Submission Saved Us

*This one's for anyone who's ever felt like desire got lost in the laundry. I wanted a story that was hot but also a little funny, because kink doesn't always have to be solemn. Thanks for reading, hope it made you feel something.*

The bar smelled like old beer and cheap deodorizer, and Isobel was mixing a track she'd mixed a hundred times before. Thirty-two minutes into her set and she felt nothing. The bass thumped the floorboards the way it always did, the crowd swayed the way it always did, and she watched the levels on her laptop like she was doing a tax form.

She was twenty-eight years old, three years into DJing at clubs, and lately the whole thing felt like pressing play on a machine she'd already wound up. Eugene had been sitting at the end of the bar for most of her set, doing his phone thing, because that was their life now. He came to support her. She played. They went home. They had sex that was fine, or they didn't have sex and didn't really talk about it.

Her phone buzzed on the table beside her mixer. She glanced down between transitions.

Eugene: Come home. I have an idea.

That was it. No smiley face, no "great set." She stared at it while the track she'd cued up rolled into the drop. Eugene never texted like that. He sent paragraphs. He sent her articles about sound design at eleven at night.

She looked over at the end of the bar. He was already gone, stool pushed in, jacket not on the hook where he'd left it.

Well. Okay then.

* * *

The bus stop outside their building had two people under the shelter, hunched against the drizzle, and Isobel stood in the doorway for a second watching them before she went up the stairs. Their apartment was on the second floor of a place on a street busy enough that sirens went by at least twice a night. Thin walls. They knew everything about their neighbors' lives and hadn't asked to.

The door was unlocked. Eugene was in the kitchen, wiping down the counter like he was nervous.

"Hey," she said. "You bailed on my set."

"I'm sorry. I got antsy." He set the cloth down. "Come look at the bedroom first, then I'll explain."

Isobel dropped her bag by the door and followed him down the short hallway. The bedroom had been rearranged. The massage table was folded against the wall, and the bed had been moved to give more floor space. On the bed, laid out like a display in a shop window, was the spreader bar they hadn't touched in over a year. Beside it sat the drawer contents, all of it. The flogger, the silk rope, the blindfold, the padded cuffs.

"You cleaned," she said, because she had to say something.

"I vacuumed too." Eugene sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her. He was thirty-three, five years older than her, and he had this way of getting still when he was about to say something serious. "I want to try something, and I want to do it properly. A real scene. Formal. Me as your dominant for the night, you as my submissive, with actual rules and a safeword and check-ins. Not the half version we've been doing."

Isobel leaned against the doorframe. "The half version."

"You know what I mean. We play around, we laugh, we order pizza after. Which is fine. But it's been fine for a long time, and I miss something else, and I think you do too. Tell me I'm wrong."

She thought about the bar she'd just left, about feeling nothing while the bass shook the floor. She thought about the last three months of sex, which had gotten so predictable she could have scheduled it.

"You're not wrong," she said. "God. I've been bored, Eugene. Like, actually bored. In bed. With you. I kept waiting for it to fix itself and it just kept being Tuesday."

"So let's do Tuesday differently." He picked up the flogger and put it down again. "Rules first. Your safeword is 'red.' Yellow if you want to slow down or check in. I check in after every new thing, and you answer me honestly, that's part of the deal. If you say stop, everything stops. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Nothing we haven't done before, mostly. The difference is I'm going to be strict tonight. No laughing, no pizza breaks, no falling back into being us for a couple hours. Can you give me that?"

Isobel looked at the spreader bar, at the cuffs, at him. Something in her chest had already started moving, the thing that had been asleep at the bar.

"Yeah," she said. "I can do that."

* * *

He had her kneel on the cushion in the middle of the floor. It was the old couch cushion, the gray one, and her knees found the spots in it that knew her. Eugene knelt beside her and held out his hand.

"Wrists, please. Together, in front of you."

She put her wrists out and he tied them with the silk rope, slow loops, the knot sitting just above the pulse points. It was snug without biting. He'd always been good with rope, self-taught over years of videos and practice on a chair leg while she watched TV.

"How's that?" he asked.

"Good. Tight enough."

"Color?"

"Green." It felt strange and good to say it out loud. Like answering to her name at a meeting she'd been skipping.

He stood and took the blindfold off the bed. "Last check. This goes on, and I'm in charge until you say otherwise. Understood?"

"Understood."

The blindfold was soft and the world went dark. The apartment was suddenly very loud. The radiator ticked. A bus hissed at the stop outside their window. Somewhere below, the two people at the shelter were probably still waiting, and Isobel thought about them seeing her window glowing and had no idea what was happening behind it.

Then the first fall of the flogger.

It landed across her upper back, soft as a sweater thrown over a chair. She flinched anyway, because the anticipation was worse than the touch. The second fall came lower, the third lower than that, a slow train of soft leather kisses walking down her spine.

"Color?" Eugene said, quiet.

"Green," she said, and her voice came out different. Lower. "It's so light I can barely feel it."

"That's the point. Breathe."

She breathed. He kept going, building a rhythm, the falls landing in a pattern now, and the sounds of the city kept coming through the wall. A siren on Burnside, fading. A guy outside swearing at something. The rhythm of the flogger threaded through all of it, and Isobel found that her gasps were landing in the gaps between the traffic like they'd been scheduled there. She stopped caring that the neighbors could maybe hear. She stopped caring about the levels on her laptop and Tuesday and everything.

The falls got firmer. Not pain yet, but the cousin of it, and she felt her skin warm up across her shoulders and her hips start to tilt back toward the next fall before it landed.

"Still green?" he asked.

"Green. More, if you're asking what I think you're asking."

The next fall landed harder across her ass and she gasped, actually gasped, loud, the sound bouncing off their thin walls, and somewhere down at the bus stop the drizzle kept falling and the city kept going and Isobel knelt on a gray cushion with her wrists tied in silk and felt, for the first time in months, completely awake.

The flogger stopped. Isobel heard him set it on the dresser, the soft wooden clack of it, and then his footsteps coming back around in front of her. The floorboard near the radiator creaked the way it always did.

"Open your mouth," Eugene said.

She opened it. That was the strange part, how fast her body just did what he asked now, no negotiating, no joke first. She heard something soft being unrolled, and then leather pressed against her tongue and he worked it in and buckled it behind her head. Then he folded something small and cold into her tied hands. The little brass bell from the hallway hook. "You can't say red with that in," he said. "So drop the bell and everything stops. Shake it if you want to check in. Nod if you've got it."

She nodded, and closed her fingers around it.

It was the old bit gag, the one they'd bought years ago and barely used. It tasted like leather and a little like the drawer it lived in, which was a smell Isobel had never been able to name. She made a noise around it that was supposed to be a laugh.

"That bad?" he said.

She nodded and made the noise again, a kind of mmph that she meant as *tastes like the junk drawer,* and she heard him huff, almost a laugh himself.

"I know. Focus on breathing, Isobel. Through your nose, slow. This is the entire job right now. In and out. Can you do that for me?"

She breathed. In through the nose, out through