Full Immersion - part 2 (Patreon)

The tile is cold under my feet.

I don't remember deciding to stand. I don't remember pulling Delia out of the water with me. But here we are, both of us dripping onto the stone floor, her body pressed against my side, her hip against my hip. The contact sends a ripple through me I can't ignore. She's shorter than this body, her dark hair plastered in wet curls against her cheeks, her lips parted, her eyes on my face. Waiting. The way the programming taught her to wait.

Her hand moves.

Down from my waist, over my hip, across the flat of my belly, and then lower. Her fingers find the cleft between my legs with the ease of someone who's done this a hundred times. I feel her middle finger press against me - against the vulva, against the place where my dick should be but isn't, where instead there's this soft wet heat and a sudden sharp jolt of pleasure that shoots up through my stomach and makes my back arch before I can stop it.

I make a sound. I hear it come out of my mouth. It's not a protest.

"Domina," Delia breathes. Her finger moves, small circles. "You're trembling."

I am. My thighs shake and my breath keeps catching and the pleasure builds in a way that's terrifying because it's not mine and also it is. I can feel myself getting wetter under her hand. The slickness means the body is ready for something I don't want it to be ready for.

Across the bathhouse, Marcus is undressing.

I see it from the corner of my eye. His hands working the leather straps, the harness falling, the tunic underneath, the belt. Each piece hits the tile with a wet slap. He's still dusty from the track, still breathing hard from the race. His body is sculpted in a way that says someone spent a long time in a design suite getting every muscle right. They probably did.

Under the tunic he's not wearing anything. His erection is prominent and the programming in my head notes this with a pulse of something my brain translates as pride. He's hard for Livia. The champion won his race and now he's here for the other prize.

That's another guest inside that body. Someone who woke up in the charioteer the same way I woke up in Livia. Someone who's probably having the time of his life, playing out the fantasy he paid for, not knowing the woman he's about to fuck is a man who checked the wrong box on his intake form. Or maybe he does know. Maybe the resort programmed his body too and he's just running on tracks he can't see. I don't know which is worse.

Delia's finger keeps moving and I can feel myself getting close to something I don't want to reach. The orgasm is coiling at the base of my spine. Another thirty seconds of this and the body will do what it's designed to do and I'll have to feel it happen from the inside of a body that isn't mine.

No.

I grab Delia by the shoulders and I push.

My arms are weaker than I expect. The muscle memory's all wrong for a smaller frame and she stumbles more than I meant her to. But she stumbles in the right direction. Toward Marcus. Toward the charioteer who's walking toward us with his hand already reaching.

Delia's fingers leave my vulva and the loss of contact is a sharp thing. My hips keep moving for a second after she's gone, pushing into empty air, and I hate how much I want her hand back.

"There." My voice is wrecked, breathy, not my real voice at all. "Take her."

My words. At least partly. I can feel the programming trying to twist them, trying to turn take her into take us both, and for a half-second I'm not sure which version is going to win. My jaw locks. Something twitches in my cheek.

"Take her," I force through my teeth. Just those two words. Just what I meant.

I feel it happening - the muscles around my mouth, around my eyes, rearranging themselves into something I didn't authorize. My lips curve. My eyelids go heavy. My tongue wets my lower lip, slow and deliberate. The expression settles onto my features and I can't take it off. It's like trying to frown during a wedding photo. The muscles just won't.

Erotic pleasure. That's what the programming wants on Livia's face. And my face is giving it to them because the programming has found the shortest route from intention to expression and I haven't figured out how to block it yet.

Delia stumbles again, catching herself on the edge of the bath. She looks back at me. Confused. This isn't in the script. Livia doesn't push the handmaiden at the charioteer. Livia keeps the charioteer for herself and lets Delia watch from the shadows if she lets her watch at all.

"Domina?"

Marcus doesn't seem to care about the script. He's still coming toward us, still hard, still looking at the two nude women in front of him like he hasn't decided which one he wants first. His hand closes around Delia's wrist and she makes a small sound - surprise or anticipation, I can't tell. I can see the moment she decides to go with it. The programming is in her too. She was literally built to be flexible.

I take a step back. Then another. The tile is cold and wet under my feet and my legs are still shaking from what Delia was doing to me but I'm moving under my own power now. Not far. Just far enough to put some distance between me and what's about to happen.

