Her thoughts scattered when a soft weight landed in her lap, and she jolted, spilling a bit of Coke onto her leg. Her soft oath turned into a sharp one when little needles stabbed into her legs, and she looked down at Phoebe with a laugh.

“Well, hello.” She set her Coke on the table and picked up the cat, who immediately began to purr. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been told not to give you any more tuna.”

Phoebe just closed her striking blue eyes and tilted her head, and Olivia obligingly scratched behind her hears.

“Is that better?” she asked, smiling when she got a rumbling purr in response. “I don’t blame you. I could use a massage myself. Maybe I should call Sadie and see if she can fit me in this week.”

The cat flipped herself over for a tummy rub, and Olivia obliged. Phoebe’s belly was soft and warm, and stroking her was oddly hypnotic. She found herself drifting, Phoebe’s purrs the only sound in the quiet room, and all the emotions she’d been ignoring since last night came rushing to the forefront.

There were a lot of feelings to sort through, but the two most prominent were anger and disappointment.

“I’m so pissed,” she murmured, still stroking the cat. “And hurt. How the hell could he think that presenting me with that ultimatum was okay?”

Phoebe let out a plaintive meow and wriggled in Olivia’s lap.

“Though now that I think about it, maybe that was the point,” Olivia continued. “Maybe he wanted me to break up with him, and that was a guaranteed way to make it happen.”

She huffed out a breath, anger pulling ahead of disappointment in the Olivia’s Uncomfortable Emotions Race. “I’m not kink shaming, you understand. I just don’t want a Master/slave relationship.”

She looked down at the cat, who was staring at her with what Olivia decided to interpret as understanding. “Which he knew, by the way. We had that talk at the very beginning, and he didn’t want one either.”

Phoebe meowed, and Olivia realized she’d stopped petting her. “Sorry,” she said, and began to stroke again. “So if he knew I didn’t want a Master/slave relationship, and he didn’t want one, then him presenting me with that contract was either a test—of what, I have no idea—or a way for him to get me to break up with him. Which I did.”

She dropped her head back to rest on the chair. “Son of a bitch.”

She sat there, stroking the cat and staring at the ceiling. Almost a year of her life, wasted. And now she had to start all over again.