“Adriel. Hey. Come back to me, baby. That’s it. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
Then touch; a hand on his face, thumb stroking his cheek. Something cool and wet pressed to his lips. Water. He drank without thinking, a few sips, then more.
The room reassembled itself around him in pieces. Ceiling. Light. Landen’s face above him, close, watching him with anexpression Adriel had never seen before; tender, alert, awed, and something else beneath it. Pride.
“There you are,” Landen murmured.
Adriel blinked. His body felt boneless and heavy, like he was made of something denser than flesh. His limbs didn’t want to move. His mind was still cottoned, still soft, still wrapped in whatever that place had been.
“What...” His voice came out slurred, barely there. He tried again. “What happened?”
Landen was stroking his hair. His other hand was wrapped around Adriel’s, thumb moving in slow circles over his knuckles.
“Did I faint?” Adriel asked, a flicker of worry cutting through the haze. “The… the breathplay, did I…”
“No,” Landen said immediately. “You didn’t faint. You’re fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Then what…”
“You went into subspace,” Landen said.
Adriel stared at him. Subspace. He knew that word. He’d heard it…
“Like… like what happened at the Knot?” Adriel asked. “To that sub? When we watched the… the scene with Adrian?”
Landen nodded, his expression warm.
The memory surfaced in fragments. The Crimson Knot, weeks ago. Landen had taken him to watch a performance, his first time in the club’s main room during a scene, and Adriel had been terrified. Not of the scene itself, though the scene had been intense enough to make his pulse pound, but of everythingaround it. The people. The confidence they carried, the ease with which they moved through that world, the words they shared that Adriel was still learning one word at a time. He had felt, standing in that room with Landen’s hand on the small of his back, the acute awareness of being an outsider. A tourist. Someone who didn’t belong.
It wasn’t the lifestyle itself that had intimidated him, it was what it represented. Experience. Mastery. Years of knowing yourself and your desires with a clarity Adriel couldn’t imagine. He’d looked at the subs that night, beautiful, confident, certain in their submission, and felt the familiar whisper start up in the back of his mind:
They can give him what you can’t. They know things you don’t. It’s only a matter of time before he realizes you’re not enough.
He was working on that. He knew the voice was wrong, knew it, even when his body hadn’t fully caught up. Landen loved him. Landen chose him. Landen had told him, in words and in touch and in every way that mattered, that Adriel was what he wanted. The voice was quieter now than it used to be. Some days it was almost silent. But it was still there, in the corners, waiting for a moment of weakness to speak up.
That night at the club, it had spoken loudly. Adriel had watched Adrian, one of Landen’s friends, broad and commanding, paddle his sub with precise, relentless strokes. The sub had taken each one with moans and grunts, his cock hard and leaking, counting each strike through gritted teeth, begging for more. The sound of it, the sharp crack of the paddle, the sub’s voice breaking around the numbers, had made Adriel’s stomach tighten with something he couldn’t name. Want, maybe. Fear, maybe. Both.
And then, after a while, the sub had gone quiet. The counting had stopped. His body had gone slack in the restraints, his head lolling to the side, and the expression on his face had shifted into something Adriel didn’t have a word for. Blissful. Absent. Like he’d gone somewhere far away and left his body behind with instructions to keep breathing.
Landen had leaned close to Adriel’s ear and murmured, “He’s in subspace.” Had explained it quietly; the altered state, the endorphin flood, the way the body could transcend sensation when trust and intensity and surrender aligned. The way some subs described it as the most peaceful place they’d ever been.
Adriel had watched the sub’s slack, beatific face and thought:
I will never get there.
And now he’d been there.
“That was subspace?” Adriel asked, voice still soft, still half-dissolved in the warmth.
“Yes,” Landen said.
Adriel was quiet for a moment. Then, tentatively, uncertain in the way he still sometimes was after they’d done something new: “Is that... okay? That I went there?”
Landen’s face changed. The smile that broke across it was brilliant, unguarded and full and radiant in a way that Adriel rarely saw.
“Okay?” Landen repeated. He laughed softly, the sound warm, almost disbelieving. “Adriel, it’s… that’s the greatest compliment you could give me. As a Dom. Getting someone there, it means...” He paused, choosing his words. “It means you trusted me completely. It means you let go; all the way. No holdingback. That you felt safe enough with me to surrender.” His hand tightened on Adriel’s. “Especially this early. Especially given everything. Do you understand how extraordinary that is?”
Adriel looked at him. At the brightness in his eyes, the emotion barely contained in his voice, the way he was holding Adriel’s hand like it was something he’d never let go of.
