Morgan found herself thinking of that most famous passage by John Bergen.

To be born a woman has to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women is developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself.

Years of cultivated feminist militancy had not fully rooted out that impulse in Morgan. All the time, whether at the office or in everyday life, she was acutely aware of people perceiving her. She tried to weaponise that against the patriarchy, to defy expectations and take up space. How many boutique firm CEOs were like her? Not just a woman in her mid-thirties, but very openly lesbian, with short-cropped hair dyed red, lean and muscular from martial arts?

Unapologetically butch and punk as fuck?

She did all that in a performative way. She knew this. It was an explicit denial of the expectations of visual femininity that society had been placing on women, since time immemorial.

Right now, though, as she nursed her drink, she was thinking about that Bergen quote for a more literal reason. It was because Morgan could feel herself being watched.

She shifted her gaze from her laptop screen, scanning the room. The booth she'd chosen was tucked in the back corner, deliberately isolated, the kind of spot that usually guaranteed privacy in a fancy bar like this.

The group of four at the table near the bar clearly hadn't gotten that memo.

They were young—barely old enough to be in here, Morgan guessed. A good decade and a half her junior. Adults, sure, but boys all the same, the kind of boys who'd never worked a real day in their lives, if the obscenely priced streetwear was any indication. Designer labels everywhere, pretending to be streetwear, and it looked especially tasteless when paired with their greasy, unwashed hair.

They were loud. Obnoxiously, aggressively loud, laughing like braying donkeys at some video they were playing on a phone.

Morgan's jaw tightened. She looked back at her laptop, trying to focus on the quarterly projections she'd been reviewing.

Another burst of cackling. She caught the word "bitch" floating across the room.

Her eyes flicked up again, involuntary. The one in the sports cap was staring directly at her now, slack-jawed, his acne-scarred face twisted into something between a leer and a sneer. He elbowed his friend—a pale, stringy-haired kid with the beginnings of a patchy beard struggling across his weak chin—and nodded in her direction.

They weren't even trying to be subtle about it.

She kept her face neutral, her expression arranged into the mask of a woman absorbed in work. It was a performance, like everything else. She was looking at her laptop screen without actually seeing the projections anymore.

Because she could still feel it. That crawling, prickling awareness along the side of her neck and across her bare forearms, where the sleeve tattoos—a full Japanese traditional piece on the left, geometric blackwork on the right—were on full display beneath her rolled-up shirt cuffs.

Like countless women before her, she felt like a piece of meat on display at the market.

Were they staring because she was an older woman alone in a bar? Because she looked like she'd wandered in from a different postcode, a different tax bracket, a different species entirely from whatever Instagram-curated femininity they were used to jerking off to? Were they trying to figure out if she was a dyke, and if so, did that make her more or less attractive to them?

Either way, it was creepy and gross.

She thought of John Bergen again.

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.

She'd built her entire visual identity as a fuck-you to exactly these people, these men. And still. Still they stared. Still they felt entitled to the looking, as though her body existed in public specifically for their appraisal, and her aesthetic choices were just another variable in their assessment.

Cap guy slowly pushed back from the table.

As soon as he was up, the other three followed. She categorised them similarly in her head. Gold chain, sandy hair, and hoodie, a stereotypical fat incel slob if she’d ever seen one. Morgan watched them approach over the top of her laptop screen. Her stomach lurched. Not fear, exactly. More like the resigned irritation. They were headed towards her table. Why oh why did today have to be like this?

Cap guy positioned himself at the head of her table, directly across from her. Sandy hair slid into the booth uninvited, dropping onto the seat beside her with a waft of perfume applied in quantities that could only be described as chemical warfare. The other two flanked the booth's open side.

"So what are you?" cap guy said.

Not who. What.

Morgan made a show of sighing in exasperation, then met the guy’s gaze. His face was pockmarked with acne.

"Busy," Morgan said.

