I haven’t been helpless since I was twelve years old.
She made me feel that again.
And then she saved me.
The math doesn’t work. I’ve run it a hundred times while I split this wood, while sweat froze on my skin and my muscles screamed, and I kept swinging because the alternative was going inside and putting my hands on her, and I don’t trust what I’ll do when I finally touch her again.
She’s walking toward me through snow that glows amber in the firelight. She’s wearing my shirt and nothing else, white cotton hanging to mid-thigh with the buttons done wrong so I can see the curve of her breast through the gap.
Her hair is down because she knows I like it that way, dark waves spilling over her shoulders. She’s got her feet shoved into my spare boots, the ones I keep by the woodpile, laces dragging through the snow because she didn’t bother tying them.
“I can’t stop thinking about me dying.” I drop the axe into the snow and turn to face her fully.
She stops six feet from the flames. Her chin lifts in that angle that makes me want to fuck it out of her until she forgets how to do anything but beg. “Youdrank both glasses.”
“I couldn’t move.” I take a step toward her, and the snow crunches under my boots. Her throat works as she swallows. “I watched you run to save me, and I couldn’t follow. Couldn’t help. Couldn’t do anything but lie there and wait to find out if you loved me enough to let me live.”
“I came back.” Her voice wavers, and I see tears starting in her eyes, and I don’t fucking care.
“After you made me feel like a corpse.” Another step. She holds her ground, but her hands are shaking at her sides, and Ican see her nipples hard against the cotton. “After you took my legs. My hands. My voice. Left me trapped inside a body that wouldn’t obey.”
“Roman—”
“You wanted me to know what it felt like.” I’m close enough now to see her pulse jumping in her throat, to count the freckles on her collarbone, to watch goosebumps rise on her skin from the cold or the fear or both. “To be powerless. To watch someone you love and not be able to stop what’s happening to them.”
Her eyes are wet, and her lower lip is trembling. She looks so fucking beautiful, I want to break her.
“Yes,” she whispers. “I wanted you to know.”
Gentle won’t fix this. Only pain can fix this.
“Don’t be kind,” she says, like she can read my thoughts, like she knows exactly what I need to hear. “I can’t survive, kind.”
“Then you understand what comes next.”
I grab her wrist before she can react, my fingers closing around bones that feel so small I could snap them without trying, and I drag her toward the birch tree at the edge of the firelight. She doesn’t fight. Just stumbles after me, wearing nothing but my shirt and my boots.
I spin her to face the trunk and press her palms flat against the bark.
“Do you want this?”
“Yes.” Her voice breaks, but there’s iron underneath it. “Don’t be gentle.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
I kick off my coat and spread it on the snow beneath her feet. I need her on her knees for what comes next. I pull my belt free from the loops, and the leather makes a sound as it slides through the fabric, a whisper that makes her whole body shudder. I take her wrists and bind them together before tyingthe excess around a low branch and pulling until her arms stretch above her head.
“You made me watch. Now you’re going to see how it feels.”
Her whole body is trembling. “Punish me. I’m still here.”
“Color.”
“Green.” Her voice cracks on the word. “Green, Roman. Make it mean something.”
I step back and look at what I’ve made.
My wife, bound to a tree, on her knees in the snow, firelight painting her skin gold and shadow, the shirt riding up her thighs and her legs shaking from anticipation. I can see the curve of her ass beneath the white cotton, can see the outline of her spine, can see her shoulders already straining from the position I’ve put her in.
