"All right, and first and last name?"

"Sadde, that's S-a-d-d-e, last name Baldwin."

"All right, just come in at eleven-thirty and the psion will get you taken care of."

"See you then," agrees the librarian. "Just sign your start time on the clipboard at the desk when you're clocking in."

Her delightful dom is, it turns out, actually in the library now, typing up an essay.

Oh, well, that's terribly convenient. "Hello, ma'am," she greets Isabella.

"Hello lovely, how are you?"

"Alright. I'm going to start working here after lunch today, and I have an appointment with a psion at eleven thirty."

"Oh, you decided to go for it?"

"Yeah. It's—been going on since the eclipse, it's unlikely to stop any time soon, or any time in the next however many years, and it really loses its charm when the possibility of sleeping with another person exists."

"It'll be anticlimactic if it turns out we just don't co-sleep very well even without."

"Yes, it will, but thankfully the real world doesn't run on irony."

"True." Isabella reaches for her collar, pulls, and kisses her sub. "Run along now, pet, I need to finish my final paper."

The student health center is waiting for her when she arrives.

And she gives her name and informs someone she has an appointment.

And she is shown into an office with a subby little thirtysomething psion, who adjusts her glasses at Sadde and says, "Nightmares?"

"Yeah. Recurring, since I was ten."

Nod. "On what subject or subjects?"

"Um. There are a few. Being lost in a forest that's on fire, but I'm causing the fire. Being hungry and not eating because something terrible will happen except I don't know what. S—someone dying in front of me, in various ways. Combinations of those."

"Do you have anxieties about these things while you are not having nightmares?"

"Anxieties like what?"

"Do thoughts of these scenarios trouble you in your waking life?"