How do you break a masochist? If receiving pain is part of their identity, how do you cause so much pain they forget who they are? Reveal their secrets? Bare themselves to you?

One hour.

I didn’t want the loft anymore. I did. I wanted a life with her inside that loft or outside of it, but the loft was ours. It was us. And there was no us without the truth.

Once I decided to trust her with submission and then trust myself with her self-determination, the resistance washed away like years of caked-on dirt because I loved her. I’d give her anything she wanted, but not without letting her enjoy the fight.

She kept a mug of pens on the bar, next to stacks of paper and business cards she’d never get to. I picked out a pen, made sure it worked, and put it in my pocket. She was mine, and her body was going to announce it.

I was snapping the last of the blackout drapes closed when I heard her keys jingling outside the door. I shut off the last lamp. The loft went black.

The darkness was cut by an arrow of light from the hall. I grabbed her wrist before she could flip on the hall lamp.

“Close the door,” I said.

She did, and I clicked the deadbolt.

“Hello to you too,” she said to the sound of her bag falling on the floor.

My watch glowed when I touched it and beeped when I set it. “One hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

I was in the same darkness she was, but I’d been in the loft for a couple of hours. The darkness was mine. I knew where everything was. So when I stepped away from her, I knew where to go.

“Strip down. Quickly. Then put your hands behind your back and stand with your feet apart. Close your eyes.”

Her clothes rustled and her boots clonked on the hardwood. When the rustling stopped, I flicked on a very small, very powerful flashlight and pointed it in her eyes. She put her hand up to block it, a porcelain statue in a dark room.

“Ow, hey.”

“Close your eyes or you’re going to be punished in a way you don’t like.”

She scrunched them tight. I shut off the flashlight, took her by the wrist, and put her hand behind her back. She gasped with arousal.

“Your safe word?”

“Pinochle. But forget it. I’m not saying it.”

A silver cuff set that looked like two intertwined rings sat by the coats. I crisscrossed her wrists behind her back and snapped it closed around them. “The Jag says you’re wet already.”

“I’m not taking that bet.”

I put a black velvet hood over her head and tied it around her neck to keep her eyes from adjusting. “Do you know where the credenza is?”

“Yes.”

I smacked her ass hard. The darkness seemed to echo the sound more than the light ever did. “Yes, what?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That was for forgetting.” I smacked her ass again. “That’s for not closing your eyes.” Again and again, I felt her ass give under my hand and the sharp clap of pain. “For not keeping your hand behind your back. For trying to make deals, and three more just because you love it.”

Smack, smack, smack. She was already panting. I held her up so her knees wouldn’t buckle under her.

“The credenza,” I said. “There’s a window to the left of it. Can you walk to it?”

“Yes, sir.” She took a step.

I stopped her and push one shoulder toward me and one away until her feet twisted and turned. I spun her again and again, leaving her facing the kitchen.

“Go then.”

She stepped toward the kitchen, which was nowhere near the credenza, and yelped in pain. “What…?”

“You said you wanted children. I’m giving you a taste of it. Keep walking.”

“I don’t… ow!”

I put the flashlight at her feet. The black Lego brick was stuck to the bottom of her foot. She rubbed it against her knee, and it clacked and bounced on the floor.

Letting the flashlight run up and down her body, I soaked in her submission. Hands behind her back, off balance, fighting every painful step as she tried to avoid the bricks I’d covered the floor with. She was the picture of ungainly, awkward, unsexy obedience. It was the most arousing thing I’d ever seen.

She bumped into the back of the couch and growled in frustration. “Which direction am I facing?”

I smacked her ass.

“Sir. What direction?”

I put the flashlight on her face. I couldn’t see her expression past the hood, just the bottom of the fabric going concave, convex, concave with her heavy breaths. Her chest heaved, nipples like pebbles. I put my hand between her legs, and she opened them for me, squeaking when she stepped on a Lego. Soaked. Her arousal was dripping inside her thigh.

“I’ll tell you on one condition.”

She groaned. I pinched her clit. A long N sound came from beneath the mask. That was new.

“Okay,” she gasped, rotating with my finger, “what’s the condition?”

“You get there on your knees.” I slid two fingers inside her, hooking the fingers until I found the bundle of nerves just inside. She cried out. Back to vowels.

“There’re these things on the floor all the way there?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a sadist.”

