As She’s Told

A Monday morning lidded by low clouds. Anders manoeuvred his truck through clogged southbound traffic, with the reflexive dexterity of a man who spent a lot of time behind the wheel. He eyed a Civic in the oncoming lane that looked as if it had been waiting a while to turn left; a lengthening line of cars was trapped at its tail. The frustrated grinding of gears and molars was almost audible. Taking pity, Anders braked and waved the Civic through. Two blocks further on his own lane was blocked by pylons and municipal trucks. He edged around a stationary tractor trailer, made it onto Lakeshore, and saw before him inching lines of metal with their tails of spewing exhaust, all the way to the horizon. Toronto traffic had descended yet another giant step into hell. He was going to be late.

But nothing could annoy him today. He would have liked to have his foot down and be driving down an empty highway with the wind in his hair, singing at the top of his lungs, but you can’t have everything. It was enough that he could see her before him: Maia shy and vibrant in her russet dress.

Maia sprawled flushed and naked on her bed. Maia bent over the table, those lovely oval ass cheeks framed in the red kimono. The sound of her voice when he touched her. He could almost taste her. And by the end of the day she’d be in his hands again.

There were two little birthmarks on either side of her belly; they made a diagonal with her navel that absolutely charmed him.

He made a quick lane change and made it into third gear. The future was unfolding like a huge blueprint in his mind, a blueprint of his own devising. Only the foundations sketched in distinctly so far. Maybe a little bit of detail: part of a floor plan, a staircase. Beyond that, a project subject only to his insistent imagination.

It was going to happen this time; this time he knew. His blueprint sprouted a bell tower and rang an exultant peal.

And then the peal’s echo became the inevitable warning knell.

Expectations of delight never failed to activate the dour Lutheran ancestors living in his frontal lobes, his Swedish grandmother’s voice leading from the lectern. Life was responsibility, duty, forethought, said the implacable voice.

Joy was fleeting. In fact this side of his mind tended to express itself within him in a Scandinavian language that was a mixture peculiar to that lady.

Anders imagined a discussion with his Mormor about his responsibilities in this situation, and he smiled. The dangers were more than present to him.

Maia might not be what she seemed to be, or need what she thought she needed. Hidden motives might emerge over time, or perhaps just mistakes that followed on inexperience. Or covert craziness; there was a thought to gave him serious pause. Anders drove mechanically, his mind churning.

No, somehow he thought not. Beneath all that shyness and hesitation, that eager, docile outward face, there was something balanced and poised, and not over an abyss, either. Maybe just a few feet off the ground. She seemed to have a very clear idea of who she was and what she wanted.

He braked and geared down; traffic was piling up again. Where did that assurance come from, deep in his gut? Recognition, moments of connection, again and again. She was okay, that girl; on consideration she seemed remarkably sane, despite being perverted as hell just like he was, with every doubt and crazy feeling that entailed. A lurking sense of humour, too. All those fears, that need for safety might be signs of sanity, given that the world was what it was. Could he rely on his own judgment of her mental state, given how invested he was in the answer? The fast lane was opening up; he pressed the accelerator. His gut said yes, but could he trust it? Ancestors frowned and shook grey heads, pointing bleakly to a spectral vision of his old nemesis: overconfidence, ego. Beware…. He’d beware. But that had pitfalls its own. Maia’s fears didn’t stop her, evidently; she did what she had to do. She had even managed the piercings, an act of initiative that seemed almost against her nature. And in their online conversation she had expressed her opinions with passion and confidence, and without looking for approval. Mind you, these were her opinions on her need to hand herself over, and were articulated in the anonymity of a chat group ….

She’d have to be balanced, given what he was going to do with her. She could walk away from him, hypothetically, at any time, but he intended before long to have her in so deep that walking away would seem unthinkable. The world he would construct for her would have to seem inescapable. Anything less would work for neither of them. If that kind of totality wasn’t what she needed after all, the relationship would be destructive to her, wickedly so. And if he harmed her he wouldn’t forgive himself. He could feel the weight building up in his chest at the thought. A dumpster load full of broken bricks, shards of glass, insidious toxins.

