None of the alarm spells Alexandra had placed around her hotel suite had been triggered, yet there was someone standing at the foot of her bed. It was a human-shaped someone, who had not yet tried to hurt her. That could only mean one thing.

“Daylight,” she said, conjuring a beam of it directly into Jim’s face.

Jim groaned and held his palms out to shield his eyes.

“It’s me, Lex!”

“I know,” Alexandra assured him, without dropping the beam.

“I need your help.”

“I assumed so.”

“It’s life and death.”

“Always.”

“Cosmic-scale life and death,” he insisted in his natural Irish lilt, which had definitely contributed to his ability to compromise Alexandra’s judgment in the past. It wasn’t affecting her now, of course. The only reason she was allowing his continued presence was because she knew how capable he was of making cosmic-scale messes that really might require her attention.

She sighed. “Start talking.”

Wincing, Jim lowered his hands from the light to unbuckle his belt.

“I said talking.”

“Please,” Jim said urgently, proceeding to his zipper. “It’s easier to just show you.”

“I’ve seen it before.”

“No, Lex. I promise, you haven’t.”

Jim dropped his jeans and pulled his briefs down far enough to show her where his thoroughly average-looking dick should have been.

“What the actual fuck?” Alexandra jumped out of bed. With a gesture, she doused the daylight beam and brought up the room lighting, to make sure she was seeing what was in front of her correctly. “What did you do to yourself?”

“I’ll explain after we stabilize it,” said Jim.

“What do you mean, ‘stabilize it’?” Alexandra’s tone rose toward either shouting or laughter, she wasn’t yet sure which.

Jim’s testicles and the base of his shaft looked about how she remembered them. From there, his skin transitioned gradually into rough gray scales. A pair of spindly arms with tiny clawed hands reached out from either side of the dangling creature between his legs. Where the head of his penis would have been, there was indeed a head, ringed with a frill of spines and seven intelligent black eyes. In the center, a short reptilian snout full of needle-sharp teeth snapped furiously at the air.

A muzzle, which looked like it had been recently jury-rigged out of paperclips, prevented the jaws from actually grasping anything. Several angry, circular bite marks lined Jim’s inner thighs, presumably from before he’d perfected the design.

“It feeds on blood,” said Jim.

“Okay,” said Alexandra, nonplussed.

“And the more blood it consumes, the stronger it gets.”

“Ah, hence the muzzle.” Alexandra nodded. “Seems like you’re on top of this. Not sure why you need me.”

“Its mouth isn’t its only method of consumption,” Jim explained. “If my blood starts flowing into it, more than just the bare minimum that’s sustaining it now, it’ll start growing. Within a few seconds it’ll be strong enough to drain me by force, and then it’ll move on to the rest of the warm-blooded creatures on the planet.”

The dangling creature appeared to be trying to swing its face upward, to look at Alexandra with more of its eyes at once. It seemed frustrated with its lack of substance.

“You came to me to avoid getting turned on?” said Alexandra. “Thanks so much.”

“I came to you because you’re the only person I know who can keep me in check.”

“I could never keep you in check,” Alexandra muttered.

“And who could help me figure out a long-term magical solution,” Jim added.

It was true. There was no one more qualified for that job.

Alexandra pinched the bridge of her nose, coming to terms with the total disruption of her immediate plans.

“Okay.” She grabbed the ice bucket from her bedside table and shoved it into his hands. “Go fill it. Come back here, get in the tub, and turn on the cold water. If you feel like you’re about to endanger warm-blooded life on Earth—”

“Maybe even beyond,” said Jim.

“Pour the bucket in.”

“Right,” said Jim, carefully fitting his underwear and jeans back into place over the creature for the walk. “What are you going to do?”

“Get the rest of a night’s sleep,” said Alexandra. “I’ll get you more thoroughly ‘stabilized’ in the morning. So keep your bath quiet.”

She was half surprised when Jim carried the bucket to the door without complaint.

“Irresponsible fucking druids,” said Alexandra, sliding back under the warmth of the covers.

“We can’t all be demigoddesses, Lex,” said Jim.

“Ice. Now.”

He shut the door behind him.

# 

Alexandra’s decision to go back to bed, letting Jim’s latest magic crisis wait at least a few hours for her convenience, had felt great while she was making it.

It was such a simple, clear boundary, the kind she never had any trouble with when it involved anyone other than Jim.

Actually getting back to sleep was a lot more difficult.

Already, she was busy plotting out the next day, cancelling her lunch date and her evening shift in the dungeons, getting that thing between Jim’s legs chained up securely, and trying about thirty different spells that just might help diagnose what the hell it was.

Her mind also kept wandering off to picture Jim waiting in her bathtub for her.

She wondered if he’d left on his shirt and sweater (a “jumper,” he’d call it) to try to hold on to some warmth, or taken them off to keep them dry.

She could easily imagine him sitting there naked, his slender, usually unassuming muscles tense and shivering and obvious.

Nipples rock hard from the cold, but trying determinedly, for the first time in his life, to keep his dick soft.

Suffering.

Helpless.

Dependent on the chance that she might be able to save the world for him again, and also, incidentally, his genitals.

The thought made her feel reflexively guilty for making him wait. It also turned her on to an inconvenient degree.

