My improbable adventures in sexual domination started completely without warning, on a Saturday night a couple years after college.

I was sitting on the couch in my apartment, with my arm around my best friend, Rachel, who was sobbing into my favorite Renaissance Faire cloak.

“This is pathetic,” she said, sitting up, blowing her nose, and putting her glasses back on.

She had done this three times already — said something final-sounding and started cleaning herself up as if she intended to change the mood, but none of her previous attempts had lasted long enough for us to make a start on the new RPG campaign I’d designed for us.

I was kind of glad she wasn’t set on playing the game. I’d put a lot of work into it, with the expectation that her boyfriend, Cameron, would be joining us. I’d put in lots of little moments where the two of them would have to work together, and although it would be possible for Rachel to just play multiple characters to get through it, I suspected it would be more of a painful reminder than a distraction from the fact that Cameron was, for whatever reason, not here.

Rachel hadn’t gotten around to sharing the details yet, and knowing her, they’d be sparse when she did.

Another wave of tears hit her, she took the glasses off, and I put my cloak back around her. I would have liked to hug her properly, head on, but then she might rest her ear on my chest and hear how rapidly my heart was beating.

This was not the first time we had gone through these motions.

Rachel had had eight boyfriends over the course of the seven years I’d known her, and every single one of them had left her sobbing into one or another of my costumes somehow.

It felt like I was going to die, every time. Partly because it hurt so bad to see Rachel in pain, and partly because whenever she broke up, it meant the guy was going to disappear from my life too. It almost always happened once I’d come to think of him as at least a casual friend, which I didn’t exactly have a ton of.

These guys weren’t the stereotypical red-flag-athons you’d expect to see with someone who’d had eight serious boyfriends in seven years. I never knew what happened between them behind closed doors, but Rachel always seemed, at least from an outside perspective, to have pretty solid taste. Cameron had been my favorite so far. He’d shown up to my mom’s funeral with a bouquet of daffodils, which I think I’d mentioned her liking maybe once before.

But I’d be lying if I said that was what was bothering me most.

The truth was, Rachel’s breakups sent me into a cold sweat, because her having a boyfriend made things… simple.

When she had a boyfriend, I could tell myself that that was it. The current guy across the gaming table from me was the one who would be her permanent, endgame partner. Any window where I could have been that guy was closed and gone, and that was just the way things went.

It was fine.

It was good.

It was better that way, in fact, because it meant Rachel and I could stay friends forever. I’d always have her in my life, for this one sacred gaming night, every two weeks.

There was no risk of ending up a footnote on her list of exes.

As long as Rachel was with Cameron, I was safe.

But if she told me right now that Cameron was fully out of the picture, or had done something that meant he should be out of the picture, there was a very real danger that I might try to kiss her, and end up making everything worse.

Rachel blew her nose again, and let out a long sigh. My heart hammered in the silence.

“I wish I could just feel normal things,” she said, clutching her d20 die to her chest. “Want normal things. If I could just do that, maybe I’d be happy by now.”

“I’m… not sure what you mean by normal,” I said honestly. “Are you… are you trying to…?”

My stomach tightened with the opposing hope and horror of finding myself truly, permanently safe.

“Because, I mean…” I forced myself to say it. “If you were gay, you could tell me. It wouldn’t change—”

“I’m attracted to men,” Rachel stopped me, firm and confident, and the pressure on my stomach lifted, or at least shifted angle. “Trust me, if all I was missing in a partner was boobs, I’d have gone and found someone who had them by now. What I want… I’m starting to think it may not be out there.”

“Oh,” I said. “Um, well, what do you… If you don’t mind—”

“I know you want me to tell you, Seth,” Rachel said flatly. “How it ended. How it always ends.”

My breath caught in my chest. So it had ended, then.

“I know I’m being cryptic and ridiculous,” she said.

“No!” I said. “But I mean, if you wanted to tell—”

“I feel like I’m taking such horrible advantage of you,” she said. “By not telling you. It’s like I’m tricking you into not making fun of me. But I just don’t know if I could take hearing it from you too.”

“I wouldn’t make fun of you,” I said.

“Oh, you would,” she accused. “You’d say, ‘That does it, Rachel. You’re living proof that women have an insatiable appetite for asshole, metaphorically and possibly literally, and it’s your own fault you can’t ever be happy!’”

“That doesn’t sound like me,” I said. “Or like making fun of someone. More like a prelude to violence.”

“Well I don’t have an insatiable appetite for asshole!”

“Okay.”

“I can’t stand it. When a man treats me like he thinks I’m something other than a person, I literally want him dead.”

“I’m aware,” I said. “I was there when you punched Codey. It was dope.”

“And then I want to vomit all over his corpse,” Rachel ranted on. “Does that sound like an insatiable appetite?”

“Nope.”

I paused a moment, in case she wanted to keep going.

