I pulled back enough to look at him.
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a length of black leather. It was soft and dark, with a small silver clasp and a single ring at the throat. He held it in both hands and looked at me, not saying anything, and waited.
He’d gotten me a collar.
My heart was very loud right then.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “It’s not a command. It’s a question.”
I reached up. Took it from his hands. Turned it over in my fingers, feeling the weight of it, the softness. The silver ring caught the light.
I gave it back to him.
I lifted my chin.
His hands were steady as he fastened it at my throat. He smoothed his thumb along the underside and I exhaled a little shakily, the last of the pretending going out of me like smoke.
“There,” he said softly. “There you are.”
He tipped my chin up and kissed me, slowly and thoroughly, the kind of kiss that was in no rush. I melted into it, and when he pulled back his eyes were dark, his thumb still resting at my throat, just above the collar’s edge. His eyes moved over my face the way they sometimes did, reading things I hadn’t said.
“What do you want tonight?” he asked.
A few months ago, I wouldn’t have answered that question honestly. I would have deflected or shrugged or made a joke and let him take the lead so that whatever happened could be something donetome rather than something I’d asked for. Asking meant wanting. Wanting meant vulnerable. Vulnerable meant exposed in a way that had nothing to do with being naked.
But his hand was warm at my throat and the collar sat against my skin like something I’d been missing without knowing it, and I was so tired of pretending I didn’t know exactly what I needed.
“I want you to put me over your knee,” I said. My voice came out steady. Barely. “And I want—” I stopped. Looked at the middle of his chest. “I want you to spank me and I want it to sting. Then I want you to make me come. While I’m wearing this.”
Silence.
I made myself look up at him.
His expression had gone very still in the way it did when something mattered to him.
“You’re asking me to give you a spanking,” he said.
“Yes.”
He exhaled slowly through his nose. Then he reached out and curved his hand around the back of my neck, just above the collar, and the warm weight of it made my eyes close for a second.
“Good girl,” he said quietly. “Come here.”
He moved to the edge of the bed and drew me with him, and I went over his knee with none of the fight of that first time. There was no kicking, no cursing, no furious attempt to save face in front of the market square. Just the soft give of my body settling over his thigh, my hands finding the blanket, my cheek pressing into it. His palm came to rest on the small of my back.
The tail shifted between my cheeks as I settled, and I gasped softly.
“Comfortable?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
His hand moved to my bottom, stroking slowly across both cheeks, unhurried. Mapping the territory. This always made me aware of myself, of every inch of skin that was about to bear his mark. The silver ring of the collar was cool against my throat. I focused on it.
“What’s mine tonight?” he asked.
“Everything,” I said into the blanket.
His palm lifted and came down hard. The sound cracked through the quiet room and the sting bloomed out across my skin. I exhaled hard. He didn’t wait for me to gather myselfbefore the next one landed, and the next, a slow relentless rhythm that I sank into like water. Each one drove the tail a little deeper, and I whimpered, the sensation tangling together until I couldn’t have separated the sting from the heat from the desperate ache between my thighs.
