Archive of Our Own

Yes, the tapes were unmarked, but it wasn’t as if Juli had no idea what might be in them, considering the scandal that had been painting the papers on and off for the past month. Her uncle Geraldo had been arrested for being one of the eight key members of a child prostitution ring. Juli’s politician mother was furious, and her fury had choked the dining room for the past weeks.

Juli, fifteen, wished it weren’t summer holidays. Geraldo had been her favorite uncle out of six, and lack of school gave her too much time to think about his arrest. She alternated between trying to comprehend that Geraldo had sodomized a seven year old boy just four months ago, and that Geraldo was going to spend the rest of his life in an asteroid quarry ship. It was hard to share this complicated grief with anyone. Father would not speak of it – Geraldo was his brother – and Juli’s mother was the one who had pressed for the harshest punishment possible. Juli’s sister, who had also idolized Geraldo, was ten, and not suitable to discuss with.

So Juli wandered the Oquendo residence in a slow, unhappy daze, and eventually found herself – of course – at the suite facing the lake, where she and Geraldo had spent a lazy summer fishing just last year. And, of course, eventually, she went into the bedroom Geraldo took every time he was here at the lake house.

It was in this bedroom that she found the tapes.

If Geraldo had been less obviously guilty, the bedroom would have been scoured weeks ago by police officers. But they hadn’t had to bother. They’d found him red-handed, or red-dicked, as Juli’s mother had put it in a conversation with Juli’s father that had not been meant for their children’s ears. So Juli was able to find, under the bed, a cardboard box with a set of unmarked black tapes. There were thirty of them.

There was a TV in the room. Juli locked the door.

Later, when she reviewed that afternoon to comb out her own culpability, she would be unable to overlook that: she had locked the door. She had known.

Juli liked to think that she didn’t destroy the tapes for almost five years because the Lucitano boy was so beautiful. And he was. He was one of the most beautiful human beings she had ever seen. It was true before he hit puberty and it was true when he was on the cusp of adulthood. The boy had skin like macademia cream and large gray eyes whose color looked somehow fragile, like heated glass about to shatter in a furnace. His body was like music. Every noise he made was music, too. Juli had watched pornography before and had been variably impressed by the human sex act. This boy, in every video, made it art.

But Juli, for her many flaws, was not in business of lying to herself. It was not his beauty. It was that he was hemmed in like a caged animal between two or twelve men, eyes darting and afraid. Or glazy, if they had drugged him. It was that he didn’t have a choice about it when they stripped him naked or wrapped his hand around a cock. Juli watched all thirty tapes multiple times in between the ages of sixteen and twenty because she liked that they were doing something horrible to him.

Some of the tapes were worse than others.

Although Juli eventually ordered the tapes in rough chronology. She permanently resisted the urge to label them. She learned to find her favorites by location, walking her fingers five from the right on the upper row, or three from the left on the lower.

If she had labeled those two, it would have been, “they get him so drunk him barely seems to notice” and “he breaks down crying in the middle and visibly pulls himself together afterwards”, and she could not fathom putting those words down on a sticker and pasting them to the plastic.

Even the thought of numbering them put her off - some part of her flinched from treating Geraldo’s tapes like her objects, to put stickers or markings on.

She knew, from the videos, that his name was Rafa, but when she thought of him, she called just called him the Lucitano boy.

In the very last video of the chronological sequence, he might have been fifteen, and he stared at the men bearing down on her with a strange composure. Juli liked to think the look meant, I’m getting out.

She liked to think he hadn’t been murdered, as the seven year old boy Geraldo had raped had been.

Sometimes owning the tapes felt normal – Juli would be biking home from class and think, I’m in the mood for watching tape #4 today, and feel no stranger than she would if she promised herself an extra piece of cake for acing a test. Other times she wished Geraldo a quick clean death in the asteroid belt, because she thought that this was the best she herself could hope for.

When she went to college, she kept the tapes in a lockbox. She made a show of putting love letters in there, to keep her roommates off the scent of what sort of secret she had.

