Then sighs.
Then kisses me gently on the lips, whispering her love into my mouth.
She snuggles into my chest and sleeps.
I'm not tired, it's only five o'clock in the afternoon. But Emmaleen needs her rest today and I want her to do that in my arms.
Jino's voice cuts through my head—a memory from months ago when he first realized Lorcan's theatrical chapel bullshit was something Emmaleen responded to.
He's got game, G. We don't have that kind of game.
Don't I?
I mentally challenge the memory, feeling the weight of Emmaleen's sleeping form against me, her breath soft and steady against my chest.
Don't I, Jino?
The question lingers in the silence of the afternoon bedroom, unanswered but somehow already proven.
Because what Lorcan has—his theatrical chapel performances, his elaborate rituals of penance and redemption—those are seductions dressed up as salvation.
And my little word collector comes home from every visit with a poem. Words meant only for me. Words that calm myracing heart. The fear inside my chest that she will some day choose him.
She gives me these words, unasked for, not part of our never-ending poem. Words composed while she's with him, still thinking ofme.
What Jino has—his clinical precision, his ability to frame submission as art—that's philosophy made flesh. Devotion as methodology.
And my little fashion disaster spends most of her time with him shopping for hideous vintage outfits to punish me for missing dinner. To tell me, without words, that she doesn't want to sleep alone and worries about what I do when we're apart.
I have something totally different than they do. Something much better than control.
I look down at the woman sleeping in my arms, her dark hair spilling across my chest, one hand curled loosely against my ribs where the sea glass sits quiet and settled.
What I have is everything she chooses to give without me having to orchestrate a single fucking thing.
I have worn paperbacks stacked on my nightstand—dog-eared romance novels and poetry collections she insists I'll appreciate someday, their spines cracked from repeated readings.
I have oversized cardigans draped across the backs of my leather chairs, soft wool in muted colors that smell like her lavender soap and the faint vanilla of old pages.
I have half-asleep monologues about marsupials and their evolutionary advantages while I sit behind her in the tub, carefully washing her body, my hands moving with deliberate gentleness as she sways slightly, exhausted and trusting.
I have her warmth pressed against me in my bed every single night—not because I commanded it, not because some elaborate ritual demanded it, not because I orchestrated somepsychological game to manufacture her compliance, but because when I asked if she wanted to sleep next to me or down in the dungeon, she went on a five-minute spiral about how she's not the doomed gothic heroine who chooses the creepy attic over the warm bed with the hot mobster boyfriend, she's seen enough horror movies to know that's how you end up possessed or married to Rochester's first wife or whatever, and she's already got enough trauma without adding "slept alone in a sex dungeon for aesthetic reasons" to her therapy checklist, plus the thread count up here is like a thousand and she's not an animal, Giovanni, she hasstandards, and also I'm warm and the dungeon is cold and she's from Cleveland not Antarctica—then climbed into bed and fell asleep mid-sentence with her face pressed against my chest.
All she wants from me is…me.
And that's all I want from her too.
Justher.
This is whatIhave.
My Little Miss Take.
Because somewhere between learning to engineer her submission and perfecting the machinery of her obedience I forgot that control was never about what you take, it's about what people give you, what you allow to simply exist without your hands wrapped around its throat, and maybe—maybe—the most powerful thing I've ever done is let this one small chaotic woman make her own catastrophically bad decision to love me without trying to dissect why, or how, or restructure the entire foundation of her choice until it fits into my framework of dominance and submission, because she doesn't fit, she never fit, she justis, and I've spent my whole life trying to cage things, only to realize…
You can't cage sea glass.
It just… rolls.
