Page 57 of Mister St. James

We don’t fuck, not tonight. We just lie there, tethered together by hands and heartbeats, until the city outside goes silent and the sun starts creeping up the windows.

When I wake, he’s gone from the bed, but there’s a cup of coffee on the nightstand and a note tucked under it. My name, in his impossible handwriting. Underneath: “Survival is a joint venture. I’ll see you at work.”

I drink the coffee, black with one teaspoon of sugar, and smile so hard my face hurts.

The cactus sits in the kitchen window, catching the sunrise. I think it looks better here.

I think I do, too.

Chapter twenty-five

The Offering

Aiden

Every evening since the cactus, I’ve found myself orbiting the locked door. I run scenario trees in my head. How long will Cat let it sit unopened, if she’ll ever ask, if she’ll care enough to press, or if she’ll forget it the way people forget the signature on a painting they already like. I want her to ask. But I want her to never need to.

Tonight, she’s sprawled across my couch in what passes for pajamas: yoga shorts and a crop top, the latter a size too small and featuring a faded logo from a band I’m ninety-percent sure she doesn’t even like. Her hair is up, but loose—she always does that after nine. Her bare legs are propped on the armrest, one foot flicking in rhythm to music that’s only in her head.

She’s reading, the book spine bent all the way back and around, pages wrinkled and folded. I know she knows I’m watching but she makes a show of ignoring it.

I want to simultaneously destroy her in every filthy way possible while also pulling her into my arms and protecting her from the world and I don’t know what to do with that. So I just let it linger in the back of my mind.

I hover in the threshold, considering the playbook. Instead, I just say, “Come with me.”

She doesn’t ask where. She marks her place, stands, and pads over barefoot, stretching her arms overhead in a move designed to draw my eyes to the bare swell under her breasts. I let her have the win.

I lead her down the hall, past the monastic whiteness of my office, past the bedroom, to the spare door. She’s passed it a hundred times and never bothered to test the knob. She’s never even asked why it’s locked.

Tonight, I unlock it. The key is weighted, familiar. I open the door, but I don’t step in. I gesture for her to go first.

Cat hesitates at the threshold. The lights are set low, triggered by motion, so the room fades up in increments: first the perimeter, then the center, then the far wall, all at once and slow as sunrise.

She steps in. Stops. For once, she doesn’t have a line ready.

The room is nothing like the rest of the penthouse. I gutted it six months ago, before I ever let her stay the night, before the first time she left a bra on the bathroom door handle and dared me to make a scene. The floors are black walnut, finished in a matte oil that makes them look soft even when they’re freezing. Against the east wall, custom cabinetry runs the length of the space, floor to ceiling, with glass-front compartments holding rope in every conceivable weight and weave: jute, silk, Egyptian cotton, twisted hemp. Each coil is looped in a figure eight and secured with a hand-tied Turk’s head knot. I arranged them by color and thickness, even though nobody ever would have noticed but me.

Two steel anchor points are sunk into the ceiling joists, their rigging perfectly aligned with the padded platform at the center of the room. The platform itself is rectangular, low, and surfaced in black leather. There is no other furniture.

Instead of a window, there is a wall of mirrors. But it’s just mirrors—no two-way, no audience. Just the room, and the work, and whatever truth comes out under the pressure of rope and skin.

The only thing out of place is the thin velvet rope barrier I put up across the platform. I thought about making a sign, “Exhibit in Progress,” but apparently even I have a threshold for how much of an asshole I want to be.

Cat doesn’t say anything. She walks in, slow, her bare feet whispering over the wood. She traces a fingertip along the edge of the cabinet, then opens one, lifts out a length of red silk, lets it pour through her hands like water. She tests its stretch, its memory. She glances up at the suspension point, eyes narrowing, calculating span and drop.

I watch from the doorway, hands in my pockets. I leave the jacket on. It’s armor.

After a long silence, I say, “This isn’t the club. There’s no scene, no voyeurs, no one waiting for a show.”

She sets the coil down on the platform. She doesn’t turn around.

“Then what is this?” she asks. Her voice is half-whisper, like she’s afraid to echo.

I hesitate. Words are always harder than knots.

“It’s just ours,” I say. “Only ours.”

She runs both hands over her face, then back through her hair, and finally turns to look at me. She’s not smiling. She’s not anything, at first. Then her throat works, and her eyes flare. She looks down at the platform, at the silk coil, at me. A hundred unspoken things pass between us, none of them small.