5:30 and my first thought is not where am I.
My first thought is the cage.
It is right there, snug and cool and smaller than it felt last night, and my cock has spent the whole night trying to fill it. I wake up aching in a way that is almost funny. Morning wood in plastic. The tag with KELLER on it taps my thigh when I swing my legs out of the bottom bunk.
Above me Jace drops down like he has done this a hundred times. Across the room Theo is already on his dorm tape, standing, hands behind his head, eyes on the wall, shaking slightly. Bennett is last out of bed. He is not caged. He refused to ask. I can see exactly how that went for him overnight, because he is standing on his tape with his hands laced behind his head and his cock pointing straight at the ceiling, and he is red to the ears.
Maddox is in the doorway with the stopwatch.
"Morning stance. Thirty seconds."
I make it in twenty. Bare feet on the tape. Grey shorts off and folded on the bunk, because the rule sheet says stance is issued, and issued means bare. Fingers laced. Elbows wide. Chin up.
The belt lines from yesterday are a bruised map across my ass. I can feel every one when I lock my knees, so I don't lock them.
Maddox walks the line.
He stops at Jace and taps the cage with one knuckle like he is checking a melon. Jace does not flinch. He stops at Theo and checks the lock, then lifts Theo's chin a quarter inch. He stops at me.
"Night?"
"Long, Trainer Maddox."
"Good." He flicks the tag on my cage. "Long is the lesson."
Then he stops at Bennett.
He looks at Bennett's cock for a long, bored moment, the way you look at a dog that has gotten into the trash.
"Proud," Maddox says.
"Yes, Trainer."
"How did proud sleep?"
Bennett's jaw works. "Badly, Trainer."
"Write that down in your head," Maddox says, and moves on.
Breakfast is oatmeal and black coffee and silence. Then the drill hall.
Rourke is waiting at the far end beside the correction bench, arms folded, belt on his hips. There is a new line of tape on the floor this morning, about two meters out from the wall, and four small square cushions spaced along it.
"Phrase drill," Rourke says. "Kneel."
We drop. Clean, this time. Even Bennett. Knees on the cushions, ass on heels, hands on thighs, eyes down.
"You will learn four phrases today," Rourke says. "You will say them when they are required and never when they are not. You will say them clearly enough that a trainer across the hall can hear every syllable. If you mumble, you repeat. If you add words, you repeat. If you make a joke, you will learn why we do not make jokes."
He holds up one finger.
"Yes, Trainer."
Two fingers.
"Thank you for the correction, Trainer."
Three.
"Permission to speak, Trainer."
Four.
"I need help managing, Trainer."
He lets the last one sit in the air. Theo's breath goes shaky beside me.
"The fourth phrase is not weakness," Rourke says. "Three of you used it last night without knowing it was on the syllabus. One of you didn't." He does not look at Bennett. He doesn't need to. "Now. Maddox."
Maddox clicks the stopwatch.
"One," he says.
"Yes, Trainer," four voices say.
"Again. Together."
"Yes, Trainer."
"Two."
"Thank you for the correction, Trainer."
"Keller. You swallowed 'correction.' Again, alone."
"Thank you for the correction, Trainer."
"Again."
"Thank you for the correction, Trainer."
My face is hot. Saying it out loud with nothing on but a cage and yesterday's belt lines does something strange to my chest. Every time I say it, it gets a little less like a performance and a little more like something I mean.
We run it for twenty minutes. One, two, three, four, scrambled, fast, slow. Maddox calls the number, we say the phrase. Theo stumbles on three and repeats it eight times until his voice stops shaking. Jace is perfect and smug about it. Bennett is precise and furious.
And I break.
Not on purpose. It is the scared thing, the mouthy thing, the thing my high school coach used to bench me for. Maddox calls "Three" and I say, "Permission to speak, Trainer," and then, because my mouth has never in my life known when to stop, I add, "Since apparently I need a permit now."
The hall goes dead silent.
Jace actually closes his eyes.
Maddox clicks the stopwatch off. He does not say anything. He looks across the hall at Rourke.
Rourke unfolds his arms.
"Keller," he says, very calmly. "Stand up."
I stand. My knees are pink from the cushion.
"Come here."
I walk the length of the hall in front of three other naked men on their knees, and I can feel every eye in the room on my striped ass, and the cage feels about a hundred times heavier than it did at breakfast.