I touched her nose through the hood. “Correct.”

“Or you won’t tell me which way I’m walking?”

“Nope.”

She turned her head right, where she’d bumped into the couch, then left, where she’d started. She was calculating where she was, and if she managed to do that, she’d find her way too easily and we’d have no fun.

“Also, I moved the furniture,” I said, still rubbing between her legs.

“Jesus.”

I didn’t know if she was praying for relief from my cruelty or for release from my fingers. I took them away from her sex, and she jerked toward them as if on a string.

“If we spend the whole hour with me knocking around here, you’re not going to get your pinochle.”

“You underestimate how much these things hurt the twenty-fifth time.”

She didn’t answer. Without seeing her face, I was only guessing at what she was thinking, and my guess was she was thinking she could kill an hour.

I was right. She stepped forward, right onto a nasty two-by-two brick.

“Ow! Shit!” She lost her balance trying to shake it off, but without her hands, her foot landed hard on another brick. She screamed.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said as she rubbed it off, letting it bounce. She put that foot on top of the other. I allowed it. I wanted her safe word, but I didn’t want to be a brute. “They’re hard on the knees. But if you crawl, I’ll clear the way under your knees.” I let my pause hang. “On one condition.”

“I thought this would be easier.”

“You want to stop?”

“Hell, no.”

“Do you want to hear the condition?”

“Yes.” She caught herself just in time. “Sir.”

“You tell me the truth when I ask you a question.”

She barely let me finish my sentence. “Yes.”

I turned her ninety degrees. She was a straight line to the blackout drapes on the center window, which started a foot above the floor and ended higher than either of us could reach. I removed the cuffs, and I used my foot to clear a space in front of her.

“On your knees.”

She fell to her knees. She didn’t land one at a time, nor did she drop cautiously. She trusted me, and I was filled with satisfaction. There in the dark with her naked and unsure, I felt a contentment that everything inside the space was under control. My control. She was my partner, giving me everything she had so we could trade pleasures.

She put her hands down. Squeaked at the sharp edges I’d never promised to move.

“Straight.”

Standing behind her, I put the flashlight on her back, watching her go two paces and stop when she got a brick in her knee.

“You’re supposed to wait for me to ask a question.” I took the brick out of her skin.

“Right. Okay.”

“When you went to the Greens to meet with Insolent, did you intend to let him touch you?”

“I knew you were the only one. I kept trying to think of myself taking an order from another man. I let Insolent boss me on text, but I pretended it was you. And the thought of someone else breaking me… being vulnerable in front of them. It’s not supposed to be creepy. Right?”

“Creepy isn’t your kink.”

“I told myself I’d let you go after thirty days but I knew I wouldn’t. I’d fight for you to the end. I’d put off the fight until later, but never, ever give up.”

I reached under her and cleaned the space in front of her knees. She took two paces, using her fingertips to avoid the sharp bricks, and stopped before she got her knee on one.

“Go.”

She took one step on her hands and knees then stopped.

“Will you do whatever I ask?”

“Yes.”

Another painless crawl forward. I had about four left before she reached the window, and she wasn’t getting to the window without safeing out.

“Serena came to my office today,” I said. “Do you want to know what she said?”

She tensed.

“You all right?” I asked.

“That’s not even a question.”

“Do you?”

“I trust you.”

“I know.” I crouched beside her and ran my fingers along her spine. “That’s not what I asked you.”

“You’re asking me if I’m curious?”

“Yes.” I caressed her bottom then thwacked it. “Now answer.”

“Fine. Tell me.”

“Is that how we ask?”

“That’s another question.”

She was particularly on the ball so she’d make it the hour. I was going to have to go outside her comfort zone very quickly.

I swooped some bricks away, and she moved forward a pace.

“No,” she said. “That’s not how we ask.”

Good thing she couldn’t see my face, because I had to bite back a laugh. She was a formidable and worthy opponent. She was going to make me earn my Dominance over her for the rest of my life.

I put my hands between her shoulder blades and leaned close to her ear. “Do you want to know what she proposed?”

“You’re scaring me.”

I took my hands off her, kneeling back on the balls of my feet, waiting. I had fifty-five minutes, and I’d take all of them if I had to.

“Okay. Tell me.”

“She’s changing sides and wants a try at you. What do you think?”

She tilted her head, making the tie of the hood drop between her shoulder blades. “What?”

