He wrote, “Sexual contact only with enthusiastic consent, at all times. No sex as punishment. Sex only for pleasure, or for comfort.”
I read it. I said, “What if I want you to use it as a reward?”
He thought. “Then you ask. If I think you need it, I’ll say yes. If not, we find something else.”
That made sense to me. I wrote, “Can be used as reward, if I ask, but not as bribe.”
He laughed. It was a good sound.
RESTRAINTS.
He said, “Some people like them. Some don’t. You?”
I had to think about it. I thought about his hands on my wrists, the way he’d looked at me the night at the piano, the strength ofhim. I thought about being held down, but not as a threat—more like a safety harness, a way to keep myself from floating off the planet.
“I’d like to try. Maybe I want to be held down,” I said, “but not tied. Not at first.”
He nodded. “We start with that. If you ever want to try more, we’ll talk about it. You can say stop anytime.”
I wrote, “Holding is okay. Tying, not yet.”
HARD LIMITS.
He asked, “What are yours?”
I said, “No humiliation. No name-calling. No public stuff. No posting online. No making me feel less than. No pain for its own sake.”
He wrote, “Agreed.” He showed it to me before setting down the pencil.
He tapped the top of the page. “Safeword?”
I hesitated. I tried to think of something that would not come up by accident, something I would never say unless I meant it.
“Renaissance,” I said. I didn’t know why. I just liked the way it sounded.
He wrote it down, circled it, then wrote: “If she says Renaissance, everything stops. No exceptions.”
He finished the page. He set the pencil down.
He looked at me for a long moment. “Do you have anything you want to add before we sign this one?”
I looked at the table. I looked at my hands.
I said, “I should tell you something.”
He waited.
“While you were gone,” I said. “I— I touched myself.”
He didn’t move. Not even a blink.
I kept my eyes on the table. “I know we hadn’t signed. But I wanted it. I needed it.”
He let out a breath. It was a slow, deliberate sound.
He said, “I should have given you a rule about that before I left.”
I looked up. “What would the rule have been?”
