Stella #2
‘I’m sorry, doll, but you can’t wear streetwear,’ she tells me.
I look down at the dress I’m wearing – an Abercrombie sundress with cherries on it, and I can kind of see her point. ‘Oh,’ I say, looking at Beau. ‘I guess I can’t go in.’
Beau grins at me. ‘You could just take it off.’
I want to say that I tell Beau to suck it.
But he runs his hand down my arm and moves my hair away from my neck, and I want to fuck him so badly that this does seem like a good idea.
I’m a grown-up. I’m not a prude. Before I had Rose, Louella made me go to a club in Berlin where everyone was naked and whipping each other.
Gav and I didn’t really do much by way of experimenting once we’d figured out what buttons worked consistently.
Besides, the whole point of this dating thing is to have enough experiences that I don’t need to keep having new experiences.
If I chicken out now, I’ll have to go home to my mother, she’ll know that my date was a disaster and when I eventually confess what happens she’ll inevitably tell me something horrifying about having been to ‘lots of sex parties, darling.’
‘There’s also the market upstairs,’ says the latex woman helpfully. ‘You could get something there.’
When I was pregnant, I got something called diastasis recti, where the muscles in your upper torso just sort of banana-split themselves apart to make way for the bump.
It’s never quite gone back to normal, so my waist looks wider than it once did, and I’m pretty sure that my belly button is actually slightly off-centre from all the stretching it had to do, so this sounds like a better idea.
Beau waits downstairs, chatting to the girl in the latex while I go to the upper floor.
A man with a blue ponytail and a gold front tooth is selling things to hit people with.
To the side of him there’s a rack of lingerie and outfits.
I tell myself again that I’m not a prude, and that I’m having an adventure.
This is a good thing. I’m experiencing everything that I didn’t experience in my twenties – these are the kinds of stories I’ll be telling when I’m old.
Then I pay an eye-watering ￡65 for a pink mesh ‘dress’ that doesn’t cover my knickers and has a fluffy pink feather trim, which I’m unlikely to get much future wear out of.
As I pick my way down the stairs, I give myself a pep talk.
Okay, this isn’t ideal. In fact, it’s embarrassing, and I sort of hate it, and this was really not the life I signed up for and I feel too old, too fat, too neurologically developed to have let any of this happen, but we are where we are and the purpose of this evening was to get laid so I’m going to wear this for an hour, then Beau and I are going to go back to his place, he’s going to blow my mind with the best sex I’ve ever had, and then I’m going to go home and put all of this behind me.
Unless the sex is so great that I want to do it again, in which case Beau (who is going to decide that I’m amazing) will be willing to provide.
In news that didn’t surprise me at all at this point, downstairs is a dungeon.
I look around and it’s exactly like every scene I’ve ever seen on TV where they’re trying to depict sexual degeneracy.
There’s a balding man wearing rubber pants standing on a cross thing, being whipped by a heavyset woman with a sort of whip.
In the corner there’s a cluster of more attractive, younger people, all watching everyone else watching them.
It’s got the vibe of a secondary-school cafeteria, only everyone’s wearing fetish gear.
‘Do you want to try something?’ Beau asks me.
‘Um,’ I say, trying to sound keen. ‘Maybe later? Is there like, another area? Somewhere we can maybe be a bit more. . . private?’
‘Sure,’ he says. He guides me into a lounge where there’s music and proper lighting and, to my enormous relief, a bar. I pay for our drinks – and try not to mind that I pay for them – and then perch on the arm of a chair, my legs across Beau’s lap.
‘This is a pretty wild first date,’ I say, smiling.
‘Sure,’ Beau agrees. ‘But then it was all on my profile, so I guess you knew what I was planning, right?’
Beau’s profile was basically unreadable. It said he was a queer pansexual kinkster looking for GGG and then mentioned a load of clubs he wanted to go to, which I assumed would be music venues and I now realise were fetish venues. So I suppose he has a point. This one’s on me.
I pull my phone out to check whether I’ve got anything from Mum by way of an update on Rose. Nothing from Mum, but there’s a message from Dom, which I only see half of. If you’ve realised what that place is and you want me to fake an emergency to get you out. . .
‘Excuse me,’ says a man wearing a black leather harness. ‘No phones.’
‘I’m just really quickly checking—’
‘No phones,’ he repeats.
‘Sure, but my—’
‘No phones.’