“She can tie you down and fuck you. I’ll watch.”

She got up on her knees and grappled with the hood’s tie. “Fuck you. Get this off me.” She made the knot worse, and I didn’t move. “Stop it now, all of it. Let me out.”

“You’re breaking the scene.”

“Fuck the scene.”

“Fuck the scene?”

I put the flashlight on the floor, facing the ceiling, then undid the string on the hood and lifted it off her. She was sweaty and beautiful, panting. Her eyes were crystal-clear blue, the lenses refracting the hard, limited light from the flashlight.

“You’re considering—?”

“Nah.”

“What?”

“She’s flipping, but she didn’t bring you up. Or me either,” I said.

“You made it up?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I only had an hour, Diana.”

Her eyes went wide and her mouth opened enough to reveal the little crease in her bottom lip. I tried not to smile and succeeded.

“You…” She drifted into silence where all the worst insults lived.

“Yeah, well. I want to live with you. I want to share a bed and a couch. I want to use that blue pot to make us a dinner just because you put a hole in the wall with it. I want to share your air again. Your space. Everything. So yeah, I played a trick on you, but Serena gave me the idea—”

“Serena what?” She’d gone utterly white. Her face practically glowed in the dark.

“Don’t freak out.”

“You really spoke to her?”

“She came to the office. I’m not pursuing her.”

“Were you ever?”

“No. And she’s not pursuing me. She needed my approval to feel right about becoming a Domme.”

“You think you’re so indispensable.”

I laid my hands on her arms until they unfolded. I caught her fingers and laced them in mine. “I am indispensable.”

“To me.”

“Goddess of the hunt.” I kissed her fingers one by one, leaving the left ring finger for last.

I hadn’t intended to make any big gestures during our hour together. I only intended to win the game. But being with her in the darkness and talking of mundane things reminded me of what I’d longed for from the minute I met her. Before the lies. Before the games. When I met her and the sky opened above me, I wanted to possess her in a way that ached so badly, I had to deny it for five years. All I’d wanted to do was share her life, please her, care for her, mark her as mine.

“I am going to spend the rest of my life with you,” I said. “That’s non-negotiable.”

Her smile was magical, unintentional, a reflection of her body and heart. Not all of her smiles had that glow of truth. She was undeniable when her expression so matched her true desires. “Thank you.”

Her gratitude took my breath away. Never had she been so beautiful. Never had I needed to own her so badly. Not even in the deepest colors of my blind infatuation. Not even when I thought I’d saved her company and her family and done everything I’d set out to do with her. Not even the first time she opened her heart in submission and I tried to deny that I loved her.

I placed her left hand on mine and spread the fingers, isolating the fourth. I kissed the pad of it, ran my tongue along it, took the whole thing in my mouth and sucked it. She groaned until I bit down on the base. Then she gasped and tried to pull away, but my teeth held. I sucked hard, and I saw from the twist of her hips that she was moving inside the space between arousal and pain, pushing her finger in my mouth and yanking to the side at the same time, as if she wanted both and neither sensation. Or as if she understood that from now on, she’d associate one with the other.

I let go and held her hand to the flashlight. A layer of spit and the indents of my teeth were on her ring finger. “The bruises will last until you put your ring back on.”

“That really hurt.” She observed it closely in the beam of light, like a curious nude painted by Caravaggio in layers of glaze.

“I have forty minutes to get your mind off it.” I got on my feet and stood over her.

Looking up at me, her eyes clear and open and ready for anything, she placed her hands behind her back and looked down.

“I’m going to push a limit,” I said. “Can I trust you to safe out if it’s too much?”

“I’m not going to safe out twice in one scene. Even if you cheated the first time.”

“We have a lifetime of pushing boundaries together.”

She sighed. “You’re right, sir. We do.”

“The flashlight. There’s a hinge on the bottom panel. There’s a strap inside for your wrist.”

She picked up the flashlight and poked at the bottom, more curious than obedient. She opened the bottom, took out the four-inch plastic loop, and closed the compartment. Opening the loop, she started putting her hand through it.

“No,” I said. “It goes in your teeth. The strap.”

She bit it, letting the light swing below her chin, illuminating her breasts in a kinetic glow.

“Now you can see.” I stepped out of the way. “Crawl to the window and open the drapes.”

Between her and the window stretched a path of black bricks. It was worth the extra cost to get the single color. They looked painful, and anticipation of pain was where the sex was.