Rourke has pulled a plain wooden chair out from the wall. He sits in it. He pats his thigh once.
"Over," he says.
I have never been put over a man's knee in my life. I don't know how to do it. I stand there like an idiot until he takes my wrist, gently, and guides me down across his lap, my hips over his right thigh, my hands on the floor, my toes barely touching the mat on the other side. The denim of his jeans is rough against my stomach. The cage is trapped against his leg. I can feel the heat of him through everything.
"You added words," Rourke says. "Why?"
"I was scared, Trainer."
"Of what?"
I think about lying. I don't.
"Of meaning it."
He is quiet for a second. His hand settles on my ass, right over the bruises from yesterday, and I hiss.
"That's honest," he says. "Honesty gets you a hand instead of a belt. The joke still costs. Twenty. Count. And after each count you say phrase two."
"Yes, Trainer."
The first smack is right on yesterday's lines. My whole body jerks across his thigh.
"One. Thank you for the correction, Trainer."
"Two. Thank you for the correction, Trainer."
He goes slow. Steady. Each smack on top of old bruises makes the heat bloom twice, once fresh and once remembered. By eight my voice is wobbling. By twelve I am saying the phrase like it is the only sentence in the world. My cock is straining in the cage against his leg and I can feel myself leaking through the little hole at the end, a wet spot spreading on his jeans, and he must feel it, and he says nothing.
"Fifteen. Thank you for the correction, Trainer."
"Sixteen. Thank you -" my voice breaks - "for the correction, Trainer."
"Clean," he says. "Again."
"Thank you for the correction, Trainer."
"Seventeen."
By twenty I am not mouthy anymore. I am not anything. I am a body draped over a man's knee in front of my cohort, saying thank you and meaning every syllable.
His hand rests on me when it's over. Heavy. Still.
"Do you understand why the phrase exists?"
"So I mean it, Trainer."
"So you have somewhere to put the feeling," Rourke says, low enough that I think only I can hear. "You were not scared of the permit. You were scared of having nowhere to put it. Now you do."
He lets me up. I stand on shaking legs with my face wet and my ass on fire and a glistening wet patch on the leg of his jeans that he glances down at once, dryly.
"Maddox," he says. "Keller owes the floor."
Chore penance turns out to be a bucket, a brush, and the entire length of tile in the shower block.
On my knees. Grey shorts still not allowed. Maddox sits in the doorway with a coffee and the stopwatch and calls out the time every five minutes like I am running a race. The tile is cold. The brush is stiff. Every time I lean forward to scrub, my ass lifts and the fresh handprints throb on top of the belt lines, and every time I sit back on my heels the cage presses up between my thighs.
Halfway through, Bennett gets sent in to join me.
He is not caged. He is hard. He drops to his knees on the other end of the tile with his own bucket and his own brush and his ass flushed bright red - Rourke's hand, I'd bet - and he does not look at me.
We scrub in silence for a long time.
Then he says, very quietly, so Maddox can't hear, "Did it help? The cage."
I think about the long night. The ache. The way I stood in stance this morning without fighting myself.
"Yeah," I whisper. "It did."
He scrubs a while longer.
"Permission to speak, Trainer Maddox," Bennett says, loud and clear.
Maddox looks up from his coffee. "Granted."
Bennett's ears go red all over again. His brush stops.
"I need help managing, Trainer."
Maddox sets down the coffee and smiles for the first time since I arrived. It is not a nice smile. It is a satisfied one.
"Cubicle two," he says. "After the tile is done. Both of you finish the tile."
At lights out I lie on my stomach in the bottom bunk. Above me Jace is breathing slow. Across the room Theo is already asleep. By the window Bennett lies on his side with a tag that says BENNETT clicking against the bed frame every time he shifts, and every time I hear the tiny plastic tap I grin into my pillow.
My ass is a mess. Belt, then hand, then tile. The cage is snug. My knees are scraped. I am so tired my bones hum.
And I keep saying it in my head, over and over, in time with my pulse, without any trainer asking me to:
Thank you for the correction, Trainer.
I mean it every single time.
If you need somewhere to put the feeling, there's training built exactly for that at reformery.org. Slave School continues on Day 3, when Rourke picks a new demo, and it isn't Keller.
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