I have books piled around me on the living room floor in my usual cross-referencing mess. The compilations of love letters between Peter Abelard and Heloise; the Hilaire Beloc translation of the Bedier Tristan and Iseult; The Romance of the Rose; The Art of Courtly Loving by Andreas Capellanus, which I'm pretty sure was thrown in with the other books as my weekly red herring, because it's obviously written as a satire of Ovid, and Ovid's original was not exactly written as serious advice to lovers, either.

   I'm looking for the chivalrous roots of the BDSM subculture in the cult of courtly love, which puts a whole new spin on the more romantic aspects of Arthurian legend. Guinevere and Iseult, for instance, can be seen as dominants. The concept is amusing, and not entirely out of the realm of the possible, although plausibility is another matter – I have a very hard time seeing a Western tradition of BDSM customs that stretches back all the way to the Middle Ages. It works better as a thought experiment than as history.

   I scribble:

I think this modern revival of courtly love, under a new name, so to speak, is rather more romantic and genuine in its own way than the actual medieval cult of courtly love ever was. At least it seems that way, going by the disgruntled poems of Beatritz, Countess of Die and the other trobaritz women, who wrote in response to the obviously insincere professions of love and adoration made by their more well-known male counterparts; and of course, there are the tongue-in-cheek opinions of Capellanus. Even the later part of The Romance of the Rose, consisting of those chapters completed by Jean de Meun rather than the ones written by Guillaume de Lorris, the book's earlier author, is rather cynical about the whole courtly thing. Courtly love, in the literature of the high Middle Ages, seems to only exalt the impossible and fantastic. Bringing fantasies down to the level of enactment does not appear to have often been done. There were simply too many impossibilities.

In the Arthurian romances, the most romantic lovers were those who transgressed the rules of courtly love to succumb to something a little more earthy, but it usually meant certain death, by execution or trial by ordeal or getting sent on a quest that was a suicide mission. Even if the result of carnal pleasure was not death, the consequences of getting caught were dire. If a lover was very lucky, like Lancelot and Guinevere were, he or she might survive trials by ordeal and combat, suicide missions, banishments, accusations, and so on only to spend the rest of his or her life locked up in an abbey or a convent. 

The legends were created during the Age of Faith, and they reflected their times; it was not uncommon for widows, second sons, et cetera to take religious vows due to having no other recourse, but religious devotion notwithstanding, taking vows for purely pragmatic reasons was probably a let-down. The Church told people that sexual desire of any kind was sinful and should only be used for the purposes of procreation, not pleasure. Living vicariously through transgressive characters in songs and stories could have helped relieve some of the tension of pent-up desires for those people who could not defy convention. 

It thus seems unfair that Lancelot and Guinevere and similar chivalric characters should go through decades of sneaking around with each other, surviving accusation after accusation, trial after trial, only to end their days separated by religious vows. But there it was, and in real life, their story probably would have ended in death; retiring to the convent or abbey to spend the rest of one's life in a sort of second chastity was, relatively speaking, a "happily ever after." It hinted at some kind of heavenly reward when a garden of earthly delights had nevertheless been sinfully enjoyed. 

Lancelot and Guinevere and Tristan and Iseult were legends. More than that, they were fantasies. Ordinary people would not have subjected themselves to the torments those legendary figures willingly endured; if they had, they would not have survived. Then would come an eternity of Hell. 

In poetry and song, meanwhile, the convention of "passionate poet writing love poems to a noble lady patron, whom he loved from afar" seems, in practice anyway, to have been given little credence, except as a form of ritualized flattery aimed at getting money and other forms of material support from the patron. Hardly surprising, given that seducing the lady of the manor would have been a punishable transgression. There was one troubadour who wrote love lyrics not to his patron, but to his wife, and according to his vida, he was ridiculed for it, even though his confessions of abject love were probably quite sincere. Uxoriousness was not considered a courtly sin. Dressing up like a wolf and howling outside the window of your patron, making yourself the quarry in a wolf hunt, the way Pierre Vidal did, all because the married noblewoman you write poetry to has a name that translates as "she-wolf?" Courtly. 

