smooth seas won't make good sailors

Because alongside the book there has been: a browser tab he forgot to close, open to what appeared to be a forum thread titled "single column tie for beginners, advice?". A second library book, returned before you could clock the title, which he insisted was "just a thing for school" with the bright innocent expression of a man who has never in his life convincingly lied. A small coil of soft white cotton rope that appeared in the bottom of his sock drawer four days ago, which he relocated to the bedside drawer two days ago, and which he has since checked on, you are fairly certain, three separate times.

Ryland Grace is the world's worst secret-keeper. It is one of your favourite things about him.

It is also why, tonight, when he comes into the bedroom in his pyjama pants and a faded t-shirt that says I HAVE A CHEMISTRY JOKE BUT I'M AFRAID IT WON'T GET A REACTION, and finds you sitting cross-legged on the bed with the book open in your lap, his face does something extraordinary.

It is a face that goes through approximately six expressions in two seconds. You catalogue them, because you love him, and because they are very funny.

One: recognition.

Two: alarm.

Three: a brief, valiant attempt at innocence.

Four: the dawning realisation that innocence is not on the table.

Five: a flicker of something else. Something warmer, and lower, and considerably more interesting.

Six: the smile. The crooked one. The one he does when he's been caught and has decided, with admirable speed, to enjoy it.

"Ah," he says.

You turn a page. You do not look up.

"So."

You turn another page.

"So you've," he says, and stops. Starts again. "So that's. That's a book."

"Mm."

"That you have. Found."

"Mm."

"In our bedroom."

"On your nightstand," you correct, helpfully, still not looking up. "For three weeks."

There is a pause. You can feel him calculating. You can practically hear it. He's running through, you suspect, several increasingly creative explanations and discarding each one on the basis that you are smarter than he is currently capable of being.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. Right. So."

You finally look up.

He is standing at the foot of the bed with his hands shoved into his pyjama pockets, his hair doing the thing it does at night where it sticks up at the back, his glasses pushed up onto his head and clearly forgotten about. He looks, for a man who has just been busted, remarkably pleased. Slightly flushed. Mouth twitching at one corner like he's trying not to laugh and only partly succeeding.

"How long," you say, "were you planning to wait."

"To," he says.

"To say something."

"Oh." He considers this with the seriousness of a man being asked a question on the SATs. "Honestly? I had not landed on a timeline."

"Three weeks, Ryland."

"Three weeks is a timeline. It's a slow one. I had not ruled it out."

You close the book. You set it on top of the duvet. You raise both eyebrows.

He exhales, scrubs a hand over his face, and laughs, soft and a little helpless. "Okay. Okay, yeah. Fair. I have been. I will admit. I have been, uh. Sitting on this."

"Among other things."

"Among," he agrees, "other things."

"Were you," you say, "going to mention the rope, too. Or was that going to live in the sock drawer indefinitely."

His mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. "You found the—"

"It was in the socks, sweetheart."

"It was under the socks."

"Ryland."

"Look," he says, holding up both hands now, the picture of a man trying to defuse a situation he has, in fact, set up entirely himself. "I want to be clear that there is a reason for the order of operations here. There's a methodology. I had a plan."

"You had a plan."

"I had a plan."

"That involved hiding rope in your sock drawer."

"That involved," he says, "doing the reading first. And then ideally not springing anything on you. And then, you know. Talking. About it. Like adults."

"And how was the talking going."

"The talking," he says, "was scheduled for some unspecified future date when I had finished assembling the relevant. The relevant. Look. There are things you should know before you say yes or no to a thing. There are things I should know before I ask. I was being thorough."

"You were stalling."

"I was being thorough and also stalling. These are not mutually exclusive."

You bite the inside of your cheek to keep from grinning. He sees you do it, because of course he does, and his whole face goes soft around the edges. He climbs onto the bed, finally, and sits down at the other end of it, facing you. He pulls his glasses down off his head, looks at them like he's surprised to find them, and sets them on the nightstand on top of the book, which is now, of the two of you, the third most embarrassed object in the room.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. Hi. Let's. Let's do this properly."

"By all means."

He takes a breath. He looks at his hands for a second, and then he looks back up at you, and his eyes are doing the thing they do when he's about to be serious about something, which is to say they are very steady and a little bit bright.

"So I've been," he says, "reading about something. Which you have now correctly identified. And I have been reading about it for. A while. Actually a longer while than three weeks, if I am being honest, the book is just the most recent of several books, which I am bringing up now because I am committed to full disclosure."

"Several books."

"There is a stack at school. In my desk drawer. Under some lesson plans." He winces. "Don't ask which lesson plans. The answer will distress you."

You make a small involuntary noise.

"Right. Anyway. The point is that I have been. Thinking about this. For some time. And the thinking has gotten, increasingly, less abstract. And at some point in the last, I want to say, month, it stopped being a thing I was curious about in theory and started being a thing I was, very, specifically. Curious about. With you."

He pauses. He's watching your face.

You keep it still. You do not, you are quite proud, give him anything.

"And I want to say a couple of things up front," he says, "before I get any further into this, because I think it matters. The first thing is that I am not. Bringing this up because I think anything is, you know, missing, or wrong, or. None of that. We are good. We are extremely good. This is not a, a fixing thing. This is a, a, an additive thing. A bonus content thing. A director's cut."

"Ryland."

"Sorry. Yes. The second thing is that I have done a truly embarrassing amount of research. Like. Genuinely embarrassing. I could give a seminar. I have, at this point, opinions about cotton versus jute that I will spare you unless you are interested, in which case I have a lot to say. But the relevant takeaway is that I know what I'm talking about. I would not be bringing this up if I didn't. I would not put you anywhere I had not, mentally, been already and figured out the load-bearing parts of."

Something low in your stomach tightens.

"The third thing," he says, and he's still watching you, still very steady, "is that I have been thinking, very specifically, about. About what I'd want to do. If we did this. And I want to tell you. I want to lay it out. So you know what you're saying yes or no to, if you say either."

"Okay," you say. Your voice is, you notice, a little quieter than it was a minute ago.

"Okay," he says back. He shifts on the bed. He doesn't come any closer. He's giving you space, which you only notice because of how deliberate it is. "So. Here's. Here's what I've been thinking about."

He takes a breath.

"I've been thinking," he says, "about doing this slowly. Like, much slower than you would think. Because the thing about rope, the thing that is genuinely the cool thing about rope, is that the point of it isn't the. Isn't the end state. The point of it is the time it takes to get there. The whole experience is the wrapping. The being-held. The not being able to go anywhere because you don't need to go anywhere, because I've got you. That's the thing. That's what it's for."

He's looking at you and he's talking with his hands a little, the way he does when he's enthusiastic about something, but his voice has gone quieter to match yours, and the effect is that he sounds less like he's explaining and more like he's confessing.

Your mouth is dry. You did not notice it going dry.

"I've been thinking," he says, "about starting with your wrists. Just your wrists. Because I want to see how you do with that first before I do anything else. Single column tie, behind your back, soft cotton, the kind that won't leave marks unless I want it to. I've been thinking about how that's going to feel for you. How your shoulders are going to sit. How you'll have to lean forward a little, because you won't be able to balance the way you usually do, and I'll have to put a hand on you to keep you steady. Right here." He touches the centre of his own sternum, lightly.

The image arrives in your body before it arrives in your head. His hand. Flat against you. Holding you up because you can't hold yourself. You feel the heat of it climb up the back of your neck. Your stomach does something low and stupid and slow.

"And I've been thinking about how that's going to feel for me," he says. "Having you like that."

You cannot look directly at him. You cannot look away from him. Your eyes have settled, traitorously, on his mouth, which is a problem because his mouth is what is making the sound, and the sound is the issue. His voice has dropped half a register without him seeming to notice and you have, you are realising now, stopped listening to the words a sentence ago. The words are arriving on a small delay, like a translation. The sound is going somewhere else. Somewhere lower. The sound is doing the work the words are only describing.

"I've been thinking," he says, lower still, "about taking my time once you're tied. Not doing anything for a while. Just looking at you. Because I am, you should know, extremely planning to look at you. For a while. And I've been thinking about what you're going to do, while I'm doing that, because you are very bad at being looked at without doing something about it, sweetheart, you cannot help yourself, you will start to fidget, and you will not be able to, because I will have made sure of that."

Your thighs press together before you decide to do it. The duvet shifts under your hand. You think, with great and useless clarity: he is not even touching me.

You try to say his name.

