Page 36 of Suite 7

I pace through the flat trying to name the feeling crawling beneath my skin. It’s not quite anxiety. I know anxiety intimately, have cataloged its every manifestation. It’s not quite anticipation. It’s something between the two that won’t sit still.

Restless. That’s the word, finally. Agitated, like my skin doesn’t fit right over my bones and nothing I do is going to change that fundamental wrongness.

The clock reads two forty-seven PM and I’ve already run through my entire repertoire of displacement activities.

So I do the thing I’ve been resisting since I got home. The thing I’ve been circling around for hours without admitting that’s what I’m doing. I open my laptop, navigate to my email inbox, scroll past the work correspondence and subscription newsletters, and stop pretending I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for.

Dominic’s materials have been sitting in my inbox since the night he took me as a client.

Permission slips, he’d called them. Things that let you explore on paper before you explore in person.

I’d read some of it. Enough to feel prepared. Enough to walk into Suite 7 with the vocabulary and the theoretical framework and the comprehensive research notes I’d assembled at two in the morning across three months of obsessive forum-reading. I was thorough, and I’d told myself that was sufficient.

Apparently reading enough to feel prepared and reading enough to actually understand are not the same thing.

I open the first document and two hours later I haven’t moved.

The neurochemistry of submission. What happens in the brain during a scene, the specific cocktail of oxytocin and dopamine and cortisol, the way the body’s stress response inverts under the right conditions from threat into trust. The architecture of a scene from a Dom’s perspective: how every decision is made in service of the submissive’s experience, every constraint a form of care, considered and specific.

One passage stops me completely.

The Dom’s responsibility doesn’t end when the scene ends. True dominance means protecting your submissive through the emotional aftermath, even when that means creating distance to allow processing time. Post-scene, a submissive may experience conflicting emotions: elation, vulnerability, confusion, grief.

The Dom’s role is to provide stability without creating pressure. Sometimes the greatest act of care is stepping back and allowing space for the submissive to find their own footing before re-engagement.

I read it twice. A third time.

And then I sit there as Kane’s careful professional distance this morning rearranges itself into something I recognize.

The clinical check-in at Eclipse. How are you feeling? Any concerns I should know about? The professional mask, precise and impenetrable, that I’d spent the entire morning telling myself was evidence that last night meant nothing to him. That I was just another sub he’d handled and filed away. The door he stood at with his back to me, delivering responsibility like a verdict and walking out like the conversation was already closed.

Not coldness.

Protocol.

He was following protocol. Creating distance, giving me room to land without the weight of his presence complicating everything before I was ready for it. The distance wasn’t dismissal. It was designed.

He could have told me that.

The thought arrives before I can contain it. Three sentences — that’s all it would have taken. This is what I’m doing. This is why. This is what it looks like from the outside.

I close the laptop.

My keys are already in my hand.

The streets are amber with late afternoon, the city in its Sunday evening register. I drive through it telling myself I haven’t decided where I’m going yet, which is a lie I stop bothering to maintain about three minutes in, because I know exactly where I’m going and I’ve known since I picked up the keys.

I give myself ninety seconds in the parked car outside his building. The parking lot is mostly empty, his firm taking up the ground floor behind floor-to-ceiling glass, interior lights making the windows luminous in the fading light. Through the glass, a silhouette, tall, broad-shouldered, standing at a drafting table with the focused stillness I would recognize from across any room I’ve ever been in with him.

Ninety seconds.

This is insane. He was clear. And I understand now why he was clear, which is almost worse, because it means there’s nothing to be angry at and I’m angry anyway and I don’t — I can’t —

Through the glass, the silhouette moves. Precise. Certain. Entirely himself.

I get out of the car.

The door is locked, of course it is. It’s Sunday evening and this is Kane’s office, so I press the intercom button and wait, watching through the frosted glass as the silhouette goes still, then straightens, then starts moving toward me. The shadow grows larger, and then the lock clicks and the door swings open, and he’s standing there in shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, blueprint dust still on his fingers.