“Thank you for these,” she said. “I’ll be back about the dessert table. You’re getting the contract.” And she gave me one short nod, woman to woman, and went out into the cold, and the bell went, and the warm gold of the shop closed back over the gap she left.
I stood there holding a paper bag with four letters on it.
D. D. l. g.
I had no idea what they meant. But I was going to find out.
“I’vegottocheckthe books,” I told him, which was true, in a way. “Back office. Don’t burn anything, watch the second proof, and if the bus driver comes in he gets the seeded ones, not the plain, he’ll pretend he doesn’t care but he counts the seeds.”
“Seeded for the bus driver. On it, boss.”
The office is barely a closet—the desk that holds the books, the chair, the safe nobody’s ever broken into because there’s nothing in it, my father’s spare apron on a hook, my phone charging on the corner because I forget it out front. I shut the door. I sat in the chair. My heart was going.
I typed the letters.
And then I sat there and read.
Daddy Dom. Little Girl.
My first instinct was to laugh, and I almost did, and then I kept reading and the laugh died in my chest. Because it wasn’t what I’d braced for. It wasn’t the leering thing the four letters had made me brace for. It was—I scrolled, fast, my eyes hunting—structure. Care. Someone who holds the line. Rules that aren’t a prison but a hand on your back. Meals. Sleep.Eat this. Sit down. Let me. I’ve got it.The relief of handing the weight to someone you trust enough to hold it. The freedom—that word,freedom, right there in the middle of a thing I’d have sworn was the opposite of freedom—of not managing everything alone.
Not a leash.
The more I read, the more I realised that I was reading about . . . me.
I read about different types of Littles, with the reasons they do what they do. One of the descriptions resonated so strongly with me. A passage about a businesswoman who carried everything all day, who was the boss, who ran her office, but underneath, was so tired of being in charge that the relief of putting it down was enough to make them cry. I read about her coloring, about her Daddy looking after her, about the freedom of submission, and I thought I was going to cry.
But it wasn’t just the emotion of relief. It was more than that. It was more complex.
Because I read about other women, too. Who longed for the release of discipline, by the erotic power of being dominated, controlled, worshipped by their Daddies.
My face was hot. My whole body had gone warm and tight in the little office, low down, that same dawn-over-a-valley heat, just reading, justreading, and I pressed my thighs together without deciding to and was appalled at myself and didn’t stop.
And then—because I couldn’t help it—I turned it on him.
Tonio.
And every piece fit. Every single piece slotted in like he’d been built out of the page I was reading.
The way he sets people down. I’d watched him do it for two weeks—the bus driver, the nurses, the old woman, the kid in the thin coat—he runs toward the thing that needs feeding, he notices who hasn’t eaten, he’s the steadiest thing in any room he’s in under all that noise.Sit down. Eat something. I’ve got the counter.I’d thought that was just kindness. It was, but it was ashapeof kindness, it was the exact shape, the words almost word for word off the screen in my hand.
And the near-kiss.
Oh.
I sat very still in the office chair.
He’d had me. My fist in his shirt, my mouth on his, my body up on its toes andyesin every cell, and he was the one who pulled back, who uncurled his hand off my waist like it cost him everything, who opened the space and left me with nowhere to fall—and I’d decided it meant he didn’t want me, and it had made no sense because his face hadn’t been a face that didn’t want me, his face had beenpain—
He stopped because he knew what he was and he was worried.
Worried about telling me. He wanted me, but he was anxious to say that he was a Daddy Dom.
Fuck.
The whole chapter of confusion I’d been living in resolved all at once, every crooked thing going straight, and it was the most terrifying and the most thrilling thing that had ever happened to me.
Because now I knew. I knew what he was. I knew what I might be—what the screen said I was.
