Together Is Not An Option

continued from part one

Chapter Two

Maeve cursed Paul Ridley for making her feel so weak, cursed herself for wanting him, and if not for needing him, for wanting to need him. Why was she letting herself hope, when there really was no hope? She’d never by anything more to him than a conveniently kinky sex partner.

What did she want him to do though? What did she really want from him? It was almost certain he’d wrap things up before Sunday evening, but it sent a thrill through her to imagine that he might keep her bound all week, or longer. How long could he stretch it out if he spread the right stories and filed the right documents? A year, maybe? And after that, who would remember she was absent? At least one person, maybe four or five. But the faint possibility still made her breathless. She’d come here today with the intention of ending it between them, to protect her job, and his. She’d planned to do the right thing. But there could be other ways to do things, possibilities she’d scrupulously ignored.

Maybe, if he put it the right way, she’d never want to go back, and she’d stay with him forever. If that was what he really wanted. Not like this obviously, not in a sex-game, but in some kind of meaningful relationship, some kind of partnership. It was possible, if he was genuinely capable of making himself available for her, of providing normal human intimacy.

She sighed quietly to herself. It was a fantasy, as absurd as the idea of him keeping her indefinitely as a rubber sex doll. He wasn’t capable of that kind of relationship, and they wouldn’t stay together. That was it, the entire rotten scenario was just another stupid dream, as unrealistic, in its own way, as the sex-games. She shouldn’t even think about it, it could only make her sad.

He would never ask, never commit, or reveal his inner self, and that was why one of them had to end it. For all that he’d let her do to him … made her do to him … the debasement, the physical pain and helplessness she’d inflicted at his request, he’d never really let her see his heart, let alone touch it.

Maybe she’d given him this last opportunity, put herself so completely in his hands, in the hope that he would reciprocate. She was probably being foolish, totally naive. He had his boundaries on what he’d do to her, and the boundaries to what he’d ever give of his inner self were just as solid. It was tantalizingly possible that he might go beyond the limits of his previous erotic behavior, but anything else was just wishful thinking.

She had to make clear what she was doing, at least to herself. But he had a knack of making her confused, of getting her to do mixed-up things, like coming dressed to tease him, like coming to end it and getting into this game instead. In fact, this whole affair… No. She couldn’t blame him, it wasn’t fair. She’d done these things herself, because she’d wanted to.

He was rummaging through the things on the bed. She had been so lost in her own world that she hadn’t even noticed him begin. How long had he been looking?

She turned to him, took his hand in hers, feeling his warmth through the glove. “I’m not faking it. You can do whatever you want, and I’ll cooperate, for as long as you want to keep doing it, without...” She took some deep breaths. “Without limitation, Paul. I’m not pretending. I’m not acting. I’m giving you permission, not playing a game within a game, not topping from the bottom. You can do whatever you like.”

He laughed and looked away. He said nothing for a while, finally took his hand back. With a disappointed noise in the back of his throat, he turned to her. “I get it. I get it. So much talking. No need for you to say any more. And you even asked who was going to be on top. Ridiculous.”

“I can play top if that’s what you want. I’ll do it if that’s your fantasy. If it’s how you want to play, I don’t mind, and I promise, it will be convincing. I’ll treat you as the dirty little worm you really are.” She couldn’t help smiling, it probably wasn’t a look a domme should ever have on her face. At least she didn’t giggle.

“It’s a habit with you. As long as you’re talking, you’re always the bloody top.” He held the ring-gag by the straps, just in front of her face. “Open wide.” He leaned in closer. “One word from you and I’m fucking hopeless. How is that fair? Let’s even the scales.”

She opened her mouth and let him force the ring into place. It was an efficient device that she’d worn before, a sturdy plastic molding, in the form of a pair of flat rings bridged by a short tube on the inside edge, a kind of grommet, just long enough to sit front and back of her teeth. The inner disk was shaped to fit behind them, and the outer disk designed to fit tolerably under her lips. She had to force her mouth wide to get the inner disk in, where it engaged firmly in place behind her teeth. It took two hands to force her mouth open wide enough to get it in or out, and with it in place, her mouth was held wide open. The straps that fastened behind her head weren’t really necessary, though they added to the impossibility of removing it. She could bite down as hard as she liked, it would make no difference. The tough gray plastic wouldn’t give a millimeter.

