“Stand here,” I tell her, indicating the center of the mat. “Hands at your sides. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.”
She obeys. The first exhale is too fast. The second finds a rhythm. I let my own breath match hers until I feel the subtle shift in the way her ribs move. I’m close enough now that if I reach out I can trace the same line down my own body and my hand will land at her hip.
I step around her into her peripheral vision. “I’m going to touch you,” I say. “One hand, right shoulder.” I put it there and feel the way heat collects under knit and skin. “Left shoulder.” I mirror it. “Find your feet,” I say. “Feel the mat under the bones at the base of your toes. Press down until your arches soften. Good.”
Her jaw works and relaxes. Her eyes flicker to mine, then away. The first contact in this room is never the first contact of a night; it’s a calibration. I map her without making it look like cartography. Wrist bones. Flexor tendons. The notch at the inside of her elbow where skin is thin. The cord of her neck where it meets her shoulder. The way her breath changes when my hand hovers at her lower back and doesn’t settle until she shifts her weight and makes a place for it.
“What I do here,” I say, “is listen.”
“To what?” Her voice is already cleaner at the edges.
“To the part of you that doesn’t lie,” I say. “Your pulse. The muscles that grip for a living. The places you guard. The ones you’ve already given me without knowing.”
She makes a sound that could be a protest. I give it room to be one. It isn’t. I step to the cabinet and take out the suede cuffs and the heavier blindfold. I lay them on the low leather ottoman at the edge of the mat and leave them there, visible.
“I’m not going to surprise you,” I tell her. “Nothing happens without a name.”
“I’m not afraid of surprises,” she whispers, and then the honesty she’s been practicing downstairs carries her further than she intended. “I’m afraid of what I’ll do when I like them.”
“That’s information,” I say. “We use it.”
I face her again. “Hands,” I say, and lift mine at my waist. She lifts hers and they’re steady. I take the right one and turn it palm up. Her lines are stained faintly with paint she didn’t scrub completely from this morning. I put my thumb over the space below her index finger where the nerve bundles through and press. Her eyelids shiver. “Perfect,” I say, as much to her body as to her mind. The left hand tells me a different story—more tension in the wrist extensors, less in the thumb. I press the flexors in her forearm until I feel the micro tremor release. When I let go, her fingers curl and uncurl once as if checking the range without asking me.
“Cuffs,” I say. “Loose. In front. It’s not about stopping you; it’s about giving your body permission to stop holding the rest of the world.” I hold them up where she can see. “Yes?”
She nods. “Yes.”
“Say it,” I tell her.
“Yes,” she says again, voice firmer. Consent is a muscle. You strengthen it by using it to lift your own weight.
I wrap the suede around her wrists, the edges smooth, and the buckle floating on the inside where the skin is thicker. I link them with a short length of leather. I don’t pull. I let her test the give. The sound she makes is not the sound from the feather; it’s lower.
“Blindfold,” I say.
She looks at it as if it were a horizon. Her breath lifts once. She holds my eyes longer than she did at any door downstairs and then she nods. “Yes.”
“Say it.”
“Yes,” she says. “Blue if it’s too much.”
“Blue,” I affirm. I step behind her and lift the blindfold. “I’m putting it on you now. It will block the light but not the dark.”
She huffs something like a laugh. “Is that a line?”
“It’s a fact,” I chuckle. I fit the blindfold, adjusting the strap until it sits on hair and not skin at the back of her head. I smooth the edge at her temples. The world moves for her. I watch the muscles around her eyes react, the way her lips part because mouths try to see when eyes can’t.
“Name where you are,” I say.
“In your… therapy suite,” she says, feeling the words. “On the mat. Barefoot. Hands in cuffs. Blindfold on.”
“Name your breath.”
“Fast,” she says. “But better.”
“Name who’s here,”
She hesitates. “Me,” she whispers. “You.”
