【Her · Protagonist】The person in the mirror wore a cream-white turtleneck knit, her hair pulled back without a single stray strand — in her colleagues’ eyes she was the good girl who spoke little, always sat in the farthest corner of every meeting, and would never quit no matter how high the turnover ran. Lin Wan was twenty-four, six months into a consulting firm downtown, her badge photo as flat as an ID card, her smile faint. No one would ever connect a face like hers with the thing she was now gripping in her hand.
【Her · Protagonist】It was a flesh-toned realistic toy, a little over ten centimeters, its surface a deliberately weathered soft silicone, the head tilted slightly upward. When she drew it out from the very back of the drawer, her fingertips trembled — not from fear, but from that kind of anticipation that surged up from the pit of her stomach and set her ears burning. Today was the weekend. She had given herself the day off — and given this secret the day off too.
【Her · Protagonist】She had known for a long time that something was wrong with her. Other girls kept cotton briefs in their wardrobes; in the hidden layer of her drawer lay a stack of thongs — lace, cut-out, tied with ribbons — and several fetish pieces that covered nothing at all, cutting into her flesh, adorned with only a scrap of fabric at the most crucial spot. She loved wearing things short too, so short she had to press the hem down with her hand when she bent over. The more demure she appeared in public, the more this side of her could not be held back. She had tried many times — unbuttoning her blouse in an empty stairwell, stripping down to a single thin layer in a late-night parking lot — and every chance of being exposed left her soaking wet. But that had never been enough.
【Her · Protagonist】Today she wanted to go a step further. She set the base of the realistic toy against the inside of her lower lip and slowly opened her mouth to take it in. The soft silicone slid inward against her tongue, and when it reached the mouth of her throat she flinched on instinct, her throat clenching hard, her eyes stinging at once. Too deep. She quickly dipped her head lower, letting the length of it return to a bearable position — she discovered that as long as she kept her head down it stayed obediently against the root of her tongue, neither too deep nor too shallow; but the moment she lifted her head, it immediately slid a notch farther down her throat, making it itch until she nearly gagged.
【Her · Protagonist】She picked up the thick black face mask. This was the plan she had spent half of last night testing before settling on it: wedge the base of the toy into a little pouch she had sewn on the inside of the mask, put the mask on, and from the outside nothing looked out of place — only her mouth bulged faintly, as if she were holding a breath, or had a toothache. She hooked the mask over her ears, and the length of it was locked firmly between her lips and teeth, pressed against her palate, weighing on her tongue, impossible to spit out and impossible to fully swallow. She let out a tentative “mmph” at the mirror — nasal, muffled, as blurred as a word muttered in sleep.
【Her · Protagonist】That was it, then. She would walk out that door with it in her mouth, into the crowds, into the mall, and wander a whole afternoon among hundreds of strangers. No one would know. But she would. The thought made her knees go weak, made her clamp her thighs together on instinct — today she was wearing a black ultra-short pleated skirt, and beneath it a fetish pair of panties that was barely there at all, a scrap of floral print so thin it was translucent, and she had already gotten it wet just by imagining. She reached down to check, and her fingertips met a slick, sticky coolness. That place of hers was always clean and smooth, not a single hair, soft to the touch like something peeled of its shell, and right now it was throbbing and weeping.
【Her · Protagonist】Out the door. An elderly couple walking their dog stepped into the elevator and gave her a polite nod. She nodded back, and with that motion the length in her throat slid inward half a notch; she braced herself at once and hummed a very faint sound through her nose to force it back down. The old woman even asked her with a smile, “Toothache, dear? You’re all bundled up.” She could only mumble a muffled “mm,” her eyes curving in a pretense of sweetness. In that very second she distinctly felt another gush seep into her panties. So it turned out that being spoken to face-to-face, and having to answer while keeping up appearances, was a thing this exciting.
【Her · Protagonist】The subway station was the hardest. The crowd surged in from every direction, and she was pinned in the middle of it, inching along with the flow. She had to keep her head slightly lowered the whole time — partly for fear the toy would slide too deep, partly because she dared not meet anyone’s eyes, terrified the shameful look on her face would be seen through. Yet the more she lowered her head to hide, the more sharply she became aware of every single person brushing past her: the boy on his phone, the mother carrying her child, the two girls laughing together… none of them had any idea that this quiet girl squeezing past them right now had a thing like that in her mouth, held until it ached and swelled, saliva pooling at the root of her tongue with nowhere to go, so she could only swallow it down in small secret sips, and each swallow made her throat knock against the head of the toy, the ache surging straight up into her sinuses.
【Her · Protagonist】The gust from the arriving train lifted a corner of her short skirt, and she hurriedly pressed it down with her hand. In that instant the cool wind poured up under her skirt and swept across her bare, dripping sex, and her whole body jolted — she nearly cried out on the spot — of course no cry came, her mouth was plugged, only a tiny, all but inaudible whimper was forced out of her throat, buried under the station announcement, heard by no one. But she heard it herself. She felt her heart pounding so fast it seemed about to leap out of her throat — out and straight into the thing pressed against it.
【Her · Protagonist】Inside the car she clutched a hanging strap, packed in tight by the crowd. A man in a suit stood directly opposite her, less than twenty centimeters away, head bowed over his phone. She stared at his tie and was suddenly seized by an absurd thought: if she pulled off her mask right now, the thing would drop out in front of him, fall right there among the feet of everyone in the car. The image threw her breathing into disorder, her breath fogging hot and damp against the inside of the mask. She quickly shut her eyes and pretended to doze, when in truth she was straining to hold down the fire blazing hotter and hotter inside her. She knew she was already thoroughly wet, the little scrap of the fetish panties clinging to her flesh, chafing against her sex with every sway of the car, chafing until her lower belly went taut.
【Her · Protagonist】Her stop. She stepped out of the car with the flow of people, up the escalator, and the mall’s bright atrium opened out above her head. There were even more people than she had expected on a weekend; just standing here, countless gazes swept unconsciously over her — landing on her turtleneck sweater, landing on her short skirt and her pale long legs, and no one would think twice. But she knew that the secret held in her mouth was being carried by her into the very depths of this sea of people. She lowered her head, drew a deep breath through her nose to press down the ache at the mouth of her throat and the ball of fire in her lower belly, and stepped inside. The day had only just begun.