He looks at me, sees the tears on my cheeks and maybe thinks I’m crying because I don’t want him to free me. I don’t even know why I’m crying. I’m just spent, and if he can’t be inside me anymore I need to be tied up, and if I can’t be tied up I need another way to know that, right now, I’m his and he’ll take care of me. That he’ll take over and fix everything because I’m not sure I know how.

Finn swipes at my face with his thumbs. “I have to, sweetheart, you can’t be bound up any longer.”

It just feels like it’s the only thing holding me together.

“I know,” he says.

Oh God. I said it out loud.

“Shh, shh, come here.” He unwraps me like a gift, running a gentle fingertip along every groove the bungee cord left in my skin, and then he picks me up like I weigh nothing—I have no bones, no muscles, only skin and lust and blood—and carries me to my bedroom.

“This one?” he asks at the end of the hall.

I nod and he ducks in, pulling back the covers with one hand and sliding me under. I’m terrified he’s going to leave, but he doesn’t. He climbs in behind me, spooning me, running a reassuring hand down my side, over my hip, up my stomach, until he’s soothing the cord lines around my breasts with his tender, rough hands and kissing my neck.

“I need to hear you’re okay,” he rasps. “Tell me you don’t hurt.”

“I’m okay.” I take a deep breath but it chokes halfway through. “But don’t leave.”

“I don’t think I could. I’m... it’s intense for me, too. I... forgot.”

I’M A LIGHT sleeper, but I don’t wake once in the middle of the night. Not for water, not to go to the bathroom, not even to roll over and find a cool section of the sheets. When my eyes do open, the sun is high in the sky, and Finn and I are in exactly the same position we were in when we fell asleep.

He’s not awake yet, but his body is. It takes about a hundred promises to myself—new shoes, ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner, an afternoon swim—to get out of bed and not roll him onto his back and take him inside my body just to see if he’ll look at me again the way he did last night.