Chapter Eight #2
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and looks at the front of the camisole where it hangs loose, where you'd never know there's a cage under the underwear under the fabric, and he says, conversational, "You can't even tell it's there.
That's the nice part. Whole outfit and that little cock's just tucked away being quiet. Nobody'd ever guess."
Little cock.
He's never called it that. He's said small.
He's said you're small, that night on the couch with his hand around it, plain as a measurement.
This is different. This is a name, a soft one, handed to me warm across the coffee table like it's a kindness, and the awful thing is how it lands, which is not like an insult at all.
It lands like the camisole lands. Like something being fit to me.
He's not laughing. He's just calling the thing what it is now that it's this small and this locked and this beside the point, and there's that same low relief I keep finding at the bottom of the worst moments with him, the relief of a fact finally set down where I can't argue with it.
"You don't have to say it like that," I say. It comes out with no weight behind it.
"Say it like what," he says, easy. "It's not a knock.
It's the opposite. It's the least of your problems now, isn't it.
Locked up, out of your way, not running the show for once.
" He sits back. "That used to be the loudest thing about you.
Now it's the thing nobody can even find.
That's the whole win, Teddy. That's what you wanted. "
I don't say anything. I stand there in the camisole with the little pink cage he can't see and can name anyway, and I feel the quiet spread out from the middle of me, warm and low, and I let it.
"And listen," he says, gentler now, like he does right before the thing that's supposed to comfort.
"None of this is spending anything. You know that.
Dressing you up, taking the noise off, getting you easy in your own skin.
It's all still saving, not spending. Whatever's under there is exactly as untouched as it was the day I met you.
" He smiles a little, the picked-you smile.
"You're just getting comfortable while you wait for it to matter. "
Saving, not spending. Still untouched. I take it the way I take all of it, because it's late and he's kind and I want it to be true, and I don't look at the part where a thing you keep locked and call by a small name and dress a body around isn't being saved for anything at all.
* * *
After, he has me on my knees.
He doesn't rush it and I don't need him to tell me anything anymore.
I go down without being told, both hands and my mouth, the way he taught me, and I stay in it instead of floating off.
It's longer tonight. He lets it be longer, one hand resting in my hair, not guiding, just there, and I hold the pace he likes and don't come up until he's done and I've swallowed it, all of it this time, nothing running down my chin because I've learned how to take it.
The camisole hangs off me the whole time.
The cage stays locked and straining and useless against the smooth underwear, leaking into it like it does now every time I swell against the plastic and stop.
When I sit back on my heels he looks down at me, calm, that same look still on him.
"Good," he says. "You're barely in your head at all anymore. That's the whole thing right there."
Then he gets up and comes back from my room with the box.
The new plug. The bigger one. The one I bought myself in the bright little store with the college kid at the register and drove home and put in the drawer and haven't touched since.
He takes it out and it looks bigger out of the box than it did in my hand at the counter, wider through the middle than the black one I've been wearing, and my stomach does the thing it does.
"You've had the small one a couple weeks," he says.
"You're ready for this. You bought it, didn't you.
Some part of you already knew." He sets it down and picks up the cage where it sits caught in the camisole and the underwear, just lifting the fabric to look, and he holds the plug up next to it, side by side, the wide plug and the little pink shell, and he doesn't even say the thing.
He just lets me see the two of them next to each other.
The one going in and the one locked away.
How much bigger the going-in one is than the whole of what's caged.
"Funny, isn't it," he says, mild, setting it back down. "More going in back there than you've ever had up front. And you'll take all of it." He says it like he's pleased for me. "Lie down."
I lie on my side on the rug. He works it in slow, more lube, the same low steady voice, breathe out, bear down, don't fight it, and the stretch is sharper than the small one, wider, a real ache at the middle of it where it's widest, and I grip the rug and make a sound and then the widest part goes and it seats and the ache drops down into a heavy full pressure that doesn't leave.
"There," he says. He wipes his hands. "You're taking more already. Told you."
I stay on my side breathing around it. It's a lot more than the black one. I feel it with every breath, deep and solid and impossible to ignore, my body stretched around it and holding it and not fighting.
"You'll wear it tonight," he says. "Sleep with it in.
Get used to the size." He drops nothing in the dish because there's nothing to drop, the cage stays on, but I hear him set the little brass key back where it lives among the others, the car fob and the mailbox spare, all of it his. "Off in the morning. Maybe."
* * *
I go to bed in the camisole.
I don't decide to keep it on. I just don't take it off, and Graham doesn't say to, and it turns out those are the same thing now.
I lie on my side because it's easier on the plug.
The bigger one sits deep and full inside me and every time I shift I feel the whole size of it.
The cage is a small locked press at the front, the leftover ache of straining into it still there.
The camisole is thin and cool against my chest and the lace edge sits across me light as nothing.
I'm caged and I'm plugged wider than I've ever been and I'm in a woman's top a man picked out for me, lying in the dark taking careful inventory of everything that's happening to my body, and I'm not scared of any of it.
The phone lights up on the nightstand.
ok I looked at my week and I'm off saturday. there's a coffee place by the river that does a walk-up window and there's a path. we could get bad coffee and walk and be bad at talking to each other in person for once. saturday, 10?
I read it twice. Saturday. Ten. A window and a path and a woman who texted me first, laying out the whole plan so I don't have to build it, handing me the easy version like nobody ever does.
saturday 10, I write back. I'm in. fair warning I'm worse in person.
good, she writes. me too. it'll even out.
I put the phone down. My wallet's on the nightstand next to it and I know without opening it the condom's still in there, expired, been expired a while now, bought for a first time that keeps sliding out ahead of me like a light down a wet street.
It used to be a joke I did at parties. It doesn't feel like a joke tonight, because Saturday there's actually going to be a woman on a path by the river who might be the one it was for, and I'm going to walk up to that window locked in a cage the size of a bottlecap with a plug seated deep inside me, in a top I slept in, saving a thing I'm never getting to spend for a reason I can't say out loud to the one person I'd want to say it to.
I lie there and hold both of them at once.
Nora on the path Saturday. The camisole against my chest and the plug deep and the cage locked and the key in Graham's dish.
The gap between the two is the widest it's ever been and I can feel the whole width of it and I still don't reach for the alarm, because the quiet's there, low and warm and steady, and the quiet is the thing I'd give anything to keep.
Down the hall Graham turns off the last of the lamps. The apartment comes down to the one dim level he likes before he sleeps.
Saturday, ten. Her name still on the phone beside me, and the size of everything else still on me.