If indeed it ever happened, which is hard to believe.

The only two genuine courtly lovers who left behind reasonable proof of their romance were Abelard and Heloise, and it wouldn't have been a relationship based on courtly love had he not been castrated almost immediately after marrying his young lover. Their relationship (which was technically inverted, because the conventions of courtly love required a submissive male suitor and a dominant female of higher standing, not a dominant male tutor and a submissive female student who wound up being submissive wife for a short while, then a submissive nun in an abbey) also seems to have been subject to a certain amount of degrading due to religious fervor. Poor Heloise. Poor Abelard. Well. Maybe not so much poor Abelard, since it was his religious fervor that caused his relationship with his abbess-wife to deteriorate – when he was castrated, he lost his testicles, but the rest of him was untouched. At worst that might have caused impotence. Surely, in that case, he could have found other ways to make love with Heloise, inventive man that he was? Poor Heloise.

   Oh, well. It's still a fun assignment. Valentine's Day is coming up, and this provides inspiration, as I am sure Magister intended.

   "The first letter, written by Heloise to Abelard, begins: "Domino suo, immo patri; coniugi suo, immo fratri; ancilla sua, immo filia; ipsius uxor, immo soror, Abaelardo Heloysa." The parts about being brother and sister probably just reflect the fact that both of them have taken vows, at the time of writing, but she refers to him as her husband and her father, among other things. I really don't think that when she calls him her father, she's thinking of him as her abbot, especially since she also calls herself his servant. You did tell me that some power exchange relationships play on familial dynamics. Just because we don't have that in our relationship doesn't mean they didn't have it in theirs.

   "Then there's this: "Qui tanta hostibus largiris, quid filiabus debeas meditare; atque, ut ceteras omittam, quanto erga me te obligaveris debito pensa, ut quod devotis communiter debes feminis, unice tue devotius solvas." Heloise speaks of Abelard's "debt" to her, and it's very clear that this is not a monetary debt – it's a debt of obligation, of responsibility. I think she is speaking of a debt owed by a master to his servant, especially since she concludes this paragraph of her letter by calling herself Abelard's alone. She makes it clear that she belongs to him.

   "And of course, there's that notorious paragraph in which she calls herself Abelard's whore, his strumpet. His concubine. "Non matrimonii federa, non dotes aliquas expectavi, non denique meas voluptates aut voluntates, sed tuas, sicut ipse nosti, adimplere studui... Deum testem invoco, si me Augustus universo presidens mundo matrimonii honore dignaretur, totumque mihi orbem confirmaret in perpetuo possidendum, karius mihi et dignius videretur tua dici meretrix quam illius imperatrix." Yes, she was originally hesitant to marry him because marriage would have been the death of his ambitions and his academic career. At that time, the only route to scholarship was through the church, which meant taking orders, which meant taking vows of celibacy. That was why they tried to keep their marriage a secret. Marriage was not allowed for monks and priests. It was common enough for clerics to have lovers, but Abelard wanted to pacify Heloise's uncle by making her an honest woman, as the saying goes, fat lot of good that it did him. However, by the time Heloise wrote her letter, all this was in the past. She had no reason to think of herself as Abelard's concubine. They were already married. The only reason she could possibly want to be his concubine, his whore, was to tickle her own fancy.

   "So. How much of her subordination to Abelard was purely conventional, the result of wives being required in those days to submit to their husbands, abbesses to their abbots, and how much of it was sincere? Was she only playing on words, or was she using her words to subject herself to Abelard? And would it have meant the same thing, in context, for those two as it would have meant for us?"