In college, Juli enrolled into a social work program. And of course she chose her specialty as Lucitano studies. That fringe of mountainous land at the west of their country belonged to herdsmen who had, until glidertech, been hard to subjugate by the state. They therefore had customs that made them clumsy in the transition to modernity – primarily the custom of owning their children. So of course it was in this backwards hill-land that Rafa and the tapes of him had originated, finally finding their way to Geraldo’s hands in the eastern capital, where Juli herself in childhood had freely roamed the streets and woods, monitored by her glider, safe from rape or kidnapping.

The day her application was accepted, she tried to get very drunk. She recognized that she had the choice now of having a career that redeemed the past five years, or having one that built on the same voyeuristic sadism that the tapes had kindled in her. How little difference it made materially, to have certain tapes in her house or not, to watch them and milk more pleasure out of a suffering long past. But how much difference it made to her soul.

If she destroyed them, she recognized, she could make for herself a narrative where an evil thing had entered her life, changed her, and responding to it she had committed herself to a life of fighting that evil.

If she kept them, that narrative was barred to her. She would be something else.

Juli tried to drink about it, but the wine was unappetizing in her mouth. It tasted like a very expensive excuse from a sour terroir. So, totally sober, she opened a lockbox, took a hammer to the tape cases, and pulled out the magnetic tape. Then she took scissors to them.

She spent the next five hours cutting up the tape into smaller and smaller pieces, going through all the scissors in her house. The next morning her hand hurt so much she could barely flex it. But she had turned the key, she felt, to the door out of hell.

“You have an unusual facility with Lucitano culture,” her mentor congratulated her, after a particularly hard case. “Many of my students are shocked at the…”

“At the children shackled to the basement?” Juli said dryly. It had not shocked her because the Lucitano boy had been kept that way as well often. Two of the tapes began with retrieving him from the basement. “I knew what I was getting into.”

“The orientation material isn’t graphic about it. I think that’s one way we do a disservice to our students.”

“Publishing such warnings explicitly would make the position of Lucitanos in our country more precarious,” Juli said. “No, I really do think that it’s best that students find out the real extent of it when they come here to learn, with a mentor who can help them contextualize it.”

Juli’s mentor quirked an eyebrow. “Beautifully answered, Julissa.”

Over the next two years, half of Juli’s cohort left the program. Juli, though, was leading the pack. She went to Porto Lucitano, which wasn’t the cushiest posting but the one closest to power – it was the bustling port she’d first arrived at, and one of the few places in Lucitan that could be called a city.

While she took her administration course, and juggling a caseload of almost two dozen. Juli liked work. Between her efficacy and her family connections, it was clear to everyone that, if she wanted it, she could be Minister of Cultural Harmonization in fifteen or even ten years.

A big difference, Juli secretly thought, was that she enjoyed the actual hands-on social work. Where it drained and depressed others, it fed her. The part of her that hadn’t been able to sleep after watching tape #19 was long gone.

She had a male patient, now nineteen years old, who had sobbed to her not about his rape by his older brother, but about the time he’d needed to piss during his rape and been denied a break until he went over himself. His older brother had cuffed him and pushed him out into the living room, where his father had seen, and looked away, disgusted. Juli had held him – one of her exceptions to the no-touch advice therapists were given (although they were also given the discretion to break it when it seemed appropriate). He had cried for half an hour into her neck and she had felt fully content.

He was doing well now. He was on track to get a permit to work in the city next year, escape the Lucitan hills. Juli had helped him do that. He liked her as he would an older sister.

In general Juli seemed to make Lucitan patients, especially male ones, feel safe enough to open up to her about their family abuse. This, too, made Juli feel content.

Juli met a lot of murdered kids. Killing your kids was legal under Lucitan law but not central law, and it was always a muddle that depended on the situation. A lot of the time it was because the kid had been raped in an illegal way and the owner had wanted to dispose of the evidence.

A lot of what happened to Rafa had been very illegal. The drugs they’d given him – that was illegal. The filming – that was illegal. But most of all, exporting those films outside of Lucitan was a no-no. Child pornography was illegal everywhere in the country, but it was enforced harshly on the mainland and almost not at all in Lucitan, because it was such a lost cause culturally.

Rafa’s father, the guardian, had no doubt been complicit in producing and distributing those tapes. He must have been afraid, especially as Cultural Harmonization became an increasingly powerful force in Lucitan, succeeding the gangs that had succeeded the historic chieftains.

