I gave him a single, gentle kiss, and then pulled back. Hishead tilted forward, lips hunting for mine. A small hum left him—a warning, the way a dog growls before it bites.
I thought about the beat of his breath over the voice notes. The gravel in his voice. The way he moaned:I don’t think I can hold back.
This is what it’s like to kiss a man who is constantly pulling on the leash of his self-control.
I put my fingers to his chest, stalling him.
As much fun as I was having…I didn’t know his limits. I didn’t knowhim. And I needed to slow us both down before I got myself into trouble.
I slid into the cab. I made room in the seat beside me. “There’s room enough for two if you wanna share a ride.”
He hung in the doorway, his long arms stretched over the top of the cab. Those blue eyes looked charged, vibrant in the dark.
“It’s a nice night. I need to walk this off. Get home safe.”
“You too.”
He shut the door. I watched him step back onto the curb, shove his hands in his pockets, and start a quick walk down the city street.
In the rearview mirror, the cabbie lifted his eyebrows at me.
I grinned like a kid a Christmas. “I gave him a boner.”
The cabbie gave me a thumbs up.
Ophelia wasn’t there when I got back to the apartment. I walked Spud and, when we came back upstairs, I found myself staring at the half-finished wall.
Inspiration swept through me. I wanted to hold a paintbrush. I wanted tocreatesomething.
I took out my supplies from my room, dragged them intothe living room, and started painting. Not the simple pink that Ophelia had picked up. Dark lines. Swirls. People and monsters.
It was almost two in the morning when Ophelia came home. I heard the door click behind her quietly, trying to stay silent in case I was asleep. Instead, I heard her step into the living room and stop when she spotted me drawing my brush across the wall.
“What’re you doing?” she asked.
“Covering up the cracks.”
I’d turned the wall into a mural. A woman swooped across the top section. Her hair ran trickling down. Underneath her, a creature pulled her hair into its mouth with sharp little claws. Eating her up.
Ophelia stood beside me, assessing the painting. Slowly, she nodded. “Fucking awesome.”
I turned to her. I could feel smudges of paint drying on my cheek. “I’m meeting up with Dorian again on Friday. We’re going to his place to play.”
Her eyes met mine and a smile lit up her mouth. “You know what that means, right?” She knocked her hip against mine. “We’re going shopping, Vincent van Gorgeous.”
The next day, we went to a fetish store. And a lingerie store. I blew cheese money on crops and leather onesies. I packed a bag with dildos, paddles, and other instruments of torture. If I was going to be a domme, I was going to be a prepared domme.
Ophelia came with me the first time. On the outside, we looked like two average, thirty-something women in New York. Ophelia in her stylish, faux-leather coat. Me in a green wrap around, a giant purse, and an orange beanie.
No one on the subway would guess that I was wearing a full, Matrix-style, skin-tight bodysuit underneath, and my bag was packed to the brim with sex toys.
The C train rumbled into Manhattan, metal scraping metal, and my nerves began to bang around inside my body. My body got hot under the suit, which left no room for my skin to breathe, and my mouth went dry. Ophelia kept trying to talk me through it, reminding me to establish boundaries and safe words anddon’t forget to have fun. I took my water flask out, sipping nervously, trying to distract myself from the growing imposture syndrome.
All I could think was:
He’s going to clock you immediately for what you are. A fraud, a fake, a failure?—
The train spat us out on the Lower East Side—once, Manhattan’s creative community, full of hipsters and artists. Like everything in Manhattan, it was now mostly commercial, but if you looked hard enough, you could still find bohemian remnants growing like flowers in-between slabs of concrete. We passed thrift stores, a Ramen restaurant, and followed Dorian’s address to an apartment building wedged side-by-side with a bookstore called “The Paper Cut.”
