Collar

She dressed me.

Then, there was change. She arrived at my apartment one evening with a garment bag over her arm and hung it on the back of my door and said, "Put this on," and sat on the edge of my bed and watched me do it. The clothes were expensive and fit too well to be guessed. She had measured me somehow, sometime, in one of the nights I could not remember. The thought should have frightened me. It made me hard. She noticed. She did not comment.

"You're coming out with me tonight," she said.

She had never taken me anywhere. I had only ever been brought to her, or found by her, or woken by her. The idea of being beside her, in public, in the world, made my chest go tight.

"Where?"

Her hand came up and caught my jaw and turned my face to hers and the cold of it ran through me like water.

"Did I say you could ask?"

I shook my head inside her grip.

"No," she said. "I didn't." She let me go. She adjusted my collar. She smoothed a hand down my chest. "You will stand where I put you. You will speak when I allow it. You will not look at anyone unless I tell you to look. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Yes, what."

I swallowed. "Yes, Elena."

Something moved behind her eyes. She did not let it land. She turned and walked out and I followed.

The car was waiting. A woman was driving, dark and still, and she did not turn when we got in the back, and Elena pulled me across the seat to her and put my head in her lap and stroked my hair the whole way and I lay there with my face against the cold silk of her dress and listened to the absence of her heartbeat and did not ask where we were going.

The place was underground. A door I would never have found, down a set of stairs, into a room that was all candlelight and dark wood and the low pulse of music that seemed to come from under the floor. And people. Beautiful people. Women, mostly, tall and pale and dressed in things that cost more than my rent, moving through the candlelight with that same stillness, that same slow sure grace I had only ever seen in Elena. They watched me come in. They all watched me. Their eyes were her eyes, pools of endless night, and they watched me the way you watch something small and warm walk into a room full of cold sharp things.

Elena kept her hand on the back of my neck. Possessive. On display.

A woman came to us. Dark hair cut short, mouth painted the red of old wine, and she bent and kissed Elena on both cheeks and did not look at me at all until she did, and when she did she smiled and said something in a language I did not know, low and musical, and Elena laughed.

"He is," Elena said, in answer to whatever had been asked. "Isn't he."

The woman circled me. I did not move. I had not been told to move. She leaned in close to my throat and breathed in and I felt the cold of her and the pull in my marks answered it, a low sweet ache, and she pulled back and looked at Elena with raised eyebrows.

"May I?" the woman said.

My pulse kicked. I kept my eyes forward. I waited.

Elena was quiet for a long second. When she spoke her voice was very controlled. "A taste."

The woman stepped into me. She was taller than Elena, and colder, and her hand came up and turned my head to the side and her mouth found the old marks and I felt the small sharp hurt of teeth and then the warm gold pull of it and I made a sound I could not stop and I felt my knees try to soften and I stayed upright only because Elena's hand was still on the back of my neck, holding me, steadying me, owning me while another woman drank from me in the middle of a room full of watching eyes.

The woman pulled back. She licked her lips. She looked at Elena and she laughed, delighted, and said again in that other language, and Elena's hand tightened on my neck.

"Enough," Elena said.