chapter 1
Anais always knows exactly what she’s doing. That’s the thing about her — she never acts without intention, never says a word that hasn’t been carefully chosen, never gives an instruction that doesn’t serve some precise, elegant purpose I’m not always clever enough to understand until it’s already happening to me.
So when she told me she was dropping me at a café on my own, I knew there was nothing casual about it.
“You’ll sit,” she said, pulling up outside in that low silver car of hers that makes people on the pavement turn their heads. “You’ll order something. You’ll wait for me.”
Simple. Except nothing with Anais is simple.
I looked at myself in the passenger mirror before I got out. Brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, glasses slightly smudged — I really should have cleaned them before we left — and underneath the soft grey scarf she’d wound carefully around my neck before we left the flat, the collar. Black leather. Snug and warm and absolutely, completely hidden. Unless someone looked closely. Unless someone knew.
“Off you go,” she said, and her voice had that particular quality to it. Calm. Certain. The voice she uses when the dynamic is already in motion even if nothing obvious has happened yet.
I got out of the car. I heard it pull away behind me.
The café was the kind that takes itself seriously — dark wood, proper cups, a little chalkboard outside listing the roasts by region. It smelled wonderful from the doorway. Coffee and warm pastry and something slightly floral I couldn’t place. It was maybe half full. Late morning, mid-week. A few people on laptops. A middle-aged woman at a table near the window with a book she wasn’t really reading. A young girl, maybe eighteen, tucked into a corner with what looked like a novel. The usual quiet hum of people being comfortably alone in public.
I joined the short queue and tried to look normal.
I’m not sure I ever manage that entirely, when I’m in this headspace. There’s something that happens to my posture, my expression — I get quieter somehow, more internal. Anais calls it going soft. It’s not something I do deliberately. It just settles over me when I’m wearing the collar, even hidden as it was.
The barista behind the counter was young — early twenties maybe, with a bleached undercut and small gold hoops in her ears. She moved efficiently, confidently, the way people do when they’re good at their job and know it. She caught my eye as I stepped up.
“Hi,” I said. “Could I have a flat white, please?”
She smiled. Not unkindly. She actually reached for the group handle before she said it.
“Do you really think you deserve a coffee?”
She was already tamping the grounds. It was clearly a joke — the kind of thing a confident, friendly barista might say to a regular, the sort of throwaway banter that usually gets a laugh and an oh, probably not, ha. Her eyes were warm. She was being playful.
I bowed my head.
“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose I do.”
I heard my own voice and it was soft and genuine and utterly, completely sincere, and I couldn’t have made it sound any other way.
There was a pause.
When I looked up, she had stopped. The group handle was back on the machine but nothing was running. She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t fully interpret — somewhere between surprised and carefully, quietly fascinated.
She reached under the counter and set a glass of water in front of me. Lukewarm. Just a plain glass of water.
“Enjoy this, then.”
She was still smiling, but it had changed. It had become something more considered. She slid the glass forward but didn’t let go of it.
I reached out and wrapped my hand around it and said, “Thank you, madam.”
She held on.
I looked up at her.
“Thank you, madam,” she repeated, gently — slowly — as if she was testing the shape of it in her mouth. Tasting it. There was a delicate mockery in her tone but nothing mean, nothing cruel. More like wonder, I thought. Curiosity. As if I’d done something she hadn’t expected and she was deciding what to make of it.
I felt warmth rise in my face. “I’m sorry,” I said.
I have absolutely no idea what I was apologising for. Nothing, specifically. Everything, generally.
She studied me for another moment. Then she smiled properly — a real one, generous and a little wide — and she let go of the glass.
“I like your manners,” she said.
“Thank you,” I breathed, and took the glass to a table near the middle of the room, because Anais had taught me not to hide in corners.
The water was barely worth the glass it was in, honestly. I sat with it and tried to look like a normal person quietly resting, and I thought about Anais and why she’d sent me here and what exactly I was meant to be learning today. I usually figure it out eventually. Patience is something she’s been working on with me.
I was about halfway through the water when I felt it — that particular prickling awareness of being watched.
I raised my eyes.
The woman near the window. The one with the book she wasn’t reading. She was looking at me directly. Not rudely, not aggressively — but steadily, with an attention that felt evaluative. She looked to be in her mid-forties, well-dressed in a plain and considered way, dark hair going silver at the temples. She held herself with ease. With authority, I realised, though she was simply sitting.
I looked down.
The heat in my face was back and spreading now, down into my throat and my chest. I stared at the table and I knew — knew — I was completely obvious. Whatever it was that happened to me when I was in this state, she had seen it. I could feel her still watching and I couldn’t look up and I was simultaneously desperate for her to come over and desperate for her not to.
She came over.
I heard her chair scrape softly, heard her footsteps, and then she was simply there, standing beside my table. Unhurried. At her full height, which meant I had to tilt my head back to look at her properly, and something about that angle — having to crane my neck, having to look up — made my breath come a little shorter.
“You are so easy to read,” she said. Her voice was measured and low and kind in the way that didn’t require softness. “I’ve been watching you. You’re owned, aren’t you?”
It wasn’t really a question.
Her hand moved to my scarf — slowly, giving me every opportunity to object — and she drew it aside, gently, and looked at the collar.
Her fingers came to rest against my cheek. Warm. Dry. Still.
“What are you?” she asked.
My throat tightened. “I’m a submissive girl,” I said, barely audible.
“Louder.”
I swallowed. My whole body felt like it had been turned inside out, like every nerve ending was suddenly on the outside of my skin, raw and aware. I took a small breath.
“I’m a submissive girl.”
Loud enough that across the café, the eighteen-year-old in the corner looked up from her novel.
I kept my eyes on the woman’s face. She was watching me with something that I can only describe as approval — not warmth exactly, something more formal than that, more considered.
“Your mistress has taught you well,” she said. “You show good manners towards other women. That’s worth knowing.”
“Thank you, madam,” I whispered.
She lifted her hand. Held it there, just slightly extended, with perfect patience.
I understood. I leaned forward and brought my lips to the back of her hand and kissed it, softly, briefly.
She rested her fingers for just a moment on the top of my head — a gesture so unhurried and settled it made my eyes sting slightly, which I did not expect — and then she walked away, back to her table and her book, as though nothing particularly notable had happened.
I sat very still for a moment.
Then the girl from the corner spoke.
She’d got up. She was maybe eighteen — not older, I didn’t think — with a canvas bag over one shoulder and her novel tucked under her arm. She spoke loudly and clear, with the confidence of someone who has absolutely no self-consciousness whatsoever, in the way only teenagers and the very secure ever manage.
“I gave up babysitting a couple of years ago,” she announced to the general café, which was now paying attention whether it wanted to or not, “but I reckon I’d come out of retirement for you. Tell your mistress to give me a ring.”
She put a folded piece of paper on my table, gave me a look that managed to be both mischievous and entirely sincere, and said:
“I’d love to punish you if you’re a bad girl. A good spanking — that’s what you need, I think.”
She patted my head once, cheerfully, and walked out.
I unfolded the paper.
Her number, in round, tidy handwriting. And underneath it: BTW nice boobs.
I put it in my pocket. My face was absolutely on fire.
The flat white I’d never received was looking more necessary by the minute.
