“Dame CoCo,” he whispered when I got close enough. “Please. I need to talk to you.”
“My name is not Dame CoCo right now. And you are standing next to my car at my school. How the fuck did you find me here, Timothy?”
“I followed you last week. From the dungeon. I just wanted to see where you went. I wasn’t going to approach you, but I can’t take it anymore. You blocked me. You won’t answer my calls. I’ve been losing my mind.”
“You followed me.” I let those words settle between us. “A federal judge followed a woman to her school and is now ambushing her in a parking lot. Do you understand how insane that sounds?”
“I know, I know, and I’m sorry, but please—” He dropped to his knees. In the parking lot. On the asphalt. In his two-thousand-dollar suit. In broad daylight with students walking to their cars ten feet away. His hands were clasped in front of him and his chin was trembling and he looked up at me with the most pathetic expression I had ever seen on a human face, and I had seen a lot of pathetic expressions because I charged men money to make them.
“Take me back,” he begged. “Please. I’ll pay whatever you want. I’ll double the rate. Triple it. I’ll do anything. I can’t function without our sessions. I haven’t slept in days. I can’t concentrate on the bench.
“Get up off the ground, Timothy.”
“Not until you agree to see me again.” Tears were streaming down his face now. Actual tears. A man who decided the fate of felony cases was kneeling on asphalt outside a beauty school sobbing into his own necktie. “I need you. You don’t understand. Nobody makes me feel the way you do. Nobody sees me the way you do.”
“I see you as a paycheck, Timothy. That’s literally all this is.”
“I don’t care! I don’t care if it’s transactional. I’ll pay for your attention for the rest of my life if that’s what it takes.” He pulled out his phone with shaking hands. “Here. Right now. Five thousand. Ten. How much do you want?”
My CashApp notification went off. $5,000 from Timothy B.
“No!” I said. “I don’t want your money. I want you to get off the ground and leave. Now.”
“Please, Dame CoCo, please?—”
“Timothy, listen to me very carefully.” I stepped closer and dropped my voice low enough that only he could hear. “You have shown up to my school. My real life. Where I am a student, not a dominatrix. You have compromised my identity, my safety, and my privacy. If you ever show up here again, or at my home, or anywhere that is not the dungeon during a scheduled session, I will send every text, every CashApp receipt, and every piece of evidence I have to the Washington Post, the DC Bar Association, and your wife’s attorney. Your career will be over. Your marriage will be over. Your reputation will be a punchline. Do you understand me?”
His face went white. The crying stopped.
“Now get up. Get in your Jaguar. Drive back to whatever courthouse you came from. And lose the address to this school.”
He stood up slowly, his knees cracking, asphalt dust on his suit pants. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and looked at me with an expression that cycled through abouteight emotions before landing on something that was halfway between devastation and worship.
“I love you,” he said. “You will take me back. You will love me.”
“Timothy, you are a sixty-one-year-old federal judge crying in a beauty school parking lot. The only person who needs to love you is a therapist. Go home.”
He turned and walked toward his Jaguar, which was parked three rows over. Halfway there he turned back and screamed, loud enough for the two girls walking to their car to look over in alarm, “YOU WILL LOVE ME, DAME COCO!”
“Lord Jesus,” I muttered, getting in my car as fast as I could.
My phone buzzed. Another CashApp. $1,000 from Timothy B. With a note:For calling me pathetic. Thank you. I needed that. Please beat me. Please pee on me. I’m begging you.
I stared at the notification, looked up at the ceiling of my car, took a deep breath, and started the engine. The beauty of findom was that the money came whether I wanted it to or not. The horror of findom was that the men came whether I wanted them to or not.
That evening I was at the dungeon for a new client. The booking had come through my encrypted app a few days ago. It was a first-time session, paid the consultation fee upfront without negotiating, which told me he had money and wasn’t intimidated by the price. The name on the booking was Mr. Rios.
He arrived at six sharp. When I opened the camera feed to check him, the man standing outside was not what I expected. Most of my clients were soft. Doughy corporate types with bad posture and expensive watches who wanted to feel something other than powerful for an hour. Mr. Rios was not that.
He was tall, maybe six-two, with a lean, athletic build. Dominican or Puerto Rican, with dark hair slicked back and a jawline that could’ve been on a magazine cover. He was wearinga tailored black suit with no tie, the top button undone. His watch was an Audemars, which I recognized because Quest wore one. And there was something in his eyes when I let him in—something behind the polite smile and the respectful nod—that wasn’t soft at all. It was calculating. Measured. Dangerous in a way I couldn’t quite place but could absolutely feel.
“Mr. Rios,” I said from the throne. “Welcome. You know the rules?”
“I read them,” he said. His voice was smooth with just enough accent to make it interesting. “No touching. No eye contact. Pay tribute before speaking.” He pulled out his phone and CashApped me a thousand dollars without being told the amount. “I hope that’s sufficient.”
It was more than sufficient. It was confident. He wasn’t groveling. He wasn’t nervous. He was transacting business with the same energy you’d use to buy a building, which made sense because when I’d Googled him the night before, Mateo Rios came up as a real estate developer with properties across the DMV. Luxury condos, mixed-use developments, a few commercial properties in areas that were suspiciously close to neighborhoods I knew were connected to money laundering. I couldn’t prove that last part and it wasn’t my business, but my radar had been tuned to dangerous men for long enough that I could spot one from across a room.
The session was professional. He followed every rule without needing to be reminded. He paid every penalty without hesitation. He didn’t cry, didn’t beg, didn’t fall apart the way most first-timers did. He took the humiliation with a stillness that unnerved me slightly because it felt less like submission and more like a man choosing to kneel rather than being forced to. There’s a difference, and the difference mattered.
