Research and Development

---

**Diary Entry — Tuesday**

I bought the cock ring on Monday afternoon. I'd been reading chapter nine — the one I told him to wake me up for — and there was this scene where the woman straps a vibrating ring on her partner and then rides him while controlling exactly how and when he gets to feel it. I read that paragraph four times. Then I closed my laptop, put on shoes, and drove to the shop on Seventh Street — the one with the plain black storefront and the buzzer you have to ring. The woman behind the counter was maybe twenty-five and had the bored expression of someone who'd sold a thousand cock rings and couldn't be surprised by the thousandth. I put the ring on the counter. She rang it up. I also grabbed another bottle of the warming lube — the same kind from last time — because we'd gone through most of it and I had plans that required more.

Walking back to my car, I felt that specific hum of anticipation that I've started to associate with him. Not butterflies. Something more deliberate than that. More like the feeling of loading a weapon, except the weapon is me and the target is a seventy-year-old man who lies on his back and lets me pin his arms and licks his own cum off my fingers when I tell him to.

I'm writing that down and reading it back and it still sounds insane. It is insane. I've never been this person before — the one who orders, who controls, who decides when and how and how fast. Before Lawrence, sex was something that happened to me. Something I participated in, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes not, but always on someone else's timeline. The first time I climbed on top of him and pinned his wrists and felt him go still beneath me — not resisting, just waiting — something cracked open in my chest. Like finding a door in a house you've lived in for years and never noticed.

Today I walked into his condo at two in the afternoon. He'd left the door unlocked. I came in with a bag in one hand and my shoes already off, and he was in the kitchen pouring water into a glass, shirtless, in those gray sweatpants he wears when he's not trying to impress anyone. His back was to me — broad, still solid for his age, the skin slightly looser across the shoulders than it would've been thirty years ago but no less appealing for it. I set the bag on the counter. He turned around.

"You're early," he said.

"You're shirtless," I said.

"I live alone. I can be shirtless."

"You won't be living alone for the next few hours."

He drank his water and set the glass down and looked at the bag. He didn't ask what was in it. He'd learned not to ask. I liked that — the way he'd started accepting that I'd show up with things and he'd find out what they were when I decided he should. There's a specific kind of trust in that. He doesn't need to know the plan. He just needs to know there is one, and that I'm holding it.

I unpacked the bag in front of him. The lube went on the counter first. He picked it up, turned it over, read the label like he was checking the ingredients on a cereal box. "Same as last time?"

"Same brand. Different formulation. This one's supposed to be more intense."

"More intense than the one that made you come in thirty seconds?"

"It made me come in forty-five seconds. And it wasn't the lube. It was your tongue."

"My tongue and the lube."

"Fine. My tongue and the lube." I took the bottle from him and set it back down. Then I pulled out the cock ring and placed it on the counter between us.

He looked at it. It was black, silicone, with a small bullet vibrator attached at the top — the kind that sits against the base of the cock and presses into whoever's on top. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands with the same careful attention he'd given the lube. Then he found the small button on the side and pressed it, and the vibrator buzzed to life in his palm — a low, steady hum that I could feel from where I was standing.

"Chapter nine?" he asked.

"You read it."

"You sent me the link."

"I sent you the link to the whole series. I didn't think you'd actually read ahead."

"I told you I wanted to be prepared."

"And? Are you prepared?"

He turned the vibrator off and set it down. "No."

"Good."

I told him to go to the bedroom and take off his pants. He went. I stayed in the kitchen for another minute, opening the lube and squeezing a drop onto my finger, rubbing it between my thumb and forefinger. It was slicker than the last one — warmer too, almost immediately, with a slight tingle that spread across my skin and made my breath catch. This was going to be interesting.

When I walked into the bedroom he was sitting on the edge of the mattress, naked, his cock soft against his thigh, his hands resting on his knees. He looked up at me with that expression I've started to recognize — the one that's not quite submission, not quite anticipation, but some hybrid of the two that lives in the space between wanting something and being willing to wait for it.

"Lie down," I said.

He did. I stripped slowly — not as a performance, but because I wanted to feel each piece of clothing come off and register the change in the air against my skin. Shirt first, then bra, then jeans, then underwear, each one a layer of distance between me and what I wanted removed. By the time I was naked, the lube I'd tested on my fingers had spread its warmth into my knuckles, and I could feel it everywhere I touched myself — the slight heat of it intensifying as I ran my hands over my own body, across my breasts, down my stomach, between my legs.

I climbed onto the bed and straddled him. His cock was starting to respond — not hard yet, but thickening, lifting slightly off his thigh. I took the lube and poured a line of it down my palm, then wrapped my hand around him and started stroking, slow, feeling him grow in my grip. The lube did something remarkable — I could feel the heat of it transferring from my hand to his skin, and he gasped, his hips jerking upward.

"Fuck," he said. "That's—"

"Different?"

"Stronger."

I kept stroking. He hardened fully within a minute, and I could feel every ridge and vein through the slick warmth of the lube, my hand gliding over him with a friction that was somehow both slippery and intense. His breathing changed — deeper, more deliberate, like he was trying to keep control of something that was already slipping.

