Then, she paused just before she turned. And only then did she look at him.
Her eyes locked with his for the briefest second.
“Go through them,” she said. Her next words were slower. “Initial… both.”
It was the only time she looked at him that entire morning. There was no question in her tone. No inflection that implied flexibility. And, God, how it thrilled him.
Before he could even lift his head, she was already walking away with that predatory grace that reminded him less of a woman and more like a panther that didn’t need the moonlight to be devastating. Halfway across the room, she turned her head toward Johar and responded to his questions.
And just like that, she was elsewhere. Gone.
Adrian stared down.
The first file was thick. Familiar. But then his eyes slid to the second file.
Thinner.
Smaller.
Unlabeled.
It shouldn’t have carried any significance. And yet, his fingers hesitated above it.
The moment his eyes landed on the title, his breath caught.
Dominant/Submissive Contract
Between Dr Rebecca Voss and Mr. Adrian Tierney
For a split second, he just… stared. The words didn’t register at first, but his name next to hers was a flare in the dark. A strange heat bloomed behind his ears. Something about it radiated. Is it finally happening? Isn’t it too soon? She’s too quick. Or, no. She’s just too sure. How does she read me like this?
The heat in his chest deepened into something breathless. He didn’t think. He snapped the file shut and slipped it into his bag like a student hiding something inappropriate from a teacher. He cast a glance around the room. The lab carried on as always; papers rustling, keyboards clacking, and muted voices in the corridor.
No one had seen. Or at least, no one reacted.
But his pulse was thudding like he’d stolen something sacred.
Hours later, the corridor had dimmed into near-total darkness only deepened by the whirring hum of distant generators. He keyed open his door with the mechanical precision of someone too used to silence, and the room greeted him not with warmth in the emotional sense, but with that dry, overprocessed gust that carried the peculiar scent of lived-in loneliness: stale paper, scorched circuits, synthetic fibres, and his tired skin. He stepped inside, let the door seal shut behind him, and leaned against its cool, metal frame because pausing there, and letting the silence enclose him like a familiar cocoon, was a small comfort he’d allowed himself to need.
And then he saw it again.
Still.
Unmoved.
Her coat.
It hung on the back of the door exactly where it had been for weeks now. He had meant to return it after she had left it behind that night. But she never asked for it. Not once. And maybe he never truly forgot. Maybe he just never wanted to remember enough to act. Maybe it had become easier—no, preferable—to pretend it had always belonged here, anchoring his solitude in something shaped like her.
“You’re still here,” he murmured, his voice just above a whisper, his mouth tugging into the ghost of a smile.
“Checking if I vacuumed again, Dr. Voss?”
It had begun as a joke. A defence mechanism. A feeble attempt to fend off the madness of isolation in a place where even time gave up trying to behave normally. But over time, it had evolved into something stranger.
Stranger and more sacred.
He had started talking to the coat. Not every night, no. But often enough that it became a habit his mind stopped questioning. On days when the endless cycle of coding, cross-checking, recalibrating, and caffeine withdrawal left his head pounding and his eyes grainy from too many hours in front of dim screens and too few minutes under actual daylight, he would talk to it. To her. Or some version of her conjured by fabric and association.
He’d update her on his data breakthroughs, on the latest disaster with the logistics team, on the entropy of their shared research folder. Sometimes he asked her questions she couldn’t possibly answer; about dark matter, or Maxwell’s Demon, or what she thought of his control group variables. Other times, all he managed was a plaintive, “What do you think, Doctor?” spoken into the hush, as though her opinion still hovered just beyond the edge of sound.
She never answered.
But it was Antarctica.
And Antarctica, with its endless horizons and its biting silences, made a man gentle in ways he didn’t know he possessed. Made room for tenderness without permission. For longing without the theatrics of romance. For vulnerability without an audience.
He toed off his boots, lined them neatly by the door as if someone else might see, and slid his coat onto the hook beside hers. Then, rubbing the fatigue from his eyes with fingers that still smelled faintly of graphite and solder, he walked to his desk. The lamp clicked on with a soft snap, casting a halo of golden light across its surface. She would have approved.
He placed the two files down gently.
