9
I heard talking on the edge of sleep, Derek’s voice murmuring just out of earshot. When I reached across the bed he wasn’t there. Great. More work calls, no doubt.
His voice drew nearer and I peered blearily up to see him standing in the bedroom door, phone still clamped to his ear. “Oh my God,” he said. “Fuck off.”
“Huh?” Nice to start the day with some random verbal abuse.
“No, not you,” he said, leaning over the bed to kiss me. “You’re delightful. Stay right where you are.”
I was still none the wiser and half asleep. Derek walked into the bathroom and shut the door. “No, listen to me, Jeff…I am having a relationship with an actual person, okay? One of the…the normals. And I like him that way. He has lovehandles and self-doubt…”
Now I was awake. And somewhat annoyed.
“…if you want to know what he did at the Tory Party Conference then read the Independent, but don’t start dragging him into our horrible fucking games. I like going out with someone who still has part of his soul intact…and yes, it does turn me on actually. Thanks for asking…well, fuck you, too…”
I sat up, wondering what the hell I’d just been listening to. Who was Jeff? An ex?
Derek opened the door and jumped to see me sitting upright in the middle of the bed. “Oh. You’re awake.”
“Yep. All of me. Me, my ears and my lovehandles.”
He winced. “So you were listening?”
“What games?” I said, surprised by the edge in my own voice. Clearly it was enough to make Derek think twice about playing the ‘you shouldn’t have been eavesdropping on a private conversation’ card.
He sighed. “You know,” he said. “The usual. The party keeps asking how I can use you. What you know.”
“Again?”
“Yes.” He sat down on the end of the bed. “It’s going to keep happening, Toby. It’s a shark tank, and I don’t want you swimming in it.”
“I’m a journalist,” I said. “You can’t keep me from swimming in it. In this metaphor I’m basically a remora.”
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t be.”
I frowned. What was I supposed to be, then? Another shark? It didn’t seem likely. “What are you saying, Derek? That you disapprove of my job?”
“No,” he said, but he did. I could tell. “I’m just saying you might be…unsuited to it. You’re a nice person, Toby. Way too nice for Westminster.”
“Oh. Good. I’ll just sit around and be nice then. That’ll pay the rent.”
Derek groaned. “Oh God. What the fuck is happening with us this morning? Why don’t I make you a cup of tea? How about that? Is that something I can do correctly?”
“Thank you,” I said, trying not to sound too begrudging. I should have left it alone. I should have just pretended to have slept through the whole conversation and said nothing, but I didn’t, and now we were squarely in the realms of f-bombs and industrial strength sarcasm before I’d even had my morning piss, never mind my first cup of tea.
I took care of one and went in search of the other. Derek was in the kitchen, making tea.
“Okay,” he said, in a conciliatory tone. “Why don’t we just rewind and make this the start of the day? Just ignore that messy bit earlier?”
And just like that I kept going. Maybe he reminded me too much of Gareth in that moment, Gareth who liked everything so tidy and squared away that he made a hot mess like Olivier look like a great choice for a rebound. “Which bit?” I said. “The bit where I’m apparently an overweight baby who needs you to lurk in toilets and plan my career for me?”
Derek stared at me, looking almost as appalled as I was with myself in that moment. The teabag he had been squeezing dropped back into the cup. “Oh my God, Toby,” he said. “What is wrong with you today?”
I shrugged. “Lovehandles and self-doubt?”
“I like your lovehandles. They’re cuddly.”
“So I’m fat?”
Derek let out a short scream of frustration.
“Yeah, that’s helpful,” I said.
“I wasn’t trying to be.”
“Well, that much is obvious. Don’t try to plan my life, Derek. Seriously. Because I will not respond well.”
“I wasn’t…” He raked his hands through his hair, sighed and then reached out to me. “I was just saying to one of my colleagues in the shadow cabinet that I love you just the way you are, and that I don’t want you dragged into all the filth and muck of Westminster. Okay?”
He was being perfectly reasonable, which made me feel worse. “Okay,” I said, and tried to get my head together. “Listen, I’m going to have to get going because I’m going to need to pick up a suit from home…”
“No, I know. You don’t have one here yet.”