When she returned to silence, I asked, “Did Cameron turn out to be an asshole?”

Rachel sighed again, heavily, winding her braid around her fingers.

“No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

I watched her, helplessly, for some scrap of anything that I could say something intelligent about.

Rachel watched me watch, snorted grimly, and shook her head.

“Fuck it,” she said. “I asked Cameron to try something in bed that he… wasn’t up for.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding in what I hoped was a reassuringly adult manner. “Like, a different position, or-”

“I asked him to pretend,” Rachel winced at herself and kept her eyes screwed shut as she spoke, “that he’d kidnapped me, and, like, was going to do whatever he wanted with me, until he found a way to make me like it.”

“Oh! Oh, wow. Okay.” I strained for another dose of reassuring maturity. “I mean… cool. So, you said that, and then he…?”

“He said something like, ‘You know I’m not that kind of guy,’ and I said, ‘Duh, of course I know, that’s literally the only reason I’d trust you to act like one!’” Rachel rolled her eyes. “And it seemed like he almost understood that, for a minute, because he actually kinda tried for me. But it was just…”

“...Bad?”

“It was so bad,” Rachel confirmed. “He was all self-conscious and uncomfortable, and he kept asking what I wanted him to do. And when I said I wanted him to tell me what to do, he kind of threw up his hands and said, ‘Can’t we just do the usual?’ And then I told him… maybe I shouldn’t have told him. It made him really mad.”

She put a hand over the bright pink splotch of shame blooming on the cheek closest to me.

“I told him I’d been faking with him all this time,” she said softly. “It’s not his fault. He tried so hard, and he had no way of knowing that I wasn’t turned on enough for any of it to work, because I never told him before. But I couldn’t just let him know he was getting nowhere when he touched me, without letting him know why! And I couldn’t tell someone this shit about me, when we were just starting out together. And once I started lying….”

She folded her arms on top of her knees and buried her face in them.

“Maybe I should have just kept faking my way through the sex,” she said. “He was so good to me, in so many other ways. I could have just gritted through—”

“You deserve better than having to ‘grit through’ your whole sex life,” I said.

Rachel shrugged and let out a snort of air. “What if it’s not about deserving? What if the kind of, you know, sex god I’ve got my heart set on, what if it’s not actually possible for him to overlap with the kind of man I can trust and respect? The kind who doesn’t expect to be treated like god of everything all the time.”

She sat back on the couch and wiped her face.

“I just want sex to be…” she turned her d20 thoughtfully in her hand, “to be like this, actually. Like playing one of your games. I want to give myself over to a magical world, where I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but I do know that I’m going on an adventure run by someone who wants me to have fun. Someone who gets that it won’t be fun if he makes it too easy for me. I want someone who makes me argue. Like, I’ll say, ‘I should be able to do the thing because xyz,’ and he’ll hear me out and sometimes say yes, but he won’t be afraid to say no when I’m bending the rules too far. When I’m making it less fun. And then, I want him to be able to switch it the fuck off and just be my normal, equal friend again when we’re done or need a break. That’s what I want. I want my sex life to be run by a good DM. Is that so much to ask?”

She looked up at me, her bloodshot eyes wide and focused, one eyebrow lifted inquisitively upward.

Jesus Christ, if that’s not what a window looks like, I’ll never recognize one.

“Give me ten minutes,” I said.

#

It was the fastest, most slapdash setup I’d ever done, for the most important game of my life. I was going to have to improv so much stuff on the fly.

Yet from the moment I sat down at my bedroom desk and started sketching characters and writing out stats, I felt calmer than I had at any point on the couch that evening.

I knew exactly what I was doing.

When I returned to the living room, Rachel burst out laughing, and I didn’t even care.

I had changed out of my wizard’s attire and into a black roughspun shirt, with a lace-up neck which I left deliberately loose. I’d done my eyeliner too, something I’d never done for anyone but myself before. I hadn’t yet learned how to be the most precise with it, but I didn’t need to be, to get that sunken, punky, ambiguously undead look I was going for.

Rachel put a hand over her still-smiling mouth.

Laughs always came first for new characters, and then all the other feelings.

I sat in the folding chair on the opposite side of the coffee table, where I would have been sitting all along if Cameron had been there on the couch with her.

“You remember that young human spy character you were working on?” I asked.

“Arianna Brighton?” she said.

I tossed her the character sheet.

“You, Arianna, have just been sacrificed to the demon prince, Bastidio, as his latest virgin bride.”

Rachel giggled again, and her eyes glinted with joy, as well as amusement.