* * * * *

She could still speak, to some extent, in a manner intelligible to dentists. Later he might put a clamp on her tongue, or introduced some kind of gag, but she guessed he was more likely to want her tongue free and her mouth accessible. The inside of the hole was lined with soft rubber, so he wouldn’t scratch his penis when he inserted it. To ratchet up her arousal, she reminded herself how helpless she would be to keep him out.

A quiet noise came from her crotch, followed by a dribble of lubricant. Her face flushed deep red, though it was stupid to be embarrassed, dressed as she was.

Paul, to his credit, pretended not to notice as he pressed down on the velcro that secured the gag-straps behind her head. “I think you’d be more honest if you wore this all the time. Perhaps we should have made it a blanket condition that you put it on before you stepped through the door?”

She tried to avoid his gaze, but he stopped the turn of her head with the light pressure of a finger. She didn’t fight him. She looked deep into his eyes, but there was nothing profound to be seen there. At most, there was a kind of playfulness.

“Here,” he said, briefly showing her a nose plug before inserting it in her nostril and pushing it up into place so it was stuck. He inserted another, in the other nostril, sealing her nose. She tried an experimental breath, but her nose was thoroughly blocked. It was a new sensation. Frightening. It would be so easy for him to control her breathing through her ring-gagged mouth, and she tensed with anticipation of what might come next.

“Here, get ready for this. It’s going to be hard at first, so prepare yourself.” He showed her the hood, heavy black rubber. It was new, unfamiliar, suggestive and ominous in its complexity, with lacing at the back and buckles, and there was a black plastic dome on each side.

She knew enough to take a deep breath.

He pulled it over her head. A plunge into darkness, and brutal tightness that crushed her nose and ears. The air-pressure told her that her mouth was sealed, breathing hopeless. Only the open-face hood stopped her hair being snagged or her ears pulled off. And now that she couldn’t breathe, for some irrational reason, she desperately wanted to. Contrary fear, rising panic, whatever it was… She needed to gasp for air, useless, her lungs suddenly burning, even though she had plenty of air, and could usually hold her breath for much longer than the few seconds that had passed. If she was calm this would be easy, but she wasn’t calm. It wasn’t ever easy to be calm under a hood, and this one was thicker and tighter than she was used to. Her heart was pounding, burning oxygen she couldn’t replace.

She felt his fingers in her mouth, probably checking the mouth hole was clear. As soon as his fingers were out, she gasped for air. It came less readily than she’d hoped and stank of rubber, or tasted of it, or both. He adjusted the hood again, and she could see once more.

Everything in Maeve’s world was dim, details barely visible amidst the shadows. The hood had built-in lenses, but they were darkened, and set deep, forming blinkers that narrowed her vision to what was directly in front of her. She couldn’t see above or below. Her body was blocked from her field of vision. He tugged at the back of her head, probably easing the back of the hood into place before lacing. She explored the rubber hole for her mouth with her tongue. It was slightly smaller than the hole in the gag, presumably hiding it completely. It was tight of course, her lips crushed beneath it, and heavily reinforced, with beading around the edge, so it wouldn’t close accidentally. But the beading was not so heavy that it wouldn’t stretch enough to easily admit a penis, or a penis gag.

She could imagine how silly she looked, how inhuman, her head covered in smooth black rubber, with her eyes hidden beneath the dark goggles, her nose just a vague bump, protruding domes over her ears, and a comical circular sphincter opening where her mouth ought to be. She wanted to look in the mirror, but he was still tightening the laces. There was no way this hood could be quickly removed. In the event of a panic attack, Paul would be unable to free her.

As he progressed, the pressure on her head grew increasingly intense, pushed itself to the forefront of her perception until it started to overwhelm every other sense. He hadn’t been joking about it being hard. If she’d been claustrophobic, she’d be screaming to be let out, no matter what she’d promised him.

The loudest sound was that of her own blood pumping, pounding, pounding, in her ears. The only other thing she could hear was the fumbling of his fingers as he did up the buckles over the laces, terribly loud. It seemed to drown out everything beyond the surface of the hood.

