Dreaming in Dark

years ago That story stuck with me longer than it should have, even when love is beautiful, it is rarely clean. It has fingerprints. In my early years, I lived inside a polyamorous D/s household without fully understanding the gravity of what that meant. I was young, fragile, and freshly broken. I was the subwife’s lady in waiting, a title that felt old-world and ceremonial, like I had stepped into a strange court without knowing the rules. Edain was married to a Marine named Cid. He was gone often, deployed, disciplined, distant in a way that carried authority even in absence. Because of that distance, Cid had a long-distance submissive he called Midnight. Edain herself had a Dom named Pascha. The relationships overlapped carefully, deliberately, like architecture. Everything had a place. Everything had intention. Edain rescued me from a relationship that had nearly erased me. I had been with him since I was seventeen. High school sweethearts, or so I believed, until I learned he had also been seeing my best friend. By the time I left, I was nineteen, nursing a swollen lip and a deep sense of humiliation. I felt stupid for believing in love that small, for staying as long as I did. I did not know what I was being brought into. I thought my friend Dainy simply needed help. A nanny. Someone to sleep on the couch and watch her baby while she managed her complicated life. I folded myself into that role easily. I was grateful to be wanted at all. I kept my head down. I told myself this was temporary. October arrived, and with it, Cid’s return. We planned a party that doubled as my twentieth birthday and Halloween. It was my first kink party, though at the time I only understood it as something electric and unfamiliar humming just beneath the surface. Midnight came. She was blonde, gorgeous, and impossibly composed. She looked like a Victoria’s Secret angel stepped out of a dream. I felt impossibly small beside her. Dainy was radiant, dressed like one of Pan’s fawn conquests, all myth and invitation and light. And then there was me. A little black dress. Fishnets. Standing between these two women, unsure of my place but aching to belong. Midnight held my hand while I fidgeted on the couch. Her touch was calm, grounding, deliberate. When she kissed me, it felt like a door opening somewhere inside my chest. The rush was immediate. Warm. Dizzying. Like my body had recognized something my mind had not yet caught up to. What followed was overwhelming and transformative in ways I did not yet have language for. I remember being led outside. I remember the oak tree standing solid and ancient, like a witness. I remember the feeling of surrender, of ritual, of being guided rather than discarded. Voices rose into the night. Sensation blurred into emotion. Fear braided itself with exhilaration until they were inseparable. It felt like initiation. A week later, I went home with my ex. But I was not the same girl who had arrived on that couch bruised and apologetic. Something in me had shifted. I had glimpsed a world where desire had structure, where power could feel purposeful, where attention could feel like reverence. I had learned that intimacy could be dark and ceremonial and still feel like being chosen. That house did not keep me. It did not save me. But it changed me. Once you see how easily love can bleed into ritual, into hunger, into devotion with shadows, you never fully return to innocence. You just learn how to wear it better.