Behind her, watching her crawl with her ass up as the light swung, stopping when sharp edges went into soft skin. The way she kept going because I wanted her to, without complaint, not out of fear. She endured the pain because she wanted it, and she wanted it from me.

The power was laced with adrenaline and gratitude. I wanted more. I wanted to take her places only I could guide her to, because I’d own them. Open her in ways she’d never imagined, because she’d let me. Care for her because she’d given me a gift no one else had. She’d given me the gift of my true self.

I was bursting out of my skin for her violation, her degradation, and her honor.

She raised herself on her knees, shook off sharp little bricks, and opened the blackout drapes. The loft was flooded with the nighttime light of New York. We were above the streetlights. Their illumination was soft and shadowless. The lights from the department store across the street had a warm bite that slit Crosby sixteen hours a day, casting long shadows in the evening, and dimmed down to romantic-dinner levels after closing. Before the neighborhood changed, the building across the street had had the same use as our loft—a factory with big casement windows for free lighting and ventilation.

“Stand,” I said, pushing her gently onto the six-inch-high ledge under the window.

She stepped up, and I stepped back. Her body was silhouetted by right angles. The black grid of the window panes. The yellow glow of the department store windows. The uneven colors of the bricks across the street. She was a goddess on the hill, staring down at the field of battle. She took my breath away.

I put my hands on her hips, ran them along her ribs and down again, trying to locate the source of her supremacy. She shuddered under my touch, transferring her power through my arms to my heart.

Why couldn’t I love a sub before? Because they made me no better than a Dominant. Diana, the goddess of the hunt, loaned me her power and made me her equal.

“Turn around.” My voice was pitted as a broken stone. Her existence pushed my limits, challenging my ability to dominate her, and in that moment of awe, I was surprised and honored that she obeyed.

On the ledge, she was almost my height, but she kept her gaze down and let the flashlight display the glorious velvet of her skin.

I needed to lift myself to her level. I needed to mark the moment. Put myself on her, in her, with her. Degradation had its moments, but as I pulled the pen from my pocket, I felt only the reverence of a supplicant writing their name on a piece of paper and putting it at the feet of a sponsoring saint.

Brushing my hand across her left bicep to her right and back again, I took stock of the room I had to say what needed saying.

“I’m not a poet,” I said, taking the flashlight out of her mouth. “But I want you to indulge me. Repeat after me, but only if what I’m telling you to say is true. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

I clicked the flashlight off and put it away. “This isn’t a game. I’m taking you at your word.”

She glanced up as if checking my sincerity. She nodded and put her eyes back on her feet.

“I belong to Adam.” Third person sounded comedic coming out of my mouth, but I needed to hear the words exactly that way from her.

“I belong to Adam.”

I bit the cap off the pen and spit it to the side. I started at one of her shoulders and wrote across it.

I BELONG TO ADAM

“He belongs to me,” I said.

She looked at me, eyes dark in the night, and bit her lip. “He belongs to me.”

I wrote under the last line.

HE BELONGS TO ME.

I thought I had a unifying line for the bottom, which would fall just above her breasts and over her heart. But as I drew out the last E, the sense of the words left me, and I tented my fingers on her sternum as if I could draw the intersections of our feelings through them. “I want to say, ‘When I write it here, it’s real.’”

We stood still with it for a minute, then she said gently, “On this body and in the book of life, it is written.”

“It’s perfect, but it may take two lines.”

She shrugged, and a smile curved her mouth. “Take all the time and space you need.”

ON THIS BODY AND IN THE BOOK OF LIFE, IT IS WRITTEN.

I stepped back to look at my work, placing the pen on a side table and crossing my arms. “Too dark in here. Turn around. Let the city see.”

When she faced outside, I got up on the ledge and put my back to the window. I could see how she was marked, her hard nipples, the glow of the street on her skin.

“Do you know what I’m feeling?” I asked.

“Sexy and dominant?”

I brushed my fingers along the letters and across her breasts. “Proud and honored.”

Her eyelashes fluttered when she looked down, and she pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. I enjoyed humiliating and hurting her. I was who I was, but those acts made her moments of fulfillment all the sweeter.

“Thank you,” she said, pausing before the last word. “Sir.”

“Put your hands on the glass and show me my options.”

