“Whose choice is this?” I ask.
“Mine,” she mumbles, and the word steadied the muscles in her throat.
“Who can stop this?”
“I can,” she said.
“Who am I?”
She holds my eyes in the glass and speaks, “The man I chose. Right now.”
The room settles. The tremor in her shoulders shifts from rage to something I can meet without destroying either of us.
“Good.” My approval travels over her skin and down her spine. I don’t confuse praise with permission. Instead, I use it like oxygen.
The first touch is not a blow. I don’t punish with pain for its own sake; I don’t discipline with randomness. I take her hands in mine and lift until her arms are over her head and her wrists are crossed. I let the leather press into her skin. I watch the way her eyes hold mine. “Breathe with me,” I say, and I set a pace she can find.
When she has it, I lower her arms and turn her to the mirror again. “Look at yourself,” I command. “Look at what that anger hides when you let it be the only language you have.”
Her mouth tips as if she might smile, and then the expression breaks like a wave against a wall. Truth hurts. So does relief.
I use my voice as the first instrument. The second is my hand. Not the belt yet. When defiance pulls her gaze off my face, I bring it back with nothing more than a quiet “No.” Her chin edges up again and then bows, not in humiliation or worship, but in the old movement of a spine that remembers what it is to trust a hand at the nape.
“Say why you’re here,” I repeat, each time her eyes spark with the fight that wants to turn into flight.
“Because I want you,” she says eventually, the word small and huge, and she flinches from herself. “Because I want this.”
“Say what this is.”
“Control I don’t have to carry,” she says, tears catching and not falling.
“Say it simpler,” I order.
“Rest,” she whispers.
“Good girl,” I say, and the sound that leaves her is not pain.
I bring the leather into it when I am sure she will feel the logic, not the threat. One stroke, firm and true, where it will teach without bruising. Her breath catches. Her eyes stay on mine. “Color?” I ask.
“Green,” she replies, and I almost smile because she gave us that scale without meaning to—green for go, yellow for think, blue for stop—and it pleases me to see her move inside a system she helped build.
I alternate—voice, palm, leather, and voice again. Correction, praise, correction. Not longer than necessary; not even as long as we both might want. This is where men like me go wrong and tell themselves they are doing it for the healing: when they use the session to feed hunger instead of the hunger to deliver the session. I keep count. I watch her pupils. I listen for the change in sound that means a body has shifted from fight to surrender. When it comes, it isn’t theatrical. It is a soft sound from the back of her throat and the loosening of a muscle at the base of her neck. I see the precise moment the anger unclenches and something older takes its place.
“Tell me,” I say, softer now, stepping in until my breath warms the skin below her ear. “Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” she says and the word shakes. “Please.”
I have what I need. I don’t go farther than we agreed to go in words, only in heat. I make it hurt in the way a knot hurts when a hand finally finds it and presses until the muscle remembers how to stop trying to hold the whole world. I keep her eyes on mine. I use each correction to ask for truth. “Whatare you?” I ask at the end because reclamation is the only punishment I trust.
“Mine,” she says first, because she was, and then—after a second, after a breath, after I see the line she has drawn for herself— “Yours,” she whispers, “because I said so.”
The sound she makes when I let the leather fall to the floor and put my mouth against the place behind her ear where fear lives is the sound I listen for in ORs when the heart that fought too long finally believes it can let the machine help. I take the rest of her with my hands and my voice. I take her to the edge and teach her how not to fall. And when she does fall, I am already there.
Aftercare is not a kindness with me. It is the point. When it is done—when her breath comes unbroken, when the blaze in her face resolves into something clean—I untie the simple loop at her wrists and lift her wrists to my mouth in the same motion. The skin is warm. The imprints are already fading. I hold her as the trembling comes, because it always comes, and because I would be unfit to touch another human if I didn’t know how to hold it without needing to turn it into something that makes me feel better.
“Breathe,” I say again, quiet. “Feel the floor under you. Feel me.”
She is rigid for a moment, then soft, then rigid again as memory walks through and makes its inspection. A tear lands on my throat and streaks down into the collar of my shirt. I don’t move to wipe it. I keep one palm at the base of her skull, letting the heel of my hand hold the place people learn to hide. The other arm wraps her. I let my breath carry the tempo.
