Author Notes
Similarly to what I did for Record Chaser, I want to share some of my thoughts on writing Late Satisfaction. I will begin with some general remarks and then go through the chapters one by one.
General Remarks
Late Satisfaction is the second long story I started writing after Record Chaser, but actually the first one I completed. When I started writing the story in late November 2024, I wanted to challenge myself to write something I hadn't written before, as is the case with most of my stories.
The most glaring new thing I tried with Late Satisfaction back then was writing a story in German. I had never done that before. If you're reading this, you most likely read the translation I started working on roughly one year later. But the original version, Späte Genugtuung, was written in German. Admittedly, writing in my native tongue might not seem like a huge challenge, but at the time it was something new for me.
The language I chose to write the story in wasn't the only new thing I tried, though. I wrote a bunch of short and medium length stories (An Unfortunate Misstep, Men at War, Venus' Touch, Self-Defence) after I took a break from Record Chaser after chapter 5. Only then did I return to the long story format. And Late Satisfaction is in many ways designed to be the antithesis of Record Chaser. Where Record Chaser tells the story of a delicate girl getting kidnapped and raped by a physically much stronger serial rapist, Late Satisfaction features a tall, physically strong, and experienced martial artist as the victim, who freezes because she's confronted with institutional power and feels dependent on her rapist. The rapist is also the opposite, an up to this point innocent man, a 47 year old, respectable math professor who has never sexually harrassed a woman in his whole life.
What I wanted to explore in Late Satisfaction was a MeToo like scenario: Director and actress, photographer and model, or in this case, professor and student. The basic setup is the same in either of these scenarios. An older man in a position of power meets a younger woman who depends on his help. I wanted to write a rape scene that focuses on the psychology of that situation. And to really underline that, I designed Eleanor to be physically superior to her rapist. She could break him in half at any moment, but she doesn't do it because she fears the social and institutional consequences and because she is caught completely off guard by the sudden assault.
I also decided to connect the events of Late Satisfaction to Record Chaser. Claire makes a brief reappearance in the story, and the guy she met at the Infinite Pint, Eugene, turns out to be Eleanor's roommate. What was initially nothing more than an easteregg for readers familiar with Record Chaser turned out to have much larger consequences long term. I made that decision on a whim, and now I'm writing a sequel that combines the cast of Record Chaser and Late Satisfaction.
Chapter 1
The most interesting aspect to reflect on regarding chapter 1 is the order of the two parts. I decided to start with Anthony's pov, and not with Eleanor's. But the way these two parts are written, you could just swap them and nothing much would change. So why start with Anthony?
I think that starting with Anthony adds a sense of dread when you read Eleanor's part next. She genuinely likes her professor, but you as the reader already know that things are more complicated. If you read chapter 1 part 2 just on its own terms without prior knowledge about Anthony's obsession, the part can feel like very low stakes slice of life. By putting Anthony's pov first, the reader knows more than Eleanor and the dramatic irony adds tension to the seemingly harmless dressing scene and the following roommate banter.
I also like the contrast between Anthony's obsessive thoughts in part 1 and when you get to see Eleanor for real she turns out to be... just a girl. She doesn't even have any deeper thoughts regarding Anthony beyond "Nice math professor, explains stuff well!
"
Fun fact: The name Anthony Robertson originates from Venus' Touch chapter 2 where Ryan reveals to Amelia that he expected a man named Anthony Robertson to be his customer instead of her. Turns out, Anthony canceled his appointment at Venus' Touch. Again, this was just me having fun creating connections between stories. But now that I think about... I most definitely need to include a chapter in Divergent Limit where Claire, Eleanor, and Emily go to Venus' Touch together.
Chapter 2
The end of chapter 2 is how far I had planned the story when I started writing. I think if you reread chapter 1, you can easily see how was I seeding the reveal of the connection between Eleanor's mother Victoria and Robertson.
I still like how the reveal plays out in part 1. Showing Robertson actually have a change of heart only to destabilize him immediately after by the Victory reveal is deeply satisfying for me.
But the heart of the chapter 2 is of course the rape itself depicted in part 2. Here comes everything together that I had planned. Now I needed to show why Eleanor doesn't resist and what goes through her head while she just endures what Robertson is doing to her. The entire rape scene is essentially structured around her psychological state. She starts with shock and disbelief, transitions into fear, experiences self-doubt and a loss of dignity as the actual rape begins, dissociates, and finally slips into internalized victim blaming as she imagines the voice of her mother.