Yet. He was right, because there was something wrong with me. Some snarling, monstrous part of my brain glommed onto that ‘yet’ and ran with it. “Yet?” I heard myself saying. “So what? You think I’m trying to move in with you now? You think I’m trying to get my feet under the table?”
“No,” he said. “Jesus Christ, Toby. What the fuck? I can’t say anything right this morning, can I?”
“Apparently not,” I said, and stomped off to the bathroom. What the hell was going on? Why was I suddenly this unable to communicate? I was capable of persuading people to masturbate to stories about cephalopods and yet somehow I couldn’t seem to reply to a simple question like ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ without going all Bruce Banner about it. It was true that I was never at my best before my normal morning fix of tea so tannic you could use it to scour a sewer pipe, but this was absurd. And forget telling him that I was going to see Cerys. There was no way that would have gone well in my present mood.
My toothbrush was not where I left it. I searched for it in vain, my internal rage dial quickly flying past Bruce Banner, leaving the Hulk in the dust and edging dangerously towards flashing bright orange section of the dial labelled ‘Donald Trump’.
“Where the fuck is my fucking toothbrush?” I said, throwing open the bathroom door.
Derek, who had been packing some clean things for the trip, looked up. “Oh,” he said. “I threw it out.”
I blinked insanely at him for several seconds. “You threw out my toothbrush?” I said. “Why? Did it clash with the toilet paper holder or something?”
He stood up, squared his shoulders and stared me down, absolutely unafraid and clearly very, very sick of my shit. “It was old,” he said. “And worn out.” He nudged past me into the bathroom. “I got you this instead.” Derek reached into the medicine cabinet and took out an electric toothbrush head. “It’s a spare head for mine. See? It’s got a little green band at the bottom so you know it’s yours. Green, like your name. Yours is green, mine’s red. What could be easier to remember?”
I held my hand over my mouth for a long moment, horrified by my behaviour.
“Oh God,” I said, managing to get a hold of myself. “Forgive me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.”
My eyes were stinging. He put his arms around me and I clung to him almost frantically, breathing in the warm smell of his skin and hair, disgusted with myself for everything I’d said. “I’m so sorry.”
He kissed the top of my head. “You’ve had a hell of a week, Toby. We both have.”
“I have. We have.”
I looked up, marvelling at his understanding. The morning sun was streaming through the frosted glass of the bathroom window, lighting up the faded freckles across his nose and turning his hair to bright fire. He cupped my face in his long fingered hands and kissed me, close-lipped but still tender.
“We’re going to go to a beautiful hotel,” he said. “In a beautiful city. And we’re going to eat and drink and have fun, and get completely pissed.”
“Are you allowed to get completely pissed while you have a concussion?” I asked. I’m sure I’d seen something about avoiding alcohol on the NHS website.
“Probably not, but it’s a free bar.”
“Oh, well. That is kind of asking for trouble.”
He kissed me again. “Are we okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, because it didn’t feel like the right time to tell him that I didn’t really have an appointment at the Guardian this morning and that I’d actually booked a session with his favourite professional dominatrix. Was there ever a right time to tell someone that? I’d been searching for the right moment for over forty-eight hours now and I hadn’t come across it yet.
And now I was out of time.
*
The bondage dungeon did not look the way I’d pictured it. I’d imagined a lot of red and black PVC and sordid lighting, but Cerys’s den of depravity almost looked as though it could have been a dance studio. There was one bare brick wall, but the others were painted stark white and one was dominated by a huge, gilt-edged mirror. The floors were that kind of distressed hardwood beloved by people who loved to put lumps of bleached driftwood on every available surface and serve cocktails in old jam jars. Then I looked up.
There were ropes hanging from the ceiling.
At one end of the room was a stark, modernist four poster bed, and a chair that looked like a dentist’s chair but I knew wasn’t used for pulling teeth. In one corner was a cage, the recent residence of a viscount, I guessed.
“Nice, innit?” said Cerys, her four inch heels ringing on the hardwood. “I know it’s unusual, but I didn’t want a red room. Not after…well…you know.”
