under the lab coat

The icy Berlin Monday morning air hit my face as I let the heavy front door of the Steglitz apartment building click shut behind me. Drizzle glistened on the asphalt of Schloßstraße while I took the stairs down to the U-Bahn. Beneath the thick wool coat and the snug turtleneck, every movement felt like a silent dialogue with my own flesh: the lock at my throat rested cool against my jugular notch, the surgical steel cage pressed into my thighs with every stride, and the fresh fineline tattoo (∇+ ♀) on my pelvic bone pulled taut beneath the waistband of my trousers.

On the U9 toward Charité Campus Mitte, I leaned my forehead against the vibrating windowpane. With the rhythmic rattling of the train, the images of the past forty-eight hours washed over me.

I saw myself once again alone in Nadja's drawing room. The door had barely clicked shut, the click of the women's heels fading down the stairwell, when the heavy silence of the unfamiliar apartment swallowed me whole. Naked, my back on fire from the welts of the crop, my nipples still stinging and damp from Saskia's touch. I hadn't waited. On trembling knees, I had moved through the rooms, gathering the empty wine glasses from the glass table, carrying away the bowls of olive pits, smoothing the cushions across the velvet sofas. With every bend, with every reach to tilt the windows, the steel between my legs served as a dull reminder of my defenselessness. I had scrubbed the parquet floor on my knees, erasing the traces of their footwear—exactly as Loona had demanded. Hours later, when I waited exhausted in our Steglitz apartment for the women to return, there had been only this leaden, absolute surrender.

Then came Sunday. Loona had entered my room late in the morning, her hair still disheveled from the club, but carrying that clear, detached gaze that instantly made me lower my head. She hadn't punished me. Instead, she had sat on the edge of my bed, taken my hand, and looked at me—with a rare, almost tender pride that cut deeper than any chastisement.

"You held yourself impeccably, John," she had said softly, brushing her fingertips across my cheek. "Nadja was impressed. Elena and the others couldn't believe how flawlessly you functioned. You did us proud."

She had stood me before the mirror, carefully massaging the healing ointment into the red lines across my back and inspecting the black seal on my hip, all while calmly explaining that this was merely the beginning. That praise, paired with the unyielding grip of her hand around the base ring, had ignited a warmth in me that stayed with me for the rest of the day.

Even on Sunday evening, when I had gamed for hours with Timo over Discord. Timo was sitting hundreds of kilometers away in Leipzig before his monitor, shouting into his headset, cursing at lag in Counter-Strike, and teasing me about mundane university matters: "Dude, John, are you falling asleep over there? Your reactions are like a sleeping pill today!"

Timo could never have guessed that at that moment, I was sitting bolt upright on a cushion, the zipper of my oversized hoodie pulled all the way to my chin to conceal the hardware, while the welts on my back throbbed against the chair's backrest. While Timo went on about grades and parties, Loona had stepped silently into the room, casually set down a glass of water for me, and briefly rested her hand on the back of my neck—directly over the lock. She had simply squeezed, gently. For a millisecond, in absolute silence, while Timo's voice blared through my headphones. It had been total degradation and complete shelter all at once: right in the middle of my ordinary world, I was entirely her property.

"Friedrichstraße station. Transfer to S-Bahn lines," the mechanical voice of the announcement tore me from my thoughts.

I blinked and drew myself upright. The doors hissed open. Tucking my coat collar higher to ensure the neckline of the turtleneck remained fully covered, I grabbed my shoulder bag and stepped out into the grey Berlin morning. A few minutes later, I passed the barriers of the Charité grounds. Ahead of me, the clinical concrete towers rose into the sky. The respectable facade had to hold—yet beneath the white coat I was about to put on, the reality of every single touch from the weekend pulsed against my skin.

After lectures and ward rounds, the corridors of the old ward high-rise gradually emptied out. The bitter smell of vending-machine coffee and disinfectant foam hung heavy in the air while November dusk settled over the Spree outside.

We hadn't taken our seats in the lecture hall as we usually did. For the preparation of the upcoming cardiovascular practical, {reader:Mira} had reserved one of the glass-walled seminar rooms on the fifth floor of the outpatient clinic.

When I slid the glass door open, she was already seated at the head of the meeting table. She had pushed the sleeves of her black fine-knit sweater up to her elbows, her legs extended casually to the side. Her boots—that pair made of supple, dark brown smooth leather with the distinctive buckle accents at the ankles—held a muted sheen under the cool ceiling lights. Beside her open laptop, a thermal mug of black tea was steaming.

"Punctual to the minute," she noted without looking up, her fingers entering a series of lab values into an Excel spreadsheet. "Grab the second stethoscope binaural. We're going through valvular heart diseases. Auscultation, valve defects, pressure gradients."