Jim wasn’t some client who had paid her for exactly this treatment. He was… a friend. She supposed she still had to call him that. A friend who needed her help. Even after all he’d put her through, good taste put limits on how insensitive she could be to his predicament.

For the first hour or so, she tried to soothe her mind and body with deep breathing and meditation.

Then she gave in and reached down to touch herself.

It was just like getting thirsty while watching a movie about people wandering in the desert, she reasoned. It was only natural that seeing Jim unable to safely touch himself would make her sympathetically horny.

Besides, the more worked up her body was over him, the more prone she was to bad decisions. It was better to get as much of it out of her system now as possible.

Three times. She gave herself three rounds of shamelessly picturing him sitting there in the ice until she came hard against her fingers, before she put him aside and tried to sleep again.

Three times was almost always enough to wear her out.

She did sleep, a little, judging by the fitful dreams full of the secondhand taste of coffee on Jim’s tongue.

#

At seven in the morning, Alexandra gave in and opened the bathroom door.

Jim was indeed naked, and seeing him so made Alexandra uncomfortable in all of the same ways she had been in the night, as if she had gotten absolutely none of it out of her system after all.

The only part she’d imagined wrong was how tired he looked.

As she entered, he was nodding off against the shower wall and jerking himself awake with a hard pinch on his arm and a brief expression of terror.

The bucket was empty, and the ice had all presumably melted into the water in the tub.

If the cold wasn’t enough to keep him awake, she realized, it probably wouldn’t prevent erections if he started to dream, either.

“How are you doing?” she asked neutrally.

“Grand.” Jim managed a weak smile for her and lifted one eyebrow toward his dark, currently damp hair. “Is that one of the nighties I gave you?”

“Yes,” said Alexandra, putting one hand on the hip of the short, black, satin slip.

“Huh,” said Jim.

Alexandra rolled her eyes. “What?”

Jim shrugged. “Somehow I never imagined they were the sort of thing you’d wear alone.”

“You have annoyingly nice taste.”

His eyes traced the lace hem wistfully.

“I certainly do.”

The creature splashed restlessly under the waterline.

“Am I going to have to blindfold you for your own good?” Alexandra asked.

Jim shook his head and placed his hands on the side of the tub. “I’ll go. I assume you need the room.”

“You stay put,” she told him with a stern gesture of her finger, before gathering up her toothbrush and paste. “I’ll use the one downstairs. I’m going out to get you a proper cage for your new friend. Then we can have a talk that even you won’t be able to turn into potentially world-ending foreplay.”

“Can’t you just put a spell on me to temporarily switch off my sex drive?” Jim asked. “There must be about fifty million impotence curses on the books. I’d even settle for one of those as a stopgap.”

“The more magic you perform on one human being in a short period of time, the more unpredictable it becomes,” Alexandra reminded him. “And I have no idea how much experimentation it’s going to take to undo what you did. Do you?”

Jim shook his head reluctantly.

“Controlling circulation to a penis is something we can do through mundane means,” said Alexandra. “So that’s what we’re going to do.”

Jim looked up at her, mischievously skeptical. “Are you sure you’re not making up excuses to torture me?”

“You never even learned about the instability of high-density magic around humans?”

“Of course I did, but how much difference could one little comfort spell really make?”

Alexandra cackled with exhaustion as she grabbed her long black coat to throw on over her nightgown. “I love how you think you can lecture me on the limits of magic, when you’re the one who had to come crawling to me after your hobbyism turned your cock into an otherworldly abomination.”

“Hobbyism?”

“I said what I said.”

# 

Alexandra didn’t have far to go for her errand.

The Darkling Hotel knew its clientele, and in addition to its extensive dungeon facilities, it had multiple boutique sex shops on the ground floor.

“Mistress Alexandra,” the prettiest clerk at her favorite shop greeted her warmly, brushing her red hair behind her triple-pierced ear. “You’re early for a supply run. Did you forget something?”

Alexandra almost lied and said yes, but she wasn’t about to misuse her company card because of Jim.

“I’m here for a personal project,” she said. “Male chastity, unpierced, very narrow. Something tough, built to last. Must be genuine steel, that’s very important.”

“Lucky man, your personal project,” said the clerk, opening a locked case behind the counter.

Alexandra snorted. “You tell him.”

While the clerk wrapped her order, Alexandra eyed the racks of whips and collars. They were routine things, suddenly both bitterly tempting and intimidating in a way they had not been to her for years.

She looked away and paid for the device from her personal account, making a mental note to collect the worth of it from Jim eventually, one way or another.

# 

Alexandra stopped by the café on her way back to her suite. She could see Jim’s mouth begin to water the moment she reopened the bathroom door, letting in the aroma of coffee and bagels.

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

“You’re an angel,” he said.

“Demigoddess,” Alexandra corrected, backing into the bedroom and setting the food aside on an end table. “Lie down on the bed.”

Jim toweled himself off and did so, with an extra-long look at the two coffee cups as he passed them.

With her other purchase in hand, Alexandra knelt on the mattress between Jim’s legs. The creature twitched ominously, standing up slightly straighter.

“Think about soccer statistics, or something,” she told him.

“I never liked football,” said Jim.