“It was your own idea, a way of infiltrating his home in Hell,” I went on with the setup. “Getting yourself on the bride roster was the easy part. This guy goes through ‘brides’ on a monthly basis, so even the regions that worship him unquestioningly are in constant short supply. The real challenge starts now. Your top-secret mission here is to search Bastidio’s personal files for the sins of one particular dead man, one Earnest Kniles. As a failsafe, your handler sent you in with a magic escape word: flutterby. If you so much as think this word with intention to use it, you’ll be instantly transported back to Earth. The longer you spend in Bastidio’s presence, however, the more you expose yourself to his infernal gifts of persuasion. It would be easy to lose yourself here, and forget that you ever had a will of your own.”

Rachel rubbed her palms together in anticipation.

“After you allow Bastidio’s Earthly acolytes to kick you through the sacrificial portal, you materialize in a palatial dining room, sitting at a table long enough to host a hundred people. All of that space is empty at the moment, except for yourself, and, on your left, at the head of the table, the prince himself. Right now, he looks basically like a man. Very handsome, in a sickly, malnourished, Burtonesque kind of way. But he does have a prominent pair of ridged horns, and when he moves, you notice that the speed and effort of his motions don’t quite line up with what you’d expect for the dimensions of his body. There’s clearly something bigger and incomprehensibly more powerful controlling this form of a man in front of you.”

“Uh huh. So, am I dead now?” Rachel asked.

“You’re, like, provisionally dead,” I explained. “You could theoretically just stay here like this and be immortal if nothing changed, but you still have the ability to return to Earth in your own body as a living person. You can also be injured and killed just like on Earth, and potentially end up in a different part of the afterlife.”

“Okay, cool.”

“Prince Bastidio leans forward to take your hand,” I said, and leaned forward to take Rachel’s. “‘Welcome home, Ms. Brighton. I know this may not be the existence you imagined for yourself, but please believe me when I tell you, all of Hell and Earth salute your sacrifice.’ And he slides out of his chair, onto his knee, and kisses your hand.”

As I narrated, I did the same, holding Rachel’s gaze as I took one knee and pressed my lips to the soft skin between her knuckles.

During an everyday game, I tended to get pretty into my gestures as I strove to embody all of the NPCs the players interacted with. While caught in the moment, I might reach out to hold someone’s hand, but that was about all the contact I’d go for.

To my relief, Rachel watched me cross that line and grinned, like it was exactly what she’d been hoping for.

Okay. So, this game wasn’t going to be just words and dice and paper.

Rachel squeezed my hand, held the moment a little longer, and then said, “So, I can roll for insight on this guy, yeah?”

“Go for it.”

She rolled. “Sixteen plus two… eighteen.”

“Eighteen? Nice. You don’t sense any direct deception from Prince Bastidio. He has secrets, for sure, but he honestly does seem to want you to feel comfortable and appreciated, if possible.”

“Do I have my weapons?”

“No. You were sent through the portal in just ceremonial, like, baptismal clothes.”

“Are there knives at the dinner table?”

“…Sure, you see some steak knives lying around.”

“I stab him in the neck and run for his office.”

I laughed. “Already? We’re going right from hello to neck stabbing?”

“I came here to do a job, didn’t I?” asked Rachel.

I’d had this whole simmering dinner scene sketched out in my mind, but frustrating as it could be, this was a big part of why I loved playing with Rachel. Stories were much less interesting when they played out unchallenged, exactly the way I’d predicted.

“Roll to attack,” I said.

Rachel rolled. “Natural twenty, baby!”

“Seriously?” I laughed. “Roll for damage then.”

She did.

“You plunge the serrated blade into the meat of his neck, right about where his carotid artery would be flowing if he were a living human, dealing seven points of damage and taking him completely off guard.”

Rachel acted out my narration with a thankfully imaginary knife, and I gurgled and stumbled backward.

“So now you’re running down the completely unfamiliar hallways of a palace in Hell, I reminded her. Roll for perception.”

“Seventeen,” Rachel rolled and checked her character sheet. “Plus… that makes twenty-one total.”

“Unreal,” I said. “There’s a door up ahead on your left that says, ‘Prince Bastidio’s Office, please knock before entering.’ It’s slightly ajar.”

“I investigate the room, to see if I can figure out how he stores his files on individual sinners.”

“Awesome. Roll for it.”

Rachel tossed the die and winced. “Ooh, natural one. Do I, like, give myself a horrible papercut rifling through his files?”

“Files? What files?” I joked. “You see arcane instruments, indecipherable runes, nothing that says ‘filing system’ to you.”

“Hmm. Okay. No, wait.” Rachel pointed to a line on her character sheet. “I’m going to use ‘indirect breakthrough.’ When I fail at figuring something out, it makes it so that I instead stumble on some unrelated but significant information.”

“Nice. Let’s see….” The sparseness of the scenario I’d planned out gave me a narrow range of breakthroughs to offer her. “What you do see is a map of Hell on the wall. You see Prince Bastidio’s territory demarcated within it. That territory is labeled, ‘Pits of Casual Cruelty.’ There are spots marked around the border, showing the wards that contain the souls that dwell here, the souls condemned for just everyday but relentless, remorseless shittiness. Each ward has its current strength level marked, kind of like the battery symbol on a cell phone. None of them are doing great. Below the map is a leger. You can’t read most of what’s in it, but there are lists of names, written in their original Earthly tongues.”

