Chapter 15 #3
‘And the hardest.’
He doesn’t answer.
His thumb moves once, very slightly, across the wood of the table between our hands. Not touching me. Thinking something he won’t say aloud.
I pick up my cold coffee. Drink it anyway.
My phone is face down on the table beside the notebook, and for the first time all evening I am aware of it as a physical object. A small black rectangle full of a brother whose Sunday call I haven’t picked up yet this week.
The phone stays dark.
The kitchen empties of the conversation we just had, and neither of us moves to clear the cups. We sit in the residue of who raised you and let it cool.
After a minute, Laurence speaks, voice changed register—the lover, the one I’m starting to learn.
‘There is something I have not done in a long time.’ Eyes on his cup. ‘I would like to talk about it before I propose it.’
I sit with this. He’s not a man who lengthens his sentences for nothing.
‘Go on then.’
‘Restraint.’ He looks at me. ‘Cotton rope. Wrists, primarily, possibly arms. You bound, me not. I haven’t asked anyone for this in some years. I would not ask if I did not trust both of us with the talking that has to happen first.’
The kitchen does the small electric thing it does when a sentence has weight. I run the words over the back of my teeth before I answer.
‘Have you done it before.’
‘Yes.’
‘A lot.’
‘Enough. Not in seven years.’
The number lands in my chest without his face shifting. Seven. I do not say the maths. He doesn’t either.
‘OK.’ I’m trying to sound like a man who has done this before. I haven’t. ‘Talk to me about it.’
He pushes the mug aside. Folds his hands on the wood between us, the way he does in tutorials when something needs care.
‘Stillness, mainly. Holding without holding. The rope does the work a hand would do, leaves my hands free for other things. I would tie your wrists. To begin, only the wrists. Not your ankles, not your chest, not in this conversation. If we do this twice we’ll have a different conversation about it the second time. ’
‘Rules.’
‘Yours, mostly. Mine: no gag. No blindfold. You tell me to stop at any moment and I stop. No question, no apology. We pick a word that means stop now, separate from anything you might say in pleasure. Most people use traffic lights. Red, amber, green. I would suggest a different word, since colour ones can blur when arousal is high.’
‘Pick one.’
‘You pick.’
I think about it. Lewisham, too much. Patient—the hinges, the ex, no thank you. I land on:
‘Notebook.’
His mouth does a thing.
‘Notebook,’ he confirms.
‘And amber for slow down.’
‘Slow down, check in. Anything in between fine and stop. Yes.’
‘What else.’
‘I’ll narrate.’ He says it like a man explaining a syllabus.
‘I’ll tell you what I’m about to do before I do it.
You may stop me at any point during the narration.
Once a thing is done, I check before I do the next thing.
The check may be a word. May be your hand on mine. We work out the language as we go.’
‘OK.’
‘Are you saying yes.’
I look at him. The man asking is the same man who, an hour ago, had his palm flat over a proof I closed at seventeen.
My pulse is in the soft parts of my hands.
My cock is doing the thing my cock does when his voice drops a register, but there’s something underneath it I haven’t had before. The sense of being asked.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Notebook. Amber. Tell me what you’re doing.’
He nods. Stands. Holds out his hand. I take it.
The bedroom is the bedroom. He doesn’t make a ceremony of going to it.
He turns on the bedside lamp with the warm shade, crosses to the chest of drawers I’ve been in twice for clean t-shirts, and from the bottom drawer, under a folded jumper I have never seen him wear, he lifts a coil of rope.
Cotton, natural-coloured, soft from handling. The coil neat.
The way he holds it tells me his hands know it.
‘I haven’t taken it out in a long time.’
Said with the same flatness as seven years, which is a way of telling me he has before, and a way of telling me not to ask.
‘OK.’
He sets it on the bed. Sits beside it. Pats the sheet next to him.
‘Come here.’
I sit.
He looks at me with the look I remember from first office hours. Quiet, attentive. The one that asks a question without making it a question.
‘Take your shirt off.’
I take it off.
He doesn’t undress.