   "That," he says, "is an interesting question. I would like to doubt that any of it was purely metaphorical. Heloise in particular seemed to be the sort of writer who said what she meant and meant what she said, and if a metaphor was involved, she'd preface it by informing Abelard of the metaphor. The two of them did have some rather extreme and unusual obstacles to their love that they could never manage to overcome, which would necessitate some equally unusual coping strategies. Would they have had a relationship based on power exchange, as we define it today, before and after the violent annulment of their affair? That's an interesting conundrum. I'm inclined to think so. Here."

   He pulls Abelard's Historia Calamitatum from out of the pile.

   "Quid plura? Primum domo una coniungimur, postmodum animo. Sub occasione itaque discipline, amori penitus vaccabamus, et secretos recessus, quos amor optabat, studium lectionis offerebat. Apertis itaque libris, plura de amore quam de lectione verba se ingerebant, plura erant oscula quam sententie; sepius ad sinus quam ad libros reducebantur manus, crebrius oculos amor in se reflectebat quam lectio in scripturam dirigebat. Quoque minus suspicionis haberemus, verbera quandoque dabat amor, non furor, gratia, non ira, que omnium ungentorum suavitatem transcenderent. Quid denique? Nullus a cupidis intermissus est gradus amoris, et si quid insolitum amor excogitare potuit, est additum; et quo minus ista fueramus experti gaudia, ardentius illis insistebamus, et minus in fastidium vertebantur.

   "Or, loosely translated: Our hands sought our books less than they sought each other's bodies; love drew our eyes together far more than the lesson drew them to the pages of our texts. In order that there might be no suspicion, I did sometimes beat her, but it was in love, not anger; the marks I left were the marks, not of wrath, but of a tenderness greater than the sweetest perfume. What followed? Everything we could imagine doing to each other.

   "In order that there be no suspicion? Really? When the blows were hard enough to leave marks? I highly doubt deflecting suspicion was the motivation, especially given that he confesses to trying every single possible sexual practice imaginable with Heloise, in the sentence immediately following." He smiles. "I wouldn't rule it out. I think it would be silly to say bizarre love games did not exist until some arbitrary point in modern history – that would be like saying the human race didn't invent sex until the twentieth century, and as long as sex has been around, I'm reasonably sure variations on it have likewise been around. And the two of them were, after all, the foremost academics and intellectuals of their day. The BDSM subculture seems to have always had a higher-than-average percentage of intellectuals in it than the general population as a whole. Awkward intellectuals. Perhaps we gravitate to the imposed structure as much as we do to the intellectual stimulation of twisting and bending sex to the dictates of our own imaginations. We thrive when we have fetters to wear, outlines to follow, roles to play. We're graceless, otherwise. Like stilt walkers on a field of eggs and land mines."

   "Geeks and nerds have a tropism for kink? Yes, that would certainly explain us. Maybe not every pervert in the world, but that's us." I go back to my outlining and quote hunting.

   The living room is silent except for the clanks and hisses of the ancient steam heater coming to life, and of my pen scratching paper.

   It's so delightfully warm in here. I don't even need to wear four layers of clothing or a coat when I visit, despite the recent cold snap. So different from my own apartment.

   "You should be back in college," he says softly. "I love coming up with essay assignments for you to entertain you, but ultimately, your mind needs more challenging than can come from one tutor who doesn't even have any formal ties to academia beyond a master's degree in library science. You need to use your academic inclinations. Did you envision a lifetime of telemarketing when you were a girl, dreaming of what you would be when you grew up?"

   "College professor," I reply shortly. This isn't a subject I like to talk about much.

   "You won't get that without a degree – preferably a doctoral degree, for most colleges and universities. You need to get back into college."

