Chapter 8 #2
I tried to shake it off. I went to YouTube. Searched “ddlg couple real life.” A million hits, but most were garbage. Clickbait. But on the fourth page, there was a video: “Daddy & Little Q&A—No Sex Talk, Just Us.” I clicked it.
The video was eight minutes long. The man was quiet, hands folded, answering the questions only after she looked at him for permission.
The girl glowed, literally glowed. She giggled and fidgeted and kept touching his hand.
He was gentle—never raising his voice, never interrupting.
When she got stuck on a question, he said, “that’s okay, you don’t have to answer.
” She smiled so hard she covered her face.
I watched it twice.
Halfway through the second time, I realized my thighs were pressed together so hard my hamstrings ached. I was clenching, hard. My breath was tight. My mouth was dry.
I was so wet I could feel it, hot, slick, seeping out of me and soaking into the waistband of my sweats.
I had not been this wet in two years. I had not wanted anyone this much in my whole life, not even in the dumb high school way, not even the day I’d first seen my college girlfriend walk into class in her rugby shirt and cutoffs. This was animal. This was real.
I pictured doing all of this with Pietro—his hand, his voice, his accent on the words good girl.
The way he’d looked at me over the rim of his mug, the weight of his gaze like it could pin me to a wall.
I pictured myself in his lap, and my heart did something it had never done before, a double-beat, a skipped gear.
I snapped the laptop closed.
I sat there, shaking.
After a minute, I stood. My legs felt unreliable, like I’d run too far, or like my blood had been replaced by something heavier than itself. I left the kitchen. I went straight to the nursery.
The soft room.
The air in the room was warmer than before. Maybe it was the radiator, maybe it was the way I was burning up from the inside. I walked to the sheepskin rug, sat down, then let myself sink all the way onto my back. My heart was pounding, wild, like it was trying to break out through my ribs.
I closed my eyes. I breathed. I waited for the feeling to pass.
It didn’t.
I lay on the sheepskin rug, still as a corpse, and let the heat work its way through me. The radiator hummed, the city outside threw orange light against the clouds, but in here it was dusk, half-shadows and no sound but my own breathing.
I did not turn the laptop back on. I didn’t need it.
The research was in my bones now, so dense I could have recited the blog posts word for word, the Reddit threads, the fucking bullet points about bedtime and vegetables and the relief of being told no.
My head was a database. It always had been.
But this time, the knowledge was physical.
I tried not to think about him. I failed.
I saw his hands—bigger than mine, the kind of hands that could crush a glass or cradle an egg, the kind that went on piano keys or on the back of my neck.
I saw the bandage, white and clean, across his knuckles where I had bitten him.
I saw his mouth: the curve of it, the threat and the promise, the way it had tasted when I’d kissed him on the street. His mouth was a weapon.
I remembered the voice, too. Not the words, but the cadence.
I remembered what it sounded like when he said my name, careful, with the up-bend at the end.
“Angela.” I heard him say it now, in my head, over and over, softer each time, until it didn’t sound like my name anymore. It just sounded like want.
I tried to make myself small. I curled up, knees to chest, cheek pressed to the wool. I tucked my hands under the edge of the rug, gripping it tight, so tight the muscles in my forearm screamed.
It wasn’t enough.
I rolled to my back, one leg bent, the other flat.
My hands hovered above my belly, then slid under my shirt.
My ribs were visible, the skin pulled tight.
I traced the line down the center, not thinking, just cataloging sensation: warm, then cold, then the tremor that started under my ribs and shivered down to my pussy.
I wasn’t going to do it. I told myself that. I was not going to touch myself in this room, in this apartment, while he was still here, still responsible for me, still somewhere in the building keeping watch. I was not that girl.
But I was. Of course I was.
I let my hand slip lower, down my abdomen, past the band of my sweats.
I expected to feel resistance, to feel guilt, to feel nothing at all.
What I felt was slick, hot, and so fucking wet I was embarrassed, even alone.
My fingers came away sticky, the smell of myself heavy and undeniable in the air.
