I Met My Mistress Playing Online and She Banned Me From Finishing

Two years ago, when I was still single, virtual reality video games were my refuge. After three years in a relationship that left me more exhausted than hurt, the headphones and the voice servers became the closest thing I had to a social life. I would join co-op matches, talk to strangers for hours, and every now and then I’d meet someone who stayed beyond logout.

One of those nights I met Mara.

I don’t know what it was about her voice. A mix of weariness and amusement, as if everything struck her as a little funny and at the same time nothing mattered all that much. She said she was in her early twenties. She said she lived alone in a tiny apartment in some city up north. She said her hair was short and her eyes were too light for her taste.

And even though I never asked her for a photo, in my head I built her whole body from those scraps: narrow back, a lower lip a little fuller than usual, long hands, nails always short.

We started talking almost every day. Connection, chat, two or three matches, and after the matches there was always another hour when neither of us wanted to log off. I didn’t pay attention to the way she was getting into my head. I kept telling myself I wasn’t going to depend on her, or on anyone. That I didn’t want to feel the emptiness of the last few months with my ex all over again. That this was just voice, game, safe distance.

By the fourth or fifth night, the conversation stopped being casual.

We were both awake, she who knows how many kilometers away, me in my bed with the headset on the floor and only the headphones on. She started by asking innocent things: what I was wearing, what I was doing with my hands, how long it had been since anyone had touched me. When I stopped answering with jokes and answered seriously, there was a long silence on the other end.

—If I tell you something, will you do it? —she asked.

—Depends.

—No. It doesn’t depend. Will you do it or not?

Something in the way she said it took my breath away. It wasn’t a question. It was an invitation to hand over something I hadn’t known I wanted to give away.

—Yes —I said.

***

What happened that night was unlike anything I’d ever done before. Mara didn’t describe bodies, or landscapes, or clothes falling to the floor. It had none of the usual awkwardness of sexting that I’d tried with a couple of people. She spoke in the imperative. Short sentences. One command, one wait, another command.

She told me where to put my hand. How long. With how much pressure. She forbade me to close my eyes when I did. She made me open them again and describe what I could see on the ceiling. When I tried to speed things up because I felt like I was going to explode, her voice went softer and, at the same time, more final.

—No. Slower. Much slower.

—I can’t —I whispered.

—You can. You will, because I’m asking you to.

And I could. That was the part that undid me.

We stayed like that for close to an hour. Every time my breathing got too fast, she made me stop. She forced me to stay still, my hand still where she had put it, feeling my pulse pound against my fingers. Then she’d start again, a little slower, a little deeper in. I told her everything I felt and she corrected me whenever I used vague words. She wanted the exact detail. As concrete as possible.

When there was finally very little left, when there was no human way for me to hold back any longer and I told her so in a thread of voice, she cut me off cold.

—Take your hand away.

—What?

—Take your hand away and put both hands on the pillow.

***

I don’t know how long I stayed like that. With my arms stretched out against the wood of the headboard, trembling, my whole body screaming for what she had just taken away from me. On the other end of the headset, Mara breathed slowly, as if it cost her nothing.

—You’re saving this —she said at last—. You’re not touching yourself. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not the next day. Not until I say so.

I let out a nervous laugh, still breathless.

—You’re joking, right?

—No.

There was another silence. Long. Long enough for me to understand she wasn’t playing, or that she was playing far too seriously.

—And if I can’t take it?

—You can take it.

—And if I tell you I can’t?

—You tell me, and I’ll tell you whether I let you or not.

She didn’t let me.

***

The first night I slept terribly. I woke up three times with my body burning and my hands clenched in the sheets. I thought about sending her a message in the game chat to say this was ridiculous, that we didn’t even know each other in person, that nobody could ask someone else to sit with frustration for no reason. I didn’t send it. I clenched my fists and fell asleep on my left side, the most uncomfortable one, because it forced me not to roll onto my back.

The second night was worse.

By the third, I understood something I later struggled to admit: the waiting itself was doing more work than any orgasm. I thought about Mara on the bus, in the kitchen, in the middle of boring meetings. I thought about her voice telling me “no” with that calm. Every time I felt the temptation, I imagined what she would say to me, and it gave me a strange mix of anger and obedience I had never felt before.

