Every Collar Can Be Discarded.

In the morning he seems like a different person. The wind blows in through the open windows and even underneath the blanket, I shiver. He pulls me closer and tucks me in before placing my head back on his shoulder. I am barely awake but I feel his lips on my forehead and I feel his fingers stroking my head. His lips rest on the side of my lip for a moment before he kisses the swollen spot. 

"Go back to sleep, my love," he whispers as he pats my head as if I am a little child. 

"It hurts," I tell him, pulling the blanket tighter around my neck as I turn my back to him. 

"What hurts?" He asks me, burying his head in my hair and holding me from behind. 

"Everything," I tell him, truthfully, "My thighs, my back, my head, my jaw, my insides..." 

His hand moves up to my neck, and his fingers fan over it, he doesn't squeeze or apply any force at all, instead just one finger oscillates gently over a course that is merely a few millimetres long and for a few seconds that is the only part of my body I feel. He doesn't feel sorry, and that's my favourite thing about him. No matter how much he may have hurt me the night before, he won't show me sympathy for it in the morning. He won't be sorry for being himself and giving me what I want. In that regard, I guess he is the same person in the morning as he is at night; hearing me tell him how much it hurts is as pleasurable to him in the morning, as it is at night. 

"Go back to sleep," he says again, and I drift back off to sleep. 

When I wake up, he is already dressed and kissing me goodbye. I notice the pillow he has propped up against my back where his warmth used to be. He holds his hand out to me and opens his palm, there are two things inside it: the stainless steel cuff from my wrist that flew open against the wall and fell on the floor last night and my nose ring that I didn't even notice was gone until I turned my head sideways to save my nose from his knuckles and saw lying all the way across the bed. 

"Put them on," he says putting them down on the pillow right in front of me. 

"But daddy," I whine in a tone only he has ever heard me use, "I'm sleepy." 

He grips my wrist and pulls my arm out of the covers, his grip is not too tight but it's tight enough to wake me up. 

"Do it now," he says. 

It's so strange that now I cannot go a few moments without having these things on my body but last night when they were flying off me in all directions it didn't matter at all. In many ways though, I appreciate that he designs my aesthetic and in doing so sends himself messages about owning me. I have no sense of aesthetics, not when it comes to decorating myself. I know that as an empowered woman I am supposed to say that I do these things — jewellery, make up and my hair — for myself and my own pleasure but that's not true at all. I don't get any pleasure from doing these things, I really can only do them when someone else is deriving pleasure from them. I only know what to wear when I know what the person fucking me would like to see me wear. 

I take the cuff drom him and snap it over my wrist but as I am putting the ring back in my nose, a surge of pain so intense washes over my nose and upper-jaw, I drop the nose ring on the bed and grasp at my face like it's falling off. 

"Now," he says without an ounce of empathy, "I am getting late." 

I pick it up and I push it into my nose as he nods approvingly. He looks like a different person and I realise how that's what started it. Last night he got on top of me and something about the light and the angle made him look like a different person. I kept telling him that he looks like somone else until he started beating me, asking whether he still feels like someone else. For some reason, I told him to shut up. I don't quite get it but the best explanation I can muster is that he said something. 

"It's not so bad now, isn't it?" He asked.  

But because a strange and transient form of synesthesia when I visualised the words as he said them, I didn't see the apostrophe. He didn't say the apostrophe. It felt like he was saying the word wrong. I thought I merely muttered the words shut under my breath, and I wasn't even telling him and I was telling the synesthesia, but the moment he heard me, it was as if a glass had broken during a moment of remembrance at a church. That's when the nose ring, so comfortably latched to my face went flying off it. I reached over to the side, to pick it up when he grabbed my hand and banged it against the wall, snapping the cuff off it instantly. 

"You want it back?" He asked pulling me up by my neck, making it impossible for me to signal any kind of answer, "You don't wear anything that gets in my way." 

Last night these were things that got in his way, and he stripped them off me like clothes that were destined to be rags anyway. Today I cannot rest a moment if he don't put them on right away, no matter how much it hurts. So I guess he's not, he's not a different person in the day, he just wants different things.  He kisses the side of my mouth as I snap the jewellery back in place, and I want to cry out from the tended force of his kiss. 

"Was that so hard?" He asks, pulling my hair and straining my neck. 

"No, I'm sorry," I say because apology is the only thing that tastes better than coffee first thing in the morning.

"Good," he says, getting up to leave. 

Nothing that gets in his way, not even my will. Every collar can be discarded, when it's in his way.