I touched, slow. I did not close my eyes.
I made myself watch the ceiling, made myself breathe through the wanting.
I thought about the blog posts, about the woman who was told to eat her carrots, about the woman who was read to sleep, about the woman who said no and meant it.
I wondered if they all felt this hungry.
If they all felt like this was the only way to get quiet inside their own heads.
I moved my fingers in slow circles. The heat was immediate, volcanic. Every nerve in me was awake, every single cell screaming for touch. I pressed harder. I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the next circle, and the next, and the next.
I let myself think about Pietro. Not the fantasy version—the real one.
I thought about him at the kitchen table, watching me eat, not saying a word.
I thought about the way he’d told me to sleep, the way he’d refused to fuck me when I’d begged for it.
I thought about his control, about the way he wanted me but did not let himself take, about the way his discipline made me feel like a partner in something big, something real.
I thought about his voice. “Good girl,” he had said, once, when I’d finished my lasagna. I’d almost dropped the fork.
I whispered it to myself now, quiet. “Good girl.” The words lit me up.
The fantasy came on hard, unstoppable. In it, I was on my knees, head down, and he was standing behind me, hand in my hair.
He made me ask permission, and I did. He told me yes, or sometimes he told me no.
The ones where he told me no were always the best. That was what did it—the idea of him refusing me, of being under someone else’s control, of being wanted enough to be denied.
I came. Hard. Harder than I ever had in my life.
It happened fast—one second I was grinding my palm into myself, the next I was arching off the rug, body clenching, vision gone white at the edges.
I was loud, probably too loud, a cry ripped straight from my lungs.
I let myself have it. There was no one to hear but the walls and maybe Sal, but fuck Sal. I needed this.
After, I lay flat, panting. My fingers were sticky, my thighs shaking. I felt cold and hot at the same time.
And then I cried.
Not a sob, not a breakdown, just a quiet, leaky sort of crying.
Tears came up and rolled down into my hair, and I let them.
I was not ashamed. It was something else—recognition.
This was who I was. This was who I had been my whole life.
The analyst, the woman with the rules, the girl who wanted to be told no, the girl who wanted to be small.
I’d never had a word for it. I’d never let myself look for a word for it. But now I had a name. Now I had a map.
I cried until I was empty. Then I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, breathing slow.
Ten minutes passed, maybe twenty. I could have lain there all night.
But eventually, I stood. I cleaned up. I stripped off my shirt and pants and took a shower, not because I was dirty, but because the water was hot and I wanted to feel new. I wrapped myself in a towel and crawled into the bed, still damp. I slept like the dead.
The next morning, I woke before dawn. The city was pale blue, the river iced over. My body was sore, every muscle used up. I reached for my phone and opened the text thread I’d started with Pietro.
He had not messaged me since he left.
I typed:
Pietro. Come back.
I hit send.
He was at the door in twenty minutes. I counted every second.
I spent the first three walking the perimeter of the apartment, as if I could prep the room to look more like a crime scene and less like the inside of my head.
I wiped down the counter, threw my dirty clothes in the hamper, ran a brush through my hair.
I changed shirts three times and settled on black, tight at the wrists, because it looked like armor.
I didn’t want him to see the inside of me yet.
When he knocked, I didn’t answer right away.
I listened. I heard him shift his weight, probably leaning on the doorframe, maybe arms folded.
He waited, patient. When I finally opened, he was exactly where I pictured: both feet planted, hands empty, eyes on mine.
He didn’t say anything, just waited for me to speak first.
“Hi,” I said.
His face did something. The corner of his mouth twitched, not a smile, just a small breaking of the surface. “Hi,” he echoed, quieter.
I stepped back. I didn’t touch him. I didn’t want to, yet. I just stood aside, and he walked in, as if we had done this a hundred times before.
He had a leather folder under his arm. He set it on the kitchen table, careful, and then looked back at me. “You haven’t eaten.”
I bristled. “How do you know that?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Just a feeling. I also feel like it’s been a big night for you.”