I nodded silently, slipped out of my lab coat, and draped it neatly over the back of the adjacent chair. Beneath it, I was wearing the dark grey long-sleeve with the snug crew neck. The collar closed high enough to seamlessly conceal the metal band and the small padlock at my jugular notch—yet the fabric hugged my skin tightly.

When I took my seat, it didn't come with the jarring pain of the previous week. The fineline tattoo on my flank no longer burned; the lines of $\nabla$ and ♀ were completely closed, dry, and settled deep black into the tissue. Instead, it was the Neukölln surgical steel driving like a solid wedge between my thighs with every lowering of my pelvis, along with the dull sting across my back: the welts from the weekend's chastisement had been tended to with Loona's balm, yet the leather's friction had left deep, heated trails. If I leaned even two centimeters against the hard plastic backrest of the office chair, the memory of the crop in Nadja's drawing room shot like lightning through my nerves.

I remained sitting bolt upright. No contact with the backrest. Knees pressed tightly parallel, forearms resting flat against the tabletop.

{reader:Mira} pushed the laptop aside and looked at me. Not with a passing glance, but with that quiet, analytical sharpness she normally reserved for ambiguous ECG strips.

"Aortic valve stenosis," she began abruptly, locking her gaze onto mine. "Crescendo-decrescendo systolic murmur, radiation to the carotids. Where do you auscultate it best?"

"Second intercostal space, right parasternal line," I answered immediately, glad for the firm clinical footing.

"And the peripheral pulse characteristic?"

"Pulsus parvus et tardus. Diminished amplitude, delayed upstroke."

"Good." {reader:Mira} gave a barely perceptible nod, yet her eyes slowly wandered down from my face. She studied my neck, where the cervical muscles stood out taut, let her gaze sweep across my rigid shoulder line, and finally settled on my hands, which lay flat and motionless on the table.

She remained silent for several seconds. The only sound in the room was the low hum of the air conditioning.

"You do realize, John, that you've been sitting there for twenty minutes like a department store mannequin?" she said suddenly. Her voice was no longer in seminar mode. It was quiet, dry, and laden with an unsettling ease.

I forced a smile, which froze on my lips immediately. "I'm just focusing. We have a lot of material to cover."

"Focus looks different," she countered smoothly, resting her elbows on the table and interlacing her fingers beneath her chin. "When you're focusing, you tap your foot or drum your pen. Right now, your breathing is so shallow it's as if every lift of your ribcage takes physical effort. And your hip seems to have healed up nicely—you certainly aren't wobbling when you walk the way you were last Monday."

"Told you so. The muscle settled down."

"Right." {reader:Mira} arched an eyebrow. Then she reached for her textbook, flipped to a page, and slid it across the tabletop toward me. "Here. The pressure-volume loops in mitral regurgitation. Point out the phase of isovolumetric contraction for me."

The diagram lay dead center on the table. To reach it, I had to lean forward.

Swallowing dryly, I braced my left hand on the edge of the table and shifted my torso forward. With that movement, the fabric of the shirt pulled taut across my shoulder blades. The sensitized skin screamed silently as the textile scraped across the fine crusts of the strikes. At the same time, the rigid base ring of the cage ground into the base of my scrotum. Holding my breath, I pulled the cap from my pen and tapped the diagram.

"Here. Pressure increase with a closed valvular apparatus."

I intended to pull back immediately into my upright rigidity, but {reader:Mira} reacted faster.

She reached her hand out. But she didn't reach for the book.

Her slender fingers settled casually onto my right forearm—cool, precise, right over the radial pulse. At the same time, she leaned forward slightly. The movement brought her so close that I caught the subtle, earthy leather of her footwear, mingled with the crisp scent of her perfume.

Her fingers slid slowly up from my wrist, over my forearm, up toward my shoulder. It wasn't a rough touch, but the pressure was firm, searching, unrelenting. When her hand reached the crest of my shoulder and applied gentle pressure, my entire body flinched. A barely audible hiss slipped past my teeth.

{reader:Mira} didn't pull her hand back. Instead, she kept it there, feeling the rock-hard bundle of muscle beneath, looking directly into my pupils, which had dilated on reflex.

"Fascinating," she whispered, a trace of amusement coloring her low voice. "Last week the flank. Today the back. You're full of blind spots, colleague. Wherever one touches you, you seem to catch fire."

My heart hammered against my ribs, pounding directly against the cold metal at my throat. "Mira, stop… I just pushed myself too hard working out."

"Working out." She repeated the words, yet this time without mockery, but with something far more dangerous: the detached curiosity of a woman who understood completely that the man before her wasn't injured, but marked.

