He brushed a thumb over my lip, and his tenderness didn’t steady me. It only broke me further. This collar around my neck attached to the chain he held in his tight grip—we were this act of depravity, yet so much more. We were the meaning behind the props and the theater. We were the exchange of trust and the flow of surrender and devotion. We were the obsession and the addiction, the love and the art and the poetry. Life, in all of its complexity and duality, its grit and its unending fire.