What comes out is closer to a breath than a word. A small soft thing. Not language. You feel it leave you and you cannot take it back and there is a heartbeat of silence after it in which you realise, with a fresh wave of heat up your throat, that he heard it.

His eyes change.

"Yeah," he says, quietly. Like he's answering you. Like that sound was a complete sentence and he heard it and he is, very mildly, taking note. "Yeah. That. That's what I've been thinking about."

He doesn't come any closer. He doesn't have to. You feel the inch of space between you on the bed like it has acquired weight. Your pulse is in your throat. Your pulse is in less defensible places. He is sitting cross-legged in his pyjama pants and a t-shirt about chemistry and he has not raised a hand and you can feel exactly where he has decided his hand is going to go first, on your sternum, holding you up, and you cannot, you find, breathe quite normally.

"I've been thinking," he says, and his voice has dropped again, and you feel it in the small of your back, "about what I'd want once you've stopped being able to fidget. About putting my mouth on you. Slowly. Working out what makes you make noise and what makes you make better noise, because there's a difference, and I have, frankly, been collecting data on this for some time, and I have hypotheses I have not been able to test under controlled conditions."

The laugh that wants to come out of you does not come out. It catches somewhere in your chest and turns into something else on the way up. You exhale through your nose. Your hand has, you discover, closed in the duvet without your permission, and you cannot make it let go.

"I've been thinking," he says, ignoring you, or possibly answering you, or possibly both, "about not letting you come for a while. Because you are extremely in charge most of the time, like I said, and a lot of being in charge is about deciding when things happen. And I want to. I want to take that. For a little bit. I want to decide. I want to make you ask. And then I want to make you ask again. And then I want to see what you sound like when I finally say yes."

You make a sound. You do not know what kind of sound. It is small and involuntary and absolutely not your fault.

He notices. Of course he notices. The corner of his mouth lifts. Just slightly. Just enough that you know he heard it and filed it and is, somewhere behind his eyes, pleased.

"I've been thinking," he says, softer now, almost gentle, "about every single one of these things, in detail, for weeks. I've thought about them sitting at my desk during fifth-period prep. I've thought about them in the shower. I've thought about them lying right here next to you while you were asleep, which I am telling you because I said I would be honest. There is not a part of this I have not turned over and looked at."

He stops.

Not for breath this time. For effect. You feel the shift the second it happens, in the way the silence between you changes texture, in the way his shoulders settle, in the small specific stillness that comes over him when he is, you know from a hundred other contexts, about to land something.

He looks at you. Properly. He takes his time about it. His eyes move over your face, your throat, your hand still closed in the duvet, the way your chest is moving, the way you are not, currently, meeting his eyes. He looks at all of it. He looks at all of it the way he looks at a problem he has already solved and is now simply confirming the solution to.

The half-smile is gone. Or it has changed. Something has settled into the corner of his mouth that was not there a minute ago, something quieter and more certain, and you understand, with a small bright drop somewhere behind your sternum, that he has known for some time that you were going to say yes. That he has been watching you arrive at it. That the gentleness of the speech was, in part, a courtesy, and the courtesy is now, very deliberately, being set aside.

"And the only thing," he says, and his voice is low and easy and entirely unhurried, "the only thing in the entire world that has been stopping me from doing any of it."

He pauses. He holds your eyes. He lets you feel it.

"Is that you haven't asked me to yet."

The room is very quiet.

You can hear, distantly, a car going past on the street. You can hear the soft hum of the fridge from down the hall. You can hear your own pulse, which is doing something embarrassing.

He's just sitting there. He's not pushing. He's not even moving. He's put the entire situation on the bed between you, neatly assembled, and stepped back from it with both hands visible. The ball, as the saying goes, is in your court. He is wearing a t-shirt about chemistry.

You look at him. You look at the book on the nightstand. You look back at him.

"You did do a lot of reading," you say.

He grins. Wide and stupid and relieved.

"I really did," he says.

You take a breath. Your hands are not steady. You don't try to make them steady. You reach behind you, slowly, and you pull your hair off the back of your neck, and you hold it there for a second, and his face does something you will think about later, in detail, with great satisfaction.

"Okay," you say.

He goes very still.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah to. To which part."

"To all of it, Ryland."

His exhale is audible.

"Okay," he says. His voice has gone rough at the edges. "Okay. Right. Yeah. Okay. Give me. Give me one second."

He gets up. He goes to the dresser. He opens the drawer. He turns around with the coil of rope in his hands, and he is, you notice, very slightly pink in the face, and his hands, you notice, are not steady either.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi."

"I love you a lot."

"I love you too."

"I am going to take my time," he says. "Just so you know."

"I gathered."

He climbs back onto the bed.

He sets the rope down beside him on the duvet, neatly coiled, and you look at it and then you look at him and you watch, fascinated, as a small flicker of something passes across his face. Not nervousness exactly. Not anymore. Something more like the feeling of standing at the edge of a thing you have planned in detail and are about to step into for the first time. He looks at the rope. He looks at his own hands. He breathes out, once, quietly, and the flicker resolves.

"Okay," he says, mostly to himself.

He looks back up at you, and his eyes are warm, and the half-smile is back, and the something-else underneath it is back too, and you understand that whatever momentary uncertainty just moved through him has been catalogued, accepted, and set aside.

"Come here," he says.

It is not a question. It is not unkind. It is the voice of a man who has thought about this exact moment for weeks and has decided, on the available evidence, that this is how it begins. You go to him. Of course you go to him. Your knees move you across the duvet without consulting you and you arrive in front of him, on your knees, close enough that you can feel the warmth coming off his chest through the thin cotton of his t-shirt.

He looks at you for a long second.

"Hi," he says, softer.

"Hi."

"You're okay."

"I'm okay."

"You'll tell me if you stop being okay."

"I'll tell you."

"Good," he says, and the word goes through you in a way that is genuinely unreasonable given that he has not, technically, started anything. He sees it. The corner of his mouth moves. He files it. You feel filed.

He reaches up, slowly, and he brushes your hair back from your shoulder with the side of his thumb. His knuckles graze the skin at the side of your neck and you do not, you are very proud, make a sound. Then his hand settles, flat, at the centre of your sternum, exactly where he said it would. He does not push. He just rests his palm there for a second, as if checking the calibration of a piece of equipment he has been describing to you in theory and is now meeting in practice.

"Okay," he says, quieter. "Okay. Yeah. There you are."

He moves his hand. Down. Slow. He hooks his fingers in the hem of your shirt and lifts, and you lift your arms because you have apparently agreed to be useful, and the shirt comes off over your head and is, with great care, folded once and set on the nightstand on top of the book. You almost laugh. He almost laughs. Neither of you does.

He looks at you.

It is, in fairness to him, exactly what he said he was going to do. He looks at you for what feels like a very long time. His eyes move, slowly, over your collarbones, your shoulders, the line of your throat, the slight rise and fall of your chest, the place where his hand rested a second ago and where you can still feel the heat of it like an imprint. He does not say anything. He does not need to. The looking is doing something to you that words have already done once tonight and are apparently going to keep doing in different forms.

You want to cross your arms. You don't. You hold very still and let him have it, and the holding-still is, you realise, a thing you are choosing, and the choosing is its own kind of giving.

"Beautiful," he says, eventually. Just that. Quietly. Not a comment. An exhale.

His hand comes back. Settles between your shoulder blades. Light pressure. "Off the bed for me, sweetheart. Just for a second."

You slide off the edge of the bed and stand on the floor. He stays where he is, kneeling at the edge of the mattress, which puts him almost exactly at your eye level, and his hands settle on your hips. His thumbs hook in the waistband of your pyjama bottoms. He slides them down, slowly, all the way down, steadying you with a hand on your hip while you step out of them, one foot then the other. He folds them. He sets them on top of the shirt. The little stack on the nightstand is becoming, in its quiet way, completely unhinged.

He looks at you from where he's kneeling on the bed.

You have, you realise, never been looked at quite like this before. Not by him. Not by anyone. He is looking at you the way he looks at something he has earned the right to look at, the way he looks at a thing he has been thinking about so long that meeting it in person is a small and serious event. His eyes are bright. His hand is still on your hip and his thumb is moving in a small absent circle on the curve of bone there, like he doesn't know he's doing it.

"Okay," he says, and his voice is rough at the edges again, "okay, you have to. You have to give me a second here, because I'm going to. I'm going to lose the plot if I don't. Come back up here. Knees. Yeah. Like that."

You climb back onto the bed and kneel facing away from him, your back to his chest, your hands loose in your lap. The mattress shifts behind you as he settles in closer, close enough that you can feel the soft cotton of his t-shirt against your shoulder blades, close enough that you can feel him breathe. His hands rest, briefly, on your upper arms. A grounding touch. A here-we-go touch.

"Hands behind your back for me," he says, near your ear.

You bring them back. Your wrists cross, automatically, neatly, the way they would in handcuffs, and you hear him make a small soft noise behind you that you are going to think about later, in considerable detail.

"Look at you," he says, quietly. "You've thought about this too."

You cannot answer. Heat moves up the back of your neck where he can see it. He sees it. He does not comment. He is, you understand, busy.

The rope comes off the coil with a soft dry sound. You feel the weight of the bight as he doubles it. You feel him measure the length against your forearms, once, then a second time. He is, even now, checking his work.

"Okay," he says, and his voice has gone different. Not the bedroom voice. Not the speech voice. Something narrower and more focused, the voice of a man with his hands inside the actual problem. "The thing about a single column tie is that the whole trick is friction and load distribution. You want the wraps doing the work, not the knot. The knot is just where you stop the wraps. So I'm going to wrap you a couple of times here. Soft. Snug, not tight. Tell me how it feels."

The rope settles around your wrists. Cool at first, then warming fast against your skin. He wraps once. Twice. A third time. He is so careful. He is so unhurried. You can feel the small precise tension as he pulls each wrap into place, and you can feel his knuckles brush your skin, deliberate, attentive, not incidental.

"How's that," he says. "Talk to me."

"It's. Good."

"Good how."

"Snug. Not. Not tight."

"Can you move your fingers."

You move your fingers.

"Good," he says, soft and pleased, and you feel the word in three different parts of your body. "Good. Okay. Now I'm going to take the working end through. Here's where the friction does its job, see. This part. The wraps grip themselves. So even when I tie it off here, the tightness doesn't change. You're not getting tighter. You're getting secured. There's a difference."

You did not know there was a difference. You did not know you wanted to know there was a difference. You know now.

You feel him pull the working end through. You feel the small definitive cinch as the friction takes. You feel him tie something off behind your wrists with a soft brisk efficiency that you are not surprised to learn he possesses, given that this is a man who has, by his own admission, given a seminar's worth of thought to this exact event.

His hands rest on your forearms when he is done. He sits back, just slightly. He does not let go.

"Test it for me," he says, quietly. "Pull. Gently. Just see what it does."

You pull. Gently. The wraps hold. There is no give. There is no tightening either, exactly as he said. You are simply, definitively, held. Your shoulders adjust, exactly as he said. You lean forward, a little, because you cannot balance the way you usually do, exactly as he said.

His hand arrives at the centre of your sternum from behind, palm flat, steadying you. Exactly as he said.

"There you go," he murmurs, right at your ear. "There. I've got you. I told you."

You make a sound. Small. Involuntary. Absolutely not your fault.

He files it. You feel him file it.

"Okay," he says, soft. "Okay, sweetheart. Now I get to look at you for a while."

He works the knot at your wrists once, gently, testing it himself. He runs the back of his fingers up the inside of one of your forearms, slow, checking the line of the rope where it meets your skin. Then he sits back. The warmth of his chest leaves your back and you feel the absence of it in a way that is, honestly, a little embarrassing.

"Don't go anywhere," he says, softly, like there is any version of this where you could.

He moves. The mattress shifts. He comes around the side of the bed and settles in front of you, cross-legged, knees almost touching yours, and now you can see his face again for the first time since the tying started. His hair is sticking up at one side from where his hand kept going to it during the speech. His t-shirt about chemistry has, somehow, become a thing you cannot stop noticing. His eyes are bright and very level.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi."

"How are we doing."

You try to assemble an answer. Your assembled answer is: "Good."

He smiles, slow. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Talk to me if that changes."

He picks up the rest of the rope. There is more of it than you realised. He had not just brought one short length out of the drawer. He had brought enough. You watch him uncoil it across his lap, sorting it into a length he likes, and you understand, with a small clean drop somewhere behind your ribs, that he had a plan for tonight that did not stop at your wrists. That when he said the only thing he had meant the plural. That the chest harness, when it arrives, has been pre-measured.

He looks up and catches you looking at the rope.

"Mm," he says, soft. "Yeah. I'm not. I'm not done with you yet, sweetheart."

You make a small noise that you absolutely did not authorise.

"Okay," he says, in the narrowed-focused voice from before, the one that arrives when his hands are about to start working. "So this part. This part is what most people picture when they picture this kind of thing. The chest harness. I'm going to build a frame around your ribs. Above and below. It's structural. The whole job of it is to give the rest of the system something to anchor to, so when I do the next bit, it has something to hang off of. Okay?"

"Okay."

"I'm going to need to be in your space a little for this. I'm going to be close. Tell me if that's too much."

It is, you suspect, going to be too much in a number of ways that he has not specified. You nod.

He brings the bight of the rope up. He folds it once. He measures it, briefly, against the width of your ribcage with a small workmanlike motion, and you watch him do it and you have the distinct and unhelpful thought that you have never wanted him to take his shirt off more in your life than you do at this exact moment, while he is fully clothed and you are not, and you understand with absolute clarity that this asymmetry is deliberate, and that he knows it, and that the knowing is part of the point.

"Lift your chin a little for me."

You lift your chin.

He passes the rope behind your back, under your arms, and brings it around in front of you. The first wrap settles high across your chest, just under your collarbones. He pulls it through with one hand and catches it with the other behind you, and you feel his knuckles brush the side of your ribcage as he passes the working end. Once. Light. Deliberate. He does not acknowledge it. Neither do you.

"This wrap," he says, conversational, like he is teaching the most ordinary class of his life, "is the upper band. It sits here. It's not load-bearing in the way most people think, it's actually mostly for shape, and for. For where I want your shoulders to be sitting. Which is exactly where they are right now. Good."

The second wrap comes around. Lower. Underneath. Just below your breasts, snug against the curve of your ribs. He pulls it through and threads it back, and as he does his fingers pass, briefly, along the side of your breast. Not lingering. Not avoiding. Just passing, with the kind of casual intimacy of a man who has decided that you are now within the territory his hands are allowed to cross while working.

You exhale through your nose. He does not look up.

"This one," he says, "is doing more of the actual work. You can feel the difference, right. This one's snug. The wraps above and below are going to share the load."

"Mm-hm." You cannot, you find, make a longer sound than that.

He passes the rope behind you again. The cinch goes in at your side, against the inside of your upper arm, and you feel the small bright tightening as he pulls the two bands toward each other and ties them off there. His fingers work at the knot. The backs of his knuckles rest against your ribs while he ties. He is so close. He smells like the soap you both use and something underneath that is just him, and the t-shirt about chemistry is brushing the back of your hand where it is bound at the small of your back, and you do not think you have moved at all for several minutes, possibly longer, possibly years.

"Other side now," he murmurs.

He moves around you to do the matching cinch on your other side. His hand travels across the front of you to get there, the back of his fingers tracing, slowly and apparently incidentally, across the upper band as he goes. The contact is, for half a second, deliberately and unmistakably across the curve of your breast.

You make a sound.

He does not stop. He does not even look up. He just finishes the pass and threads the rope through and starts the second cinch, and his face has done nothing, but his ears, you can see, are very slightly pink.

He files it. You file the filing.

He ties off the second cinch. He runs his fingertips along the lower band, checking the tension. He nods, once, to himself. Then he reaches behind you and brings the working end up to your wrist tie, and you feel him thread the rope through the cinch at the back, and you understand, with a slow rolling realisation that goes through your whole body, what he is doing.

He is connecting them.

Your hands, at the small of your back, are about to become part of the harness. The rope at your wrists is being tied into the rope at your ribs. You are not just being bound. You are being integrated.

He ties the final knot. He tests it. He runs his hand, flat, down the line of your spine from the back of your neck all the way down to where his knot sits at the base of your shoulder blades, and the gesture is so casually proprietary that you make another sound, smaller this time, almost inaudible.

He comes back around to the front. He sits, again, cross-legged, knees almost touching yours.

He looks at you.

The looking is, somehow, worse than before. You are now framed. You can see, peripherally, the soft white lines of cotton crossing your chest above and below. You can feel the rope holding you upright in a way your own muscles are not, currently, contributing to. You can feel your hands at the small of your back, secured to your own ribcage. You cannot, you discover, slump. You cannot hunch. The harness holds you in a posture that is, by accident or design, the exact posture of being presented.

And he is looking at you like the looking has been the entire point of the last twenty minutes.

"Beautiful," he says, quietly, the second time tonight. He uses the word like he's learning how to. Like he is, perhaps, going to use it again.

"Ryland."

"Mm."

You don't have a next sentence. You just wanted to say his name. You wanted to hear yourself say it and you wanted him to hear you say it and you wanted, you realise, for it to come out small and a little wrecked, which it has.

He breathes out. He shifts forward. He brings one hand up, slowly, and rests it flat against the upper band where it crosses just under your collarbones, his palm warm through the rope and against your skin. His thumb moves, once, in a slow arc across the cotton.

"You feel okay."

"Yeah."

"Tell me if anything goes numb. Hands especially. Promise me."

"I promise."

"Good."

The word, again. You feel it land in three different places.

He leans in, slowly, and presses his mouth, briefly, to the centre of your forehead. Then to the bridge of your nose. Then, for a long warm second, to your mouth. He does not push it. He does not deepen it. He just kisses you, soft and slow and entirely on his own time, while you sit bound in front of him and cannot, with your hands, do a single thing about it. When he pulls back, his thumb is still moving on your collarbone, and his eyes have gone very dark.

"Okay," he says, soft. "Okay, sweetheart. We're not done yet."

He sits back. He surveys his work for a long second, head tilted slightly, the way he does when he is looking at a thing he has built and is mentally checking it for load-bearing accuracy. His eyes go from the upper band, to the lower, to the cinch at one side, to the cinch at the other, to the line of rope disappearing behind your shoulders. He nods, once, small.

"Okay," he says, mostly to himself. "Okay. Last bit."

He picks up the remaining length. There is, you note, still a surprising amount of rope left. You had assumed, somewhere in the back of your head, that he was almost done. You were, you are learning, wrong about this. You are wrong about a lot of things tonight. This is, apparently, going to be a recurring theme.

"This part," he says, his voice quieter now, no longer in teaching mode, more like he is talking to himself while he works and has decided to let you listen, "is going to come down from the front of the harness. Here." He touches, lightly, the centre of the lower band, where it sits in the soft valley just under your breasts. "Down. Across your hips. Around the back. Up to the cinch points on the sides. So it's all. It's all going to connect. Everything is going to be part of everything else."

You exhale, slowly. You feel him track the breath.

"And then I'm going to do something around your thighs," he says, "but not. Not so much that you can't move them. I just want. I want the line of it. I want to see it on you. I want you to feel it there."

He stops. He looks up at you. The corner of his mouth lifts, slightly, with the small specific wickedness it has acquired over the last hour.

"You know where I want you to feel it," he says.

You make a sound. You do not have a word for the sound. It is not a sound you have made before and you are not, currently, in a state to interrogate when it might have entered your repertoire.

"Yeah," he says, soft. "Yeah. I thought so."

He brings the working end down from where it sat at the centre of the lower band. He pulls the length through his hand once, smoothing it, and then he leans in, close, and his face is at your collarbone as he reaches around behind you to feed the rope through the cinch at your shoulder blades. His cheek brushes the curve of your throat as he does. You feel the soft scratch of stubble. You feel his breath on your skin and you feel your own pulse jump visibly there, and he must see it because he makes a small soft pleased sound that goes through you like a struck note.

He doesn't pull back right away. He stays close for a second, his face at your neck, working the rope by feel behind you. Then his mouth, briefly, lights on the place where your shoulder meets your throat. Not a kiss. A pressing. A confirmation. You hear yourself say something that is not a word.

"Mm-hm," he murmurs, against your skin. "I know. I know, sweetheart. I'm taking my time. I told you."

He pulls back. He keeps working.

The rope comes down the front of you, from the lower band, slow. He guides it past your stomach. Past your navel. His knuckles trail the path the rope is taking, light and deliberate, as if showing the rope where to go and showing you where it is going at the same time. By the time the working end reaches the top of your hip he has, technically, done nothing untoward, and you are, in practice, almost incapable of holding still.

He passes the rope around your hip and behind you. He brings it back through. Your hips, he is now, very methodically, framing. A wrap above. A wrap below. He pulls them snug against the curve of you and you feel them settle, low, lower than the harness, in a place that is, anatomically and otherwise, beginning to be a problem.

"Okay," he says, his voice gone soft and very low. "Okay. Let me. Let me just."

He shifts. He leans in. His forearm rests, briefly, against the inside of your thigh, light, just for balance, as he reaches to thread the rope behind you. The contact is, you tell yourself, incidental. The contact is, the more honest part of you knows, not incidental at all. You make a small involuntary noise.

He pretends he has not heard it. He is busy.

He brings the rope around to your other hip. He ties off a small efficient connection at your side, where the hip wraps meet the cinch from the harness above. Now the harness and the hip rope are one system. The wrist tie behind you is part of that system. You are, increasingly, one entire piece. You are no longer a body with rope on it. You are, you are realising with a slow heat that is climbing in places it has no business climbing this far in advance, a body that is part of the rope.

He sits back. He looks at his work again. He nods.

"One more thing," he says. "Bear with me."

He takes the remaining length and brings it down past the hip wrap on one side. He guides it across the top of your thigh, just below where the hip rope sits, low across the front of your upper leg. He passes it around the back of your thigh, brings it back, and ties it off into the hip rope so it forms a soft loop. Then he does the same on the other side. Two loops, one around each thigh, low and snug, attached up to the hip wrap. They do not restrict your legs. They simply sit there.

They sit, specifically, exactly where the line of his attention has been pointing for the last twenty minutes.

You can feel them. You can feel the line of the rope across the front of each thigh. You can feel where each loop disappears around the back. You can feel, with a clarity that is genuinely unfair, the open inch of space between them.

He runs a fingertip, once, along the front of the rope where it crosses your right thigh. Slow. From the outside in. Following the line of it. His fingertip travels along the rope until it reaches the inner edge of the loop and then, for one half-second, it does not stop. His knuckle brushes, briefly and with absolute deliberation, across the place his speech had promised and his hands had been deferring.

You jerk.

You cannot help it. Your hips move and your breath leaves you in a sound that is half gasp and half something else, and the harness holds you upright when you would otherwise have folded forward, and he watches it happen with his hand still resting, lightly, on your thigh.

"Mm," he says, soft. "Yeah."

He removes his hand. Just like that. He sits back on his heels and looks at you, and his face has done the thing it does when he has confirmed a hypothesis, the small bright contained pleasure of a man whose data has come in exactly as predicted.

"Okay," he says. "Yeah. Yeah, we're. We're good. We're past good. Sweetheart, look at you."

You cannot look at yourself. You can, however, look at him, and what you see in his face is the same look from before the speech ended, the look of a man who has been planning a thing in detail and is now, with great satisfaction, watching the thing arrive. Except now there is something further in it. Something almost reverent. Something that has, you understand, been waiting for this exact configuration of you to exist.

He reaches up. He cups the side of your face. His thumb traces, slowly, along your cheekbone. You lean into his palm without deciding to.

"You okay."

"Yes."

"Tell me how you are."

"I'm. Ryland."

"I know. Use your words for me, sweetheart, just a couple."

"I'm. I can't. I want."

"I know."

"Please."

The word leaves you before you decide to release it. It is the first time tonight you have asked him for anything in plain language and the sound of it in your own voice is a thing you are going to think about, later, with great and burning specificity.

His eyes close. Just for a second. Like the word has gone through him too.

When he opens them, they are very dark. The half-smile is gone. The settled certainty is fully in his face now, the look he had right before the closer of his speech, and his thumb is still moving on your cheekbone, and his voice when he speaks is so quiet you almost feel it more than hear it.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, okay. Lie back for me."

You lie back.

It is not, mechanically, easy. Your arms are behind you, tied to the harness, and you cannot use them for balance. You start to tip and he catches you, one hand at the back of your neck and the other flat against the harness at your sternum, and he lowers you down slowly onto your back across the duvet. He is so careful. Your shoulders settle. He adjusts your hips so your weight is not on your wrists, and the small specific competence of it, the way he handles you like you are precious cargo he has personally packaged, does something to you that you do not have language for.

He looks down at you for a long second.

The angle is, you understand, different now. He is up on his knees beside you, fully clothed, and you are laid out on the duvet in nothing but rope. The asymmetry from earlier has acquired a final form. He is looking down at you the way he looks at a problem he has solved and built and is now, with great satisfaction, going to test.

"There you are," he says, softly. "There you are."

He puts a hand, flat, low on your stomach. Just resting it. The weight of it goes through you. His thumb moves, once, along the line of the lower hip rope where it crosses your skin.

"You feel okay."

"Yes."

"Shoulders okay."

"Yes."

"Hands."

You move your fingers.

"Good." The word again. You feel it land. "Sweetheart, look at you. Look at you. I'm just. I'm going to look at you for a second. Is that okay."

"Yes."

He does.

You have, possibly, never been looked at so completely in your life. His eyes go everywhere. The rope across your chest. Your throat. The slight shine of sweat at your collarbones. The line of the hip rope. The loops at your thighs. The space between them. His attention is the most physical thing currently happening to you and he is not touching you at all. His hand is still resting, light, low on your stomach, and his thumb has gone still, and he is just looking.

You move, involuntarily, a fraction. Your hips shift. The rope at your hips moves with you. You see his eyes drop to track it.

"Mm," he says. Soft.

He shifts. He moves down the bed. He settles between your legs, on his stomach, propped on his forearms, and the new angle puts his face level with the lower hip rope, and you realise, with a slow heat that climbs the inside of your thighs, that he is now exactly where he has been describing being for the better part of an hour.

He rests his cheek, briefly, against the inside of your thigh, just above the rope loop. He turns his face slightly. He presses his mouth to the soft skin there, slow, a real kiss, and you feel his lips part and the warm flat press of his tongue and you make a sound that you do not authorise and cannot retract.

"Hi," he murmurs, against your skin.

"Hi."

"How long have you been like this for me."

You cannot answer. You do not know. Time has, you suspect, broken slightly.

"Long enough," he answers himself, soft. "Yeah. I know. I've been watching."

He kisses, slowly, across the inside of your thigh. He kisses the soft hollow just above the rope loop. He kisses the place where the loop meets the inner skin of your leg. He kisses, with great deliberation, around where you need him, in a small unhurried arc that maps the outer perimeter of his actual destination. He is taking inventory. He is, you understand with a kind of distant despair, still doing reconnaissance.

"Ryland."

"Mm."

"Please."

"I love it when you say that," he says, conversational, his mouth still moving slowly across the inside of your thigh. "I love it. I've thought about it. It is, in fact, one of the things I have been thinking about. I want you to know that."

"Ryland."

He laughs, quietly, against your skin. The vibration of it goes through you in a way that makes your hips jerk forward without your permission.

"Okay," he says, softer. "Okay, sweetheart. Okay."

And then his mouth is on you.

He licks you, one long slow stroke straight up the centre of you, and the sound that comes out of you is high and broken and entirely new. He makes a low pleased sound back, into you, into the wet heat between your thighs, like he has been waiting to hear that exact noise and is filing it for later. His hands settle on your hips, but only briefly. They move down. He hooks a finger under the rope loop at each thigh and pulls, gently, opening you wider for him, and the rope obliges with a soft creak and you make a sound you do not authorise.

"There," he murmurs. "Better."

The hip rope is, you note distantly, holding you in place where his hands no longer need to. You understand now why he built the system the way he did. The rope is helping him. The rope is part of him. The rope is, you understand with a small distant heat, currently doing more to you than his mouth, because his mouth has not started in earnest yet and the rope is already holding you open for him.

He licks you again, slower, savouring it. Then again, the flat broad press of his tongue dragging all the way up and ending in a slow tight circle around your clit, and your hips try to lift. The rope at your hips creaks, holds. You do not move. Your breath leaves you in a single shaky exhale.

"Fuck," you hear yourself say.

He laughs against you, a small warm vibration that makes you make a noise you do not authorise.

"Mm-hm," he murmurs, his lips brushing your clit as he speaks. "Yeah. I know."

He takes his time.

He takes, in fact, all the time he said he was going to. He licks slow flat strokes up the length of you. He works his tongue into you, briefly, pushing in, fucking you with it in slow shallow strokes that make you say his name on a broken vowel. Your breathing has, you realise, picked up. You hear yourself, distantly, the small fast hitches of it. He hears it too. He hums into you in response.

Then back up. He sucks your clit into his mouth, the small bright pull of it, and you make a noise you have never made before in your life. He hums around it. He releases. He licks you again, slower. He is calibrating. He is, you understand with a kind of distant wonder, running the experiment he said he would run. He is mapping you. He is checking what makes you make noise and what makes you make better noise, and he is, on the available evidence so far, learning very fast.

He sucks your clit again, harder this time. Your back arches against the duvet and the harness holds you and you cannot, with your hands, do a single thing. Your breath comes faster.

"There," he murmurs, briefly lifting his mouth, his chin already wet, his voice gone low and rough, "there it is. There. Look at you. You are soaking, sweetheart. You are absolutely fucking dripping for me. I can taste how long you've been like this."

"Ryland."

"I know. I know. I've got you."

He releases the thigh loops. He brings one hand up. He hooks his fingers, instead, into the front of the hip rope where it crosses low across your stomach, and he uses it. He uses it as a handle. He pulls, lightly, lifting your hips up off the duvet by the rope itself, tilting you into his mouth, and the angle changes and the sensation changes and your breath leaves you in a ragged shocked sound that is barely a word.

"Yeah," he says, soft, into you. "Yeah. Just like that. Stay there for me."

He holds you there, suspended by the hip rope against the strength of his arm, and he goes back down on you with the new angle, and the new angle is, you understand within about three seconds, devastating. He sucks your clit and works it with the flat of his tongue at the same time and your hips cannot move because he is holding them in place with the rope itself, the rope he built specifically so it could be used this way, and you are, increasingly, breathing in fast shallow hitches that you cannot regulate.

You try to look down at him.

He must feel your head lift, because he glances up, and the second your eyes meet his you make a noise like you have been struck. His mouth is on you. His eyes are on yours. His hand is wrapped in the hip rope, holding you up to his mouth. The lower half of his face is wet. His chin is wet. He looks like a man who has been doing exactly what he is doing for as long as he has been doing it and is, with great satisfaction, not about to stop. The combination of his mouth on your clit and his eyes on your face and his hand fisted in the rope and the loops at your thighs and the fact that you cannot, with your hands, do anything but lie there and let him eat you, is too much. You make another sound. Your breath catches. Your head starts to go back.

"Uh-uh," he says, briefly pulling off. His mouth is wet. His voice is wrecked. "No, sweetheart, look at me. Eyes on me. I want you to see this. I want you to see what you look like with my mouth on you like this. I have been thinking about your face right now for six weeks. You are not going to deprive me of it."

You make a noise that is not, technically, a word. Your breath is coming faster.

"Yeah," he says, soft and low. "Yeah. That's what I thought."

You open your eyes. You lift your head, again, with great effort.

He waits until you are looking at him. Until you have, deliberately, met his gaze. He holds your eyes for one long deliberate second.

Then his mouth returns.

And he does not look away.

He sucks your clit and works it slow with his tongue and his eyes stay locked on yours, and it is, you understand in some far back unreachable part of your brain, the most him thing he has ever done. He is going to make you watch. He is going to make you see him doing this. He wants the data on what your face does. He wants to record it. He wants, the speech had said, to see what you sound like when he finally says yes, and apparently finally says yes is happening now, and the saying-yes is being delivered with his mouth and his eyes both, and you cannot, you find, look away from him.

The pressure builds. He sucks at your clit in tight focused steady pulls that have absolutely abandoned any pretense of teaching mode. He is no longer figuring you out. He has figured you out. He is now, deliberately, doing the thing he has figured out, with the focused unhurried efficiency of a man who has the right equation and is solving for the variable.

Your breathing is ragged now. Open-mouthed. You can hear yourself.

He slides his free hand up off the rope, briefly. He brings two fingers to your mouth. You suck them in without being asked, because it is the only thing you have left that you can do with your body, and his eyes go black when you do.

He pulls them out, wet. He brings them down. He pushes them, slow, into you, and you feel them slide in easily, you are so wet they slide in like nothing, and he makes a low broken sound when they do.

"Christ, sweetheart," he says, his voice cracked. Christ. You are. You are absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Okay, you can take more than that. Look at you. You can take more."

He pulls his fingers out, briefly, and adds a third. He pushes them all back in, slow, slow, and the stretch of it makes your back arch against the rope and the sound that leaves you is high and broken and your breath stops, briefly, before it starts up again faster, much faster, the small fast pulls of it audible in the quiet room.

"There," he says, soft and wrecked. "There. Yeah. Look at you taking that for me. Look at you."

He curls his fingers inside you. He finds the spot he is, evidently, looking for, the spot you had not known you had labelled in his head for him, and his fingertips drag against it with the stretch of all three of them filling you and you make a sound that is, frankly, humiliating. Then his mouth is back on your clit, sucking steadily, while his three fingers work you from the inside, curling in time with the pulls of his mouth.

You are gone.

Your breathing is, you realise dimly, no longer regulating itself at all. It is coming in fast desperate hitches. You can hear it. He can hear it. The room is full of the sound of your breath and the small wet sounds of his mouth on you and his fingers in you, and the hip rope creaking faintly each time his arm flexes against it, and your own voice making noises you do not recognise.

"That's it," he says, briefly lifting his mouth, his fingers still moving inside you, "that's it. There you are. I've got you."

"Ryland please."

His mouth returns to you, briefly, a slow press, before he lifts again. His eyes lock on yours, low and rough. "Come on, sweetheart. Come on my mouth. Come on my fingers. Look at me and do it. Yes. Yes. Now."

And then, with absolutely no warning, his mouth closes around your clit and you feel the soft careful precise scrape of his teeth.

It is so light. It is so deliberate. It is, you understand in the same second it is happening, something he has been saving, something he has been timing, something he has known he was going to do exactly when he did it. His teeth, his tongue, his three fingers buried inside you, his eyes on you, the rope holding you in place, the rope at your hips holding you up to his mouth, and your breath stops happening and your chest cannot move against the harness and the sensation goes bright in a way you have never felt before, and then it goes through you, and you come.

You come with his teeth grazing your clit and his three fingers buried inside you and your eyes on his and your hands tied to your own ribs and his hand fisted in the rope at your hips and the rope holding you in the exact posture of being given, and the sound you make is loud and high and absolutely beyond your control. You come around his fingers in tight clenching pulses, the stretch of them making it sharper, brighter, more, and you feel him groan into you when you do, the sound vibrating against you and dragging the orgasm out longer. He works you through it with his mouth and his fingers and his steady dark eyes on your face. He does not stop. He does not slow. He keeps you there, in it, riding the bright sharp peak of it for longer than you knew was possible, his fingers still curling against that spot inside you, his mouth still working your clit in steady pulls. Your breath comes back in great shocked gasps. He works you through every one of them.

When you start to come down he eases off, gentling, slow soft passes of his tongue, his fingers stilling inside you, the pressure backing off in careful stages. His hand uncurls from the rope at your hips and he lowers you, slowly, back down to the duvet.

You are not.

You are not entirely here.

The duvet is soft under you. That is a fact you have access to. The ceiling above you is white. That is another fact. Your eyes are open. You think they are open. The light is doing a thing where it has gone soft at the edges, gone blurred, gone honeyed. You can feel the rope. You can feel the rope as the most present thing in the room, the rope across your chest, the rope at your hips, the rope at your wrists holding your hands to your own ribs, and the rope is the thing keeping you in your body when the rest of you has gone somewhere else.

You hear him say your name. From far away. Soft.

You think you make a sound back. You are not sure.

His cheek is on your hip. You can feel his breath, warm, against your skin. He is breathing. You are breathing. The breathing is the same thing, somehow. The breathing is one breathing.

He shifts. The mattress shifts. He moves up the bed, slowly, and you feel him settle alongside you, his body warm against your side, his hand sliding flat across your stomach above the hip rope, his face close to yours. He kisses your temple. Soft. He kisses the corner of your mouth. He kisses the bridge of your nose.

He is saying things. The things he is saying are warm and quiet and at first you cannot quite assemble them into language, you can only assemble them into the texture of language, the low gentle particular shape of his voice when it is close to your ear and speaking only to you.

The texture, eventually, becomes words.

"There you are," he is saying, soft. "There you are, sweetheart. Hi. Hi. I've got you. I'm right here. I've got you. You did so well. You did so well for me. Look at you. Stay with me a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, just like that. Breathe."

You breathe. The breathing is, you discover, something you have to be reminded about. You breathe in. The air goes deeper than you expect. He breathes with you. His hand on your stomach rises and falls with the rope.

"Good girl."

The words land somewhere quiet. They do not hit. They settle. You feel them in the same place you feel the rope.

He kisses your temple again. He stays there. His mouth is warm. His hand on your stomach is warm. The warmth is, you discover, holding you together in a way that is, currently, necessary.

You do not know how long you are there. Time has, you suspect, broken slightly. You have been told this happens. You did not know it would feel like this. It feels like floating in warm water with the lights off. It feels like the rope and his voice and his hand and nothing else.

You become aware, slowly, that you are coming back. The ceiling is whiter. The light is sharper at the edges. You can feel the duvet under you in detail again, the small weave of it, the slight cool of where your shoulder has not been pressing it. The room reassembles. He is still here. Of course he is still here. He has been here the whole time.

You turn your head, slowly, and look at him.

He is right there. His face is close to yours on the pillow. His eyes are warm and very steady and watching you with the focused careful attention of a man who has been waiting and is not going to rush. He smiles, small, when you meet his eyes.

"Hi," he says, very softly.

"Hi."

"There you are."

"Mm."

"How are you doing, sweetheart. Talk to me. Just a little."

"I'm." You try to find the word. "I'm. Good."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Can you tell me where you are."

You consider this. "Bed."

He laughs, very quietly. The laugh moves through his chest and into your side where you are pressed against him. "Yeah. Bed. Good. Excellent."

"With you."

"With me. That's the one."

His thumb moves on your stomach, slow, against the rope. He is, you notice, checking. He is running through a list. He has, you suspect, been running through a list the entire time you were away. His eyes go to your hands, briefly, to the angle of your shoulders, to the rope at your hips, to your face. He brings his hand up. He touches your cheek. He brushes your hair back.

"Anything hurt."

"No."

"Hands okay."

You move your fingers. "Yes."

"Shoulders."

"Yes."

"Tell me if anything changes."

"I will."

"Good." He kisses your forehead. He stays there. His mouth is warm against your skin. "Good, sweetheart. You did so well. I am. I am genuinely struggling, here, to convey to you how well you just did."

You make a small pleased sound. It is the first proper sound you have made since you came back, and it surprises you a little to hear it.

He smiles against your forehead. You feel the smile.

He pulls back, slightly. He looks at you again. His eyes are still very dark, you notice, underneath the softness. The softness is real. The dark is also real. He has been holding both, in parallel, the entire time.

"Stay with me a little longer," he says. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me your name."

"What?"

"Tell me your name, sweetheart. Just say it for me."

You say your name.

He grins. Slow.

"There you are," he says. "Yeah. Okay. Now we can keep going."

He kisses you. Properly. The first proper kiss since the harness, his mouth warm against yours, the taste of you still on his tongue, and you make a sound into it that is, you realise distantly, the sound of you fully arriving back in your body.

He pulls back.

"Because," he says, soft, his forehead against yours, "I am, sweetheart, in fact, not done with you."

He kisses you again. Slower. Properly. You can feel him taking inventory through the kiss, the way his mouth moves against yours, the soft thoroughness of it. His hand has moved up off your stomach. It rests, warm, against the side of your throat, his thumb at the line of your jaw, holding your face exactly where he wants it.

When he pulls back, his eyes are dark again. Fully. The softness has not left, but the dark is rising back through it.

"I need you to sit up for me," he says, soft. "Yeah? Slowly. I'll help."

He shifts. He sits up alongside you, swings his legs around, and slides one arm under your shoulders. He brings you up with him, slowly, taking the weight of your upper body for you, because your hands are still tied behind your back and you cannot push yourself up. He is so careful. He brings you up to sitting and steadies you there, one hand flat at the centre of the harness, the other at your lower back. He lets you find your balance.

"There," he says, soft. "Good."

You sit, looking at him. Your knees are tucked under you. The hip rope creaks softly as you settle. He is sitting in front of you, fully clothed, hair worse than ever, the lower half of his face still faintly damp, and he is looking at you with the same focused careful attention he tied every knot with.

He smiles. Small. Crooked.

"Stay right there for me," he says.

He gets off the bed.

It is the first time he has moved away from you in a long time, and you feel the absence of him like a small cool draft against your skin. You watch him. He stands at the foot of the bed and pulls his t-shirt off over his head in one motion, the chemistry pun balling up in his fist and getting tossed, without ceremony, in the direction of the laundry basket. He misses. He does not appear to care. His hands go to the waistband of his pyjama pants and he pushes them down and steps out of them, and then he is standing at the foot of the bed in nothing at all, and you have, you realise, not exhaled.

You look at him.

You look at him properly, for the first time tonight, and the looking is sudden and total and unbalancing. He is flushed across the chest. His hair is a complete disaster. He is hard, obviously, achingly, the visible evidence of how long he has been holding himself in check while doing everything he has done to you for the last hour. His hands at his sides are not quite steady.

He sees you looking. The corner of his mouth lifts.

"Hi," he says, softly.

"Hi."

"Yeah," he says. "I know. I've been. It's been a long evening."

You make a small wrecked sound that is half laugh and half something else. He grins, briefly. He climbs back onto the bed.

"Okay," he says. "Okay, sweetheart. Last bit. Come here."

He gets you up onto your knees. He turns you, gently, by the harness, so that your back is to him and you are kneeling facing the foot of the bed. He shifts you, slowly, until you are kneeling at the very edge of the mattress, your knees just at the line where the bed ends and the floor begins. The hip rope creaks. He is using it, again, to position you, the rope doing the work of placing your body exactly where he wants it.

He gets off the bed.

He stands behind you, on the floor. The height of the mattress puts you, kneeling, at exactly the right level. You understand, with a small bright drop, that this is what he was building toward when he chose where to put you. The geometry has been planned. Of course it has.

His hands settle on your hips. Warm. Skin to skin now, for the first time in over an hour, and the difference is immediate. You make a sound. He makes a small low sound back, like the contact has hit him too.

"Okay," he says, soft, at your ear. "Okay. I'm right here. You with me."

"Yes."

"Tell me your name again."

You say your name.

"Good." His mouth presses to the back of your shoulder, soft. "Good, sweetheart. Stay with me."

His hands move. One stays on your hip. The other slides up your back, slowly, finds the rope at your shoulder blades where the wrist tie connects to the harness, and his fingers wrap around it. He has, again, a handle. He has, again, the system he built doing exactly what he built it to do.

He pulls, gently. The rope pulls your shoulders back, the harness pulling with them, and your spine arches and your chest goes forward and the hip rope tilts you, slightly, the angle of your body adjusting under his hand without you having to do anything. You are being posed. You are being put into the position he wants and the rope is doing it for him.

You exhale, shakily. Your breath has, you realise, picked up again.

"There," he murmurs. "Yeah. Like that. Look at you."

You feel him, then. The warm press of him against you, at the very entrance of you, slick from your own wetness and from the residue of his mouth and his fingers from before. He does not push in. He just holds there, the pressure of him against you, and you make a sound that is desperate and unauthorised and entirely his fault.

"I know," he says. "I know. I'm taking my time."

"Ryland."

"Mm-hm."

He pushes in. Slow. So slow. He sinks into you in one long unhurried stroke, his hand still wrapped in the rope at your shoulders, his other hand fisted in the hip rope, using both to hold you exactly where he wants you, and the stretch of him after the three fingers is, somehow, still a stretch, and the slow inevitable slide of him into you makes you make a noise that is almost a sob.

He bottoms out. He stays there. He breathes.

"Christ," he says, his voice cracked. "Oh, sweetheart. Oh, fuck. You feel—"

He cannot finish the sentence. You understand. You are not capable of finishing sentences either. He is in you. He has been talking about being in you for an hour and he is now, finally, in you. The fact of him is the only fact in the room.

He moves. Slowly at first. Long deep unhurried strokes, his hand in the rope at your shoulders pulling you back onto him in time with the push of his hips, the rope doing the work of moving you because your hands cannot. The harness creaks. The hip rope creaks. You can feel the rope at every wrap on your body, holding you in the shape he chose, while he uses you in the exact way he described he was going to.

"There you are," he murmurs, his mouth at your shoulder. "There. Yeah. Just like that. Just like that."

He picks up the pace. Not by much. Just enough that the strokes become harder, more deliberate, the slap of skin audible in the quiet room. Your breath is, you realise distantly, picking up again, fast hitches that match the rhythm of him. You feel it starting to build again. You did not know it could build again so soon. You did not, in fact, know anything about your own body that you are currently learning.

He feels it before you can tell him.

"Wait," he says, soft, almost surprised. His hand on the rope at your shoulders flexes. "Wait. Sweetheart. Are you. Are you already."

You make a noise that is, you suspect, an answer.

He laughs, low and incredulous, the sound vibrating against your back. "Already. Okay. Okay, that's. That's fast. That is genuinely. Okay."

He presses his forehead to the back of your shoulder for a second, as if collecting himself. His hand on the hip rope tightens. When he speaks again his voice is rougher, lower, the half-smile audible in it.

"Okay," he says. "Okay, fine. Fine. Yes. Yeah. We can do that. We can absolutely do that."

Then his hand in the rope at your shoulders releases.

You feel the absence of it for one half-second, and then his hand is sliding, slowly, up the line of your spine. Up the back of your neck. Around to the front. His palm settles, warm and certain, across the front of your throat.

He does not press. He does not squeeze. He just rests it there, his fingers light at the side of your neck, his thumb at the line of your jaw, the heel of his hand at the soft hollow at the base of your throat. His hand is, you realise with a small bright drop, exactly where his hand has been heading all night. The sternum. The collarbones. The side of your throat after the harness. The kiss. He has been circling this. He has been getting closer to it for an hour. And now he is here, his hand at your throat, the warm certain weight of him there, holding you in place not with pressure but with the simple fact of his hand on you.

You make a sound. It is small and wrecked and you do not have a word for it.

"Yeah," he says, soft at your ear, his voice gone low and dark. "Yeah. I've been thinking about this too."

His thumb moves, once, along the line of your jaw. He tilts your head back, slowly, until it rests against his shoulder, until your throat is exposed in his hand, until you are arched against him with the rope holding you up and his hand holding you back and his body pushing into you from behind. Your breath comes in slow shaky pulls. He can feel each one. His hand at your throat feels every single one of them.

"Breathe for me," he murmurs.

You breathe.

"Good." The word lands directly into the skin of your throat under his palm. "Good, sweetheart."

He starts moving again. Slow at first. Deep. The rope at your hips is the only thing positioning you now because his other hand has stayed there. The shoulder rope hangs loose. His hand at your throat is what is holding your upper body in place. The rope built the cage. His hand is the final lock.

You feel yourself, distantly, going somewhere again. The light at the edges. The slowness. The hand at your throat is keeping you here, keeping you in your body, the simple anchoring fact of it.

"Stay with me," he says, quiet. "Yeah? Stay right here. I want you here for this."

"Yes."

"Good girl."

The words go through you and you make a sound and his hand feels the sound move up your throat and you feel him smile against the back of your shoulder.

He picks up the pace properly now. The strokes get harder. Deeper. The slap of his hips against you is loud in the quiet room. His hand at your throat does not move. It just stays, the warm certain weight of it, the thumb at your jaw keeping your head tilted back against his shoulder, the heel of his hand at the base of your throat, and you can feel your own pulse against his palm and you understand that he can feel it too.

His other hand slips off the hip rope.

It slides down your front. Down across your stomach. Under the hip rope, between your legs, and his fingers find your clit with the precision of a man who has been there recently and knows the way. The moment his fingertips press there you make a noise that is, frankly, indecent.

"There," he says. "Yeah. Right there. I've got you. Come on."

He works your clit in tight focused circles in time with the strokes of his hips and the hand at your throat holds you exactly where he wants you, and you can feel him deep, the angle of him hitting the same spot his fingers had found before, and the combination is, you understand within about ten seconds, going to undo you completely.

"Look at you," he says, his voice gone rough. "Look at you taking that. Sweetheart. Sweetheart, you are. Fuck. I'm not going to last. I'm not. Come on, come for me, I want to feel it, come on."

You come.

You come a second time, harder, sharper, your whole body going tight inside the rope, and his hand at your throat feels every pulse of it move through you, and you feel the harness hold you in the exact shape he set you in, and you feel him groan against your shoulder, deep and broken, and his hand at your throat tightens just slightly, just enough that you feel it, just enough that it makes the orgasm go bright and sharp at the edges, and his hips stutter and he buries himself in you and comes with a sound that is, you note distantly through the haze of your own pleasure, the most undone you have ever heard him.

He holds himself in you. He breathes. His hand at your throat softens, just slightly, the thumb stroking along your jaw. His mouth presses, open and wet, to the place where your shoulder meets your throat.

The aftershocks start, small and bright, before he has even finished. Your body keeps clenching around him in soft involuntary waves and each one makes him groan against your skin and you cannot stop them, you are not in charge of stopping them, you are not in charge of anything anymore. Another wave. Another. Smaller. He is still in you. He is softening, slowly. He is breathing against your shoulder.

"Oh," he says, very softly. "Oh, sweetheart. Oh, look at you. You're still going. You're still. Yeah."

His hand at your throat strokes your jaw. His other hand is still between your legs. He has not moved it. His fingers are still there, light, resting against your clit, and as you ride the small waves through your body he starts to move them again. Slow. Light. Almost nothing. Just enough.

"You can give me one more," he murmurs. "Can't you. Just a small one. You're so close already. Look at you."

"I can't."

"You can."

"Ryland."

"Sweetheart. Yes you can. Just one more. Just for me. I want to feel one more move through you while I'm still in you. Yeah? Come on."

His fingers work, so light, the lightest possible pressure, slow circles that match the small involuntary clenches still moving through you. He is softening inside you and you can feel it, the slow change of him, and somehow this is doing it too, the awareness that he is going soft in you and is still, with the last functional half of his attention, working you toward one more.

"Come on, sweetheart," he murmurs. "Right here. Right here with me. One more."

You feel it gather, small and bright and so close to the surface that it barely has to climb to get there.

"There," he says. "There. Yeah. Let me have it. One more for me."

You come again.

It is so small. It is so bright. It moves through you in a soft slow wave that makes you shudder against him from your shoulders down through where he is still inside you, and his hand at your throat feels it move up through you and his other hand feels it move through your clit and he makes a low broken sound at the back of your shoulder, his whole body tightening around you in response.

"Yes," he breathes. "Yes, sweetheart. Yeah. There. There. Good."

The wave subsides. His fingers slow. They still, eventually, against you, but he does not move them away. His hand at your throat stays where it is, warm, steady, the thumb stroking your jaw. He is still, just, in you. He stays.

"Oh," he says, very softly, against your shoulder. "Oh, sweetheart. Sweetheart. Look at you."

He holds you, like that, against his chest, his hand at your throat and his hand between your legs and the rope holding you in the exact shape he set you in, for a long time. You do not know how long. Time has, again, gone strange around the edges. You can feel your own pulse in his palm. You can feel his pulse in his chest behind you.

Eventually, slowly, he eases his hand from your throat. He brings it up. He brushes the hair back from the side of your face, tender, slow. He kisses the line of your jaw where his thumb has just been.

"You with me."

"Yes."

"Yeah?"

"Yes, Ryland."

"Good." A kiss to your temple. Soft. "Good. Okay. Okay, sweetheart, let me. Let me get us sorted."

He eases out of you, slow, careful, both of you making a small involuntary sound at the loss. His hand stays warm and flat against your stomach as he does. He kisses the back of your shoulder, once, soft.

"Stay right there for me. Just a minute."

He moves. The mattress dips and rises as he gets off the bed. You hear him in the en suite, briefly, the soft sounds of water and a cloth. He comes back. He kneels behind you on the bed again and you feel the warm gentle press of a damp cloth between your legs, careful, thorough, and then a soft dry one after it. He cleans you up the way he ties knots, which is to say with the focused unhurried attentiveness of a man for whom the doing is the whole point.

"Okay," he murmurs. "Okay. Let's get you out of this."

He gets you turned around, slowly, by the harness, until you are facing him again, kneeling in the centre of the bed. He sits cross-legged in front of you. His knees touch yours. His hands settle on your forearms behind your back, checking the wrist tie, and his eyes do the small bright inventory thing again, looking you over from collarbones to thighs.

"How are we doing," he says, soft.

"Good."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Anything hurt."

"No."

"Anything numb. Hands. Tell me."

You move your fingers. "No."

"Good." He smiles. Small. Crooked. "Okay. Sweetheart. We are going to do this in reverse. Yeah? Same as we did it. Just. The other way. Slowly. Tell me if anything feels weird coming off."

"Okay."

He reaches behind you. His fingers find the knot at your wrists first, because that was the last thing he tied to the harness, the connection point that made the whole system one piece. He works it loose. He pulls the rope back through the harness cinch. He frees the wrist tie from the rest, and now the rope at your wrists is its own length again, separate.

But he does not untie your wrists yet.

"In a minute," he says, when you make a small questioning sound. "I want to do these in order. Trust me."

He moves on. He works on the hip rope and thigh loops first. His hands are deft and patient. He unties the thigh loop on one side, slow, slides the rope free, then the other. He lays the lengths across the duvet next to him as they come off. Then he works the hip wraps. He unwraps them, slowly, his knuckles brushing your skin as the rope comes away from you. Each wrap that comes off, he traces the line of where it was with the backs of his fingers, slow, deliberate. There is a faint indent in your skin where the rope was. He runs his thumb along it. He does not say anything. He just looks at where his rope was.

He kisses, once, the soft place at your hip where the lower wrap had been sitting.

"There," he murmurs. "Yeah."

He moves up. The chest harness comes off in stages. The cinch on one side first. The cinch on the other. Then the lower band, slow, unwrapping from your ribs. He pulls the rope through and lays it aside. You feel the cool of the room replace where the rope was. You feel his fingers trace the line of the indent again, light, careful, the way he traced the hip mark.

"Look at that," he says, soft. "Look at where I had you."

He kisses the line. Once, twice, following the soft red mark just below your breasts where the lower band had sat snug. His mouth is warm. Your breath, against your will, hitches.

He smiles against your skin. He kisses the place once more. Then he moves up. The upper band comes off the same way, unwrapped slowly, set aside. He traces the line just under your collarbones. He kisses there too, slow, almost reverent.

"Hi," he says, quietly, into your collarbone.

"Hi."

"Almost done."

He sits back, just slightly. He brings you forward, gently, until your forehead rests against his. He reaches behind you. He finds the knot at your wrists, the last one, the first one he tied tonight. He works it loose.

The rope comes away from your wrists.

Your hands fall, slowly, free for the first time in what feels like hours, and they do not seem to know what to do with themselves. He catches them in his. He brings them both around to the front. He looks at your wrists. They are faintly pink where the rope was. The lines of the wraps are visible, soft, not raised, just the soft impression of where you were held.

He brings one wrist to his mouth.

He kisses the inside of it. Slow. He kisses the soft place where the rope had sat. He does the same with the other wrist. He rubs his thumbs, slowly, into the small muscles of your hands, the way he would knead a cramp out, working the blood back through them.

"How are these," he says.

"Fine."

"Tell me if they tingle."

"They don't."

"Good."

He keeps holding your hands. He looks at you over them. His eyes are warm. The focused careful attention is back to its normal household configuration. He looks like himself. He looks, you note, extremely like himself, like a man who has been Ryland Grace this entire time and is now just letting it all show.

"Okay," he says. "Come here."

He pulls you down with him. He lies back against the pillows and brings you with him, settling you against his chest, your cheek on his shoulder, your hand resting flat over his heart. He pulls the duvet up over both of you. He folds you in. He rests his chin against the top of your head.

You can feel his heart under your palm. It is, you notice, still going faster than it should be.

"Hi," he says, softly.

"Hi."

You stay there for a while. His hand moves, slowly, up and down your back. His breathing slows. Yours slows. The room is very quiet. You can hear, distantly, a car going past on the street. You can hear the soft hum of the fridge from down the hall. The same small sounds the room made an hour ago when he was telling you what he wanted to do.

He has, you note, done all of it.

You make a small sound against his shoulder that is almost a laugh.

"What," he says. His voice is sleepy now. Warm.

"You did do a lot of reading."

He laughs. The laugh moves through his chest, into your cheek where it is resting against him, into your hand where it is over his heart. He laughs for a long time, soft and slow and helpless.

"I really did," he says, finally.

"Was it. Was it worth it."

"Sweetheart."

"Mm."

"I am going to be processing tonight for, in fact, the rest of my life."

You smile against his shoulder. He kisses the top of your head.

You lie there. He is warm. The rope is in soft pale coils on the duvet near his feet, neat where he laid them as he took each one off you. You can see them, peripherally, the white of the cotton against the dark of the cover. They look, you think, more innocent than they have any right to. They look like rope. They look like the kind of thing he would, with great quiet certainty, put back in the bedside drawer in the morning.

You think about the book on the nightstand. You think about the browser tab. You think about the small coil that appeared in the sock drawer four days ago and the way he checked on it three separate times before he was ready.

"Ryland."

"Mm."

"Are there more books at school."

He goes very still. You feel him try, for a second, to assess whether this is a trap.

"Yes," he says, carefully.

"Bring them home."

He laughs again. Helpless. He pulls you closer. He kisses the top of your head.

"Yeah, sweetheart," he says, soft and warm and slightly wrecked. "Yeah. Okay. I can do that."

You close your eyes.

You think, with the last small functional half of your brain before sleep takes you, that you are going to have to renew the library book one more time. Just to be safe. Just in case.

You fall asleep with your hand over his heart.