She was proud of that witty response, but cap guy didn’t seem particularly stung. He was probably too dim to get it, she guessed.

"Nah but like, seriously," he said. "Are you like pretending to be a dude or what?"

Sandy hair beside her snickered. "She's definitely a lesbo," he said. "Look at the hair. The arms. Bro, she's got bigger arms than you."

This produced a round of donkey-braying from the hoodie guy. He had a face like a thumb—small features crowded into the centre of a wide, doughy head—and when he laughed his whole body shook in a way that suggested his core muscles had never once been engaged for any purpose.

Cap guy hadn't broken eye contact with Morgan. There was something genuinely unnerving about the total absence behind his eyes. Was this guy some kinda sociopath?

"You know this is a nice bar, yeah?" Cap guy said. "Like, people come here to have a nice time. And then you're just sat here looking like—" He gestured vaguely at all of her. "Like that. It's putting people off their drinks."

Morgan closed her laptop.

"I'm going to give you one chance," she said, "to take your little boy band back to your table before I ask the staff to throw you out."

"Boy band," hoodie repeated, and laughed again. His body fat jiggled as he did that. "She called us a boy band." He said it like he was narrating his own life for an audience.

Cap guy didn't laugh. He tilted his head, studying her with that vacant, lizard-brained curiosity.

"Staff?" he said. "You think the staff are gonna do anything? My dad owns the building this bar is in. Like, the actual building."

Seriously? This was the guy’s level? My dad works at the CIA level of stupid?

"Cool," Morgan said. "Does daddy also pick out your outfits? Because someone should be held accountable."

Gold chain let out a short, involuntary laugh at that. Cap guy shot him a look and the laugh died instantly. Interesting. There was a hierarchy here.

"You're funny," cap guy said, in a tone that made it clear he didn't find her funny at all. "For an old dyke."

Sandy hair shifted, and his knee pressed against hers under the table. She moved her leg away immediately.

"You work out a lot, yeah?" he said, and his eyes dropped to her arms. "That's pretty hot, actually. For a lesbo. I bet you could, like—" He made a crude pumping gesture with his fist. That made them all wheeze, like it was the absolute height of comedy.

"I'm just saying," he insisted, leaning closer. His knee found hers again. "Like, maybe you just haven't had the right—"

"Finish that sentence," Morgan said, "and I will break your wrist."

Sandy hair's knee withdrew.

"Yo, chill," hoodie said, holding up his hands in a pantomime of innocence. "We're just being friendly. Right? We're being friendly." He looked to cap guy for confirmation, like a dog checking with its owner.

Cap guy nodded, slow and magnanimous, as though he were granting permission for the conversation to continue. "You're hostile. Like immediately hostile. We come over, we're being nice—"

"You opened with 'what are you.'"

"—we're being nice, and you're just a bitch about it. And I'm like, okay, maybe that's why you're sitting here alone on a Friday night. Maybe that's why you're a dyke. Because no man would put up with your crap. It’s a shame, because you could be hot if you tried. Even at, like, your age. "

Gold chain nodded sagely. "Facts."

Gold chain, Morgan noticed, hadn't contributed a single original thought since they'd arrived. His entire function in the group seemed to be affirmation. A human "like" button.

Morgan let the silence sit for a beat. Two beats. She let it curdle in the air between them until cap guy's smirk started to lose some of its structural integrity.

Then she leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands clasped, and gave him the look she reserved for the vilest members of the patriarchy.

"You're going to go back to your table now. All four of you. And you're going to do it because somewhere in the back of that acne-ravaged skull, behind all the Axe body spray fumes and the half-digested Andrew Tate clips, there's a single functioning neuron that knows—knows—that you are out of your depth."

Cap guy's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"And if that neuron isn't enough," Morgan continued, "I have two learning aids right here."

She made a show of balling her hands into fists.

Sandy hair was already sliding out of the booth. He didn't announce his departure or make a joke about it.