Four days passed. Then a week. Then ten.

I sent her a message at the end of the first week.

“Are you coming back?”

It took her two days to reply.

“Maybe.”

And nothing else.

***

The second time she came online, nearly three weeks later, I was already at the edge. We had talked twice more by chat, brief exchanges, her deliberately distant. When I saw her name in green on the match list, I felt my stomach drop.

—Hi —she said, as if nothing had happened.

—Hi.

—Did you hold out?

—Yes.

—Lie to me again.

—Yes. I held out.

A pause.

—Good.

***

That night she let me finish.

It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t tender, either. She made me go through every single day I had spent waiting before allowing me anything at all. She made me describe what I had done each day: what I had thought when I woke up, what I had avoided, where I had almost broken the promise. Every time my answer seemed weak to her, she made me go back to the previous day and tell her again, in more detail, until I could barely speak.

When she finally gave the order, it was one word.

—Now.

And everything that had built up over those three weeks came out all at once, in a long, rough orgasm that left me crying without fully understanding why. It wasn’t sadness. It was something more like the relief of letting go of a weight I hadn’t even realized I was carrying.

Mara said nothing for a long while. Then she gave a low laugh, almost affectionate.

—Good girl.

That was the first and last time I ever heard her praise me in that voice.

***

After that night, things settled into a strange pattern. Mara appeared and disappeared without warning. Two weeks passed, a month, sometimes more. I never wrote to her first. It was an unspoken rule the two of us had accepted without ever discussing it.

When she came back, it wasn’t always for the same thing. Sometimes we just played. Other times we talked about silly things, about shows, about people who had annoyed us in college, about food. But every now and then, without warning, her voice would shift register and I already knew what was coming. An order. A wait. A new rule I had to follow until the next time she decided to show up again.

Some rules were easy. Others made me live differently for whole days. Once she forbade me from wearing underwear for an entire random week, and I went to work those days feeling, in every movement, that she was a little bit there, watching something nobody else could see. Another time she made me sleep with my legs crossed. Another time she made me tell her, the next day, everything I had dreamed.

We never met in person. Not because of any clear decision, but because neither of us ever seriously proposed it. Sometimes I wondered whether she would be completely different from the image I had built in my head, and whether that difference would break the spell. I suspect she wondered the same thing. It was easier to leave the distance exactly where it was.

***

This went on for almost a year and a half. Until Lucía showed up.

I met Lucía somewhere else, far from the virtual world. A friend introduced us at a birthday party and I liked the way she laughed with her whole mouth. We went out a couple of times, then several more, and by the fourth month I was sleeping at her place more nights than at mine. It was a real relationship: future plans, exchanged keys, serious conversations about where we were going to move.

The last time I spoke to Mara was one dawn, two months after I started with Lucía. I logged into the match almost by reflex, after a long time without going in. She was there, as always, as if she had never left.

—You’re different —she said.

—I’m seeing someone.

There was a long pause. This time it wasn’t a game pause.

—Seriously?

—Seriously.

—Congratulations —she said, and for the first time her voice sounded small to me.

We never spoke about the rules again. That night there was no order, no wait, nothing. Just two people who had kept each other company for months from two screens and who understood, without needing to say it, that the game ended there.

Before I disconnected, she said one more thing.

—May she take good care of you.

—She does.

—Good.

***

Sometimes I think about Mara. Not with guilt, not exactly with nostalgia. I think about her when Lucía touches me in a certain way and my body remembers that way of waiting I learned in those endless weeks without permission to finish. I think about the voice on the other end of the headset telling me “you can take it” as if it were an obvious truth. I think about how strange it is that someone I never saw taught me more about my own desire than anyone I ever slept with in a real bed.

I don’t know what became of her. Maybe she’s still logging into the same matches, finding other sleepless girls, giving them orders with that strange calm. Maybe she found someone too and settled into a life without headsets or rules. I hope so.

And yet, if one night her name appeared green in the match list again, I don’t know if I’d have the strength not to answer.