Even the ceiling was blue. She stared up at it, the ceiling the same color as the walls, the same color as the painted floor: all turquoise, all the time, it was soothing, it was isolating, it was like the sky was a box and she was a bird locked inside it.

There was no noise. She laid on the bed and took especial care not to rattle the chains and held her breath, but all she heard was her heart thudding in her ears. Once she thought she heard traffic noise, but it was exotic and ephemeral and her mind could not connect it to the swath of surrounding blue. Silence drifted up to the ceiling and spread apart and drifted down, smothering even the soft in-out whistle of her breath. The silk on her body whispered. The silk on the bed whispered. The bristles of her hair whispered. She thought the chains would whisper if they could. Rhiannon imagined silk-padded chains, links wrapped in velvet. She wondered if such a thing existed.

It could. It could in here.

She crept into sleep and dreamed about the room and in her dream the chains were dressed in pewter velvet. The walls held the scent of jasmine and her skin murmured at the touch of her fingers, sighed out words she couldn’t understand. She tried to make it talk and there was the breath and the softness and the weight in her bones, weight lent to them by her chains, and she was comforted. She didn’t know when she was awake and she was sleeping, though in her dreams blue butterflies flew out of the chains and whirled in a cloud around the light fixture and melded into the ceiling and left behind the dry rustle of their wings. In her dreams the silk was her skin. She touched the hems of her skirt and felt it tickle in her loins. A tracing of the embroidery made goosebumps in her mind. A brisk snap of fabric between her fists ignited a strange humming vibration deep in her pelvis. Wings unfolded from the surface of her tongue and twitched and fluttered along the insides of her cheeks. She opened her mouth. Butterflies flew out, pink and veined as she was along the inside of her white skin.

Sometimes she dreamed that she was dreaming that she was awake. She peeled back one silken layer, then another that was tender and sweet, like the pulp of an overripe fruit. The inside layer, the waking layer, was transparent and full of screaming nerve endings. They wailed and moaned, keened and scratched. With patience the noise would recede. Her breath would swallow it. She was made of patience, crafted out of its strong beams and set afloat on a shadowy sea of tranquility. Her breath knew the way to the secret places and it stopped the hidden machineries. The pink butterflies swarmed it. They muffled it with their wings, dismantled it one molecule at a time with their twitchy legs.

The machinery fell away and there was complete darkness and out of this blindfold came a great smooth heavy skin-temperature silence and he was in it.

The silk went first. It billowed ahead of her carried on the will of her breath and it brushed against his skin. She felt electric. Her hands trembled and remained still. The silk reached out through the space and came in contact with his skin, all of it, the vast warm topography of it, each hair and folded place and its moisture, its warm scent. It moved around him like a blanket. It enveloped him. The air gained an imprint of heat, the map of his bones, each vein a hot singing pulsing river, a longing taste sinking deep roots in the back of her tongue. His skin brushed her skin. She knew crippling thirst and hunger that threatened to flense her bones, to tear her skin inside out and vomit her soul into the bowl of his hands.

The velvet links shifted. She pulled on them, felt him cry out. She pulled again. The chains murmured and his breath was a blade on her neck, a thin hot edge that aligned itself with her pulse, tracing it with a soft fluttering tongue

(to…want to)

Rhiannon looped the chain around her hands, made fists, breathed soft into his skin and reached into the darkness, drew it up close around her shoulders and

(pull)

The pain and the resistance, his flayed voice, raw and delirious

(Carl I want I’m hungry so)

So much lung-conditioned dark humid living and her eyes are in her fingers

(wet inside)

She glimpsed it spelled out across the insides of her hands: steel cord laced into his back and chained to her chains. She clenched her teeth and pulled. He screamed. The screams fell onto her skin and wormed their way inside, played with her nerve endings, stroked them into gentle feeling. She dropped the chains and he made a hissing pained noise and it moved through the folds of her skirt and touched her clit and her breath sucking inward sawing open her throat and the blood on his tongue, in his hands, flowing through his fingers she is a long hot sticky moan and falling falling falling awake. The vertigo snapped. She moved and heard the chains clink, too heavy and too loud in the darkness of her closed eyes. She pulled on them and they dug bruises into her wrists. Her groin beat a slow somnolent throb.

The tears rose but she was too tired to care.