Page 92 of Minha Dona

Helena was wired, unsurprisingly seeing as she’d been undergoing a torturously slow form of foreplay since dawn. She ate her starter without really tasting it, laughed along with the table without really hearing it, and agreed to organise some aspect of Mariana’s upcoming birthday party without really comprehending what she’d agreed to. She was performing normality while her body buzzed with anticipation, every nerve she had tuned to her dominant across the table who was eating grilled prawns and talking to Mariana about a film they’d seen as if the evening was entirely unremarkable.

Then, between the starter and the main course, Helena’s phone buzzed.

Go to the bathroom. Take off your lingerie. All of it. Bring it back and give it to Caitlin under the table. She’ll confirm for me.

Helena stared at the message. She read it twice, her heart hammering, then looked up at Juliana across the table. Juliana was talking to Camila, not looking at Helena, not acknowledging that she’d sent anything. Her composure was flawless.

Helena looked at Caitlin next to her. Caitlin’s phone was on the table and Helena saw that she had an unread message of her own. Caitlin glanced at it, read it, and turned to Helena with an expression of barely suppressed delight.

“You’d better go,” Caitlin leaned in and whispered. “I believe you’ve been given an instruction.”

Helena stood up. “Excuse me,” she said to the table. “Back in a moment.”

She forced herself to walk normally through the restaurant to the bathroom, locked herself in a stall, and stood there for ten seconds deep breathing. The practicalities of following her instruction hit home… lingerie as in bra and underwear. As in she’d have to take her dress off to remove her bra, either that or try on the spot to master the bra removal trick she’d never managed before.

Better get this over with, she thought. She unzipped her dress, lowered it down to her waist, and took off her bra. She pulled the dress back up again, zipped it, then hooked her thumbs into the waistband of her underwear and pulled them down. Once she stepped out of them she held her lingerie in her hand… her nicest set, deep red, chosen specifically for Caitlin and Juliana, warm in her hand, physical evidence of her obedience and her surrender.

She walked back to the table and sat down. Her hand reached under the tablecloth and placed them in Caitlin’s waiting hand.

Caitlin’s fingers closed around them. Helena saw her glance down, confirming she’d done as ordered, then discreetly tuck them into her bag. A moment later Caitlin sent a message on her phone and turned to look at Helena with a small grin. “You ok?” she asked.

Helena nodded and smiled.

Across the table, Juliana picked up her phone, glanced at it, and looked at Helena. There was the faintest smile and a nod so small that nobody else at the table could have seen it.

Good girl, Leoa.

Those two words, good girl, sent a shiver of pleasure through Helena that was entirely disproportionate to two words on a screen. She’d said them to submissives before, of course, and when she’d been submissive they’d been said to her. But right then, in that context, knowing that Caitlin was at most a handful of hours away from seeing Helena do something intensely private with the woman who’d earned the right to say them… it was a different level.

The main course arrived and Helena toyed with her food, naked beneath her dress, the fabric shifting against her skin every time she moved, the awareness of her own exposure constant and maddening. She could feel Caitlin next to her, radiating amusement and arousal in equal measure, and across the table Juliana ate her fish and talked about psychology research and gave absolutely no indication whatsoever that she’d just commanded a woman to remove her lingerie in a crowded restaurant.

“You’re quiet,” Mariana said to Helena from the end of the table.

“Just tired. It was a long day in the sun.”

“Drink more water. You look flushed.”

Helena drank more water and tried not to think about the fact that she was sitting at a table with her sister, her girlfriend, and the woman who currently owned her, wearing no underwear because the last of those three had told her not to.

After the main course, while dessert was being debated, Helena leaned close to Caitlin. “I’m sorry.”

Caitlin looked at her. “For what?”

“For… this. All of this. I know I’ve been distracted. I know my attention has been on Juliana all day. You came to Brazil to be with me and I’ve spent the last twelve hours focused on someone else.”

Caitlin’s expression went from surprise, to kind, to a grin that was so genuinely, thoroughly delighted that it transformed her entire face. She leaned in and placed a soft kiss on Helena’s lips.

“Helena. You absolute idiot.” She took Helena’s hand under the table. “I love this. I love watching you like this. Flustered, distracted, trying to maintain your composure while a twenty-three-year-old runs you ragged with text messages. Do you have any idea how unusual it is to see you off-balance?”

“I’m glad my psychological torment is entertaining.”

“It’s not just entertaining. It’s magnificent.” Caitlin squeezed her hand. “You spend your life in control, in one way or another. Of yourself, of situations, absolutely wonderfully of me. And today I’m watching that control get systematically dismantled by someone you trained to dismantle it, someone who knows everything about what control means to you, and it’s the most fascinating, arousing, wonderful thing I’ve ever witnessed. Don’t apologise for it. I wouldn’t change a single second.”

Helena looked at her, this force-of-nature who’d had the strength and bravery to kneel for her again and again and who was watching her dominant be dominated and finding it not threatening but thrilling, not diminishing but illuminating, and felt like her chest could burst.

“I don’t deserve you,” Helena said.

“You one hundred percent deserve me. You just don’t realise it yet.” Caitlin kissed her cheek. “Now order dessert. Because I promise you that with what Juliana has planned, you’re going to need the energy.”