Chapter 08 (Part 02)

I did not remove the collar that night.

The collar lay about my neck like a question. For months — maybe longer, maybe a handful of repeated evenings indistinguishable in their sequence — it had been both an ornament he liked and an object that signified possession in the terms he used. It was not choker-fashion pretty; it was precise, metal glinting against my throat in a way that made it difficult for other people to look away. I had worn it because he had asked, because it pleased him, because sometimes obedience is its own kind of currency. I had thought, before tonight, that I kept it as a bargaining chip. That it was an offering I could recall, a thing I could take back when I needed to declare my own borders. Tonight it felt less like a bargain and more like a question I could not answer.

I lay down on my side, facing the mirror. The mattress beneath me was too soft, the sheets too quiet. I could feel the indentation of my body like a record of a recent animal — the curve of my hip, the dip under my waist. When I turned my face toward the glass, my reflection looked like two people superimposed: one with the practiced composure I presented to the world, the other raw at the edges and thinning like paper in water.

A dozen small things crowded for attention: the taste of copper in my mouth, the slight ringing behind my ears that followed a high adrenaline pulse, the way my breathing had turned shallow, as if I could prevent my lungs from filling with the moment he had offered me. My legs, under the sheets, lay still because stillness was safer somehow. Movement might call him back the way a dropped spoon calls a cat.

It’s absurd when you think about it — the little inventory you make when someone else takes a thing and tells you it was theirs to begin with. I ran through practical options like a prisoner pacing a cell: call someone, leave, throw the collar away, sleep with the light on, hide the ribbon. The options sat in my head like unopened letters. None seemed like anything but a promise to myself I could not keep.

His shadow, across the corridor in my memory, was taut as a wire. I could feel it loose and tauten again, elastic, at any time. The absence of his touch was a presence shaped like a hand. It hovered over the crease of my wrist, over the contours of my collarbone. It settled on the small soft spot at the back of my neck and stayed there, cool and waiting.

I tried to think of the precise moment the dynamic had shifted. Was it the first time he had corrected me with a smile? The first time he’d taken something small to see my reaction — a book, a stolen line of mine in conversation, the temperature of my coffee? Memory is not linear in these things; it folds and loops. There are no singular pivot points so much as a slow seep. It is the accumulation that kills you; a thousand small permissions piled into a mountain.

My mind supplied images unwillingly, as if it were trying to keep me safe by giving me a script I could rehearse. In one, I was young and at a party, hands clasped too eagerly around a plastic cup, someone telling a joke and everyone laughing and me thinking, for a blessed moment, that I belonged to the rhythm of the room. In another, my father — quiet — adjusting the hem of a shirt, teaching me to hold my shoulders a certain way that said I could be trusted with business and with heartbreak. Those images stitched together a map of why I had let certain hands in; not all hands were the same, but they all taught me how to concede.

He closed the case on the ribbon. The sound of the lid settling into place was a small punctuation mark that echoed like a sentence ending. I imagined him there, humming softly, turning over in his palm a token that likely meant nothing and everything to him. I imagined the ribbon’s color catching the light like a secret.

Sleep edged toward me like an animal, tentative, sniffing. My eyes closed. For a moment the memory of him in the hallway — the intelligence in his calm, the way he measured my reaction — blurred into something more incisive: the exact pattern of his thumb against my pulse, the rhythm of my heartbeat against the wall, the way my breath hitched when he uttered the words “You may go.” I could not decide, with any clarity, whether I was angrier about the thing he’d done or at myself for how little I had done in return.

I turned my face back to the mirror and caught, in the glass, the repetition of small betrayals: the collar glinting at my throat, my wrist still faintly red, the slack of my jaw. The image was unbearable in its ordinary brutality. It did not need fireworks. It needed only accuracy.

Some nights I imagine the pure animal reaction — the kind of scream that would fracture a room and solicit heroes from nowhere. It is a fantasy that makes me feel both foolish and a little guilty. I am a rational creature; I catalog possibilities. The scream is the same fantasy as a lottery win, a surprise inheritance, a perfectly timed rescue. It exists for the same reason: to make the present more bearable by folding it into a different future.

He had, tonight, let me go. He had moved away with the finesse of someone undoing a stitch and left me holding the thread. He had also, with a simplicity that made me ache, shown me the architecture of my obedience. Knowing that he could, had he wanted to, cross whatever line he pleased, left me with a terrible clarity. It meant that anything I had thought of as my own — my time, my wardrobe, my evenings — were, in the way that mattered, negotiable.

Something in me counted it all with a cold, mechanical precision: the temperature of the air, the way the towel smelled, the distance from the bed to the bathroom, the softness of the sheets, the point where the collar rubbed against the neck. If one needed to flee, it would be these things you measured and stored — the logistics. If one needed to resist, you saved the small, precise facts. They are the skeleton keys to decisions you have not yet granted yourself permission to make.

I let the room go dark around the edges. The mirror reflected a softer version of me: face smudged into shadow, collarbone a line of pale, wrist a faint bruise. The night held its breath with me, as if it, too, were waiting to see whether I would rise.

I did not rise.

I re-breathed my lungs down to a manageable size. I listened for the click of his bedroom door, the shuffle of his movement, any sound that might mean he would not come back down the corridor to check. The silence that responded felt the way a taut string feels right before it is plucked.

The hand that had touched me — the architecture of the palm, the methodical pressure of the thumb, the way he had not raised his voice — lived on my skin like a map. I pressed my thumb to the faint crescent and felt nothing more than warmth. I wanted something to give me a line I could pull and make the scene unravel into meaning. I wanted the sensation to be simple: a bruise that hurt, a scar that was clear and defined. Instead it was inconveniently ambiguous, like a riddle solved in the wrong tense.

I did not sleep, not properly. I lay there, awake and anchored to the mattress, and let the hour collect itself into small observations: the radiator’s tick, the whisper of the sheets as the night settled, the distant thud of someone living somewhere else. I recycled the corridor like a movie I could not stop watching: the way his thumb pressed down, the pause, the whisper of his breath. Each replay made some detail clearer, sharpened the logic of his restraint into a display of dominance that did not rely on pain but on ownership.

And somewhere inside the thick slow churn of my body, a quiet, pitiless thing cataloged one last fact: he had let me go. That was the part that stung the most because it meant the option had been his all along, and the release was not something I had earned in anything I could name. It was his to give.

I lay with that weight like a folded piece of paper pressed to my chest. It was small and heavy and impossible to ignore. I felt, in the same place where his thumb had rested, the tiny heat of it like a fossilized ember.

The night continued to be too much and not nearly enough. The corridor outside seemed to breathe at a different rhythm. The ribbon in the case lay like a secret he had not yet offered to anyone else. I imagined him watching it as if it were a narrative he rewrote every time he considered it. I imagined him folding and unfolding the same small moment into an assurance that nothing was really mine.

When my eyes finally closed, they found a place in the dark where the thought of his hand did not burn as sharply. I did not sleep the way people do who trust the rooms they lie in. I slept the way someone naps between trains: waiting for the whistle that knows when it is time to stand.