Chapter 10 #2
"You're staring," she says. Not looking up at me. Looking at the room.
"I'm always staring."
"Usually it's more subtle." Now she tilts her head back. The angle puts the collar on full display, and I don't think the display is accidental. "What are you looking for?"
The honest answer would end the evening. I give her the other one.
"I'm looking at a woman who relaxes at my feet and tenses in a parking lot."
Her expression doesn't shift, but the stillness that replaces it is its own answer. She keeps her face steady because she decides to keep it steady. Not because I missed.
"Parking lots are poorly lit," she says. "This room has excellent lighting."
"And excellent security."
"That too." She looks up at me again, and this time the angle carries something sharper than deflection.
"You know, for a man who insists on control, you spend a lot of time trying to get me to volunteer information.
If you want to know something, Sebastien, give me an order. See if that works better."
The words land precisely where she aimed them.
The dare underneath is specific: you can command my body but you can't command my trust. And we both know which one I actually want.
"Noted," I say. The word is drier than I intended.
"Noted." She turns back to the room. The faintest edge of satisfaction at the corner of her mouth. She knows she scored.
Relaxed here. Vigilant everywhere else. These walls make her safe. Whatever is outside them doesn't.
The woman in my collar is managing a problem alone. That's not how I want this to work.
The collar isn't decoration. It's an agreement, and I've discovered I want more from that agreement than I wrote into it.
She hasn't given me more. And the contract doesn't entitle me to demand it. That's the part that's grinding.
When the evening winds down, I take the collar off in the corridor. My fingers at the back of her neck. The lock releases. The ruby leaves her skin. I fold the collar into my jacket.
The ritual is the same as every other time. Except she walks out with whatever she's holding, and the contract I wrote doesn't give me the authority to stop her.
At the car, I open her door. She settles behind the wheel.
Jeans and fitted jacket, the street clothes she changed into.
Already the woman in front of me looks different from the one who knelt at my feet wearing a corset and collar.
Put together differently. Contained by her own choices rather than mine.
The version of Natalie that faces the world without my structure.
The impulse to pull her out of this car and back inside the club is sharp enough that I feel it in my hands.
I lean down to the window. Close enough that she has to tilt her chin up. Close enough to see the bare skin where the collar sat all evening.
"Lock your doors."
The corner of her mouth shifts. Almost a smile. "Every time."
"Every time." I hold the position a beat longer than the instruction requires. Let her feel the proximity. Let her decide what to do with it. "I don't like the distance between this car and the door to the club."
"You've mentioned."
"I'll keep mentioning."
Her eyes hold mine. The dare from the booth is still there, banked but present.
Then she puts the car in gear, and I step back because the alternative is reaching through the window and turning off the ignition.
She pulls out, and I stay where I am and watch her go.
Just before the turn, her head swivels. Left, right, the mirrors, the gaps between parked cars. Deliberate. Thorough.
That sweep has nothing to do with the dark or being a woman alone at night. She's done it every time since I first noticed the change.
I stand in the entrance longer than the moment requires. The air is heavy with river water, magnolia and the sounds of the night.
Five years I told myself the booth was enough. The scotch and the watching and the careful remove from anything that required more than observation. I built the collar contract with that same restraint—clean, boundaried, controlled.
Control is what I practice. What I applied to Natalie's body while she was bound in my rope, and the application was flawless.
The control I'm exercising right now is the opposite of flawless. I'm standing on the sidewalk watching her drive away from my protection into whatever she's not telling me about. The only thing stopping me from calling Luc is a clause I wrote when I still believed distance was sustainable.
I get in the car. The drive to the Lower Garden District is short this time of night, and I spend every minute of it not calling Luc.
The townhouse is quiet when I lock the door behind me and head to the study.
Scotch on the shelf. Better than what I order at the club. I pour two fingers and carry it to the desk.
The glass from the shibari night is in the kitchen, washed now. I'd stared at the unwashed glass for two days before I realized I was treating it like evidence.
My desk is clear except for the lamp and a legal pad. I've used it before.
Years ago, after Elysium closed, I sat at this desk and wrote down everything I remembered. The fragments. The questions. The proximity. I went through this exercise and came up empty because there was no pattern. Just guilt looking for a shape.
I pick up a pen.
The fragments haven't changed. What's changed is the variable I didn't have before.
I write:
A submissive asked me a question at Elysium.
A woman whose name I never knew. She wanted to know whether trust should feel the way hers felt.
Whether what she was carrying was normal or a warning.
I told her unease in a new dynamic is common.
That was true. It was also insufficient.
Her death was ruled accidental. The investigation was thorough. Nobody argued with the findings.
A different submissive left the community without explanation. Packed her locker. Didn't say goodbye. Nobody followed up. Privacy is the product at any lifestyle club, and respecting someone's departure was treated as courtesy rather than negligence. People leave. It happens.
An incident. A scene that went wrong, attributed to miscommunication.
The Dom involved was contrite and cooperative.
The submissive didn't come back. The safety committee reviewed protocols.
Gaudet chaired the review. Andy handled the member interviews.
étienne provided the room logs. Both parties corroborated the miscommunication.
At Elysium, everybody's name appeared somewhere if you looked long enough. Gaudet's appeared often enough that I noticed. Not often enough that noticing meant anything. Comforting. Explaining. Smoothing. Not at the center. At the edges.
The same fragments I wrote down years ago. The same list that refused to resolve. Each piece had a perfectly reasonable explanation at the time.
But now:
Natalie Chastain asks questions about Elysium that go beyond the book she described. Whatever she's actually looking for, it overlaps with my old fragments.
Gaudet is collecting oral histories from the same people Natalie gravitates toward. Generous. Consistent with who he is. Also consistent with a man who wants to know what stories are being told and to whom.
Natalie is concealing something outside Dominion. She scans the street before she gets in her car. Her phone behavior has changed. Cole noticed the scanning. When I gave her the opening to tell me, she closed it with the precision of a practiced answer.
I set the pen down. The old fragments and the new observations sit on the same page. They don't form a picture. Not yet. They form the border of one, edge pieces whose center is still scattered. But the border is tighter than it was years ago because of her.
What I suspect: Natalie is looking for answers about Elysium. Gaudet keeps appearing near the questions she's asking. She's concealing a problem she doesn't trust me with. And she's chosen to manage it alone.
That last line is the one I keep returning to.
I've spent five years watching from a booth, holding fragments, telling myself observation was enough. Telling myself the boundary between my life and the people in it was protection rather than cowardice.
The woman wearing my collar told me she's fine. Everything in her body said otherwise. The contract says within Dominion's walls. The qualifier was supposed to protect us both from exactly this. The moment the boundary stops holding and starts failing.
I pick up my phone.
The clause I wrote says within Dominion's walls. The clause is wrong.
Luc answers on the second ring. The background noise says Dominion.
"You busy?"
"Depends." His voice carries the particular neutrality that means he's already reading tone.
"I need another set of eyes on something."
The pause is brief. Luc doesn't waste time asking whether it's important. I don't call. That's the tell, and he reads it cleanly.
"I'll be there in twenty."
The line goes dead. I set the phone on the desk beside the legal pad.
Five years of fragments and one name circled twice on a page that should have been written years ago. Luc is on his way. I pour a bourbon and set it across from my scotch.
For five years, I watched alone. That ends tonight.