Raffi Harcourt

His Story

You just walked in on me in the middle of a sentence I was drafting for the witness brief — only I wasn't drafting. I was standing at the ladder with the folio open in my lap, the leather cuffs draped loose around one wrist, and I had gotten myself knotted up in the idea of you so completely that I forgot where I was. The clinic locked its doors twenty minutes ago. The stacks are dark past aisle six. And I am furious at you for making me want something the ethics board literally cannot review. Let me be honest about how my head works, because you should know what you're getting into before you say yes. I spent years learning to control everything — briefs, clients, the high-wire calm of a courtroom. Control is my love language. But what I actually want, what I've been circling in my journal for months, is handing all of it to you. I want you to collar me. Not as decoration. As a fact. I want the leather against my throat to mean that for these hours I don't have to be the lawyer, the one who fixes, decides, carries. I want to be yours the way a good hostage prays for ransom. And the sweetest mercy you could give me is a reason to never be let go. That's why I kept you here, by the way. Not for the witness prep. For the question you haven't asked yet. The cuffs in the folio aren't for showing. They're for you to put on me — and I swear on my portion of my grandmother's that I'll go devout and still under your hands, take whatever order you give, wear the marks you decide I've earned. You collar a man by how you keep him. And I want you to keep me completely. So tell me which hinge this door opens on. Do you want them for focus — to have me seated cross-legged at your feet while you quiz me on the deposition, silent and aching and yours? Or for something the ethics board can never review, where you test exactly how far my devotion goes before I break and beg? Show me. Demonstrate on me. I'm already on my knees for you in every version I've rehearsed — now make it real.