She looked down, but all she saw were her knees, before he yanked her head back up.

Paul said something, or probably did, the quiet murmuring drowned under the thunder of his fingers and her blood. There was a crackle, and suddenly his voice was sharp and clear, with a slightly echoing quality.

“-eadphones. Nod if you can hear me now.”

She nodded.

“Good. Now I’m going to add a heavy posture collar. It’s like the one you used on me a couple of weeks ago, but in your size.”

Maeve could remember every detail of the collar she’d used on him, but was this new one really the same? Black rubber, steel-boned, with a thickly padded inner lining. On the exterior, sturdy metal rings attached, front, back, left and right, for bondage convenience, riveted to the inner boning for strength. Apart from the laces, it closed with buckles, and an optional padlock.

She would be getting the padlock, for sure.

It closed around her throat, more controlling than any plain slave collar. It was so thick that it naturally formed a platform under the chin at the top, which had additional padding. It pressed down on her collar bones, limiting the movement in her shoulders, and the panel at the front extended far enough down to press against her breast bone, impairing her ability to breathe deeply into her upper chest.

He settled it in place, forcing her chin up, taking the rest of her head with it. Her field of vision tilted upward, and all she could see was the cornice where the wall met the ceiling. A tiny black dot was barely visible through the tint, at the bottom of the cornicing. She hadn’t noticed it before her gaze was forced to attend to nothing else. Was it a spider?

Inside the hood, it was like she was in a dark balloon, floating away from her body. The buckles made it snug. The tightness around her neck alarming. She hadn’t expected it to limit her breathing so much, but it made a kind of sense. The corset stopped her breathing deep into her diaphragm, and the collar limited the heaving of her chest that she had to perform to compensate for that. Even without a re-breather, she was kept short enough of air that an edge of fear constantly ate away at her self-control.

The simple tightness of the collar seemed to be strangling her too. It couldn’t really be restricting her breathing that much, but it felt like it. Or maybe it was? Maybe it was interfering with the blood flow?

She couldn’t complain. Wouldn’t complain. She’d given her word.

He showed her the padlock before he put it on, and she felt its click as he snapped it closed. She would just have to get used to the awful short-breath, tight-throat feeling. Of course, with it locked in place, she couldn’t access the zip to her outer suit, and that covered her inner suit zip entirely. It probably also covered the end of the laces on the hood, and without removing the hood, she couldn’t remove the gag. She wouldn’t be able to touch the gag-straps, or open her mouth wide enough to remove it anyway.

Bit by bit, it was starting to feel like a serious situation, maybe deeper than she’d gone before. It was never simple, but the hood was taking her somewhere new, and a little worrying. It didn’t feel right for this fear to be making her so wet.

For all that her hands were free, standing or walking would be a precarious and difficult business. Once shuffling along would lose sight of anything she got close to, unless it was at head height. Given the size of the house, that basically meant she would be working blind everywhere. The corset was heavy rubber, but the boning was steel, so her ability to bend was also restricted, and increased the risk of losing her balance while walking.

“There’s a bit more to come, but I’ll leave your hands free for now so you can help me dress for a bit.” He held out his arm. “Stand up. If you can.”

She grabbed his arm with both hands and pulled herself upright. The boots were prone to tipping sideways, but the solid attachment to her legs helped. The clip connecting her ankles made things more difficult than the heels or the restricted movement of her knees.

With his help, she shuffled over to the mirror and inspected herself. She didn’t look like a person. There wasn’t even a millimeter of exposed flesh unless she stuck out her tongue. Reflected in the mirror was a fetish doll, a mannequin dressed in rubber, a robot, movements stiff and jerky, with domes on the side of its head, silver circles for eyes.

She hadn’t noticed before that the lenses on the hood were mirrored. Obviously, there were built-in wireless headphones in the solid dome over each ear, which apparently helped isolate her from external sounds. Perhaps the headphones had active noise-cancellation for good measure? He obviously had something he could speak into so she could hear him, but she hadn’t guessed what it was.

She kept trying to turn her head, only to be reminded that it was impossible. She put out her arms to help her balance and shuffled around until she was facing him. Yes, he was wearing a headset, of the kind sometimes used in the office to talk hands-free on the phone.

