【No. 62 · Heroine】
People who know me describe me with the same set of words: quiet, hardworking, dependable. At the start of my first year, my advisor singled me out in the lab meeting to praise how cleanly I had done my literature review, saying I was the kind of student who lets you relax. I bowed my head and thanked him, my nails digging into my palm under the table — because just the night before, I had been kneeling in a room with no curtains, a collar buckled around my neck, ordered to crawl the whole length of the hallway on my knees before I was allowed to drink that cup of warm water. Relax. When that word landed on me, a quiet corner of my heart laughed. The me they could relax about, and the me that truly kept me alive, were two different people.
【No. 62 · Heroine】
I did not always understand myself. Truly grasping it came after I started university. In the winter of my freshman year, I stayed alone in the study room until the lights went out, and a thought suddenly surfaced in my mind: if someone forbade me to leave this chair, forbade me to stand up, forbade me to touch myself, would I actually feel safe? The thought came without warning, yet it set my ears burning and my heartbeat out of control. When I closed my book, I discovered that the base of my thighs had grown wet in a small patch without my noticing. From that night on I slowly began to admit it — what I wanted was not freedom but to be firmly kept in hand; not to be praised as good, but to be pressed down to the very lowest place, stripped, forbidden, and then, at the very moment my endurance reached its limit, absolved with a single phrase: good doggy.
【No. 62 · Heroine】
I hid this thing very deep. On the surface I still took first place, still lent my notes to classmates, still saved seats for my roommates in the cafeteria. Only in the dead of night would I open those forums no one knew about, scrolling page after page, my heart pounding as if it would leap out. Reading the words confinement made me hold my breath; reading forbidden orgasm made me clench my thighs without meaning to; reading about someone called a bitch by her owner who still thanked her made my eyes inexplicably grow hot. So I was not broken after all, and I was not alone. That realization steadied me more than any first place ever had.
【No. 62 · Heroine】
The turning point was my undergraduate roommate, Ah-Tang. We lived together for four years, and I always thought there was a wall between us. Then, one rainstormy evening in our third year, she came out of the shower, and as she changed I glimpsed a very regular red mark on the small of her back — not from a bump, but the kind of patterned mark left by some tool struck again and again. We locked eyes for a second; neither of us said anything. After lights-out that night, she asked me softly in the dark, “You… are you one too?” My throat tightened, and it was a long while before I answered, at a volume only the two of us could hear, “Yes.” Two good girls, between the upper and lower bunks, entrusted their deepest secret to each other for the first time.
【Domme · Ah-Tang】
I had been led through that door half a year before No. 62. I could tell at a glance she was one of us — not from any red mark, but from the way she tidied her desk. Too neat. Neat to the point that it looked like she was waiting for someone to come and throw it into disarray. People like that carry, deep in their bones, a longing to hand over control; they just do not dare admit it. So that night, when I asked her, I already all but knew the answer. Her voice trembled badly when she said yes, but she did not look away from my eyes. I sighed inwardly: this girl, once she fell in, would fall deeper than I had.
【No. 62 · Heroine】
Ah-Tang told me she had joined an organization. An all-female leather circle, where both the Dommes and the subs were women, its rules strict, everything built on safe, sane, and consensual. Before you could enter you had to sign a stack of documents, undergo a physical exam, and confirm your boundaries over and over. She said it all very calmly, as though introducing a book club. But the more I listened, the more my palms began to sweat. She asked whether I wanted to meet the people over there. I knew that once I agreed, some door would never close again. I stared at my hands resting on my knees — those hands that wrote neat characters, turned clean pages, and were praised by everyone as “clearly a good student’s hands” — and then I nodded.
【No. 62 · Heroine】
The first time I went with Ah-Tang was on a Saturday afternoon. The house was on the outskirts of the city, quiet, ordinary, without so much as a sign at the door. The woman who opened it was somewhere around forty, carrying herself like the most formidable professor at the university, and she took me in from head to toe with a single glance. She did not introduce herself; she only said flatly, “From now on you are called No. 62. The number is not given carelessly — it is to remind you: here, you are a number first, and a person second.” I ought to have felt insulted, but I did not. The instant she said those words, that hollow I had hidden in my heart since that freshman winter night was suddenly, steadily, filled. I lowered my eyes and answered softly, “Yes.”
【Dommes · the Mistresses】
This new one — among ourselves we called her “the honor-roll pup.” Her file read beautifully, her GPA was frighteningly high, she spoke in a thin, soft voice, looking utterly harmless. But we have done this long enough to know best: the more a good girl holds herself ramrod straight out in the world, the more she craves someone to loosen that string of hers completely. The first time she walked in, her eyes gave her away: that was not fear, that was finally coming home. We were in no hurry to touch her. On the first day, we only had her sit in the corner and watch how others were used, how they gave thanks. We let that flame in her own heart catch fire first.
【No. 62 · Heroine】
That afternoon I was not asked to do anything, only to watch. But after I returned to the dorm, I did not sleep all night. I lay in bed, listening to Ah-Tang’s even breathing, my mind full of the scenes I had seen that day: collars, chains, kneeling backs, the glowing expression on a face being praised. I reached up and touched my own collarbone, imagining what might one day hang there. I knew I had fallen utterly. The next morning I got up at seven as usual, went to the lab as usual, replied to my advisor in the group chat as usual — “Understood, I’ll take care of it right away.” No one could tell that the most obedient student had, just the day before, handed over half of herself into a house without a name.