"...seriously? Did they, ah, even actually read the book?"

"They did refer to the plot on several occasions, just - not my kinda book club."

"Me too. I missed you so much. I missed you all the time. I kept—I never stopped thinking about you. Not for a minute."

"- I'm all out of synonyms for 'you poor thing'." Pet, pet. "Seriously, would you rather go out for dinner and be fed four kinds of dessert or go have a night in and go to bed early, help me help you."

"I—" Pause. "Am having a hard time expressing desires." Another pause. "Dinner. I want—I don't want to sleep. I want to be with you and aware of you."

"Dinner it is. There's a nice place with a very tempting dessert menu and I am getting you steak and four desserts and packing up whatever you don't finish so you can eat it for breakfast in the morning. My lovely, it must have been so hard."

"It wasn't," he says automatically and then stops and corrects himself: "Yes, it was. I can't even—I hope it takes less than two weeks to get—used to talking."

She leans down and kisses his head. "Did you not talk or just - talk strangely?"

"I—barely talked. Tobias has this thing, only speak when you're spoken to. I'm submissive, don't you see, that means I'm not allowed to have a personality or opinions."

"Well, I and my personality and opinions think he's full of shit. My pet needs rights because I said so." Head kiss again.

He giggles a bit. "And of course you're right. But he has this—thing. I'd almost say he's a psion if I didn't know better. You spend enough time around him and you can almost believe what he says."

"I—I don't know if I'd call it holding together."

"I mean - when I met you you'd come out of more than two weeks of that. And you still told me you were a switch, you were still shaped like a boy. You were you and not his trained stereotype."

"Yeah, because I—resisted. I was still a, a switch, an—and sometimes a boy, then, with him. It's—these two weeks, I wasn't. I never did resist. Not once. It's—a—" He trails off, failing to articulate what he means.

"...Oh. Was it a bad idea, having me tell you to -?"

"...I—" He breathes deeply, then exhales slowly, and thinks. "I don't know. Pr—probably not. He'd—I'd—he'd have made me—I wouldn't—have come back. I think. He kept—praising me, for what a good girl I was being, how well-behaved I was, and I felt good when he did, damn it."

"Oh lovely." Hug.

"But—but I'm yours. Not his."

"All mine." Head-kiss. "He was just ignorantly complimenting you on your high-quality deep-cover mole behavior."

He giggles again.