I reached for the cock ring. He watched me stretch it over my fingers, then position it at the head of his cock and roll it down to the base. It fit snug — not too tight, but enough that I could see the pressure of it registering in his face, a slight tightening around his eyes that was part discomfort and part something else. Something hungry.

"Turn it on," I said.

He reached down and pressed the button. The vibrator hummed to life against the base of his cock, and the sound he made — this low, guttural noise in the back of his throat — went straight between my legs. I could feel myself getting wet, the combination of the lube's warmth and the sight of him reacting making my cunt clench around nothing.

I positioned myself above him. The vibrator was pressed against the top of his cock, and when I lowered myself onto him, it pressed directly against my clit. The sensation was immediate and overwhelming — the fullness of him inside me combined with the steady buzz against the most sensitive part of me, and the lube on his cock creating a heat that seemed to travel inward, deep into my core.

I didn't move. I just sat there, full of him, the vibrator doing its work, and let the feeling build. His hands came up to my hips and I pushed them down.

"No," I said. "I'm going to ride you. You don't get to help."

He gripped the sheets instead. I could see his knuckles going white, the tendons in his forearms standing out, and I started to move.

Slow at first. Rolling my hips in a way that dragged him in and out of me while keeping the vibrator pressed against my clit. Each rotation sent a pulse of pleasure through me that was so concentrated it was almost too much — the buzz on my clit, the heat of the lube inside me, the stretch of him filling me — and I had to slow down twice just to keep from coming in the first thirty seconds.

He was watching me. His eyes were on my face, then my breasts, then down to where we were connected, watching himself slide in and out of me, watching the vibrator disappear against my clit each time I pressed down. His jaw was clenched. He was fighting something — the urge to thrust up, to grab my hips, to take over — and the fact that he was fighting it, that he was letting me set the pace even though I could see how badly he wanted to move, made me wetter.

"Faster," he said.

"No."

"Please."

"No." I leaned forward, putting my hands on his chest, changing the angle so the vibrator pressed harder against my clit and his cock hit a different spot inside me — deeper, more deliberate. I was close now. I could feel it building in my thighs, in my stomach, in the way my cunt was starting to clench around him in involuntary pulses.

"You're going to come," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"Can I—"

"No." I pressed my hands harder into his chest and sped up, my hips moving in short, grinding strokes that maximized the pressure on my clit. The vibrator hummed against us both, and I could feel him tensing beneath me, his cock swelling inside me, the cock ring keeping him hard and trapping the sensation at the base where the vibrations were strongest.

I came first. It hit me like a wall — my whole body locking up, my thighs clamping against his hips, my cunt gripping him in rhythmic contractions that I could feel echoing through the vibrator and into him. I heard myself making sounds — not words, just noise, raw and involuntary — and I kept grinding through it because the vibrator didn't care that I'd come, it just kept buzzing against my clit, and the overstimulation was so intense it was almost pain but I couldn't stop.

"Fuck — stop — I can't—"

I didn't stop. I rode him through the aftershocks, my body jerking with each pulse of the vibrator, and then I felt him tense beneath me. His hips came off the bed — one hard thrust upward that I couldn't stop and didn't want to — and he came inside me with a sound that was close to a growl, his cock pulsing against the ring, the vibrations milking him through it. I could feel each pulse, each warm rush of him filling me, and the sensation triggered another smaller orgasm in me, a sharp aftershock that made my vision blur.

I collapsed onto his chest. The vibrator was still going. I reached down and turned it off, and the sudden silence was almost as intense as the noise had been. His cock was softening inside me, the ring still snug around the base, and I could feel his cum leaking out around it, warm and slick against my thighs.

We lay there. His hands came up to my back, finally, and he held me against him, and I could feel his heartbeat through his chest — fast, erratic, slowly calming.

"The lube," he said after a long time.

"What about it?"

"It's going to kill me."

"That's a risk I'm willing to take."

He laughed, and the vibration of it moved through his chest and into my body. I pressed my face into his neck and breathed him in — sweat and sex and the faint chemical tang of the lube that was still warming both of us.

I climbed off him eventually. The ring came off with a slow, careful pull that made him wince, and I set it on the nightstand. Cum ran down my inner thigh, and I didn't wipe it off. I liked the feeling of it — proof of what we'd done, what I'd taken from him, what I'd decided to let him give me.

He got up to get water. I stayed on the bed, naked, sprawled across the sheets that I'd brought last time, writing this entry in my head while the afternoon light moved across the ceiling. He came back with two glasses and sat on the edge of the bed and handed me one, and I drank half of it in one long swallow.

"Chapter ten," I said.

"What about it?"

"I think I'm going to need restraints."

He looked at me over the rim of his glass. "You already pin my arms."

"With my hands. I want something more reliable."

He drank his water. I drank mine. The lube was still doing its work — I could feel the warmth of it lingering between my legs, a slow, persistent heat that was making me want things I'd just finished doing.

"Send me the link to chapter ten," he said.

"No."

"No?"

"You don't get to prepare for this one."

He set his glass down. I set mine down. I reached for the cock ring on the nightstand and turned it over in my fingers.

"We have time," I said. "The lube's not done with us yet."

He looked at the ring in my hand. He looked at me. He lay back on the mattress.

I climbed on.

---

*End of entry. Tomorrow: research restraints. Also: buy more lube. We're going to need it.*