“Fine.”

She gave his testicles a swift, bare-handed swat.

Jim writhed and rolled sideways to muffle a groan against the covers. Alexandra shoved him back onto his back and grabbed the cringing creature. She bent part of one of the paperclips away from the rest of the muzzle, threaded it through the rigid, downward curving tube of the chastity cage, and then dragged the creature through behind it.

Jim gasped as the muzzle crunched inward slightly to fit.

The frill of spikes around the creature’s neck flattened against its scales on the way through, and then flared out when it reached the opening at the end, leaving it little chance of being able to back its way out.

Alexandra didn’t take any chances. She closed the device’s latching mechanism, a bar that ran behind Jim’s testicles to secure it in place, locked it, and dropped the key into the faintly glittering wooden box on her bedside table.

“That’s the magic box that only opens for you, isn’t it?” Jim checked with a nervous chuckle.

“Yes,” said Alexandra.

“I thought you said no magic for this part.”

“The spell is on the box, not on you.”

“But don’t you think it would be safer if I had access to—”

“No,” Alexandra told him flatly.

“Only in case of emerge—”

“This is the emergency,” she reminded him. “If it gets to be any more of an emergency, the backup plan is removing your dick completely, for the good of all life on Earth and beyond. Are we on the same page here?”

Jim shifted his hips uncomfortably.

“Yes,” he said. “Though I have to tell you, Earth is lucky you got me locked up tight before this conversation.”

The head of the creature was bulging through the gaps in the paperclip muzzle. It had swollen about as far as it physically could now, its scales spreading apart on its stretched skin.

“Oh, this does it for you, does it?” Alexandra teased Jim, staring him down and dropping into one of the sultrier tones she used for her clients. “Being told no? Hearing about how your cock no longer belongs to you? How you have no control over what happens to it? You know, you could have told me sooner. Not too long ago, I would have done this for you without cosmic life and death stakes.”

The creature gnashed its teeth against the paperclip bars, as a few drops of pre-ejaculate dripped out of its forcibly downward-bent mouth.

Jim broke off from looking at her and draped his arm over his eyes, breathing slowly.

“It hurts,” he said.

“You thought caging a creature as overexcitable as yours would be comfortable?”

“Please, Lex,” he said seriously.

“See? This is exactly why you shouldn’t have a key. The world would be doomed.”

“I’m not asking you to take it off,” he said. “It’s just digging into me so hard. Isn’t there anything you can do?”

Alexandra sighed. “Hold still.”

Carefully, she nudged the muzzle, trying to adjust it back to its original shape, but it was too tangled a mess now. Finally, she disassembled it completely, letting the creature snap freely at the air.

The device held its head firmly enough in place that it could no longer reach Jim’s thighs to bite him, but just for safety, Alexandra took a few of the least distressed paperclips and forced them between the creature’s teeth like a bit, securing the ends behind its frill with a final paperclip as a collar. This one she wrapped around the outside of the device, to protect Jim from the pointy ends.

“Better?” she asked.

Though it was obviously far from the freedom his body craved, Jim nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

“You can get warm now,” Alexandra told him, moving to sit beside him and placing the breakfast between them.

Jim put his shirt and sweater on and pulled her comforter over his legs. Alexandra noted how casually he had made himself at home in her bed again, but she decided to let it be for now.

He took one of the coffee cups from the carrier and sipped it gratefully.

Alexandra allowed him one swallow before telling him, “Start at the beginning.”

“The beginning, you say?” He covered a grimace with a shrug. “Well, I was studying with a new master.”

“You mean you were fucking a better magic user than you, to keep them off balance while you looted them for knowledge.”

“Don’t judge, Mistress Alexandra,” Jim nudged her. “We all use our wiles for fun and profit in our own ways. Anyway, after dinner last night, the chap takes me into his basement and shows me a big jar full of the little bastards….”

###

Jim stared through the glass wall of the jar with a healthy amount of fear, which was completely overruled by his fascination.

“What are they?” he asked, watching the thumb-sized, lizard-like creatures crawl over each other, posturing with their frills and blinking their many eyes in rapid sequences.

“Fate burrowers,” answered the mage, stroking his beard, a calculating look on his agelessly handsome face. “As useful as they are dangerous. Communing with one just once can bind your course to your most desirable possible destiny.”

“You’re telling me,” Jim swallowed, “that if there’s any reality where I become one of the great sorcerers of history, even one thread out of trillions…”

“These little geniuses have the power to find it,” the mage confirmed with a flick of his cloak.

“How does it work?” Jim asked. “What does it cost?”

“First, you must understand what you’re dealing with.”

The mage opened the jar and, with a long pair of tongs, plucked one of the creatures from among the rest. He placed it in an even larger empty jar on the floor and then screwed on the lids of both.

The lid of the jar with the solitary fate burrower had a hole punched through it, a little smaller than a pencil eraser.

The mage handed Jim one of his smaller ceremonial daggers. “Feed it one drop, no more.”

Jim pricked his finger with the tip of the dagger and held it over the hole in the jar, careful to pull it away as soon as the first drop fell.

The tiny creature launched itself to catch the drop in midair. When it did, it instantly doubled in size, barreling into the wall of the jar and knocking it on its side.