So, simple conclusion: Rafa was dead. It would be insane to try to find out what had become of him – and stupid. The statistics were so stark. Kids who were raped normally got to grow up. Kids who were taped being fed ecstasyl so they wouldn’t scream when throatfucked didn’t.

“Give a talk at the upskilling conference,” Eusebio said. “You care about it, you’re good at it.”

“And you get to be the guy who got Speaker Oquendo’s daughter to come out in favor of his program, huh?” Juli laughed. “Thumb your rival’s nose?”

“That too,” Eusebio said.

Eusebio’s family was wealthy, and Juli wanted him to owe her a favor. So she went and gave the talk in one of faded buildings of the city’s university.

It was open to the public, and natives kept trickling in. (Armed building and personal security ringed the auditorium, looking nervous. They were most suspicious of young Lucitan men, who were searched physically before being admitted.) Juli, shuffling her notes for the talk, took a second to appreciate how easy it was to tell apart mainlanders from Lucitanos, despite their physical similarity – Lucitanos had a skinny, endangered look, with quick-moving eyes and tense shoulders.

She didn’t notice Rafa until the very end of her talk, which was good. Three minutes before wrapping up, she saw his face and trailed off mid-sentence, looking blindly at her lectern. It was just not possible. But why shouldn’t it be? What about reality had precluded this? Nothing. Staggering, she picked up her sentence somehow. “…many cultural factors inhibit Lucitano workers from success in the mainland, and the best models for success involve matching workers up to host families.”

She looked at the desk more than was normal as she gathered her papers up. She did not want to see Rafa leave. She did not want to wonder where he lived, what kinds of clothes he wore now that, presumably, he had control over his own wardrobe. But then out of the corner of her eye, she saw a lean figure approach, with that kind of under-controlled shamble that typified Lucitanos who had ecstasyl overuse in their past or present. Dread formed a fist in her stomach.

“Dr. Oquendo,” said the Lucitano boy. “Are you, are you open to questions? From me?”

She had to swallow before saying, “Ah, perhaps. I am not sure of my schedule. It may be that I don’t have time.”

“Of course,” he said humbly as Juli pretended to check her itinerary. “I never meant to waste your time. I’m sorry.”

The servility was familiar, but not his voice, which had become a husky murmur. The man himself was taller than Juli had expected. He wrung his hands. Juli saw the blue pass that marked him as a student of the university. He was taking some class with them, and much like any native in Porto Lucitano with an education, he probably wanted to emigrate to the mainland. Away from the childhood he’d escaped.

Juli said, “Actually, my next hour is free.”

Looking around the room, which was already filling in with attendees of the next talk, she added, “My office is just two blocks away. It would be the most convenient place for a talk.”

The Lucitano boy sat down at her worn velvet couch. He said, “This is as comfortable as a therapist’s office.”

“I am a therapist,” Juli said. “I still like to do the legwork with Lucitano citizens. The real stuff. It takes up about half of my workload.”

He smiled awkwardly. “Hopefully this won’t be too much like work. I wish to ask technical questions only. About the host family system?”

“Don’t hold out to find a family,” Juli said immediately. “Supply five times over wouldn’t be enough to meet the demand.”

“I understand,” said the Lucitano boy.

“What’s your name? What are you hoping for in the mainland?”

“Rafael Magalhães. I am studying to become an electro tech. But I am a whore by profession, and everyone knows it, and they will use me only for that purpose and not recognize any other profession I wish to move to. It is because my father gave my contract to someone I do not know, and until I find my owner, everyone in the world will perform as owner. I was wondering if there’s any chance the mainland government can write an ownership form for me that can legally override that contract, the one I cannot find or fulfill? Perhaps it can belong to my host family? I would not mind that so much – belonging to a family rather than the whole world – and perhaps I can jump the queue that way, if I let them own me. What do you think, Dr. Oquendo?”

Juli stared in amazement, and the Lucitano boy started to wilt. She said, “How do you spell your last name?”

She searched for him in the university system. To her surprise, she found him. To her surprise, he was still enrolled. And to her surprise, he was performing in the top decile. He would make the cut for a mainland work permit for sure – if only he weren’t insane. She said, “Rafael, I want you to take a drugs test for me.”

“I’m not on anything,” he said, but when she gave him a hard look he folded immediately. He was a man used to being given drug tests. She took him to the bathroom, where he gave her an apprehensive look.