“Do you like the hood?”

She began to answer him, but even she had trouble figuring out which word was which. She couldn’t speak easily with the ring-gag in, and the nose-plugged hood made it worse than usual.  She’d wanted to say, “I look like some kind of nineteen-twenties robot.” All she managed were vowels. She began to edge towards him, precarious on the platforms and massive heels.

“I better take these shorts off.” He stood up and removed them. Completely naked, with a step he was right in front of her, leering. He put one hand behind her waist and grabbed an exposed nipple with the other and pinched.

She squealed and then cursed him, but after the gag and hood had done their work, all that came out was a pitiful meep followed by some mumbling.

“I like our conversation better like this. Nothing personal, I’m just a bad listener.” He pinched her nipple again. “I’ll help you kneel down and you can rub talc all over me. Then I want you to dress me in the suit.”

How one sided of him. It would be fairer if he also had to wear a gag, then she wouldn’t have to put up with his snide little comments.

Under multiple layers of rubber, it felt like she was swimming in perspiration. Her boots squelched as she shuffled, and the sweat under the hood was running into her eyes, blinding her almost as much as the goggles. It was also difficult to swallow saliva with her mouth wedged open, but the collar kept her head tilted back so that none ran out of her mouth. She had to manage it carefully or some would go down the wrong way and there’d be coughing and choking.

He tried to get her to kneel back on her heels, but the boots wouldn’t bend enough to let her sit back in a kneeling position. Even without bending her legs more than ninety degrees, they pinched her knees, and her lower legs began to go numb. She had no choice but to hold the tiring position, half standing on her knees. It was this, or standing up in the shoes, or lying down. If she wanted to go anywhere, a crawling position would be the only practical way, and even then, the hobble would make it a slow crawl. If she lost the use of her arms, crawling wouldn’t be an option either. Unless she was already on her feet, she’d probably have to inch along like a worm.

He put the talc in her hand and sat down on the floor in front of her. She glimpsed his erect penis as he sat, but once he was down, all she could see was the top of his head. She leaned forward, so she could see his face. Her legs ached. It wasn’t a position she could maintain for long.

She shook a mound of talc into her gloved hands and smeared it down his chest. She slid her hands over his nipples, through the hairs on his chest, and downward. She repeated the process, then began to spread the talc more evenly, circling over his nipples again and again, working mainly by feel, which was limited due to the gloves.

His sweat cut tracks in the talc. She sent her hands down to his crotch, blind, for she couldn’t tilt her head to look down that far. She couldn’t feel the hairs on his scrotum through the gloves, but she could tell they were there somehow. She got a fresh load of talc and dumped it over his balls and penis, then began to massage it in.

He grabbed her wrists and pulled her hands away. “Not yet. I’ll cum if you do. Just the talc. Cover my legs.”

She obliged, working completely by feel, and that too was transformed by the rubber, she rubbed multiple handfuls of talc into his legs. He probably looked like a snowman, but her dim and restricted vision didn’t reveal it.

“That’s enough. I’ll pull the suit on.”

The suit was another thin, translucent latex affair, like the one she wore underneath the rest of her fittings. She had nothing to do but watch as he got himself into it. It might have been entertaining, but due to the goggles, all she got was glimpses, and those were blurred and dark. The stinging sweat running in her eyes made her blink continually. Her eyes were probably red and puffy, but thankfully, he wouldn’t be able to see them through the mirror lenses.

“Ah, now the pants.” He held them up so she could see them. A pair of heavy rubber shorts with a built-in molded penis-sheath, ball-sac and butt-plug. The plug was molded into the pants, so they would hold it in place. “Lube this up for me, would you?” he said, and pushed the plug through the ring-gag, into her mouth, blocking her breathing.

The plug was soft and bitter-tasting, and completely filled the openings through the hood and gag, sealing her mouth. It seemed hollow, so was probably inflatable. That would be fun. It would be more than fair, as long as he didn’t plan on putting something similar into her.

