He slides a hand under me, low, supporting rather than taking. He says what he’s going to do and then does it, each detail narrated in a voice that knows exactly where my fear lives and steps around it without letting me lie to myself about its existence. When it begins—when he pushes me open with patience that feels like reverence and pressure that feels like gravity—my breath stutters so hard he stops.
“Color,” he says, immediate.
I know he’s checking t make sure I’m okay. The question wraps around the back of my heart. “Here,” I say, but my voiceis tight, and I find out something about myself at that edge: old memory will try to burst its banks when new pleasure pushes floodwater down the same riverbed. He knows it too; I can tell by the way his hands rebracket me—sternum and lower belly now—and by the way his breath moves in my ear as if he can blow the ghosts out from behind my eyes.
“Say blue,” he murmurs. “If that’s what you need.”
The power in the option is as intense as anything he’s done with his hands. I grip it and look at it and then, for reasons I will only understand later when I’m not inside the blindfold, I test the shape of it. “Blue,” I whisper.
He stops. Instantly. The sensation that was building collapses without hurting. The absence is a kind of proof I didn’t know I craved. His mouth finds my hairline and does nothing but breathe. His hand moves from where it was to my forearm and strokes down slow. “Good,” he says, and the praise makes tears sting the back of my eyes. “You’re safe.”
I swallow. I am. I didn’t know until now that safety could feel like this—permission to interrupt what I want to make sure I still have what I need.
He waits for me to come back to baseline. I can feel the patience in the space between us, a quiet, sturdy enough to hold both of us, and that’s when the tears slip out from under the blindfold. They are not dramatic. They are not a collapse. They are edges softening where I have kept them hard for too long.
“I want you to keep going,” I say, when my throat opens around the words.
“Say it the way you want it,” he answers.
“I want you to keep going,” I repeat, and then, because I can, “Please.”
He doesn’t make a noise that tells me how the please lands in his body, but his hands do—they move with more certainty, as if the room shifted and showed him a new angle where the flooris smoother. He brings me back slowly, not trying to make up for the interruption, not punishing me for it. The blindfold turns what he does into blackness again. The feather returns for a pass so light it almost undoes me, and then his palm replaces it, and the pattern becomes something the animal in me trusts.
He unhooks my wrists. My arms float forward like I’m under water. “Hands here,” he instructs, guiding them to the leather, splayed. “Ground.” I do it, grateful for instruction in a way that embarrasses me less than it should. He nudges my ankles wider and the straps at my feet become chalk lines I stay within willingly rather than fences I press against.
When he enters me again, he does it with a patience that makes the room feel bigger instead of smaller. I go up on my toes without thinking and he anchors me down by the hips. “Breathe,” he says, and I do, and this time the rush doesn’t blow out the edges of the past. It blows past them. His mouth is at my ear now, not talking, just there as a place my breath can aim. He moves, steady and sure, and the heat he draws up in me is the kind that doesn’t flare and go out—it builds, a tide that drags at bone before it spills.
I don’t know when I start saying yes. It isn’t a word so much as a shape my mouth holds through an exhale while my hands clutch the column, and I abandon the habit of checking the door with my ears. There is no door here, not for me. There is only this body and this man and the way I am allowed to want without being punished for it or asked to turn it into currency.
He says my name once, quiet. It makes me shudder more than touch does. He keeps me on the edge for a time that stretches and contracts; the blindfold breaks my clock in the best way. When he finally pushes me past it, the sound that leaves me is honest and indecent and not for anyone outside this room. I break open on that breath with the feeling of falling that I always hated in life and have never allowed myself to trust until now.This time the fall is into arms, into leather, into a mat that gives, into myself. He holds me there, moving through the last of it with a control I have never seen on anyone’s face except in the mirror when I am painting and something comes true under my hand.
He slows. He stills. We breathe. He doesn’t leave me, he doesn’t leave me. The sentence repeats, a drum under the evaporating thunder, and then I realize my mouth is forming words against his wrist where he holds me: “Thank you,” like a prayer and a dare.
The cuffs come off. The blindfold lifts. Light pours into me too fast and then settles into honey. He turns me carefully, hands at my waist, and lowers me to the mat with a tenderness that isn’t show. I curl before I even mean to and he fits himself around the curl, not prying it open, just fitting. The room spins once and stops. My eyes find his, and it’s almost obscene how intimate it feels after everything else.
“What was that?” My voice is a wreck, but I don’t care. It feels right that it would be ruined.
“Therapy,” he says, and his mouth quirks at one corner, not a smile, more like a tell. Then, softer, “And you.”
I laugh and it breaks at the end into something that might be crying and might be relief. He does not name it. He strokes my hair back from my face with fingers that smell faintly of oil and my skin. The smell is both foreign and mine. I didn’t know scent could feel proprietary.
He gave me a ritual, and I gave him my ghosts. The suite took both and gave us back something that feels like a beginning rather than an ending. I’m an artist; I should know better than to declare what a work means before it’s done. But tonight, blindfold off and eyes open, I let myself write the caption anyway, if only to keep my hands from shaking:
I’m not just inside his world now.
He’s inside mine.
Chapter 45 – Cassian
The suite still smells like candle wax, warm oil, and her skin.
Dawn is a thin line trying to pry its way into the world. It hasn’t made it to us yet. Behind me she shifts and settles, the sheet whispering over her hip. Her wrists, faintly marked by suede, not bruised, rest on the pillow like an answer I asked for and got, and now have no idea where to put. Her hair is a dark spill over linen, one curl stuck to her cheek by the humidity we built into the room last night. The urge to go to her is animal and immediate. The urge to stay where I am and not touch anything is stronger. I have never felt this raw after a session. I am not sure I like it. I am not sure I can go back.
My phone vibrates on the low table. It does it once; I ignore it. It does it again. The third time is a pulse, not a request. I cross the floor silently, pick it up, and the world that isn’t this bed, this woman, and this hour returns like a fist closing.
Reid:BREACH at Haven South. Probable credential compromise overnight. Comp terminal accessed remotely. Time code 03:17 to 03:22. No exfil metrics visible yet. Working theory: Caldwell proxy.
Under the text is a screenshot of a security console: red flags, an IP trail that looks clean enough to be a confession. I stand with my thumb pressed against the glass until the urge to put my fist through the window drains down to a hum I can use.