Cap guy held for another second. Maybe two. He was trying to find the exit that let him keep his dignity, she could see it, the gears grinding behind those empty eyes as he searched for a parting shot that would let him walk away feeling like he'd won.

He didn't find one.

"Whatever," he said. "This is boring. Let’s go, guys. Enjoy your boring Friday night, dyke. You’ll be begging for our cocks soon enough anyway."

He pushed off from the table and turned. Hoodie fell in behind him immediately, the loyal retriever returning to heel. Gold chain was not far behind.

Just like that, they were gone, and finally, finally, Morgan allowed herself to exhale. Her hands were trembling. Adrenaline. Not fear. She was certain of that.

She opened her laptop again, even though she knew, with certainty, that she wasn’t going to get any more work done right now.

Instead, she was thinking of the quote again.

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another…

Her own success didn’t come that way. It wasn’t owed to men. She was immensely proud of that, every single day.

And yet.

Something was wrong.

Her mind kept obsessively replaying the encounter over and over. The casual cruelty of their comments. The way cap guy had looked at her. Not at her. Through her. As if her personhood were a pane of glass and whatever was behind it belonged to him by default.

What are you.

The thing that bothered her most was the absolute, breathtaking certainty they'd had. Not confidence. Confidence implied some underlying competence, some justification. This was something more primitive. These were four mediocre boys, ugly, stupid, charmless, and they had walked up to a woman their senior who could have snapped any one of them like dry kindling, and they had simply assumed.

Assumed what, exactly?

You’ll be begging for our cocks soon enough.

That they had the right. That was it. That was the whole thing. They had the right to her table, her space, her attention, her body as a site of commentary. Not because they'd earned it. Not because they were impressive or attractive or intelligent or powerful in any way that she recognised as legitimate. But because they were male and she was female and that, in whatever cobwebbed reptile-brain arithmetic they were running, was sufficient.

Morgan took a long pull of her drink.

She was thinking about what would have happened if she hadn't told them to leave.

She wasn't choosing to think about it. It was an intrusive thought, and a deeply unwanted one.

If she'd just sat there. If she'd been smaller, softer, meeker, less on the defensive. If the lean muscle and the ink, the cropped red hair and the practiced hardness of her expression had all been stripped away, and she'd been just a woman sitting alone at a bar on a Friday night, being confronted by four guys making jokes about her handjob skills.

What would they have done? What would she have done?

Beg for cock.

Stop it.

But the intrusive thought wouldn't obey. It unspooled with lazy inevitability. It made her perceive her hypothetical weaker self as they would have perceived it. Free real estate. Open season. Responsive to input. Submissive.

I said stop it.

She was a lesbian. She was a lesbian. She had known this about herself forever. She had never, not once, been attracted to a man or even idly fantasised about one. The thought of sex with men was about as appealing to her as the thought of licking a public toilet seat. Less, actually. At least the toilet seat didn't have horrendous opinions about the Me Too movement.

And these weren't even attractive men. If her subconscious was going to betray her, couldn't it at least have the decency to conjure up something aspirational? Some chiseled, symmetrical, hygienically acceptable specimen? But no. Her traitor brain had fixated on these specific specimens. Cap guy with his cratered skin and his dead shark eyes. Sandy hair with his wispy excuse for facial hair and his chemical-weapon cologne. Hoodie, shaped like a sack of laundry. Gold chain, a man with zero personality.

And they had walked up to her like she was theirs.

It wasn't even arrogance. Arrogance required self-awareness. This was more like gravity, they didn't think about it, they didn't have to. It was just the physics of their world: men act, women are acted upon, and the relative merits of the specific men and the specific woman were irrelevant to the equation.

She imagined it. Hoodie's doughy hand fisted in her cropped red hair, yanking her head back. The way her neck would arch. The sound she'd make—involuntary, animal, nothing like the controlled, measured voice she'd used to dismantle them. Cap guy saying what are you again, but this time not as a question. As a statement. As in: this is what you are. A woman. Just a woman. All the ink and the muscle and the corner office and the seven-figure revenue and the martial arts belts and the carefully cultivated fuck-you aesthetic reduced to that single, flattening category.

