Voluntary Cage: Taming My Yandere

I called the boy who's obsessed with me and asked to borrow the room he built to lock me inside.

All because I couldn't get a seat at the library. Third time this week.

...Can I borrow the cage you made for me? Just for a while. Early.

The line went quiet. Then, low and careful:

I didn't build a cage.

I smiled.

"Don't. The week you put it together, I was right there the whole time. Watching you. Supervising."

Chapter 1

Dead silence on the line.

Even his breathing had stopped.

I waited. Gave it a few seconds. Then I couldn't leave it alone.

"You're allowed to breathe."

Don't suffocate on me.

Something shifted on the other end. A beat later his voice came through, low and rough.

"...Thank you."

Polite. For what, I had no idea.

He did have a nice voice, though.

I came back to the reason I'd called.

"I'm graduating soon. Two theses to write, double major. I need somewhere quiet." A pause. "The room you made for me would be perfect. So. Can I borrow it early? I really do need it."

"...Okay."

"Not going to pretend you never built it this time?"

"...Sorry."

Quick to apologize.

I let him off the hook and didn't push.

"...Do you want to come now?" he asked.

"Mm. I've got the address. I'll grab a cab."

"I'll drive you. It's easier."

A beat.

"You're close right now. Watching me."

"...S-sorry."

"Stop apologizing. Where are you?"

"Turn around."

I turned.

And there he was, stepping out from behind a tree a little way off.

Tall. Long-limbed. Black hoodie, a baseball cap pulled low. His eyes were lost somewhere under his lashes and the brim, and I couldn't make them out. The lower half of his face was pale and fine-boned. Porcelain.

Beautiful. And for some reason, all I saw was red.

The smell of blood came first, thick and sudden, and shoved a door open somewhere in my memory.

When I came back to myself he was already in front of me, head bowed. Obedient.

My eyes went to the cap. I raised a brow.

"I think I have one almost exactly like it."

He didn't dare look at me. His voice dropped.

"I had it made. To match yours."

Young hearts really are something.

I looked down at his hands. Beautiful hands. Pale, long-fingered, every knuckle clean and defined. And right now, trembling. Badly out of place.

"You're nervous?"

"No" Reflex. Then he caught himself. "...A little."

He pressed his lips together, like he hated himself for it.

"Where's your car?"

"Level B2."

"Lead the way."

"Okay."

His car was a Maybach.

The kind you can tell costs a fortune from clear across the garage.

I can't usually tell luxury badges apart. The Maybach is the exception. Those two M's, stacked and crossed, impossible to miss.

Nine years ago, when I'd just started middle school, my biological father drove a Maybach for a while too.

Chapter 2

"...Is something wrong?" Dorian's voice pulled me back. I was still standing by the car, not moving. "Is it the car?"

I shook my head.

"The car's fine. It just dragged something ugly back up."

The Maybach my father drove, years ago. He was never the owner of it. He was the owner's driver. Useless at everything and a mediocre driver on top of that, and somehow a deadbeat like him had landed the job anyway. He lasted a month before they let him go. Small mercies.

I didn't say any of that out loud, and he didn't push.

He just opened the passenger door for me, careful, one hand cupped over the top of the frame so I wouldn't hit my head.

I slid in without ceremony.

He came around to the driver's side, buckled in, set his hands on the wheel, and didn't start the car. He turned to look at me instead.

"How did you know I built you a..."

He stopped. Couldn't make himself say the word. Cage. The thing shamed him too much to name.

I knew exactly what was happening behind his eyes. I asked anyway.

"A cage?"

"...Yeah." His head dropped lower. A dog braced to be left behind.

I reached over and scratched under his chin.

He went rigid. Every muscle.

I took my hand back, slow, and smiled.

"I figured you'd be more curious about something else," I said. "Why I didn't call the police. Why I just... supervised instead."

"...Why?"

He followed right where I led him.

I didn't answer.

The car went very quiet.

The seconds stacked up. A thin sweat broke across the bridge of his nose.

"...You don't you don't have to say," he managed, careful, hoarse. "Don't be angry with me."

Don't hate me.

"I'm not angry."

I just didn't know where to start.

