The first time the garbage pail crashed into the glass, the window shattered like a windshield. A hole in the center webbed out in a series of tempered glass cracks that looked like her eye, ocean blue, trapped in a white net. I smashed it again, breaking the web.

I was supposed to know how far to push a sub before she broke, but I didn’t. I’d misjudged. I loved her. I knew I loved her. I didn’t know how to express it, but she knew. She knew.

She knew everything. She’d intuited it in my old bedroom, even before I digested it. The path closed behind me, and if I stopped, the inertia of the past would run me down.

I’d realized my error too late, because it was the first of so many.

Up to a point, I’d been honest with myself and Diana. That point had been in my grandparents’ reinvented porch in Sheepshead Bay. I’d gone to hell after that. Right to hell. I didn’t know what to tell her, because I was barely on speaking terms with myself. I kept my silence to buy time. If I’d bought enough, there wouldn’t have been lies, only delayed truths, but the mistake went from emotional to tactical. I’d made the mistake of not recognizing that my love had never left and a second mistake of not telling her.

I’d wanted to be sure. I didn’t want to lead her down a path she couldn’t finish walking without me.

When I saw her in that room with Chris, I broke.

I was jealous. When her toes curled and I could see the bottoms of her feet, I pounded the glass. Fuck the glass. It wasn’t stronger than I was. It wasn’t thick enough, tough enough. It was a thin layer of bullshit.

If I could just talk to her. Tell her I got it. I was jealous. I’d admit that. I’d cop to a ton of shit. Paddling Serena because I thought Diana didn’t even care. Stupid. I’d opened that door with my own actions. Me. My fault. All of it. I’d drop all my shit and apologize. I knew how it felt. And I’d tell her, for a goddamn second if I could, that the jealousy was bad but not the worst of it. I could handle jealousy. It was seeing her hurting herself that broke my heart. She was a new sub. An open wound. I’d let her down, and she did what any sub would do. She tried to find an answer, and for the love of fuck, there was no good end to this for her.

She was in that room because of my failures. She was trying to preserve her dignity with indignity.

As I stormed out of the dark room, I understood it all. I saw inside her because she was my sub, and she saw that I still loved her because of a bond I’d forged and ignored.

We were in sync. I got it. Now to destroy the thin layer of glass between us.

Heaving the pail, I hit the glass so hard my arms vibrated. It cracked into an eye-shape. I couldn’t let that cracked eye bore down on me for another second. I smashed the window again, and it came apart in a layered symphony of glass cracking, breaking, falling. A jagged hole opened from knee to chest height. I walked through it ready to connect with her. Ready to tell her I loved her. I’d always loved her. I’d fight for her.

“She was lovely,” Chris taunted. “Too good to throw away.”

The little fucker just had to poke me. I went in with the best intentions, and he’d picked at the scab like a toddler, flicking away the healing so the wound bled. I would have done something stupid if she hadn’t stopped me long enough to let him leave.

“What were you thinking about?” I asked as if I didn’t know. She was working on her own wounds.

“My future. My life. What I want.”

“I won’t watch you become a whore.”

I had more to say. Nicer things. How she didn’t have to hurt herself. That I’d take care of her. Take care of everything.

But I lost control. She was the sub. I was the Dom. For fuck’s sake, why did I lose control with her constantly?

She hit hard. I’d give her that.

“Diana,” I said as I held her wrist.

She wasn’t a lefty, but she hit like one. I held both her wrists. I could explain this. I could tell her what the fuck was happening if she’d just stop slapping me for a second. Then she spit in my face. I should have been enraged at the humiliation. Any Dom would have punished her hard or broken it off right there. But she was more than a sub at that moment, and I was less than her Dom.

She was the huntress, and I admired how she’d found a way to slap me without her hands.

“Stop it.” I maintained a deep control of my voice, but she wasn’t receptive. Couldn’t say I blamed her.

“Fuck you, Steinbeck. Fuck you. You made me like this. You woke me up. You dragged me out of the darkness, and now you don’t want me in the light. Well, fuck you.” She jerked her arms. I let her go and went for my handkerchief. “I don’t fit in that box anymore, and you don’t love me outside it. Fuck you. Either love me or set me free. And if you let me go, don’t think for a minute you can dictate how I live without you.”

I heard her. Every word. She’d said similar things before, but I hadn’t heard her the way I heard her then.

I opened my mouth to tell her, but in the moment I closed my eyes to wipe off the spit, she was gone.

I had to tell her the most important part first, but she was walking so fast and there were people everywhere. I hooked my finger in her pocket as if her clothes might accept me where her body wouldn’t.

“I love you.” I’d said those words before, but I was sure that was the first time I’d understood them.

