reign.

The train does the last of the thinking for him. Fluorescent light the colour of old teeth. A stranger’s shoulder. Between his shoes a plastic bag keeps tapping the same ankle, a stupid metronome, and inside it a brass padlock he bought because a hardware-store window was still lit and the office had not yet let go of his neck. For a shed. He does not have a shed. By the time the doors open on his stop he has already forgotten the purchase, which is how you know an evening has begun without him.

Home is the lamp he never chose. He drops the bag by the shoes. He puts water in the kettle and does not wait for it. The notebook is still on the table from the morning, lid half-closed like a mouth that did not finish a sentence. He should eat. He should take a shower. He should not sit down. He sits down. The office day is supposed to be over. The chair disagrees. The compiler is a closed tab and still it hums in his wrists.

This time the destination is not work. A forum. Blue on black. Rooms he has only visited in his head, smelling of other people’s midnights. He tells himself he is only looking. Looking is already a posture. Looking is how a man with a forgotten padlock becomes a man who will remember it.

Her profile does not shout. That is the first wrongness. No throne. No price. A still of a woman in a doorway, zip to the throat, copper caught under cheap light, a mouth that has already decided. The bio is almost nothing. He reads it twice because his brain keeps trying to add a shop. He initiates. Of course he does. A sentence that wants to be casual and comes out like a throat-clear. Something about the still. Something about the writing. He has no idea what he is in for, which is the last honest minute he will own for hours.

She does not answer. The kettle clicks off in the other room and he does not get up. He refreshes. He hates that he refreshes. He is a grown man with a notebook and a brass secret by the door and he is refreshing a doorway like a boy. The wait gets into his cock before she types a word. That is not romance. That is occupancy arriving early, taking off its coat, sitting in the lamp-circle as if it paid rent.

When she answers it is not a conversation. It is a temperature. Sit. He laughs once at the screen because he is already sitting, and then the laugh dies, because he understands she did not mean this chair. She meant the other one. The one that makes sitting into a personality. He feels himself thicken in his work trousers like an idiot. Palms on the table, as if the wood had asked.

She lets him talk. That is the second wrongness. He tells her about the day, the meeting, the train, the tiredness. He does not tell her about the lock. She does not comfort him. She asks whether the trousers are still on. He says yes. She says good. For now. The for now lands on the back of his neck like two fingers. He could close the lid. He does not. He could eat. He does not. He remembers the bag, suddenly, all at once — brass in plastic — and the knowledge is filthy without anyone having touched him.

Then she starts to push.

Not loudly. The lamp makes a circle and she occupies it from a city he will never be invited to. He can hear, or imagines he can hear, a mug set down, a boot heel, the small private sounds of a woman who is dressed and remaining dressed. He is still in the shirt he compiled in. The contrast is a hand without a hand. She asks what else is in the room. He names a chair, a lamp, a table, a life. She names what he did not: the floor, the fact of his cock, the fact that he is still dressed like a person who went to an office. She asks him to say it without the office in it. He tries. He fails. She makes him try again, and the second attempt is uglier, and she tells him so, and the ugliness goes straight down, a humiliation so precise it feels like being seen from the inside.

He offers jokes. She does not tax jokes and she does not laugh. He offers manners. Manners are a shop. She lets him feel the shop close. A minute goes by in which she types nothing, and the nothing is denser than instruction. He almost fills it. He almost says how much do I owe, as if an evening were a ledger. He does not, quite. The almost is enough for her to smell. She tells him he is already performing. He hates that it is true. His cock has been performing since the profile, a stupid employee who came in on a day off.

Proof, she says, as if she were asking for the time. Not his face. She is not that cheap. The chair. The table. The trousers still zipped, the padlock he has not mentioned sitting in the frame like a joke he is not in on. He tells himself he will not. He takes the picture. His hands shake in a way that has nothing to do with caffeine. Send. The file leaves him. He sits in the quiet after sending like a man who has handed over a key and called it a jpeg.

She does not say pretty. She says she can see he bought something stupid. He goes cold. She has not asked for the lock and she has found it anyway, a small brass betrayal in the corner of his own proof. He types that it was for a shed. She lets the lie sit. Then she asks, mild as tea, whether he knows what she could do with a picture. Not his cock. Not his face. Just a grown man, office trousers, a padlock for no shed, a table that looks like waiting. A page. A caption. A doorway. He says please don’t. She does not promise. She does not post. The not-posting is worse. It sits in the room with them, a third animal.

Toys, she says. What he can offer. He lists like a shop because he is still trying to be useful, which is a mistake, and she humiliates the list, not the steel — the eagerness, the way he wants to be a catalogue. She picks anyway. Collar if he has one. Something for the hole. Something that bites. Something that closes. He has more than he wanted to admit. She makes him say the names out loud in the empty apartment, and his own voice makes him smaller. Clamps on the nipples under the work shirt. The shirt stays. The pain is a bright stupid line. He hisses. She tells him that is not a personality either.

Restraints next, because pain without staying is just a gym. Wrists to the chair with what he has — a belt, a cuff, the brass he bought for no shed, used at last for its real job. He has to do it himself. That is the online part, the reign that does not need a room. She is only text. She is only a still in a doorway. And still he cinches, still he sits, still he is a body arranging itself into a sentence she has not even bothered to write down. The hole gets work. The cock gets none. Brutal is a motor. He is wet and locked and ridiculous, and he is afraid in the way that makes the fear delicious, which she can hear in the gaps between his messages, and which she uses.

He asks to come. She does not even bother with no. She asks what he thinks he is for. He tries to answer like a person. She waits until the person falls off him. What remains is a wait with a pulse, a hole doing as it is told, a mouth that will say slut if she wants the word, and will hate how easy it is. She tells him he is furniture with a login. He hates that it fits. He stays. The lamp is a cheap circle. The sky has gone. Compile is dead. This is not a hobby.

Closer: the drip he is not allowed to finish. The clamps biting through the next empty minute. The belt marking the wrists he types with, hunt-and-peck, one-handed, like a man sending mail from a wreck. Distance: she is on a feed that is not him. Type. A still. A sentence. She does not look up when he makes a sound. He learns the length of an evening without a clock. He thinks if I am very still. If I am very good. If I send another picture she will come closer. She hears furniture. She scrolls.

When she finally gives him a line that is almost kindness it is only this: sleep when she says, toys out unless she says overnight, which she does not. Collar can stay if the hardware needs it. Hands off. He will not come. He says yes. He means it in the way a body means a weather. Enjoyment and fear have stopped being two animals. They are one wet thing in his lap that does not get a name.

He thinks the twist will be that she posts the proof. She does not. She never needed the jpeg. She has the evening. She has the padlock he carried home before he knew her name. She has a man who sat down after work and became, by the time the mug went cold, a wait. Tomorrow he will go to the office like a person. Tonight he is steel in a chair, online to a woman who has not taken off a single thing, and the page you are reading is the feed she was on while he bargained. You are still sitting. She still has not come over. The brass is still on the table. She still has not asked for it. He will leave it there anyway.