Just a woman in a bar. And them, just men. And that being enough to make her beg for cock, on all fours like a dog, lesbianism forgotten, licking her lips as the tip inevitably approached—

What the fuck is wrong with me?

She knew about intrusive thoughts, of course. This was like the fleeting impulse to jump from a vertiginous height. Her mind cataloguing the worst possible outcome and then refusing to stop replaying it, precisely because it was the worst possible outcome.

That was all.

All the same, Morgan signaled for the check. She didn’t feel safe in the bar any longer.

More worryingly, she didn’t feel safe in her own head, and that one was not left just as easily…

***

Morgan's car was parked at the far end of a dark alley, because the main lot had been full when she'd arrived three hours ago and she'd been too focused on work stuff to care about the walk.

She cared now.

Her boots were loud on the wet tarmac. They sounded like a nervous heartbeat. She imagined herself through the eyes of any male stranger who might be looking at her — an unsettled woman, walking nervously back home, alone at night.

Bergen again, uninvited: the surveyor and the surveyed.

She was exactly halfway through the alley when cap guy stepped out from behind the dumpster.

He didn't say anything. He just stood there, hands in his pockets, that same slack nothing on his face.

Morgan stopped.

Behind her, she heard steps on concrete. She didn't need to turn around to know that his three goons were now behind her.

They'd been waiting for her.

One on one, any of them, she'd have put money on herself without hesitation. She was more than capable of defending herself, and she had several pounds’ worth of muscle over any one of these little shits except maybe hoodie, but his extra pounds were distributed in ways that would not help him in a fight.

Problem was, there were four of them.

She may have intimidated them back at the bar, but their bruised egos clearly motivated them to try again. She could still go down swinging, maybe if she landed the first solid kick or punch and neutralised one of them the other three would get scared and back off. Especially if she went for cap guy first. They didn’t strike her as brave, unsurprisingly.

And yet.

And yet.

There it was again. That thing from the bar. That uninvited, unwelcome, filthy little tremor somewhere beneath the fear, intertwined with the fear, feeding on the fear like a parasite.

Her traitor brain, her traitor body, registering the geometry of the situation—cornered, outnumbered, four males closing in on one female in a dark alley—and producing alongside the perfectly rational terror a response so inappropriate, so fundamentally at odds with everything she understood about herself, that it made her want to vomit.

A thrill.

"You embarrassed me in there," cap guy said. "So I've been thinking about what to do about that."

"Here's what's going to happen," cap guy said. He took a step closer. Then another. He was within arm's reach now. "We've had a little chat, the lads and me. About what's fair. About what you owe us for being such a cunt in there."

"I don't owe you anything," Morgan said. Her voice came out steady. She was amazed by that. Amazed and grateful, because inside she was utterly paralysed by two conflicting impulses.

Fight on. Give in.

"See, that's where we disagree. The way I see it, you came into a nice bar and you acted like you were better than everyone. Like you were better than us. And maybe you think you are. With your butch vibes and your tattoos and your whole—" He gestured. "Whatever this is. Trying to be a man. But you're not a man, are you?"

He was close enough now that she could see individual pores. Individual blackheads. The patchy, translucent fuzz on his upper lip that aspired to be a moustache.

"You're just a woman with big arms."

Behind her, someone laughed. Hoodie.

"So here's the deal. We can do this the hard way. All four of us. Right here. On the ground. And I promise you, dyke or not, you will not enjoy it. We will make absolutely fucking sure you do not enjoy it."

Morgan wavered. She tried to will herself to move, to do something, anything. She ran a company. She held power over men, every single day. She could kick their asses. She was not a scared woman, frozen in a dark alley, she refused to be that.

"Or," cap guy said.

Morgan drew breath.

