This is a test.

They’ve tried things like this before. It was much more contrived. There was fur on the handcuffs. There was an unwritten agreement not to push anything too far. It was, in its plainness, simple and safe, just a few twee forays into something vaguely perverse. Something they could laugh over later.

Now, no laughter. Just stares, expectation, a hope for some sort of common understanding in the shifting against the chair and the tightening of his fist in his pocket. Someone could say something, but it wouldn’t do any good in air this electric and unstable. It’s somewhere between vulnerability and a sort of bravado that had been, since today, unparalleled. 

There could have been conversations, they both knew that. There could have been things hinted at when rolling over between bouts of sleep. But there was something gorgeous about this sort of spontaneity and the way she was, in this terribly available and humbling position, boring into him with such a gaze as to suggest that she would devour him were it not for how she were restrained. If he were not to partake of this, it seemed, there was a chance he could be swallowed whole.

This is a test. And the light on in the bedroom, the ringing telephone, that look on her face are all just factors. The answer’s somewhere else entirely.