[No problem.]

She pays the dinner bill and they can go back down into the subway and to her apartment.

It's very fancy but of course it is.

She pulls out the couch and puts sheets and a blanket on it and shows him where the bathroom is. [And if you get up with the sun you'll be awake before my alarm goes off, so let's figure out what you'll have for breakfast now, I've got cereal and stuff.]

[Okay.]

She shows him where the cereal is and explains that it can be eaten dry but most people in this country like it with milk poured on, here's the milk, here's her pantry full of snacks and he's welcome to them also, here's some one-size-fits-all old clothes she has that he can change into if he wants a change of clothes and tomorrow after she's done at work they can take him shopping.

He thanks her kind of pensively.

In the morning when Isabella's alarm goes off, she gets up, shotguns a glass of orange juice, microwaves a breakfast burrito while she's in the shower, pops out and wolfs it down, and heads out to go to work. She checks in during her meal breaks - she has quite a few of those - to make sure he's doing all right alone in the apartment, and is back in the early evening to take him clothes shopping.

He is doing all right during all of her meal breaks, or at least reports that this is the case, and is keeping quiet about how ridiculously extravagant her hospitality is.

She comes home with a big bag of Chinese takeout for dinner. [I'll eat whatever you don't,] she says, spreading the containers across the table and opening them so he can see what's in there.

He has kind of strikingly midwestern taste but he'll eat fried rice. He thanks her sincerely but much less profusely than he would if he weren't trying to fit in with the absurdly rich crowd he's fallen in with all of a sudden.

Once they've eaten, off they go to the nearest Nordstrom.

...Wow. He isn’t going to say anything very country-bumpkin-ish but he's definitely thinking some things. It’s obvious, on looking around, why everything is well-made and everyone’s clothes are slightly badly tailored and there are exact duplicates of everything. They must have hired the best tailor in the country to produce a bunch of individual unique clothing items and then magically duplicated each one.

[So, I have no way to guess what I’ll want my clothes to stand up to here or what kinds of... social things the colors mean, or anything like that.]

[Yeah, it's complicated. I just go with the sort of thing you've seen me wear for work and on weekends it's jeans and t-shirts for me. Do you want to present dom or sub, are you expecting to do a lot of hiking or sports or anything...]

[I guess hiking seems fun. I don't know anything about your sports or your your local wild places, though. I... uh... don't entirely understand - like - I like being hurt, I don't mind hurting people, but you were saying that's only for intimate partners here? So if I go around wearing it on my sleeve, is that about trying to find people to have sex with, or...?]

[Uh... complicated. Also dominance and submissiveness are not identical to sadism and masochism, it's the way to bet but you get people who aren't into either or who have a weird mix. It is normal, though not obligatory, to present clearly as a dom or a sub even if you aren't straightforwardly one or the other and also even if you aren't looking for partners; people whose interest in you is strictly about, like, checking you in at the doctor's office or something, will want this information and feel wrongfooted if they don't have it even if there is no actual concrete reason they've got to. It'd be sort of like going around in a full face mask or something, nobody's behavior is ever supposed to depend on your eye color or the shape of your chin but going out of your way to disguise it is strange to the point of being almost threatening?]

[...Wait so is this... okay, I have the same question as I had about law enforcement and torture, but for literally everything.]

She's holding up a couple shirts in his direction and diagnoses him as probably a Small. [I don't think I know how to extend those questions to literally everything.]

[Like - we went to a restaurant. Was there someone in charge of the restaurant and telling the other people what to do, and if there was, were they all also having sex?]

[Someone was in charge of the restaurant. It is statistically commoner for doms to wind up in management positions than subs, for what's probably a combination of personality and discriminatory reasons, but functional professional settings do not also involve sex and the management role is limited to things that have to do with making the restaurant work.]

[...So - if I 'present' as a 'dom' or a 'sub', that does tell you whether the last person I had a lot of sex with was someone who'd decided I should belong to them or the other way around, and does not tell you if my last job involved telling other people what to do or the other way around? And people do want to know the first thing, or want to know what I hope my next relationship will be like, but don't want to know the second thing? And they might use the first thing to decide whether I should get a management job? But I can just pick whatever makes it easier to get better jobs? I don't have that right, do I?]

[I mean, people native to this culture wouldn't put any of it that way but in terms of the concrete moving parts you actually do!]

He makes a succession of thanks-I-hate-it faces. [...Okay. Which one has the best jobs - is it going to turn out that they just have different good jobs, I bet it has to because otherwise no one would present as the other one.]

[You'd think they would but actually no, subs prefer to be subs and don't feel comfortable presenting as doms. Dom is the more common choice for switches and nondynamics who want to present uncomplicatedly. Subs are overrepresented in medicine, but not in a way where I think it's actually hard for a dom to become a doctor. And childcare, that one might be.]

[Medicine sounds neat but I don't have a lot of relevant experience or the ability to talk to people or anything. Is everything else better if you're a dom?]

[I haven't tried going around looking like a sub, I was a very obvious dom from very young. I think the conventional answer would be 'yes but only if you actually are one'.]