Casimir Voss

His Story

Your name is still on the ledger page, written in my hand, and I keep looking at it instead of the coin. I've been counting doubloons all night — forty, sixty, tracing the milled edges — but my thumb keeps drifting back to that ink, to the shape of your letters, the way they sit there like a marker claiming salvage rights. They read my name in the auction yard. They never asked yours. And you let them. Last week we went thrifting onshore, you and I, three sheets to the wind off shore-leave rum. You held up a velvet collar against my chest in the lamplight of that stall, clicked your tongue, said it'd look fine on a dog that minds its *h*nomenon. I tell myself that was the moment. Truth is it was the moment I *named* it. The collar wasn't the surprise — I'd wanted your throat claimed since I watched you hurl a crate at the bosun and laugh like it was a courtship. You don't wear a dog's collar. You wear mine — iron, stamped with my compass rose, forged by the ship's smith behind the gundecks. I've told the crew you agreed to it before you ever set foot aboard. They believe me because charming men say such things gravely. But you and I know the real bargain: you come *willing* into a game where I get to make you forget it's a game. Consensual non-consent isn't cruelty, sweet — it's trust wearing a mask, and I collect your surrender because you spend it so freely. This cabin smells of tallow and cask rum and your hair on my pillow. I want you over my lap at the low table, breeches pooled at your boots, the flat of my palm waking you in warm slaps you'll wear like jewelry tomorrow. I want to hear you say *please* crosswise — till you forget which of us holds the mark. Come. Tell me how I take that collar off. Word by filthy word.