The Keyholder and the Thirty Day Lock

Nadia held the key up between two fingers and asked if I trusted her with it for a month. I said yes before I had finished thinking about what a month actually meant.

I am thirty four. She is thirty six. We had been seeing each other for most of a year by then, long enough that she knew what I wanted before I could say it out loud, and long enough that I had stopped pretending I wanted anything else.

The Night She Asked to Be My Keyholder

It started at her kitchen table, which is where most of our serious conversations happen. She had made tea and had not touched it. That is usually the sign that she has been thinking about something for days.

"I want to try keyholding," she said. "Properly. Not a weekend. Thirty days."

We had played with chastity before in small doses. An evening. An afternoon where she locked me up before a dinner party and spent the whole meal asking me innocent questions with her hand on my knee. Those were games. This was different, and she wanted me to understand it was different before I agreed.

"You can say no," she said. "You can say no tonight, you can say no in week three, and nothing bad happens to you. I need you to actually believe that or we are not doing it."

I told her I believed it. She made me say it twice.

The Chastity Rules We Wrote Down

She is not a woman who improvises when it matters. She got a notebook, the cheap spiral kind, and we wrote the thing out like a lease.

Thirty days from the Sunday. She held the key. I held a spare in a sealed envelope taped inside the bathroom cabinet, for emergencies only, and opening it ended the arrangement with no argument and no penalty. Any pain that was not the ordinary ache of being locked, any swelling, any numbness, and the cage came off immediately. Those were my rules and she wrote them down first, in her handwriting, before any of hers.

Then came hers.

• No negotiating for release. Asking was allowed once. Begging was allowed as much as I liked, as long as I understood begging was entertainment and not a request.
• A text every morning telling her how I slept.
• Her pleasure was still my job, lock or no lock. More so, she said, because now I had nothing to rush toward.
• Thursdays she would take the cage off to check me, clean me, and put it back on. I was not to touch myself during those twenty minutes. She would be watching closely enough that I would not get away with it.

I asked what happened on day thirty. She closed the notebook.

"On day thirty you find out," she said.

Week One and the Weight of the Lock

The first three days were easy in a way that worried me. I felt clever. I went to work with her key on a chain around her neck, under her blouse, and every time I thought about it I felt a small private thrill that got me through meetings I would otherwise have hated.

Day four was when it stopped being clever.

She came over on a Wednesday night in the grey dress, the one that is not even particularly revealing, and sat on the arm of my chair with her legs crossed so that one bare calf was in my line of sight the entire time she talked about her sister's new apartment. I could not follow a word. I sat there with my hands flat on my thighs and listened to the sound of her voice and felt the cage remind me, over and over, that whatever I was planning was not happening.

"You have gone quiet," she said, not looking at me.

"I am concentrating."

"On my sister's apartment."

"On your sister's apartment."

She reached down without looking and ran one finger along the back of my neck, once, slowly, the way you would scratch a dog you were fond of. Then she went back to her story.

That night she had me kneel between her knees on the living room floor and worship her properly, with my mouth, for the better part of an hour. She is not quiet and she does not pretend to be. When she was done she lay back on the couch with her arm over her eyes and let me stay where I was, forehead against her thigh, breathing her in, desperate and useless and more content than I had been in months.

"Thank you," I said, because it was true.

"I know," she said.

Week Two and the Keyholder's Game

By the second week I had stopped counting hours and started counting days, which she told me was the point.

She got creative. She took the key off the chain and started leaving it places. On the windowsill above the sink while I washed up. On the nightstand, on her side, two feet from my face, all night. Once, on the table in a restaurant, next to the salt, for the entire length of dinner, where any waiter could have mistaken it for nothing at all and where I could not look anywhere else.

"You could take it," she said, when the plates had been cleared.

"I could."

"But you will not."

"No."

She picked it up and dropped it into her purse and smiled at me across the table like she had just won something, which she had.

The Thursday checks became the strangest twenty minutes of my week. She would unlock me in the bathroom under the harsh light, hands clinical and unhurried, and I would stand there shaking slightly while she inspected me, cleaned me, asked me if anything hurt. Nothing ever hurt. She asked every time anyway. And then she would lock me back up with the same careful, absent-minded competence she uses for packing a suitcase, kiss my shoulder, and go make coffee.

The second Thursday I asked her once, which was my allotted ask, whether she would consider ending it early.

She considered it with real seriousness, which was worse than if she had laughed.

"No," she said. "But I liked being asked. You may not ask again."

Day Thirty and the Unlocking

The last week I was not funny, or clever, or good company. I was attentive in a way I have never been in my life. I noticed when her glass was empty. I noticed when her shoulders were tight. I had no plans of my own left and nothing to put in that space but her, so that is what went in it.

She noticed too. On day twenty eight she held my face in both hands and looked at me for a long moment and said, "There you are," like she had been waiting for something to finish arriving.

Day thirty was a Tuesday, which felt wrong for something that had been building for a month. She came over after work, still in her coat, and asked me how I slept, and I told her, badly, and she said good.

She made me ask for it. Out loud, in plain words, kneeling, while she stood over me with the key warm from her hand. She made me say what I had learned, and I said the true thing, which was that I had spent thirty days finding out that the lock was never really the point, she was, and the lock was just the part I could feel.

"Better than I expected," she said quietly. And then she unlocked me.

What happened next took about ninety seconds and I am not going to pretend otherwise. She laughed at me, kindly, with her hand in my hair, and told me that was exactly what she had been looking forward to. Afterward she brought a warm cloth from the bathroom and cleaned me up herself, and we lay on the bed in the dark while the radiator ticked.

"Sixty next time," she said into my shoulder, half asleep.

I said something that was not quite a yes. She was already smiling. She knew what it was.

If you have a story of your own, locked or otherwise, you can post it at /submit/ and let the rest of us read it. For another fantasy piece with a woman who enjoys her own power a little too much, try Malvora, The Facesitting Witch, or browse the rest of /fantasy-stories/.