"Or you give me a handjob. Right now. Make me cum in five minutes, and we walk away. That's it. That's the whole thing. Five minutes of your life and then you never see us again."

Sandy hair made a sound like a kettle reaching boil. "Bro, are you serious?"

"Shut up." Cap guy didn't look away from Morgan. "Five minutes. One hand. Easy, yeah? For a woman with arms and hands like yours."

She looked at cap guy's hand. At his crotch. At the absurd, humiliating simplicity of what he was proposing.

One hand. Five minutes. And then it's over.

Or.

On the ground. In the dark. Four of them.

"Clock starts when I say," cap guy said. He was already fishing his phone out of his pocket. "Five minutes. I'm being generous."

"You're being a rapist," Morgan said.

"And you’re wasting time," sandy hair said behind her.

Five minutes. Five minutes and she could get in her car and drive away and shower until the hot water ran out and then shower some more and never, ever think about this again.

Besides. Look at him. Look at this greasy, acne-riddled manchild with his designer cap and his daddy's money in his pocket and his complete inability to form a sentence without the word "like." There was absolutely no chance—zero, none—that such a loser was going to last five minutes.

She could do this. She could grit her teeth and grip his pathetic little cock and pump it like she was wringing out a dishcloth and he'd spurt in ninety seconds and she'd wipe her hand on his stupid jacket and walk away.

But that would mean giving these losers such an existential victory over her.

"No," she said. "Absolutely not. You can all go fuck yourselves."

Cap guy shrugged. He tapped his phone screen.

"Timer's started," he said.

Morgan blinked. "What?"

"Five minutes. Running now." He held up the phone so she could see the countdown. 4:58. 4:57. 4:56.

"I didn't—I haven't agreed to anything," she said.

"Don't care," cap guy said. He pocketed the phone. "Clock's ticking. Your choice what happens when it hits zero."

"That's not how consent works, you absolute—"

"Tick tock, dyke," sandy hair said from behind her.

"This is insane. You can't just—you can't unilaterally start a countdown and then—"

"Tick tock," said gold chain, even now incapable of producing anything original.

"—and then act like I've entered into some kind of fucking contract—"

Cap guy crossed his arms. He looked, if anything, slightly amused.

"I'm not doing this," Morgan said. She said it to him, but she was also saying it to herself. "I will scream. I will fight every single one of you. I will bite and scratch and I will make sure that at least one of you leaves this alley missing something he came in with."

"Cool," hoodie said. "So do that then."

She didn't move.

Why wasn't she moving?

"Four minutes," Cap guy said.

A full minute had already passed, and Morgan was losing her ability to think coherently. She had to decide, now. If she wanted to fight them, she had to strike them right now.

She did not strike.

"… Fine."

Cap guy's eyebrows went up just as Morgan’s knees bent down. He hadn't expected her to submit, she realised.

"Fine," she said again, harder this time, as if repetition could make it feel like a decision she'd made rather than one that had been made for her. "I’ll get it done, okay?"

"Yo," sandy hair said from behind her. "Yo, she actually—"

"Shut up," cap guy said. His voice had gone slightly hoarse. He cleared his throat. "Everyone shut up."

He lowered his trousers one-handed, the other still holding the phone. Morgan watched him, and she thought: I am watching this, but focusing on him watching me milk his cock.

The surveyor and the surveyed.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

He was already half-hard, naturally. This situation was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him, the sick little fuck.

Morgan looked at his cock. She didn’t have much experience with dicks, but all the same his cock looked perfectly average to her. Unremarkable in every conceivable way, which, she supposed, was fitting.

The tarmac was wet and cold and it had started soaking through her jeans as soon as her knees had hit the ground. Somehow, though, it felt like it was happening to someone else. And so did the fact that she was reaching out and wrapping her hand around cap guy’s cock.

It was warm, and it twitched when she gripped it, a small involuntary spasm against her palm.

She had never touched a cock before, much less voluntarily.

