Chapter 25 Mehar
MEHAR
It made me uncomfortable that he left in the middle of the night.
Not because he left—men leave, that’s what they do—but because I didn’t feel him go.
An orgasm had knocked me out so completely that this man had carried me to my bedroom, tucked me into my own sheets, and walked out of my apartment without me so much as flinching.
I didn’t hear his footsteps. Didn’t hear the door close.
For a woman who slept with a gun on her nightstand and woke up at the sound of a tree branch hitting the window, that was terrifying.
It also meant I trusted him. And that was even more terrifying.
His text was on my phone when I rolled over. Had an early morning. Didn’t want to wake you. I’ll call you later.
Oddly, I felt sad that he was gone. The apartment felt different without him in it, bigger and quieter, like the air itself missed him.
I needed to get him out of my head because I had a full day—class this morning and a new client session tonight—and I couldn’t afford to be floating around on some post-orgasm cloud when I needed to be focused.
I got up, brushed my teeth, washed my face, stared at myself in the mirror.
Same face. Same eyes. But something behind them looked softer than yesterday and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
I showered, moisturized, threw on leggings and an oversized crewneck because it was a school day and Mrs. Pak didn’t care what I looked like as long as my hands were steady.
Box braids into a high bun. Minimal makeup. Gold studs. Out the door.
My phone buzzed while I was in the car.
Quest: Can’t get the taste of you off my tongue
I almost rear-ended the car in front of me.
I pulled over to the curb because I was not about to crash my Honda over a text message, no matter how nasty it was.
I sat there for a second with my cheeks on fire and my pussy tingling and I hated this man for being able to do this to me with emojis.
Emojis. I was a whole dominatrix who made men crawl on concrete and this nigga had me blushing at a peach and a tongue.
I sent back because I refused to give him anything more than that. He didn’t need encouragement. His ego was big enough to have its own zip code.
Class went well. Four hours of advanced chemical peel application and Mrs. Pak only yelled at one student, which was a record.
She complimented my technique on a glycolic treatment and I filed that away in the part of my brain that collected evidence that I was building something real.
The medspa was getting closer. Every class, every practical, every A, was another brick in the foundation.
By the time class let out around one, I was feeling good.
Centered. The sun was out. My skin looked great.
My grades were up. A man I was starting to care about had his face between my legs last night and told me I tasted good.
The bar was literally on the floor for my happiness and today it was being cleared with room to spare.
And then I walked into the parking lot and saw Judge Timothy Baker leaning against my car.
My entire mood collapsed like a building demolition.
He was in his court clothes, dark suit, no robe obviously, but the conservative tie and polished shoes that screamed federal judiciary.
His eyes were red and swollen. His hair was slightly disheveled, which for a man who usually looked like he’d been pressed by a dry cleaner before breakfast was deeply alarming.
He looked like he’d been crying in his Jaguar for the last four hours, which he very well might have been.
“Dame CoCo,” he whispered when I got close enough. “Please. I need to talk to you.”
“My name is not Dame CoCo right now. And you are standing next to my car at my school. How the fuck did you find me here, Timothy?”
“I followed you last week. From the dungeon. I just wanted to see where you went. I wasn’t going to approach you, but I can’t take it anymore. You blocked me. You won’t answer my calls. I’ve been losing my mind.”
“You followed me.” I let those words settle between us. “A federal judge followed a woman to her school and is now ambushing her in a parking lot. Do you understand how insane that sounds?”
“I know, I know, and I’m sorry, but please—” He dropped to his knees.
In the parking lot. On the asphalt. In his two-thousand-dollar suit.
In broad daylight with students walking to their cars ten feet away.
His hands were clasped in front of him and his chin was trembling and he looked up at me with the most pathetic expression I had ever seen on a human face, and I had seen a lot of pathetic expressions because I charged men money to make them.
“Take me back,” he begged. “Please. I’ll pay whatever you want. I’ll double the rate. Triple it. I’ll do anything. I can’t function without our sessions. I haven’t slept in days. I can’t concentrate on the bench.
“Get up off the ground, Timothy.”
“Not until you agree to see me again.” Tears were streaming down his face now.
Actual tears. A man who decided the fate of felony cases was kneeling on asphalt outside a beauty school sobbing into his own necktie.
“I need you. You don’t understand. Nobody makes me feel the way you do. Nobody sees me the way you do.”
“I see you as a paycheck, Timothy. That’s literally all this is.”
“I don’t care! I don’t care if it’s transactional. I’ll pay for your attention for the rest of my life if that’s what it takes.” He pulled out his phone with shaking hands. “Here. Right now. Five thousand. Ten. How much do you want?”
My CashApp notification went off. $5,000 from Timothy B.
“No!” I said. “I don’t want your money. I want you to get off the ground and leave. Now.”
“Please, Dame CoCo, please—”
“Timothy, listen to me very carefully.” I stepped closer and dropped my voice low enough that only he could hear.