On the other hand, if he gave that poisoned ground too wide a berth, he’d be building on the soft and treacherous sands of meaningless games.

The whole thing would founder. Far better to begin for real, and risk having to give her up, than to wait to be sure and wreck the chance they had.

Forward, with caution and consultation, feeling his way. The basic relationship seemed already to have emerged, between one glance and the next. As if they were gears, machined on opposite sides of the world, engaging at first touch. Maia’s submissive body invited plunder. He could hardly resist that arched torso and the passive hands that stayed where they were put, pliant quivering limbs that begged for restraints, big eyes watching for his slightest signal. Those rings! She wasn’t made for gentle treatment.

But he also enjoyed this slow, tantalizing journey they had started on.

Versions and stages of perversion. More to come, he promised her silently.

Much more to come.

The rings. He’d tried to conceal his reaction, but of course she was exquisitely reactive to anger or disapproval. His initial response had been jealousy; he’d assumed that she’d belonged to someone else. He loved the fact that she was a bdsm novice, that she would be his right from the start.

Previous lovers, that was nothing. No one who’d meant anything to her emotionally, or even sexually. She’d be property with only his mark on her.

Except for the rings. Which had belonged to no one but her, he reminded himself, and which he could make his own. And of course the next piercing would be his from start to finish.

***

>English, please. I must practice for Chicago.

>All right. Your fault if I become illiterate in Danish.

>How would she be so uncautious? Beware of crazies.

>You mean reckless, prof. Get English spellcheck.

>You think she was crazy to trust me? She got references. A friend of Janice’s vouched for me.

>juicy one?

>Karl, you bugger. Yes, if you want to know, she is. Now shut up about it.

>I think you are too sure all at once. Usually you are more careful.

Cynical is the word?

>Cynical is the word all right. Family trait. I am having to hold off my own Cassandra mutterings, and now here they are coming from you. But I asked for it. Don’t let me stop you.

>Your views on totality of relationship are fine in theory but will lead to self-deception. You say no games, but world and laws are what they are.

Be truthful. Unless you want to hide her away in secluded country house with all help kilometres away, chain her there and do your wicked will. And I will help very gladly. Otherwise at any time she can go, and you can do nothing.

>Sounds like a plan, Karl. What do you and Ria get up to in that cottage in Als, anyway?

>You do not know. This woman may not be strong psychologically, and is not experienced submissive. She may believe whatever you tell her, and will be easy to harm. When tasty prey offers itself it’s hard not to gobble it up, but you might regret this, and so might your meal. (Okay, I see problems with this analogy. Another one will surely be better, but you know my meaning.)

> So either she can walk right out and my control is illusory, or she is a prey animal walking right into my jaws. Make up your mind.

>I acknowledge your supportive portents of doom, you bastard. And will allow them to rankle and gall me. Or at least let them reinforce my own.

>It’s a delicate business, isn’t it? Ethically and psychologically.

Finding the balance between games and gobbling her up.

***

That evening Anders made sure Maia had written her paper and started on the next one. Then he took her out to dinner, to the Peter Pan on Queen West. They had to run for the restaurant; the clouds that had been bulging all day had finally decided to get it out of their system.

They got the table by the window, which gave them a view of wet pavement and the final spatter of the rainstorm. The sun was dropping below cloud level as it set; it sent a shaft of orange light along Queen Street that lit the drops running down the window. Anders studied Maia’s face in this temporary glow, rediscovering it feature by feature. It was rescued from perfection by the long, rather elegant nose. Her smiles always started tentatively at the left corner of her mouth, and then, if they got any further, swept across her face, lighting up her eyes for brief, incandescent moments.

Anders watched her as they talked, listening to her low, husky voice, trying to catch whatever flickered out from behind the hesitations and constraints.

They glanced at the big, weighty abstracts on the walls, accompanied by tags with even weightier prices. But the restaurant’s decorative tin ceiling interested Anders more.