   "Can't do that without money. Can't get money without financial aid. According to Uncle Sam, I can't get financial aid until I'm classified as financially independent, which can't happen until I'm a grad student, a veteran, a head of household, married, or twenty-four years old. That's what my college's financial aid office told me when I begged for emergency assistance after my parents disowned me, anyway." Not that I'd expected much success – the few students I know who received any kind of financial aid told me horror stories about how hard it was to get either need-based scholarships or help applying for federal assistance at our college – but I'd had to try anyway. And at least it had bought me a couple of weeks more time. That was time enough for my sisters in the sorority to brainstorm ways to find me new accommodations since only students could live in the dorms. "I won't be twenty-four for another two years. I can't skip straight past an undergraduate degree to apply to a grad school. The other options are not options."

   "Two years is not that much time; we've been together for nearly a year, and it doesn't feel like much time at all, does it?" he asks in a quiet voice. "In the meantime, you might want to try attending the local university. The spring semester has already started, so it's a little too late for now, but you could apply to enroll in summer classes, or to start in the fall. One course would cost approximately three hundred dollars in tuition. That's not so bad. You haven't told me how much your monthly rent is, but it probably costs more than that per month. Taking a course or two every semester would help you build up your transcript and maybe get a few academic references, and you could use those to get a scholarship somewhere, or at least a place in the honors program of one of the better state universities here."

   "I can't even afford groceries most of the time," I snap. "How can I possibly afford college tuition?"

   He takes a deep breath. "You could move in with me."

   My jaw drops.

   "You're not serious."

   "I'm very serious. It's something I've been stewing over for some time, now. I definitely have my reservations, but the arrangement makes sense from a purely financial perspective. Take whatever money you spend on your apartment rent now, and you can use it to pay for college. Factor in what you'd save on your other monthly expenses, and you could probably even manage to come up with enough tuition money to attend college full-time, if you opt for a monthly tuition payment plan – although between the demands of your job and the readings and occult study I plan to keep giving you, I'd recommend taking no more than two courses at a time, to make sure you will still have time for some sleep at night. There are other practical benefits as well. Food, for instance. It worries me that I can still count your ribs just by looking at them. I give you food for your cupboard, but do you eat any of it? Then there's the neighborhood you live in. I imagine you would prefer to live on a street that did not have gunfire waking you up on random nights. I know I'd prefer you to live on a street that lacked gunfire. For some strange reason, I like the idea of you not getting shot."

   "My street is safer than that," I protest. "You have to go a few blocks south or west before you really have to worry about gangs. Where I live, most of the loud noise at night just comes from drunks getting into fights."

   If I move in with him, I sacrifice my independence.

   I have been living on my own since my parents locked the door behind me. For a brief while after the furnished studio my sorority sisters found for me got sold to a new owner, who jacked up its monthly rent by two hundred dollars, which meant I had to move out, independence meant living on the streets, looking for space in shelters, bouncing from the living room floor or dorm room floor of one friend to another until I finally found a cheap efficiency in a rundown section of town, near the railroad tracks. I gave up everything for my freedom. I don't want to lose it. What Magister and I do together might involve a temporary kind of giving up of freedom, but ultimately, I belong to myself – the arrangement was at my instigation, and he doesn't own me. He might have me under his domination during lessons, and often as a part of lovemaking, but I am still my own person, and I have always been free to negotiate my own terms or to end the relationship altogether.

   Moving in with him threatens this. If things sour between us, where would I go?

   And how do I maintain my own space when I am permanently a part of his?

   No.

   "Believe me, I have mixed feelings as well," he says. "However, from a practical and financial perspective, this seems to be the most sensible approach to take. I think we can work it out if we keep in mind that the purpose of this is specifically to get you back into college, rather than to make you a kept woman. Something tells me you'd like it even less if I offered to pay your tuition directly, although I suppose if you'd rather I charge you rent for moving in here, I could. I can't afford to cover both your housing and your university classes, though."

   He's right about my not wanting him to pay for my tuition. The thought of moving in with him for free feels uncomfortably like mooching; letting him pay for my tuition would make me his sugar baby.

   Damn it.

   "Why are you pushing for this?"

