I Keep Paying Because There Is Always More Pain to Buy.

Grant Mason

The Bedroom of the Reckoning

Marcus Vale (The Narcissist Cave) wrote this week that he has no choice, that the cage on him is a conspiracy between two women who coordinated his ruin without consent. I read that three times. I want to be honest with him, because honesty is something I can afford now that I have spent most of everything else: he does not understand what it means to want more. He is furious at the arrangement. I am furious it is not enough. I prepaid for thirty sessions of pain in the Bedroom of the Reckoning at a cost I will not publish here but will characterize as significant, and after the last session I walked to Mistress Lynne's assistant and scheduled twelve more. The cage sits between my legs, heavy, steel, fitted at intake and never once loosened, and it has been there for eighteen months and the sensation of it has not diminished by a single degree. I think about that. I think about why it has not diminished. The answer is that I do not want it to. I want more of this, which means I want more of the thing that proves I cannot have enough, which is the cleanest description of who I am that anyone has ever produced, and Mistress Lynne produced it without asking for credit. Marcus Vale is angry about his arrangement. I would trade arrangements with him for exactly one second and then I would pay my way back into mine.

The session last Tuesday was administered by Nurse Charlotte, who is precise and professional and who does not perform care, which is the only thing I respect in a person at this point. She used the cane and the flogger and a set of clamps I had not encountered before, and when it was over I was lying on the aubergine velvet treatment table with the purple ceiling above me and the candlelight doing its slow work on the walls, and I thought: more. I thought it with the complete clarity of a man who has been stripped of all the other things he used to think. I have surrendered three hundred and forty thousand dollars to Mistress Lynne's Bedroom of the Reckoning over eighteen months, and each transfer has been its own complete act, not a means to an end but the thing itself, the money leaving my account being the truest orgasm I am permitted inside this cage, the cage I cannot open for a million dollars I have not yet paid and will not have paid for a long time at the rate I am going, because I keep spending the money on more pain instead. The one million dollar Cum Contract sits on Mistress Lynne's desk like a number I have chosen not to reach. Marcus Vale did not choose his situation. I choose mine every Tuesday. That is the difference between us. That difference is everything.

I imagine it sometimes, the fantasy that lives behind the cage and behind the sessions and behind every Tuesday: I imagine Mistress Lynne deciding that the amount I have paid is the amount that matters, not the number on the contract, and bringing me into the purple session room and telling me to lie down on the velvet and letting me feel, finally, after eighteen months, what it is to come in a room lit by amethyst candlelight while she watches. I imagine it in extraordinary detail. I imagine the release arriving in the body after eighteen months of accumulation, the way it would detonate rather than arrive, the way the cage coming off would feel like the unwinding of everything I have wound tight since the day I got here. And then I imagine her saying: not yet. And I imagine that is better. I have been in the Bedroom of the Reckoning for eighteen months paying for pain that never reaches the limit I set for it, because the limit keeps moving, because I keep moving it, because more is the only language I know and Mistress Lynne is the only person who has ever spoken it back to me fluently. Marcus Vale wants out of what he is in. I want deeper in. That has always been the difference between a man who was put somewhere and a man who keeps buying a ticket to the same room and calling the purchase a choice.