I didn’t say anything because my throat was doing that thing where it closes up when someone says something too accurate.
“So when you step into that room as Dame CoCo, you’re not just earning money. You’re rewriting the script. You’re taking the dynamic that terrorized you, a powerful person exerting control over a vulnerable one, and you’re flipping it. You’re the powerful one now. The men on their knees are stand-ins for every man who ever had power over you.”
“Is that bad?” I asked, and I hated how small my voice sounded.
“It’s not about good or bad. It’s about function. Right now, domming is serving a function for you—it’s giving you a sense of safety and agency that was stolen from you as a child and again as a wife. The question I want us to sit with is whether that function is healing you or just managing the wound.” She picked her pen back up. “There’s a difference between processing trauma and performing the opposite of it. One movesyou forward. The other keeps you locked in the same room, just standing on the other side of it.”
That hit me somewhere deep. I looked at the window because I couldn’t look at her.
“The control you feel in that room, does it follow you out?” Janelle asked. “When you leave a session with a client, do you feel more at peace? Or do you feel the same hunger for control in the rest of your life?”
I thought about the cage. I thought about Thad on his knees in a warehouse with destroyed legs. I thought about the switchblades on my nightstand and the gun in my purse and the way I backed into parking spaces so I could pull out fast.
“The same hunger,” I admitted.
“That tells us something important. It tells us the domming is a coping mechanism, not a resolution. It’s managing your need for safety without addressing the root of why you don’t feel safe. And until we address that root—the trauma from your father, from Ahmad, from all of it—the hunger won’t go away no matter how many men kneel for you.”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and pretended I wasn’t crying. Janelle pretended she didn’t see. We had an unspoken agreement about that.
“I’m not telling you to stop,” Janelle added. “That’s your choice, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with the work. What I’m telling you is that if you’re using it as your primary source of safety, we need to build other sources. Real ones. Ones that don’t depend on someone else being beneath you for you to feel okay.”
The session ended ten minutes later with Janelle assigning me a journaling exercise about moments where I felt safe without being in control. I couldn’t think of a single one. Then I thought about that booth at Ray’s with my shoulders down andoxtail on my fork and a man sitting next to me who I couldn’t scare away with a knife. I didn’t write that down.
I walked to my car feeling the way I always felt after therapy, raw, cracked open, and vaguely pissed about it. The drive home was supposed to be twenty minutes of silence where I put myself back together before I had to face the world again.
I made it about six blocks before the steering started pulling hard to the right.
“No. No, no, no.” I gripped the wheel and guided the car to the curb, already knowing what it was before I got out and looked. The front right tire was completely flat, pressed against the rim like a deflated balloon. I crouched down and saw the problem immediately—there were at least four nails embedded in the rubber, clustered close together in a way that felt deliberate but was probably just bad luck because that was the only kind of luck I had.
I stood up and kicked the tire because it felt good even though it accomplished nothing. Then I pulled out my phone and remembered that I had said no to roadside assistance when I got my insurance because I was trying to save thirty dollars a month and past Mehar was an idiot who present Mehar would like to have a word with.
I was scrolling through tow truck numbers, trying to figure out which ones were scams and which ones would actually show up in less than two hours, when a Maybach pulled up behind my car.
Of course it did.
Quest Banks stepped out in a charcoal suit with no tie and his sleeves rolled up to his forearms and I swear to God the universe was testing me personally.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said.
“Flat tire?” He walked toward my car with his hands in his pockets, looking at the damage with that calm assessment he brought to everything.
“I’m handling it.”
“By standing on the sidewalk kicking your tire?”
“That’s step one. Step two is calling a tow truck. Step three is you driving away and pretending you never saw me.”
He crouched down next to the tire the same way I had, examining the nails. “You got a spare?”
“No.”
“I have a friend who runs a tire shop and has a tow truck. He owes me a favor. I can have him here in about an hour.”
“I don’t need your help, Quest.”
“You need somebody’s help. Your tire looks like it lost a fight with a nail gun.” He pulled out his phone and dialed before I could argue. “Yo, Darnell. It’s Quest. I need a favor—I got somebody with a flat on…” He looked at the street sign. “Vermont Ave, near the Dupont Circle Metro. Honda Accord, front right tire is done. You free?” He listened for a second. “Cool. Appreciate you, bro.” He hung up. “He’ll be here in about forty-five minutes.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
