Page 62 of Jax
I didn’t move. I let the moment breathe.
She’d trusted me with the edge, and I would take her there with care. Knot by knot. Breath by breath.
I stepped in front of her, slow and deliberate. The rope in my hands creaked softly, warm and worn, familiar but somehowchanged. The 6mm strands had been conditioned to satin. I knew them. But they felt different tonight.
Or maybe it was her.
“Color?” I asked gently, though I already knew. Her eyes had that glassy, tethered look—not gone, not dissociated, but balanced in that breathless place between holding on and letting go.
She looked up, breath catching, lips parting. “Green,” she whispered. Not loud. Not bold. But real. A word that gave me more than permission. It gave me her.
I reached for her jaw, cupping it gently, thumbs brushing the curve of her cheeks while my fingers traced beneath her ear. Her pulse beat fast there. Steady. Present. Fragile in its beauty. I wanted to count it. Memorize the rhythm like a song I didn’t know the name for but already couldn’t forget.
“You feel that heat in your belly?” I asked, my voice low and reverent, shaped by the weight of what she’d given me. Not dominance. Not control. Something older. Something earned.
She gave the faintest nod, like her neck was no longer entirely her own.
“That’s yours. Every drop of it. You made this. You gave permission.” I leaned in, letting my breath coast over her mouth without touching. “I didn’t bring you here. You let me.”
Her exhale hitched. The knot at her sternum shifted with it, golden hemp flexing subtly across flushed skin where her camisole had ridden up. She was a painting undone by pulse alone, and I was already wrecked. I didn’t kiss her. I hovered, lips near enough to taste her breath, to make her ache for more, while the air between us thickened into something molten, weighty with the things we hadn’t spoken aloud.
“You’re doing so fucking well,” I whispered, because she needed to hear it. “I could write sonnets with this rope. I could carve poems into skin and story into flesh. But this? You’realready the masterpiece.” Her knees bent slightly, not from weakness but because tension had to go somewhere, and I stepped closer, catching her with the steady heat of my body.
The next coil came low across her hips. I looped it through my fingers before laying it against her, slow and deliberate. It shimmered where the light touched, threading between her thighs in a wide cradle that gently urged her open. My fingertips adjusted the cinch with precise care, brushing over the rope nestled between her legs, and her breath caught, her lips parting around a prayer she hadn’t fully formed.
“Still with me?” I asked, voice barely a hum against her ear.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “God, yeah.”
“You’re holding tension in your thighs,” I murmured, moving behind her once more, letting my knuckles trace the inner seam of her leg. “Breathe into the rope. Let it take some of the weight.”
She did. I felt the tremble first, then the slow, gorgeous exhale that followed as her muscles released into the pressure. The rope shifted with her, not restricting, but supporting. Not a trap, but an embrace. I adjusted the hip harness, fingers resting momentarily beneath the twist that pressed against her pelvis, and let my palm linger longer than was strictly necessary.
“You feel that?” I asked.
“Yes.” The sound cracked through her—half-gasp, half-moan—as her head bowed and her hair slipped forward like a curtain across her cheek. I reached up gently and pushed it back, knuckles brushing the vulnerable stretch of her nape.
“This rope doesn’t take,” I said, the words quiet, but grounded. “It holds. It carries. It speaks what you don’t always have to.”
I circled to face her again, my fingers trailing over the cinches along her ribs, then following the lines that shaped her torso. “You asked for this,” I whispered, drawing one fingertipdown the dip of her navel where a decorative knot nestled between curves of tension. “And you’re fucking radiant.”
Her breath hitched again. Her back arched, only slightly, but enough to tell me that praise had landed. That being seen and spoken into opened something tender beneath the surface.
“You like being held,” I murmured, lowering my mouth until it hovered near her ear. “Don’t you?”
She didn’t answer at first. But her breath staggered. Her fingers flexed behind her back.
“You want to be kept,” I said, gentler now. “You want to belong in this.”
Her voice came raw, velvet shredded at the edges. “Yes.”
I skimmed the backs of my fingers along the seam of rope between her thighs, not pushing, just letting her feel the shape of intention. She shuddered beneath the contact, body humming like a live wire.
“Color?” I asked, my breath brushing her cheek, heat threaded through every syllable.
“Green,” she whispered without looking at me, her voice already slipping downward. It sounded like surrender laced with survival, like saying it cost her something, and saying it anyway meant more. The rope in my hands no longer felt like a tool. It felt like a vow.
Her breath shifted before I touched the next knot. Not overtly. Not audibly. But the current between us changed as her expression shifted from surrender to worry for a moment, brows drawing together above her closed eyes. What had been smooth and steady fractured at the edges. I had been guiding the line around her waist, slow and intentional, shaping a clean cinch across her abdomen, and I continued for the moment, watching her closely. Each pass was deliberate, a quiet echo of the trust she had given me without hesitation. That had always been the point.
