Page 19 of Safe Word

I didn’t bother with the title. Didn’t give a fuck about her pen name. My fingers flipped over to the trigger warnings.

The usual suspects were there – violence, breath play, degradation. Then the deeper cuts: coercion. Captivity.

My body followed a few seconds in front of my thoughts – dumber than my instincts.

Self-harm, predator-prey…

And there it was—

Knife kink. My thoughts stilled. My breath too.

My thumb hovered over the next line: consensual-non-consent with psychological conditioning.

Fuck. Me.

I wrote about those things. I lived that.

My stomach twisted from the way my body responded. As if it recognised her. As if we had both been carved from the same kind of broken.

Shifting again, slower this time, I flipped to the prose to make it seem I was reading instead of trying to breathe through the throb low in my gut. My pulse was in my ears now. And my dick. And my fucking tongue.

I focused on the words as they jumped off the page. They felt familiar in tone and theme – dark and vivid, twisted in ways that almost mirrored my own work.

‘That’s one of my best-sellers,’ she said, her tone even, though her eyes betrayed a hint of pride. ‘You’ll find the trigger warnings are similar to yours.’

No shit. My throbbing hard-on and the momentary moral crisis completely agreed with her.

My focus was split between the text on the page and the slow, insistent pulse in my body. I stretched my feet to the side to avoid squirming, desperate for some relief. Vinnie, the arsehole, didn’t miss it.

He winked.

Now wasn’t the time for his mockery.

And as I refocused on her, I realised that this interview suddenly mattered to me. From the few passages I’d read, it was clear she wasn’t afraid of the dark corners of storytelling. She embraced the need to confront uncomfortable truths. And just maybe, she could understand me.

‘Well, that’s a start,’ I said, leaning back and studying her more intently. ‘So you think you can handle the kind of work I do?’

Her lips curved just slightly – a hint of a smirk, too self-aware to be sweet. ‘I think the real question is whether you’re ready to let someone else into your world.’

She didn’t blink when she said it. No twitch, no shift, no sign of unease. She didn’t even try to soften it with a laugh or a nervous glance – just threw it out like a fucking gauntlet.

Something in me snapped taut.

It wasn’t just that she was a pretty face – though she was in that clean-lined, no-nonsense way that made me want to rip all that order right out of her. It wasn’t even that she was probably as unhinged as I was.

It was the fact that she knew her worth. She was like a loaded weapon – held steady, safety off, and pointed straight at me.

Hope?

No, this wasn’t hope.

It was threat. Sprinkled with something that made me want to bite into it.

And after blue-balling it through Scarlett’s session last night, I was fucking starving.

It was Vinnie’s turn to discreetly adjust his slacks.

‘Can I keep this?’ I asked quickly, turning the book over to glance at the back cover. My fingers traced the blurb absent-mindedly, though my thoughts were already racing ahead.