‘This place used to be a greasy spoon, same name, way back when, did you know that?’ he said, taking a good look at the ceiling – original, apparently – and the dark cherry-wood booths. ‘They did a nice job on the reno; fixed it up without changing much. I heard that some old guy stumbled in after the change, took a good look and stumbled right back out again.’

They studied the menus, light years from what the old guy would have eaten, and ordered. Calamari and then lamb shank for him, arugula and daikon salad and chicken penne for her. When that was settled, Anders continued. ‘There used to be a lot of real stores along this part of Queen.

Hardware, used furniture. Then, gradually, some good funky alternative places, all sorts of unique businesses coming and going. That’s the stage I first knew it at.’

She nodded. ‘Even since I’ve moved to Toronto, some of those places have moved out. What is there out there now, the Gap?’

‘Yeah, the gentrification’s finally complete. Active Surplus must be about the last holdout. Not even the funky places left. They’ve moved west.

More and more lofts, lawyers’ offices, big clubs, big chains. Concrete and steel.’

‘And of course anyone poor has had to move out.’

‘Oh, yeah, long since. And nowhere to go.’

The appetizers arrived, and she looked down into her arugula. ‘Would the old guy even recognize this as food, do you suppose?’ she asked.

He smiled. ‘Probably not. I’ll take you to a greasy spoon next time; I know some good ones. Redeem our sins for eating this way while the masses starve.’

They talked on about the housing lost, the housing not built, the rising rents pushing more and more out into the streets. She put down her fork and propped her chin on her hands as if her head was sinking under the weight of it all, and looked at him from under her lashes. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘You’re so calm about this. Pragmatic. I can’t – I can hardly think of it – being homeless. The vulnerability. The exposure.’

‘Yes. It’s criminal that people have to live like that.’ His face was grim.

‘I mean it literally, it’s criminal, or it ought to be. I’m not as calm as I look.

As for pragmatism, there are practical solutions. It’s just the lack of funding.

When it comes to subsidized housing, the federal government and the province and the city just argue over who pays. Money’s actually reserved for housing that never gets spent.’

‘There some program, social workers connecting with street people, getting them housed, right?’

‘Streets to Homes. Better than nothing, maybe. A lot of the housing they’re putting people into is seriously substandard. And pushing that program gets the government off the hook for any decent national housing strategy.’

‘Wait – didn’t the mayor announce …?’

‘Yes, there are supposed to be a couple of projects soon. Maybe there’ll be something I can do. In the meantime I volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, help to build a few houses a year, and try to be satisfied with that.’

The entrees arrived. They ate and talked about underfunded programs, and human spaces, and the Regent Park redevelopment. Anders knew the immediate politics, and Maia put it into a historical context, picked up from her reading, surprising him with the extent of it. ‘I like the history of North American cities. Despite all the greed and exploitation. That kind of pioneering naiveté.’

He looked at her carefully. ‘And it’s easier for you to talk about the past than the scary stuff happening right in your face.’

She winced, then laughed a little sadly. ‘Yup. You got it.’

On less painful topics Anders watched her follow him, match his thoughts in her quiet way, formulate and make subtle connections. He shared out the last of the wine and sat back, looking at her. ‘I’ve just realized – you really are an information-management girl.’

She laughed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You cross-reference things. You catalogue.’

‘That sounds awful!’ She looked down into her glass. ‘But you’re probably right.’

‘Is that what made you go into it?’

‘Because my mind works that way?’ She thought a moment. ‘Don’t think so. That’s more a product of school than a cause.’

‘Why, then?’

She gave an embarrassed smile. ‘Well – I’ve always hung out in libraries. Reading. Nerd that I am. Nice and quiet, safe. This huge one in Oakland – I used to sit near the reference desk and listen. It was amazing what that woman could find out; all sorts of information – basic, obscure, downright esoteric. And she’d just give it out, no strings attached. Anyone could come in or call and ask all sorts of stuff, and she’d look it up for them.’

‘And you liked that.’

