- - -?- - -
Time had stopped pretending to move in any direction Tuesday recognized.
There was only the arch of her body. The eternal, architectural fact of her spine bent backward against its own nature, the slow fire radiating outward from nearly every major joint of her body, and some of the minor ones. Her right shoulder burned with a deep, structural ache that had long since passed the point of sharp and settled into something akin to a geological fault line about to break — like pressure that had been building for centuries rather than hours.
And her left hip, connected to her right shoulder through her hand and foot, throbbed in time to her heart.
She’d tried, more times than she could count, to think around the pain. To go somewhere else.
She had not succeeded.
The cinnamon was still there, stronger than ever. She thought it mightalwaysbe there.
She’d tried to track time. She remembered trying. She didn’t remember the specific conclusions she’d reached, only that she’d tried and failed, and there’d been a reason she stopped.
Her free arm was now nothing more than a dead weight. The shoulder ached until it’d become its own separate entity, a passenger she was carrying through whatever this was, its complaints adding to the larger chorus without distinguishing themselves from it.
Her body had become a democracy of pain. Everything had a vote andnothingwas silent.
She was aware, in some distant administrative way, that she could safeword. She heldketchupsomewhere in an offshoot of her brain while her body burned, filed away underdo not press this button under any circumstances.
She wasn’t a quitter, and he had plans for her. She was not a woman who tapped out before the thing was finished. She simply had to hang in his ropes until he decided she’d suffered enough.
Remainingwas the entire job now.
Her wolf was still present, still watching, but in the background. It wasn’therbody hanging in the ropes, and she was interested in this man. Curious about what he did next.
The knot against Tuesday’s clit had stopped being a knot and started being a fact of physics, like gravity and the speed of light. It simply was, and her body had reorganized itself around its permanence.
She had no idea how many times she’d been up and down. She only knew it was hard to find subspace again once he pulled her out of it, and that he kept doing so. Clearly, he wanted her to experience this and not float through it.
She thought about the French toast. The sparkling shiraz chilling in the bowl of ice because he wasn’t a wine person, but he’d gone to the store and asked…
The thought dissolved before she finished it, unraveling into the dark behind the hood.
There was only the arch of her spine, her throbbing shoulder, her strained hip, the cinnamon drowning out allother smells, the silence, the nothing-nothing-nothing of having no information from the world outside her own burning body.
She breathed.
It was the only verb left available to her besides the bad ones: hurt, throb, strain, spasm.
So she focused on the air moving in and out of her body, and tried to ignore what the movement did to all the ropes.
The pain didn’t care. The pain was patient in a way she was beginning to understand was not cruelty but simply the nature of the thing — it would be here when she got to the other side of this, and it would be here during, and there was nothing to do about that except breathe and wait. And not tap out. To trust the man who put her here. To believe he had a plan, and the other side of it would be a payoff.
She breathed.
The ropes held her.
And time did what it wanted.
Chapter 12
Knife kept an eye on the time and saved his game at a natural stopping point about twenty minutes before his phone would go off.
He headed downstairs because she’d need more than mere hydration this time. She was going to need actual calories once the hood came off.
Once in the kitchen, he filled a large cup with electrolyte mix, added ice and a straw, and set it on the counter. He peeled an orange and separated it into sections, and grabbed a few squares of dark chocolate. All would give simple carbs her body could access immediately, and it was a good combination for a foodie.
