Four #2
The wanting moves the same way, some nights reaching for control and some for the opposite, and I stopped treating that as contradiction a long time ago.
It was never a rule I broke. It’s closer to weather.
What changes which one I need isn’t what’s between my legs and isn’t the day of the week.
It’s trust — how much of myself I’ve had to spend that day defending, and how much I trust the man across the table to hold the rest of it without narrating it back to me.
The rules hold on the bad days too, which is the whole reason I trust them.
There’s a kind of Tuesday — it’s always a Tuesday — where the mirror over the sink hands me back somebody I didn’t agree to be.
The temptation is to let the rules go soft: what’s the point of the map when I can’t read the territory.
I do the opposite. I keep them harder, because they’re the one document about me that stays true regardless of what the glass is doing.
The face can lie to me. The rules can’t.
Dignity isn’t a feeling you summon. It’s a procedure you keep, and by the time the kettle’s boiled I’m usually enough of a person again to be worth the trouble.
Two times, before that table. Everybody assumes the map comes first and the body after, and it was the other way round entirely: I had that man in my bed twice before I handed him a single drawing.
Both times I started it, which isn’t a boast, it’s a fact about the machinery.
I have never once managed to want somebody in the passive voice.
The first was a Tuesday, at mine, and I’d spent the afternoon shift running the negotiation in my head and losing it.
It isn’t will he; I’d stopped wondering about will he somewhere around the ark joke.
It’s the other one, the one with an answer I don’t get a vote on: whether the version of me that comes off with the clothes is the version he climbed two flights of stairs for.
There’s a paragraph available here about dysphoria and I’m not writing it, because the true account is smaller and duller than the paragraph.
I was fine. Then I was standing in a room with a man holding his hands at his sides waiting to be told where to put them, and the fine went sideways for about forty seconds, and what turned up wasn’t disgust — I’ve never had a great deal of that, I’m lucky in it — it was the administrative one.
The certainty that inside four minutes he would arrive at a fact about me and have to do something with his face, and that I would be watching for it, and would find it, because I always find it, and that the finding would then be the rest of the night.
So I went first, which is what I do with anything I can’t survive being handed.
The flannel shirt off and onto the floor, then the bra, which is where a stranger’s face does its work if it’s going to, and I told him he could take it off and made myself watch all four seconds of it, fingers too big for the clasp, wrong way twice, laughing at his own hands.
There was no face. Not a suppressed one either, and I can spot suppressed at forty paces through frosted glass.
There was a large man concentrating on a hook.
He put his mouth on my sternum. That’s the bit I kept — not the chest, the bone, like he wanted the frame and not the finish.
Then the rib, the scrape of his stubble travelling ahead of his mouth, then the line of hair down my stomach, and somewhere around there I stopped auditing and started wanting, and those two are supposed to run at the same time and in me they mostly can’t.
Then I said it, with a condition welded on the end, because a wanting with no door in it isn’t a wanting, it’s a summons.
‘I want you to fuck me. If you want that.’
The voice held. The hand didn’t — one tremor on his cheek, quick as a fuse going — and I pressed my thumb harder into the bone to stop it, and he didn’t mention it that night and hasn’t since, and I’ve come to think the not-mentioning was the first real thing that man ever did for me.
He asked if I’d done this and I said not like this, and he told me years afterwards that he’d meant it as a confession and I’d taken it as a fact, and we were both right.
‘Okay. I’ll show you.’
And then the part nobody writes and everybody does.
My bag by the chair, front pocket, foil and bottle, packed that morning for a possibility I hadn’t yet said out loud to myself.
He got the zip stuck. He said you brought this in the voice of a man discovering something about his own evening, and I said I’d brought options, not assumptions, and watched it go into him like a nail into softwood.
I did the rest myself. I rolled it onto him because I wanted my hands on the decision, and I put the lube on cold and worked him twice through my fist, slow and even, and enjoyed what it did to his breathing.