‘Yes. I want to do that myself, one way or another. Get people the information they need.’ She unfolded her napkin, folded it up another way.

‘At home everything seemed to be about money, about what something was worth, what it cost. How to make more. How to make people pay. My father has a software consulting business. He doesn’t do anything for free; he says he can’t afford to. But I don’t want to live like that.’

‘What does your family think of your going –’ his eyes darted to left and right, and he leaned forward to whisper, ‘– non-profit?’

She mimed shock, grinned, shrugged. ‘It’s a job. They tried to make me a junior entrepreneur like my sister, but they had to give up on that pretty early. I’m too introverted. I think they’ve got visions of me going into corporate information technology or some damned thing, but if so they’re going to be disappointed.’

‘Ah, yes, the expectations. My mother wasn’t too happy about my business. Wasting all that college education. Picking up master electrician instead of an MA. Though she’s come around now and my dad never minded, as long as I got the education in the first place; he insisted on that.’

‘That was a given in my house, too.’

‘Well, not entirely in mine. My grandmother was pissed that I wasted time in university, given that it had nothing to do with construction. She said I’d been reading blueprints and building things since the age of three and that there was no point pretending I was going to be anything else. She still harps on it whenever she wants to annoy my mother.’

‘You were reading blueprints at three?’

‘So to speak. I used them in my games. My dad gave me old draft versions; I kept piles of them.”

“You could have taken architecture or urban planning or something.’

‘Probably. Though I don’t think I would have been satisfied if I wasn’t building with my own hands. I like getting in there. Anyway, back then I didn’t think I was going to be in any way like my father. Who does at eighteen? I thought I was going to be quite unlike any of my relations. Shake their dust off my boots. Have an impact on the world. Thus the political science. After a while I figured out that I was actually quite a lot like my father and there was no shame in it. And then everything fell into place.”

“Despite your mother’s disapproval.’

‘Nah, she’s okay with it now. As long as I’m happy; you know mothers.

She’s a teacher; education is high on her list.’ He set his cutlery on his empty plate and wiped his mouth. ‘What about your mother, what does she do?’

‘Everything, all the time, it seems to me. Always going at something full tilt. Mostly she runs an organic food wholesaling business. The first thing she wants to know when she calls me is whether I’m eating organic.

Tells me about all the poisons in the food chain as if I’d never heard of them.”

“The first thing?’

‘I exaggerate, sorry. Maybe the second. The first is whether I’m using birth control and safe sex. She seems to have this vision of me partying away night after night with one boyfriend after another. It’s got to be left over from her college days in the seventies, because she sure didn’t get it from me. ‘Just for god’s sake don’t get pregnant, Maia,’ she says. ‘I raised you to be a powerhouse, not a baby machine.”

‘I’ll bet she was on the ramparts back in the seventies.’

‘Oh, man. Not just the seventies. She’s got a drawer full of buttons from abortion rallies, violence against women, all that.’ Maia saw his eyes dance, and she laughed. ‘I know. Hey, I’ve got some, too; she used to haul us along.

Well, my sister didn’t need hauling; she was really into it; still is. I used to try not to hear the stories – the abuse; it upset me for weeks.’ Maia broke off, looked down at her lap, clasped her hands there. Then she looked up.

‘It’s not that I don’t agree with feminism, right down the line. Only – not for me.’ Then she spread her hands on the table. ‘No, you know, even for me. I don’t think men – all men – have the right to make my decisions for me. Just – one.’

Anders nodded. He was deeply familiar with the apparent conflict between sexuality and values, between intellect and politics and the body’s needs. He sat back. ‘I suppose you could be a rather extreme and quirky demonstration of a woman’s right to choose.”

“The personal not being political in my case.’

‘Right. Tell me, does the contrast bother you? Between what your mother thinks and what you are?’

Maia furrowed her brow. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m used to concealing things from her – from my sister, too – everything that matters, really. Pretending to be something I’m not, doing the assertive act so they’ll stay off my back. The stuff I learned from books, not them, I might add.’

