Full Frame – Book 1 [Teaser]

An Excerpt from Chapter 3

I make it upstairs before him. Shower. Bedroom. Nothing on.

Exactly as instructed.

My skin still holds the heat of the water and the ghost of Noah’s hand on my thigh. He drove us home with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on me, completely undisturbed. As if the business card had not declined. As if that meant nothing because the money is there. Because the money has to be there. Because our rep would have called if there were a real issue, and Noah would know before a server at a wine bar handed him back the card with an apology.

He did not check the app. I did not ask again. Now the question sits beneath my skin with everything else.

Mara’s clean, callous smile. Nico’s face when he saw her. The strange little silence after her name. The card. The email.

The strange commission.

Not a couple they wanted us to photograph. Us. Me in front of the camera. Noah behind it. Another man close enough to turn the fantasy into something risky. 

The request should feel absurd in my head. But it doesn’t. It feels stolen from our bedroom and dressed in business talk.

I stand naked in front of the closet and look at the things we keep there. Noah told me to choose a toy. Singular.

The coil of hemp catches my eye. Broken in by years of his hands and my wrists. It still has a dry bite to it, a fine rasp that wakes my skin before it ever tightens. The rope asks one question: do I need to be held through my discomfort?

Tonight, yes. I want resistance from escape. I want to pull and find him there.

I let my fingers drift past the paddle. Smooth black leather. The paddle asks whether I want the day driven out of me one sharp breath at a time. Whether I want impact clean enough to cut through the noise. Impact is attention. Counted. Measured. Checked against my breathing. He can make one sharp line of sensation turn my whole body obedient, then lay his palm over the place he marked until the sting becomes warmth and the warmth becomes need.

I could choose that. Part of me wants to.

The part still carrying Mara’s voice. The part that wants something decisive enough to erase the way she looked at me, like she had found a seam.

Then I see the clamps. Small. Silver. Neat in their little case. They ask a different question. They ask if I want to be made aware of myself in a way I cannot ignore. If I want every breath to tug sensation sharper. If I want Noah’s eyes on the smallest flinch, the smallest tremor, the exact second too much becomes almost too much and almost too much becomes the precise point.

I close the case. Not tonight. 

The blindfold lies folded in the corner, black silk with the faintest crease down the center. That one asks if I want the room taken away. Without sight, I become all listening skin. His breath. His weight on the mattress. The pause before he touches me. The quiet sound he makes when he likes what he sees. 

I think back to the email. My pulse drops lower.

Noah has put that image in me a few times before. Only when I am already soft and open and too far gone to pretend the thought does nothing. His mouth at my ear, his hand in my hair, his voice dark and calm as he tells me how beautiful I would look under another man’s gaze. How still he would make me stay. How proud he would be. How jealous. How badly he would want to take me apart afterward for making him feel both.

It has always been a game. Dangerous, but ours. Locked inside the room. Contained by his voice, my body, the certainty that the other man was only smoke.

And tonight, because of that email, the dark does something else. It gives my imagination somewhere to put him.

I pick up the rope. Then the blindfold. Noah said to pick one.

I carry them both to the bed anyway. Because sometimes mild disobedience is just another way of asking him to come closer. To notice. I set them on the bed, then kneel on the floor beside it with my hands resting on my thighs.

Naked. Clean. Waiting.

He taps twice at the door. I take a grounding breath. I am ready.

“Yes, Sir.”

He comes in quietly, but his eyes go straight to the bed. The rope. The blindfold. One slow exhale.

“I said one, Pet.”

My stomach tightens.

“Yes, Sir.”

“And you chose two.”

“Yes, Sir.”

His mouth curves. “So you do want a little punishment.”

The words move through me and reach my cheeks in a hot flash. Because yes. I do.

That is the shape of my disobedience: not defiance, not rupture, but invitation. A small tug on the line between us. A way of asking him to step closer, take hold, remind me that he sees every choice I make and knows what to do with it.

Punishment, with Noah, means extra time. Patience.

The slow denial of what I want until wanting becomes the only clean thought left in me. It means his hand withdrawing the second my body starts to beg. His voice in my ear, pleased and mercilessly calm, telling me I can wait a little longer. That I asked for this.