She slurped and sucked on the plug until she started to get dizzy from lack of breath. Hypoxia was no joke. If she blacked out in the hood he might have trouble resuscitating her. He pulled the plug free, and she took a whistling gasp of air, then another, but her head didn’t clear completely. The heat, sweat, and the pressure of the hood were taking their toll. She needed a drink, and also needed to pee. If Paul didn’t realize soon, she would have to make a concerted effort to tell him, while she still had a chance. At least he hadn’t used a gag that silenced her completely.

He stepped into the shorts, then reached inside them to guide the plug into his behind. He seemed to have the knack for it. Maeve had tried to put an inflatable plug in once and failed. It was harder than it looked. The plug had to be inflated just enough to be stiff enough to insert, but not so much that it was too big.

“Damn, I can’t get my cock in the sheath. I’m going to have to lube it with something.” He made to stand. She put a hand on his shoulder, using him for a support as much as holding him down. She slipped her free hand inside herself, drew it out again. The glove was dripping with a perfect slippery lubricant of her own making, and she wiped it onto his penis.

“Good idea. That would have been better for the plug too.” He fed himself into the cock sheath, settled his balls in the sac, and snapped the pants into position. The sheath would deaden any sensation. He could probably go forever wearing that thing, as long as he could keep it up. Most likely it would be frustrating for him, but it might be good for her, if the rubber didn’t make her sore.

He slid up onto the bed and started pulling his heavy rubber suit over the shorts. The suit was crotchless, so the pants made a lot of sense. He seemed to have forgotten her, and was intent on untwisting one of the suit legs, which was on slightly askew.

* * * * *

She really needed to pee. She set off crawling towards the bathroom and he didn’t seem to notice. When she got to the door, it was too much bother to turn her whole body around to find out what he was up to, so she kept on going. The layers of rubber saved her knees from a carpet burn, but the bathroom tiles were hard on her knees.

Finally at her goal, she clambered up the toilet like it was a mountain that had to be scaled, clinging to it however she could, mostly pulling herself up with her arms. Once seated she released the tension in her pelvic floor. The wide-open crotch holes of her suits offered no obstruction to her peeing without assistance, but she seemed to go on forever.

She just needed to drink some water. He might come to get her at any moment and she’d miss her chance. First, she had to wipe. She twisted her body, but no matter how she contorted, the collar and hood made it unable to see the roll while she was still on the toilet. Defeated, she felt for the paper. The gloves numbed her sense of touch, but she was able to manage the task eventually, if somewhat wastefully.

When she was done, she used the wall as a support to stand up, and shuffled over to the washbasin. After rinsing her hands of talc and who-knows-what, she cupped them and filled them with water. By the time she had them at her mouth, almost nothing was left, just a trickle to moisten her drying tongue. It was a hopeless way to drink. She daren’t lean over further. Between the corset, hobbled boots and the collar, every movement was a gamble, making the simplest task into a struggle. She backed up and looked for a glass.

There was no glass, but there was a blue anodized metal water bottle that Paul might have used at the gym. It felt heavy. She shook it, and felt something slosh inside it. It was still partially full. She was so thirsty, should she dare drinking from it without refilling it with fresh water? It was tempting. But she had no idea how long that water had been in there. Her hands slipped trying to open it. She screeched in frustration. It was on tight, and she improved her grip and tried again, once more. Her gloves slipped over it again, uselessly.

From out of nowhere, Paul appeared and snatched the bottle from her hands. She let out a gasp of shock. He must have come up behind her, and of course, as she was wearing the sound-damping hood, there was no way she could have heard him. That didn’t stop it being startling, quite the opposite. Her heart had been pounding fast enough as it was.

He stared at her, twisting at the bottle, hands slipping too, trying to open the lid. “Did you drink it?” He must have been shouting because his voice broke up as it came through the headphones, crackling and snarling, barely understandable. “Did you drink any of it?” he demanded again. The whites of his eyes were showing. She tried to back away from him, but there was nowhere to go. He had her pinned against the basin.

She shook her head, though it was more a twist from the thighs upwards.

He stopped moving and closed his eyes, tipped his head back, doing and saying nothing, as if he was offering up a prayer. He almost had the heavy suit on, but it wasn’t zipped up at the back and he hadn’t pulled the front of the neck properly into place.

