Chapter Fourteen #2
"You want to know what you found out today," he says.
"Not that you couldn't have her. You've known that a long time.
Something better than that." His voice is even and low, the one he uses for the true things.
"All those years you threw yourself at it.
The bars. The apps. The freezing. You thought there was a room on the other side with your whole life in it, and if you could just get the handle to turn you'd finally walk in and be a man about it.
" His thumb moves once. "It was a door painted on a wall, Thea.
You've been trying the handle on a wall your whole life, and this morning a woman you like held it open for you, and you looked through it and saw what I've been telling you was there the whole time. Nothing. Nothing for you."
He calls me Thea and it goes in without a snag, like it does now.
I don't move to correct it. Nothing in me even reaches for the old name.
My throat is tight. It should be the cruelest thing anyone's ever said to me and it doesn't land like cruelty.
It lands like being handed permission to put something heavy down.
"The wanting was the whole weight," he says. "Ten years of it. And you set it down on a path this morning and walked home to me. You feel how light you are?"
I do. That's the terrible part. I feel light.
"That's not loss," he says. "Losing means there was something there.
You didn't lose a thing today. You just stopped paying rent on something that was never real.
" He tips my chin up. "The part of you that works, the part that was always going to work, isn't out on a path with her.
It never was. It's here. It's what you do on your knees, and what you take when I give it to you.
That's not the consolation prize, sissy.
That's the only thing under all of it that was ever actually yours. "
* * *
Then he does the thing that always comes next now, except tonight it comes with a difference.
He sits down on the couch. Just sits, in the middle of it, and looks at me standing there in my Saturday clothes with the cage and the plug and the camisole underneath, and he doesn't reach for me and he doesn't get up.
"Take those off," he says. "All of it. Leave the cage."
I undress in the middle of the living room in the flat afternoon light.
Shirt, pants, the panties, until I'm down to the camisole and the cage and the plug, small and locked and full, standing in front of him while he sits back with one arm along the top of the couch like a man watching something he owns.
He gets himself out. He's already hard, big and thick and heavy against his stomach, the thing my mouth and my hands and now the rest of me knows better than I know anything about my own body. He works lube over himself, slow, and sets the bottle on the cushion.
"Come here," he says. "You're doing it this time."
I go to him. He works the plug out with two fingers, unhurried, and my body gives it up without a thought, open and ready, how it stays now.
He doesn't lay me down. He guides me up onto his lap, a knee on either side of his hips, facing him, my chest against his through the thin camisole.
He lines himself up with one hand and puts the other flat on my lower back, and then he stops.
He doesn't push. He just holds there, the blunt hot head of him pressed up where the plug was, and waits.
"Down," he says. "You do it."
And I understand what tonight is. Every other time he put me where he wanted me and did the work while I took it.
Laid down, bent over, held in place. Tonight he sits there and makes me lower myself onto him.
Makes me be the one who does it. Makes me want it out loud with my whole body while he watches.
I brace my hands on his shoulders and I sink down.
The stretch is the stretch, familiar now, my body opening around him the way it's learned to, but it's different when I'm the one setting the pace, when nobody's pushing and the only thing moving me down onto him is me.
I take him slow because I'm the one taking.
Inch by inch, my own weight doing it, until I'm all the way down and seated and full, and the cage is trapped small and useless between us, pressed against his stomach, leaking already from how long it's been locked.
"There," he says, soft, his hands light on my hips, not lifting, not pushing. "Now show me."
I move.
I have to do all of it. That's the whole thing.
I lift myself up the length of him and drop back down and do it again, riding him in the lamplight with my hands on his shoulders and the little cage jostling useless against his stomach every time I come down, my body doing the labor of its own use while he sits back and watches my face.
He barely moves. One hand comes to my hip now and then, not to help, just to slow me when I go too fast, to make me feel every inch on the way down.
"Slower," he says. "All the way. I want to watch you take it.
" And I do it slower, all the way, taking it, and the shame of it, that I'm the one moving, that I'm the one working for it, that he's making me perform the wanting with my body while the front of me stays locked and pointless, lands low and hot and turns into the thing it always turns into now.
Because my body wants it. That's the part I can't get out from under.
Somewhere in the lifting and the dropping it stops being a thing he told me to do and starts being a thing I'm doing, and I'm riding him because I can't stop, chasing the deep spot the toys taught me and the first night taught me and every night since has carved deeper.
The cage drips steady between us. The plug's out and it's just him now, filling the only part of me that ever knew what it was for.