Beau puts his hand on my leg. ‘The phone policy is for everyone’s safety and privacy,’ he says, like English is my second language. ‘I’m a member here, so I have to vouch for your behaviour – please adhere to the rules.’
I consider throwing my phone at him, but I take a breath and try to be reasonable. Obviously, you can’t have phones here.
‘Come on,’ says Beau. ‘Let’s go explore.’
He takes me upstairs to another room, opposite the one where I bought this hideous outfit.
It’s a sort of pub function room, only in every corner, people are shagging.
Which shouldn’t come as a surprise – we’re at a sex party – but god, it’s really quite arresting.
I’ve never seen someone having sex outside of porn.
There’s a pretty blonde woman on her knees, going down on another woman.
A couple going at it doggy style on the bed.
Two men sharing one woman up against the blacked-out window.
The music in here isn’t loud enough so I can literally hear the noise of the man next to me who is stoically ploughing into his female companion.
In theory I’d always thought that coming to something like this might be quite sexy.
If Gavin had had any interest, I’d have been up for it.
But maybe it’s the fluorescent lighting, or the smell of latex, or maybe it’s just that the reality of watching people have sex is quite weird?
But for whatever reason, this is the least sexy room I have ever been in, in my life.
I think about Rose. I don’t want to be thinking about Rose, I don’t want Rose to be in any way connected to this half-farcical, half-seedy tableau, but I can’t stop myself thinking about her eating tiny pasta shells earlier today and trying to say the word ‘cat’.
Beau slides up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist. Then he trails his hand up my inner thigh, towards the gusset of my knickers. He hasn’t even kissed me yet and he’s trying to put his fingers inside me. ‘Do I have your consent?’ he asks.
I shake my head and he freezes. ‘What?’ he asks.
Stepping backwards, I find my way back to the hall. ‘Give me a minute,’ I say, stumbling away from him.
Beau follows me. ‘What’s the problem?’ he asks.
‘I’m sorry, this is just a lot— like, it’s very fast, we literally just met—’
‘We’ve been discussing our needs and desires all week?’ he says, sounding weirdly annoyed. ‘If you weren’t into this then you shouldn’t have said you wanted to come.’
‘I didn’t know we were going to a sex club,’ I say, exasperated. ‘At no point was that made clear to me.’
‘You know there were a lot of girls I could have brought here tonight?’ he says, increasingly red in the face. ‘I picked you because I wanted to be open-minded, and I wanted to experiment with someone older—’
‘Older? I’m six months younger than you are!’
He gives me a withering expression. ‘It’s different, though, isn’t it?’
Is that because I’m a woman? I don’t have the desire to find out. ‘Fuck you,’ I say instead, taking my phone out.
‘You can’t use your phone here!’ he yells. I start down the stairs, pulling my dress from my bag, ready to yank the stupid pink thing over my head and change as I head for the door. Then I catch sight of my phone screen and my heart stops completely.
I have seven missed calls. Six from my mother. One from Lou. I’ve never had more than one missed call from my mother. My mother is the most laissez-faire person I’ve ever met in my entire life. She calls if she really needs something and if I don’t answer. . .
I race up the stairs, out into the street and dial my mum. It rings and rings and doesn’t go through. Then I call Lou. Again, it rings out. I’m calling Mum again when I get a call crossing with the one I’m making and, panicked, I stab my finger at the screen trying to get it to connect. It’s Lou.
‘What?’ I half scream.
‘We’re at the hospital,’ Lou says.
I gag. My hands are shaking so much I can barely keep the phone next to my sweaty cheek. ‘Is she okay?’
‘I think so,’ Lou says. ‘I’m dropping you a pin, get in a cab.’
The Uber is thankfully quick to arrive and the driver says nothing as I put my dress on over the stupid pink mesh thing. He drops me at the A&E entrance, briefly making eye contact in the wing mirror.
‘I hope all is well,’ he says quietly as I get out.
‘Thank you,’ I say, meaning it.
Then I leg it through the main A&E, to the children’s department.
In the waiting room, sitting on green plastic chairs, are Lou, Mum and, to my enormous relief, in Lou’s arms is a grizzly Rose.
I fall to my knees and gather her into my arms. She’s sleepy and pink-cheeked in her little white pyjamas, but seems pleased to see me.
‘What happened?’ I ask breathily, clinging on to Rose.
‘She’s okay,’ Mum says. ‘They think she’s fine.’