Home · Stories · New Bound by Desire by Sophia Moon
The safeword we settled on was marigold, which made me laugh in the car on the way over, because who in the history of the world has ever thought about marigolds at a moment like the one we were driving toward? Adrian laughed too — really laughed, the kind that creases his whole face — and somehow that steadied me more than any careful speech could have.
By the time we were upstairs my hands had gone cold. He noticed. He notices everything; it is the most unnerving and the most reassuring thing about him. He took my hands and pressed them flat against his chest and held them there until the warmth came back into my fingers.
"We stop the second you want to," he said. "One word. You don't owe me a reason."
I nodded.
"Out loud," he said. Gently. Not a command yet — a request.
"Marigold," I said, and my voice only shook a little.
He had laid everything out on the dresser the way another man might lay out cufflinks: a length of soft cotton rope, a pair of scissors in case the knots ever needed to be gone in a hurry, a glass of water. The scissors were the thing that undid me, honestly. Not the rope. The scissors meant he had already imagined the worst version of the night and made a plan for it. That, it turned out, was what trust looked like — not the absence of fear, but somebody else holding the exit open for you.
He started slow. A loop around one wrist, then the other, the rope warm from his hands. He talked the whole time, low and unhurried, telling me what he was going to do before he did it. "I'm going to bring your arms behind you now," he said. "Tell me the second your shoulders complain." They didn't. The rope drew tight and then tighter, and something in my chest that had been clenched for weeks — months, maybe, the low static of a life lived too carefully — went abruptly, gloriously quiet.
"There she is," he murmured, when he saw it happen. He always knows.
I don't have good words for the part that came after. People expect it to be about pain, or about power, and it is and it isn't. Mostly it was about being held in place long enough to stop performing. I couldn't fidget. I couldn't reach for my phone or fix my hair or do any of the small managing things I do to keep the world at arm's length. I could only be there, breathing, while he traced a slow line down my spine with one knuckle and watched the goosebumps follow his hand like iron filings after a magnet.
"Color," he said, somewhere in the middle of it.
"Green," I said. My voice had gone far away and dreamy. "So green."
When it was over he didn't leave me to find my own way back, the way the careless ones do. He cut nothing — the knots gave easily; he had tied them that way on purpose. He rubbed the faint pink lines on my wrists with his thumbs until the blood came singing back into them. He wrapped me in the duvet. He held the glass of water to my mouth and made me drink. He told me, twice, that I had done beautifully, and the strange thing, the human thing, is that I believed him.
Later, tangled and warm and embarrassingly close to tears in a way that had nothing to do with sadness, I asked him why marigolds.
"Because nobody panics about a flower," he said. "And because they're the last thing in the garden to give up in autumn. They hang on after everything else is gone."
I thought about that for a long time, his heartbeat slow and even under my ear.
I had come to him thinking I knew exactly what I wanted. What I had wanted, it turned out, was permission — to stop holding myself together for one night, and to trust that someone else would hold me instead. He had shown me a door I never knew was in the wall, and he had kept his hand on the latch the entire time.
In the morning there was a single marigold on the pillow beside me, a little crushed from the night, stubbornly orange. I have it still, pressed flat in a book I never read, the way you keep proof of the night you became someone a little braver than you used to be.