21. Camille
Camille
Ryan keeps me bound for eleven minutes after we finish.
I clean what I can while my wrists remain behind me, an awkward process that would be almost comical under different circumstances, although Ryan does not laugh.
He sits on the edge of the bed and watches, his expression unreadable except for the occasional flicker of discomfort whenever the restraint forces me to shift my shoulders farther than is pleasant.
He notices everything. That is a problem we share.
At 18:58, he finally sighs and says, “Turn around.”
He kneels behind me and works at the knot. His fingers brush my wrists as the sash loosens, and the first instinct that moves through me is to turn my hand and catch his before he can retreat, but I hold myself back.
I flex my hands and rotate both wrists, restoring circulation to fingers that had begun tingling several minutes ago. There are faint red impressions in the skin but nothing concerning, and when I glance at Ryan, I discover him looking at them too.
“Are they okay?” He sounds worried.
“Yes, Ryan. They’re fine.”
He nods, apparently satisfied, then reaches for his discarded clothes.
I want to ask if he’s okay, but I feel like all I’d get would be yet another glare.
After all, he explicitly told me there would be no conversation, no affection he did not request, and I agreed because I understood that what happened tonight was not reconciliation.
It was Ryan reclaiming something he believed I had contaminated.
If surrendering control allowed him to feel that sex between us belonged to him again, then I would have remained bound and on my knees until morning.
Perhaps that is unhealthy. I no longer trust myself to determine where devotion ends and penance begins.
Ryan pulls his shirt over his head, then pauses with his arms still caught halfway through the sleeves. “Do you need anything?”
I stare at him.
His head emerges. “What?”
“You’re allowed to ask me that?”
His expression hardens. “Don’t make it weird.”
“I am not trying to.”
“You’re doing the Camille thing.”
“I am Camille. Most things I do are therefore Camille things.”
For one fleeting second, he can’t suppress a smile. The expression is gone so quickly I might have imagined it.
He finishes dressing, then disappears into the bathroom again. When he returns, he is carrying a glass of water.
He places it on the nightstand. “For you.”
I look from the glass to him.
Ryan becomes defensive immediately. “You’ve been breathing like you ran a fucking marathon. Drink something.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t make a big deal out of it.”
“I said two words.”
“Your face made it a big deal.”
Ryan lingers for another moment as though uncertain whether he should leave, then turns toward the door.
“Ryan.”
He stops but does not look back.
I want to apologize.
The words collect behind my teeth because apology has become instinctive whenever I see the stiffness in his shoulders, but I am beginning to understand that constantly offering remorse can become another demand. Every apology asks something of the injured person, even if only acknowledgment.
So I just say, “Goodnight.”
His shoulders ease by perhaps a millimeter. “Yeah. Night.”
Then he leaves, and I remain sitting on the edge of my bed long after the door closes.
The room smells like him.
That is hardly new, yet tonight the familiarity feels almost grotesque because this—Ryan leaving my bedroom after sex, the evidence of him still warm in the sheets—is precisely the kind of intimacy I once intended to cultivate.
I wanted him accustomed to crossing the space between our properties. I wanted my home to become familiar, my presence convenient, my body pleasurable enough that returning to me would eventually stop feeling like a decision requiring scrutiny.
Tonight, Ryan came to me voluntarily.
He told me exactly what he wanted. He controlled every part of the encounter, bound my hands so I could not touch him without permission, made me wait for every instruction, and left when he decided he was finished.
I feel sick.
Because I have finally been given what I once tried to engineer, and now that it is here, stripped of illusion, I understand how worthless possession becomes when it is not freely offered.
I do not want Ryan obedient.
I do not want him dependent.
I do not want him staying in my home because danger has made leaving impractical, or coming to my bed because hurting me gives structure to his anger, or asking me for things because he is trying to reverse the imbalance I created between us.
I want him to choose me.
I lie back against the pillows and stare at the ceiling until the room grows dark around me.
There is a word I have avoided because it seemed premature, indulgent, and practically insulting in light of how our relationship began.
Attraction I could admit.
Attachment became impossible to deny.