The mage set it upright again.

“The effect is exponential, and its strength scales proportionately,” he said. “I assume your math is good enough to know what that means.”

Jim nodded solemnly.

“Seeking their help comes with the risk that they will try to escape and run amok, and they rarely try the same way twice. Are you prepared to take responsibility for stopping this one at all costs, should that happen?”

“Yes,” Jim said, almost without needing to think.

He was sure there was nothing the most powerful possible version of himself couldn’t do.

“Then remove your clothes,” said the mage.

Jim stripped down in a matter of seconds and stood naked over the jar.

“You’re calling a new future, a new life, into existence for yourself,” the mage explained, trailing his workshop-roughened fingers over Jim’s body.

He started with his hair and worked his way down, removing the studs from his ears, grazing his chest and buttocks and paying extra attention to his genitals before moving on down his legs, checking every inch of skin for more jewelry, bandages, anything that might be considered clothing.

“The easiest way is to greet it as exposed as the day you were born, and feed it the raw material of new life.”

The mage took Jim’s hand and gently wrapped it around Jim’s own cock, which responded eagerly to the promise of being used.

“Focus,” the mage whispered, his breath warm on Jim’s neck. “Go slow. Every movement is a brushstroke. Paint the pieces that define your best reality. Think of everything you want and nothing else. You only get one chance to get it right.”

Jim stroked himself slowly until he was as hard and slick as hot ice, and did his best to follow the rest of the mage’s instructions. He thought of having the knowledge of a full mystical library all inside his head, the raw power of the elements surging under his fingertips.

The trouble was, as exciting as these thoughts were, they weren’t quite the right type of exciting. Focusing too hard on the practical details of his life, even the best version of his life, made it difficult to progress toward an orgasm.

The mage had said to go slow, so he tried to be patient, to let it happen whenever it happened.

But after going over every specification he could think of for his ideal destiny four or five times, a low panic began to creep in that he would never get there.

Before he could bring his mind back under control with a meditation protocol, it flicked away from his carefully considered wishes to his favorite masturbatory fantasies, fantasies that belonged at the very back of his psyche in a box marked “private.” Things he’d had no intention of ever manifesting in reality, not even if he found himself wielding all the magic in the world.

His mental deviation lasted only seconds, but as soon as it happened, the elusive orgasm took him by surprise, weakening his knees and ejecting a generous load of semen onto the lid of the jar, right where he’d been aiming.

The thick fluid dripped down through the hole in the lid, where the fate burrower lapped it up.

The burrower did not get bigger with this meal.

Instead, it slammed itself against the side of the jar again, this time shattering it against the basement floor.

It opened its circular mouth full of row after row of needle-sharp teeth, and pounced up to latch itself onto Jim’s spent cock.

The magical merging that followed was perhaps the least painful outcome he could have expected.

###

Alexandra held her pumpkin bagel to her forehead for a moment as she processed Jim’s story, then lowered it to take a bite.

The exact features of the creature between his legs started to match up to some of the lore she’d read.

“So, you fed your semen to a fate burrower for power,” she summed up. “But you tainted your wishes with a stray thought about, let me guess, losing access to your dick?”

Jim ducked his head in a shamefaced gesture of confirmation and filled his mouth with bagel.

“And then, when it inevitably went wrong, you what? Walked out on the new partner who was fool enough to give you the high-risk secrets you wouldn’t stop asking for, and came crawling back to me to fix the mess?”

Jim drew out the chewing process.

“Actually, this one kicked me out,” he said, once his mouth was clear. “He said the results proved there was something rotten about me.”

He laughed a light, false laugh, as if this nonsense had no effect on him.

“Sure, the lad could’ve warned me if there was a ‘pure of heart’ clause, couldn’t he?”

He sipped his coffee with one eye on Alexandra, waiting for her to comment.

“Moral baggage is known to make fate burrowers fussier,” she confirmed. “That might have had something to do with it. It might not.”

Jim nodded, clearly not expecting a kinder analysis. “What’s my prognosis, then, Dr. Lex?”

Alexandra sighed. “Well, the good news is, there are spells for cleaning up contaminated burrower wishes.”

“And the bad news?” Jim asked.

“That’s twofold,” said Alexandra. “Firstly, it has to be painful. Even if the condition of your soul wasn’t offensive to the burrowers in the first place, those creatures are only the bottom rung of the hierarchy of fate. Their bosses will expect recompense from you, for trying to tamper with their work, not once but twice, and for failing to offer your full attention the first time.”

“You can say it, Lex.” Jim smiled wryly. “I’ve been a bad boy, and I need to be punished.”

“That’s the gist of it, yes,” said Alexandra.

“What’s the second part?”

“That’s more difficult,” said Alexandra. “I’m going to have to perform the ritual for you. If it were a simple charitable cause, like curing cancer, I could just do it for free. But because I’d be helping you weasel out of the consequences of tampering with fate, I’m going to have to take payment. That’s not a personal policy. It’s part of how the magic works. And it can’t just be a token, either. It has to have value to me.”

“I suppose that’s only fair,” said Jim, setting his half-finished coffee and the last sliver of his bagel on the bedside table.

