Page 4 of Minha Dona

The taxi crawled through Jardins and Helena watched São Paulo slide past without seeing it.

She was thinking about hands. Alessandra’s hands, all those years ago… the strength, the way one of them had pinned both of Helena’s wrists above her head while the other gripped her hair. The cheap mattress in the student apartment, the cold floor under her knees, the moment she’d stopped fighting and discovered that she could surrender.

That had been the beginning of who she’d become. Just the beginning… because the woman who’d knelt on Alessandra’s floor at twenty hadn’t stayed there. She’d stood back up. She’d taken everything that that night and the months that followed had taught her about what it felt like to let go and be truly cared for, and she’d carried it to the other side, understood it from the inside, and built herself into the woman who made others feel what Alessandra, and later a couple of others, had made her feel. The dominance had always been there, she thought, waiting beneath the surface, but it was Alessandra’s hands that had shown her what it meant to hold someone’s trust, by first teaching her what it cost to give it.

Five years on and Helena was usually the one who gave the commands now. The one who read people, who understood instinctively what they needed, who could take a woman apart with genuine care and put her back together stronger. That was who she was. It hadn’t always been, but it was now… predominantly, naturally, the axis around which her intimate life turned.

Nine months ago in Houston she’d been that woman entirely. She’d seen a force of nature hiding a submissive side that she didn’t know existed, and Helena had drawn it out of her in a way that cherished and respected her dominant exterior while giving her the freedom to let go: the playful game at the bar, the restraints, the slow and glorious education of a woman who’d never known that she could surrender. Caitlin on her knees, Caitlin bound and blindfolded, Caitlin gasping Minha Dona while Helena’s hands and mouth took her to places she’d never been. That had been pure dominance, Helena at her most skilled and most certain, and it had been extraordinary.

Emphasis on had been extraordinary, Helena thought, because Caitlin was thousands of miles away and hadn’t messaged in six weeks. Even before then she’d barely messaged at all, mostly professional and courteous and that was it. She’d known when they’d parted after that incredible week that it would take time, even that it might never happen. Caitlin had a lot to discover about herself, a lot of exploring to do, and Helena knew that she must give her all the space she needed to do it. She just wished, though, that there was some way of knowing whether Caitlin, deep down, was pining for Helena in the same way that Helena was pining for her.

The past tense, to Helena’s ongoing regret, was the only honest one.

Helena shook her head when she realised the taxi had arrived, paid the driver, and stepped out into the warm night air. Enough, get back into the present. She had friends waiting, champagne to drink, and a city that wouldn’t stop moving just because one person in it was stuck nine months in the past.

***

The rooftop bar was fourteen floors above the street, open to the São Paulo sky, the city’s skyline a wall of light on every side. Helena took the lift, walked through the door, and spotted Isabella waving a bottle from the booth she’d reserved.

“Finally!” Isabella thrust a glass into her hand before she’d even sat down. “I’ve been here twenty minutes. Fernanda hasn’t even arrived yet and I’ve had to talk to strange men.”

“You love talking to strange men.”

“I love having the option. The difference matters a great deal.” Isabella kissed her on both cheeks and pulled her down onto the curved banquette. “You look amazing by the way. New top?”

Helena glanced down at herself… the cream cropped top, the high-waisted dark grey trousers, the heels. She’d taken her time getting ready and had changed her outfit several times. “Yeah.”

“It’s good. Very you. Sexy but not trying too hard.”

“That’s pretty much the definition of trying too hard.” Helena took a sip of the champagne. It was good, as always. “How’s your week been?”

“Endless. A photoshoot that overran, a client who changed her mind about the entire summer collection, and my mother sent me an article about egg freezing. No message. Just the link.” Isabella shuddered. “Yours?”

“Busy. Work is ramping up. But good busy.”

“And how’s Juliana?”

Helena smiled. “She’s good. You know how it is. Casual. Fun.”

“Fun as in fun, or fun as in you’re deflecting?”

“Fun as in fun, Isa. We’re friends who enjoy each other. It works.” Helena glanced around the filling bar. “She might come out later actually. She’s having dinner with Mariana first.”

“Ah, the sister connection.” Isabella raised her glass. “To unconventional arrangements.”

“To minding your own business.”

“Never.”

They fell into the normal rhythm of their Friday nights… the conversation flowing between work and gossip, sometimes overlapping when it came to their social circle. Fernanda arrived with more friends, the booth filled up, the music got louder, the champagne bottles seemed to multiply of their own accord.

Helena let herself sink into it, the joy of people she’d known for years, the comfort of her city, her places, her people. She was present, she was enjoying herself, and she was not, she told herself definitively, thinking about a woman in Houston. Not at all.

She was on her third glass when she felt a pair of arms slip around her from behind and a mouth press against her ear.

“Guess who?”

Helena smiled. “The only person who’d ambush me from behind in public.”