She met his eye. ‘And believe me, I’m not like this in any kind of reaction to my mother and her feminism. The two aren’t related. I used to wonder about that. But it’s not so.”

“The thought never crossed my mind.’ Maia smiled. ‘No, I guess not.”

“Would you ever tell her the truth?’

‘God, no!’ The shock on her face slowly receded, leaving a wry smile in its wake. ‘Gays and lesbians don’t know what a closet is, compared with us.’

‘You’d tell her if you were lesbian?’

‘Sure. No problem. But this? Not in a million years. She’d never accept it. ‘ She squeezed her eyes tight for a second, as if to shut the thought away, then opened them again. ‘Would yours?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Not without a lot of work. And why would I bother? They’re not about to walk in on us, or participate in our lives. I don’t need their approval.’ The waiter took their plates away and offered dessert menus and coffee. Anders ordered cheesecake; Maia mimed being full but conceded to a little crème brulée. When the waiter was gone, Anders leaned in on his elbows. ‘What about you? Do you accept it?’

What came out of her was a short, rueful laugh, but for a long moment she didn’t speak.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. The table held her eyes for a while, and then she looked up at his face. ‘I am what I am.’

A twist of a smile. ‘Me, too.’

‘Inside myself, for a long time it’s been – right. I don’t know why; it just is. But in comparison with the rest of the world, you know, it’s harder. Not to think of oneself as a disgusting object.’

He shook his head. ‘Rest assured….’ She smiled.

Anders ran his eyes over the woman across the table, over the fine contours of cheek and eyebrow, the slender shoulders. So small, and even smaller in that she was self-effacing. He could easily imagine her disappearing from everyone’s notice, despite her looks. ‘Maia. What was it like, moving all the time when you were a kid?’

She raised her eyebrows, then looked resigned. ‘Oh. Well. Sometimes it was hard. I didn’t exactly come up to expectations on making new friends.’

‘Whose expectations?’

‘My mother’s. She was always trying to push me out the door.’

Resentment flickered. ‘Expecting me to be the centre of the crowd like my sister. When I’d rather have been sitting on my bed with a book.’ Maia began turning the salt shaker round and round in a very small circle. ‘I was safer with the teachers than the kids, actually. Authority figures.’ There was a wry flicker of a smile, one corner only. ‘I suppose I sucked up. I was smart. Teacher’s pet. Which was a bit of a liability in the long run, with the other kids.”

“You said you did their homework.’

‘Here and there. Sometimes more than I did my own. Some of the kids could act like authority figures too, you know.’

‘I’ll bet.’

‘But actually I didn’t mind helping them out. It felt like an okay thing to do. Even if it was a bit exploitive on their part.’

Anders put cream in his coffee and stirred. ‘Wasn’t it a little hard on you?’

‘A little,’ she agreed. ‘What are you asking?’ She sipped some tea and gave him a long look over the rim. ‘Am I submissive because I got beat up at school?’ She put the cup down. ‘No. No one picked on me particularly.

I’m good at being inconspicuous. I wasn’t exactly popular, but I wasn’t abused. Not at home either. No secret trauma. And I’ve had submissive fantasies as long as I can remember.’ She gave a little snort, and shook her head. ”Fantasy;’ what a word. It makes it sound lightweight and fanciful, tra la la. Not the – what can I call it? It felt huge, heavy, rich; a dark kind of weight. An intense secret life.’

She lowered her eyebrows at him, her face faintly challenging. ‘Are you asking if I’m like this because I’ve got low self-esteem? Not that either. I may not be the most confident person in the world, but in my own way I’m all right.’

‘Well said.’ His eyes were warm.

‘Hey, what about you?’ she asked suddenly.

‘What about me what?’

‘You moved, too. To a different country, a different language even.

That couldn’t have been easy.’

‘I guess.’ Anders leaned back in his seat and stretched out long legs beneath the table. ‘But I thought of it as an adventure; I know it’s hokey, but it’s true. My English wasn’t bad, and using it in school was a bit like a game, a puzzle. Something like driving when you’re only just learning how. Clutch, gas, turn the wheel…. Svend had a harder time; he wasn’t so far along in English.”