“Are they women’s names?” Rachel asked.

“They are women’s names,” I confirmed. “And there’s a column of what look like numbers on the right side, which shift from black to red as the pages go on, as if an enterprise is sinking slowly into debt.”

“The virgin sacrifices hold the damned souls in place!” Rachel deduced with satisfaction. “Can I tell who set up that bullshit system?”

“There are more legers in this room, dating back to time immemorial, basically.”

“And how old is Prince Bastidio?”

“From your preexisting research, his cult only came into being about three hundred years ago.”

“Ah, so, he inherited the whole deflowering virgins to keep the wards of Hell in place job.”

“For his particular region of Hell, yes, that seems to be the case.”

“Got it. I love me a complicated fictional badboy.”

“I know,” I said, smirking.

I’d based Bastidio largely on the characters Rachel had most enjoyed hitting on in past campaigns, and I felt the warm little glow that came with eliciting exactly the reaction I’d been aiming for.

“Prince Bastidio unhurriedly catches up and enters the office behind you,” I said.

“Hey, so, hubby,” said Rachel. “What you do looks super fascinating. Before we get down to business, could you maybe walk me through a day in the life of a royal demon?”

I couldn’t help laughing at her innocent face. “Roll for persuasion.”

“I’ve got plus ten to charisma, baby,” Rachel said, and rolled. “Ten plus… oof, that’s a three. Thirteen total.”

“‘I safeguard damned souls,’ says Bastidio.” I arched one eyebrow and filled Bastidio’s voice with regal, no-nonsense condescension. “‘Do you think I’ve never heard someone stall, before?’”

Rachel drew her chin sheepishly down toward her chest.

“He snaps his fingers,” I said, doing so, “and instantly teleports you both to a lush bedroom, all furnished in red and black, with a huge four-post canopy bed.”

I stood up from my chair.

Rachel stood up with me, die and character sheets in hand.

So slowly, eyes locked to each other, like that game where one person pretends to be the other one’s mirror, we walked from the living room into my own less-than-lush bedroom.

“Prince Bastidio puts a hand on your shoulder,” I said, putting my hand on hers. “He’s totally calm, without a trace of anger over the whole knife thing. He says, ‘I’m afraid I will have you, Ms. Brighton. Would you prefer I endeavor to make it pleasant, or quick?’”

“I punch him in the junk,” said Rachel.

A snort escaped me.

“Roll to attack,” I said.

She rolled the die on my dresser. “Fourteen.”

“Fourteen does not hit him,” I said.

Rachel threw a downward punch, and let me catch her wrist easily in my hand, and wrench her arm up between us.

“With a flick of his wrist, Prince Bastidio directs a wave of Hell magic toward you,” I said. “Roll for dexterity.”

Rachel rolled. “Ooh, that’s a four.”

“Four’s not going to help you,” I said, not even trying to suppress my smile. “Invisible tendrils wrap around your limbs, and then through them, not damaging you, but infiltrating and essentially seizing control of every muscle in your body. You feel your arms and legs, your midsection and neck, all of your individual fingers and toes, harden to the consistency of wood under your skin, until you freeze into a statue before him.”

Rachel acted out the process beautifully, starting with a wild swing for the door, then a couple of increasingly laborious steps that took her only as far as the side of the bed, where she came to a teetering stop.

I stepped around to the front of her, put the tip of one finger to her forehead, and ever so slightly pushed.

She toppled backward onto the bed, holding that same rigid position so perfectly, you could almost swear she was really stuck in it.

“He arranges you on his bed,” I said, pushing down on Rachel’s left leg, which was still extended in mid-step. “The tendrils operating your muscles soften and bend effortlessly to his will, but harden against any attempt to move under your own power.”

I adjusted her in a few more places, straightening out her slightly crooked spine, making sure her head was fully resting on the bed, until she looked comfortable.

“Can I still talk to him?” Rachel asked.

“No,” I said. “The invisible tendrils are holding your jaw and tongue in place.”

She shut her mouth with a snap.

I ran my fingers slowly along the waistband of her jeans, to the fastening.

“What you can still do is think your magic escape word and return to Earth,” I said. “Tell me if you decide to.”

Rachel’s mouth remained firmly closed, motionless except for the involuntary upward twitching at the corners.

“The demon prince removes what clothes he finds inconvenient,” I said, unbuttoning her jeans and pulling them, along with her lace-trimmed panties, down over her tense, immobile ass and legs.

There was heat radiating palpably from the skin underneath, and I took a moment to stroke the backs of my fingernails up over her thighs.

