"That if every night he treats you like this and doesn't take care of you, eventually you won't be able to get off. Not to mention that it's very suspicious that you have neither a safeword nor the understanding that stop means stop."

"It's not always like this, usually I'm good."

"That's play. It shouldn't matter whether you're good or not, he shouldn't actually hurt you more than you want to be hurt."

"...you want to be hurt more than you want to be hurt? That makes no sense."

"I want it to be real, I don't want it to be some stupid game I can call time out on, I want someone to want me and have me, and I finally found somebody who'd have me and you think he's, I don't even know what you think."

She folds her arms. "I think he doesn't actually care about your wellbeing."

"My well being is better off than it was before I met him, so if you think you 'actually care about my well being'..."

"I didn't reach out to you with some bizarre ulterior motive, did I? I may be factually wrong about what's good for you—I don't think I am, of course—but I don't think you can say I don't care. Of course, you're the final arbiter of what's good for you, so I may not believe you if you tell me you're fine but I won't actually do anything about it."

"Good," sighs Jackson. "Just - just - It's so much better for me to belong to somebody, so much, I can't freak out over every little thing because a sex ed teacher might have told me to if I'd been in school that year."

She sighs. "Just take care of yourself, 'k?"

That might be a nod.

"Well. Bye, then."

"Bye," mumbles Jackson.

Sadde closes Jackson's door and gets back to her room.

Isabella's up and dressed; the door's open. "What was up with that, lovely?"

She closes the door behind her, sighs, and leans against it. "Jackson's dom hurt him, they don't have a safeword and he says that if he says 'stop' his dom will just keep punishing him."

"From what I gathered Jackson doesn't have a way to actually get his dom to stop if he wants him to."

"How confident are you that this isn't just Jackson having some sort of 'tough it out' ethos."

"He actually said—what were his words... He said he wants it to be real, not some game he can call time out on. And, he knocked here because he wanted to see if I could heal him."

"I'm not sure this is cause for panic. I mean, it could be, but as long as Jackson could move under his own power it wasn't irresponsible of his dom to let him go - Jackson could choose to go to the health center - and if Jackson is the one who 'wants it to be real' then it could be that his dom would drop the toys instantly on hearing 'safeword' and Jackson just hasn't tried it and there's a communication error there."

She sighs. "Yeah, I suppose. But not being irresponsible is not the same as being... nice."

"...Realistically, pet, a decent fraction of the doms in the world aren't nice, and the ones who are can typically afford to have higher standards than 'Jackson'. Does Jackson think it's better than nothing?"

"Yes."