He reached for the thicker one. He opened it and immediately found her hand everywhere. Her sticky notes fluttered like thoughts caught mid-breath: short arrows pointing toward pivotal charts, precise questions scrawled in that elegant, infuriatingly legible handwriting. She had absorbed the architecture of his thinking: the curvature of his doubts, the hesitation in his margins, the leaps of intuition he’d buried beneath layers of formula.
She had read him.
And more than that, she had stayed with him in the reading.
His smile, this time, was not tentative. He closed the file slowly, as though folding away memory, and placed his hand on the second one.
Thinner. But somehow felt so much heavier.
He opened it with the care one reserves for old letters or sharp things.
Dr. Rebecca Voss
Dominant.
It stood with the same sharp, elegant stillness she had always possessed in rooms that bent toward her gravity. He hadn’t read past it yet. He just let his finger drift across the letters, as if touching them could make her solid again.
In this small room, on the edge of the world, with the wind howling like old gods outside and frost chewing at steel and bone alike, she lingered. Not just in her coat. Not just in her notes. Not even in the paper that bore her title like a signature. She lingered in the shape she had made in his life: a space no one else could fill because no one else had carved their presence with such quiet conviction.
He let out a soft, almost disbelieving breath.
“I think you'd approve of the lamp, too,” he said to the coat, his eyes lifting to its silhouette, structured and silent against the door. “Warm light. Clean desk.”
And then, as though responding to a summons he hadn’t realised he’d made, he sat down as one does before a confession. Or a resurrection.
He didn’t mean to read it. Not that night.
The file had no business calling to him. Not after the hours, he’d just waded through tedious, bone-dry work that left his brain thrumming like the underside of a glacier about to crack. He had convinced himself he’d wait, as one does with indulgences too potent to be rushed. He’d wait for a day when the storm outside wasn’t carving at the walls, when his muscles weren’t stiff from hunching over incomprehensible graphs, or when his body wasn’t vibrating from the ache of too much solitude and too little sleep.
But the file sat there and knew he'd come.
So, he gave in with the resigned grace of a man who knows when he’s already surrendered. He walked to the small kitchenette and retrieved the last sachet of pepper mushroom soup. And he opened the file.
Page one.
Consent Agreement
Initiated by: Dr. Rebecca Voss
Entered Voluntarily by: Adrian Tierney
His name stared up at him, suddenly unfamiliar. As if she had taken the syllables of him and placed them somewhere deliberate. He began to read clause by clause. Each sentence was meticulously constructed as a formula written to reveal the corners neither of them had yet named. The language was clinical, yes: mutual consent, predetermined limits, communication cadence, psychological aftercare. It read like any scientific protocol.
He took another sip of soup. It was hotter now. Or maybe he was warmer. The heat curled deeper in his chest as if her words had ignited something molecular.
Clause 5.1: Psychological Aftercare Protocols. Clause 6.2: Dominance As Daily Presence. And then—Clause 9.3.
9.3: When in doubt, ask. When in pain, speak. When afraid, do not retreat.
Stillness is not silence.
He froze.
The words didn’t demand anything of him, and yet they left nowhere to hide. He couldn’t tell if it was instruction or grace, but it struck with the quiet force of snowfall, the kind you don’t notice until the world is already blanketed and transformed. That line… didn’t just settle into his mind; it embedded itself, like a fragment of melody you don’t remember learning but can never forget.
He turned the page.
Definitions. Terms. Not just words, but worlds: submission, service, attention, devotion.
And his body responded before his thoughts caught up. Something in his breath slowed. His shoulders eased back, spine uncoiled, and his heart quietly took its place in the centre of his chest. He hadn’t expected how physical it would feel to read her dominance so plainly laid out as principle.
By the time he reached the final page, he felt… understood. Named.
He looked at her signature again.
He didn’t pick up the pen.
This wasn’t the moment for decisions or declarations. He closed the file gently. Outside, the wind roared with the fury of an old world tearing at the edge of the new. But inside, the room remained warm. Scented faintly with mushroom and black pepper. His body was wrapped in the slow hush of comprehension. His breath was steady.
He turned to the coat again and said nothing.
But his smile was the kind of answer that did not require words.
Comments (0)
No comments yet