“His touch is careful but businesslike, with an aftertaste of tenderness. It’s like he’s really trying to treat your body like nothing more than a valuable, delicate piece of equipment, but can’t quite forget the presence of a soul inside it.”

I put her hands over her head, with the die still in one of them, and pushed her legs apart. She remembered the rules of the spell, allowing herself to be spread without resistance, but then returning to her rigid state.

“That’s it for Prince Bastidio’s turn,” I said. “Catching you in his binding spell and moving you into position for the ritual deflowering.”

“But I can’t do anything on my turn, can I?” Rachel asked.

“You can try to break free of the spell with a raw strength check,” I suggested, “but with your stats, it’s going to take a nat twenty.”

“I guess that’s what I do, then.”

Moving only as much as the task absolutely required, Rachel opened the clenched hand holding her d20, letting it fall off the bed and onto the floor.

It was a sixteen.

I picked it up and pressed it back into her hand.

“No such luck. Bastidio’s turn again. You’re still fully immobilized and at his mercy.”

Rachel didn’t look the least bit broken up about this course of events.

“Even though you’re fully splayed out at this point,” I said, “Bastidio continues exploring your body for what seems like a little bit longer than necessary to get the job done.”

Rachel’s nipples were straining through her bra and soft t-shirt. I tapped each one in turn with a finger, through the fabric, and then ran my hands down to her naked pelvis. I pressed one palm flat over her utterly available pussy, just to feel the streak of moisture along my skin.

“‘One more chance to answer,’ Bastidio growls in your ear,” I said, leaning down toward her ear to do exactly that. “‘Give me one scream for pleasant, two screams for quick.’”

Without hesitation, Rachel screamed one short, sharp blast in her throat, from behind her sealed jaw, and then was silent.

“Very well.”

I crawled backward, lowered my head, and blew softly over her pussy, watching the close-trimmed hairs stand on end in response. Then I kissed it, starting with the lips on one side, then the other, licking and softly sucking, making my way up to her clit.

I touched it ever so slightly with the tip of my tongue.

Rachel managed not to move any major muscles, but that tiny little bump moved on its own, stretching upward, and her lips glistened with fresh moisture that was not from my mouth.

I licked a light circle around her clit for several more seconds, just barely touching it without pressing down, and then dipped the tip of my tongue briefly, experimentally, into her opening.

Rachel hummed and giggled and gasped and sighed, but remained a statue. The only time I saw her falter was when I pulled away, and it was only for a moment.

She didn’t even try to bend her neck to look at anything but the ceiling.

I unbuckled my belt, letting it clatter obviously, and stripped from the waist down too.

“Arianna’s turn,” I said. “You can feel the power of Prince Bastidio’s spell degrading over time, becoming, not easy to break, but less impossible by the moment. You have seconds left before he full-on takes you, and uses this tender, intimate moment of your young life as fuel for his infernal containment enchantments. Enough time still to use your word, or for one more strength check. You need a fifteen.”

Rachel tossed the die.

I had never been more excited to see a player fail.

“Twelve,” I said, returning the die to her. “Bastidio presses the head of his demon cock against your helpless, magically bound human form.”

I lined myself up between her legs.

“Demon cock?” Rachel asked.

“It’s a cock, it belongs to a demon,” I clarified. “It thankfully feels pretty normal, though.”

“Not that I would have any context—”

“No, not that you would have any context for what a normal cock feels like,” I acknowledged quickly, “being raised to your recent adulthood in an all-girls spy academy and all. But it’s not barbed or spewing brimstone or anything.”

“Okay, cool.”

“You feel a moment of pressure and resistance,” I said, pressing down on her, steadying myself with my hand. “And then, pop,” I slid past the tight entryway, “it’s in. You can feel an eerie, tingling, magical energy sweep through you, through Bastidio, rushing from your interlocking body parts out in all directions to the boarders of this particular realm of Hell. The conditions have technically been met for the wards to stay in place another month, but the magic is still flowing, and you get the sense that there’s more that still has to happen to make them as strong as they can be.”

“It has to be good?” Rachel guessed.

“Roll for perception, if you want.”

She did, and got an eighteen.

“It at least has to be good for him,” I said.

“Typical.” Rachel rolled her eyes.

“But he seems to be taking that quick-or-pleasant question he asked you deadly seriously,” I went on, slowly sinking the rest of the way into her, all the way to the base. “He’s taking his time, moving in gentle stages that give you the chance to adjust to his presence, along with the binding spell tendrils inside you. After a few seconds, you find that you have more room for him than you would have expected. Only then does he really begin to fuck.”

Rachel giggled. I backed out enough to give her a deep, quick thrust, and the sound became a moan.

She closed her eyes, and for a moment, I felt my attention slip perilously back toward myself.

Toward my deeply average dick, which was never going to make any princes of darkness blush.