She said, half-telling the truth, “It’s standard procedure. I have to make sure you’re not cheating.”

He nodded. He unzipped his pants and took out his cock to piss into the cup. It was flaccid, silky and berry-flushed. Juli knew all too well what it looked like erect. She made a show of politely looking away once she’d checked that he was using his own urine.

Back in the office, the tests for the common street drugs came out negative one by one. They studied the tabs on the test strips in silence. Juli said, “I had to check that. Rafa – may I call you Rafa?”

The Lucitano boy went white and rocked back into his seat. He said, “See, even you know – you’re part of it!”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Juli said. “Rafa is a common nickname. But you prefer Rafael?”

“Very much so, please,” mumbled Rafa.

“Then I’ll say that. Rafael, you’re going to be have to be specific. What happened to your father?”

“He sold my contract when I was sixteen. I’m not sure to whom – it could have been any of twenty clients, or a stranger. Maybe even a mainlander. He didn’t tell me who, and then he died.”

Rafael had a marking on his record that indicated a brief prison stay. Juli clicked on it for details – the prison stay was when he’d been sixteen. Patricide. Just two months locked up. He was let out on insufficient evidence from a follow-up investigation, but Juli could read between the lines. Cultural Harmonization had had a meeting about him and decided to let him out – who could blame a slave-child who’d killed his owner?

“How did he die, Rafael?”

“I don’t know how he died. I think a feud with one of his business associates. I never even saw the body.”

“And when do you mean by everyone in the world acting as owner to you?”

“Strangers take me aside and fuck me a lot,” said the Lucitano boy. “Sometimes they give me money and sometimes not.”

“You never fight back?”

Rafa looked genuinely astonished at this idea. “That wouldn’t be right, Dr. Oquendo! I’d be beaten… I’d go to prison again. It’s their legal right to have me, and even kill me if I resist.”

“Hm,” Juli said, and smiled thinly. “Do you have a case worker, Rafael?”

“No. I don’t need one.”

Interesting. He must be half-right about that, to have slipped through the cracks. “Well, Rafael, the bad news is that your host family can’t own your contract. It is totally illegal in the mainland, despite the rumors that go around in Lucitan that they aren’t so pure as that. But I think we have a solution to your problem – I can put in for a contract that overrides the one you’re worried about, give you a concrete owner, and then set you free formally so you can go work in the mainland. How does that sound?”

“Would that really work?” the Lucitano boy said. His beautiful face was an expressive masterpiece of hope and consternation.

“Yes,” Juli said. “I think I can have it done in a week, even. Do you have anyone in mind, Rafael, that would be suitable? Do you have any living family you trust?”

“I am not in touch with my family, Dr. Oquendo. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry, Rafael. Any friends at school you trust?” He wouldn’t. He was older than most of his schoolmates. Probably they raped him. A beautiful classmate, half-tethered to reality, who moved like a victim – those skittish little movements.

Juli felt her teeth grind slightly in anticipation. Her hands were flexing agitatedly under the desk. So close to – what endpoint? What brilliant dark hare was she chasing blindly in the woods? She couldn’t tell yet, but she had the scent, and to stop was unthinkable.

“There are a few classmates,” Rafael said uncertainly. “Who might be pleased…”

“Are they responsible?” Juli said smoothly. “Would they set you free on schedule? Would the mainlander evaluating your application consider you to have been under a good influence?”

“I don’t know,” said the Lucitano boy, wringing his hands.

“Then I think you’re best off with a Cultural Harmonization employee,” Juli said. “For the good of your work application.”

Rafael nodded.

Juli said, smoothly, “If you have any past case workers you’re on good terms with, you can contact them and see if they have the capacity. I have openings this month, so I could serve as well, although I’m sure you’ll want someone you know better. Perhaps the one who handled your case after your father’s death?”

“No, not him,” Rafael muttered. He rocked back and forth for a few seconds. “I don’t really have anyone, Dr. Oquendo. It would be really kind of you to… to take me.”

“I’ll get the paperwork started today,” Juli said. “Come see me next Friday to sign it.”

I won’t rape him, Juli thought, of course not, after everything he’s been through.

And also: Of course I’m going to rape him. After all these years he falls into my lap – to turn that down?

