Page 9 of The Dragon’s Good Girl

Page thirty-two becomes thirty-eight. Thirty-eight becomes forty-three. At some point the empty cereal bowl ends up on the coffee table, my feet end up tucked beneath me, and I promise myself I'll stop as soon as I finish the next section.

The next thing I hear is my alarm.

I open my eyes to a stiff neck, a dead phone on my chest, and pale morning light coming through the blinds. My laptop is still open beside me, the cursor blinking halfway down page forty-six. The blanket is still folded over the back of the couch. I didn't even make it far enough into falling asleep to reach for it.

5:45 a.m.

Friday.

I plug in my phone, brush my teeth, make coffee, and finish the report before I leave for work.

By eight, the revised file is in Marc's inbox.

Richard doesn't mention it.

Tess finds me outside the office at five-fifteen that evening, halfway through zipping my coat and trying to remember where I parked.

She takes one look at me and sighs. "You look like you need wine."

"I need like twelve hours of sleep."

"Wine is better." She hooks her arm through mine before I can argue. "Come on. You can leave your car here and I'll get you home."

Tess has been my best friend since freshman year of college, when she sat beside me in Introduction to Statistics and waited until halfway through the lecture to tell me I had blue pen across my cheek. Fourteen years later, she's still one of the few people who can take one look at my face and decide whatever I had planned for the evening is no longer happening.

She takes me to a wine bar six blocks from the office, the kind of place with low lighting, tiny tables, and glasses large enough to hold a goldfish. By the time she slides a sauvignon blanc across the table, I've taken my hair out of its clip and stopped checking my work email every time my phone lights up.

"Drink that," she says, settling back with her own glass. "Then I want to show you something."

I pause with the wine halfway to my mouth. "The last time you said that, I ended up in Lisbon with food poisoning and no sunglasses."

"You had a great time before the food poisoning."

"The bartender stole my sunglasses."

"He was very attractive."

"He was still a thief." I take a drink, and Tess smiles into her glass like this proves her point.

Halfway through my second glass, she reaches for her phone. "Okay, I need you to look at something and I mean really look at it, before you decide it's ridiculous."

"That sentence isn't helping your case."

"I know. Just shut up and look."

She turns the phone toward me, and whatever I expected, it wasn't this. The website is dark and understated, with clean lettering and none of the leather-and-red-satin nonsense my brain immediately associates with the word dom. DOM DOT COM stretches across the top of the screen. Everything beneath it is surprisingly professional, with sections on privacy, screening, consent, safewords, and something called magically enforced contracts.

I glance up at her. "What exactly are you showing me?"

"It's a booking service for professional doms. Before you make that face, I checked. It's legitimate, very discreet, and ridiculously hard to get into."

"You looked into it already?"

"I was curious."

"Of course you were."

Her mouth twitches. "There is one other detail."