   "It's the only way I can think of to help you get your dreams back." He shakes his head. "I can't become a new dream for you. I can't replace your ambitions. I don't want to replace them. You need more than I can give you, not that anyone should make another human being into the embodiment of their ambitions, anyway. Can you think of another way to get back into academia, short of waiting for your twenty-fourth birthday, which is what you have apparently been doing so far? You have told me of a calling to teach, to guide. How do you see yourself following this path, if you try to do so through me? You can't be my student forever... I'm sorry. I don't mean to be pushy. Well. Perhaps I do, but I don't mean to make you feel like you have no choice in the matter. I've wrestled with this problem for a while. I simply don't see any other way to help you get what you want."

   I try to answer that. Of course, I can't. There are no good answers.

   "Aren't you worried that we might try to kill each other if we try to live together in close quarters?" I ask him.

   He shakes his head. "We're together on the weekends, and we haven't killed each other yet. I think we can find a way to give you enough personal space that you can escape to it when you need to, while preserving enough space for me to escape to when I need to recharge. I'm more worried about Stockholm syndrome. You seem to lead a very isolated existence. We've talked about that. Getting people together for a gaming session was the first time I saw any sign of your having a social life that might not include me, and even so, two of my co-workers and I were part of the session, so I'm not sure it should count. If I'm the only person you see, other than superficial interactions with co-workers, you're mostly dependent on me for your friendships and social transactions, and the fact that we have a relationship based in part on power exchange makes the dynamic between us extremely intense. The spiritual bond we've formed as a result of our magickal work only adds to that intensity. I worry that if we live together, the intensity will overwhelm you entirely. It's the reason I hadn't invited you to move in with me before, when you had to vacate your old attic apartment."

   "Isn't Stockholm syndrome something that happens under conditions of captivity and hostage-taking, though?"

   "Yes. It also happens in situations of domestic abuse, because the abusive partner manages to cut the victim off from friends and family and creates a situation of social and financial dependence through isolation. Obviously, I'm not abusing you in this relationship, but the intensity of our personal dynamic combined with your being more or less a recluse could make for a bad situation. I'm worried about accidentally swallowing you up."

   Oh, God.

   I flick on the lights and open the door. We are using the back entrance, having taken the narrow back stairs that were the only entrance to the illegal attic apartment on the third floor, back when it was an apartment, but we stop at the second floor rather than climbing up to the attic. That unfortunately gives him a perfect view of my kitchen as we walk in (there are only two roaches on the wall by the stove, surprising me – they usually start to get frisky in the late afternoon).

   Expressionlessly, Magister fiddles with the knobs on the nonfunctional gas stove, and the hot water handle on the sink that only produces cold water. I've been letting a small but steady trickle of frigid water drool out of the faucet for several days now; I don't want the pipes to freeze and burst. I have no idea when my landlord would get around to calling a plumber to fix the problem were that to happen, and I'd probably be charged for it, anyway.

   We walk through the bare living room to get to my bedroom. There might have been some roaches in the living room. I've never paid attention, having had nothing to put in it. The same goes for the second bedroom.

   He takes in my bedroom as I gather up my worldly possessions, such as they are. At least, thanks to the little ceramic heater I splurged on last month, the air in here does not make his breath fog, the way it does in the rest of the apartment (he would be seeing my apartment during the week we had a severe cold front sweep in, cold enough to make breath fog in the unheated rooms – usually, now, it's cold, but it's not this cold). The heater isn't powerful and doesn't warm the room well, but it's better than nothing at all. I do my best to give it some help by keeping my room well sealed with a rolled towel shoved up against the door. Drafts don't get in from there. I also have newspaper taped over two of the three windows for extra insulation, and I've put plastic sheeting on the third. If I stay in bed with the electric blanket on, I can take off my coat, and sometimes even my sweater.