“I know.” It didn’t do to mention Fifty Shades of Grey to Cerys. Not unless you wanted to annoy her, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to annoy someone who was just about to work you over with a spanking paddle. “Oh my God. Am I really about to do this?”
“I’ll be very gentle with you,” she said, leading me over to the big bed.
“I’m not sure I deserve that.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
I sat down on the bed beside her and sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. I woke up in a mood and took it out on Derek. He said it was probably because I’m stressed and he’s probably right. I mean, Jesus Christ, Cerys. I started the week feeling like Daniel in the lion’s den at the Tory Party Conference, then Derek decides to wrap his car around a tree and I spent Wednesday and Thursday watching him obsessively for signs of serious brain injury. I’m used to getting up at two o’clock in the afternoon and maybe writing a blog post or banging out another thousand words of pornography. And the latter is usually heavily dependent on whether I can actually be bothered to masturbate. I don’t know if I’m quite cut out for life in the political fast lane.”
“You didn’t leave the house like that, did you?” she said. “In the middle of a row?”
“No. Why do you ask? Are you planning on killing me?”
She laughed and slid a suitcase from under the bed. I wanted to tell her that I hadn’t told him about this, but she had opened the case and my curiosity overwhelmed me.
“Right,” she said, taking out what looked like a feather duster. “I thought we could start with some sense play and work our way up to some light spanking.”
I let out a nervous laugh. “This is really happening, isn’t it?”
“Hold out your hand.”
She dusted the back of my hand, then turned it palm up and trailed the feathers over the inside of my wrist. It felt silly and pointless, and in that moment I wanted to laugh, shake my head and say this really wasn’t for me and that this had all been a mistake, but then I spotted something hanging over the side of the suitcase. It looked like the suede cat-o-nine tails thing I’d found in Derek’s bondage drawer, and once again I felt the desire to know more. “What’s that?” I asked.
“Flogger,” said Cerys, taking it out to show me. The strips felt soft, softer than they looked. “The soft suede’s very popular with beginners. Gives you a nice little glow but not too hardcore.”
“Are you going to use that on me?”
“If you want me to. I should be very clear about that; you don’t do anything you don’t want to do down here, all right? I know people have the idea that bondage is about people screaming for mercy, but it’s all theatrics. It’s all consensual. Everything is agreed before the scene.”
“Right,” I said, stroking the strips of the flogger and trying to imagine using such a thing on Derek. To my immense surprise I felt something dark and hungry stir within me. “Safe words and such. Red, yellow, green.”
“Ah, you did your homework,” said Cerys, looking pleased. “Is that all right with you? We’ll go with that if you understand the system. Green is carry on, yellow is slow down–”
“–and red is stop,” I said. “Yeah.” I handed back the flogger, my heart beating skittishly in the bottom of my throat.
“We’ll work our way up to that,” she said. “And see where we go from there. I thought maybe a little open handed spanking and then we’ll see if you want any more.”
I might have once laughed at the idea of wanting more pain, but something strange was going on my head. I think I was actually looking forward to it. Some kind of male bravado thing had kicked in, spurred on by something altogether weirder and much more beguiling. My head was full of Derek’s long, lean thighs, filling in the blanks about how he might flinch under a flogger and the sounds he’d make when it struck him.
“Pop your clothes off,” she said, as though she were a doctor. “You did wear a thong, didn’t you?”
“Yes. And you’re not allowed to mention the lovehandles.”
“Oh, believe me, I’ve seen a lot worse,” she said, as I peeled off my shirt. “There’s a blindfold there if you want it. A lot of people find it a lot more sensual if you wear one. Builds up the anticipation. I’ll be back in a minute.”
I picked up the blindfold. It was a black satin eye mask a bit like the one Derek had used that first time in my bed, and this time the picture in my head had all the details filled in. Because I’d been there. Inside him. I stretched out on the bed, face down, conscious that I was actually starting to get hard. What the hell? Was I into this?
Cerys’s heels rang out on the wooden floor as she approached. The skin around my balls tightened and my stomach felt fluttery. “Right,” she said, and I felt the feather on the skin of my back, brushing lightly and tickling over my folded upper arms. Baby’s first bondage. “How’s that?”
“Tickly. Quite pleasant, actually.”
