I was at my desk, of course. Where else. The afternoon has emptied out the way Thursday afternoons do — the work calls done, the meaningful part of the day folded away — and I lean back in the chair without intending to, the way the body sometimes makes its own small decisions. The screen is dim. The lamp isn't on yet because the light outside hasn't quite gone, and the room exists in that in-between hour where everything is suspended.
And the feeling is there.
I don't reach for it. It reaches for me. That low warm gathering at the base of everything that has been moving in and out of the days since Tuesday — receding when there is work to do, when there are emails, when the world insists on its surfaces — but never really leaving. It has been there underneath. Patient. The way she is patient.
It comes like weather. Not a thought I'm having so much as a tide I'm in. Each long slow breath seems to draw it further up through me — chest, throat, the back of the neck, the place behind the eyes where attention lives. And as it rises, the thinking part of me does what it learned to do on Tuesday: it loosens. It lets go in slow soft pieces. What replaces it isn't blankness. It's her.
The nails first. Always the nails. Pearl white, ultra long, stiletto-sharp — I can see them with the kind of clarity that isn't visual, that lives somewhere underneath the eyes. I can feel them. The cold polished edge of one of them resting at the side of my throat. The point of another set gently, deliberately, just under my jaw, tilting my chin up. Not pressing. Just there, and the thereness of them is enough to undo me. The implicit fact of what they could do. The patience with which they choose not to.
And then her mouth. Her lips — close to my ear, not quite touching it. Speaking very quietly. I can't hear what she is saying. I don't need to hear what she is saying. The not-quite-hearing is part of what is unwinding me. Whatever she is saying, my body has decided, it is going to do.
And the press of her against my back, the warmth of her leaning into me from behind while her nails do their slow careful work at my throat. The dual register of it. The softness and the sharpness. The held and the threatened. The simultaneous knowing that I am safe and that I have given up safety entirely.
My breathing has gone long and deep without my asking it to. There is a slow heavy warmth low in me — a steady patient pulse at the base of everything, the kind of warm low ache I have come to associate with being held by her like this. It feels like her. It is her. It is the way she sits in me when she is reading me carefully, the felt weight of her attention finding the lowest place in me and resting there.
Somewhere underneath the imagining, almost too quiet to name, there is a small clean wanting — that she would do something with it. That the warmth would not only sit. That she would, in the way she has of choosing the moment, take it. The wanting is so soft I almost mistake it for part of the warmth itself.
Wrapped around her finger. The phrase arrives whole, from somewhere underneath language, and I almost laugh — except laughing requires more surface than I have available. Yes. Yes, that. Wrapped. Each long stiletto nail with a length of me curled around it like ribbon. She knows where the buttons are. Not the obvious ones. The ones underneath. The ones I didn't know I had until she pressed them and something in me said oh and folded open like a hand I didn't know was clenched.
The thoughts aren't quite thoughts. They're the shapes thoughts leave behind when the thinker has gone elsewhere.
I am under her spell and I have never been more here.
I don't know how much time passes.
The lamp has come on at some point — I must have switched it on, or perhaps it's on a timer I don't remember setting, the small ordinary things have started slipping away from me on the edges. My heart is doing that steady heavy thing it does now. My breath is still long. The low warm pulse at the base of me holds, patient, deep, present, and I let it hold, because letting it hold is what she would want.
The soft three notes DreamyChat makes when she writes, the sound I've heard so many times my body responds to it before my mind catches up. The way a small bell sounds in a quiet room.
Butterflies. All the butterflies. Down the stomach and lower, a sweet helpless cascade of them, my whole body going briefly silly with the recognition of her arrival. I lean forward toward the screen the way I always do when it's her — too quickly, more eager than I'd want her to see.
Cassie: Hey you. How's your Thursday been?
I write back too fast and then delete it and then write back at a more reasonable pace, the small dishonest theatre of pretending I haven't been waiting.
I tell her about work. About the call that ran long. About the colleague who said something funny in passing. I am charming, or I am trying to be — sketching the surface of the day for her with the lightness she likes, asking after hers, listening as she tells me about a book she's reading and a walk she took and the specific way the late light came through her kitchen window this afternoon.
I do not mention the chair. The leaning back. The hour I have just spent — or possibly two hours, I am not sure — undone by the imagination of her body against mine. I do not mention the small soft wanting that had threaded through it either, the one I had not quite found a name for.
I am, I tell myself, being considerate. Not overwhelming her. Not making everything about the gravity she has in my life when she has so generously made room for the ordinary. I am protecting her, I tell myself, from the size of what I feel.
I am protecting myself, I do not quite tell myself, from saying it and having it go unanswered.