But I wouldn’t hurt him…

Of course I’d hurt him.

Those were my favorite tapes.

Juli handed the paperwork to him. She’d spent the good part of an evening fabricating them. She’d rifled through legal records and some of her own patients’ records to see what terms and wording would be realistic.

“Are you satisfied that mainland authority will override your father’s contract?” she said, when Rafa had made a full pass.

“Yes,” Rafa said, looking rather amazed. “There’s no way he got all those authorizations when he sold me. You make it sound like it was illegal for him to sell me?”

A pause. Juli said smoothly, “Why not?”

“This document says a contract transfer is void if the slave was regularly injected with class H substances for sexual compliance.”

“Among other things. Your father did that to you?”

“I think so,” said the Lucitano boy. “Yes.”

“Then you are legally in the complete clear,” Juli said. “You only have one owner – me. If anyone you meet gets confused and tries to act as your owner anyway, you are to resist them and declare they’re in violation of mainland law.”

“Should I name you to them, master?”

“My family is quite powerful, Rafael – to throw my name about would… well, it would shame you. You would seem like a power-chaser. And I’d look weak, for owning a slave who was too eager to name-drop.”

Rafael said humbly, “I didn’t think of that. I’m sorry.”

Juli said, “Are you ready to sign?”

“Yes.” He took a pen from a desk and did. “Is that it?”

“That’s it,” Juli said easily. “I own you now. No one else does.”

Rafael burst into tears.

Juli sat down next to him and pulled him into a hug. “There there,” she murmured. He was wonderfully warm, even if his clothes didn’t smell very good. “Everything will be all right.”

Juli thought of tape #28, the one where they made Rafa masturbate at the beginning and the end. He was on the older side in that one, maybe fifteen. No bruises on him at the beginning, almost – it must have been a restful month. His curly black hair was messy – attractively rumpled – almost a halo. He smiled at the camera and started fucking himself with his fingers while pulling at his cock.

He came within minutes, and a voice off screen said, “Good boy. Now give us another one.”

The boy’s face scrunched up and he kept going without a pause. The second orgasm was small but fast. His dick drooled weak cum. He smiled, uneasily now, at the camera.

Then they crowded in and fucked him, big ugly cocks in the boy’s face, in his hands, shoved into his ass. This was one of the ones where they wanted him to smile, which Juli hadn’t liked so much. She liked the ones where Rafa was genuine. The ones where he was scared and screaming. So she tended to skip the middle part, and go straight to the end, when they forced Rafa to come again.

The contrast was uncanny. Rafa was sniffling – he had choked on six cocks and cried on them – and covered with bite marks. Bruises were starting to bloom all over his body. “One last,” coaxed someone off-camera. And Rafa, high on aphrodisiacs, said, “Yes, father,” and obeyed, jerking his abused cock and hole with shaking hands. He screamed out the last one, a long wretched wail, and collapsed onto the side, sobbing.

The first time Juli had had seen that tape, eleven years ago, she had thought: this boy is some kind of sprite. Some creature made just for sex. The way he unhesitatingly obeys every command, the way he comes so copiously and loudly – he is perfect.

She had also thought: My god, how badly they must have beat him off-screen to make him react so quickly and obediently to anything that made him do.

And then she had come to that thought.

What had she destroyed those tapes for, six years ago? They were engraved into the walls of her mind’s basement. She could replay them as she pleased. What a waste of pornography.

Juli was slow about it. She’d been obsessed with Rafa for eleven years – she wasn’t going to jeopardize her operation by hurrying. Rafa came in every other week, and when she saw him struggling, she checked her schedule and said that she might be able to swing weekly, if he needed – as a temporary measure. He gratefully accepted. And in that time he told her about her childhood.

“Did you ever enjoy it?” Juli asked one time, unable to resist.

“I mean, when they drugged me… always,” the Lucitano boy said. “You probably don’t know, but you enjoy everything when you’re on ecstasyl. No matter what it is. I knew the comedown would be horrible and I would hurt… but that was all the more reason to try to enjoy it. When things felt good I had to take it.”

“Do you still use ecstasyl?”

