Page 135 of Safe Word

I was my own – unbroken, unbound, unleashed.

Or so I told myself.

Until he appeared in my vision with shadows reclaiming his large form. He stepped out from behind the mirror, emerging from the bathroom.

Slowing his steps, he raised his chin – still beneath the mask – and drank me in from head to toe, as if trying to memorise every inch.

His gaze lingered on the red streaks left by the flogger, then climbed up to the crescent bite marks blooming on my shoulder where the bruises painted a confession into my skin. His fists balled at his sides, as if he were battling something I couldn’t see.

The breeze from the open window whipped at my bare skin like a slap of reality.

I didn’t know what possessed me when I whispered, ‘I love them.’

It startled even me. But I didn’t take the words back.

His breath ceased. For several heartbeats, I couldn’t see his chest moving.

‘I don’t know why,’ I said, ‘but you set me free with everything you do.’

He let out a long, slow exhale. And I couldn’t tell if it had been a sigh of relief or the weight of something too heavy to carry.

‘That freedom had always been yours, little angel.’ His voice was low and measured. He inhaled and held there for a beat. ‘I didn’t give you freedom – I just cracked the walls until you could see it for yourself.’

My lips parted, a thousand words tangled on the tip of my tongue. His black scleral lenses caught the neon scatter of the city outside, and it made them seem like endless, inhuman voids.

Then I realised—

‘You’re clothed.’ The words stumbled out as I stared at the jeans hugging his hips, the black long-sleeve tee stretched tight over the sculpted planes of his chest down to his wrists.

He said nothing. Just stood there, unmoving, and I stared, and stared – until awareness crawled in unwelcome. All the way into my throat.

Tears pressed against my lids, and I pushed them back with a shaky breath that followed a that hollow kind of shame for tethering myself to a stranger.

‘You’re not coming back.’ I swayed where I stood, the words breaking apart even as they formed.

And we both knew they were true.

‘No,’ he breathed.

The breeze suddenly felt colder, stripping away the last of the warmth.

‘Why?’ I whispered, hating the tremor in my voice, hating how small and selfish it sounded.

And how much the answer mattered.

He turned slowly, without a word, scooping up the duffel with that signature calm of his. Then headed for the door – not looking back.

Not even once.

My feet refused to move. My hands began to shake, and every inch of me burned with the ghost of his touch. Every mark, every sting, every place he’d claimed now ached with his absence. An impossible urge to chase after him flared between my ribs.

And then the door clicked shut.

He was gone.

It felt like a tether snapped – not just absence, but loss. But in the quiet that followed, something else settled in its place… what he had left behind.

Freedom. Self-worth. The echo of a voice that had forced me to see myself stripped to the bone and still unbroken. Washed in pain, cleansed in sin.