“So you fit in right away?’

‘More or less. Well, I was taller than everyone else. I didn’t exactly blend in with the crowd. No hiding for me. We lived right downtown; Bellevue Park, you know it? Behind Kensington Market. My parents couldn’t stand the suburbs, and the ethnicities were mostly Asian or southern European; a lot of short, dark kids. I was the guy at the back who looked like he was in the wrong class. A broomstick. Skinny as hell. That was my nickname for a while.”

“Broomstick?’

‘Yeah, or Broom. See, my hair when it’s short kind of sticks up….’ He ran his fingers through his hair from below, and sure enough, for a few seconds it defied gravity, a haystack gone wild. ‘It’s bit long for it at the moment.’ He brushed it back down.

She reached over to smooth the remaining stragglers, and he kissed the inside of her wrist.

‘But I take it you didn’t get left out or picked on,’ she said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Just a feeling.’

He looked at her curiously. ‘Well, you’re right. Apart from some jokes.

Though I suppose I could have been. I don’t know. Mockery, or that macho challenge thing that boys do, they’re easy enough to deal with. So when it came up I dealt with it. For myself or anyone else I thought was getting it rough.’

She smiled broadly. ‘You protected the weak, did you? My superman?

‘You betcha.’ The waiter topped up his coffee, and Anders stirred in more cream, watching it swirl and vanish. ‘Tried to, anyway.’ She gave an enquiring look, but he left it at that.

‘So – my information management girl,’ he said, ‘you want to give freely, find people what they need, serve them with facts.’

‘Yes.’ He rested his eyes on her, and her face shifted. ‘Okay. I know.

It’s the same – I want to do the same for you.’

‘Give me what I need?’

She nodded.

‘I think you will.’

They sat quietly, looking out. It was full dark now: streetlights, headlights and neon signs reflecting on wet asphalt. Cars and crowds. At last she spoke up, a little timidly.

‘And – and what about your fantasies? When did all this – take hold, for you?’

He considered. ‘Hard to say. I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t there. At least the assumption that I ought to be in charge.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure my siblings appreciated that very much. But of course there were all the ideas beneath the surface that I only talked about later, with a cousin of mine who’s also into it. A fascination with unequal power relationships. Feudal droit de seigneur, patriarchal marriages, purdah, and of course every kind of slave-owning culture. I even wrote essays on the subject, anti- of course, while secretly imagining myself as a Viking slave raider.”

“They did do a lot of that, didn’t they.’

‘Sure. Thralls. Trælle. Spoils of war, or the results of all that coastal raiding. Not that they were the only ones.”

“I can just see you in a Viking boat. At the helm. Sword in hand.’

‘Standing over the pretty captive. Who, incidentally, fell for me big time and quite liked her collar.’

‘Consent even then?’

‘Oh, yes; always.’

‘A left wing Viking slave raider.’

He laughed. ‘Twenty-first century version.’

They went for a long walk. The air was still damp but the clouds had moved on; the moon was visible between the streetlights. They strolled north through Grange Park and along Dundas, still crowded with stalls, and thick with the odours of Chinese food, car exhaust and damp asphalt. The restaurant smells persisted until they were well into the residential part of Chinatown. Here the scent of damp earth rose unevenly through the downtown exhaust fumes; people’s gardens waking up. Anders felt Maia’s small, smooth hand like a child’s in his own. ‘What about your cousin?’ she asked him. Anders looked down at her. ‘What about him?”

“Another Viking slave raider?’

‘No. Well, maybe a scene version. Clubs and scenes, midnight to six a.m., that’s Karl.”

“In Copenhagen?’

‘Uh-huh. And Amsterdam. He’ll be in Chicago soon doing graduate work. There’s more to Karl than clubs. But no doubt he’ll be at it till all hours still.’

She reached up and touched the scar beneath his chin, though she couldn’t see it in the dark.

‘Mm?’

‘While you’re telling me things. What happened there?’