Marcus pulls Delia against him. One arm around her waist, his hand splayed across the small of her back. She has to tilt her head back to look up at him, she's that much shorter. Her hands come up to rest on his chest, fingers tracing the lines of his pectorals the way Livia's fingers were supposed to.

The programming in my head makes a sound like pressure. An insistence that something is deeply wrong and needs correcting. I'm supposed to be where Delia is. I'm supposed to be the one pressed against the charioteer's chest, tilting my head back, spreading my legs. Every second I stand here watching instead of participating, the pressure gets heavier.

My feet want to move. My hips want to sway. My lips want to part and my voice wants to say something breathy and my body wants to want it, that's the part that scares me most. The programming doesn't just make me do things. It makes doing them feel like my idea.

I lock my knees. I dig my fingernails into my palms. The pain is small and real and I focus on it.

Delia's mouth is on Marcus's chest now. She kisses her way down his sternum, her hands working his hips, and he's got his head thrown back and his eyes closed. He's not even looking at me anymore. His body's programming has accepted the substitution, rerouted the scene to accommodate the NPC who's doing what the noblewoman was supposed to do.

The pressure in my head eases. Not much. But enough that I can breathe.

I keep backing up until my shoulders hit the wall. The tile is cool against my skin, rough along the edges where the grout has worn down. I press into it, grounding myself in the texture, the temperature, anything that isn't Delia sinking to her knees in front of the charioteer.

My face is still doing the expression. I can feel it - the smile, the half-lidded eyes, the parted lips. I try to make it stop and my cheeks twitch but the expression holds. My nipples are still hard. The wetness between my legs hasn't gone anywhere. Livia's body is ready for a scene that I've managed, barely, to keep it out of.

Delia takes Marcus in her mouth. He groans, one hand fisting in her wet hair, and the sound bounces off the tile walls. My body responds to it the way Livia's is supposed to. A flutter low in my belly. A fresh pulse of heat.

I hate it. I hate how ready this body is for something I don't want. I hate that I can feel myself getting wetter while I watch a stranger get a blowjob from a woman I've known for fifteen minutes and also my entire life, depending on which set of memories I trust.

But I'm still here. Still thinking my own thoughts. The programming hasn't managed to shove me into the scene yet, and the longer I stand against this wall the more I feel like I'm learning the shape of the fight. It's not a wall in my head, the programming. It's a current. If I relax, it carries me. If I push straight against it, I get exhausted. But if I lean sideways - if I find an angle that isn't resistance but isn't surrender either - I can stay where I am.

Like right now. The programming wanted me on my knees. I couldn't do that. But I also couldn't stop my face from looking like it wanted to be there. So I gave it the face and kept my body out of it. Not a good compromise, but the only one I could make work.

Marcus opens his eyes. He's looking at me over Delia's head, watching me watch him. His expression is pure victory. He thinks I want him. He thinks I'm standing here with my back to the wall and my lips parted and my nipples tight because I'm so turned on I can't move.

And part of me does want him. The Livia part, the part that was written into this body's nerves before I got here. I can feel her desire like a second heartbeat, insistent and warm and completely artificial.

But I know it's artificial. That's the difference between me and him. He probably thinks everything he's feeling is real - the lust, the power, the adrenaline from the race. He doesn't know there's a script running underneath it all, nudging him toward the scene's natural endpoint. I know. I can feel the seams.

Delia makes a small muffled sound, her head moving in a rhythm my body recognizes. I know what Marcus tastes like even though I've never tasted him. I know the exact groan he makes when he's close. I know Delia will swallow because the script calls for it, because the programmers decided that's what the handmaiden does at this point in the scenario.

I turn my head away. It takes effort. More than it should. But I do it.

I stare at the wall instead. At the grout lines, the crack in one tile that runs from the floor to about shoulder-height. I count my breaths. Behind me, Marcus makes a sound that the programming tells me means he's close. Delia makes a sound that the programming tells me means she's ready for it. I didn't ask for either piece of information.

My face is still smiling. Still flushed with the pleasure Livia is supposed to be feeling. I can feel it sitting there, this mask of arousal I didn't put on and can't take off.

But I'm still me. Still in here. Still holding my own name somewhere behind my teeth where the programming can't quite reach it. And I'm not on my knees. And I'm not the one with a stranger's hands in my hair.

That's something. For now, that's enough.