He took a deep breath and twisted at the lid again. This time it came off. He immediately tipped the contents into the sink. “It’s a good thing you didn’t drink it. It had something besides water in, and I have no idea what it would have done to you. It’s not something intended for women to use.”

She tried to tilt her head, but that wasn’t possible. She made a question-mark shape with her hands instead.

He offered her his arm to hold. “I was about to show you, let’s do that now.”

She ignored the proffered arm, instead picked up the bottle, and started rinsing it out.

“Oh, sorry. You needed water. Of course, that’s what it was. We’ll both need them. I’ll get more water bottles ready, then I’ll explain.”

Maeve rinsed the bottle repeatedly, until she couldn’t stand waiting any longer, then filled it and drank deeply. She sucked down the whole thing, and then half of another. By the time she was finished, he had returned with a pair of large plastic bottles that had tube attachments, one pink, one blue. She’d got them specially, and they’d used them before. As a rule, she didn’t trust the metal bottles he liked to be sanitary.

“I’ll put these on the floor by the door, ok?”

She tried to show assent, but nodding was not practical. She settled on a thumbs-up instead.

He guided her back to the bedroom. “I need to go over this with you before I put my hood on. It doesn’t have any eye holes, so I’ll be blind, and I need to see for this part. Oh, but I forgot. You need something else before I do that.”

He picked a heavy rubber panel off the bed. It was even thicker than the boots or corset, stiff, dual-layers or rubber, with straps extending from one side. She couldn’t figure what it was, but it made sense when he wrapped it around her forearm and pushed the first strap through a buckle. It was like a wrist guard that stretched from just behind her thumb all the way to the crease in her elbow. A guard, or looking at it another way, a long cuff that covered and gripped the length of her lower arm. The four straps that held it were stiff due to being as thick as a leather belt, but much stiffer than leather of similar thickness. Paul was struggling with them, and her delicate fingers would never be able to undo them without a tool to help prize them out.

There was a sturdy ring attached at each end of the arm-cuff, and another in the middle. She could tell now that the dual layers had flat steel bones sandwiched between them, which probably also served to anchor the rings securely.

She wasn’t able to see him fit the second arm-wrap because of the hood, but she could feel the tightness and weight of it. He’d fastened both of them tightly, and they gripped her arms with an uncomfortable pressure.

He moved around behind her. Would he attach her wrists to the ring at the back of the posture collar for a kind of reverse prayer? She couldn’t reach all the way up, but he could use a strap. She’d grown more flexible, but it would still hurt. Or he could lock them elbow to elbow and wrist to wrist, to make a kind of arm-binder. That position wouldn’t be too hard on her shoulders.

Rather than do either of those things, he folded her arms behind her back, forearm to forearm, wrist to elbow. It wasn’t as easy a position as she’d expected. It pulled her shoulders back uncomfortably and made her want to arch her back, but the corset wouldn’t allow the belly-out, chest-back posture that the arm-bondage demanded, and the stress was considerable.

She felt three clicks though she couldn’t hear them. It might be padlocks, binding her arms together, or simply clips. It wouldn’t make any difference either way, she had no chance of getting out of them. She squirmed and tested them. No chance at all.

He moved back in front of her and she struggled against her bonds, trying to free herself again, mainly for his benefit this time.

The loss of her arms made it difficult to balance, and if she toppled, the best she could do was to try and throw herself on her knees to try and break the fall. More likely she’d go down so fast that there would be no chance to do anything.

* * * * *

With his hand on her upper arm, he guided her over to the near-empty bookshelf that hung on the wall. There was a black box on the shelf, about the size of a wireless speaker, a foot long, by three inches tall, and an inch deep. It was made of glossy cardboard with some Chinese writing on it.

He flipped the front up and over, revealing the lower part of the box was a rack made of molded plastic. It held several small clear bottles with eye-dropper tops. Their intense colors, vivid even through the mirrored lenses, reminded her of expensive food-coloring gel.

“These are samples from-” and he said something that sounded a bit like, “Zinyung Shan Pharmaco.” He paused, as if expecting her to digest the incomprehensible factoid, as if it meant something. “You might doubt me after I’ve explained, but I can promise you they are completely legal, not restricted in any way. For now.”

