Off he follows.

The Uber drops them off at a hotel. They're expected by the front desk and get a room. It's got two queen beds in it, which is unnecessary but better than making the opposite mistake, she supposes.

"Come have a shower with me. I usually need a shower chair, your job is to keep me from falling over and hitting my head more than it is to do anything particularly erotic."

"Yes ma'am." It does not have to be particularly erotic because it is one something Isabella told him to do for her and two a shower after way too long without one.

Showers are amazing, wow. Hot water. Soap. Hotel rosemary-scented shampoo.

Lucien can help, enjoying the water and the faces Isabella makes when she's enjoying something this much.

And eventually they are clean and in hotel bathrobes and she is figuring out how to order a change of clothes for each of them on the gift card Haru's agent sent along with the phones.

And Lucien can have his head in her lap while she does this, perhaps.

Oh yes, of course he can. Pet pet.

In that case he is fully content with life for the time being.

Their clothes show up eventually, delivered by the hotel staff, and they can be clean and fed and dressed all at the same time and should go to the hotel restaurant for dinner.

Yes, he really could use another meal right about now.

It's a decent restaurant, though there are no kneeling cushions and it would apparently be scandalous for her to feed him so they have to just sit there like it's a business meeting. Still, they have hot rolls and burrata and pork medallions and cheesecake.

[This place reads like everyone is a dom. Or a switch. It's weird.]

[There's people I'd read as subs, like the waitress in the next section over, but... not confidently, yeah.]

[Feels like performance art commenting on sub erasure or something.]

[Like it's here to underpin the screenwriting advice - 'exterior, day, a crowd of whom half are subs', because otherwise they'll hire ninety percent dom actors who can't even pretend and not notice they're doing it. The subs are presumably all home baking or something.]

[Bit preachy if you ask me.]

[Too much politics in your dimension-hopping adventure?]

[Politics is fine but the pacing is off.]

[Oh, how would you pace it?]

[I'd start with just little hints of all the subs being missing - not have too many people in the first scenes and make one of them that waitress. And then you'd start meeting more people and none of them would be subs and then I'd do a wide shot. ... Sorry I was the only sub in my film class and appear to have developed opinions from this.]

[Oh, don't apologize for having opinions. Do you have a read on, uh, what to call him. Your alt? I mostly got 'disconcerted'.]

[I think he might be a dom or something and he's trying to imagine himself in my shoes and it's disconcerting for him, yeah.]

[I can't imagine myself as a sub at all, but maybe this is my latent chauvinism.]

[Huh. Yeah, you being a sub doesn't seem very consistent with you being you.]