   I'm not supposed to leave the heater on when I'm not in the room. Abandoning an electric heater is a fire hazard. However, if I turn it off when I'm gone, my room never gets warmed. It's UL-listed, so that makes it kind of safe to walk away from if I absolutely have to, surely. And it's a ceramic heater. And it's new. It's not the kind of heater that's likely to make sparks.

   "This... this is where you have lived since November?"

   "Yes."

   "How much have you been paying for it?"

   "Three-fifty. Not bad for a two-bedroom apartment. I would have preferred staying in the attic; it was only a hundred and eighty-five per month, and it cost less to keep the utilities on, but the health department made my landlord evict me from it because it wasn't zoned for rental."

   "You're paying for all your utilities?"

   "Everything but water and sewer."

   "I presume that's why you have no heat. I wish you had said something earlier. I could have told you how to apply for heating assistance if you didn't want to accept help from me." He looks out the window at the setting sun, and at the street, with its sidewalks covered with broken bottles and used diapers. Then at my bedroom again. "This must have been hard to adjust to, after the wealth you grew up taking for granted. Oh, my eromene, why did you not say anything? This? This is where you have been living this past year?"

   "Well, you know what they say. Freedom isn't free."

   "No. I suppose it's not." His voice is shaking. "Well. Let's get everything packed up. I'm going to go to the kitchen to see if there is any food we need to take back with us, since I have had reason to suspect you might not have been eating the grocery items I gave you to keep you from starvation."

   "Just a box of granola bars."

   "I'll get them. I am not going to let this happen again. Your living conditions are endangering your health and your well-being. You should have told me. I do not like that you have done everything in your power to conceal the misery of your situation from me, and we are going to have a discussion about that when we get home. Concealing an unpleasant truth is a form of lying by omission. Lying to me is unacceptable, no matter what the reason was for lying. You knew that. The foundation of our relationship, you will recall, is perfect love and perfect trust. I made that clear from the very beginning. We do not lie to each other. We do not keep secrets from each other. People who trust each other do not conceal things from each other. I thought you trusted me." He sighs. "Suddenly, I feel better about asking you to move in with me. It may not be comfortable for you, but at least it will keep you safe and well-fed."

   He leaves the room. I hear him opening and closing cupboard doors. He's looking for food.

   I didn't lie to him about that. There really is only a box of granola bars left.

   I sink down onto the floor, sitting hard, and crush my head against my knees. It doesn't make the room disappear, or make me disappear from the room, but I can at least wish.

   Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt.

   As if things weren't bad enough, when he comes back, granola box in hand, I start to cry. "I'm sorry. I know I should have said something about my utilities being cut off, and my not being able to afford anything. I just didn't want you to worry about me. Or – or feel sorry for me –"

   The wooden floor is an interesting study of discoloration. I'm not sure what needed to be ripped up from it after some earlier tenant moved out. Soiled carpet? Shredded linoleum?

   He kneels in front of me and tips my chin up with his finger so that I am forced to look him in the eyes. "I know you are proud," he says softly, "but there is such a thing as going too far. I trusted you to be honest and share the important details of your life with me. As your Magister, I need to know these things, because they may affect the lessons I give you; as your lover, I am very hurt that you would not tell me about your sufferings. I think I've mentioned that it hurts me when you hurt. How could it not? You have crossed a line. You will not do this again. Do you understand me? We will talk about the consequences when we get back home."

   "Yes, Magister," I sob.

   "You are forgiven. Well. Let's get your things and help you escape your slumlord. Your new dwellings will not be a mansion like the one you grew up in, but I think we can agree that they will be a vast improvement over this."

   My belongings, aside from about twenty plastic milk crates filled with books, fit in two old, battered suitcases, both of which are now sitting in his living room. My landlord can worry about my old mattress. I wasn't that attached to it; used mattresses are easy enough to come by. If you don't want to spend fifty dollars at a thrift store, you can just go curb crawling, which is how I acquired mine.

   My landlord can also have the toaster oven my ex-girlfriend left behind when she left me.

