Chapter 28

“Yellow,” Valerie answered, shifting her eyes away from Lucca. She felt suddenly shy, and was unwilling to see the expression they would give her in reply. She suppressed a shudder as she imagined the scenario Lucca had asked about, but she also imagined herself enduring it. Surviving it.

“I’m not talking about you and Dana, your idiotic contract.” They sounded exasperated. “This is about you. Your wants, desires. Just you.”

Valerie flushed, shifting awkwardly. The two sat in Dana’s living room; Lucca relaxed in an armchair, and Valerie looking small on the oversized sectional. The remains of a pizza that Lucca had ordered for them were shoved to the far end of the coffee table. Valerie had eaten much less than her share, and it was sitting uneasily in her stomach.

She found herself struggling to connect with her own desires. The past month had centered entirely on what Dana desired; but even before that, the stress and demands of her life, both before and after Heather had left, left scarcely any time or capacity for Valerie to pursue desires. Thinking about them had been a painful thing. A dangerous thing. She hadn’t noticed when the desires had stopped showing up.

“I..” she swallowed.

It felt unsafe to answer honestly. She swallowed again, breathing in deeply, and answered anyway.

“Red,” she looked back up at Lucca, fearful for reasons she could not fully identify.

Lucca simply nodded, and moved on, marking Valerie’s answer and moving to the next category on the kink quiz.

They continued on this way for several hours, Lucca regularly nudging her to answer only for herself, and Valerie trying her best to remember what it was like to want things.

“Orgasm denial?” Lucca asked, nearing the end of the quiz.

Just the question reminded Valerie that Dana had left her delirious with pent-up need. Despite the strange— borderline traumatic— last twenty-four hours with Lucca, she still felt the arousal like a distracting ache. She shivered with it, a tingling rush through her body.

“Green,” she whispered softly, and admitting it out loud ratcheted her re-awakened ardor a notch higher. She knew deep down that she enjoyed it, but she still blushed crimson to admit it.

“I see why Dana is so fond of you,” Lucca remarked, skimming the results, and the various kinks to which Valerie had answered ‘green’. To Valerie, they sounded mildly annoyed.

Valerie knew what Lucca meant without seeing the screen. She and Dana fit together well, she thought; almost perfectly, like two puzzle pieces. The woman’s proclivities for domination were almost a mirror image for her own submissive fantasies.

Valerie bit her lower lip and looked away, blushing again.

“What do you like to feel during sex? During a scene?”

Valerie looked back towards Lucca, confused.

“What? I mean…”

“As in, emotions. What emotions?”

“I don’t…” Valerie furrowed her brow; she had never considered this perspective, never thought of the emotional content of sex as something intentional.

Heather had been her first real partner, and at first sex with her had been novel and exciting. Heather had a narrow idea of “sex”, however; and it quickly became monotonous, or even a chore; and Valerie’s dysphoria with the role of “boyfriend” quickly outweighed the novelty. Their intimacy had tapered off altogether as Valerie’s transition progressed. She had never been brave enough to tell Heather about any of her kinks. When there was even shallow representation of bondage or dominance and submission in some movie or TV show, Heather had responded to it with judgment and disgust.

“Uhm.. happy? Good, I guess?”

Valerie was unsure what kind of answer Lucca was looking for, and they didn’t look satisfied with her attempt.

Lucca tapped around on their tablet for a few moments, and then laid it down on the table between them. An emotion wheel was visible on the screen; concentric rings of words radiating from the center, subdividing the entirety of human experience.

“What about shame?” Lucca asked.

“No.. uhm.. red..” Valerie answered in a small voice.

Lucca looked at her expectantly, but Valerie wasn’t sure what else to say. Eventually they shrugged, highlighted a part of the wheel red, and moved on.

“Vulnerable?” Lucca asked, eventually.

“Yellow.. uhm.. greenish? greenish-yellow?” The color rose in her cheeks yet again.

For all that they had discussed over the past hours, somehow it was these questions that left her feeling the most vulnerable, indeed.

“Abandoned?”

They worked their way through the wheel. Valerie responded ‘red’ to most of the flavors of sadness, which she supposed made sense in retrospect; it was her default state, and if she wanted anything from sex and kink, it was an escape from that. ‘Rejection’ and ‘humiliation,’ too, were marked red; even considering the experience of those in a scene made her feel withdrawn.

She had only mildly negative reactions to emotions like ‘disgust’. Somewhat to her own surprise, when she considered them directly she found she also disliked what seemed like more traditionally submissive emotions like ‘insignificance’ or ‘worthlessness’. She felt worthless far too much in her life, as it was.

She hesitantly, somewhat shyly, gave affirmative responses to fear, and anticipation.

“Valued?”

“Green,” she responded, after a few moments of silence.

“Loved?”

The question, which should not have come as a surprise, shocked her into silence for a moment. She had never consider feeling loved as part of kink, until Lucca proposed it. She realized that even if she was hesitant to believe that Dana loved her, with a capital ‘L’; the woman clearly cherished her, and that she had been unfailingly caring— even if sometimes that care was in the form of whispered encouragement in the middle of an unprovoked impact scene.