“Okay. Good. Pay attention to the sensations, because what we’re going to do is wake your skin up. Stimulate all the nerve endings so that you’re really aware of every touch. That’s what’s going to make it really nice and intense for you.”
Does Derek like this? I felt the feather on the backs of my knees, brushing up the back of my thighs. I kept picturing him in this room, but of course he wasn’t messing around with feather dusters. No, he’d have been into the hard stuff, the stuff that meant black leather straps tight on his white skin, or ropes around wrists and ankles. I had a vivid mental picture of him standing in my doorway, adjusting the French cuffs of his ivory shirt. Perhaps to conceal a rope burn.
I felt a scratch on my back and gasped.
“Okay?” said Cerys. “That’s my fingernails.” She sounded like someone else, distant, and professional.
“Yeah. That’s fine. Thank you.” I was relieved to be lying on my front because there was no concealing the effect she was having on me. Me, a gold star gay who had had his first proper wank to the men’s underwear section of Kays Catalogue.
Or maybe it was him. He wasn’t even in the room, but he may as well have been. He was the reason I was here, after all. As her fingernails raked my back – leaving tingling trails in their wake – all I could think of was how she must have left marks on his pale skin whenever she did this to him.
“Would you like to try the flogger now?” she said, as if she were suggesting a wine.
“Yeah. Do it.”
“Okay. We’re just going to go gentle on your back now. Never here, by the way.” I felt her hand on my lower back. “Just a quick safety tip. Your kidneys are very close to the surface.”
I was about to say that evolution probably should have handled that better, but then I heard a swish and the flogger landed on the back of one shoulder. Initially it felt like nothing, but about a second later it started to sting, with a glowing sensation that radiated outward from the spot where she’d hit me.
“All right?” she said.
“Yes. Again.”
This time she got me on the other shoulder. The stinging, ringing sensation spread, and I was acutely aware of my own vulnerability and the bare expanses of flesh I was offering up for abuse. Once again he was with me, in spirit if not in body, and already I could imagine how this might feel with him and me and my whole body alive with pain and pleasure. I had the impression of an intensity that took my breath away, and with the next stroke the air left my lungs in a moaning gasp that was so embarrassingly, frankly sexual that I immediately apologised.
“It’s all right,” said Cerys. “You can scream in here if you want to. Unless you’d like a gag? Then we’ll have to go through hand signals instead of safe words…”
“No, it’s okay. Carry on.” I bit my lip hard as the next blow landed. The stinging sensation built and lingered, building up tension. “I think I’m getting it.”
“It’s good, innit?” she said, sounding like herself again instead of a professional. “You get the whole body going. Like you’re one big erogenous zone.”
“I always meant to–” Ow. Oh God. “–ask you. Do you do this for fun? Or do you knock off work and go home and have missionary sex with the lights out, just for a change of pace?”
She laughed and hit me again. “No, I love it. What is it they say? Do something you love and you’ll never do a day’s work in your life.”
“Something like th-aaaaat. Ow. Ow….ow.”
“Traffic lights, remember?”
“I know,” I said. “I’m all right. It’s just weird. It’s like it hurts but then as it fades it starts to feel really satisfying, like a deep tissue massage or something. I think I can see why he wants me to do this to him.”
“And are you okay with that?”
She got me again across the shoulders and this time the noise that burst from my lips was utterly obscene, a sound of supplication straight out of The Story of O. My mind was whirling with the sounds of flogger on flesh – my flesh – and my dick was more than into this.
“I don’t know,” I said, when I got my breath back. “Seeing him all bashed up like that from the car accident scared the…oh my God.”
Her nails scraped over my arse, and I was astonished to find myself rising to meet her touch. I had a clear and vivid picture of Derek on his knees on the bed, but not this bed. His own bed, where anything could happen and often did. He was naked, his head down and his knees apart, his upper back red from a flogger, his bum all but waving in anticipation of my hand.
“You’re liking this, aren’t you?” asked Cerys, sounding amused.
“I am,” I said, relieved to defuse some of the tension with a laugh. It felt deeply strange to be this aroused in front of her. “What the fuck?”
“You were saying,” she said, and I felt her trail the flogger over the burning skin of my back. “With the car accident.”