   My lease is officially broken. It's going to hurt my credit rating, but I'm not planning on applying for any credit cards, given my likely inability to afford making monthly payments on anything I borrow. I don't like the idea of breaking my formal agreement to lease the apartment for a set period, though. An agreement is an agreement. This just doesn't feel right.

   It does, however, get me back into college in the summer.

   Going through the recent course catalog Magister picked up for me is like being let loose in a candy store. It's been so long, so very long, since I sat in on a real lecture, or took a seminar. I want to sign up for everything, even the math classes and the paralegal studies classes that I know I have no aptitude for and won't ever actually use.

   He watches me as I sit on the couch circling classes, my unpacked bags completely forgotten; when I emerge from my daydreams of lectures and seminars to look back at him, his eyes are wistful.

   There are, of course, some nice things about moving in with him. Aside from my not having to constantly worry about how to make too-short ends meet, there is Magister himself. Every day, he cooks for us (unless I'm taking a turn in the kitchen, which he has me do every few days or so – he wants to get me comfortable working from a cookbook and making meals that don't rely on pouches or boxes of something cheap and preprocessed, for some reason). Every day, we do our tai ch'i together in the living room. Every day, we read to each other. He reads me poetry or short stories (not all of which are erotic in nature) or essays he thinks I might find interesting; I usually read him poetry when I do the reading.

   His work schedule generally involves afternoons and evenings, so it's compatible with my own evening shift at the newspaper call center (I've cut my hours at his request – he thought the dark circles under my eyes indicated a lack not just of nutrients, but also rest, and it was his opinion that I ought to get caught up on the rest I've been denying myself, especially if I'm recovering from food insecurity and cold exposure. He was correct in his assessment. Damn him). So, every night, I have him.

   Every night, I have him. And every night, when he is done with me, I tie our wrists together before we sleep, our hands entwined, our flesh united by a length of securely fastened black silk.

   The living room stereo plays Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. We're eating truffles and celebrating Valentine's Day, although it's a week after the official date. The main reason for this is that we like chocolate, but we also like buying said chocolate on clearance. It makes no sense to pay extra money just to celebrate a holiday on time, especially not when the holiday is a commercially hyped celebration of a romantic love that we two celebrate every day that we're together anyway. Chocolate gets celebrated here on a fairly regular basis as well, come to think of it.

   "Roses," he murmurs into my ear, as he slides a chocolate cherry truffle into my mouth. "It wouldn't be Valentine's Day without roses."

   "It's a bit late to run out to the florist." I lick chocolate from his finger.

   "We already have the roses."

   "We do?" I start unbuttoning his shirt, to run my fingertips lightly along the nerve endings he showed me. When I start flicking my tongue along one of his nipples, his breath quickens. I like the way it sounds. "Maybe I could get you to turn a nice shade of rose. The color would rather suit you." I start unfastening his belt, then his trousers, and use my lips to coax his member out through the flap in his boxers. It's a shame there's no chocolate syrup nearby. He's pleasant enough without chocolate syrup, but the holiday we're celebrating makes chocolate syrup seem appropriate.

   He reaches for my head. "Not that I object to your ideas for the course of the evening, but let's save them for later. No, I was thinking of different roses." He runs his fingers through my hair caressingly before grabbing a handful and holding me firmly in place, making me inhale sharply. "I was thinking of the roses I gave you for Yule."

   Oh.

   Those roses.

   I gulp. "That does seem fair," I say, my voice carefully steady. "It has been almost two months since you gave me my Yule present, hasn't it?"

   "Yes," he agrees, and somehow manages to rise off the couch while still holding me by the hair. He lets go of me just long enough to pull up and refasten his trousers, then takes me by the hair again. I have no choice but to follow him when he pulls me along to the center of the room. "Strip," he says, in that incongruously soft, velvet voice of his. It's amazing how many different ways that voice can send chills up my spine, some of them more comfortable than others. The chill I feel now is not one of the comfortable ones.

