Chapter 44 – Aurora #2
He gives me more: a slow, deliberate trail up the inside of my thighs, stopping where I want in a way that makes me want more in a way that makes me show more.
I press into the leather at my ankles and the anchor at my wrists and the space between those points becomes a place instead of a measurement.
My body finds its shape inside the confines like water finding the bowl that’s always been waiting for it.
I lose track of time. The room narrows to cadence—feather, palm; pressure, release; voice, breath.
He keeps me here with commands that are almost instructions for living.
“Chin down.” “Let your mouth unhook.” “Breathe into my hand.” “Tell me what you want.” I start to answer in real words.
“Lower.” “Slower.” “There.” Later I hear myself say “More,” and I say it again immediately because I like the sound of it in my own mouth.
“Good,” he says, and the word rewards me and winds me further down at the same time.
He unhooks the connector from the anchor.
My arms lower. His fingers work the buckles quickly and the cuffs come off as if they were never there.
For a second my wrists feel cold naked. “Hands behind your back,” he says, quiet.
“Don’t force it.” He binds them there, not tight, just enough to make me conscious of the fact that I am not using them to manage anything.
The blindfold makes the act feel like a curtain rising; the suede makes it feel like I bought a ticket to the show.
He turns me by the hips and sets me forward a half-step.
I lean into the leather column without being told because now I know the difference between giving and being taken.
When his chest meets my back, his breath hits my ear and I stop thinking.
His mouth doesn’t touch me. The restraint and nearness do.
“Tell me you can breathe,” he murmurs. The backs of his knuckles skim my ribs like he’s reading braille.
“I can breathe,” I whisper, and then, because honesty regenerates in this room like a cut under clean water, “I am.”
His hand cups the base of my skull through my hair, not pushing, just holding.
The other travels down, over the lines of me he already mapped with feather and palm, lower, patient.
I arch without meaning to, and the sound that breaks out of me is a small proof that my body knows what it wants even when my mouth is slow to admit it.
He works me there with the same focus he used at my shoulder—measured, present, asking for feedback in breath and muscle before he asks for it in words.
When he finds an angle that makes my mouth drop open without language, he stays and lets me ride it until the electricity turns warm.
“Good,” he says again, and I resent how easily the syllable turns me inside out while I try to maintain a thin strand of complaint that I came here to be difficult, to be contrary, to test him and myself and this.
The complaint burns off like fog under heat.
There’s only wanting and his willingness to keep it company.
He slides a hand under me, low, supporting rather than taking.
He says what he’s going to do and then does it, each detail narrated in a voice that knows exactly where my fear lives and steps around it without letting me lie to myself about its existence.
When it begins—when he pushes me open with patience that feels like reverence and pressure that feels like gravity—my breath stutters so hard he stops.
“Color,” he says, immediate.
I know he’s checking t make sure I’m okay.
The question wraps around the back of my heart.
“Here,” I say, but my voice is tight, and I find out something about myself at that edge: old memory will try to burst its banks when new pleasure pushes floodwater down the same riverbed.
He knows it too; I can tell by the way his hands rebracket me—sternum and lower belly now—and by the way his breath moves in my ear as if he can blow the ghosts out from behind my eyes.
“Say blue,” he murmurs. “If that’s what you need.”
The power in the option is as intense as anything he’s done with his hands. I grip it and look at it and then, for reasons I will only understand later when I’m not inside the blindfold, I test the shape of it. “Blue,” I whisper.
He stops. Instantly. The sensation that was building collapses without hurting.
The absence is a kind of proof I didn’t know I craved.
His mouth finds my hairline and does nothing but breathe.
His hand moves from where it was to my forearm and strokes down slow.
“Good,” he says, and the praise makes tears sting the back of my eyes. “You’re safe.”
I swallow. I am. I didn’t know until now that safety could feel like this—permission to interrupt what I want to make sure I still have what I need.
He waits for me to come back to baseline.
I can feel the patience in the space between us, a quiet, sturdy enough to hold both of us, and that’s when the tears slip out from under the blindfold.
They are not dramatic. They are not a collapse.
They are edges softening where I have kept them hard for too long.
“I want you to keep going,” I say, when my throat opens around the words.
“Say it the way you want it,” he answers.
“I want you to keep going,” I repeat, and then, because I can, “Please.”
He doesn’t make a noise that tells me how the please lands in his body, but his hands do—they move with more certainty, as if the room shifted and showed him a new angle where the floor is smoother.
He brings me back slowly, not trying to make up for the interruption, not punishing me for it.
The blindfold turns what he does into blackness again.
The feather returns for a pass so light it almost undoes me, and then his palm replaces it, and the pattern becomes something the animal in me trusts.
He unhooks my wrists. My arms float forward like I’m under water.
“Hands here,” he instructs, guiding them to the leather, splayed.
“Ground.” I do it, grateful for instruction in a way that embarrasses me less than it should.
He nudges my ankles wider and the straps at my feet become chalk lines I stay within willingly rather than fences I press against.
When he enters me again, he does it with a patience that makes the room feel bigger instead of smaller.
I go up on my toes without thinking and he anchors me down by the hips.
“Breathe,” he says, and I do, and this time the rush doesn’t blow out the edges of the past. It blows past them.
His mouth is at my ear now, not talking, just there as a place my breath can aim.
He moves, steady and sure, and the heat he draws up in me is the kind that doesn’t flare and go out—it builds, a tide that drags at bone before it spills.
I don’t know when I start saying yes. It isn’t a word so much as a shape my mouth holds through an exhale while my hands clutch the column, and I abandon the habit of checking the door with my ears.
There is no door here, not for me. There is only this body and this man and the way I am allowed to want without being punished for it or asked to turn it into currency.
He says my name once, quiet. It makes me shudder more than touch does.
He keeps me on the edge for a time that stretches and contracts; the blindfold breaks my clock in the best way.
When he finally pushes me past it, the sound that leaves me is honest and indecent and not for anyone outside this room.
I break open on that breath with the feeling of falling that I always hated in life and have never allowed myself to trust until now.
This time the fall is into arms, into leather, into a mat that gives, into myself.
He holds me there, moving through the last of it with a control I have never seen on anyone’s face except in the mirror when I am painting and something comes true under my hand.
He slows. He stills. We breathe. He doesn’t leave me, he doesn’t leave me. The sentence repeats, a drum under the evaporating thunder, and then I realize my mouth is forming words against his wrist where he holds me: “Thank you,” like a prayer and a dare.
The cuffs come off. The blindfold lifts.
Light pours into me too fast and then settles into honey.
He turns me carefully, hands at my waist, and lowers me to the mat with a tenderness that isn’t show.
I curl before I even mean to and he fits himself around the curl, not prying it open, just fitting.
The room spins once and stops. My eyes find his, and it’s almost obscene how intimate it feels after everything else.
“What was that?” My voice is a wreck, but I don’t care. It feels right that it would be ruined.
“Therapy,” he says, and his mouth quirks at one corner, not a smile, more like a tell. Then, softer, “And you.”
I laugh and it breaks at the end into something that might be crying and might be relief. He does not name it. He strokes my hair back from my face with fingers that smell faintly of oil and my skin. The smell is both foreign and mine. I didn’t know scent could feel proprietary.
He gave me a ritual, and I gave him my ghosts.
The suite took both and gave us back something that feels like a beginning rather than an ending.
I’m an artist; I should know better than to declare what a work means before it’s done.
But tonight, blindfold off and eyes open, I let myself write the caption anyway, if only to keep my hands from shaking:
I’m not just inside his world now.
He’s inside mine.