Chapter 9
Chapter nine
Red Rope
Aiden
The weight of her body against me feels surreal.
She is limp, pliant, still half-lit from the endorphin blitz, her cheek pressed against my shoulder in a way that makes her look absurdly young.
The room is dark, sound-dampened, no thud of bass, just the wheeze of the ventilation and her uneven breath.
I am careful not to move too quickly. There is a protocol for these things, and I pride myself on knowing it.
But for me, personally, this is not protocol.
This is improvisation. Her thighs are splayed over my lap, skin still prickled where the rope had bit.
I watch the red marks bloom and fade, fingers hovering just above the surface.
I want to touch, to trace the lines, but hesitate.
When in doubt, do nothing. That is lesson one.
I try to remember if I have ever done aftercare like this before.
Holding, waiting, smoothing her hair out of her eyes with a tenderness that feels less clinical, more affectionate.
Normally I prefer my rope bottoms having a designated partner for most of this.
I hand them water, drape a blanket, offer a debrief if they want it and disappear if they do not.
Someone else handles their care once the ropes are removed.
But her, the Scarlet Muse, Catalina my office siren, she lingers. She does not stir, does not immediately inventory her limbs or scan for her clothes. She just breathes, shuddery at first, then steadier, each inhale dragging in more of herself. Each soft breath steals a piece of my soul.
I debate breaking the silence. I want to ask if she’s cold, if she’s thirsty, if she needs me to tell her she did well, if she wants the fantasy to keep running or if it’s okay to just sit here, silent and raw.
I do none of these things. Instead, I offer her a bottle of water from the side table, the cap already twisted off.
She takes it, slow as pouring syrup. Her hand is steady, which surprises me, but her voice is not there yet. She sips, holds the bottle with both hands, and watches me over the rim. The pupils are still wide, eyes unguarded.
I say, “You okay?” before I can stop myself.
She nods, twice, quick and shallow. “Yeah. Good. Just—” She cuts herself off, breathes again. “You didn’t go easy on me.”
I fight down the urge to apologize. “You said not to.”
“That’s what makes it good,” she says, and her lips twitch. Not quite a smile. “You’re very…thorough.”
“Occupational hazard.”
Her head tips back, and for a second I see the edges of the woman I know from nine to five, CEO wrangler, office tactician, champion of email triage. In that look, a flicker of appraisal, of recalibration.
She pushes herself upright, but does not leave my lap.
Instead, she reaches for the blanket I have already tucked around her.
I must have done it without thinking. I adjust it anyway, smoothing the hem over her knees, then, idiotically, do it a second time.
She raises an eyebrow at me, dry as a martini.
“You can stop tucking me in,” she says. “I’m okay.”
My jaw locks for a moment, then I exhale through my nose. “Noted.”
The silence that follows is less charged, more companionable. I rest my elbows on my knees, hands clasped, and wait. She drinks more water. We are not looking at each other, but not looking away, either.
Eventually, she swings her feet to the floor, tests her balance, stands.
The blanket falls, puddling around her ankles, and she is entirely naked except for the indentations of rope and the wildness of her hair.
She bends, retrieves her robe from the floor, still the same woman who orchestrated an entire quarter’s marketing campaign in three days with only caffeine and sarcasm, and shrugs it on.
I watch as she picks up the bundle of rope, coiled on the floor. She cradles it in one arm like a pet. I expect her to hand it back, but she just holds it. Possessive. She looks at me, chin tipped down, eyes almost unreadable in the shadow.
“Do you want it back?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Keep it. You earned it.”
A smile now, small but real. “Thanks.” She knots the sash of the robe and tucks the rope into the crook of her arm.
The dynamic has shifted. I am no longer the operator of her body, just the audience. She walks to the door, then pauses. I can see her debating whether to say something else, but she doesn’t. She just waits for me to catch up.
We leave together, navigating the labyrinth of corridors back toward the main lounge.
The hallway is empty except for us, the only witness is the abstract pattern of carpet and the muffled sound of distant laughter.
I do not touch her. I want to touch her, so fucking bad, but I refrain.
She does not reach for me. Our hands swing inches apart.
