She woke up panicked. What had she been thinking? What had she done? Why did everyone tout the virtues of living in the moment? Whenever she lived in the moment, she woke up like this. When the courage of the moment receded, she was left with nowhere to hide -unsure of her convictions. The cold light of day always changed her thinking. She wished she could only live in the dark – within her impulses, never seeing the light – never having to wrestle her nocturnal lusts and hungers with who she tried to be in her waking, daily world. The memory of his kiss good night slowly lulled her. It was softer, sweeter, more heart breaking than she would have ever imagined. That was it. The unexpected. The surprise of it. She had been looking for experiences that defied her expectations, not merely the ones that fulfilled them. God, how many times had she dismissed a possibility because it didn’t live up to her expectations rather than giving into the actual experience? Why had she let ‘what is’ be diminished by her thought of ‘what should be’? He was delicate. At the centre of him was delicacy. Refinement. Manners. Elegance. But none of these was at the expense of his masculinity. She fretted a bit about her need for masculinity. When she thought about it, she didn’t even know what masculinity was or what it meant. It was an amorphous concept, like beauty. She couldn’t name its parts or how it worked. She knew what it wasn’t. But she couldn’t articulate what it was or why she needed it so much. She looked over at the scarf he had given back to her. She reached for it and breathed it in. He had taken excellent care of it. She thought of the scarf in his hands. The silk caressing his fingers. The colours against his skin. She thought of him tying her wrists with it. Or using it as blindfold. No, she wanted to watch him touch her. She wanted to see his hands on her breasts, torso, thighs. She wanted to see his eyes close in as he entangled himself in her. Before she knew it, she had thrown off the covers of her bed and let the cold air strike her warm morning skin. She closed her eyes and traced the contours of her face with her fingertips, imagining they were his. She touched her lips and let her nerves relive his lips, his tongue, his breath. She could feel the gentle exhale of him in her lungs. Penetrated by his breath and nothing more. She let him linger there. She reached for her scarf and covered herself with it like a shroud. The silk barely touching her skin in the places that curved. Her nipples rose to the almost imperceptible tingle of the fabric. They yearned to be fondled, bitten, sucked, and she left them wanting as she continued to trace her fingertips along her neck, down the ravine between her breasts, down her taut stomach. A sudden shudder from deep within made her spread her legs wide letting the edge of the scarf fall between them. The woven threads immediately began to absorb the pearl of her milky pleasure that had beaded between the folds of her sex. She brought the stain to her nose and breathed in the scent before sucking the stain out. She imagined what it would be like to let him see her, prone like this. She imagined him enthralled by the wonder and beauty of her – that threshold of dark mystery and pleasure that for many men is a place of both reverence and revulsion, an all consuming sanctuary and everlasting sin – where she would take him in, surrounding his erect need, pulling him into the core of her, where home and hell are one in the same, transforming his energy and power into mutual pleasure and release, bathing him in that briny, primordial nectar where the mystery of life and death begin and end. She caressed that ridge of flesh that gathers and rises and permeates every nerve centre with exquisite pulses of electrical pleasure. She let it gather and disperse repeatedly rising until she couldn’t avoid the climax. She contracted every muscle, pulling the singing, quivering, delight into her womb and just as it reached the highest note possible she let in erupt, pulsating down, as if excavating a new channel through her loins down into her tenderest flesh, releasing like an effervescent spring of carnal rapture. For her, pleasure was like the blood lust of vampires, once she had a taste of it, she needed more and more and more. She began to indulge again when she heard the initial melody line of Beethoven’s Fur Elise. It startled her. She wondered where it was coming from. As it repeated, she realised it was coming from her phone. It was a blocked number. As soon as she answered, the call disconnected, and a text came through. “I hope you enjoyed yourself this morning.” She wondered for a moment if he could possibly know what she doing, but he couldn’t. He might have guessed, but… “Do you imagine me there?” “Yes” “Did you ask my permission?” “No” “Every time you please yourself without my permission, you will spend a week alone. You’ll hear from me next Sunday.” He couldn't be serious. She tried to text him back, but none of her texts went through. She tried the first number he had used to contact her, but the line was disconnected. Would he really make her wait a week? And how would he know if she masturbated every moment of ever damn day until the end of time? As she tried to convince herself that there was no way he would - “Remember what I told you last night. Don’t start with defiance or you’ll starve.”