Chapter Four
I say yes on a Tuesday.
He didn't ask again. All week he let it sit, and by Tuesday I'm the one who brings it up. We've finished dinner and he's washing the one pan he used, and I'm drying, and I hear myself say it before I've decided to.
"I want to try the thing," I say. "The cage thing."
He doesn't turn around right away. He rinses the pan and sets it in the rack and dries his hands on the towel over his shoulder. Then he looks at me, easy, like I said I wanted to try a new place for lunch.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." And then, because the silence needs filling, "Just to see. Just at night, like you said. While we figure it out."
"While we figure it out," he agrees.
He doesn't make a big thing of it. That's what lets me do it.
If he'd smiled the wrong way, if he'd looked pleased, if there'd been one ounce of a man getting what he wanted in his face, I think I'd have laughed it off and gone to bed.
But there's nothing like that. He just nods, slow, like I've made a sensible call.
"Okay," he says. "I've actually already got one."
I don't know why that lands so hard. Of course he does.
Graham doesn't float ideas he hasn't already made real somewhere.
But hearing that it's here, in the apartment, that it's been here maybe since Thursday, sitting in a drawer while I did my whole slow dance of pretending to think about it, makes my stomach do something complicated.
He was ready before I was. He's always ready before I am.
"You already got one," I say.
"It's not a big deal. It's a starter. Basic. We'll see how it goes." He hangs the towel on the oven handle. "You want to do it now, or you want to sit with it another week."
And there's the trap I always fall into, except it doesn't feel like a trap.
If I say another week, I'm the guy who freezes.
The guy on Meg's bed floating up by the ceiling.
He knows that guy. He's offering me the chance to not be him, right now, in the warm kitchen with the good light, no woman to disappoint, nothing on the line.
"Now's fine," I say.
* * *
He gets it from his room. I sit on the couch and wait and my heart is going harder than the situation calls for. He comes back with a small box, the kind of unlabeled brown box a thing arrives in, and he sits next to me and opens it on the coffee table like it's nothing.
It's smaller than I pictured, and plainer. A short curved tube of clear hard plastic, a ring, some little pins. It looks medical. It looks like a part off something. There's nothing scary about it, which is somehow worse, because I'd braced for scary and got a piece of hardware instead.
"This is it," he says. He turns the tube over in his fingers. "It's the standard men's one. Everybody starts here. We size down later if we need to."
"Take your pants off," he says, and it's the same voice as Thursday, the same voice as the pan, and I stand up and do it.
It's already less strange than the first time.
My hands aren't shaking as much. I push my jeans and briefs down together and step out and sit back down, and I'm bare from the waist down on the couch we watch TV on, and Graham looks at me like a man reading a tape measure.
I'm soft. Nervous-soft, tucked-in small, the way I always am when I'm not the one running the show.
He doesn't comment on it. He picks up the ring first, the part that goes around behind everything, and he says, "This part sits at the base.
Behind your balls. It's going to feel weird for a second," and he fits it on me, cool plastic, his warm fingers, and it does feel weird and then it just feels like a ring sitting there.
Then he takes the tube. The cage part. He holds it up next to me for a second, comparing.
And I watch his face do a small thing. Not a big thing. Just a flicker at the corner of his mouth, something almost like a man who's opened a box and found the wrong size.
He fits the tube over me anyway. Tucks my soft dick down into it and slides the plastic on. It goes on. And it doesn't fill.
"Hm," he says.
There's room in it. That's the thing I feel first, before I understand it.
There's air all around me in there. The tube is meant to hold a soft dick snug, to press in on every side, and my whole soft dick is maybe two inches of me sitting in the bottom of it with the rest of the tube empty over the top.
It doesn't touch anywhere. When Graham moves the ring to seat it against the tube, the cage shifts on me, slides forward and back, and I can feel my dick loose inside the plastic, knocking against the walls when it moves, a small thing rattling around in a container built for something bigger.