Her breasts hung as she bent to get her hands on the cold window. I got the flashlight from my pocket and tucked the strap away, facing the window with her.

Sometimes, after closing, people milled around the floor across from us. Designers, store buyers, renegades from a cocktail party on the third floor.

That night, with Diana no more than a body in a window, a young couple had split from what looked like a meeting on five and were chatting in the empty store with a row of white and silver mannequins behind them.

“They’ll see you if they look,” I said, clicking the flashlight on.

She sucked air through her teeth. “Can I say something?”

“Speak.”

“You’re so fucking filthy.” She said it as if she had bacon fat and brown sugar rolling around her tongue. “If I’d known that when we met, I never would have married you.”

“I know. Now open your mouth.” I put the back end of the flashlight as far down her throat as I thought she could take. “They won’t see your face with the light here. But your body’s lit by the street. Be their inspiration. Their north star.”

I took my cock out, fisting it for her. I needed her to see it, accept it, before I tore her apart with it. She acknowledged it with a low nnn in her throat, and I got off the ledge.

Grabbing the place where her ass met her thighs, I opened her to me.

The couple across the street faced us, but they weren’t paying attention to anything besides each other.

“Watch them,” I said, putting my dick where she was wet, sliding along her slick line. She bucked. “Watch for when they see your light.”

I rammed inside her, and a split scream and growl came from her as I buried my cock as deep as I could. As if he heard the pressures of the mass and volume of the universe shift, the man across the way looked at his reflection in the window and straightened his tie. I dug my fingers into Diana’s hips and thrust twice. The second time was so hard, the flashlight tapped against the window, and though he likely couldn’t hear it, the young man across the street had definitely noticed the light.

Diana went hmp around the shaft of the flashlight, her head turned slightly toward the couple. She saw him looking.

“North star,” I said. “Are you ready?”

She made a bouillabaisse of sounds around the flashlight. A sentence.

“Are you safeing out?”

She shook her head.

I took a handful of hair and bent over her to whisper in her ear. “Then just take it.”

I rammed her, driving so hard and so fast I had to hold her hip to keep her steady. With every move, I aimed for her heart, to go deep enough to touch it, own it, crawl into it and expand it. My life was written there. I wanted to enter her and explode, covering the world in all-consuming fire. Inside. Deep. So deep we became linked at the soul.

“Ook!” she grunted, spit dribbling off her chin.

So sexy, the depths of her debasement. How far down she had to crawl to love me. I followed her stare to the couple across the street. They were watching. Her fingers were at her throat. His were in her hair as he said something in her ear.

“They’re going to worship you.” I reached around her, getting four fingers on her hard clit.

He was behind her now, rubbing his dick on her ass. Saying dirty things. One hand on her breast and the other reaching for the hem of her skirt. An R-rated version of the goings on in heaven.

“Look what you’re doing to them. God, Diana, you’re that sexy. That powerful.”

The woman pulled her skirt up as he dug his fingers down her underwear. She buckled at the same time as Diana. My wife’s voice came in a stream of long sounds. Her fingers curled against the glass.

“You want to come?”

She nodded.

“Wait for her.”

It didn’t take long for the woman’s back to arch. Her mouth opened, and he had to hold her up. Diana let loose, pulsing around me, knees stiffening, her legs going out from under her. She trusted me to hold her up, and I did, lightening the pressure of my fingers so her orgasm sat on the edge of pain without crossing into it.

She fell against me, limp and boneless, folding to her knees like a map.

I did that. I gave her so much pleasure she couldn’t stand, and she gave me the control to do it. I felt wrapped and right with the world.

“Beautifully done.” I took the flashlight out of her mouth.

“Oh, God. Thank you.” Her words were molded around her breaths. “For that. Sir.”

I looked in her face. She was high on endorphins, pliable and pleasured.

I was bigger on the inside than the outside. My dick was going to explode.

Taking her cheeks in one hand, I forced her mouth open and guided myself into it. She took it. All of it. Marked with ownership of her heart. Sweat-streaked. Mascara running black. Spit dripping, messy-haired, she opened her throat for me. I got two strokes in then pulled out.

“Look up.” I jerked myself with her body’s juice.

When she exposed her chest, I came on it, marking those words true.

I BELONG TO ADAM

HE BELONGS TO ME

ON THIS BODY AND IN THE BOOK OF LIFE, IT IS WRITTEN.