I think having the office itself slowly but surely become ever more chaotic gives the scene a certain kinetic energy that it would otherwise have lacked. There is also the obvious symbolism of the loss of control and the facade crumbling.
The one thing I'm still sceptical off to this day is the sequence in the chapter where I try to show the acceleration of the rape orthographically by shortening the moaned "Ahh"s and "Mhhm"s by removing one h and . at a time. That was again me trying something new. When I translated the story, I actually considered rewriting that passage into more conventional prose, but ultimately decided against it. Does that sequences work? I can't really tell. But changing it seemed to be too much of a deviation from the original. And if some people don't like it, then it doesn't seem to be so bad that it stops them from reading and enjoying the chapter. Given that at this point 23 people voted that they found the office rape scene hot and another 8 voted they found it hot and depressing at the same time, it doesn't seem to be a deal breaker. Btw, if you are one of the people voting "Both", please leave a comment. You are the person I'm writing this kind of story for, someone who revels like me in the hotness and the sadness of the scene at the same time.
I think what still works best in the entire chapter is the imagined voice of the mother. It adds a sense of brutality to the scene that completes the violation.
Chapter 3
After chapter 2, I had to reorient myself. Whenever you write a rape fantasy story that doesn't just stop with the first rape, the question naturally follows: What now? That first rape is necessarily a highly intense, highly emotional, and very traumatic moment. Many authors make, in my view, the mistake of just chaining more and more rape scenes together, not understanding that the subsequent rapes have a hard time matching the sheer intensity of that initial violation. Even if you change the logistics of the subsequent rape scenes, like a change in position, number of people involved, switching from vaginal to anal sex, etc. - you are ultimately not adding meaning to what the initial rape already portrayed. A good rape fantasy story delivers not only a different kink for the next scene, but a different emotional experience, a change in meaning. And that's much harder to do.
As I started writing chapter 3, I saw two potential paths for the story:
1) Anthony and Eleanor engage in a longer abusive relationship that sees Eleanor getting raped repeatedly and growing numb to the assaults.
2) The second assault is the last one as Eleanor resists this time.
As you know if you read the story, I ended up choosing option 2. I thought long about a way to make option 1 work somehow, but I couldn't find a way to do so. After chapter 3 part 2, Eleanor had reached her low point already. She was depressed and had just ruined her friendship with Eugene. What change could, let's say, two more months of repeated assaults actually make now? She'd be in a depressed state throughout while I'd have to write her friends and family as oblivious or indifferent to her obvious suffering. The story would have become monotonous with Eleanor being depressed and Anthony revelling in his power fantasy. That would have been boring.
What tempted me the most about option 1, though, was the idea to write a chapter where Eleanor spends a whole weekend at Anthony's house while his wife Marla is out of town. No time pressure, no risk of being caught, just an agonizingly long weekend for Eleanor. I even thought about leaning into the forced orgasm trope for that chapter that I usually dislike in noncon stories because most stories don't earn it. But here I thought about Anthony taking an entire weekend to slowly get Eleanor to that point as the ultimate humiliation.
But again, I found no way to make scenario 1 compelling as it inevitability would just end up becoming boring or devolve into a kink parade instead of a serious story.
So after I finished writing chapter 3, I decided on the course of events for the story as you know them and planned the story through to the end.
Regarding chapter 3 itself, I really enjoyed exploring Marla more as a character in part 1. Part 1 also shows that Anthony's obsession is not gone with raping Eleanor once, but that it has only been fed to grow even stronger.
Part 2 is the more important half of the chapter, though. At the time, it was the most ambitious thing I had ever written and I didn't know whether I could pull it off. I wanted to show a victim of sexual abuse crossing somebody else's boundary and have the reader understand why she does it. And I wanted to portray a man here as the victim of a woman. Both are difficult because, first, the common perception of victims is them being morally pure, sad, and inactive after trauma. Second, sexual abuse against men is still often downplayed or even played for laughs. So I needed to write this chapter in a way that the reader understands why Eleanor does what she does and that they even perceive what she does as a boundary violation.
