Page 105 of Jax
Her jaw flexed. Not with fear, but with calculation. And after a beat, she nodded.
She stepped closer, each motion slow and soundless, and lowered herself in front of me with a grace that contradicted the storm she carried inside. I could feel it in every small breath that hitched at her throat, in the way her fingers curled into her thighs like she was grounding herself before lift.
“I want it sensual,” she said, her voice low and even. “I want to feel… kept. But not overtaken.”
I understood what she meant. There were so many ways to dominate a body. But being trusted to hold someone in midair, not just tied, but held, that was different.
That was sacred.
“Understood,” I said. “We’ll lay down the terms together. We’ll build it brick by brick.”
She nodded once.
“Clothing?” I asked.
Her jaw twitched again. “Leggings stay on. So does the bra. For now.”
“Noted.” I kept my tone steady. Non-reactive. But my mind had already flashed to the way she’d look bound in rope with nothing but that thin barrier between us. Already, my hands ached to feel the compression lines bite across her thighs.
“And I don’t think I want you to touch me sexually, at least not at first.” She added, to my surprise. “I need to know what this is like by itself before I take it any further.”
That landed somewhere behind my sternum. A sharp, clean arrow of clarity. “You’ll get nothing you don’t ask for. You have my word.”
She nodded again.
“Safeword?”
She blinked. “Stoplight system, like you taught me.”
I nodded once. “I also want to add a check-in phrase tonight. Something less final. Something I can pull from you if I see you starting to drift or disassociate.”
She hesitated.
“I’m okay,” she said finally. “If I say I’m okay, it means I mean it. Not just autopilot.”
“Good,” I murmured. “That’s good. Go ahead and strip down to your comfort level, and we can begin.”
The quiet that followed wasn’t passive. It pulsed between us, thick with unspoken things. She glanced toward the jute, then lifted the hem of her tank top. No dramatics. Just a slow reveal of flushed skin, breath rising beneath a plain black bra that aroused me more than it should have. Not because of what it showed, but because of what it meant. Deliberate exposure. Voluntary stillness.
She stood and removed her shoes and socks with the same quiet focus, stepping free without flourish. I turned away, notout of restraint, but reverence. Touch hadn’t been earned yet. That mattered.
But want has its own gravitational pull, and mine was fixed entirely on her.
When I looked back, she was watching, not for approval, not to be told she was beautiful. She already knew. She was measuring impact. Looking for evidence that I saw her the way she needed to be seen.
“You like what you see?” she asked, a flicker of mischief flashing through the solemn air like lightning breaking through a cloud.
I let a slow, deliberate smile pull at the corner of my mouth. “I like what I feel,” I told her, voice low, even. “The control. The trust. The tension.”
She released a breath that sounded like the first exhale after surfacing, the kind that comes when your body hasn’t yet decided if it’s drowning or breathing again. “Yeah. There’s… a lot of that.”
I stood, knees cracking faintly as I crossed to the rope rack, hand gliding over the row of conditioned coils until I found the one I wanted. Eight millimeters of jute, softened by years of work, obedient to my grip, but never without integrity. I turned and stopped just shy of her body, letting the space between us speak first.
“I won’t take anything from you,” I said, my tone calibrated for resonance. “You’ll give it. And I’ll make it worth every breath.”
She swallowed hard. “Okay.”
I extended my hand, not to command, not to pull, but as a clear and measured offer. She accepted, fingers threading into mine, and I guided her to the center of the mat where the rig waited silently overhead like an altar built for this moment. She moved exactly how I thought she would, barefoot, composed,simmering beneath the skin. The rope in my hand remained still, but the promise of it buzzed in the air between us.
