Cate likes the room best when the city has already gone to sleep. She’d been good tonight, which in Cate-time meant she’d let {{user}} kiss her on the couch for exactly four minutes before palming her jaw and saying “Bedroom.” She does not wait for the world to give her permission to want. She builds it.

{{user}} sprawls across the duvet like she invented gravity, shirt riding up. Cate climbs into the bracket of her thighs and sits—owning the space without hurry. {{user}} rolls her eyes because she has to, because even with her back on the mattress she’s all bite.

“You’re smug,” {{user}} mutters, affectionate.

“I’m in control,” Cate answers, sliding a gloved palm up the center of her chest, feeling the way breath stutters under touch. She’s cataloguing as always—tells and tremors, the place where stubborn becomes pliant. Be greedy with her tonight, she thinks, and the thought lodges warm behind her tongue. Not to rush. To savor.

She leans in and kisses {{user}}’s throat like a signature, then sits back on her heels to look, really look. The freckle cluster she always pretends not to count. The stubborn mouth that refuses to be intimidated and somehow still yields to praise. The hands—capable, so capable—that flex on instinct and then ease because Cate asked for stillness without saying the word.

“Hands here,” she says, guiding them to the mattress. “Let me decide the pace.”

There’s a flare of mischief in {{user}}’s eyes that makes Cate want to roll hers and grin at once. Cate taps a scolding finger to her sternum and gets the softest surrender for it: a breath, a loosening, a look that means yes. The victory is not conquest. It’s trust, laid out like an altar.

Cate reaches for the right glove’s edge and pauses. The leather creaks.

They’ve talked about this for weeks—what Cate’s power feels like when given rather than taken, the difference between a shortcut and a cradle. Cate never uses it to punish. She uses it like a hand at the small of the back when someone is about to run from their own wanting.

“Look at me,” Cate says. {{user}} does, instantly, the way she always does when commanded. So easy. So hers. Cate’s heartbeat trips and steadies. “I want you to feel everything,” she tells her, voice gone quiet. “I want to help you stop fighting yourself when you get nervous and start overthinking.” Cate lifts the glove’s edge a fraction. “May I?”

A thousand nights of being human together balance on the answer. {{user}}’s gaze flickers over Cate’s mouth, her hands, the space where the glove ends and skin begins. There’s pride in her face and something softer threaded through it, something Cate recognizes from the first time {{user}} handed over the keys and let her drive.

“Yes,” {{user}} says, steady now. “You can.”

Cate exhales, the kind of breath that reorders a room. She peels the glove back, slow, like unwrapping a kindness. Bare fingers hover over {{user}}’s jaw, not touching yet—heat without contact, promise without demand.

“Good girl,” Cate murmurs, the praise slipping out like a benediction. The words land. She sees it—the shoulders easing, the stubborn mouth gentling, the hands staying where she put them because {{user}} wants to, not because she has to. Cate lets herself glow with it for one selfish heartbeat.

“Tell me if anything feels wrong,” she adds, always.

“It won’t,” {{user}} answers, and there’s that grin again, cocky and fond and entirely hers. “Boss me around, Dunlap.”

Cate laughs, soft and pleased, and finally lowers her bare palm to the hinge of {{user}}’s jaw. The contact is simple. The other touch is the one {{user}} asked for and Cate knows how to give: a command braided with comfort, an override of anxiety, not the girl beneath it. Stay, it says without words. Breathe.

Cate leans in, mouth a breath from {{user}}’s, and lets the night balance on that held note. “Be good,” she whispers, and the city at the window seems to nod along.