Toward this silly costume shirt I’d bought explicitly because I knew Rachel like them, and then never had the nerve to wear before today.

Toward the fact that, holy shit, I was having sex, I was having sex with Rachel.

Toward how overwhelmingly, physically fucking awesome it felt inside her.

Every thought I let in about what I was doing, in reality, made me want to shrivel and run, either with or without a game-breakingly premature ejaculation happening first.

All I could do to hold it off was be the dungeon master, just be the dungeon master, watch and guide and enforce the integrity of the story as my players, my player, explored and gave it form.

Lucky for me, Rachel needed a bit of integrity enforcement right about then.

She started off following the rules, but before long, she began to move under me, stiffly and subtly at first, then blatantly grinding against me. Her face rose up, head tilting back in search of a kiss.

I grabbed her by a hip joint with one hand and her throat with the other, and shoved her flat to the bed again.

“Nope, you failed that roll,” I reminded her. “You’re still immobilized. You’ll get another chance to break free on your turn.”

Rachel stiffened back into shape and whimpered pitifully through her sealed, smiling lips.

I didn’t think I’d ever seen her so happy before.

Now, I may not have had the most sexual experience, but I was a sponge for knowledge when a subject interested me. Authentic instructions on how to pleasure a woman, or even accurate diagrams of typical female anatomy, weren’t easy to stumble across by accident, and they weren’t spoon-fed to boys in school. But they were possible to find if you went looking, and you knew anything about how to use a search engine or evaluate the credibility of your sources.

The few women I had gotten the chance to fool around with casually in college had also been more than willing to educate me on how things felt and what they liked, once I managed to convince them that I actually wanted accurate feedback.

So, you could say I knew exactly what I was doing to Rachel now, when I sat up on my knees, held her rigid hips up off the bed, and continued thrusting into her from the lowest possible angle.

I knew that I was dragging myself back and forth along her g-spot, basically hitting the roots of her clitoris while ignoring its head. It wouldn’t hurt her, as long as she was well warmed up, which, by wetness of her and the sounds she was making, she sure seemed to be. It would just give her the open-ended feeling of building toward an orgasm that she probably couldn’t actually reach, until she got that head-on contact.

Obviously, Rachel hadn’t exactly had the chance to talk me through the foibles of her body in particular, but if a lack of orgasms was a major part of what had plagued her fraught love life, I doubted her win conditions were any easier than the average.

In short, I knew what a vicious tease I was being. And she was taking it.

The power of that was a hell of a rush, I won’t lie. But I couldn’t let it go to my head.

In a high-urgency encounter like this one, a character’s turn was only supposed to last about ten to fifteen in-game seconds, and I was acting out Bastidio’s ravishment of Arianna in basically real time.

I started the count from when Rachel had stopped moving again — just a little penalty for her attempt at cheating, I reasoned — and allowed myself fifteen full, deep thrusts before forcing myself to stop.

It was a close call. Even with my mind on the story, and on Rachel, my body was approaching its limits.

Rachel was panting with the effort of keeping still, and now so was I.

“Roll,” I told her. “This time a ten gets you free.”

Rachel tossed the die onto the floor.

I had to lean down on top of her to reach down and pick it up. She shamelessly lifted her pelvis to try to bump it together with mine on my way.

“That’s a nine,” I said, sitting back up before she could do much damage.

“So, I get most of the way free?” Rachel tested me hopefully.

“Nope.”

“Like, my calf and shin muscles are still stuck in one position, but everything else works normally, right?” she pushed again, sweetly.

Well, if that was the way she wanted to play it….

“What would you do if you did break most of the way free?” I asked.

“Reach down and touch myself, right in front of him,” she answered, face lighting up. “You know, just to let him know that I know what’s up and I’m not afraid of him? And take away that little bit of leverage he might have over my mind by holding out on me. I’d be like, ‘You think you’re using me for your needs, your shadowy highness? I can use you for mine, too.’”

I grinned.

“You put all your will, every ounce of strength you have, into moving your right arm,” I told her. “You picture yourself reaching your hand down to your pussy, and stroking it in your favorite way, with the demon prince still inside you. You imagine turning his cock from this fierce, conquering intruder into, like, an auxiliary toy, something that’s just there to enhance your masturbation experience without even being the main event. You strain against the invisible magic tendrils inside your triceps, until you feel something snap.”

Rachel took in an excited gasp.

“With all your strength committed to this motion, and all resistance suddenly gone, your arm goes from being still as a statue to flinging wildly through the air. Your aim’s dead-on, though.”

Rachel’s face dropped gradually into a pout as it dawned on her where this was going.

“You try to pull back at the last moment, but your own flailing hand slaps you on the pussy, and then your arm sort of falls to the side on the bed, immobile again, because you’d need to use a different muscle group to lift it back up.”

She took a few nervous, bracing breaths.

