"Then at least we'll have had this." He gestured between us, at the mess we'd made of professional distance. "Whatever this is."
I wanted to argue. To point out that "this" was doctor and patient, captor and captive, a power dynamic so skewed it had its own gravitational pull. But I was too wrung out, too raw from coming apart under his hands.
"I need to clean up." My thighs were sticky, his slacks undoubtedly ruined.
"Use my bathroom." He moved to his tablet, back to clinical distance. "Then return to your room. We'll resume normal protocols tomorrow."
"Normal." I laughed, shaky and bitter. "Nothing about this is normal."
"No." He glanced up, and for just a moment I saw the man who'd held me last night. "But it's ours."
I fled to the bathroom before I could say something stupid. Like how "ours" was starting to feel more real than anything in my life before. Like how I'd choose this beautiful nightmare over the gray nothing I'd been living. Like how I was starting to forget what I'd fought so hard to preserve.
In the mirror, I looked debauched. Pigtails askew, mascara smudged, lips swollen from pressing them against his shoulder to muffle screams. I looked like exactly what I'd said—Daddy's toy, well-used and glowing with it.
The collar caught the light, GMM monogrammed into silver that would never tarnish. I traced the letters, remembering when they'd felt like a brand. Now they felt like belonging. Like promise. Like home.
"Fuck," I whispered to my reflection.
Because I was starting to want impossible things too. Starting to imagine past eight weeks to something nebulousand necessary. Starting to think of this as something other than captivity.
Starting to think of it as love.
The word sat heavy in the bathroom's silence. Too big for what we were. Too real for games of dominance and submission. But growing despite the impossibility, like flowers through concrete.
I cleaned up mechanically, fixed what could be fixed. But there was no repairing the fundamental shift, no returning to simple hatred or basic survival. He'd worked his way under my skin with patience and perversion, and now extraction would mean bleeding out.
When I emerged, he was gone. Only a note remained, precise handwriting on expensive paper:
Session tomorrow at 9 AM. Practice your affirmations.
You did beautifully today.
-G
G. Not Doctor. Not Sir. Just the initial of a name I wasn't supposed to use during sessions. A crack in his own rules, small but significant.
I held the note against my chest and tried not to hope.
But hope, like everything else here, wasn't really a choice anymore.
It was just another thing he'd conditioned me to feel, trained into my bones until I couldn't tell where his programming ended and my reality began.
Eight more weeks.
The numbers felt like both forever and not nearly enough.
I returned to my pink prison, body still humming from his touch, mind replaying every word. The AI greeted me cheerfully, and I responded without thinking, playing my part in this careful choreography.
But something had shifted. Some essential understanding that we were both trapped in this together—him by his obsession, me by my need, both of us by contracts that had stopped mattering the moment he'd called it love.
Eight more weeks of pretending this was just research.
Eight more weeks of careful distance broken by moments of raw truth.
Eight more weeks to figure out if impossible things could survive outside pink rooms and protocols.
I curled up with Mr. Hoppy and practiced my affirmations, tasting each word:
