The lubricated slope that slid into the pit of cool detachment got wider and easier to find. I felt relief sliding down it and worried about how easy it was. Was I making a choice anymore, or was I like an addict telling myself the story of a decision I never made?

I didn’t leave her alone out of consideration but practicality. Considering her earlier refusal, I wasn’t sad or guilty. I couldn’t register her needs as important outside my own because Damon was shouting in the desperate corners of my perception. But I knew they existed and I knew what they were. I knew feelings inside me would return and that I’d be glad they were there. Maintaining complete detachment wasn’t hard, yet the consequences were exhausting.

It got worse every time.

I didn’t wonder if I loved her; I wondered what love was at all.

It was getting harder to pull back.

I had control over what I did to her, but without love to set boundaries or guilt to govern my impulses, when would I start to ask myself what I could get away with?

Without the wherewithal to feel fear, I had to ask myself if I should be afraid.

By the time I left the OR in the morning, one thing had become very clear.

The absolutes were unsustainable.

Not my pattern of madness or her constant patience.

Not my unquestionable demands or her total acquiescence.

The calculation was made to my own detriment, but even in the hardest part of my heart, where the long-term decision happened, the truth of it was the single constant.

This had to end.

---

Early morning on September 13th, 2001, I stopped working and started looking for my parents.

At one point, I realized they were never coming back from their morning appointment with their financial advisor. Dad hadn’t been with the first responders doing triage or patching the immediately patchable. He hadn’t made it to a hospital to offer or receive services. My mother wasn’t in a recovery room or wandering around with amnesia.

The flyer I stapled to poles and subway walls had a recent photo of them at a hospital fundraiser. Mom was smiling. When I’d offered to take her away from Dad, she laughed at me. She loved him. She’d never leave him.

I loved him too. I didn’t want to love him. He deserved to be despised, but I couldn’t. I was a surgeon. And an adult. But all I wanted was to earn his approval.

It was a week before I could stomach the September eleventh videos, and that was when the narrative formed. The jumpers were falling like dried buds off an old Valentine’s bouquet, dropping petals of shredded fabric, too fast to identify. Too blurred.

There was a couple holding hands on the way down. They could have been strangers. Friends. Lovers. Married. We’d never know.

The acceleration of gravity is 9.81 seconds per second. They fell for six to eight seconds, depending on wind shear, hitting a velocity of 132 miles per hour. They must have been conscious in freefall. Capable of thought and fear. Capable of peace. Capable of making a decision.

The couple holding hands wasn’t Mom and Dad, because I decided that in the end, my mother would have come to peace and realized she was better than the way he treated her.

And Dad? Was he sorry?

Between the place where I trusted Mom had rejected him and the place where I loved my father enough to wish atonement for him, I hoped he’d died proud of me.

Which was pathetic.

I didn’t find peace. I found impotence and rage. On October first, after hanging on to hope for three weeks, I signed up for the war to keep as many soldiers as possible from dying for my father, and to avenge my mother, who never got to avenge her years of abuse.

We weren’t anything like Greyson’s family. We didn’t have a history of military service. My great-grandfather served as an army doctor in World War II and Korea. That was the extent of it.

The country was doing something. We were taking out the bases where the men who’d killed my parents trained. Even if it was too late, it was something. I wouldn’t watch vengeance on television.

If I’d had a sense of duty before, it had been hidden. My girlfriend at the time was shocked. She’d thought I was crazy. Rich surgeons didn’t sign up for the military. That was for white trash and brown people.

Needless to say, that relationship went down in a sputtering flame from a hundred and ten stories above.

I never looked back.

---

In the dark living room, with the streetlights casting edges in blue, I waited for Greyson to come home. We had much to discuss.

The tricky part was explaining things to her as the man she’d married, not the monster I was.

I knew my face was somehow different to her when I was like this.

So I unscrewed the bulb from the front hall.

I knew my voice sounded different, because I could hear the hardness as well as she could.

So I wouldn’t speak.

Damon swirled desperately in the shadows, so real I was sure I could touch him, but I didn’t move. Not when she came up the stoop, carrying a binder, or when she opened the door. Not when she flicked the light for nothing or when she pulled off her coat and dropped her stuff on the chair to try the light again.

I stood.

When she turned and saw my silhouette, she jumped like a colt, then smiled when she realized it was me. “The light’s busted.”

I took her hand and put it over my lips. She let it linger there, and I slid my mouth to the inside of her wrist and kissed the soft flesh, letting my lips linger over the throb of her pulse.

“You’re not mad,” she said.

I shook my head to say no and ran my tongue over the inside of her arm, pushing away the sleeve of her blue dress.

“Good. We should talk.”

“You talk.” The words left my mouth like frozen stones. I wanted control, but I’d spent too much time talking. Too many words gave her space to hear the voice of a man disentangled from his love.

“I’m not sorry about last night,” she said. “I wish I could be there for you every time, but sometimes I just can’t.”

“Mm-hm.” I nodded into her skin. My lips ran up her arm to her shoulder, her neck, kissing the curve of her jaw. A wet sigh drifted from her, and her body lost its rigidity.

“Caden,” she whispered.