The psychological mechanism behind Eleanor's behavior was this: Eleanor was raped, but can't admit to herself that she was raped. Why? Because freezing when a physically weaker man assaults her is not compatible with her identity as a capable fighter who knows how to defend herself. So she reinterprets the events into a trade: sex for help. She doesn't like this either of course, but in this made up story she at least made a choice. And it explains perfectly why she didn't enjoy the sex. Why would she? Pleasure was never the goal in the trade she made up in her mind.
That is her initial belief at the beginning of the chapter. This belief also explains why she doesn't tell her father or Eugene what happened. Telling your father you were raped is difficult, but you would expect him to support you. Telling your father you had sex for money, a job, a scholarship, whatever, and now feel bad about it? Good luck trying that. So as long as Eleanor believes her own made up story, telling somebody else what happened is incredibly difficult.
When she finally talks to Eugene, she experiences his careful touch as soothing, healing even. She wants him to overwrite the bad memories with his better touch. Of course, if Eugene had agreed to that, it most likely would have gone catastrophically wrong. But in the moment, this is what she feels.
She tries to sleep with Eugene not because she's horny, but because she wants him to touch her everywhere AND to reinforce her new identity. If she's someone who trades sex for what she wants, then why not with Eugene? The whole thing collapses when Eugene desn't want any of that. The more Eugene tries to slow things down, the more does Eleanor try to reinforce her new identity until she gropes him and crosses his boundary.
When Eugene finally tells her that he doesn't recognize her, he accidentally destroys her new made up identity and the truth of what happened begins to dawn on her.
That was the idea I had for the chapter and I had never before tried to portray something so psychologically ambitious and intricate as this. It took me a long time to write this. I was stuck for weeks on that chapter. But I think that in the end the chapter turned out very well. To this day, I consider chapter 3 part 2 to be some of my best writing. And I think it is a bit overlooked in our community because the chapter features no explicit sex scene. But writing that chapter successfully was what changed my writing for the better long term. Without this chapter, Record Chaser chapter 6 and all the later chapters would probably have looked drastically different.
I also invented Eugene's own history of sexual abuse for this chapter which ultimately became important for the final chapter of Late Satisfaction and even more so for the sequel Divergent Limit that I'm currently writing.
Chapter 4
After chapter 3, I knew the trajectory of the story to the very end. Chapter 4 part 1 was mostly setup for the climax of the story in part 2. But I also started to plant the seeds for Robertson's demise, the most obvious of course being the email he sends Eleanor. But there is also the beginning suspicion of Ms. Green.
Part 2 is of course more important. I hadn't planned the rape in the elevator from the start, but I had luckily seeded an elevator fantasy in chapter 1 already. In hindsight, this might appear more planned than it actually was.
I love framing devices that give a scene structure. And the elevator ride was just perfect for that. I committed myself to the idea that the pov would switch back and forth between Eleanor and Robertson with each floor. If you add to this pov swiitching that the scene ends with Eleanor resisting and walking out of the elevator triumphantly on the final floor, a lot of the scene writes itself from those structural constraints.
The scene ends on the 13th floor and that end needs to be told from Eleanor's pov. That immediately pins down which pov you're following in which floor.
For Eleanor to be triumphant on floor 13, she needs to strike down Robertson on her previous pov floor, i.e. on floor 11. So if the climactic punch happens on floor 11, floor 12 naturally has to show Robertson's collapse from his pov. But if the punch happens on floor 11, then the trigger for that punch needs to occur on floor 10 in Robertson's pov. And what better way to trigger that punch than to have him indulge in maximum hubris and calling Eleanor by her mother's name?
So the trigger for the punch finally let's the two strands in the story regarding Eleanor's mother collide. The reader already knows about Robertson's connection to Victoria, but Eleanor doesn't up to that point.
Now, for Eleanor's sudden resistance on floor 11 to not feel too abrupt, it needs to be seeded before that. The Victoria-trigger can not flip the scene on its head, it works better if it makes an already brewing anger boil over. So floor 9 needs to show her getting angry already.
You can see how the chosen structure pins down a lot of beats in the scene almost immediately. You can make similar arguments for the first and second floor and pin down what has to happen there. All that's left to do is to connect the beginning and end and fill out floors 3 to 8. For that purpose, I added the mirror, the coffee, and then torn panties as props for the scene that the narrative could play with while it filled the gap.