“There’s not a single piece of magic you’re better at than me,” said Alexandra. “And if this is anything like your last seven breakups, you came here with all your worldly possessions on your back. What could you possibly have to offer me?”

Jim cracked his knuckles theatrically, shifted onto his knees beside Alexandra, and tugged the comforter off of her.

“You have a strangely selective memory,” he said, leaning down to hover his face mischievously over her lap.

“You’re just assuming I’m going to allow you back between my legs?” Alexandra asked, crossing them sternly, along with her arms.

“No, no, I fully understand that you could reject the only tribute I have to give.” Jim blew gently on the skin of her inner thighs, sending reflexive tingles all the way up her body. “You could leave me in this cage forever, refuse me any chance to earn my way out, and you’d deserve my thanks for doing that much. My future is in your hands, and you owe me nothing.”

He looked up at her face, and could not have missed the sight of her nipples hardening under her satin nightie in the foreground.

His grin of triumph began half a second before she sighed, “Fine!”

Jim grabbed her legs and pulled her from a sitting position onto her back.

She allowed it. If he was offering so enthusiastically, she might as well enjoy a little compensation for the mess he’d dragged her into.

He started by pulling down the loose spaghetti straps of her nightie to expose her breasts to the air. Just the way he used to, he brushed his fingers ever so lightly around them, weaving wreaths of caresses, working his way inward. When he reached the first hint of the puckered skin of her areolas, he stopped and started over, stroking her sternum and collarbones and slowly approaching again.

Goosebumps rose all over Alexandra’s skin, multiplying its sensitivity tenfold. By this point, he could touch her with nothing but the faint aura of warmth around his hands, and she felt it more intensely than a firm massage.

The third time he reached her nipples, he rolled the left one back and forth twice with one fingertip, then pinched it, hard.

It was the best kind of pain, harmless and shocking, demanding of all her attention. For a second, nothing existed except the thrill shooting along her nerves, signaling her vagina to contract and moisten in a violent hurry.

Then Jim let go, and left her untouched for several long seconds.

“I said ‘fine,’” Alexandra said, summoning her commanding dungeon tone. “Are you going to give it to me or not?”

Her voice rang false, and Jim was not fooled.

He lifted the skirt of her nightie and kissed her very softly along the upper border of her panties.

“Do you want me to do it fast,” he asked between kisses, “or do it right?”

The nerve of him, making her wait.

The audacity of knowing how much she liked it.

Jim’s hunger for knowledge, and the power that came with it, had never been limited to magic. Whenever she instructed him on the eccentricities of her body, or when he discovered by experimentation how to make her feel something, the recipe was indelibly etched into his memory.

“I am your keyholder,” Alexandra reminded him with half-joking indignation.

“Technically, you are,” Jim agreed, finally pulling her panties down and off.

“Technically?”

“Well, you have the key, but you can’t use it, can you? You couldn’t let me out right now, even if you wanted to. Not safely. Not yet.”

He began trailing his fingers up her thighs, along the valleys of her hip joints, stopping just short of the parts that most wanted his attention, just as he had with her breasts.

“I think it’s in my best interests,” he said, “to make you think about what I could do for you with my full set of tools.”

Trailing his way to her labia, he slipped one finger easily inside her and then pulled it away just as quickly, before it could do her much good.

As intended, it left behind a nostalgic craving for exactly what neither of them could have — that perfectly ordinary cock of his, applied with the same extraordinary precision as his hands.

He returned to tracing slow, light circles around her vulva.

Part of Alexandra still wanted to put a stop to this line of play, for no reason except that Jim had initiated it. She wanted to remind him of his situation, of how it and so many other things were all his fault, and collect her payment by treating him like a toy.

But she had toys. Two drawers full of them, to enjoy whenever she wanted.

They could synthesize almost any kind of physical sexual pleasure… except for exactly what Jim was doing to her now.

Like trying to tickle herself, there was simply no solo substitute for a teasing caress she couldn’t control or predict. Even when she brought home a partner, there was a learning curve to getting them to do it right, to the point where she usually just asked for something else.

How did you tell someone who was all ready to worship you, “Give me what I want, by not giving me what I want”?

Jim not only understood that paradox in the abstract, he knew the exact balance it struck inside her particular body.

That was an exceptionally rare treat, and Alexandra couldn’t resist it.

She waited patiently, accepted every pause, every denial and deferral he imposed. She squirmed for him, even let her frustration manifest in undignified little cries, allowing him to read her level of agitation, like an expert pilot monitoring the instruments.

“We’re not in any danger of using too much magic on you today, are we?” Jim whispered.

“No.”

“Good.”

Jim lifted his hands off of her, rubbed them together, and blew into them to form a simple golden ribbon of magical energy. He merged it into a loop, endlessly flowing in one direction, and wound it around both her nipples in a figure-eight.

When he let go, the ribbon hung in place, glowing and moving, warmly brushing her skin without pause.

Finally, finally, he lowered his head to kiss her desperately neglected-feeling clit.

Alexandra’s patience broke when he paused after that first gentle kiss, and she reached down for his hair to pull him closer.

Jim caught both her wrists and pinned them down at her sides, but then mercifully kissed her again with a little more pressure.