Fondness sounded absurdly inadequate but was at least safe.
Love is neither safe nor flattering.
Love makes what I did worse.
I close my eyes.
I love him. It’s the only explanation I can find. Why else would I be allowing this? Letting Ryan order me around all day, all while ignoring the fact that the evidence I have searched for my entire life is finally within reach, just behind the guest room door.
I know it because when I imagined my parents’ ghosts in the room with us yesterday, when he crawled out of that hole covered in plaster and clutching what should be the most important thing to me, I felt ashamed.
They would not recognize what I have done to their memory, and if they did, they would despise it.
My mother—a researcher whose patience was the stuff of legend, who once spent four months rearing a single clutch of viper eggs just to confirm a hypothesis about maternal heat transfer—would not congratulate this bastardization of the scientific method.
My father—a man who endured the last years of his life under public scrutiny, who clung to hope with the persistence of a barnacle until the very end—would not have wanted me to become this version of myself.
He was a man who died because he could no longer balance his profound love for my mother, his grief at losing her, and the constant accusations that he was the one who drove her away, that he was the one responsible for the loss of the brilliant Nadia Moreau.
I study my hands where they rest in my lap.
The red imprints from the makeshift restraint are fading, but it is difficult to shake the sense that I am marked by this in a way no amount of time will erase.
I have told myself the ends would justify whatever means I needed, but after tonight, I cannot escape the feeling that the ends are not what I wanted at all.
I wanted something truer, but I do not know if that is possible anymore.
Over the next three days, Ryan uses me.
He would object to that description, perhaps because some part of him still considers what he is doing revenge and would therefore prefer language with sharper edges, but the truth is considerably gentler than his intentions.
He asks for breakfast each morning.
He appears in the kitchen wearing sleep-soft clothing and an expression designed to communicate that I remain personally offensive to him, tells me what he wants, then sits at the island while I prepare it.
The morning after our encounter, he requests French toast, berries, coffee, and eggs prepared in a specific way that requires two pans.
He makes me do his laundry again.
He sends me upstairs for his phone while he is already halfway up the staircase himself.
He asks me to bring him water while we are both in the kitchen and I am farther from the refrigerator than he is.
And I do it.
Every time.
The requests are never cruel. Ryan does not ask for anything uncomfortable or unreasonable, and seems incapable of enjoying the arrangement for much longer than thirty seconds before guilt begins eating through whatever satisfaction he obtained.
That guilt manifests in small betrayals of his own plan.
He tells me to make his lunch, then automatically carries my plate to the table while I gather utensils.
He leaves his clothing for me to wash, then folds two of my shirts because they emerge from the dryer while he happens to be standing nearby.
He orders me to bring him sparkling water from the kitchen and, when I return, has moved my papers out of the patch of sunlight coming through the window because he knows glare bothers me when I read.
Neither of us acknowledges his actions.
The sexual part of our arrangement follows similar rules, although Ryan never announces that there is now an arrangement. He simply comes to me when he wants me.
Sometimes that means he appears in the library doorway and tells me to follow him upstairs.
Sometimes he sits beside me on the sofa, close enough that our thighs touch, and says nothing until I finally look at him, at which point he tells me exactly what he wants.
He controls what I am permitted to do.
Sometimes he prohibits kissing. Sometimes touching. Sometimes speaking.
Once, two nights after binding my wrists, he climbs onto my lap fully naked, pulls down my pants, and impales himself on my dick. He tells me I’m not permitted to move, then becomes visibly irritated when I obey, that he eventually mutters, “Fucking fuck me.”
“You told me—”
“I changed my mind.”
“Alright.”
Ryan glares at me for several seconds, then kisses me. He breaks the kiss almost immediately afterward and looks furious with himself.
Our relationship has become a negotiation conducted almost entirely through acts neither of us names.
Ryan takes control because he needs proof that I will relinquish it.
I relinquish control because I need him to learn that I can.
Neither of us says this aloud.
Ryan still seeks me out when something surprises him. He still enters a room and begins speaking casually before apparently remembering halfway through the sentence that he is angry with me.
He also still sleeps in the guest room, locking the door each and every night.