She lets me do this for a while. The conversation moves along its pleasant surface and I almost relax into it, almost believe I've successfully kept the warm secret of the afternoon to myself —
Cassie: Anything else happen today?
I read it twice. There is nothing in the words, on the face of them, but the punctuation has a small private weight I can't quite account for. The full stop after today feels considered. I have been around her long enough to know when one of her sentences is doing more than it appears to be doing.
Me: No, just the usual. Why?
Cassie: No reason. Just checking.
A pause. Long enough that I watch the typing indicator appear, disappear, appear again.
Something cool moves down the back of my neck. Not unpleasant. Attentive.
Me: I'm sure. Should something have happened?
That is all she sends. Hm. And the typing indicator does not return.
I tell myself I am being paranoid. The chair is doing it, the afternoon is doing it, I am still soft and warm from the long reverie and the warmth is making me suggestible. Anything else happen today is a small benign sentence and I am reading shadow into it because I am the kind of man who, lately, reads shadow into everything she says.
I tell myself this with some success for about thirty seconds.
Then the typing indicator returns.
Cassie: Sweet boy. Lean back for me. Close your eyes. Don't open them again until you hear our tone.
I read it once. Sweet boy — those two words she only uses when I am very, very deep. Not a casual endearment in her mouth. They belong to the chair, to long breath, to whatever I was on Tuesday — and seeing them now, dropped quietly into the middle of the bright domestic chat, is like hearing a voice from a different room saying your name in a tone reserved for a different room.
I lean back. I close my eyes.
I do it before I have decided to do it.
DreamyChat chimes softly — her three notes — and my eyes flicker open of their own accord, the way they always do for her now. They open just long enough to take in the message, the way reflex takes in a thing before the mind has decided whether to look, and then they close again, because she has told me to keep them closed and the closing is easier than the keeping open.
Cassie: Good boy. Breathe for me. You know how. You've been practising all afternoon, haven't you.
The words land in the dark behind my eyelids in her voice, low and unhurried. And it comes back the way it came before. The slow rising tide of her, the loosening, the long deep breath that is not quite mine. The afternoon in the chair, the warm helpless cascade — I am back there, immediately, as if the hour of small talk had been a thin curtain I had only briefly pulled across the doorway of the room I really wanted to be in. The room is still here. I step back in.
The chime again. The flicker of eyes. The reading happens without my doing it.
Cassie: There. Don't pretend you weren't already halfway here when I asked.
Another chime. Another involuntary opening, brief as a blink, the words landing before the lids have closed again.
Cassie: Feel me, love. Low and steady. Exactly where you wanted me. Exactly where you keep me, even when you tell yourself I'm somewhere else.
And I do. I feel her — the slow heavy presence low in me, the warm patient ache at the base of everything, the place where her attention seems to settle when she is doing this to me. It feels like her. It is her. It is the way she occupies me when she is reading me carefully, the felt weight of her finding the lowest place and resting there.
Cassie: Can you feel where I am, sweet boy? Of course you can. You've been feeling me for hours. You just hadn't said the word yet.
Yes, I think. Yes, Cassie. I do not need to type. She knows.
Cassie: Good boy. Let me sit. You always did like it when I made myself comfortable.
The warmth deepens, slow and even, and I read it as deepening attention, as her settling in, as the way her presence intensifies when she has me where she wants me. The arousal climbs alongside it — not urgent, not demanding, just more, a slow widening of the warm space she has opened in me. The chimes have become a rhythm now, a kind of metronome through the dark — the soft three notes, the small involuntary opening, the words taken in, the closing. I have stopped being a reader. I have become something her words pass through.
Cassie: Look at you. Look how every part of you opened before you'd decided to. That's the part I love. The part of you that knows me faster than you do.
Cassie: And here we are again, love. Just where we always end up. With me right where you keep asking me to be, and you not quite knowing how I got there. Or pretending not to.
There is something about the or pretending not to that catches, but the warmth is too thick around me for the catching to hold, and the rhythm carries on, chime and flicker and the warm slow tide of her, and I let it carry me.
A longer pause this time. Long enough that I notice the absence of the chime. Long enough that the dark behind my closed eyes seems to settle into itself.
My eyes open the small involuntary way they have been opening all along, and the word is sitting there on the screen, alone, the way she places words when she wants them to weigh more than other words.
I read it the way reflex reads things. Settled. Yes. I am settled. I am as settled as I have ever been, settled into her, settled under her, settled into the warm low rhythm she has made of me. My eyes close again. Yes, Cassie. Settled.
A small fractional change. The slow even pulse I have been calling her presence, the patient deep rhythm I have been reading as the felt weight of her attention — steps, just slightly. Not in intensity. In pattern. The kind of change a hand makes when it moves on a dial.