Psychologically, Eleanor is on a journey from fear, to resignation, to despair, to anger, to violent catharsis, to ultimately calm, self-assured composure. Robertson on the other hand goes from anxiety, to control, to delusion, to hubris, to full collapse.
I think the structure of the scene works tremendously well and makes it stand out among rape fantasy scenes. I guess some will dislike a triumphant victim, but the natural progression of the story demands it. And I will always prioritize storytelling over catering to a specific kink.
In the end, the scene delivers a fundamentally different experience from the first rape in the office. That is why I'm happy with it.
Fun fact: Eleanor's line “I’d prefer it if you continued to address me as Ms. Price.” was a spontaneous addition to the scene and not planned. I had planned the earlier “Eleanor, please. For the assistants in the department, I’m Anthony." moment, but the callback at the end I only considered while writing the scene.
Chapter 5
Part 1 is the end of Anthony's pov. I wanted him to show some regret, but please note how Eleanor's suffering is still secondary in his mind. His regret concerns mostly the consequences for himself and his wife. I thought this was a nice way to preserve his complexity as a person to the end. He never becomes a cackling villain, but he also doesn't get some quick redemption because he feels a little bad because of what he did. We only see the acknowledgment of consequences and a sense of responsibility returning.
Fun fact: Throughout chapter 5 part 1, Anthony's narration refers to Eleanor only as Ms. Price or as Eleanor Price, never just as Eleanor. He definitely took her final words to heart.
Some might wonder why I didn't show the conversation Robertson was about to have with his wife. The reason is simple. Nothing new or unexpected would have happened. Robertson confesses, Marla is shocked, their marriage is ruined. We could walk through that process, but the exact thing everybody suspects to happen would happen. Put differently, Robertson's character arc is over. There are no unanswered questions left, only the predictable consequences. So there is no point in showing that scene.
Chapter 5 part 2 was scary to write. Finally, Victoria would stop existing only in Eleanor's and Robertson's memory and actually appear in a chapter. I did not know if I could portray her accurately. In both Eleanor's and Robertson's narration, Victoria feels like a force of nature, like she's the greek half-goddess of ambition, an almost mythological figure. How do you write someone like that without it feeling underwhelming?
But I ended up worrying about nothing. Writing Victoria was extremely fun. The way she quickly judges Anthony as smart but unremarkable I enjoyed a lot, especially after I had to spend so much time in Anthony's more and more delusional and megalomanical mind. I think she has such a distinct voice. If I had to name a character that I'd consider to be similar to her, it would be Claire Underwood from House of Cards.
Writing Eleanor's emotional outburst was also extremely cathartic for me as a writer. After I put Eleanor through so much abuse and suffering, it felt good to give the girl some wins.
And finally, the story ends with Eleanor and Eugene in the park. If I went through every detail of that chapter, it would take me forever, so I won't. But here a few things that were important to me.
I knew from the start that Eleanor's apology would have to come first. I wanted the scene under no circumstances to come across as "Eugene forgives her because a bad thing happened to her. That makes what she did less bad." Eleanor understands that she can't use her own trauma to pressure Eugene into forgiving her. So Eleanor takes full accountability for her actions and only shares what happened after Eugene forgave her.
Then I like a lot how the basketball functions throughout the forgiveness part of the scene. Similar to the office becoming more and more chaotic in chapter 2 part 2, it gives the scene kinetic energy and prevents the scene from just being two people standing and talking. If there is anything I've learned as a writer when it comes to writing longer conversations, it's to have something else happen in parallel that keeps the scene dynamic. The basketball being dribbled, held, thrown, passed, missing the hoop, and finally landing in it serves exactly that purpose.
The story doesn't end on going to the police or lawyers or Robertson ending up in peison because that would be boring. The story ends with Eleanoer taking back control over her own life and finally asking the people she loves for help. In the beginning, she had just ruptured the relationship with her mother and kept that a secret from her father. She went to a stranger instead of friends or family to ask for help. In the final chapter, she first asks her father to help with her mother, then confronts her mother, and finally asks Eugene for his support, admitting that she can't do this alone. And of course, Eugene being the best boy, promises to help. To me, that ending fits thematically.
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I think this pretty much covers my thoughts on the story and why I wrote it the way I did. I hope you found some of that interesting. The only thing I could add now would be commentary on the translation process, but that will be its own separate post.