He ran his soft, warm tongue back and forth over the hood of her clit, first slowly, then rhythmically, careful to avoid the underside, which he knew was always too painfully sensitive for direct contact, even when she was this ready.

Alexandra sighed with relief.

Jim relaxed the weight he’d been putting on her wrists and interlaced the fingers of his left hand with her right, instead.

His own right hand, he brought back to her vulva, sliding in one finger again, and then a second. He rubbed them against the front wall of her vagina while he continued to lick her, working at her clitoral nerves from both sides at once.

This part was far too good to last, of course, especially after so much leadup.

Inside of a minute, Alexandra’s whole body seized up with an orgasm too strong to be concealed in a discreet nighttime marathon.

She stuffed the corner of her pillow into her mouth to muffle a scream than would definitely have been audible from the next suite over.

Jim said something shortly afterward that Alexandra utterly failed to comprehend. She barely felt capable of comprehending the concept of spoken language.

She tried to tell him so, to ask him to wait, and only nonsense syllables came out.

He laughed with a self-satisfaction that needed no words, and gestured to dissipate the magic ribbon.

After several seconds of heavy breathing, the pleasure cloud parted enough for Alexandra to ask, “What did you say?” And then, “Are you okay?”

Jim’s laughter had subsided, and he was now lying beside her, holding his cage very carefully in one hand. The creature was struggling and drooling harder than ever, and no adjustment Jim made seemed to ease his discomfort.

“I’m fine,” he said, wincing. “That was just a little overexciting.”

He took a moment longer to recover himself.

“I was asking you what I bought with that payment,” he said. “What do you have to do to me?”

Alexandra sighed, slashed a rift in empty air with one fingernail, and reached into the pocket dimension she used for storage.

Summoning the right book to her hand, she propped it open on the mattress between them, to make sure she was getting all the details right.

“It starts with what you have to do,” she said. “You have to unravel something that holds sentimental meaning to you, then weave its material around three willow wands, and soak the whole thing in a salt bath.”

“Honoring the value of what fate has already woven, and the weight of the task of reweaving,” Jim guessed accurately at the meaning of the spell’s parts. “Invoking the strength of the three high fates who hold all reality together, and cleansing the new construct of the residual energies of the old one?”

“Correct,” said Alexandra. “And then, when it’s done, I chain you up and thrash you with it until you bleed.”

“Yeah, I sort of had a hunch that was where this was headed.”

Alexandra rummaged in the pocket dimension for her chest of essential ingredients and selected the three willow wands for him, each one about five feet in length, tapering from the width of a finger at one end to a fine point at the other.

At present, they were dry and brittle, but after a long enough soak, they’d be durable and almost flexible enough to break the sound barrier in flight.

Jim sighed and pulled his sweater up over his head. “My gran knitted this, you know.”

“Good,” Alexandra said humorlessly, getting up to grab him a robe. “You should thank her for saving you. If you didn’t own anything unravelable with enough significance, you’d be stuck like this forever.”

#

Alexandra sprawled out on the bed with a novel while Jim laboriously wove yarn around wood in the intricate pattern prescribed in the spell book, careful not to miss a single loop.

After an hour, she had turned only two pages.

Although Jim was sitting on the floor with his back to her, she was intensely aware that he was intensely aware of her, whether by hearing alone or by some other trick.

“If you’re enjoying the silence, tell me,” he said suddenly. “And I’ll leave it alone.”

Alexandra grabbed the remote and turned on the TV, flipping in search of some neutral background noise.

“Talk to me, Lex,” said Jim. “Please.”

Alexandra turned the TV back off and put her book aside with a sigh.

“I was just thinking that maybe I should ask one of my colleagues to hold the whip,” she said. “While I focus on the rest of conducting the ritual, channeling the magic and everything. There’s no rule in the book saying one person has to handle it all.”

“Oh,” said Jim. He paused for a moment, and then returned to his weaving. “Too much work for one person to juggle?”

Jim had read the ritual as closely as she had, so she couldn’t lie.

“No,” she said.

Jim nodded, still with his back to her. “And I assume it’s not because you’re feeling unqualified to perform a service that other men pay you handsomely for every day?”

“Actually, yeah,” said Alexandra. “I kind of am.”

Jim turned sideways, leaning his shoulder instead of his back against her bed, so that he could look at her while his fingers continued their repetitive work. He waited silently for elaboration.

“I’ve been wanting to punish you for a very long time,” Alexandra admitted. “And I’m scared that makes me exactly the wrong person for the job. If I let this become about me, instead of about you, I could really hurt you. Magically. Physically. All different ways.”

Jim looked back down at his work, nodding at the skein of gray wool as he wove it nimbly between the wands.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I didn’t run off because I’d been using you and I was done, or anything like that.”

“Obviously,” said Alexandra. “If all you cared about was what I could teach you, you’d never be done. You could have spent the rest of your life studying at my feet, barely scratching the surface.”

Jim didn’t argue.

“I really could have,” he said, after a while. “I’d always pictured myself traveling the world, collecting skills, never the same experience from one day to the next. Never anyone who really knew me, so I’d always get the benefit of more doubt than I deserved. And then—”

“You caught feelings and it scared you,” Alexandra summarized ruthlessly. “I know. Is that supposed to make it better? Kissing me goodnight like everything was fine and then disappearing in my sleep, leaving me with theater tickets for two?”