This wasn't voluntary either, she reminded herself.

She started stroking, with the startled realisation that she didn’t exactly know what she was doing. She supposed it should be straightforward enough, right? Just a bit of mechanical friction. Moving her hand up and down a bunch should do the trick, that was how men worked, didn’t they?

Cap guy's face was unchanged, though. That slack, dead-eyed expression. He was looking down at her with the same lizard curiosity he'd had in the bar, like she was something mildly interesting on television.

A full minute of her tugging awkwardly at his cock had passed, and he wasn't even breathing hard.

She started experimenting with different things. A tighter grip, then a looser one, more focus on the base or on the head. She even reached out with her other hand and cupped his balls, which was a hell of a thing to do, considering how sweaty they felt to her fingertips. She doubted he’d showered in a fair bit.

That was a disgustingly powerful image. Male musk and entitlement, at the same time. But not as disgustingly powerful as her perception of herself, folded down on her knees in a slavish pose that emphasised the curves of her legs and the arch of her back, looking up at this loser and desperately trying to coax cum out of his cock.

This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.

Behind her, sandy hair whispered something to hoodie. She heard the word "pathetic." She didn't know if he meant her or the situation or both.

She was starting to panic, now, abandoning any pretense of technique and just jerking him off as fast as her muscles allowed. She was confident that this would make him cum, given time — he was starting to show indications of enjoying her ministrations after all — but she was racing the clock, and she was losing.

And if she did lose…

On the ground. In the dark. Four of them.

"Yo, you’re clearly not really good at this," hoodie said. "You should suck his cock. No way you’re gonna get him to cum in time otherwise, dyke."

A full-body shudder travelled down the length of Morgan’s spine. She didn’t know what she found more disgusting, the idea of sucking dick, or the idea that hoodie, this obese incel could suggest or order her to suck dick.

A cock. In her mouth.

But she had perhaps two minutes left. Two minutes and then the alternative. The ground. The dark. Four of them.

Morgan heard herself audibly swallow.

Then, she leaned forward and took cap guy’s cock into her mouth.

She didn't consciously decide to do it. Sure, she had thought about how much she didn’t want to suck his cock. But there wasn’t a conscious moment where she weighed the pros and explicitly told herself, my best course of action is to part my lips around his dick and submit.

There was no moment of deliberation that the decision matured in. It was an act of pure instinct and urgency, an impulse buried somewhere in a primitive corner of her female subconscious, a wordless idea that no act indicates gendered supplication to male power more than this, the pleading by mouth (but not by word) for mercy, for a kinder enthrallment, for being spared from destruction.

One second she was jerking him off with an increasingly desperate grip and the next second her lips were around him and she was sucking, hard.

She sealed her lips and sucked and worked her tongue against the underside and she didn't know if she was doing it right because she had never done this, had never wanted to do this, had spent her entire adult life secure in the knowledge that she would never have a cock in her mouth, and here she was, on her knees in a wet alley, sucking off an unwashed loser in the hope to stave off a gangrape.

The smell was musty. His sweaty pubic hair would end up in her mouth for sure. The taste was even stronger than the smell. She idly wondered if the tangy flavour she felt was just sweat, or if there was a drop of urine on the tip of his dick from the last time he’d pissed without properly settling himself after.

"There it is," cap guy said. His voice was more strained now. "There it is. Knew you had it in you."

She kept going. Eyes closed. If she couldn't see it, maybe the woman on the other side of the window was the one doing it, not her.

"Say sorry."

Morgan's rhythm faltered. She pulled back just enough to speak, her lips still an inch away from his cock. To make sure she wasn’t wasting time, she replaced her mouth with her hand, stroking his cock. It was now wet with her spit. "What?"

"You were rude to us in the bar. You were a bitch. So say sorry."

She looked up at him. His face was flushed now. There was life behind those dead eyes for the first time. He was enjoying this, not just the physical sensation but the architecture of it. The choreography. A lesbian on her knees with his cock wet from her mouth, apologising for not recognising the terrible truth of the world.