“Don’t you dare pull that trick. I’m over it, Adam. I’m over not knowing which end is up. I’m over letting you control me. I’m over being a puppy dog to your moods. I’m done. Finished.”

The moment when I crashed and all my resistance broke into sorrow, I had nothing to do. I didn’t have a plan to execute. The frustration of that note on the counter went from sharp as newly-broken quartz to smooth as a rock pounded by the sea for millennia.

Tell her. Tell her everything. Stay up all night picking it apart.

I just got on my knees and held her as if she was a buoy in a rising tide.

I had the same urgency to make it right, to do something, but I was powerless to do anything, and despair filled the space where determination had been. My attempts to love her kneeling form had worn away the need to get her back, and the intensity of my need to protect her pounded away at my ability to leave her.

Both. Neither. All.

She put her fingers in my hair as I knelt in front of her. I was going to have to get up, stand. Walk down the hall. Deal with the broken mirror and leaving my wife. I was going to have to get her back. Keep her. Turn my back on her. Let her go. Insist on possessing her. All of it at the same time.

I was exhausted. I needed her, and denying it had tapped me. I was empty. I had no will outside her anymore.

When she stepped away, I stood and walked briskly behind her without slowing down until we faced the closing elevator doors. It was full of people, and we had five floors to go. I couldn’t wait.

“Please,” I hissed through my teeth.

She didn’t answer. The doors slid open and more people got in. The floor got light as we began our descent.

“Stop playing around,” I said.

A Domme looked at me, then Diana. I didn’t know her and I didn’t give a shit.

“Not here,” Diana said, watching the numbers flicker on and off.

When the doors opened on the first floor she burst out and I rushed behind her. She and I burst into the cold, wet air of Gansevoort. Cabs waited in a line of coward yellow. She opened the door of one without looking at me. Panic gripped me when she sat and reached for the handle to close the door. I held it fast.

“What do you want?” I asked.

She started to answer, stopped herself, shut her mouth, moved her jaw a little as if she needed to chew and swallow what she had been about to say.

I shouldn’t have asked. Shouldn’t have put it all in her lap. And the question was meaningless. What is it to want? Wanting is compulsive. Want sneaks up in the middle of the night and infests the soul with dissatisfaction. Want becomes an obsession. Want isn’t real.

I needed her. My need was physical. It came in chemical bursts of sexual desire and protective rage. Did I love her? Did it matter?

“It’s midnight,” she said again. “Day thirty. Time’s up.”

What could I say to that? I couldn’t argue that she needed to finish her training or that we needed to stop this disaster before we both did something even more stupid.

“I don’t care,” I said.

“I can’t live like this.”

“Me neither. But I can’t live without you. I can’t live with how I acted. I was trying to break what we had, but I didn’t. I made us better, and I couldn’t see that. Please forgive me. You have to forgive me.”

“Okay.” Her voice was husky in those two syllables, as if the word was made up of half-digested pieces of other answers.

The cabbie’s voice came from the front seat. “I’m turning on the meter. Where to, lady?”

“Come back to Murray Hill,” I insisted.

“Out or in?” the cabbie said urgently.

Her eyes, the color of tempered glass that shattered when I cared about her more than myself, had never looked more opaque.

“In.” She tried to close the door, but I held it.

“You shouldn’t do this alone.”

“Let go.” Her voice came in the loudest whisper I’d ever heard. “I mean it.”

“Please!” the cab driver begged. “Out or in? Pick one!”

“Let go,” she said.

“Come to my place. I’ll make you believe I love you.”

“No, you won’t. It’s not about how much you say you love me. I’m ashamed of what I just did. I won the game, but at what cost? I degraded myself. Not sexually. I degraded myself morally. I used to be better than that. Now I’m an awful person. I hate what I’ve become. I hate being a winner, and I hate playing games. I can’t do this anymore.”

“We’re going!” The cabbie shouted.

The car jerked forward as he put it in drive. The door came out of my hand and she slapped it closed. The cab took off.

Maybe I should have chased it, but I thought a few hours away from me would be good for her. I’d let her stew, then look for her little green dot on my phone. I’d go wherever she was.

As Rob and Carol came toward me, I took out my phone.

“Mr. Steinbeck,” Rob said, “there’s a big mess in observation seven. Serious damages. Your name came up.”

“Yeah.” I smiled at him while my tracker app opened. “That would be me. Let’s settle up.”

I went inside without a fight. I’d pay through the nose for the glass then go to Diana. The green dot of her phone appeared on my screen, making a turn east onto 14^th street.

I was about to put the phone away as I entered the darkness of the club, but before I could, the green dot disappeared. She’d cut me off.