Because I wasn't supposed to learn any of this for another six months.

At his funeral.

Three days ago.

I opened my eyes in the middle of the library's ground floor.

Dizziness, vertigo, a ringing in my ears, all at once. For one second the crowd streaming past looked like blurred footage from some art-house film, and I was the one thing that didn't belong in the frame.

When my body settled, my head still wouldn't. I didn't know what to call what was happening to me.

Reincarnation? No. In that future, in that crash, only one person died. Dorian. He shielded me with his body and I lived. Lived to roll into his funeral in a wheelchair.

A dream, then? No. Dreams don't hold together like this. Dreams skip, contradict, blur at the edges. Nothing about this skipped or blurred.

So I worked it out. I'd come back. Six months, the future folded into now.

I breathed in, and the images came one after another. Dorian's body in a spreading dark pool. The black-and-white photo on his headstone.

And his diary.

I'd taken it from his mother's hands moments before I woke here.

The cover was good leather. Eight words pressed into it:

This body is a flame, born of longing.

I opened to the first page.

The first thing I saw was my own name.

Chapter 3

"We're here."

Dorian's voice brought me up out of the memory.

I looked up. The car had climbed into the hills outside the city and stopped in front of a standalone villa, lavish but with taste.

I turned to him.

"You've got an eye for a location. Tucked into the trees, beautiful views..."

He flushed at the praise, trying not to look pleased and failing, the corner of his mouth tugging up on its own.

I let a beat pass.

"Good place to hide a person."

He choked on air.

I laughed. He really was fun to needle.

Then my eyes caught a strip of his wrist where the sleeve had ridden up. Fine wrist bones. A silver-grey bracelet sitting against them.

I stopped.

"That bracelet. Is it the one I lost?"

"It is." He nodded. Then he caught my expression shift and went tense again, voice small. "...Sorry."

I let two seconds go by. Then I said his full name.

"Dorian. Is sorry your default setting?"

"...No."

"Then why do you keep saying it to me?"

You're the last person on earth who owes me an apology.

He kept his head down. Six-foot-something of him, standing there like a kid waiting to be punished.

"Because I did something I shouldn't have."

"Which thing?"

The part where he shadowed me day and night, stalker-close, scared something would happen to me, and never once closed the distance. Ten yards back, always. Until today.

Or the part where he built me a cage, vast and immaculate, nicer than a presidential suite, and never once worked up the nerve to use it.

"...I found your bracelet," he said, quieter and quieter. "I kept it. Hid it. Never gave it back."

The smaller his voice got, the more I wanted to laugh.

"Keep it."

His head snapped up. He looked like I'd handed him something he didn't dare hold.

"Can can I?"

I nodded. "It's yours."

He smiled. Like I'd given him the only one of its kind in the world. Those eyes of his. Pretty, dark, half-swallowed by the shadow of the brim, and still bright enough to stop you cold.

I propped my chin on one hand, lazy, and decided to push.

"Careful. Keep looking at me like that and I'll start thinking you built me a cage so I'd lock you in it instead."

He glanced at me. Something crossed his mind, and the tips of his ears went red.

"If you wanted that," he said, "that that would be fine too."

"Good pitch. I'll think about it."

The cage was underground.

The light was extraordinary anyway.

I climbed the steps and walked into the gilded thing. I tipped my head back. Set into the center of the ceiling was a pane of glass cut in the shape of a butterfly. Gold afternoon light poured through its huge transparent wings and spilled down over everything.

It didn't look real.

"...Do you like it?"

He'd come up behind me, voice unsteady. A first-time designer waiting on the client who signs the checks.

I nodded. "Hard not to. It's beautiful."

He let out a breath.

"As long as you don't hate it."

Chapter 4

"On rainy days, snowy days, the view out is something else," Dorian went on. "And on a clear night you tip your head back and there's the whole sky, the entire galaxy"

"Romantic," I murmured.

"It really is rom" He caught himself agreeing, and I turned to face him before he finished, half a smile on my mouth.

"It'd be more romantic," I said, "tangled up in here with you at night, looking up at all those stars."

Heat shot up the back of his neck.

My smile held. I crooked a finger at him.

