Maybe it’s because they’re at Amarantha’s house. Her furnishings remind Moncada of a tour of a North Korean academic’s apartment he watched online—pastel furniture covered in taught floral-patterned upholstery, doilies on the side tables and dressers, framed headshots of chess masters on the wall that resemble heads of state. Her house is like a replica of a house. Maybe it’s because of Amarantha, the way she, even in her underwear beneath him, radiates authority and triggers his compulsion to please. Or maybe it’s intrinsic to him, a fated malfunction to ensure his genetic line comes to an end and the earth is purged of his likeness. Moncada is in his underwear too, propped above her on his elbows, the two of them parallel and precarious on her hard, shallow couch. She hasn’t touched him yet, so she doesn’t know that Moncada can’t get it up.
Amarantha’s eyebrows sink in toward the middle, as if they’re heaviest there. She’s noticed he’s frozen.
Moncada’s thoughts orbit his flaccidity in a tight, hot loop, and there’s no spare processing power to emote or generate speech.
On the small table adjacent the couch, a scented candle aerosolizes the scent of fake pine cones, the kind real estate agents set out in bowls during open houses. Amarantha’s white fluorescent lights flicker overhead, creating the illusion that the yellow pastel fabric on the couch is flashing. Moncada has the sense that he is in an institutional place, a place in which people are not themselves but instead their roles and titles, in which he can only preserve his worth by fulfilling the prescribed role, and his role here is to become erect.
Amarantha pushes on his shoulder, then pushes again harder, trying to stir him from his catalepsy. She says something to him but the signal drops somewhere between his ears and his brain.
Moncada has been this close to sex zero times before. His education on the topic is wanting. In high school phys ed he endured a week of guest lectures on the virtues of abstinence, and in college he watched some porn videos before deciding to stick with jpegs—his porn collection is all still images—because jpegs don’t communicate unfulfillable expectations. There’s nothing didactic about a hot jpeg. It’s just inert, and hot. Amarantha is not inert. Behind her eyes there is an unignorable consciousness, Moncada’s agnostic sense of a soul, a first-person experience as complex and acute as his own with expectations to match. With a jpeg, Moncada always knows where he stands, but nothing is ever known with Amarantha. He does not know how to proceed.
Cool air rushes in to fill the empty space between Moncada and the couch. Amarantha and her body heat have crawled out from under him and escaped over the couch armrest. He hears her rummaging through cabinets in the kitchen. With her eyes off him his muscles relax some, and he becomes aware of his strange posture, supported on his knees and elbows. Moncada reorients into a sitting position, at first on his hands, but then he pulls his hands out and rests them on his thighs.
“Drink these,” Amarantha says when she returns to the living room. She sets down a tray of poured shot glasses, four of them.
“What are they?”
“Rotgut. Have you eaten in the past few hours?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Moncada, eager to be guided, ingests them in a single drought. A few moments of waiting later his field of vision narrows and his cognition dims, slowing his thoughts, bottlenecking the anxious loop, liberating him from it. It feels as if the present moment has always been a small pouch in his hand, but now he’s untied the mouth of the pouch and crawled inside of it somehow, to find in the tiny pouch a vast parallel world. Though his periphery has dropped off, what he still sees is closer, more real, than the thoughts that entangle him in sobriety. At twenty-eight years old, for the first time, Moncada is drunk. Time passes, either seconds or many minutes. He asks Amarantha for more.
“You can’t have more. Are you trying to wake up for tomorrow right now?”
Moncada stands. He approaches Amarantha in a cartoonish lunge and straightens up to look down at her eyes. In this state of mind he does not think about how to articulate his limbs; they approximate the kinematics according to his intent.
“It’s kicking in. You’re clumsy.”
What he could not achieve on top of her, he can achieve beneath her, under her wing, according to her guidance. He relaxes in the new balance of power. By intoxicating himself he has surrendered control to her, and now he is free from the weight of his agency. He takes her hand and shows her that he’s hard for her. “Let’s go back to the couch?”
Amarantha presses her lips together and looks up in thought, then pulls him by his hand. She takes him down the hall, up the stairs, down another hall, and into her bedroom.
It is a privilege to see Amarantha’s bedroom. Moncada studies it. The furnishing matches the other rooms. Her bed frame is ornate oak and her dresser posts have carved finials at the tops. The are streaks in the carpet where it leans against the grain, evidence of recent vacuuming. None of the surfaces have any dust, and there’s another scented candle burning on the bedside table that she must have lit before he came over, knowing she would bring him here.
In the closet Amarantha shuffles around with the door closed.
Moncada falls back on Amarantha’s bed with his feet on the floor and dizzies himself staring at her popcorn ceiling, which appears to swirl back and forth uncertainly like the inside of a washing machine. He speculates about what Amarantha is doing behind the closet door. Maybe selecting lingerie. If she could just tell him how to fuck her, he could follow the instructions. Later, once they’ve done that a few times, Moncada might feel more comfortable improvising.
Amarantha leans over him, supporting herself with one hand on the bed. He did not notice her approach. Instead of the anticipated lingerie she wears a button-down shirt, a blazer, and suit pants.
“Why did yo—“
“Shh,” she puts a finger on his lips. With a hand slipped under his waistband, Amarantha slides Moncada’s boxers off and kicks them free of his legs. She swats away his hand when it reaches to unshoulder her blazer. “Just relax.” She unfolds a pair of opaque sunglasses with one hand and her teeth, then puts them on.
Moncada cannot see her eyes. When she takes him in her grip and strokes him there is at first self-consciousness, but it complicates when he sees that his self-consciousness arouses her. He exaggerates it to turn her on, pretends he’s ashamed but that she’s subjecting him to a pleasure that overpowers his shame. The pride he believes he is handing over to her through this display, the thought of it induces real pleasure, and once so entangled he can’t unravel his own feelings from hers. Layers of his personality whither away in the building intensity of this feedback loop. What’s left of Moncada—in Amarantha’s control, naked and in her hands, reduced by her to his most fundamental aspect—is a desperation to please, to forget himself, to be used.
—
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Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/nzc8ls/otiose_austerity_mf_first_time_light_femdom