“Yeah. He looked so breakable. I didn’t think I could bring myself to hurt him, but this isn’t…this is a different kind of pain.”
“It is,” she said. “Are you ready?”
“For what?”
Her hand came down on my arse. I let out a yelp, astonished at the force of the blow.
“Right,” she said. “Red, yellow, green?”
“Green. I think? Oh my God.”
She spanked me again and I could hardly believe it. I was rock hard, my head full of Derek. Once again I saw him on the bed, imagined the sounds coming out of my mouth were falling from his open lips, ringing off his bedroom walls. I wanted him so much that it was almost physically painful.
“Harder,” I said, and she hesitated.
“What do we say?” she said, and this time her voice was low but oh so firm. This was her dominatrix voice.
“Harder, please…mistress.”
She hit me again and this time I felt tears in my eyes behind the blindfold. It was like she’d just jarred them loose with a blow. I was sobbing silently but I was still holding up my arse for more.
“You want to try the small paddle?” she said.
“God, yes. Do it.”
It landed square in the middle of my right buttock, making me howl. I was crying out loud now, but I didn’t want to stop. My whole body felt like it was singing and screaming all at once.
“Red, yellow, green?” she said.
“Green. So green.” Like the toothbrush head. He’d given me a toothbrush head. What a fucking stupid thing to get so emotional about, but I couldn’t seem to stop. I was aroused and appalled and grateful and mortified all at once, bawling messily into the bed sheets, unable to believe I could feel this many emotions all at once.
“Okay,” she said, after another two strokes with the paddle, each one jarring ever louder torrents of snot and tears from my face. “You’ve done ever so well.”
I reached for the blindfold and pulled it off. Thankfully my erection had wilted, but it was as if every single stress and strain of the past week had come pouring out of my tear ducts at once. Therapy, Derek had said. He wasn’t joking.
“Oh God,” I said, my hands shaking. “I can’t…I can’t stop fucking crying.”
“It’s all right now, Lovey. It’s all done.” She picked up a folded fur blanket from a chair beside the bed and wrapped it around me with a marvellous, almost motherly tenderness. “You were an absolute champ. How do you feel?”
“Like…” I wiped my face on the back of my arm. Cerys, who seemed to have thought of everything, handed me a box of tissues. I blew my nose and tried to get a grip on myself. “I feel like a sentient form of jelly. Oh my God. Is it always like this?”
“It can get very intense, yeah.”
“And this is what he likes?”
“He does like a paddling, yes.” She patted me on the shoulder. “He’s going to be so proud of you.”
“You think?” I wasn’t sure any more. I’d tried to dismiss my feelings of jealousy on the grounds that Derek and Cerys had never had sex, but the whole experience had been so very erotic that I was once more confused. Or at least I would be confused – I could sense that later I would be – but right now I felt quiet and sore, feeling so much of the outside of my body that the inside of my head felt serenely empty.
“I don’t know what to make of it all,” I said. “I feel very strange. Disconnected, somehow.”
“That’s the adrenaline,” she said, and got up off the bed. “Here. I’ll make you a nice cup of sweet tea. Good for shock.”
“I don’t take sugar,” I said, as she walked away, her four inch heels ringing on the wooden floor.
“You do now.”
“Right,” I said. “Yes, Mistress.”
*
I felt light and shaky all the way back to Ealing.
“Oh, good,” said Derek, as he opened the door. “You’re here. Are you okay to drive, because I might still be a bit…” He saw my face and frowned. “Toby? What’s wrong? Have you been crying?”
He ushered me in and I drifted through the house until I came to a stop in the dining room. I didn’t want to sit down, for obvious reasons.
“I have to tell you something,” I said, in a tone that I’m sure made him think that the next sentence was going to feature the words ‘tumour’ or ‘inoperable’.
“What?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, exactly.” Oh, this was hard. Was it infidelity? It felt like it. “I went to see Cerys. In a…in a professional context. I was curious.”
He seemed to relax a little, but when he spoke there was a chill in his voice. “I see.”
