She’d bought the little white flower panties on his instructions; he liked to yank them to one side when he spanked her, or stuff them in her mouth. She kept them after they broke up, because hey, no point in throwing away perfectly functional underwear.

The first time she masturbated in them she didn’t even get off: she’d been frustrated and moody a lot since the breakup anyway, and sometimes she just got tired, shut the laptop and went to sleep. But the next morning, seeing them in the laundry bin, she couldn’t stop thinking about the way they’d felt. Different than the regular, smoother cotton-nylon she was used to. They rubbed. They clung.

Too impatient to wait for a load of laundry, she went out and bought another pair. The texture was even more pronounced on those, fresh out of the package with a little starch still in the fabric. She didn’t even bother pulling up her porn tumblr. She just pulled them on and squeezed her legs together.

Breathless. She was her younger self again, the way she never had been with him, no matter how many times she called him Daddy or got turned over his knee. Instinctively, she fumbled for a pillow and shoved it up against herself the way she had done before she learned to use her hands: she needed them to stifle herself, anyway, with the sounds that wanted to squeak out of her throat at that feeling.

She never came, pillowfucking, pantyfucking, but it wasn’t even about that. She got a dozen more pairs and soaked them through every day, drifting along in a haze of arousal and squirmy need and that addictive thread of shame. Once, she bought a pair of someone else’s panties online, feeling like a perverted basement-dweller and blushing to the roots of her hair the whole time. When they finally arrived, she wadded them against her face and humped her own brains out all night.

She’d figured out what she had once known and forgotten: she didn’t need to hand-feed her pussy. She didn’t need to let it have a moment of release. And if she kept it stoked, kept it hungry, kept it nestled in flower-fresh clean white fabric, all she had to do was come along for the ride.