He guides me to the mirror on the far wall, the one angled for checking form during practice. He stands behind me, hands on my shoulders, and makes me look.
My breath stops.
The woman in the mirror isn't the one I see every morning. Tired, washed out, held together by caffeine and willpower. This woman is beautiful.
The word surfaces before I can stop it. The red silk traces geometric patterns across my torso, the diamonds drawing the eye, creating art from flesh. My waist looks narrow. My breasts look full. The rope doesn't hide my body. It frames it and celebrates it.
Tears prick my eyes and I blink them back.
"When did I become beautiful again?"
The question slips out wondering and unguarded.
His arms wrap around me from behind, careful of the rope, and his chin rests on my shoulder so we're both looking at my reflection.
"You never stopped being it." His lips brush my ear. "You just stopped seeing it."
The tears spill over and I don't try to stop them.
He holds me while I cry, silent shaking tears that have nothing to do with sadness. All those years of not looking. Of believing the body Adrian touched was something to endure, not celebrate. The rope presses against my ribs with each shuddering breath, holding me together.
I can be beautiful. I can be seen. I can be wanted like this and not broken by it.
He turns me away from the mirror when the tears slow and cups my face, his thumbs wiping the wet from my cheeks.
"Still with me?"
"Yes."
"Good." His hand finds mine. "Come with me."
He leads me out of the practice room and down the short hallway to his bedroom. A door was closed during the tour, a room he didn't offer, and now he pushes it open and guides me through.
The room is clean lines and low furniture with a platform bed dressed in white linens and a single lamp casting warm light. Minimal like the rest of the house, but lived in. It smells like him, saffron and cedar concentrated, and the sheets are rumpled on one side with a book sitting facedown on the nightstand, its spine cracked from use.
"Sit."
I sink onto the edge of the mattress, and the rope presses differently in this position. He strips off his shirt and then his jeans, and my breath stutters at the sight of him. The scars I've traced with my fingers and the planes of muscle I've memorized with my hands are all illuminated now in the warm lamplight. The starburst scar on his ribs that I haven't explored yet. The dark trail of hair leading down to where he's already hard.
"Better?"
"Much."
He kneels between my thighs and spreads them wider with his palms, then runs his hands up the rope pattern, following the diamonds from my hips to my breasts. When his thumbs find my nipples I arch into the touch, heat sparking straight between my legs.
"I've been thinking about this since the first loop went around your wrists." His mouth follows his hands, pressing kisses to the skin between silk lines.
"I could tell."
"Could you?" He looks up at me through dark lashes. "How?"
"Your hands were steady. But you kept swallowing."
A surprised laugh escapes him. "You noticed that?"
"I notice everything about you. It's becoming a problem."
His mouth finds the diamond at my waist, tongue tracing the edge of the rope, the contrast of silk and skin. Lower, following the pattern down.