“I’ll be honest,” I said, unsure if my knees were going to hold me up for much longer. “I was aroused. But I only thought of you. All the way through…”
Derek came closer, and as he did I thought I recognised the look in his eyes. It was the same expression he’d worn last night when he was telling me to sit down and watch, and just like before turned me on like a light, made me want to place myself in his hands and let his imagination lead the way.
“Did you come?” he said. My butt hit the edge of the dining room table and I winced slightly. I think he saw it, because there was a predatory gleam in his eye.
“No,” I said.
“What did she do to you?”
“Floggers,” I said. He was close enough to kiss now; I felt his breath on my lips. “Spanking.”
There. There it was again. That gleam. And now I felt I knew what it meant, because it was the same heady mixture of lust and jealousy I’d felt when I was I was picturing the things Cerys had done to Derek. Things I wanted to do to him.
“I asked for the paddle,” I said, both afraid and excited by my own power in that moment. I could see I was getting to him. I could see he wanted nothing more than to close the gap of inches between us, kiss me hard and deep and bend me back against the dining room table, but he was holding back.
“Turn around,” he said. “And drop your trousers.”
I hesitated, looking out at the extension, a sheer wall of glass between us and the neighbour’s back garden. It was a bright, clear autumn day, the kind where someone might venture outside to hang the washing, accidentally peer down and get an eyeful.
“Do it,” he said, quietly but with an emphasis that turned my spine soft.
My cock, on the other hand, felt like bone. I dropped my trousers and underwear, letting him see how hard I was before I turned towards the window. Exposed. Indecent.
“Bend over,” he said. “Hands on the table. I want to look at your bruises.”
I did as I was told, reminded of the first time in his office when he’d bent me over his desk and slapped my arse. I could hear him breathing hard behind me. His fingers were gentle at first, brushing over my sensitive skin like Cerys’s feather, but then his hands came down to cup my cheeks and roughly pull them apart, so that I heard myself let out a cry, part pain, part dismay and partly whatever black, hungry impulse it was that had set my brain on fire in the dungeon.
He rubbed a thumb over my arsehole and I instinctively flinched upwards, but then his other hand came down in the middle of my back and I found myself face down on the dining room table. My glasses skidded across the tabletop and came to rest against the side of a tissue box.
“It’s all right,” he said, his voice suddenly gentle. “I’m not going to fuck you.”
A strange whimper came out of my mouth. I was so hard and so desperate that I thought I was going to pass out, but then I heard him unbuckle behind me. I stayed down, my arse in the air, my cock untouched, picturing his fingers curling around his flesh the way the way they had last night. I heard him spit in his hand and then I heard the unmistakable sound of a wet hand on a dick.
I saw something move outside and froze, thinking that any minute now someone was going to walk past and look in. I tried to say something, but my throat didn’t seem to want to work and besides, he was going at it behind me. His breathing was already coming in those fast hitches that said he was close, and as his breath snagged and stuttered on a moan I looked up and saw that the only thing moving outside was that stupid black and white cat.
“Oh God,” said Derek, and I felt him splatter hot across my arse. His sticky hand came down on my hip and he pulled me in. My breathing slowed in sympathy with his, even though I was still unsatisfied.
“Pass me a tissue,” he said, and I reached out and grabbed a couple from the box.
He wiped me clean and told me to stand up and turn around.
I did as I was told, shuffling with my trousers around my ankles. He was flushed and still wild-eyed, but I had a feeling the game wasn’t over yet.
“Now clean my cock,” he said.
I held his gaze as I took the tissue from him. Then I dropped it on the floor, smiling at his brief consternation.
Then I knelt. Clearly he wasn’t expecting that, but he wasn’t the only one with a dirty mind around here. I licked him clean until he was wincing and holding himself steady on the edge of the table. “All right,” he said. “That’s enough now. On your feet.”
I got up. This time he took hold of me, and I gasped with relief at the touch of his hand. “Shh,” he said, kissing me slow and deep, like he was lapping the taste of himself out of my mouth. His hand stroked me closer and closer to the edge, but this time I wasn’t done with the game.
“Please,” I said, holding myself back with some difficulty. “Please may I come now, sir?”
His smile lit up the room. Pure delight. “Yes, my darling,” he said. “Yes, you may.”