The acknowledgment of my sensory differences—casual, matter-of-fact, already factored into his calculations—made something warm bloom in my chest.
"And these—" He moved to the cuffs, selecting a pair in butter-soft black leather. "Feel."
He held one out. I touched it before I could overthink, and my breath caught. The leather was impossibly soft. The inside lined with something plush that would cushion rather than chafe.
"The difference between cheap restraints and quality ones," Maks murmured, "is the difference between enduring and enjoying."
I couldn't look away from his hands. Those hands, holding something designed to bind. To control. To keep someone exactly where you wanted them.
The blindfolds hung on a separate display, arranged by material. Silk, satin, leather, something that looked like crushed velvet. Maks selected a black silk one—simple, elegant, the kind of thing that could pass for a sleep mask if you didn't know better.
"May I?"
I nodded before understanding what he was asking.
He took my wrist. Turned it over, exposing the tender inside where my pulse was visible, rabbiting beneath my skin. Then he drew the silk across.
Slow. Deliberate. The fabric whispering over my skin like a secret.
I shivered. Full-body, uncontrollable.
"This would look beautiful on you," he murmured. His voice had dropped even lower, pitched for my ears only. "Unable to see. Having to trust. Feeling everything more intensely because sight is gone."
My thighs clenched together. An automatic response, my body trying to contain the heat building between my legs.
He noticed. Of course he noticed. His eyes darkened, but he just set the blindfold back on its display and guided me forward.
The impact implements were next.
I'd known they existed. Had read about them during late nights of internet research, trying to understand what I wanted,what I might want, what the difference was between fantasy and reality. But seeing them in person—
Paddles of varying sizes, some smooth wood, others wrapped in leather. Crops with stiff shafts and looped tips. Floggers with dozens of falls in leather and suede and something that looked almost like ribbon.
My hand was reaching out before I made the decision to move.
"Touch," Maks said. Permission and encouragement wrapped in a single word.
I touched the nearest flogger first. Soft suede falls, the color of wine. They felt like velvet under my fingers, nothing like the harsh leather I'd imagined.
"Suede is forgiving," Maks explained. He moved behind me, his chest close to my back, his voice in my ear. "More thud than sting. Sensation without sharp pain. Good for warming up."
Warming up. Before the other things. The things that did sting.
"This one—" He reached past me, selected a different flogger. Heavier. The falls were leather, narrow and slightly rougher. "This has more bite. You feel each individual strand."
He let the falls trail across my palm. I gasped.
The sensation was electric. Dozens of tiny paths of awareness lighting up across my skin, my nerves cataloging each point of contact, my brain struggling to process the input.
"And a paddle—" He set down the flogger, picked up a smooth wooden implement. "Is more concentrated. All the impact in one place. Deeper. Warmer."
I thought about his hand.
The memory surfaced unbidden—our negotiation, his promises. A spanking if I've been bratty, he'd said. The sting and warmth he'd described with clinical precision while I'd squirmed on his couch and pretended I wasn't getting wet.
Now I was imagining it. His palm instead of this wooden paddle. The sound it would make against my skin. The heat that would bloom after, spreading from the point of impact to places far more intimate.
My breathing had gone shallow. I could feel it—the particular tightness of lungs that couldn't seem to expand properly, the dizziness of arousal building beyond what I knew how to contain.