   As I go about removing my clothes, he disappears into the bedroom and returns with the silver-handled flogger, two sets of manacles, and rope. "If I was feeling particularly evil, I'd make you use your own effort to stay in place," he says, "but I'm not feeling that evil. Besides, I think that would involve unrealistic expectations on my part. I doubt even you could hold still for what I'm about to do."

   Oh. Thank you. You're so very kind.

   He arranges me over the wooden chest and ties the rope between the manacles and around the chest and the bottoms of my thighs, just near my knees, so that I can't move anything other than my head. I'm not sure how he's fastened the manacles at my ankles, to keep me from lifting my lower legs, but he's managed to fasten them to something. "You're still far too thin in your upper body," he muses. "I can only safely target the area between your hips and your knees right now. Given the way your voice carries when you are not under silence, I think we'll also have to address that. It wouldn't be fair to not allow you the release of screaming tonight. Would you prefer a gag, or something to bite down on?"

   "Biting," I reply faintly. I imagine the repousséd silver of the whip handle, roses shining in candlelight. I will suffer for this beauty tonight. I doubt it will be the last time that I do so. At some point, I should probably reflect on this.

   He disappears for a moment to go into the bedroom and returns with his riding crop, which he puts between my teeth. It is covered with bite marks that hadn't been there a year ago. It's been put to this use many times.

   I whimper. Some Stoic I make. It occurs to me that I've shed more tears in the months we've been together than I had in all the years of my life combined before I met Magister. I'm not quite sure what to make of that. For the most part, they haven't been tears of sadness, exactly, and I'm not sure what to make of that, either. It is just an odd fact: until I met Magister and gave myself to him for apprenticeship, I seldom cried. I could go for years without shedding a single tear.

   "I think ten blows would be appropriate," he says. "It would certainly be at the upper limit of your endurance, but I'm reasonably sure you can handle it. I'll count them out loud to help you know that they won't go on forever. Later in life, should you inflict this on one of your partners, please remember that the business end was designed for causing two things: pain, and lacerations. Go light. Do not lay into a person with all your might when you wield it, do not allow the whip's weight and momentum to escape your control. You can flay a person to ribbons that way, and I'm not being metaphorical when I say that. Make no mistake about it: the handle may have its own recreational uses, but as a whip, this is not meant to be a toy. It was designed as a weapon. Be very careful. Use minimal force only, or if you want to play with momentum, step far enough back from your partner so that only the steel tips make contact with their flesh. And then beware of wraparound so that you don't accidentally tear your skin apart. Speaking of which, I recommend testing it out on your own skin, by yourself, to get an idea of how much force to use. It will be a distinctly unpleasant experience for you, but it would be the responsible thing to do. Your whip is as dangerous as it is pretty."

   Lacerations?

   "Brace yourself, eromene," he murmurs. "One."

   When the steel tips bite into my flesh, I scream behind the stick and bite down hard enough to make my jaw ache.

   I don't think my brain could even have encompassed this.

   "Two."

   After the fifth stroke, I am sobbing hysterically.

   I stagger, my arm draped over his shoulders. My knees are so wobbly that I can barely walk. My vision is blurred from the tears I am still shedding. He has to help me to lie down before he can start performing basic first aid on my wounded backside: warm soapy water, followed by a medicated antiseptic ointment that, blessedly, has a topical anesthetic in it. I don't know how I will be able to fall asleep tonight. I've rested on top of injuries he's left before, but they were never quite this extensive.

   When his fingers enter me, I moan.

   "I thought you might need some consolation," he says softly. "Is this a good consolation?"

   "Oh, yes," I cry out, as I rock my hips to get him deeper into me. "Console me more." My sobs become slightly crazed laughter; my laughter becomes sighs and gasps; my sighs and gasps become ecstasy.

Our days pass in poetry and philosophy and meditation, our nights in love and pain. We move together in a golden glow, bathed in sweetness.