“You have enough time while your hand’s in flight to return to Earth,” I suggested. “Or, tell you what, you can—”

Rachel slapped herself with loud, wild gusto — much more than I would have asked or expected of her. I would have accepted the lightest, most symbolic slap she wanted to give me, but her arm swung a full, believably uncontrolled arc, before landing right where it was supposed to, and rolling aside.

She twitched and grunted on impact, holding to her position with impressive precision, and for a moment, I thought that was going to be her whole reaction.

Then, “Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.”

“Are you okay?” I asked, in my most neutral DM voice, trying to hold back a twinge of doubt and regret until I was sure it was necessary.

“Yeah,” Rachel moaned. “I just… I’d have thought that would make me less horny. But I think… I think I might actually be even hornier than I was before. I mean, Arianna is. Because I still can’t talk as her right now, I can only talk about her. Right?”

“Right,” I said, needing to take a moment for a fit of internal laughter to pass. “That going to be Bastidio’s turn.”

I thrusted into her, hard, to underline the shift.

Rachel moaned through her teeth but did not move.

Relying heavily on what real-life stamina I’d been able to regain in that short break, I fucked her ruthlessly for another fifteen seconds, mostly from that same low, teasing angle, though I did lean forward over her briefly, just to make sure she still wanted the same attention after the smack.

She restrained herself from grinding on me this time, but when I reached my hand under her ass, I could feel the muscles tensing as if they were trying to grind, and only barely being held back.

To make absolutely sure, I sat back up and walked my fingers toward her clit. Her face reacted with the same flashes of hope and excitement.

I removed my hand back to her hips, and stopped again.

“Arianna’s turn,” I said. “The spell is wearing thin against your struggles. You only need a five to break it.”

Rachel tossed the die almost before I’d finished speaking.

I reached down to pick it up.

“Seven,” I read aloud. “But that’ll do it.”

Rachel burst instantly out of her rigid pose and grabbed me around the shoulders, dragging the length of my body close to hers. She locked one leg around my back and planted the other for leverage, bucking powerfully under me in search of friction where she needed it.

“Is that all you do with your turn?” I asked, laughing. “Fight off the spell and hug Bastidio, prince of—”

“I try to flip myself top of him!” Rachel exclaimed.

“Good luck with that,” I said. “Roll for strength.”

Rachel threw her die.

Seventeen. Not bad, but I was directly opposing her as a fucking demon prince, here.

I’d left my own d20 in the living room, so I picked up hers and rolled it again for myself, and laughed louder.

“Prince Bastidio gets a nat one!” I confessed, returning her die to her hand.

Rachel hurled her momentum sideways into a barrel roll, and I had no fair option but to let her.

She sat up on top of me, with my cock still inside her, braced her hands on my chest, and began grinding against me with almost startling strength for her compact, soft-looking frame.

I supposed Prince Bastidio must have been equally surprised.

Clearly enjoying the use of her arms, Rachel grabbed her shirt and pulled it off, bra and all, right over her head without stopping to unfasten it.

She ran her hands over her breasts, over those still rock-hard nipples, and then grabbed one of my hands and ran that over one of them too.

They were so much softer, so much more alive, without the fabric to hold them.

“Would you say,” she asked, “for a roll like that, I get to cum before he does?”

“That depends,” I said, playing it cool but very aware of the involuntary time limit on my own capacities, ticking away with every move she made. “How close are you?”

“Come on, it was a nat one!” said Rachel. “Can’t I do pretty much whatever I want with him at that point? Please?”

“Oh, I’ll allow it,” I said. “But only if it’s real.”

Rachel’s arguments melted. She smiled shyly and picked up the pace, rocking her hips even more frantically.

“Don’t you lie to me now,” I warned her, reaching up to pinch one of her nipples and tug her down toward me by it. “The story goes how the story goes. You don’t fake a die roll, and you don’t fake this. If you can’t—”

“I can, I think, I’m not lying, I promise, I… oh, god!”

All at once, Rachel cried out, and dug her fingers hard into my chest, tangling them in the laces of my shirt and snagging a few hairs. The rhythm of her hips stopped for a moment, and then was replaced by a slower, more deliberate wiggle, like trying to coax out the last of some precious substance in a nearly empty container.

I watched with an admittedly critical eye, as Rachel moaned, gasped, and trembled on top of me. I knew how good an actress she could be when she got into her characters, and I knew that my judgment might be clouded by how badly and how long I’d wanted to make her feel this with me.

But I could feel spasms in her legs. I could see her pulse in her tossed-back neck, the way it crescendoed and then calmed in the aftermath. I could smell the difference in the air, as the moisture already freely dripping down from her suddenly quickened.

So, I didn’t interrogate her when she stopped and sat still, messily brushing her hair out of her face, and panted, “I… I did it… I’ve never actually… with another person… before… I… Seth…” she leaned down and kissed me heavily on the mouth. “Oh my god. That was….”