“I try not to. I’ve fried enough of my brain on it… everyone from school, and Cultural Harmonization, tells me that. I take it seriously, Dr. Oquendo, I do! But a couple times a year…”

“A couple times of a year isn’t too bad,” Juli said, and it was true. “Especially if you’re taking a low dose. But the next time you have a craving, you’re to call me immediately.”

Another time she asked about his father. “Did you love him?”

“Of course,” Rafa said, surprised. “All children love their parents.”

It amazed Juli, the Lucitan insistence on this matter. Right here where treatment of children was worst, the bonds were tightest. She said, “What about when he fucked you?”

“He made it feel good, a lot,” Rafa insisted. “And it was his right to. Everyone knows that.”

“Indeed,” Juli said. And now it was her right.

Her skepticism seemed to make him slightly angry. She liked that. It was new. In none of the tapes had he shown even the slightest anger. It was hers, to quash or punish or nurture, as she pleased. He said, “It isn’t the way you mainlanders paint it – like we’re just squalling victims. I asked for it plenty of times. I’d go to his room.”

Juli’s eyes narrowed. She had the saliva-pang feeling of scenting prey again. “You’d go into his room?”

“Yes. I’d play with myself, prep myself with lube, and tease him until he took me. I would come so much, especially when it was just him. It was worse when his friends were around… actually, everyone was worse when their friends were around. When people took me solo, they were quite gentle.”

“If you’d had a mother, would you have gone to her too, for pleasure?”

“I think so,” said the Lucitano boy, blushing. “I haven’t been with many women, but I like them. If my mother had been willing, I would have liked to serve her as well.”

Juli changed the subject, but the flush on Rafa’s face stayed for several minutes, which pleased her.

Once, instead of having a session, they went out to the commercial quarter and Juli bought him clothes. She told him it was a legitimate use of case budget, since he would look more employable at work permit interviews. She decided he looked best in light warm brown, slate blue, and a light glassy silver that brought out his eyes wonderfully.

She also bought him a collar, which had no legal purpose anymore in Lucitan, but still served as a potent cultural marker: stay off. Touch my property at your peril. Rafa stared in wonderment at the solid gold band “Are you sure?” he said. “It looks expensive.”

“That’s the point. People wouldn’t dare touch you.”

She felt satisfaction beyond almost anything else she’d experienced when Rafa walked back to her office wearing it.

A month after that he got itchy. He arrived in her office and said, without looking at her, “I was – I was bad, master. There was a man in my neighborhood who was looking at me. But he saw the collar and didn’t approach.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I wanted him to. I – walked back the block, as if I’d forgotten something, just to give him more time to do something, if he wanted to. But he didn’t.”

“How dare you?” Juli said softly.

Rafa blinked in shock. “What?”

“How dare you tempt a random Lucitano to tamper with my property?”

Tears sprang into Rafa’s eyes. “I’m sorry! I didn’t think of it like that. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“Mind?” she hissed. “Am I your owner or not?”

Rafa went on his hands and knees on the floor and touched his forehead to the floor, in traditional Lucitan supplication. “I’m sorry, Dr. Oquendo. I won’t let that happen in the future.”

“Come here,” she said, and when he made to get up, added, “Crawl.”

He flinched and got on his hands and knees. He looked uncertain when he was within a few feet of her.

Juli spread her legs.

“Oh,” he mumbled, and crawled closer. Tentatively he placed his face between her legs. “Is this what you?–”

“Yes,” Juli said, and bucked against his face. His beautiful eyes squeezed shut and he moaned. “Stay there until I come.”

She ground against his face, feeling the delicate bones of his nose and mouth with her cunt through two layers of fabric. He stayed still, breathing increasingly rapidly.

“Are you hard?” she murmured.

“Yes.”

She wanted to see if she could make him come just with words. She’d seen it in several of the tapes, and had never been able to tell how staged it was. (Was it really the words, or extensive edging, or drugs?) “When is the last time you masturbated?”

“Oh. I don’t know. I don’t masturbate.”

“Really?”

“I don’t like to.”

“What a badly educated whore you are,” she said. “You held off until you were so horny you were going to offer yourself up to a stranger in your neighborhood. Like a bitch in heat.”

“No,” he cried out against her cunt. His hips bucked. “I wouldn’t.”

“No? But you’re on the verge of coming right now, aren’t you? Just from this. What does that make you?”