“You have shown up to my school. My real life. Where I am a student, not a dominatrix. You have compromised my identity, my safety, and my privacy. If you ever show up here again, or at my home, or anywhere that is not the dungeon during a scheduled session, I will send every text, every CashApp receipt, and every piece of evidence I have to the Washington Post, the DC Bar Association, and your wife’s attorney.
Your career will be over. Your marriage will be over.
Your reputation will be a punchline. Do you understand me? ”
His face went white. The crying stopped.
“Now get up. Get in your Jaguar. Drive back to whatever courthouse you came from. And lose the address to this school.”
He stood up slowly, his knees cracking, asphalt dust on his suit pants. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and looked at me with an expression that cycled through about eight emotions before landing on something that was halfway between devastation and worship.
“I love you,” he said. “You will take me back. You will love me.”
“Timothy, you are a sixty-one-year-old federal judge crying in a beauty school parking lot. The only person who needs to love you is a therapist. Go home.”
He turned and walked toward his Jaguar, which was parked three rows over. Halfway there he turned back and screamed, loud enough for the two girls walking to their car to look over in alarm, “YOU WILL LOVE ME, DAME COCO!”
“Lord Jesus,” I muttered, getting in my car as fast as I could.
My phone buzzed. Another CashApp. $1,000 from Timothy B. With a note: For calling me pathetic. Thank you. I needed that. Please beat me. Please pee on me. I’m begging you.
I stared at the notification, looked up at the ceiling of my car, took a deep breath, and started the engine. The beauty of findom was that the money came whether I wanted it to or not. The horror of findom was that the men came whether I wanted them to or not.
That evening I was at the dungeon for a new client. The booking had come through my encrypted app a few days ago. It was a first-time session, paid the consultation fee upfront without negotiating, which told me he had money and wasn’t intimidated by the price. The name on the booking was Mr. Rios.
He arrived at six sharp. When I opened the camera feed to check him, the man standing outside was not what I expected. Most of my clients were soft. Doughy corporate types with bad posture and expensive watches who wanted to feel something other than powerful for an hour. Mr. Rios was not that.
He was tall, maybe six-two, with a lean, athletic build.
Dominican or Puerto Rican, with dark hair slicked back and a jawline that could’ve been on a magazine cover.
He was wearing a tailored black suit with no tie, the top button undone.
His watch was an Audemars, which I recognized because Quest wore one.
And there was something in his eyes when I let him in—something behind the polite smile and the respectful nod—that wasn’t soft at all.
It was calculating. Measured. Dangerous in a way I couldn’t quite place but could absolutely feel.
“Mr. Rios,” I said from the throne. “Welcome. You know the rules?”
“I read them,” he said. His voice was smooth with just enough accent to make it interesting. “No touching. No eye contact. Pay tribute before speaking.” He pulled out his phone and CashApped me a thousand dollars without being told the amount. “I hope that’s sufficient.”
It was more than sufficient. It was confident.
He wasn’t groveling. He wasn’t nervous. He was transacting business with the same energy you’d use to buy a building, which made sense because when I’d Googled him the night before, Mateo Rios came up as a real estate developer with properties across the DMV.
Luxury condos, mixed-use developments, a few commercial properties in areas that were suspiciously close to neighborhoods I knew were connected to money laundering.
I couldn’t prove that last part and it wasn’t my business, but my radar had been tuned to dangerous men for long enough that I could spot one from across a room.
The session was professional. He followed every rule without needing to be reminded.
He paid every penalty without hesitation.
He didn’t cry, didn’t beg, didn’t fall apart the way most first-timers did.
He took the humiliation with a stillness that unnerved me slightly because it felt less like submission and more like a man choosing to kneel rather than being forced to.
There’s a difference, and the difference mattered.
When the session ended, he dressed, paid the exit fee, and stopped at the door.
“Same time next week?” he asked.
“If you can afford it.”
“I can afford anything.” He smiled, and there it was again—that thing behind his eyes that I couldn’t name but my body recognized as a warning. “Thank you, Dame CoCo. This was exactly what I needed.”
He left. I sat on the throne and stared at the door he’d walked through and thought about the distance between the man who’d just left my dungeon and the man who’d been between my thighs last night.
Would Quest be okay with this? With knowing that the woman he’d laid down and kissed and made cum on her own couch spent her evenings in a leather catsuit telling men to crawl?
That she charged them for the privilege of breathing her air?
That a federal judge had screamed “I love you” at her in a parking lot this afternoon and another man with dangerous eyes had just paid a thousand dollars to kneel?
I thought about it for exactly three seconds and then I stopped.
Who cares what he thinks? This was my life. My money. My dungeon. My throne. He didn’t control me. No man did. Not my father, not Ahmad, not Thad in his cage, and not Quest Banks with his cognac and his cufflinks and his tongue that I could still feel if I thought about it too hard.
I changed out of the catsuit. Wiped the makeup. Drove home.
But the question followed me all the way to my apartment and sat with me while I locked the door and turned off the lights and got into the bed that still smelled like his cologne from the night before.