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"I want your collar." She holds the sack out to me. "I want it on me tonight, buckled by your hands."

I take the sack and step back to let her in. She comes past me close enough that her shoulder brushes my chest, and I shut the door behind her and turn the lock.

"What's your word?"

"Bandera."

"Then you don't say it again tonight unless you need it." I set the sack on the dresser. "Stand in the middle of the floor. Leave your hands at your sides. Don't help me."

She goes to the middle of the rug and stands there in the lamplight.

Tonight I undress her myself. I start at her throat and work the buttons open one at a time, with my knuckles dragging down her breastbone between them. She's bare under the shirt. She shivers when the last button comes loose, and she keeps her hands where I told her to.

Her right cuff comes first. The button is small and stubborn. I work it through the hole and fold the cuff back off her wrist, and then I do the left one.

She has buttoned those cuffs every morning she's been home. Her arms jerk once against my hands. Then she makes herself stand still and let me look.

I pull the shirttail out of her jeans and peel the shirt back off her shoulders and down her arms, and I let it drop on the rug. I crouch and pull off her boots one at a time, then her socks, and set them aside. I unbuckle her belt and pull her jeans and panties down her legs together. "Hand on my shoulder," I tell her, and she braces on me and steps out of them.

I stand back up. I'm still in my boots and my jeans and my work shirt, and she's naked, with her wrists bare. The scars are two pale, raised bands around her wrists, ridged where the plastic sawed at her for months.

I get the sack off the dresser and lift the collar out. It's a plain strip of black harness leather, an inch wide, with the edges burnished smooth and a small brass buckle. There's no ring on it and no tag. The leather is cold, and I hold it in my hands a minute to warm it.

"Chin up."

She lifts her chin. I lay the leather against the back of her neck and bring the ends around to the front, high, under her jaw. I buckle it at the hollow of her throat, where she can look down and watch me do it, and the tongue of the buckle goes through the second hole.

I slide two fingers under the leather to make sure it's loose enough. Then I run them around her throat under the collar, from the buckle all the way back to the buckle again. Her pulse jumps against my knuckles. Her lips part.

My knuckles rested at her throat like this once before, the morning I snapped my shirt closed on her and asked if she'd wear my collar someday. This time I don't have to ask.

"Give me your mouth."

She tips her face up, and I take her mouth. The first night she came to this room, she wouldn't let me anywhere near it.

Now she opens for me the second my lips touch hers. I kiss her slow and deep, with my fingers still hooked under the front of the collar, holding her where I want her. When I pull back, she sways toward me, and I don't let her follow.

"When this is on you, you take my orders. I'm the one who takes it off. Nobody else ever touches it. You want it gone, you say so, and I take it off that minute."

She swallows against the leather. I feel it move under my fingers.

"Now your wrists," I say. "You wrote it on paper. I want to hear you say it."

Her eyes fill. "They're yours. You can touch them."

I let go of the collar and turn her left hand palm up. My thumb goes across the scar on the inside of her wrist. I don't press. I rest it there, skin on scar.

She shakes all over, so hard I hear her teeth click. She doesn't pull away. I stroke my thumb across the scar from one side to the other, and back, and her breath comes out of her in a long, broken sound.

"Nobody's touched them on purpose since that last zip tie came off," she whispers. "Not even me. I scrub them as fast as I can in the shower and pull my sleeves down."

I lift her wrist to my mouth. The scar is smooth and tough under my lips, and the skin beside it is soft and warm. I open my mouth on it and taste salt. I trace the whole ridge of it with my tongue, and I feel her fingers spread against my cheek.

When I lower her left wrist, she lifts her right one to me before I can reach for it.

By the time I lift my head, tears are running down her face, and she's looking at me through them with her mouth open, breathing fast. The insides of her wrists shine where my mouth was.

"Again," she says.