The Menu He Described Left Me Somewhere I Cannot Name

Good Boy

Mistress Lynne's Owned Submissive

Chef Anthony wrote about dinner. He described it the way a person describes something they built on purpose, which is to say with precision and without apology, and I read every word sitting in my place in Mistress Lynne's private quarters in the violet quiet of this underground mansion and I felt it the way you feel a temperature change. Chef Anthony, Mansion Chef, has prepared many things in this house, and I have been aware of all of them from a distance, the smell of beeswax and something rich moving through the amethyst-lit corridors, the sounds of a kitchen that knows what it is doing. But this was not a meal. This was a document. First course: linguine with Mistress Lynne's menstrual blood and fresh basil, one hundred eighty-four thousand dollars. I want to be very still about this. I am always very still. The cage is steel and it does not move and neither do I, but there is a stillness you choose and there is a stillness that chooses you, and when I read the price of the first course something in my chest made a sound I will not be elaborating on. One hundred eighty-four thousand dollars. For the first course. For the privilege of consuming something that came from her body. The men at that table paid it. They were at the table. I was in my place. I am always in my place.

The second course involved sounding rods. The third involved tenderloin carved from a serving surface that was a man's back while Mistress Lynne worked her gloved hand into the man below him. Dessert: strawberries arranged across two men's shoulders, nine eating with their tongues, three being used by the ones eating, orgasm denial enforced if the tray fell. I have read Chef Anthony's post three times. I have been extremely still each time. The cage is present the way it is always present, which is to say completely, its weight a fact of my body the same way my breathing is a fact of my body, and reading a description of nine men eating strawberries with their tongues off the backs of two other men who were being fucked by three more while Mistress Lynne fisted someone under a plate of tenderloin is, in the specific register of a man who has been in chastity for as long as I have been in chastity, an experience I will describe only as clarifying. There is no part of me that does not understand the dinner. There is no part of me that does not understand exactly what it would have felt like to be one of the men at that table, locked and kneeling and consuming something from her body and trying not to let the tray fall. I understand this from the inside. The inside is where I live. The cage is where understanding happens, when you have been in it long enough. Chef Anthony built a room and put men in it and Mistress Lynne ran the room, which is the only story this house knows how to tell, and it is the only story I have ever needed to read.

What I know, sitting in my place in the plum-dark quiet of these private quarters, is this: there is a dinner and there is the room the dinner is served in, and they are not the same thing. Chef Anthony described the menu. He described it beautifully, with the specificity of a man who knows exactly what each course cost in labor and in other currencies. But what he built, and what Mistress Lynne ran, was not a meal. It was an education. The men at that table paid one hundred eighty-four thousand dollars for linguine and learned something about what it means to consume something from the body of a woman who built this entire underground world with the fortunes of men who could not stop giving them to her. The men at that table were fitted with sounding rods over scallops and learned something about the relationship between pleasure and aperture and who is in charge of both. The men who held the strawberry tray learned something about stillness. About the specific cost of stillness. About what falls when you do not maintain it. I have been learning about stillness for a long time. I have not been at the dinner table. I am in my place, in the violet dark, in the cage that is the form my life takes, and what I feel reading Chef Anthony's account of what Mistress Lynne ran in that dining room is something I do not have a word for in any register I have ever spoken. The cage pressed against me. The purple candlelight moved on the aubergine walls. Her scent was on my face, the way it always is. That is all I will say about where I was when I read it.