‘I want to tie your wrists,’ he says. ‘In front of you first. Loose cuffs, not tight, not weight-bearing. Enough that you feel them. Not enough that you have to fight them.’
My mouth has gone dry.
‘Right.’
‘If you say stop, I stop. If you say off, it comes off. Immediately.’
‘Right.’
He picks up the rope.
‘Tell me now if anything in that sentence wants stopping.’
‘Carry on.’
He works fast, not hurried. His hands have the muscle memory of an act he is not performing for the first time. The cotton against the inside of my wrist is warmer than I expect. Not cold from a drawer. Not new.
He fits the first cuff around my right wrist, then the left, leaving a short length between them. Close enough that I know exactly where my hands are. Loose enough that I can still turn them.
‘Right wrist?’
‘Fine.’
‘Left?’
‘Fine.’
‘Show me your hands.’
I lift them. Joined, but not trapped. Six inches between the wrists, maybe less. He turns each hand, checks the rope sits flat, no twist, no bite.
‘Move your fingers.’
I open and close my fists.
‘Again.’
I do.
‘Good. Lie back.’
I lie back.
For one second my hands are still where they were, tied in front of me, resting against my stomach. Then he touches the back of my knuckles.
‘Up.’
Not an order. Not quite a request.
I raise them over my head.
He follows the movement, careful with the angle of my shoulders, and settles my wrists above the pillow rather than pulling them there.
Then he takes the spare length from between the cuffs and feeds it through the rail of the headboard, back to itself, neat and low and quick enough that I don’t see the shape of it until I feel it hold.
Not stretched.
Not displayed.
Held.
Anchored.
He sits back to look at me.
The look does something to my breathing I didn’t anticipate.
‘How are you.’
‘Yeah.’ My voice sounds different in this position. ‘I’m—yeah.’
‘Word.’
‘Green.’
He smiles, very small. Then he is on me.
He keeps his clothes on. That is the choice that almost finishes me before he’s started.
He kisses my mouth, my throat, the bone at the base of my neck.
Pushes the waistband of my jeans down to my hips, no further.
Puts his mouth on the inside of my elbow, on the muscle of my upper arm, on my ribs.
He licks the line of hair below my navel and stops.
Undoes my belt one-handed and leaves the zip closed.
I cannot reach him. The rope is doing the rope’s job.
My hands open and close above my head. The cotton tightens against my pulse on the inhale and slackens on the exhale, and I learn, in real time, that this is its own rhythm, separate from the rhythm in my hips. The two rhythms argue. Then agree.
‘Notebook?’ Low, against my collarbone.
‘Green.’ My voice is somewhere I can’t quite locate. ‘Don’t stop.’
He doesn’t.
He is unhurried, which is the cruelest setting. Mouth on my chest. Hand, slow, low, never quite where I am asking. I make a sound I do not have a name for. He makes one back.
I come like that, eventually, with my jeans only partly undone and his hand inside the fabric and his mouth on the tendon at the side of my throat, and the rope holding my arms above my head taking the surge of it because my arms have nowhere else to go.
He holds me through it. Forehead against my temple. Doesn’t let himself.
‘Stay with me.’ Quiet, into my hair. ‘I’m coming back to your hands. Tell me if anything has changed.’
‘Nothing’s changed.’
He works the half-hitch loose at the headboard first. Then the larks-heads at each wrist, one at a time, fingers slow.
Massages the place where the rope sat. There’s a faint pink line across the inside of each wrist—not raw, not white-pressed, just visible.
He bends and kisses the right one, then the left.
I find I can’t speak.
‘Word.’ Gently.
‘Green.’ It comes out cracked.
He gets up. Comes back with water in one hand and a soft jumper from the chair in the other. The jumper goes round my shoulders. The water goes into my hand.
‘Drink.’
I drink. He sits next to me. Doesn’t touch unless I move. After a minute, I lean into his side. He puts his arm around me, careful, the way you put an arm around a thing you are not sure of yet.
‘Thank you,’ he says. Into my hair. Very quiet.
For what, I don’t ask. I don’t think he could say anyway.
The clock on his bedside reads 22:43.
On the kitchen table, my phone has been ringing for hours, and neither of us has heard it.