Page 23 of Dominion’s Collar

What tips me is sitting across from a man who just described the exact thing I've been hiding from everyone, including myself. The collar gives me access. His answer makes me want to know if he's right.

"I'm sure you have terms. What are they?" I ask.

He settles forward immediately, forearms on his thighs, and the posture closes the distance between us without moving his chair. "A collar establishes an exclusive BDSM dynamic. You scene with me. Only me. In return, you have my full attention, my skill, and my protection within Dominion's walls."

"Protection from what?"

"From anyone who sees uncollared and available as the same thing." He states facts that carry entire power structures inside them.

I take a sip of water from the glass on the table. My mouth has gone dry.

"The collar is mine. Locked closure. You can't remove it yourself. When we're here, you wear it. When you leave, I remove it. It stays in my keeping between sessions."

"And if I want out?"

"You tell me. We have a conversation. The contract dissolves. The collar comes off."

"That simple?"

"Endings should be. Beginnings are where the complexity lives."

"Do you rehearse these conversations, or do they just arrive fully formed?"

His eyes stay level. "You tell me. You're the writer."

I almost smile. Almost.

"Hard limits," he says, shifting the angle.

I give him the list I wrote before I ever walked through Dominion's doors. No breath play. No permanent marks. No humiliation, public or private. No scenes involving other participants without prior negotiation.

They come out steady and rehearsed, because they are. I wrote them in a notebook in my apartment, cross-referencing community standards against my own research.

He listens without interrupting. When I finish, he leans forward.

"Those are the limits you prepared."

"They're still my limits."

"I didn't say they weren't." He waits. "I'm asking what informed them. Experience, fear, preference, or research. I need to know which is which."

"What informed yours?"

He goes quiet. Not the deliberate silence he uses as a tool. Actual quiet, the kind that happens when a question arrives at an angle he wasn't expecting.

"I asked first," he says.

"And I'll answer. After you do."

The corner of his mouth moves. That fractional shift I'm learning to read. "Experience," he says. "All of mine come from experience."

"Then you already know that research and experience produce different lists." I hold his gaze. "Mine will change. That's the point, isn't it?"

He studies me for a beat longer than comfortable. "Yes. That's the point."

The reframing tilts the ground beneath me. My research covered the vocabulary. It didn't cover sitting across from this man while he strips the preparation away and asks what's underneath.

But I just made him answer first, and the small victory straightens my spine.