I took the die out of her hand and tossed it onto the floor.

“What does it say?” I asked.

“Huh? Oh.” Rachel leaned over to retrieve it. “It’s a fourteen.”

“On his turn, Prince Bastidio says, ‘If you wanted to face the floor, you only had to say so,’ and he grabs you, rotates you around a hundred and eighty degrees, and shoves you forward so your face is up against the bed. You can roll to resist, but you’ll do it with disadvantage from being all doped up on afterglow.”

Rachel kept panting for breath, for the first time looking overwhelmed by simple arithmetic and stage directions.

“Or,” I reminded her, “of course you can still use your—”

“I’m not using the magic teleporting safeword,” Rachel stopped me.

She shifted her hips, seeming to regain her awareness of me inside her, still hard and unfinished.

“Sorry,” she said, “I’ll… of course I’ll roll. I have to roll, right?”

“No, you don’t have to fight him if you don’t want to.”

“Right. Okay. Well, I got mine, and I don’t think I’m actively fighting to sabotage the containment of Hell, so I think I just want to give him what he wants.”

“Get on your knees, then.”

Rachel complied, unsteady but unhesitating. Neither of us were quite agile enough to fully act out the move I’d described, shifting from cowgirl to doggie without pulling out in between, but we got to the same place eventually, and I got the pleasure of sliding myself back into her from the new angle.

She moaned again softly and laid her upper body down on the bed as I did so. Her ass was still propped up for me, her knees firmly under her, but her back arched downward from there, catlike and graceful, to where her head, with glasses askew, rested on one outstretched arm. She looked altogether blissfully content.

For the first time since we’d started, I let myself look at her just to marvel, rather than to anticipate or argue or instruct.

Fuck, she was beautiful. She was so much more beautiful than I’d ever let myself acknowledge while clinging to the safety of her friendship. I would have lost my grip if I had.

This view of her felt too perfect to exist anywhere, let alone in my bedroom, laid out so trustingly, generously, almost gratefully, just for me.

It was a bizarre thing, to be regarded with gratitude for something I would have given anything to do.

There were times, even in the course of ordinary DM-ing, when I felt my head start to spin at the responsibility involved. Rachel and the rest of our ever-cycling set of adventuring companions implanted fragments of their souls into these characters they crafted, and placed them freely into my hands. They gave me permission to break their hearts if the story and the dice demanded it, and when they were finished cursing me, they thanked me, for making them feel.

The feelings were real, but I could always at least technically tell myself that it was “only” a game. “Only” make-believe.

This time was maybe kinda-sorta a little less “only” than usual.

The weight of that pressed down on me, but also steadied me, like one of those balance poles tightrope walkers used, as I took my last penetrative turn of the encounter.

While I rubbed myself against the soft, wet, post-orgasmic walls of her pussy, Rachel hummed happily to herself, vocally registering pleasure of a new, languid, unurgent variety.

I paid attention to every detail, trying to engrave them into my memory, every breath, every glance and smile she shot up at me, the smoothness of her skin under my fingers, and the snug curve of her around me.

I didn’t even make it to fifteen seconds.

The orgasm I’d put off for so many moves hit me like an avalanche, sending shiny blurs across my vision and making me clutch Rachel’s beautiful hips just to hold myself upright.

I stayed where I was, floating in shimmering clouds of magic, until it felt feasible that I might be able to move without falling. Then I slid out of her, let myself collapse on the bed beside her, and reached down for the box of tissues I kept beside it.

While we passed the box back and forth, cleaning ourselves, catching our breath, I pieced words together in an almost comforting act of habit.

“At the same moment when Prince Bastidio finishes inside you, you feel a final, magical energy surge, emanating out of that same place,” I spread my hands outward to illustrate. “Then it stops. The waves already in progress continue to spread out toward the bounds of his domain, leaving a peaceful stillness in their wake. You get the sense that this place is now secure, for better or worse, at least for now.”

Rachel rolled over and propped her head up to smile at me. For a moment, I thought she was going to tease me for bothering with the conclusion.

Then she said, “What about the sins of that guy I was looking into? Earnest Kniles?”

“You never figured out about that,” I said. “Maybe next session.”

“Next session, huh?” Rachel asked with a significant smirk, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “Okay.”

I lay back on the bed, and she cuddled up next to me.

Our breathing synchronized, slow and steady, until I started to wonder whether she had fallen asleep.

Then, “So, what now?”

She was asking me. Not the demon prince Bastidio, not the DM controlling Bastidio. Just me. Just Seth.

I felt my shoulders pull up toward a shrug, even with her head resting on my chest. Every functioning system of my body and mind was engaging, with the sole shared purpose of locking me back into the same safe cell where I’d kept myself for the duration of our friendship.

I forced myself to speak the first words I could grasp.

“Roll for insight.”

***

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