She reached behind her and unzipped her dress. I pushed the neckline apart, over her shoulders. It fell into a puddle of fabric at her feet. The swell of her breasts in the lace bra, the curve of her belly over the panties. The shadow where her thighs met.

“Take it,” she said. “Show me what you need.”

She’d understood me and, in doing so, made the first crack in the crust I’d put around my emotions. I was hard. Raging. All the plans I’d drawn up while I waited for her were wiped away to be replaced with harder, more precisely cruel ones.

I tapped her lower lip with my index finger and she opened her mouth. I put two fingers along her tongue to the back, pushing against her barrier until she opened her throat. She bent under the pressure, and Damon hissed.

That was it. I had it. I had her.

I spun her and grabbed her from behind, pressing my erection against her. I hooked my finger in her underwear and snapped it. She got them down to her knees with me still holding her against me, and I wedged my hand between her legs. Throbbing and wet. The temptation to get her off quickly and feel that first bite of satisfaction was in the muscles of my hand.

But the other hand wanted more. The other hand wanted to bring her to the edge of death and back again. Collar her with my body. Restrain her most basic bodily function.

My hand on her throat, I tightened just a little.

“Caden.” She put her hand over mine. I didn’t whisper or speak. I didn’t move either hand. I just held her against me, waiting. “Breath play. You want breath play?”

I’d heard of it when a kid in my class hanged himself jerking off, but we called it something different. She was a psychiatrist with hundreds of patients telling her their deepest, darkest secrets. I couldn’t do anything she hadn’t heard in session. I nodded into her neck.

I waited. I could stand a “no.” There were plenty of ways to control her, myself, and the act, but owning her life for even a second was the ultimate, and my cruelest self craved it almost as much as I craved her pain.

There had been something to Ronin’s observation, but maybe it wasn’t either/or. Maybe I needed both.

She put her weight backward, arching her neck. I felt her swallow against my palm, felt her body take in breath and release it. She didn’t answer, and still, I waited.

Finally, she spoke. “I trust you.”

I rubbed her clit mercilessly and gently tightened my grip on her larynx.

She jerked. I tightened and rubbed, keeping her still by those two points and the pivot of our hips. As I held her tight, she fought, grabbing my wrist, twisting away. Strong as a soldier, she flung herself away, but still I held her by the clit and the throat.

She pulled my arm. She was scared. That wasn’t what I wanted. She needed to trust me.

“Shh,” I whispered because it didn’t engage the ice in my voice. “Shh.”

With a short nod, she stopped resisting. That wouldn’t last. Not as I kept her windpipe closed until her face was bulging red. Her body writhed. My hand taking her clit over and over as the physical reaction resumed. She kicked and twisted, knocking over the end table.

Then some of the fight went out of her. I didn’t let up the pressure on her nub, but I let go of her throat. She went stiff, coming with a cry and a jolt. Her sucking breath turned into an orgasmic cry. Limbs limp against me, she came and came, toes pointing, hips jerking, spine rigid, eyes rolled to the back of her head.

We bent over the back of the couch, my body curved to hers. We breathed together.

Fuck. I did that. I’d held her life in my hands. Cathartic to say the least.

“Is he gone?” she asked.

“Mostly. Are you all right?”

“Yes. That was…” She closed her eyes and rested her cheek on my arm. “The most intense orgasm I’ve ever had.”

I knew I could speak when guilt wound its way into my heart. I pulled back a little, steadying her on the sofa. My stomach was wet.

“Shit,” I said. “I came.”

She smiled. “Was it good for you?”

I laughed, or more accurately, the part of me that wasn’t capable of laughing allowed the capable part to laugh because it would soothe her. The time between changes was the most uncomfortable, and it drove my unquenchable thirst for her.

“We’re not done.”

---

My fingers in her cunt, I had her upper arms tied to the top of the headboard with clamps and latex tubing, leaving her ass six inches from the sheets. She had to use her feet to take the pressure off her arms, and the discomfort she endured for me made me want to see her racked with orgasms. She was close to her fourth of the evening. Her eyes were drooping. Her body jerked when I removed my fingers and put them in her mouth.

“Suck yourself off.”

She did it. There was no lipstick left. All the mascara had slid down her cheeks in blue rivulets. She sucked weakly. This would have to be her last one.

Good. I was almost free of the lockdown. Then I’d let the guilt walk right through me, hand in hand with the fear that I’d hurt her or worse.

Wedging my hips under her, I pushed inside her, getting my saliva-slick hand under her chin. “You want to come?”

“Yes.” Her throat was shredded from my cock.

“How bad?”

“Bad. Please, I want to come so bad.”

Thumbing her clit, I fucked her, timing it so we came together.

That last act of control and release opened me up to what I’d done when I was too cold to feel my love. When I was a monster in a man’s body.

What had I done?

---

She was in my arms, sleeping. Tomorrow we’d take stock of her bruising. We’d carve new boundaries and make new rules. The mostly sane man she married would be awake and verbal in the morning, and he’d agree she could say no for whatever reason.

Tomorrow, remorse would fill me like a bucket and Damon would reappear louder and stronger, sooner than ever before.

What I’d done was simple.

I’d agreed to a risk to save her from this nightmare.

Drowning in the gray soup of sleep, I knew I’d made the right decision.