Then I opened myself up in front of him, on my back with my knees fallen open and the lamp on, two fingers, my own wrist turning, taking my time — not for a show, but because he was going to see it eventually and I would rather he saw it the first time as something I was doing than as something being revealed to him.
He knelt between my thighs with his fists in the sheet and did not once look away, and I watched him not look away, and that was the moment the evening stopped being a risk assessment.
‘Go slow. I’ll tell you.’
He went slow, being incapable of any other speed with a thing he suspects might break, and there was the stretch and the burn behind it and the long strange minute where the body decides without consulting you, and I made him stop halfway and he stayed stopped, shaking with the effort of it, until the argument inside me came down on the right side.
‘All the way.’
The headboard hit the wall and he put a hand up flat to stop it doing it again, which is the single most him thing that has ever happened to me with a man inside me, and I laughed, and he laughed, and we did the rest of it badly and with too much lube and his knee slipping off the mattress, and I would not trade it.
I got my own fist round myself between us, knuckles knocking his stomach on the upstroke, and came like that with a word in Welsh coming out of me twice that I did not choose and did not translate for him for another eleven months.
He went about four seconds after and came apart in a way I hadn’t costed for.
And afterwards, with his face in my neck, there was water on my skin that hadn’t come from me, and he didn’t know it was happening.
I did the only correct thing available, which was nothing: a thumb on his cheekbone where it had dried, no comment, no question, no conversation demanded of a man in that state.
That was the first one. Nerve, negotiation, and a man crying without noticing, on a Tuesday.
The second was three days later and a different animal, because a second time isn’t about nerve, it’s evidence.
A first you can explain away as a good night, or a man being polite in the dark to somebody he’ll have revised his opinion of by Thursday, and I’ve had firsts that were flukes and firsts I paid for on the fourth date when the revision came in.
So I did it again, at mine again, because everything in that first year happened on my ground, and I did it differently on purpose.
On his back, and the drawer open by my own hand, and no discussion this time about foil or bottle, just the click and about nine seconds of practical, which is what a rule looks like once it’s stopped being a conversation and turned into a habit.
Then I got up over him and took him at my own speed, which was slower than he’d have chosen and a good deal slower than I’d have chosen three days earlier, when I was still in a hurry to have the thing finished and therefore survived.
I put his hands on the headboard and left them there. He left them there. I sat down on him all the way and stopped, and made us both stay in it, and watched him lose the ability to arrange his own face.
And he looked at me the entire time. That’s the whole of it. That’s what the second time was for.
There was a man I gave three months to who never once needed my face, and I called it a preference at the time.
Ron had my face six inches off his the whole way, the jaw with the shadow on it and the eyeliner gone to hell and the rest of me in plain view under a lamp I had deliberately not turned off, and he looked, and kept looking, and when I put my own hand on myself and finished across his stomach he was still looking, and what was on his face wasn’t effort and wasn’t tolerance.
He wasn’t reading me. He’d already read me. He was only checking the page hadn’t changed.
I lay on his chest afterwards doing sums I’d have denied doing: twice, both times mine to start, no face either time, no narration, no small print.
And that was where the table came from. Not because anything had gone wrong, but because for the first time in about six years I had somebody in front of me who might actually build to a spec, and it seemed a criminal waste not to issue one.
We don’t touch that night, not in the way the last two times have.
He stays anyway, on top of the covers, in his clothes, which I notice and don’t remark on, because I understand exactly what it is: not distance, the opposite of distance.
A man giving a new set of instructions the widest possible berth on the very first night he’s been handed them, treating caution like a form of respect rather than an insult to what I’ve just told him I can hold.
I lie next to him in a room lit only by the streetlight through the curtain, and I watch him fall asleep before I do, which never happens, and there’s something in the specific stillness of him, arms folded, jeans still on, the boots never even unlaced, that undoes something in me I hadn’t planned on having undone tonight.