Chapter 25 #2
I place my hands on her shoulders, right at the collarbones, my thumbs resting over the first tie.
I lean down and kiss a different part of her shoulder after every few words.
“The people who feel loneliest in a crowded room are often the ones who learned that being seen and being known are two very different things.”
Grabbing her chin I guide her face up to mine, kissing her softly while murmuring, “I don’t only see you, Catalina, I know you.”
We stay like that, in the half-light, not speaking, just breathing in the same uneven rhythm. Her pulse is visible, a flutter at her throat.
After a while, she says my name. Just once, quiet. “Aiden.”
I answer her by turning and pulling her forward, arms around her, every knot pressing between us. I hold her until she starts to shake, and then I hold her tighter.
There is nothing to watch us but the mirrors, and nothing to say except what’s already written in rope and skin.
For the first time, I’m not trying to impress, or control, or test her. I’m just here, with her, the way I always wanted but never dared to need.
She lets herself be held, and I let myself hold her, and the difference between restraint and release is less than the width of a knot.
We don’t move until the lines on her skin start to fade. Even then, I don’t want to let go.
The first thing I learned about aftercare was this: untying is a different kind of intimacy, and it shows you everything you missed the first time around.
I start at her wrists, working the knots loose with deliberate slowness, careful not to pull her skin. Her hands are flushed, the indentation of the jute precise and beautiful. I check her fingers, she curls them, flexes, offers me a shaky thumbs-up. I don’t laugh, but I want to.
Each pass of rope gets the same attention. Shoulders, chest, ribs, everywhere the rope pressed, I let my thumbs circle the marks, warming them back to normal. Cat doesn’t flinch. She watches my face, not her own body, as if the real show is what I’ll do next.
The silk comes off last. I peel it away from her sternum and hold it in my hands for a second, then wind it into a loose coil and set it on the platform between us. Her breathing is slow, deep. The tears on her face have dried, but she doesn’t wipe them away.
When she’s free, she rolls her shoulders, then stands up on the platform, naked except for the faint gridwork of lines left by the session. She watches me clean up, the way I organize the ropes, stack them, check for stray fibers. I can feel her attention, like a charge at my back.
I kneel to clear the last piece of rope and when I look up, she’s closer than I thought. She bends, reaches for my face, and slides my glasses off with two fingers. She sets them on the shelf above my head, then says, “You wore the jacket the whole time.”
I look at her, and at the platform, and then at my hands. “I didn’t want—” I start, but I don’t finish.
She laughs, short and wet, then pulls at the lapels and yanks me up to her level. She kisses me, nothing showy or rough, just skin, and heat, and yes, please, more. I taste salt on her lips, but she doesn’t care, and neither do I.
We collapse together onto the platform, the ropes coiling around us.
I shrug out of the jacket, then the shirt, and she runs her hands over my chest like she’s searching for an answer.
The sex isn’t wild or even rough. It’s just us, side by side, knotted in limbs, saying everything we can’t with language.
It lasts forever and also no time at all.
After, we lie on our backs, the leather cool under us, nothing but the residual hum of adrenaline and the echo of our breathing to fill the room.
Cat runs a finger along one of the rope burns on her forearm. “This is going to last a week,” she says, almost proud.
“Longer if you’re careful,” I reply.
She grins, eyes half-lidded. “You know I’m not careful.”
We lie there for a while, and I think about what it means to keep someone, really keep them, not just in a room or a bed but in all the small ways that accumulate into meaning.
I get up, put the jacket back on, and go to the top drawer of the cabinet. I take out the thing I made last night, before I could talk myself out of it, a key, looped and lashed into a palm-sized monkey’s fist of red silk. I turn it in my fingers before walking back to her.
She sits cross-legged on the platform, knees to her chest, watching me approach.
I set the knot in her open palm. “Move in,” I say. Just that.
Cat closes her fist around the knot, tight. Her mouth twitches, then she goes very still. I see the pulse at her neck, strong and sure.
She looks at the knot for a long time, then at me. And for once, there is nothing in her face but honesty, no performance, no deflection, no armor. I think I see her decide, right in front of me.
She smiles then, a real one, and tucks the knot against her chest, where the rope marks are already fading.
“I will,” she says. “But I’m bringing more plants.”
I laugh. “Whatever you want.”
She stands, puts my glasses back on me, and kisses me once, sweet and uncalculated.
When we leave the room, the ropes are still on the platform, a tangle of red and tan and silk, evidence of something built to last.
Her hand is in mine, warm, alive, impossible to mistake for anything but real. I glance at us in the mirrored wall as we exit and can’t help but acknowledge, this is love.