When we reach the coat check, she puts the rope in her purse, smooths the hair over her shoulder, and leans in. I think she is going to say my name. She doesn’t. “See you around, Weaver.”
I almost respond with hers, her real one, not the club handle, but stop myself. “Goodnight.”
She is gone before I can rephrase or improve upon it.
I am left standing in the lobby, cold creeping up my neck, hands empty and useless. The urge to text her, to ask if she got home okay, is sudden and visceral, like a muscle spasm. I resist. Barely.
Back on the street, the city’s noise is so loud it makes my ears ring. I walk six blocks to my car, hyper-aware of the drag of my own coat, the echo of her moans and whimpers still inside my skull.
I drive home with both windows down, the air enough to keep me awake.
I replay every minute of the night. Every twitch, every pause, every stupid thing I almost said.
There is no clean endpoint, no catharsis, just the awkward infinity of two people who have seen each other at angles that do not fit the public record.
When I get home, I sit in the car for ten minutes with the engine running, staring at the faint red marks on my wrists from her grip. I do not have words for the feeling. I am not sure I even want them.
Eventually, I kill the lights, go inside and violently assault myself in the shower, before I lie awake until dawn.
The next morning I head down to work early.
My footsteps echo. My own reflection in the elevator’s brushed steel looks like a ghost in a dark suit, no tie, shirtsleeves rolled a measured two turns above the wrist, showing the seam of my watch and the white scar from a childhood kitchen accident.
I unlock my office, turn on the overheads, and spend twenty minutes rearranging nothing.
My desktop is a cleanroom, a shrine to containment.
Four pencils lined to a mechanical engineer’s spec.
Notepad at forty-five degrees, margin aligned with the mousepad.
A single glass of water, refilled and untouched.
I turn the blinds on the wall of windows, calibrate the angle for maximum privacy, minimum glare.
I open my laptop, check the night’s breach logs, scan the Eastern European time stamps for anomalies.
There are none. I know because I checked at 2 a.m., when I woke in a cold sweat with the taste of her still on my tongue.
The real torture starts at 6:31. That’s when the lobby camera feed shows Cat striding toward the elevator, hair a riot, red lips, blazer loose over a black top that does nothing to hide the line of her bra beneath.
I want to believe she does this for herself, that I’m not the center of her gravitational field, but I’ve seen the way she monitors every flicker of my attention.
She’s a mirror, and I’m the animal who can’t stop looking.
I close the feed, ashamed of myself, and scan the project queue.
There are three critical issues: a possible breach in a vendor’s chain, a client angling for early termination, and a legal dispute that could tank Q2 projections.
Any normal executive would triage these.
Instead, I fantasize about calling Cat into my office and tying her hands behind her back with the mouse cord, just to see how long she’d hold out before breaking the silence. Just to see if she’d say thank you.
I force myself to look back at my screen. I type out a list of tasks for her in the shared folder, delete the first draft, write a new one with more polite verbs, less of the imperative mood. I have learned in nine months that Cat does not respond to authority unless it is expressed as a dare.
At 6:42, she walks the thirty steps from her desk to my office with a mug in one hand, a manilla folder in the other.
“Good morning, Mr. St. James,” she says in her usual half flirty tone while setting the mug on my desk.
My coffee is black, one defiant teaspoon of sugar.
The sugar is her signature; I have tried, twice, to tell her not to do it, and both times she shrugged and said, “You like it better this way.” She is right. It infuriates me.
She sets a fresh folder on my desk, then moves to her own workspace. I smell jasmine and a note of burnt sugar, and I want to grab her by the hair and drag her onto my lap. Instead, I pretend to read the folder, focusing on the rows of numbers until they dissolve into nothing.
But then I see it, a scrap of red silk, folded between pages four and five, is a single piece of red rope. Silk, not nylon. Two and a half inches, frayed at one end, coiled into a perfect circle the size of a silver dollar.
There is no note, no flourish. It is not a threat, not even a message. It is a memory, weaponized.
My mouth dries out. I flip the folder closed, pin the silk between thumb and forefinger, and will my face to neutral.
I glance at Cat through the glass wall. She’s already at her desk, typing.
The line of her calf beneath the desk is pure distraction, and I know she’s positioned herself so I can’t miss it.