"Oh, right--Amber!" Matt chuckled, not showing even the slightest remorse over his verbal slip. "You know, in my defense, it is one of those names it's very easy to mix up with another. You know, one of those millennial names like Madison or Brittany or Heather or Courtney or Erica. It's not my fault your parents picked something so hard to remember, now is it?"

The initial mistake had annoyed Amber, but the twinkling merriment in the older man's bright blue eyes left her absolutely sputtering with rage. "We dated for almost three months, you jerk!" she hissed, mindful of the other guests at Chloe's dinner party and not wanting to make a scene but also entirely unwilling to let the casually demeaning comment go. "Bad enough that you dumped me to go chasing after some big job opportunity in Barcelona, but it's only been five years and now you're telling me that you can't even remember my name?" She could feel her cheeks going red, not the dainty and delicate blush of someone accepting a compliment but the blotchy red of a woman getting ready to lose her goddamn shit, and she struggled to get her temper back under control.

"Look, I'm not saying I don't remember you, Ashley," Matt said placatingly, putting out his hands in a gesture of mock surrender that only served to infuriate Amber further. "I'm just saying that your name doesn't really stick out in the mind, that's all. I'm sure if we dated a little longer I would have just found a pet name for you, like 'Honey Bunny' or 'Baby Cakes' or 'Peaches', and after a while you would have gotten so used to it even you would have forgotten what your parents called you. It's just not a very memorable name." He smiled exactly the kind of smile Amber wanted to slap clean off his smug face, but she forced herself to refrain. Chloe went to a lot of time and trouble to get all her old friends back together to celebrate her fortieth birthday and Amber wasn't about to be the one to ruin the big night.

But it didn't mean she was going to just shrug off Matt's cocky little jabs, either. "It is Amber," she snapped, biting off each word into its own sentence. "Not Amanda, not Ashley, and not Baby Cakes or Peaches or Honey Bunny either for that matter. My name is Amber Sophia Davidsen, and you sure as fuck thought I was worth a last-minute proposal the night you told me you were heading to Spain in less than a week and I should make sure my passport was in order, so I think I'm at least worth remembering my GODDAMN name." That last bit had a little volume on it, not enough to turn heads but at least enough to draw glances, and Amber began to wish they were somewhere a little less out in the open.

Matt must have felt the same way, because he took her by the elbow and began to steer her through the crowd to somewhere a little more private. "You know, it's really kind of a shame it was expired, Amelia," he mused, seemingly oblivious to yet another mistake on his part. "Our whole lives might have been different if you'd have been able to come along with me. We'd have had four whole years together in Barcelona, you'd probably be answering to 'Baby Doll' or 'Cutie Pie' by now, and we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Instead we're going to have to spend the whole night making up for lost time."

Amber snorted. "In your dreams, Matty boy," she snarked, unable to avoid feeling as though it was a tiny bit unworthy of her to try to find a sobriquet for him that both showed off her ability to remember his entirely unremarkable name and got under his skin the same way he was getting under hers. "I wasn't about to go traipsing off to Barcelona with you then, and I'm certainly not about to start making out with a dude who doesn't even remember me. The only reason I'm sticking around at all is to give you a piece of my mind, you patronizing little shit."

She felt free to say that last bit a little louder, as they got out beyond the general bustle of conversation into a part of Chloe's palatial house that was relatively deserted. But if she was hoping to get a rise out of Matt, his crooked smirk and the little gleam of amusement in his eye told her she was failing. "I wasn't talking about making out, Amy," he said mildly, as though correcting her came as naturally to him as breathing. "I mean if you want to do that later, we certainly can, but I was really just thinking about the way agreement used to come to you so naturally. You might have forgotten about it over the years, but there was a time you'd have been happy to answer to a pet name, wouldn't you, cutie pie?"

"I--" Amber clamped down on the response almost as soon as it arrived on her tongue, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of answering quite so immediately to exactly the kind of demeaning term of endearment he told her she'd become accustomed to back when they were dating. "Listen, Matthew," she said at last, emphasizing each syllable of his name in the hopes that he'd correct her on that as well and she could at least get the satisfaction of knowing she'd found something that could irritate him, "I'm not going to say we didn't have a very enjoyable relationship, but if you think I'm the kind of pushover who winds up drooling over some guy she's only known for a few months you've got another think coming, okay?"

Annoyingly, that only seemed to amuse him even more. "Sure thing, baby doll," he chuckled, as though he was in on some private joke between the two of them that Amber had somehow managed to forget. "You're just not the drooling type, I guess. Never mind that you were the one begging me to stay. For someone who's so proud of her memory, there sure is a lot that's slipped your mind, isn't there? We'll have to be careful, or you'll be forgetting your name soon." He laughed at his own joke, but Amber found it anything but funny.

"Look, I... yes, if you're doing this to prove a point or something, yes I missed you a lot," she replied, after a long and heavy sigh. "I'm not going to lie, it hurt a lot when you were gone, and I did spend a long while wondering what I could have done differently to get you to stay." It was actually a lot worse than that, even if she wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of knowing exactly how badly she'd pined for him; she'd spent the first few weeks after his departure practically in a fugue state, barely even able to make herself shamble out of the apartment to buy groceries, and a lot of her masturbatory fantasies had revolved around somehow seducing him into giving up his high-paying job in favor of staying with her. But hearing that could only make Matt even smugger.

