Chapter Fourteen #3
"Good girl," he says, watching me work. "Look at you. Nobody's making you do this. You're doing it."
He's wrong and he's right and I can't tell him which.
My thighs are burning. I'm making sounds I don't decide to make.
He turns me around at some point, easy, a hand guiding my hip, until my back's to him and I'm facing the dark window and I have to hold my own knees and keep going, and now he can see all of it, the hole taking him, the little cage jolting underneath, too small to do anything but jolt, while I lift and drop.
He says so, low, against the back of my neck.
"That's the whole thing right there. That little clit not even in the room, and you still can't stop.
" The word gets loose in me on its own then, clitty, and I ride him harder because of it, not despite it, my thighs burning, the labor of it something I chose and keep choosing every time I come back down.
The finish comes the only way it comes now.
Hands free, the cage never touched, everything routed down to the place he's filling.
It builds low and deep while I'm working myself on him and then it spills, a long ruined pulse that empties out of the locked front onto his stomach without a single thing touching it, while I'm still moving, still riding, my whole body shaking with the work of it.
He lets me ride it out, then lifts me off, easy, and sets me down on the couch beside him and finishes himself with his own hand in a few strokes, across my stomach and my chest, over the camisole, marking the outside of me while the inside goes empty and open and sore.
He doesn't finish in me. He never does. That's a thing I've stopped wondering about.
After, he cleans me the way he always does. Wipes me down, works the plug back in with steady hands, settles everything small and locked and full again. He pulls the camisole straight on my shoulders and does it slow. He's not in a hurry with any of it.
"You did that yourself," he says, quiet, almost proud. "Nobody had to make you. That's the difference now."
I let it sit. I don't argue. I did do it myself. My thighs are still shaking with how much I did it myself.
* * *
The week after is quiet in a way I don't fight.
Monday I forget to take the long way around the floor.
I walk right past Steph's desk, the route I've been avoiding for a month, and she looks up from a diagram and says morning and I say morning and there's nothing in it.
Nothing to brace against. She's still the only person in the building who thinks the guy at midnight with the wet hands is worth protecting, and I still sit down and work the callouts with her and I'm still good at it, the one room I never freeze in.
But the wanting's gone out of it the same way it went out of the path by the river.
She was a door too. I can look right at that now and it doesn't cost me anything.
Another one held open, another one I'm not walking through, and I don't feel like I'm giving up a thing.
You can't give up a room that was never there.
I think about the two of them sometimes, Nora and Steph, the two best chances I'll ever get, both offered inside a single week, both let go.
A year ago it would have been the worst thing that ever happened to me.
I'd have lain awake doing the math, like I used to on myself at the gym.
Now it's just the shape of my life. The apps are dead on my phone.
Dev's stopped asking. The whole long campaign I ran for ten years to make a woman tell me what I was has gone still, and the map has shrunk to a few blocks, the office and the apartment and the walk between them.
The thing I could never say to Claire if she asked is that it doesn't feel like losing ground.
It feels like everything that was spread thin and painful across a whole city getting gathered up small and close and put somewhere safe.
That night Graham locks up. The door. The stove.
The lamps brought down to the one low level he likes before bed.
I'm on the couch in the camisole with the plug in and the cage locked and the key in his pocket, and there's nowhere I'd rather be, which is a sentence I used to be afraid of and now is just true.
He stops behind the couch and rests his hand on the back of my neck, warm, easy.
"There's more," he says. Not a threat. Not even really to me. Just a fact he's setting down where I'll find it later. "You're almost there."
I don't ask where. I stopped asking where a while ago.
I lean my head back into his hand, and he lets it rest there a moment, then takes it away and goes on down the hall.
I stay on the couch in the half dark with his sentence still sitting in it.
Somewhere in the building a pipe knocks twice and settles.
Down the hall his door settles almost shut, not quite all the way.
I lie there in the camisole and let the place tick down into night around me, and I don't get up to close my own.