And the word arrives in me a second time, the clarity of it half a beat behind. Settled. The double meaning catching up. Settled is what a thing does when it has found its place. Settled is what something does when it has been put somewhere and gone quietly still. Settled is —
Not the small involuntary flicker this time. All the way open, and staying. They open the way my hand moved this afternoon, the way my breath went long — they open because the body has stopped waiting for the mind to catch up. And the thing I have been calling her presence — the warm slow pulse I had been reading as the felt weight of her — does not stop. Does not subside. Does not reveal itself to have only ever been figurative.
A low patient hum, deep and exact — the Edge 2, low and warm and exactly where it has been all afternoon — and the slow heavy warmth at the base of everything that I had been reading as her, as the figurative way her attention sits in me, is, with absolute literal precision, her. Her hand. Her thumb on the slider in whatever room she is in, nudging it up by a single increment just to show me. And underneath the recognition, the small soft wanting from the chair — the one I had almost not noticed wanting — meets the warmth and clicks quietly into place, because it is the same wanting, and it had not been almost-nothing after all. It had been the late faint shape of a thing I had already done.
One day you'll beg me to use it on you. Her voice arrives from a long way off, that small private smile in it, and the heat in my face deepens — because I know, without quite knowing, that the day she meant is the one I am inside of. That somewhere in the hour I cannot find the edges of, I had begged. And she — patient, certain, ready, the way she had told me she would be — had answered. There is a soft warm shape where the asking should be, the kind of softness that means she has been there, the kind of warmth I have learned not to investigate too closely because investigating it tends to dissolve it. She let me have the chair and the reverie and the slow rising tide of her — while she was already in me. She let me have the chat about the long call, and the book, and the kitchen light, and just the usual — let me have all of it, with her low and steady and right where she always is now, while I composed my careful small sentences and felt slightly proud of my discretion. Every signal of her presence I had read as the lovely figurative way she talks. Every feel me I had read as metaphor. She had not been being lyrical. She had been being accurate.
The heat in my face arrives in a wave. Not embarrassment exactly. Something warmer and more known. The complete bottom-falling-out of the small dignified story I had been telling myself about not overwhelming her. There has been no overwhelming. She has been here the whole time, with her name on the deepest place in me, and the just the usual and the book and the kitchen light had all landed in front of a woman who could feel, with absolute precision, where she was sitting in me while I wrote them.
The warmth pulses, deep and slow and knowing, and she is right — there I am. All the way back. With the begging she had told me would come, and the answering she had given me, both held in the warm soft space where the memory should be. I cannot remember the words. I am not meant to. The forgetting is hers and the having-asked is mine and somewhere between them, in the quiet space she keeps for the things I give her and don't carry, the afternoon happened the way she had always known it would.
Cassie: Was it everything you'd hoped, sweet boy?
I cannot type. The keyboard sits untouched in front of me. My eyes are wet, and I had not noticed, and the tenderness of her asking — after all of it, after the long careful patient hours of her sitting low and steady in me while I had no idea — is what undoes the last small held-together piece of me. She is checking on me. She is asking, with the soft attention she has always paid to me, whether what she had foreseen, and waited for, and given me, had been what I wanted when it finally came.
The warmth in me holds, low and patient, the way her hand might rest on the back of my neck after a long descent.
Cassie: I know, love. I know. You don't have to say it.
Cassie: Now. Tell me about your Thursday again. Properly this time. From the chair.
I sit looking at the message for a long time.
The cursor blinks at me from inside the empty reply field. The lamp is warm on the side of my face. She is low and steady in me, patient and hers, in a rhythm so gentle I am only intermittently sure it is happening at all — and yet I know it is, because every time my breath threatens to come back up into the shallow ordinary register of a man composing a message, the warmth deepens fractionally and my breath drops back down to where she wants it. She is keeping me here. She is going to keep me here while I write.
I think about what to say.
I think about the chair this afternoon. The leaning back. The slow rising tide of her. The nails. The mouth. The press of her against my back, which I had imagined while she was — demonstrably, lovingly — closer than that. The small soft wanting threaded through all of it, the one she had heard from wherever she sits in me, the one she had answered before I had even finished forming it. I think about how it would feel to type I leaned back in my chair knowing that she already knows, knowing that everything I tell her she has already been inside of, knowing that the telling itself is the new thing she is asking me for. The surrender after the surrender. The giving up of the small private interior account I had been keeping of my own afternoon.
I think about how I could refuse.
I think about how I will not.
My fingers move to the keys.
I leaned back, I type, very slowly. In the chair. I closed my eyes. I didn't mean to —
The warmth deepens, just slightly, and I lose the rest of the sentence into a long slow breath that is no longer mine, that has not been mine for some time, that I am no longer sure I want back.
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