“The sun wasn’t even up before I wished I could take it back,” Jim said earnestly.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Alexandra told him, feeling his gaze erode her ability to think.

He dropped his unsettlingly blue eyes back to the work.

“I trust you more than any stranger,” he said, straightforwardly, without looking up. “And if I can pay a bit of my debt to you at the same time as my debt to fate, that’s a better deal than I could have asked for. Good enough to be worth some risk. So, if I get any vote at all, I want it to be you.”

# 

When Jim had finished constructing the whip and set it to soak in the bathtub, he made sandwiches in the kitchenette of Alexandra’s suite.

The two of them ate and watched a movie while they waited, joking about nonmagical filmmakers’ ideas on magic, and spooning on the bed the way they had in the earliest days of their relationship.

Only the unyielding lump of Jim’s cage pressing against Alexandra’s lower back shattered the illusion of having slipped back in time.

When the time came, Jim removed his robe and knelt on the floor, facing the foot of the bed, so that Alexandra could cuff his hands to the posts.

She arranged and lit a circle of white taper candles around the perimeter of the room, and then stood behind him with the whip in one hand and the spell book in the other.

Without needing to coordinate, Jim and Alexandra started the same way they always did in their formal shared spell craft.

One long breath, to release the tendrils of the outside world from inside themselves.

A second breath to form a protective shield to hold it out.

The power inside them became visible light as it stretched beyond their bodies, to mix and hover in a dome around them, anchored to the floor by the circle of candles.

There would be no distractions.

“Why are you here?” Alexandra asked Jim, following the script of the spell.

“To submit myself to the mercy of fate,” Jim recited. “And to beg its permission to correct my error.”

“What correction do you beg for?” asked Alexandra.

“I beg a safe separation from the burrower I fed with a careless thought,” said Jim, “And the restoration of what I mourn losing.”

“Which would be?”

“My cock and the freedom to use it.”

“What do you offer in return?”

Jim hesitated only a fraction of a second.

“Pain,” he said.

On cue, Alexandra raised the whip and brought it down on his naked back, leaving an angry line of red from shoulder to hip.

“And blood,” he said, through clenched teeth.

Alexandra struck again, the whip whistling loudly through the air on its way to impact.

Jim sucked in a sharp breath, but there was no blood yet. The sheath of wet wool covering the whip’s wooden core gave it an almost cruel amount of cushioning for this particular purpose. It would hurt, but it wouldn’t cut him, no matter how hard she hit. She was going to have to beat the skin raw to draw a few red beads from it.

Calling upon the part of herself that thought it served him right, Alexandra took ruthless aim at the tender stripe of skin where the last hit had landed, and swung.

Jim gripped the chains of the handcuffs, knuckles turning white.

Thankfully, the spell’s script grew more flexible here, with an open-ended prompt to do whatever was necessary to keep the subject’s mind focused on the intended result.

Alexandra suspected this would be easier than Jim’s last failed adventure in mental discipline.

“Tell me about what you’ll do when it’s safe to unlock you,” she said, and hit again.

“What?” Jim asked, voice a little shaky.

Alexandra repeated both the question and the blow.

“Well, it’s fairly obvious,” said Jim.

The task of stringing multiple words together seemed to help ground him. He managed to continue his next sentence across multiple hits, with only small gasps for each time the whip landed.

“I’m going to stay on my knees” – gasp – “long enough to thank you” – gasp – “and beg for that key, and then” – gasp – “I’m going to head straight for the nearest scrap of privacy” – gasp – “that I can find.”

“Is that really the best-case scenario you can think of?” Alexandra asked, finding her playfulness.

Jim turned his head to glance at her, and then quickly remembered to turn it forward again, to minimize the risk of being hit in the eye by mistake.

“Did you have a” – gasp – “better idea?” he asked.

“It’s your ideal destiny to design,” Alexandra reminded him. “But if your plans are reasonable, I might allow you to involve me in them.”

A smile crept into Jim’s voice, strong enough to stand up to the work of the whip.

“I doubt I can give you my usual stamina” – gasp – “right now. At least not” – gasp – “on a first round.”

“How would you spend that very brief first round of freedom, if you could pick anything you wanted?” Alexandra asked.

Jim thought for the space of two blows, but did not lose the thread.

“I’d spend it” – gasp – “in your mouth,” he said, the sound of his smile growing sharper. “I’d try to hold out” – gasp – “long enough for you to remind me how” – gasp – “gentle you can be when you want to.” His next gasp was replaced by a sharp laugh. “But almost as soon as your tongue” – gasp – “touches me, you’ll taste” – gasp – “all the hours I’ve spent” – gasp – “thinking of you.”

“And then?” Alexandra prompted.

“And then, after a quick pause to” – gasp – “catch my breath, I’d ask if you wouldn’t mind taking off that nightie, and lying” – gasp – “naked on the bed, with your hips right at the edge.”

“And if I did?”

“I’d stand with both feet on the ground for” – gasp – “leverage, and remind you why some folk call this thing a tool” – laugh – “by using it on you like that ‘magic wand’ in your drawer.”

“You could use that wand on me as you are now,” Alexandra teased. “Why do you need your dick back for that?”