He lines up the pin. Tips it a little. Frowns, mild.
"Yeah," he says. "That's not going to work, is it."
He says it in the same flat voice he used for you're small on Thursday.
Not cruel. Not even really to me. Just a man saying the true thing about the object in his hand.
He tilts the cage so I can see. There's a full half-inch of empty tube past the tip of me.
My dick doesn't come close to reaching the end of it.
There's slack all down the length where I'm supposed to be filling it out and I'm just not, my soft little dick pooled at the base with a whole empty barrel in front of it.
He gives the cage the smallest shake and my dick shifts and drops inside it, and he watches me feel it.
"This is the smallest ring it comes with," he says, "and it's still loose behind your balls.
And the tube's meant to grip. Yours has got nothing to grip.
" He sets it so it hangs off me, half on, demonstrating.
"See these gaps? Your dick would slide right back out the front of it. It's got nothing to hold onto."
I look down at myself. At the standard thing, the everybody-starts-here thing, gapping off the end of my dick like a sleeve on a kid wearing his dad's coat. Nothing for it to grip. Not enough dick to fill the smallest size they make for a man.
I should feel it as an insult. I keep waiting for that, same as Thursday, and it doesn't come.
What I notice instead is the ring. It's still on me, cool and close behind my balls, a small steady weight that wasn't there an hour ago.
That's the thing my body keeps going back to, not the empty tube, not the proof in his hand.
The cool of it. The press of it. Something sitting on me now that wasn't sitting there before.
"Wow," I say. My voice comes out light, trying to get ahead of it. "Even that. I can't even do that right."
"You didn't do anything wrong," he says. He's already easing it off me, unbothered, setting the too-big cage back in its box. "It's the opposite. This thing's built for average. You're not average. That's not a knock. It's just information."
He says information and my face goes warm, because that's my word, that's the thing I do, I take the bad fact and call it information so it can't hurt me, and here's Graham doing it for me, doing it better, handing me my own trick back cleaned up.
* * *
"Here's the good news," he says.
He's put the box aside. I'm still bare on the couch, soft, the ring still sitting at the base of me where he left it, and he's leaned back on his side like we're having any conversation.
"Think about what that just showed you." He nods at the box.
"You know how much guys have to manage down there?
The reason those things are all that size?
Because most men are walking around with a whole handful to deal with.
It runs their lives. It's the thing we've been talking about all week, the thing that grabs the wheel.
" He shrugs. "You don't have that problem.
You barely have anything to put away. That's not a loss, Teddy.
Do you get what I'm saying? For what we're trying to do here, that's the easiest starting point in the world. There's almost nothing to manage."
And it works on me. It works like the wine worked.
Like still saving yourself worked. He's taken the most humiliating fact of my whole night, the too-big cage, the not-enough-of-me, and turned it so the light hits it differently, and now it's a head start.
Now it's proof the tool was made for me.
Now the smallness isn't the problem the cage exposes, it's the reason the cage will be so easy.
"Small enough that the smallest one they make is too big," I say.
"Small enough that we're going to have to go get you the right one," he says.
"A proper one. Something that actually fits you.
" He says it gently, like he's promising me a thing I want.
"Which is fine. That's a Saturday. For tonight we make this one work, so you get the feel of it, and then we get you sized properly. "
Sized properly. Like a suit. Like a foot.
There's a whole world in those two words where this is a normal thing that reasonable men do, get themselves sized properly, and I'm being brought into it by the one person who knows how, and I don't look too hard at the world underneath the two words because it's warm in here and he's already reaching back into the box.
"You still want to?" he says. "We don't have to do tonight. I mean it. Say the word."
Which is the thing that makes me want to.
Every time he hands me the door out, the door out becomes the thing I'm scared of.
Saying no is the freeze. Saying no is Meg's bed.
He's built it so that the brave thing and the thing he wants are the same thing, and I can't see the seam, and I say, "No. Let's do it. Tonight."
* * *