He rubbed the smooth line where no beard grew. ‘That? I was – what, eleven? My brother and I found a shopping cart on a sidewalk. I thought I’d give him a ride, but there was a hill, and he was heavier than I thought….’

‘So…?’

‘So I staged a dramatic rescue.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘My superboy phase, I suppose. I yanked the thing back off its wheels just before it went into the road, banged both of us up in the process.’

‘How did he come out of it?’

‘Split eyebrow. He likes it. He was very proud of the black eye, which I must admit was a beauty. My mother always complained that she was on a first-name basis with the emergency room staff. She was, too.’

Still heading north, they made their way through the university campus, past old stone and new brick, through a gothic arch or two. They turned into Philosopher’s Walk, a twisting pedestrian byway through a narrow park that ran behind the museum, between Trinity College and the Faculty of Music, on up to Bloor. No one else was in sight; they seemed to have the path to themselves. Anders tucked Maia’s arm under his. The faint exotic tea scent of her flesh came to him; he suppressed an urge to devour her then and there.

‘I’ve made some more decisions about how this is going to go,’ he told her. ‘Choice but no choice.’ She tensed beneath his arm, and he tightened his hold. ‘First of all, understand that I’m going to do what I want with you, and I’m going to enjoy that very much. And you’ll obey me.’ She heaved a trembling sigh and he squeezed her arm. ‘I think I read you well enough to avoid causing damage, physical or psychological damage, but I could be wrong, Maia. I won’t count on that. So I’m going to give you some chances to tell me if I’ve missed anything important about what you’re feeling, what you’re going through. At the end of each day at first. Less and less often as time goes on. These will be escape points, too, if it turns out you’re wrong about what you can stand. Eventually the escape points will be very, very few and far between. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘I – ‘ She swallowed. ‘I think so. You’re – you’re building in just enough freedom so if it goes wrong there’s a way out. Sometimes. Otherwise I don’t have choices, and I do what I’m told.’

‘That’s right.’ They walked on in silence for a minute, and then he went on. ‘I’m not going to consult you, but I am going to question you and observe your reactions. This may or may not influence what I do.’ Though her arm remained tucked under his, Anders had a sense that she was drawing away. He leaned down to get a better look in the dim light. ‘What is it, Maia?’ She bit her lip. ‘Control again?’

She nodded. He stopped and turned her toward him, examined the averted face in profile.

‘You’re afraid I’ll let you decide – let you shape what happens.’

‘Mm.’

‘Go on.’

She stared at the ground. ‘I just know that if there’s something you don’t want, and you do it for my sake – ‘ Her body shrank away from him, and her face was a misery of humiliation. ‘I won’t be able to bear it. Everything –

everything will go wrong. We’ll be back to games again.’

This had to be nipped in the bud, quickly. He dug his fingers into her shoulders. ‘Maia,’ he said gently. ‘You haven’t got this straight.’ She looked up. ‘This is not a reciprocal arrangement. It’s not about giving you a kinky good time.’ He waited a beat or two to make sure she took this in. ‘If all goes well I’ll own you. Body, mind, all of you. If you’re going to be my property I need to know what I’ve got, what you’re good for.’ His voice dropped a confidential note lower. ‘Like buying a dog – is it the right kind for what I want? Does it have the right disposition? Can it be trained?’

***

I stared up at him hardly able to breathe, hit with such a maelstrom of emotions that my body could hardly contain them all; he’d be scraping me off the lamp posts and the distant museum walls.

Fear, outrage and humiliation. Rebellion. Recognition, joy, lust like sheet lightning. A thunderbolt flash of clarity and connection illuminating the landscape between us. Panic at the view of the precipice at my feet.

My eyes never left his face. He observed me calmly, his expression serious, aware. At last one of his hands came off my shoulder, held my cheek for a moment, then slid into the hair at the nape of my neck and gently, inexorably, pulled my head back. ‘You understand now, Maia.”

“Yes.’

‘Good.’ His face lowered, and he kissed me; a seal, it seemed on our agreement, or whatever it was.