And he was plenty smug right now as it was. "Well, of course you did, sweetie," he cooed, leading her down a flight of stairs into a finished basement Chloe evidently used as her rec room. "You didn't even know what to do without me, did you, punkin pie? You're just lucky I got transferred back to the States, so we could get back in that nice cozy groove we had together. Isn't that right, baby girl?" The pet names were beginning to get cloyingly obnoxious, like sticky caramel gumming up her brain, but she persisted. It felt too frustrating to leave things like this.

"Look, Matt--Mattster," she growled, the nickname feeling odd and not quite right in her mouth and she hoped in his ears as well, "you don't get to talk about getting into any kind of groove with me when you don't even remember my name, okay? It's just, it's basic respect. If you can't even be bothered to call me by my name instead of trying to hang all these cutesy little lovey dovey pet names for me, you're not going to get anywhere and whatever you're hoping to get into with me is over before it even starts. So what am I called, Ma-M-Mattster?" God, that was hard to say. She kept stumbling over it for some reason even though a part of her brain resolutely refused to give it up.

He put his finger to his chin in mock contemplation. "It was Ava, right?" he asked, his voice taking on a teasing tone as he watched her face settle back into weary exasperation. "Abby, then. Addison. Adelaide. Adrienne. Alanna. Stop me if I'm getting close. Alexa, Alicia, Allison, Alyssa?" He began to rattle the names off in faster and faster succession, almost too fast for her to get a word in edgewise, and now she knew he was doing it on purpose even if she didn't understand why.

"Look, M-Matts--M-Mastst--" She stumbled over her own effort to tease him back, tripping over the word and sputtering a series of 'st' noises that caught on her lips and made her feel even more foolish than her inability to rise above his childish taunts. She didn't know why she bothered coming all the way down here just to make her own night a frustrating mess. In hindsight it seemed downright foolish, the sucker play of a mark who didn't even know she was being conned, and yet her feet felt rooted to the floor by his continued pretense. Like Charlie Brown running up to the football, she couldn't help believing that next time he was going to get it right.

"Amethyst, Annabelle, Baby Girl, Pretty Princess, Puppy Dog," he intoned, the names coming faster and faster until she felt her eyes beginning to glaze over in lackadaisical indifference. "Angelique, Anita, April, Ariel, Drowsy Dolly, Silly Bunny, Aria, Armani, Precious Poppet, Honey Baby Sweetie Pie." The names became just sounds in her ears, Matt's words nothing more than a buzz of noise that lulled her into indolent boredom while she waited for him to stop playing and say her real, actual, one hundred percent accurate name. It felt almost strangely familiar, and she honestly began to wonder just how much of the time they dated she spent simply tuning out his conversation.

"Astrid, Aubrey, Amber, Audra, Autumn, Avril, Amber, Ayla, Amanda, Anna, Ashleigh, Amber, Addison," he recited, but none of it really mattered anymore. Even his name had become fuzzy and indistinct in her head, as her muzzy brain struggled to disentangle it from the nickname she'd come up with and found herself unable to think of either one properly. 'Matt' felt strangely incomplete, but 'Mattster' felt thick and clumsy even inside her head. She let her eyes roll back in her head in drowsy lethargy as she focused her attention on getting it right.

"Baby Doll, Sexy Girl, Cutie Pie, Dreamy Dizzy Dum-Dum," he added, each name becoming just as surreal to her as the last until she found herself becoming entirely unmoored from the very concept of identity. She didn't know what name she would answer to anymore, and it felt so much easier to stand there in slack, vacuous indifference and let him call her whatever he wanted. It was all the same now. She could respond to anything she was called, allow herself to fill up the vessel of each persona like water taking the shape of a glass, and he... ohh. He was right. It did feel just like settling right back into a groove. Her fingers drifted down between her thighs, hiking up her skirt to tease her cunt through her panties as the memory of those long, lazy nights sank in.

"Fucktoy, Slut, Tits for Brains, Breeder Bitch," he rattled off, sensing the limits of her waning resistance approaching and pressing harder on her fragile sense of self as her fingers slipped into the waistband of her panties to directly rub her swollen clit. "Mindless Slave, Brainwashed Pet, Mine, Owned, Obedient, Helpless, Deeper, Dropping, Down," he added, and her wobbly legs slowly gave out as she sank to her knees in vacant befuddlement.

There was a final moment where she tried to assert some kind of resistance, to stammer out some sputtering counter to his various assertions of her identity. "I--y-you, M-Matts, M-Masst... Master?" she mumbled haltingly, and when the word finally resolved itself properly in her brain it was with a click of recognition she felt all the way down to her throbbing cunt. Her eyes crossed, her tongue lolled out between her lips, and she sighed in satisfaction as her true self, her slave self, reasserted itself at last.

THE END