I Met My Mistress Playing Online and She Forbade Me to Finish

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 worn out than hurt, the headset and the voice servers became the closest thing I had to a social life. I jumped into co-op matches, talked to strangers for hours, and every so often I met someone who stuck around beyond logout.

One of those nights I met Mara.

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

And even though I never asked her for a photo, in my head I built her up completely from those fragments: narrow back, a lower lip a little fuller than usual, long hands, nails always short. Especially the short nails. I would think about those hands between my legs, two fingers easing into my cunt up to the knuckle, and my mouth would go dry all by itself.

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 pace at which 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 again. That this was just voice, game, safe distance.

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

We were both awake, her God-knows-how-many kilometers away, me in my bed with the visor on the floor and only the headphones on. She started by asking me 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 joking and answered seriously — that it had been almost six months since anyone had fucked me, that I wasn’t even masturbating properly, that I’d cum without really wanting to and been left with the feeling I’d done a chore — 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 stole my breath. It wasn’t a question. It was an invitation to give up something I didn’t know I wanted to give up.

“Yes,” I said.

***

What happened that night didn’t resemble anything I had done before. Mara didn’t describe bodies, or landscapes, or clothes falling to the floor. It had nothing of the usual awkwardness of the sexting I’d tried with a couple of people. She spoke in the imperative. Short sentences. One command, one wait, another command.

“Take off your panties,” she told me. “All of them. Throw them on the floor.”

I obeyed. I heard her breathe while I moved my hips to pull them down.

“Now open your legs. Wide open. Feet on the edge of the bed.”

“Done.”

“Put in one finger. Just one. The middle one. Slowly.”

I felt it slide in with an ease that made me ashamed. I was drenched. I told her so.

“I know,” she replied. “I can hear it.”

She told me where to put my hand. How long. With what pressure. She made me circle my clit without touching it, in smaller and smaller circles, until my thighs were shaking. She forbade me to close my eyes when I did. She made me open them again and describe to her what I could see on the ceiling while she kept pushing a second finger into me. When I tried to speed up because I felt like I was about to explode, her voice turned softer and, at the same time, more final.

“No. Slower. Much slower. Pull your fingers out.”

“What?”

“Pull your fingers out of your cunt and suck them. I want to hear you.”

I pulled them out. I put them in my mouth and sucked them with the microphone close by. I felt like a whore and I loved it.

“Good girl,” she said, and those two words tied my stomach in knots.

“I can’t,” I whispered when she made me start again.

“You can. You will because I’m asking you to.”

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

We went on like that for close to an hour. Every time my breathing got too fast, she made me stop. She forced me to stay still, with my hand still buried in my cunt, fingers sunk all the way in without moving, feeling my own pulse throb against them and the flesh inside clench all by itself, searching for friction I wasn’t going to give it. Then she’d start again, a little slower, a little deeper. She made me spread my lips with two fingers of the other hand, keep them apart, and rub my clit with my thumb in a rhythm she set by counting under her breath. I told her everything I felt and she corrected me when I used vague words. She wanted the exact detail. As concrete as possible.

“Say it properly,” she cut in once.

“I’m… I’m really wet.”

“No. Say it properly.”

“My cunt is soaked. It’s running down my ass onto the sheet.”

“That’s it. Always like that.”

When there was finally very little left, when there was no human way to hold back and I told her so in a thread of voice — that I had three fingers in me, that my clit was throbbing like a heart, that I was going to cum in two seconds — she cut me off cleanly.

“Take your hand out.”

“What?”

“Take your hand out of your cunt and put both hands on the pillow.”

***

I don’t know how long I stayed like that. Arms stretched against the wooden headboard, trembling, legs still open and my cunt pulsing in the open air, feeling the current run through my body without ever discharging anywhere. On the other end of the headset, Mara breathed slowly, as if it cost her nothing.

“You’re saving this for later,” she said at last. “You’re not touching yourself. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not the next night. Not until I tell you.”

I let out a nervous laugh, still breathless.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

There was another silence. 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 will.”

“And if I tell you I can’t take it?”

“You tell me and I decide whether I let you or not.”

She didn’t let me.

***

The first night I slept like shit. I woke up three times with my body lit up and my hands clenched over the sheets, the new panties already damp just from shifting position. I thought about messaging her on the game chat to tell her this was ridiculous, that we didn’t even know each other in person, that nobody could ask someone else to stay frustrated for no reason. I didn’t send it. I clenched my fists and fell asleep on my left side, which was the least comfortable, because it forced me not to roll onto my back and not to press my thighs together hard.

The second night was worse. I woke up with my hand already sliding down my belly and pulled it back as if I’d burned myself. I got up, washed my face with cold water, and sat in the kitchen until my body cooled down.

