Mistress Nora breaks people of all genders as her life's calling. She makes them beg, makes them bleed, makes them cry. The depths of agony carve the space for ecstasy. Their bodies are her canvas, her instrument, each scene a new work of exquisite beauty, the intensity of a sunset, an aurora.
Here with Søren, she's just Elle, and he breaks her. It is in her breaking that she understands what it is to give that gift to others. She lets go of that iron control she keeps in her daily life, she trusts, she surrenders, and he gives her holy fire.
But just as much as Elle loves it when Søren breaks her, she loves it when he puts her back together again, as he does now, gently rubbing salve on her wounds. He washes her feet. He cradles her, rocks her, whispers to her in Danish and English. "Jeg elsker dig. You were so good for me tonight, Little One. My good girl. My precious Little One."
She needs that, and he knows it. He's known it since the day they met.
It's hard for her to allow softness with other people. The world is a harsher mistress than she, and she has learned not to expect kindness but rather, to demand her needs met.
She doesn't have to demand, with Søren. He demands she rest, safe in the fortress of his arms, as gentle as he was fierce a short while ago. She smells the winter on his skin and she knows he can be brutal and unrelenting like the season's storms but here and now, he is all winter's hygge, the comforting hearth fire and cup of cocoa and fuzzy blankets, giving her the tender fatherly care she never knew.
"Little One," he says, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
Those two words are the center of her universe. She snuggles closer and lets herself be loved and cared for.