Chapter Twenty #2
"Not yet," he says. Easy. No hurry in it at all. "You gave me the say. This is me having it."
He does it again. Fingers back in, the slow climb, all the way up to where my whole body goes tight around his hand, and then he takes it away and lets it fall back to nothing.
Then again. Each time it comes faster and breaks harder and leaves less of me on the near side of it.
I'm shaking by the third time. The front of me strains useless in its shell and gets nowhere and the want routes down and back and has nowhere to go but where he decides to send it.
I don't ask him to finish it. Asking isn't mine anymore.
I gave it to him tonight in the kitchen and he's showing me what giving it means, that even this, even the small ruined nothing my body gets instead of a man's, comes when he says and not before.
"Please," I say anyway, into the cushion. It comes out wrecked. Not asking for it. Just true.
"I know," he says, warm. "I've got it. You don't decide this part. That's the whole of what you asked me for."
When he pushes in I take him like the biggest toy taught me to.
No resistance. No moment where I have to talk myself through it.
My hole yields and then pulls him deeper like it was waiting for exactly this.
Every thrust seats him further and I hold all of it, full past where I used to think I ended.
The cage jolts where it hangs, locked and out of the way.
Small. Pink. Exactly the size it was always going to be.
It leaks a little against the arm of the couch, a thin thread that doesn't mean anything except that my body is here and doing what it was made for.
I don't reach for it. The cage is already handling everything.
Graham's hand stays on the small of my back, holding me in place.
He doesn't have to tell me to stay down.
I stay down because that's where I want to be while he takes what he wants from me.
My mind stays quiet the whole time. No floating up to watch from the ceiling.
No math about whether I'm doing it right or whether he can tell I'm not the guy I used to pretend to be.
There's just the fullness and the steady sound of his breath and my body answering without being asked.
He finishes inside me, quiet, his breath catching once and then going even again.
When he pulls out he stays close for a minute, one hand still on the small of my back.
The clitty presses against the arm of the couch, soft and spent.
I stay where he put me a moment longer on my own.
Not because he told me to. Because it feels right to stay bent like this until he decides I'm done.
After he cleans me up I put the plug back in myself.
He watches but doesn't do it for me. When it's seated I pull the new seamless pair up over it and the cage and everything settles flat again.
I don't ask if that's what he wanted. I just do it because it's the next thing that happens on a night where I asked him to stop waiting for me to be ready.
Graham goes to the kitchen and starts water for pasta.
I stand at the island and watch him like I have a hundred nights.
The keyring is in his pocket. I can hear the small weight of it when he shifts his weight to reach for the salt.
The pink one is on there with the others.
It has been there since the last time he took it off me.
I don't reach for it. I don't need to. It belongs there because that's where I want it to stay.
Later, when the pasta is done and we're eating at the table, my phone buzzes.
Dev. Gym tomorrow? I read it once. The old version of me would have said yes without thinking, because saying yes kept the last thread of the man-world alive.
The version that lifted and joked and pretended the cage wasn't sitting small and locked under his clothes.
This one just feels the pull and lets it go.
I set the phone face down without answering.
Graham doesn't ask who it was. I don't tell him.
There's nothing left in me that needs to keep that door open.
Dev can think whatever he wants. The why doesn't belong to that life anymore.
The work on my desk tomorrow is still the one place I don't freeze up.
Steph'll be at the next desk with the callouts, same as every day, the one person in that building who ever looked at the thing I'm good at and thought it was worth anything.
She's started watching me lately, a look that sits a half second too long, and last week she said it straight out, no wind-up, no waiting to see how I'd take it.
You've gone quiet on me. You used to be in the room.
I told her I was tired. She let it go, because pushing isn't her way, and I worked the callouts clean and gave her nothing to keep, and she took the nothing and turned back to her screen.
It's still the one room I never freeze in.
It just doesn't feel like it matters the way it used to, and neither does the fact that she can tell.
When we're done eating I clear both plates without asking if he's finished. I rinse them and set them in the rack like he usually does. Then I dry my hands on the towel over the oven handle and turn around.
I don't say anything about his room. I just walk down the hall first. I don't wait for him to tell me to.
I go into his room, pull the covers back on his side of the bed, and get in on mine.
The cage shifts when I move. The plug sits steady.
The new camisole strap slips a little against my shoulder and I don't fix it.
When Graham comes in he doesn't comment on any of it.
He just gets in beside me, reaches over, and rests his hand on my hip where the cage sits under the sheet.
The weight of it is familiar and I lean into it instead of pulling away.
Back down the hall my phone sits face down on the table where I left Dev's text unanswered, the screen long gone dark, and I don't get up for it.
That whole world is out there behind a dead screen and it can stay there.
In here there's his hand, and the lock under it, and my own even breathing, and for the first time since any of this started, I'm the one who decided it would be this and not that.
The key stays where I left it because I want it there.
Not because I can't reach for it. Because I don't want it back in my hand.