By the third I understood something that later cost me to admit: the waiting was doing, on its own, 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 — and it was all the time, it was seeing a sex scene in any series, it was accidentally brushing the edge of the table with my hip, it was the fucking subway seat vibrating — I imagined what she would say to me, and I felt 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 answer.

“Maybe.”

And nothing else.

***

The second time she connected, nearly three weeks later, I was already at the limit. 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 and my cunt clench at once, as if my body recognized her before my mind did.

“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 quick. It wasn’t gentle either. She made me get completely naked and lie on my back with my legs open and my hands still at my sides. She didn’t let me touch myself for the first twenty minutes. She made me retrace each one of the days I had been waiting before allowing me anything. She made me describe what I had done on each one: 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, with more detail, until I could barely speak.

“Tuesday.”

“On Tuesday I almost did it in the shower.”

“Tell me how.”

“The hot water was falling right between my legs. I leaned against the tiles. I spread myself a little with two fingers so the stream would hit my clit.”

“And?”

“And I remembered you and took my hand away.”

“Good girl.”

When I could no longer stand the weight of my own breathing, she gave me permission to touch myself. First my tits. Just my tits. My nipples. She tightened them with words until they were hard as stones. Then she had me bring one hand down to my cunt and slip two fingers in, still, not moving them, just feeling myself from the inside. She kept me like that for minutes on end, throbbing around my own fingers, while she asked me how wet I was, whether I was dripping onto my ass, whether I felt like I was going to cum just from that.

“Move them,” she said at last. “The two fingers. In and out. Slowly. The other hand on the clit.”

I started fucking myself with my hand to the rhythm she set. I described everything to her: how my cunt was clenching around my fingers, how my thumb was sliding from how wet I was, how the orgasm was assembling itself in the lower part of my belly like a knot growing bigger.

“Faster,” she said.

I sped up. The finish was climbing in me, I could feel it coming in waves, and I could barely answer her anymore. I was just moaning into the microphone, broken up, mouth parted.

“Hold it.”

“I can’t.”

“Hold it. Three. Two.”

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 jolted my legs against the mattress and forced my back to arch so hard my ass lifted off the bed. I dripped over my hand, I dripped down my thighs, I felt a pull in my lower belly so strong I let out a hoarse cry into the mic. I ended up crying without really understanding why, still with my fingers inside me, squeezing the contractions on my own. It wasn’t sadness. It was something closer to the relief of letting go of a weight I hadn’t even known I was carrying.

Mara didn’t say anything for a long while. She let me cry, pull my fingers out, breathe. Then she let out a low laugh, almost affectionate.

“Well done.”

That was the first and last time I 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 talking about it.

When she came back, it wasn’t always for the same thing. Sometimes we just played. Other times we talked about stupid things, series, people we’d hated at university, food. But every now and then, without warning, her voice would change register and I already knew what was coming. A command. A wait. A new rule I had to follow until the next time she decided to show up again.

Some nights she made me cum three times in a row without letting me come down from the edge, one after the other, until I begged her to stop and she forced a fourth. Other times she kept me on the brink for two hours and wouldn’t let me finish, then hung up leaving me with my cunt swollen and the explicit order to sleep like that, with my hand far from my body. Once she made me put the handle of a hairbrush inside me while she counted under her breath, and made me describe how it slowly opened me. Another time she asked me to wet my fingers in my mouth before taking them down, so my cunt would taste like my own spit.

Some rules were easy. Others made me live differently for entire days. Once she forbade me from wearing underwear for a whole week, and I went to work every day feeling the seam of my pants directly against my cunt, getting myself wet in my chair, crossing and uncrossing my legs under the desk. Another time she made me sleep with my legs crossed. Another time she forced me to tell her, the next day, everything I had dreamed, and when I told her I had dreamed of her mouth between my legs she made me repeat it three times, slower each time.

We never met in person. Not because of any clear decision, but because neither of us ever suggested it in earnest. 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 keep 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 my own. 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 at dawn, two months after I started seeing Lucía. I connected to the match almost by reflex, after a long time without logging in. She was there, as always, as if she had never been gone.

“You’re different,” she told me.

“I’m with 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 seemed small to me.

We never talked about the rules again. That night there was no command, no waiting, 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.

“I hope she takes 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 is eating my cunt and buries her tongue right in the place where Mara made me wait, and my body remembers that way of holding out I learned in those very long weeks without permission to finish. I think about the voice on the other end of the headset telling me “you will” 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, about my own cunt, about how far I can stretch a finish before I break, than anyone I ever fucked 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, putting her fingers in their heads with that strange calm. Maybe she found someone too and settled into a life with no headsets or rules. I hope so.

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