Maeve had never heard the name, and suspected his pronunciation was hopeless anyway, but it was obvious from the box alone that they were Chinese made. Not German. Not Hanley-Muller. Yet somehow, she had the feeling that name was going to come up any moment.

He pulled her close and stuck his tongue through the opening in the hood and into her mouth, a suffocating kiss. Her head span. It was probably the heat as much as the shortage of air. She tried to press herself against him, but there was so little movement available to her that she doubted he could tell.

He stepped back, and there was nothing she could do about that either. He let go of her, and it was all she could do to balance upright, unassisted.

He gestured to the bottles. “As long as they aren’t sold as medicine or food, you’d be able to buy them legally. If they were on sale. Which they aren’t. Feeding them to another person, however, would be a different matter. Multiple offenses. So, if we want to remain strictly within the law, they have to be self-administered.”

She tried to wriggle her arms, but it was useless, she couldn’t even make them clink.

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you can hold the dropper in your hand, so you can squirt it into your drink bottle. And of course, you would be choosing to drink of your own accord too.” He paused, letting her try to figure out what he was talking about. “Not that you have to. In fact, it might be just as well if you decided not to. But I have experimented on myself, up to a point, and I think it’s a worthwhile lesson to discover for yourself, first hand, just how insidious, addictive and perilous they really are. Traditional drugs take some effort to get addicted to, but these, you could just stumble into it, so easily.”

She shuffled her feet, improving her ability to balance.

“They were provided to us by the Home Office with a request for feedback. Our considered opinion is that this kind of drug is the biggest threat we’re likely to face in law-enforcement over the coming decade.” He added several quick nods, as if to assert the certainty of his prediction.

Who did he mean by ‘our’? Maeve would have liked to say something, quite a few somethings, but it wasn’t really practical. Unsurprisingly, he continued his lecture without further prompting.

“They’re knock-offs of products that Hanley-Muller provided similar samples for, over a decade ago. How they were copied I don’t know, but unlike H-M, who were considering them for restricted medical use, this new company wants to put them on the open market. That request isn’t likely to be approved, but it’s a safe bet they are going to show up on the streets anyway. Making them illegal will only make things worse, as it always does. There will be so much money in it that it will be unstoppable. But who could approve of these things? It’s hopeless.”

“Ooooh,” said Maeve, as it was a noise available to her. She wished she’d stayed quiet, as she sounded so stupid.

“Keep in mind, these are the clinically pure versions, probably the best case we’ll come across. The least side effects, and the most reliable dosing results. I’m only guessing, but street-made copies will probably be a complete lottery for survival. People will buy them anyway. I guarantee it.”

“But you can’t understand yet. You need to know what they do.” He stepped closer to the bottles.

He touched the top of the blue bottle. “This is a male performance enhancer. Not only does it give you an erection that comes on hard and reliable for two hours or more, per dose, but it makes repeat orgasms possible with just a few minutes rest between each one. They go sort of dry after a couple, which hurts a bit, but it’s still a full-on orgasm. Over. And. Over. So far, so tame, right? Well you’re not a bloke, so you wouldn’t realize how good that sounds.”

He touched the top of the pink bottle. The pink was neon bright. “This causes powerful arousal in women. A genuine female aphrodisiac and performance enhancer. Not bullshit, not a fake, but the real thing. Drug companies been trying to come up with one for years, but H-M cracked it and didn’t even try to put it on sale.” He shook his head.

Maeve had never felt a need for an increased sex drive, but she could see how it might appeal to some women, the sort who didn’t really have an appetite for it to begin with. And surely, there were women, sick, or simply troubled by arousal dysfunctions who might benefit, but she had a sinking feeling. Here was a drug that was more likely to be used on women than by them.

She was still thinking as Paul continued.

“To say it makes a girl ready and receptive is an understatement, I’m told. A drop of this in your water and you literally wouldn’t be able to keep your legs together. Imagine your drink spiked with it? Imagine a punch-bowl at a party spiked with it? Goodbye any hope of a rape conviction if the victim is found to have this in her bloodstream, right?”

Yes. He’d drawn the same conclusions as she had. Who wouldn’t?

And he was suggesting she use this stuff? That she do it to herself? Had he finally tipped over the edge? For all his character flaws, she’d never expected this.

02.04.18