“Say it,” I prompt, because naming is a rope out of the well.
“Good,” she says. “It’s good.”
I run the feather over the backs of her knees. The sound she makes is obscene in its honesty. I feel it in my own throat and will my hands to stay patient. I bracket the back of each knee with my palms and press until her muscles stop trying to climb. Then I draw the feather up the length of her thigh, not touchingwhere the want is loudest, because I am building a structure here, not looting a store.
“More,” she says. “Lower,” and then she catches herself. “Please.”
“Yes,” I say. I reward the please with the thing and a fraction more, the feather ghosting under the edge of cotton, a single pass that detonates without mess. She pulls against her cuffs reflexively. The Oximeter chirps once. Ninety-nine. “Breathe,” I remind her, and she does, the exhale a sound that would make Caldwell’s staffer hang up the phone because she would not know what to do with a woman unafraid of her own noise.
I straighten and step around her, so she feels the warmth of me at her front again. I put one hand on her hip—full, claiming, not possessive but declarative—and with the other I lift the blindfold just enough to show her the mirror. “Look,” I say. The glass shows a woman tethered at wrist and ankle whose mouth is open and who is not ashamed. She startles at herself, then steadies. I lower the blindfold back into place and feel the way her breath moves under the shift. “That’s you,” I say. “That’s the body that survived. We don’t pretend it’s not the one we’re using to get you out.”
“Okay,” she says. There is a thread of tears in it; there is no collapse. “Okay.”
I take a clean cloth from the drawer and wipe my hands. I lift the bottle of oil again and warm a little more. I draw my slicked palms up from each knee to each hip, slow and even, pressure calibrated to melt and not to bruise. I pause at her lower abdomen, one hand flattening there, the other at the small of her back, and hold her between them like a promise.
“Last chance,” I say, because I owe her the door even when I know she won’t use it. “Before we begin the ritual in earnest. If you want to stop after sensation and before anything else, I’llunclip you and we’ll sit on the floor and drink water until your legs come back.”
She turns her head slightly under the blindfold, like she wants to look at me, like the old instinct to control everything by monitoring is a moth that has not learned the lamp will not feed it. “I don’t want to stop,” she says. “I want—” She swallows. The swallow is loud in the quiet. “I want you to… do your work.”
“My work,” I repeat, and the word fits. Not game. Not kink as a costume. Work.
“Yes,” she says. “Guide me.”
I close my eyes for a second. Not to hide from her, but to center the part of me that wants to take and make it kneel to the part of me that knows how to hold. Don’t break her, I think. Guide her. Build a room instead of a night.
When I open my eyes, the mirrors show us both: the man I am when I do this right, and the woman who will not let me be lazy. I lower my mouth until my breath warms the shell of her ear. “Then breathe,” I say. “And let go.”
I move behind her and plant my hands on her hips, thumbs forward, fingers wrapping the outer curve, holding her where gravity holds her too. The feather touches the back of her neck, a whisper, down along her spine, and the first layer of ritual begins.
Chapter 44 – Aurora
I hear the room before I feel it.
Soft air sighing against my skin, the faintest whirr from the vent, the patience of leather breathing under my bare feet. Somewhere a drawer slides—the quiet kind of mechanism that’s been oiled by hands that don’t tolerate startle. Metal touches something padded with a muted clink. The blindfold isn’t heavy, but it changes the world into temperature and pressure, and that feels like standing at the top of a stairwell I painted years ago, deciding whether to climb down into my own night.
I could say no. I catalogue that fact first. It sits at the center of me like a cool coin, reassuring against the hot drum of my pulse at my throat. I chose this. I can stop at any time. Cassian said it three different ways, and each one lodged in a different muscle—safe word, taps, voice. The cuffs at my wrists are soft, suede against skin, buckled loosely so that I can test the give and hear the small click without the ache of strain. The leather at my ankles is a presence more than a restraint, a suggestion to stay where I am rather than an order to be where he wants me.
“Name where you are,” his voice says, a little to my left, a little behind. He has a way of speaking that makes words behave. They arrive and I stand straighter because sound can be a hand when it knows what it’s doing.
“In your suite,” I answer. “On the mat. Barefoot.” I swallow. I can hear the wet sound of it through the blindfold. “Blindfolded.”
“Who’s here?” he asks.
“Me,” I say, then, “you.”
“Who decides?” The question threads under my ribs the way a palm does when it measures breath.
“I do.” My voice is steadier than I feel. The steadiness is a small, private victory; I tuck it away for later.
“Good.” I hear his fingers rub together once, as if he’s warming them, and then there’s just heat, a palm over my right shoulder. His hand is big enough to span from the deltoid down into the slope of the muscle that always hurts when I hunch at the easel for too long. He doesn’t dig. He settles, and my body adjusts around the contact like clay taking the shape of a steady weight. He mirrors it on the other shoulder, heat answering heat until I’m held from above without being held down.
“Find your feet,” he says. “Press the bones at the base of your toes into the mat. Let the arches soften.” I do, and something in my calves lets go. He feels it. I can tell by the quiet way his breath leaves him, a satisfied exhale I would miss if I weren’t straining to catch everything.
He narrates his touch before he gives it—left elbow, inside wrist, palm—and each time the word closes the space for fear to walk through. That’s what fright did when I was small: it took the distance between happening and name and made a home there. Now he’s taking the distance back with words and hands.
“Feather,” he says, and somewhere glass taps softly. My mouth goes dry. I don’t know why that of all things makes my breath climb, but it does; the blindfold turns my skin into a field waiting for weather. The first pass is over the back of my hand, a whisper. I flinch and then almost laugh because my body didn’t expect soft. “Again,” I hear myself say. It comes out smaller than I intend and more like a command than a request.
He obeys. Inside wrist. The bend of my elbow. Up along the arm where nerves wake even when you’re pretending to be stone. I’m not pretending now. I’m naming. He coaxes me into that rhythm: “Tell me,” he says quietly, and I do, halting at first, then clearer. “Light,” I say. “Lower.” And then, “More,” my voice dropping on the word like a weight.