She let her hand drop, but rather than stepping back, she slowly extended her boot forward beneath the table. The firm, smooth toe of the leather met my right shin—not by accident, but with a calm, sustained pressure that forced me to press my legs even closer together, causing the steel cage to bite in all the more mercilessly.

"You know, John," she said softly, her gaze locked unblinkingly onto mine, "in the anatomy dissection lab, I learned that the body forgets nothing. It always reveals exactly who or what has left an impression upon it. One simply has to know where to look."

She drew her foot back by two centimeters, just enough to break contact, and tapped her index finger against the textbook.

"Back to the material. Next curve: aortic regurgitation. And feel free to move a little, doctor. Otherwise you look like you're about to pass out."

With trembling fingers, I reached for my pen, the chill of the metal between my thighs razor-sharp in its presence, while the heat of embarrassment rose all the way to my hairline. Mira hadn't seen anything—and yet in that moment, she knew far more than I could afford.

The remaining days leading up to the weekend dragged by in a sharp, almost surreal state of limbo. At the Charité, I strained to maintain the facade: I answered promptly in seminars, dutifully palpated liver margins and lymph nodes, and avoided {reader:Mira}'s eyes whenever possible. Yet every time the clear click of her boot heels echoed across the linoleum of the clinic corridors, my stomach clenched. She didn't press the matter further—and it was precisely that knowing, patient silence that kept my nerves drawn taut to the breaking point.

On Thursday evening, the reality of the Steglitz flat caught up with me once again.

"Strip. Down to the cage," Loona said, the moment the apartment door clicked shut behind me.

She was standing in the hallway, hands buried in the pockets of her wide trousers, taking me in with cool detachment. I obeyed silently. My lab coat had long been stowed away in the clinic locker; now the turtleneck and dark trousers dropped to the parquet floor as well. The cold draft washed over my bare skin immediately.

Loona stepped closer, caught my chin in one hand, and turned my head slightly to the side before commanding me with a simple gesture: "Turn around."

Her fingers glided across my shoulders and traced down my spine. The red welts of the crop from Nadja's salon had faded; where an open fire had burned on Monday, only pale pink, barely palpable shadows remained on the skin. She ran her thumb across my lower back, lower still, down to the area right above my buttocks.

"The back is clean again," she noted. Her hand moved forward, resting against my left hip, sweeping across the pelvic crest with firm pressure. The fineline tattoo—the inverted triangle with the integrated Venus symbol—had completely healed. No scabs, no more stinging; the fine lines stood out deep black, razor-sharp, and permanent against my bone, right beside the solid base ring of the surgical steel.

"Flawless," she murmured. Her fingertip circled the seal one last time before she gave my cheek a short, dry tap with the flat of her hand. "Tomorrow night is the night. We're going to KitKat."

My breath hitched for a fraction of a second. KitKat wasn't a private drawing room behind closed doors. It was an institution of Berlin nightlife—a crucible of the libertine scene, thumping basslines, leather, vinyl, and bare flesh.

"Come along," she commanded, leading the way into her bedroom.

Laid out across the wide bed was what she had chosen for me. There was no civilian cover left, no thick wool to hide the hardware from outside eyes.

"You're wearing this," she said, pointing with her index finger at the pieces.

It was a gossamer, form-fitting top made of the finest black mesh—almost entirely sheer, with leather piping along the seams. Paired with it were low-slung briefs of matte black leather, cut so exceedingly low at the waist that the fresh seal on my pelvic crest would remain completely exposed with every stride. The front was custom-tailored to close precisely around the struts of the cage; the lock, the cool metal, and the captive flesh would be visible to anyone casting even a casual glance. At my throat, the heavy band was to remain, augmented by a broader choker of black velvet, its front ring ready to receive a leash.

I stared at the garments, my heart hammering in my throat.

"You are not going there as a guest, John," Loona continued, her voice settling into that unyielding, almost melodic cadence that tolerated no contradiction. "You are accompanying Nadja and me. You remain one pace behind us. You speak to no one. You take our glasses, you hold our jackets, and when we stop, you stand quietly beside us. When someone looks at you, you lower your head. When someone touches the seal, you hold still."

She stepped so close I could feel her breath. Her hand reached unerringly for the cold steel between my legs, wrapped around the cylinder, and exerted a firm downward tug. The jolt lanced like an electric current through my loins.

"You are our property. And tomorrow night, everyone in the club will see exactly who you belong to. Understood?"

"Yes, Loona," I forced out hoarsely, while the cage throbbed with a dull ache in my flesh.

"Put the clothes on. I want to see how they fit."