He looked puzzled, but he didn't hesitate. He bent down for me, obedient.

I brought my lips close to his ear and set a finger over his heart.

"My brilliant designer. You're telling me you never once pictured this while you were drawing up the plans?"

I pushed him down onto the bed.

The cage closed around us both. A matched pair with nowhere left to fly.

His breathing went heavy. He didn't fight it. He let me do exactly as I liked.

Those black-feather lashes shook. Color climbed his throat, his collarbone.

Lovely enough to ruin.

I settled over his waist and was about to take it further

A phone rang.

The whole charged hush of the room cracked straight down the middle. We frowned at the same time.

I picked up my phone and looked at the screen. A number I didn't know.

I answered.

A drunk man's voice came straight through.

"Your old man's tapped out. Wire me some money. Now."

Vernon. My biological father. Premium-grade garbage.

Not the first time he'd come at me for money. I'd never once given him any, the same way he'd never once paid a cent to raise me.

I was about to do what I always did: tell him to go to hell and hang up. Then I glanced at Dorian, something turned over in my head, and I put it on speaker instead.

"Don't give me that, you've got money. You're at school, pick up more shifts, eat less, buy less, there's your money. And your brother's a smart kid, his grades just aren't there, he'll be lucky to scrape into a community college this year, so you'll pay to send him somewhere real. A proper private school. His spending money too. You're the big sister. That's on you."

Vernon's voice was an ugly thing to start with. Drunk and loud and graceless, it got worse.

Dorian's face was going dark. Visibly. Like weather building.

Vernon kept digging.

"And unblock me already, you ungrateful little I had to borrow a stranger's phone just to reach you. Some daughter you turned out to be."

Ungrateful daughter. It slid off me without leaving a mark.

It landed somewhere else entirely on Dorian. He never could take one word said against me.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was already drafting Vernon's eulogy.

Vernon was finished.

Dorian was never anywhere near this gentle with anyone else.

Chapter 5

Vernon had no idea what kind of person he'd just picked a fight with.

He kept right on going, relentless, on the other end of the line.

"And another thing. Change your name back. Today. You're my daughter, what are you doing walking around under your mother's name? A kid takes her father's name. That's how it's done."

One sentence, two landmines. He'd insulted me and, without meaning to, every person who'd ever gone by their mother's name instead of their father's.

Funny. Dorian was one of them.

He and his mother weren't close, too alike for that, but the bond underneath ran deep.

"And 'Liberty.' What kind of trash name is that? Nothing on the one I gave you the day you were born. Sonny. Now that was a name that meant something."

Sonny. Because he'd figured he was owed a son, and a daughter's whole purpose was to bring one along behind her.

"I did it for your own good. So you'd have a little brother to lean on someday"

I cut him off, voice flat.

"A son you were owed." I almost laughed. "You've never been owed a thing in your life. You drank through everything my mother had and called it being a father, and now you're trying to bill me for a name you picked out for the boy you never managed to have."

"You !"

"Sober up. Learn to read. Lose my number."

I hung up. Then I flicked the number into my blocked list and left it there.

"My mom didn't last long after I changed my name to Liberty. Stomach cancer."

I was lying against Dorian, playing with his fingers, talking about the past like it cost me nothing.

"The day she died, I went down to the river. I'd hit the kind of low where the ground stops feeling like it's under you."

Something flickered in Dorian's eyes.

I didn't notice. I kept my gaze down and kept going.

"There was a boy down there too. Just as far gone as I was. And somehow the two of us ended up pulling each other back from the edge of it."

Both of us decided to keep going.

"Funny thing," I said. "As low as I was, the second I saw he was in trouble, the only thought in my head was getting to him."

"Because you're a good person." Dorian's voice was quiet.

"My mom raised me right."

He shook his head.

"The kindest parents in the world can still raise a cruel kid. You're good because you're good. That's all there is to it."

I laughed and tipped my head back to look at him.

"I think you've got a serious filter where I'm concerned."

"Do I?" He smiled too. "I think I'm just telling the truth."

His eyes curved. The smile opened slow at the corner of his mouth.

Like the first plum blossom of winter.

And just like that, I wanted to kiss him