To be born a woman has to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men.

"I'm sorry," Morgan said, still manually trying to coax cum from him.

"Nah," cap guy said. "Not good enough. Say it properly. Say you're sorry for being a bitch. And say you love cock."

There was no time to lose, and therefore, no time for hesitation.

"I'm sorry for being a bitch," she said. "I love cock. Let me show you…"

She put her mouth back on him and sucked harder, hoping that a show of enthusiasm would make up for lack of experience. His cock wasn’t really big enough for her to manually stroke while also sucking unless she only stayed at the tip, so she placed her hands against his thighs.

But cap guy would just not shut up and let her bring him off.

"More. Tell me what you are."

Once again, she pulled off, and immediately engulfed his dick with her hand again.

"I'm a stupid dyke," she said. She was shocked at herself for using that slur to describe herself. It felt like such an utter betrayal. But even that was not enough to pacify him.

"Who shouldn't have disrespected her betters," he said.

"Who shouldn't have disrespected her betters," Morgan repeated.

Behind her, someone—gold chain, she thought—let out a low, breathy "damn."

This time, there was no further interruption when Morgan sank her face back onto cap guy’s cock. Her words had gotten to him, or her humiliation had anyway. Most ominously, they’d gotten to her.

Her betters.

A part of her still scoffed at the word. These were not her betters. They were stupid losers. Mediocre and unwashed. Unremarkable in every way other than how slimy they were, both literally and metaphorically.

All the same…

Their leader was currently busy jerking himself off with her mouth, was he not?

Had she not just humiliatingly apologised for being a bitch and a dyke?

How had that happened? How had that happened so easily?

Maybe they were her betters. Maybe not in any way she'd previously understood the word, but in some older and more fundamental calculus.

A calculus old enough that it was lubricating her cunt.

There was something so atrociously self-denying about that. About getting wet from rape.

Cap guy's hand found the back of her head. He pulled her off his cock and then pressed her face downward, directing her towards his balls. Following a wordless bodily instinct, Morgan’s tongue darted out before she realised what was happening.

The smell was incredibly oppressive, and between the hair and the sweat, the texture was hardly any better. It was genuinely, objectively foul, yet she found herself lapping at his balls with full strokes of her tongue, like some kind of dog. She even took one into her mouth and suckled very gently.

It was an act of worship.

She felt the animal relief of surrender after sustained tension, like a held breath finally let go. The sheer counterphobic charge of doing the things she feared most, saying the things she would least ever say, being the things she had spent her entire adult life refusing to be.

When she returned to his cock, that only made her suck faster. And finally, at long last, the suction was too much for cap guy to hold back.

His thighs tensed and he groaned. He let out a strained muttural groan and quivered, and just like that, one big dollop of cum after another was unceremoniously deposited onto Morgan’s tongue. She kept her mouth sealed around him and swallowed, just in case, just because, and it made her feel so small and weak and stupid and ultimately female…

He finished. She felt the last weak pulse against her tongue and she swallowed the last drops of his cum and sat back on her heels, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

Done.

She'd swallowed his cum. She'd swallowed it.

Morgan's stomach contracted violently. She doubled forward, one hand bracing against the wet tarmac.

She knew, deep inside, just how pathetic a creature she must look like now. A defeated, vanquished lesbian who’d just stained her hand and lips and finally her very throat with worship of the phallus. Stained her panties, too, because she was fucking wet, despite her own incendiary revulsion at her submission.

She looked up at cap guy. His face was slack, his mouth slightly open, his chest rising and falling. For a moment he looked almost human. Then the deadness came back into his eyes like shutters closing.

He looked at his phone.

Then he turned the screen towards her.

+0:00:02

The timer had run out. The screen showed the frozen digits of the overrun. Two seconds. She had missed it by two seconds.

The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female.

What would happen to her now...?