“You did well,” he said at last. “You were brave to ask for this.” Then he leaned in and kissed me, his fingers gentle on my face.
I’d never felt so close to anyone else in my entire life.
I tightened my grip on the neck of the bottle. “I didn’t expect to feel so much.”
“No,” he said. “Most people don’t.”
I had to find a way to share the hugeness of it all with him. “There was a moment where everything else just… disappeared.”
Stefan nodded. “That happens.”
“It wasn’t about—” I gestured vaguely. “What you were doing.”
“No,” he said again. “It rarely is.”
I handed him the bottle, aware now of the heaviness settling into my limbs, the way my body seemed to be coming back to itself in stages.
Stefan closed the distance between us, his hand resting on my shoulder, warm and steady. I leaned into him, and he let me. I could feel him there, a solid safe presence. My eyes drifted closed again for a moment, not from exhaustion but from the simple relief of not needing to hold anything together.
“You’re still with me?” His quiet voice added to the calm that flowed through me.
I nodded. “I’d like to try to tell you how it felt.”
Stefan said nothing, his hand gently stroking me.
“It was… it was almost as if my mind shut down, and I found myself in what felt like a… a blank space, where it was just me and the sensations.”
He kissed my temple.
“It was so… cathartic.” I managed a chuckle. “This will sound really strange, but… It was as though I was letting go of things I’d been holding onto.”
“What kind of things?”
I hesitated for a second or two. “The way I’d hid myself for so long, trying to be something I wasn’t, to deny the way I felt, about liking men… So I gave it all up to… to the cosmos, I suppose. Every time I felt the flogger, it was like you were… purging me of all the stuff that had held me back. And in its place, all I could feel was calm… and peace.” I paused. “Thank you.” The words slipped out before I could stop them.
“You don’t need to thank me.”
“I do,” I murmured. Because I understood part of it now. This wasn’t about control in the way I’d imagined. It wasn’t about losing anything.
It was about being able to let go, because someone else was holding the line.
Stefan
I listened without interrupting. What he was giving me deserved space.
The words came haltingly at first, then with more certainty, as if he were discovering them even as he spoke. I kept my hand on him, letting him know I was there. When he finished, when that quietthank youslipped out, my chest tightened.
“You don’t need to thank me.” This had not been something I had given him. It was something he had allowed.
I trailed my fingers slowly across his shoulder, feeling his body soften, the tension draining out of him.
He’d gone somewhere this evening. Someplace deep inside himself.
And he trusted me to bring him back.
I pressed a brief kiss to his temple, more deliberate this time. “You did that, not me.”
He shifted beneath my hand, but didn’t argue.