Boundaries.
A beginning and an end.
Even if that end is just "choose your punishment from the correction cabinet and try not to come when he applies it."
Which is its own kind of mindfuck, honestly.
That Ichosethese things.
That part of me—the part that's apparently been running this show since I signed that contract—actually wants to see what Giovanni does with them.
Wants to know if his hands shake when he lights the candles.
If his breathing changes when he fastens the collar around my throat.
If he'll whisper things in Italian that I don't understand but feel in my bones anyway.
My fingers tighten on the riding crop.
Tomorrow, Jino gets me again. Gets to continue whatever the hell he started in that bathtub—that careful, precise dismantling of every defense mechanism I've spent two years building.
But tonight belongs to Giovanni.
And I just handed him the keys to every lock I have left.
Because thirty-seven demerits. Even I’m impressed. And Jino won't touch me again until they're cleared.
Which means Giovanni gets to decide when—if—I feel Jino's hands on me again. When I get that careful, methodical instruction that makes my brain go quiet in ways I didn't know it could.
The realization should piss me off.
It does piss me off.
But it also does... other things. Things I'm not ready to examine under the fluorescent lights of rational thought.
Because here's the truth I'm still trying to swallow—IlikeJino.
Not the way I feel about Giovanni—that's its own category of psychological disaster that probably requires a team of therapists and possibly an exorcist.
But Ilikehim.
Like how he explains things while he's breaking me down. How he touched me in that bathtub with the kind of precision that suggested he knew exactly which nerve endings to activate and in what order. How he made me come on his fingers like it was aclass assignmentand I was the eager student desperate to pass.
It's different.
Jino is structure. Rules. A syllabus for submission that I can actually follow because he bothered to write it down and explain the grading system.
Giovanni is... not that.
Giovanni is the pop quiz written in a language I haven't learned yet, where the questions change every time I think I've figured out the pattern.
And I hate how much I respond to that too.
Hate how my body lights up when he looks at me like he's considering all the ways he could ruin me. How something inmy chest goestightwhen he gets that particular expression—the one that suggests he's three seconds from either fucking me or throwing me out a window and hasn't decided which yet.
Reckless.
That's the word for Giovanni.