And I write.
FOURTH KNOT
The tatami feels clean and dry. I’m sitting in the middle of it like a goddamn exhibit, barefoot and twitching. My spine is too stiff, my hands are too loud, screaming for something to break through every still second I try to endure here. I hate this kind of silence—not the one after a throat gets crushed or a gasp is collected, butthis one, padded and controlled and patient, stretched all over me.
There’s shit hanging from the ceiling—black hooks, polished rings, rope coils lined up—and I can already picture what they’re for. Hanging people.Hanging me.My skin crawls, but I don’t move. I sit where Naoya told me to sit, jacket off, shoes off, body still humming with everything I haven’t hit in the last hour.
Naoya sits across from me, like this is a tea ceremony instead of whatever the fuck it really is. And then he speaks, soft and sharp all at once.
“Every time I see you, you’re bleeding. Today more than the last.”
I grin, show teeth.
“Killed four men earlier.”
I say it because I want to see what it does to him. I want to see something shift, anything. Disgust, fear, judgment,arousal—I don’t give a fuck what it is. I just want to make a dent. But Naoya just lets the words settle and studies me like I’m a case file he’s halfway through dissecting.
“Is that why you’re looking for silence?”
I snort.
“I’m notlooking for silence. Just wanna get off.”
He nods once. Accepts it. As if that’s a perfectly reasonable thing for someone to want after killing four people. There’s no fucking lecture about right and wrong or violence or morality. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to feel like. It burns good anyway.
“I understand,” he says.
I don’t know if I believe him because no oneunderstands.No one gets what it’s like to feel like this, like you’re a wire wrapped too tight, with everything under your skin boiling and you’d rather be ripped apart than keep standing still. But he says it with no irony. It feels weird.
“Before anything else,” he says, as if I just didn’t confess murder to him, “you need a safe word.”
I almost laugh. It’s not that I don’t know what that is—I’m not stupid, I’ve fucked around, I’ve heard about all this stuff—but because the way he says it makes it feel like it matters, like it’s really serious.
“Why? So I can beg you to stop once it gets too much?”
“No. So you don’t have to beg at all.”
And that does something to me. It doesn’t make me feel safer as it probably does to other people. It makes the itchworse. Because now I want to know what it feels like to actually use it. I want to find out how far I’d have to be pushed to say it out loud.
I want to know what he’d do if I didn’t.
Go on? Stop?
Try to breakme?
“A safe word is not about weakness, Arakawa-san. It’s about the control you’ll have. You say it, everything stops immediately. That power is yours, always. No matter what we’re doing. You can scream and cry and beg me to stop, and I won’t. Unless you say the word. Then I do. Every time. Without fail.”
Scream. Cry.Beg.
Should I just kill him?
“So pick one. It can be anything as long isn’t something you’d say by accident. Not ‘stop’ or ‘no’ or ‘please.’ Something that stands out.”
I lean back on my hands, let the sting in my joints distract me for a second.
“Ghost,” I say, spitting the word just to make him stop staring at me like he’s waiting for something sacred to emerge from my mouth. “That good enough for you?”
He looks at me and his lips twitch. It pisses me off immediately, because I feel like I’ve said something stupid without knowing it. Well, fuck it. I don’t need to tell him it’s because he looked like one that first night—pale and fucking untouchable.