He sobbed something in between her legs, and she jammed her pelvis up against the elegant bones of his face and orgasmed. The clitoral contact was barely satisfactory but she was so worked up that getting the right angle just a few times made her come explosively. She grabbed his gorgeous hair and swore into her office.

Juli had heard him come hundreds of times. She might have missed it if she didn’t know him so well, but his voice hitched and he made a drunk-sounding uh, uh. She pushed him back onto the floor so she could see his expression. He had been crying a bit, and his plush mouth was wet. He had drooled over her pants.

This suited Juli fine.

She guided him to the sofa and put her arms around it while he sobbed it out. “Hush,” she said. “I forgive you.”

“It won’t happen again,” he said. “I’ll come to you. I’m sorry I had to be taught the lesson.”

“It was my fault, too,” Juli said, carding through his hair comfortingly. “I should have realized you need to be fucked. A life like that – of course a drought is hard on you.”

Rafa’s breathing was raspy, wary. “You’ll use me again?”

“Yes, I believe I will,” said Juli to the man who had made her a monster.

Thirtieth session. Thirtieth tape.

"Did they ever fuck you publicly, Rafael?"

Rafa was naked on her couch except for the collar. He said, "Yes. Sometimes they took me out to games at the stadium. I'd sit on someone's lap... they'd gamble, and I'd hike my pants up and walk over to whoever had won on the latest score. Then I'd sit down on them and they'd fuck me for the next bit."

He got half-hard as he spoke.

There were one tape filmed at those very games. It had never been Juli's favorite – the camerawork tended to shakier, more furtive. No close ups of Rafa's face. But the idea had excited her.

He added, "The louder ones tried to come in time to the whole crowd cheering."

Juli said, "You said in one of our earlier positions that this was physically your favorite position – riding someone, sitting in their lap."

"Yes, Dr. Oquendo."

He'd been glancing nervously at the strap-on she was wearing since he'd walked in. When Juli said nothing, he slowly got on the floor. He knew better now than to walk around her. If he had to get around anywhere in her office, to get water or to her desk to sign something, he went on his hands and knees.

The camera tracked him automatically as he went to her, following the simple transmitter embedded into his collar.

She said, "I've been thinking, since you had that close call with the stranger on your block..."

"Yes, of course, master," he said, with a hangdog look she recognized from his childhood, when he was being punished for failing something he'd been warned in advance. "Should I make it hurt?..."

Juli's breathed exploded out of her at that question. He was perfect. "Yes, Rafa. You should."

He flinched at the nickname and stood up to ease down on the lubed dildo. She couldn't see his expression, but that was all right – the camera was capturing it for her. She could see very faintly the outline of his body and the chair she was sitting on.

She reached around and wrapped her hand around his half-hard cock. It was difficult to coax to full hardness, which both frustrated and pleased her. If he had come to her with uncomplicated heterosexual pleasure, she knew it would have angered her.

But he lived in a half-world, never knowing what he wanted, never clear with what she wanted from him. Having associated sex with coercion for so long, he could not reach full arousal while fully relaxed, but neither could he achieve it when really afraid. He spent her sessions recounting his childhood to her and the camera, half-hard at most points, but achieving a full erection only at certain points of his story, when both pain and pleasure were intensely present in his memory.

Rafa was rocking up and down on the dildo, breaths coming out in pained little puffs as he pushed himself harder than was comfortable. She had never tried a dildo on a man before – to her disappointment, it did not excite her. She yearned for a real cock, and a cock-libido to go with it. She wanted to hurt him like a man could hurt him, like his father had hurt him. Overcome with frustration she said, harshly, "Get up."

He made a quizzical, scared noise, which satisfied her for the first time. Juli bent him over her desk and started fucking him hard. This way she could feel the resistance of his body against the ridges of the dildo. He screamed and she stuck her fingers into his mouth.

"If you scream again –" she said savagely.

He sucked on her fingers in response.

When she withdrew, tired, he burst into confused tears. She cradled him close and whispered contentedly into his ear, telling him that he had worked off his punishment. She worked him in the ways his father had worked him after particularly hard sessions with clients. Juli knew what worked best, of course, because Rafa had told her all about it, and she had rewatched the tapes at home, committing to memory all the ways he could be used and comforted.

So when she sent him home, he was smiling, relieved, almost in love.