“Green,” she whispered.

She felt like she was admitting something to herself, with the response, as much as to Lucca.

“I can’t give you all of these things,” Lucca told her, gently. “I need you to understand that.”

Valerie nodded, quietly. She felt drained; she had been doing her best to let Lucca psychoanalyze her for hours, and outside the windows of Dana’s hillside house, the sun was setting behind the distant, fog-shrouded city.

“I know,” she replied softly, exhausted.

“Let’s wrap this up, for now. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

Valerie nodded in acknowledgement. She curled her legs up beneath her on the sofa, retreating back into its cushioned corner.

Lucca began tidying up the coffee table, collecting the plates, napkins, and torn-open Parmesan cheese packets that remained from the pizza they had split. Valerie moved to help, but Lucca waved her off and disappeared into the kitchen. She felt uneasy, and slightly anxious, her mind whispering admonitions to itself that she should be doing something useful.

Lucca returned a few moments later; they had retrieved their laptop bag. They seemed slightly surprised to see Valerie still tucked into the same corner of the couch, watching the dimming fog that served as a sunset that evening.

“You don’t have to stay up here, you can go do…” Lucca gestured toward the rest of the house, “I don’t know, whatever you do?”

Valerie flushed with embarrassment, and plucked at the hem of her sweater she still wore from breakfast.

“I don’t have anything to do.”

“Go watch Netflix? Shitpost on the internet? Masturbate?” Lucca shrugged.

“I’m not.. uhm.. I have rules. No screens. And, uhm,” she blushed bright red, and turned away.

After everything they had discussed that day, it seemed very silly feeling so embarrassed, but she felt it nevertheless.

“And— uhm, no masturbation. Dana and I watch movies together sometimes?” She finished, hands still fiddling with her sweater.

Lucca sighed, rubbing their temples. They muttered something that Valerie couldn’t make out.

“I’m in charge, right? So you can go do whatever. I say so.”

Valerie chewed on her lower lip, evidently tempted. She shook her head, ultimately, though she seemed uncertain.

“Dana— mistress was explicit. And she’ll ask when she gets back. I—” she swallowed nervously. “I don’t want to be punished.. again..”

“I could order you.”

Valerie gave them a sad, quiet look. She’d follow the orders, even knowing that Dana would punish her for it. She thought it likely that Dana would delight in the predicament of it.

“That fucking woman,” Lucca muttered to herself, this time loud enough to be audible. “Okay, fine. Listen, I need to work for about an hour. Then we’ll watch a movie. Go take a long shower, change into pajamas. You’re allowed to shower, right?”

“Yes, Mx,” she replied, softly, and unfolded herself from the couch.

Lucca shook their head, some conflicting combination of amused and annoyed.

Valerie disappeared into Dana’s bedroom. She found the bed in disarray, and surmised Lucca had slept in it the night before. The home had two small guest bedrooms, which Valerie had never seen used. She wondered at Lucca’s choice to sleep in Dana’s bed, but supposed they had probably shared it with her before Valerie lived there. She made the bed— one of her usual responsibilities, anyway— and then stripped out of the clothes she had worn to breakfast, depositing them with the laundry in the closet.

The shower felt luxurious, especially in contrast to the icy one she had taken the night before. The water was almost too hot to bear, and it stung the welts on her back; but she spent far longer than she was proud of with her mind empty of anything other than the sensation of warm water running over her body. She felt, afterward, that it had washed away some small part of the emotional turmoil of the past couple days. The latex that Lucca had stripped off of her the evening before was still a tangled pile on the floor; she brought it into the shower with her and cleaned it at the same time as her body and mind, then rinsed it with diluted latex shine, as Dana had taught her, and hung it up to drip dry.

She dressed, after, in one of the sets of flannel pajamas that she was seldom permitted to wear. She certainly enjoyed the leather and latex that Dana typically chose for her, but the soft flannel felt like a rare, luxurious treat; and Lucca had been explicit, after all.

She collected her own laundry as well as a few items Lucca had apparently cast off the night before, and carried them down to the lowest floor, to start them washing. Then, back upstairs to find Lucca still bent over their laptop, grumbling at it in frustration. Valerie quietly curled back up in the corner of the couch, not wanting to interrupt.

“You worked in tech. What did you do?”

Lucca’s voice surprised Valerie out of some combination of half-sleep and internal reverie. She blinked at Lucca, tilting her head to the side.

“Um, infrastructure, mostly? Ops?”

“What do you know about message queues?”

“Kafka, Rabbit, or Kinesis?”

They never got around to watching a movie. Valerie shyly and gently helped Lucca understand the system they were working with; how to retrieve messages, configure topics, and monitor the status. Hours of tinkering later, when Lucca finally told Valerie to go to bed, they looked at her with a look Valerie might have been mistaken for respect, if she didn’t know better.