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swimming pool. There was a cart next to the tub filled to the brim with loofahs and bath gels, body scrubs and bubble baths. Unlit vanilla candles lined the wide brim of the tub, and a box of matches sat in a tiny tray on the cart. I could hardly believe I was allowed to take a bath anytime I felt like it. A bath. I could light the candles and soak in the bubbles, and read as long as I wanted.
    A large shower stood in one corner of the bathroom, and next to it there were cabinets with stacks of fluffy bath towels, the kind so large you could wrap them around an elephant. And they all smelled clean and fresh from the dryer. A couple of white terrycloth bathrobes hung from hooks on the wall.
    I went to the adjoining room and scanned the bookcase briefly before picking a classic and then running water in the tub. I poured some vanilla bubble bath in and lit the candles. I wanted to do everything at once. It hadn’t occurred to me yet not to be happy.
    I hadn’t sat and thought about the fact that I should want out, not better accommodations. I was still his prisoner, still completely at his mercy and whims. He could take it all away at any second and put me back in that bare cell, that limbo. But I refused to think about any of that. Instead, I sank into the tub and turned the jets on and began to read.
    I was in the middle of the third chapter when he entered the bathroom. I hadn’t heard the door click open; I’d been so engrossed in that other magic place you go to in books. I dog-eared the page and closed the book, letting it fall to the floor and looked up at him.
    The jets from the tub had made more bubbles, a false covering for the modesty I’d recovered after an hour in my new cell. He stood in the doorway naked and more beautiful than he had any right to be considering the circumstances. Since we were in the bathroom, and not in the bedroom where there was a keypad on the door and bars on the window, I could pretend things were normal.
    I was his wife or girlfriend. He was rich––something obviously true beyond my fantasy life. He paid for everything while I did what wives and girlfriends of rich men did, pampered myself. I could pretend I’d given consent, that we had a relationship.
    I wasn’t sure if the music in the other room had gone off on its own or if he’d turned it off, but suddenly the only sound in the room was the water bubbling furiously around me, and my own ragged breath, part from arousal, part from fear.
    He crossed to the tub and turned off the jets, and once again the room was cloaked in silence. I watched him cautiously as he got into the tub with me, disturbing the private sanctum I’d created because I’d created it with things that belonged to him.
    The thought flitted through my mind that in some sense I belonged to him. I’d sold myself for pretty things, though at the time I had thought my price was much lower, since all I’d wanted was for anything to happen but him to leave me alone. For someone to communicate with me some way. Any way.

    . . . He slipped his hands underneath the water to caress her skin and she let him. She knew she would either be his prisoner in a bare cell, or in here, these three rooms where she could pretend everything was okay.
    His dark eyes drank her in as he pulled the drain on the tub. It took several minutes to drain out and while it did, he stroked her underneath the surface of the water. He dipped his fingers inside her and she found herself arching into his touch, grinding against his hand, begging for the contact that would get her off.
    The water swirled away, leaving a mass of leftover bubbles. He rubbed her clit in light circles as she gripped his shoulders and whimpered against him.
    “Please . . . ” she said. She was sure she was begging him to stop, to not do this to her, let her keep her soul. But her body kept moving up to meet his touch, and some dark part of her feared she was begging him never to stop. Wetness pooled between her