Like a Starving Cat
When I got home from work, Heeyeon was wearing the look of a cat that had gone two days without food, staring up at a donated can of tuna. Watching her tremble in fear was a pleasure of its own, but this expression wasn't bad either.
"Been good?"
I didn't let anything show. I said it casually as I shrugged off my coat, tossed it aside, and perched on the edge of the bed. Heeyeon, apparently unwilling to bare whatever she was really feeling, put on her usual act and said yes.
"Hmm. Did you masturbate?"
From what I'd seen on the pet camera, she hadn't looked like she had — but you never knew. If she'd only twitched her hand under the blankets, the pet camera, which logged event times by movement, would never have caught it. Reviewing a full day's footage properly would take a full day, of course. I wasn't that free.
Thanks to everything I'd put into her so far, though, Heeyeon didn't even try to lie. She just nodded. A flicker of doubt crossed me, but the moderate relief and lust sitting in that expression were clearly different from before, so it was worth believing.
Well — when you had a lover, holding off on masturbating for a day was something you could manage.
Maybe making her hold off hadn't been ideal. I was hoping Heeyeon would commit some minor offense soon. Then I could do the things I'd been planning.
"Ugh. I'm exhausted. So tired. Can you wait a little before giving me dinner? I'm sooo tired..."
So I put on a coy little act, lay down beside her, and pulled her into my arms.
"Ah, um, uh... Yes. That's... fine..."
Heeyeon, who'd been fidgeting with her hands, nodded. I closed my eyes and lay there a moment, and it felt so much like I had the whole world that sleep kept trying to claim me — if I stayed like this I'd actually doze off — so I sat up with a jolt.
With an iron will I used the rebound to get up, and Heeyeon, for whatever reason still so frightened, let out a little hiek! and curled in on herself. I stroked her head a little, told her to wait a moment, and headed to the kitchen to prepare food.
Even while cooking I kept turning over one worry after another. Should I ban masturbation going forward and make her edge for three hours a day? Ah — I wanted to hit Heeyeon in the stomach.
The fretting never ended, but it was happy fretting all the same. To keep a relationship from going slack, I was more than willing to put this much thought into it — so while my hands stayed busy with the food, my mind never stopped for a second.
...Of course, my own lust played a part too. Whenever my thoughts reached that far, my face would flush just the way Heeyeon's always did.
Thinking these things did leave me with the minor problem of wet underwear, but it was ignorable. The only thought that rose was that I should take a bath with Heeyeon today.
Stopping just before climax was hard, of course, but it wasn't a major problem. Aside from having dirty thoughts the moment I opened my eyes in the morning, nothing about my daily life was disrupted.
Still, every time I saw my senior I made a point of acting strained. I'd deliberately breathe a little harder, or shift just a little when she initiated contact.
I had to look as if I were struggling as much as possible — only then, I felt, would I avoid some other punishment. Yes, I knew. The so-called rules could all be interpreted to suit my senior's tastes, so if she felt like it she could torment me whenever she wanted.
This was far better than having a tattoo carved into my body, enduring sexual torture all day, or taking hits to the stomach and face. As long as I didn't touch my own breasts and pussy, I could get through a day more normally than I'd expected.
The only way I had to count the days was my own memory, so I couldn't tell whether today was Friday or Thursday. Of course I'd know once my senior came home from work, but for a modern person who'd lived in the twenty-first century, that absence of information alone was stressful.
Thursday? Friday? Wait — when I'd had that horrible climax, had that been Monday? Tuesday? No — the day before yesterday my senior had done something to my collarbone...
...Just trying to pin down the date made my stomach lurch, so I sat up with a jolt. Upper body only, of course. My senior didn't want me using my legs. I didn't know why. She'd told me that if I wanted to use the pee pad in the corner of the room, I was to crawl to it.
Of course I'd never used it. Every time I held out with everything I had until she came home, then went to the bathroom and took care of it.
"..."
Not long after I sat up, the pet camera's head, which had been locked on me, released and started sweeping left and right again. It probably meant my senior had been watching me on her phone because of the movement just now, and had at least turned the screen off. It gave me chills.
The company my senior and I had worked at was a better place than you'd think. The first-floor café and rest areas were nice perks, and if you finished early you could leave early. We clocked in and out, but attendance was tracked by finishing the work, not by the punch. Honestly, for someone like me it had been more than I deserved. If you set aside how awful the people there were, it could have been a job for life.
But the better it was, the clearer the downside: the workload was truly enormous. You had to use a hundred percent of the time you were given just to barely make the deadlines. So if you wanted even one cigarette at the office, you had to work at a hundred and twenty percent until the next one — and the fact that she was still monitoring me on the pet camera through all of that was chilling.
The swelling in the finger my senior had casually dislocated before had gone down quite a bit by now. Honestly, given everything that had happened, I hadn't even had time to feel the pain. You could say breaking a finger felt like a fairy's touch by comparison. At least she didn't spend a whole day on it.
Without anything to lean against, my back started to ache, so I watched the spinning pet camera and carefully shifted to rest my back against the wall. I wasn't wearing a single scrap of clothing, so the soft-yet-rough texture of the soundproofing panels pressed against my back.
The camera locked on again. I swallowed a gasp, lowered my eyes, and, desperate to protect what little comfort I had, pressed my thighs together and fidgeted for no reason. I moved my hands awkwardly up toward my chest, then down again, and gripped the blanket tight.
...Only when the pet camera started sweeping again could I finally let out a long breath.
I looked truly pitiful like that. I'd do anything for my own safety, but looking pitiful was unavoidable.
One thing was certain: nearly a week had passed. Even a hellish situation eventually moved with time, so all I could do was pray I'd be rescued far sooner than the month I'd estimated.
There was nothing to do in a room without a single window, so I stretched my arms and back, then pulled the blanket all the way up over my head again.
"Heeyeon."
At my senior's sudden voice I snapped my eyes open, flung the blanket aside, and sat up. She was standing in the doorway.
"Ah, y-you're h-here, cough...!"
"Mm, what were you up to?"
She came over warmly. The moment she arrived she shed her coat and half-ran, half-jumped onto the bed, making the mattress cry out.
"Ah, j-just, just... being here..."
Maybe because I'd slept most of the day, my head was a little dizzy. Sleeping through the night and then sleeping through the day left me lightheaded, but my eyes were wide awake — if anything, I felt like I could see better than usual.
"Mm. Come here."
She turned, opened her arms, and said that. When I wriggled close enough she scooped me up and drew a long breath of my scent, and I was so embarrassed I could die.
"I-I smell..."
So I pushed against her chest with both hands, just hard enough. Performing the bashful lover.
"Aha, no. You don't smell at all. Just a completely sweet scent."
"B-but still..."
Gurgle. A sound leaked from my stomach. With nothing else in the room that could make noise except the two of us, that gurgle rang out even louder.
"You're hungry!"
"Th-ah, yes..."
I knew a gurgle wasn't really a hunger sound, but if it meant my senior would put even a little distance between us, I welcomed anything. She said she'd get dinner ready and left the room — not before crushing me in one last embrace.
Whether she was in the room or not made a real difference in how much mental energy I burned, so I let out a long breath.
And in that brief window, when I moved to slip back under the rumpled blanket, the blanket felt oddly heavy—
As if something like a brick had been set on top of it. On the unmoving blanket sat, unmistakably, my senior's phone.
"...Hic."
That black rectangular machine set off such a cocktail of sudden emotions that my head spun, and a hiccup escaped. Even as my diaphragm jumped in shock, my hand was already moving faithfully toward the phone.