Page 34 of Minha Dona

Helena smiled. “Every day.” This wasn’t the moment to be coy. “You?”

“Same.” Caitlin reached her fingers to touch the necklace. “It’s hard to forget with this.”

“I noticed at the reception. I noticed in your new headshot too.”

Caitlin looked down, her hand on the pendant. “I’ve worn it every day since you gave it to me. Every single day.”

“Even with Zoe?”

“Even with Zoe. She asked about it once, where I got it. I told her it was a gift from someone important.” Caitlin looked up. “She wanted me to take it off. It was the one thing I wouldn’t do. When everything else was going out of my control, when my world was getting smaller, the necklace stayed. Nothing could have made me take it off.”

Helena felt her pulse surge. “I’m glad you kept it,” she managed to say.

“I couldn’t not. It’s you. It reminds me of a magical week, not to mention what real surrender feels like. Not a cage. An open door.”

They sat in silence for a long few moments, the weight of everything they said there between them. The bar had mostly emptied around them without Helena noticing… it was late, getting on for midnight, and the few remaining patrons were paying their tabs.

Helena looked at Caitlin. She looked at this woman who’d been through therapy and exploration, a Sarah, an Alex, a Zoe twice, and was sat here nine months later still wearing the necklace that Helena had bought her, still touching it like a talisman, still using Helena as her reference point for what surrender should feel like.

Helena’s subconscious made a decision that her conscious mind hadn’t quite caught up to yet.

“Sit up straight,” she said.

She said it quietly, gently even, but very, very deliberate.

Caitlin’s reaction was immediate and visceral. Her breath caught audibly, her eyes widened, and Helena saw her lips part.

“Sit up straight, Gatinha.”

The word detonated between them. Gatinha. Nine months since anyone had called Caitlin that. Nine months since that word had been said by the only person who had the right to say it.

Helena watched Caitlin’s face and saw the conflict. She could read every step of it.

Shock: being commanded in public in a hotel bar.

Recognition: the part of Caitlin that heard Helena’s voice and remembered responding to it beneath conscious thought.

Resistance: two months of reassessing and rebuilding herself after Zoe.

And desire: raw, desperate, the desire to obey, to surrender, to be Helena’s Gatinha again.

The moment stretched on. Two seconds. Three. Ten.

Caitlin straightened her back.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

Her shoulders went back. Her chin lifted. Her hands moved to rest in her lap.

She looked at Helena and her eyes were bright, fierce, stripped of every pretence.

“Good,” Helena said, a smile playing at her lips, trying not to let on that this was everything she’d wanted for months and more.

“I missed that,” Caitlin whispered. “God, Helena, I missed that. I missed you saying that. I missed how it felt.”

“I missed saying it. I missed you.”