“For me, of course,” Jim replied shamelessly. “We’re talking about my ideal destiny” – gasp – “aren’t we? But don’t worry, you’ll” – gasp – “love it, when I’m rubbing my densest cluster of nerve endings right against yours, so that I can” – gasp – “almost feel for myself what I’m doing to you, while I’m” – gasp – “doing it. You’ll be looking up at me, knowing that I can” – moan – “feel it, but that I’m pacing myself just for you. Dipping the head inside you just long enough to” – moaning gasp – “keep it slick before sliding it back up to your clit. And then” – whimper – “Christ, how am I not bleeding yet?”

Alexandra paused a few extra seconds to let him collect himself, then forced her vindictive streak to lend a little more of its strength. She wound up and hit harder, searching for those first few drops of blood and still not finding them.

“Stay with me,” she told Jim.

“And then,” he gritted onward, “the question will be whether I go all the way in to fuck you right after you cum” – gasp – “or right before.”

Gasp.

“We got it!” Alexandra announced, dropping the whip and gently touching her bare fingertips to Jim’s bruised and blistered back, along his right shoulder blade, where a single bead of blood had finally managed to seep out.

She held her hand out next to his face to show him.

“Oh, thank bleeding hell.” Jim keeled to the side in relief, hanging from his cuffs and taking long, slow breaths.

After a few moments, he asked, “Is there a closing ceremony?”

“Only the most basic,” Alexandra said, double-checking the book. “We give thanks to the forces of the universe and recall our shield magic.”

She uncuffed his hands so that he could bring them together in a little prayer to the fates. With another synchronized breath, the shield dome separated and contracted into two auras, before disappearing under their skins altogether.

“What are we supposed to do to present the blood to the fates?” Jim asked.

“Nothing,” Alexandra answered with a sinking feeling. “The spell should have taken effect the moment it spilled. Did it… not?”

Jim turned around to face her, leaning his back against the foot of the bed.

Between his legs, the caged creature went on choking on its metal bit, drooling pre-ejaculate faster than ever.

“Oh fuck,” Jim said, slumping forward and resting his head in his hands. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“It should have worked,” Alexandra said, uncomprehending. “I’ll… I’ll get you something for your back.”

She set the book down on her way to the door, and Jim grabbed it, desperately paging through for any explanation.

# 

Alexandra was on her way back to the suite, with an extra towel and a fresh bucket of ice, when she recognized the flaw in her assumptions.

“I think I know what went wrong,” she said when she stepped back into the bedroom.

“Grand timing for that,” Jim said, though he couldn’t help looking up from the book to her, following the most likely source of help. “Really terrific.”

“Don’t give me that,” Alexandra told him sharply. “It was your fault. Can you guess why?”

“I have no idea,” said Jim, closing the book and holding it in front of him like a shield. “As far as I can tell, we did it perfectly.”

“We did,” Alexandra confirmed and shook the ice bucket at him. “Get back in the tub. I don’t want you dripping all over the carpet.”

Jim followed her to the bathroom, lay facedown in the tub, and let her pour the ice over his bruises.

“Did you mean it, when you said you wished you could take it back?” Alexandra asked. “Walking out on me?”

“Of course I did,” said Jim.

“And now here you are, back in my home,” Alexandra pointed out. “With your last partner not talking to you, and what’s left of your dick locked up with the key in my magic strongbox. Suffering from an affliction so dangerous, so tailored to my expertise, that I can’t help feeling responsible for you. We couldn’t be more stuck together if you’d found a way to cram our souls into the same body.”

Jim’s shoulders rose sheepishly, confirming the last of Alexandra’s suspicions.

“You knew,” she said. “You knew this didn’t happen because of a stray thought about a kink you never really wanted to play out for real. It happened because you wished me back into your life.”

“The visualizations are only a guide for the fates,” Jim explained, speaking quickly and shifting away from her in the tub. “They’re not expected to come true exactly as-is. But you have to be honest about what a good destiny means to you. And I couldn’t… I couldn’t pretend my perfect future didn’t have you in it!”

“You might as well have cast a love spell, you asshole!” Alexandra shouted, scooping up a handful of ice and throwing it at Jim’s head. “And you talked me into cracking the whip, to what, make me feel sorry for you?”

“No!” said Jim. “I told you the absolute truth about why I wanted you to perform the spell.” He turned on his side to grab the cage. “This didn’t exactly turn out the way I was imagining!”

“I’ll bet,” Alexandra laughed. “But there was no way a correction spell was going to be able to ‘fix’ the one you cast with that burrower, because nothing went wrong with it in the first place.” She couldn’t stop laughing. “Welcome to your best possible destiny.”

“Wait,” Jim called out as she straightened up and turned to go. “I know you’re angry. I understand. But you’re not really saying I’m stuck like this. You wouldn’t give up on me like this, Lex. Lex, please!”

“Oh, would you just let me have this for five minutes?” Alexandra sighed. “It’s the least you can do after what you’ve pulled.”

She wiped her eyes and looked back at him seriously from the doorway.

“Of course, I’m going to find another way to get you your dick back. But it won’t be anywhere near that simple. Enjoy your ice. I’ll be enjoying my magic wand after all.”