Short story · Role play
Seven years in, Laura and Tom decide to play with power – properly prepared, with lists, safewords and a dress that creaks every time she moves.
Laura had brought out a lined notepad and a pencil, and that was what made Tom laugh.
‘You look like you’re about to cross-examine me,’ he said.
‘I’m about to negotiate with you. There’s a difference.’
She was thirty-five and worked as a court interpreter, and she had an occupational hazard she called respect for words: she didn’t believe in things nobody had said out loud. It was Sunday morning, rain was running down the kitchen window and the coffee had gone lukewarm. Tom sat across from her in the old knitted jumper he refused to throw away, his hair sticking up from the shower. He was thirty-six, a sound engineer at a theatre, and used to people giving him instructions in the dark. That was actually how it had started – a half-joking remark one evening in the spring, when she had told him to lie still and he had, and they had both noticed the air in the bedroom change.
Ever since, it had been lying there between them. A fantasy neither of them quite dared pick up.
Laura drew three columns on the pad. Yes. Maybe. No.
‘Let’s start with the easy bit,’ she said. ‘What is it you want? Not what you think I want to hear.’
Tom turned his mug round once on the table.
‘I want you to be in charge. Of the pace, mostly. That I’m not allowed to rush. That I have to wait for permission.’ He fell quiet, then gave a crooked smile. ‘And I want to see you in something that makes a noise when you walk.’
‘A noise?’
‘Vinyl. You know. That sound.’
She wrote ‘vinyl’ in the yes column and drew a little star next to it. He saw it and went red, which she liked more than she was prepared to admit.
‘And no?’
‘Nothing that really hurts. No nasty words – I don’t want you calling me names. And nothing round my neck.’
She wrote. The pencil scratched against the paper.
‘My no’s,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to have to be mean. I can be firm, but I don’t want to play someone who despises you. And I don’t want it rushed. If I’m taking charge, I want time to enjoy it.’
‘Sounds like a reasonable employer.’
‘I’m a fantastic employer.’
They both laughed, and then there was a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable at all. Laura put the pencil down.
‘Safewords,’ she said. ‘Yellow means slow down, check in. Red means everything stops, straight away, no discussion and nobody sulking. If you can’t speak, you tap three times on me or on the bed.’
‘And if you want to stop?’
‘Then I say the same thing. It works both ways.’
Tom nodded slowly. He reached across the table and took the pencil from her hand, underlined ‘red’ and wrote ‘always applies’ next to it. His handwriting leaned forward as if the words were late for something.
‘Right, then I’m ordering a dress,’ said Laura.
The parcel arrived on Wednesday. Laura opened it in the bedroom with the door shut and didn’t call him in until she had it on.
It was a short, sleeveless dress in black vinyl, tight over the bust and waist and then flaring into a skirt that stopped a good way above the knee. It smelled new, a little sharp, like a raincoat that had never been outside. When she twisted her hips in front of the mirror, the skirt threw the light back in long glossy stripes, and the fabric gave a low, dry creak, like leather but brighter.
The zip ran down the middle of the back and she couldn’t get it all the way up.
‘Tom.’
He came in and stopped in the doorway. There was something in his face she had never quite seen before – as if he had walked into the wrong room and decided to stay.
‘Zip me up,’ she said, without turning round.
He came and stood behind her. She watched him in the mirror, saw him hesitate with his fingers against her bare back before he took hold of the zip and drew it upwards, tooth by tooth, so slowly she heard every single one. When he had finished, he let his hands rest at her waist. The vinyl was cool under his palms and turned warm almost at once.
‘I didn’t say you could touch me,’ she said softly.
He took his hands away. Breathed out through his nose. Their eyes met in the mirror, and she saw that he was smiling.
‘Friday,’ she said. ‘Eight o’clock. You lay the table, you cook, and then you wait for me in the living room.’
‘And then?’
‘What happens then is none of your business.’
She took the dress off herself once he had gone, and hung it on a hanger on the wardrobe door, where it stayed for two days, gleaming every time either of them walked past.
On Friday he had made risotto and set out two candles, and he had swapped the knitted jumper for a black shirt she had once said she liked. He had heard her in the bathroom for half an hour – the water, the hairdryer, a drawer opening and closing – and now he sat on the sofa with his hands on his knees like a man in a waiting room, trying not to look towards the hall.
He heard her before he saw her. The creak. A light, rhythmic sound with every step, and beneath it the click of her heels on the floor.
She had put her hair up and painted her lips dark. The dress fitted the way it had in the mirror, but by candlelight it was something else: it caught the flames and carried them with her when she moved, and the skirt swung round her thighs as if it had a will of its own. She stopped in front of him, so close his knees almost brushed hers.
‘The colours,’ she said.
‘Yellow. Red.’
‘Good.’
They said nothing more about it than that. But she held his gaze a second longer, and he nodded, as if to say he was here and meant it, and only then did she let herself sink into the role, like sinking into a warm bath.
‘Stand up.’
He stood. She walked slowly all the way round him, and he caught her perfume mixing with the faint, clean plastic smell of the vinyl. She unbuttoned his shirt one button at a time, from behind, her arms round him and her breasts pressed against his back. The dress was cool through the shirt and he shivered.
‘You’re breathing too fast,’ she whispered against the back of his neck.
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t say sorry. Breathe slower.’
He tried. She pulled off his shirt and let it drop. Her nails ran down his back, lightly, and he had to clench his jaw not to turn round and grab her. That was the game, he realised – not that she was in charge, but that he wanted and held back. Every second he kept his hands still was charged with everything they wanted to do.
She led him to the bedroom with two fingers hooked in his belt loop. There he had to undress the rest of the way while she sat on the edge of the bed with her legs crossed and watched. She said nothing about his body, just looked, and that was more than enough; he felt seen in a way that both burned and soothed.
‘On your knees.’
The rug was soft under his knees. She put one leg over his shoulder, and the skirt fell to the side and revealed that she had nothing on underneath. He heard himself catch his breath.
‘You can use your mouth,’ she said. ‘Not your hands.’
He kissed the inside of her knee, then a little higher, and she let him take the time he wanted – no, he corrected himself, the time she wanted; she kept her hand in his hair and steered him with small, precise movements, up, to the side, still. She tasted salty and warm. When he found the right spot she moaned low, and the vinyl creaked as she leaned back on her elbows, and he thought he would never be able to hear that sound again without getting hard.
‘Slower,’ she breathed. ‘There. Stay there.’
He stayed there. Her thighs began to tremble against his cheeks, and she pulled him closer with her heel against his back, and when she came she did it silently, her whole body taut and one hand clenched hard in the duvet. He kept still through it, the way she had taught him, until she relaxed and pushed his head away with a light press against his forehead.
She lay there a while, breathing. Then she sat up and smiled at him, and it was a smile that belonged to her, not the role, and he loved her so much it ached somewhere behind his ribs.
‘Up on the bed,’ she said. ‘On your back. Arms above your head.’
He lay down. She straddled his stomach, and the skirt spread over him like black water. She took his wrists and placed them against the headboard, not hard, just firmly.
‘They stay there until I say otherwise. Understood?’
‘Understood.’
She reached for the bedside table and took the bottle of lube, the water-based one they always used, and warmed a dollop between her palms before she took him in her hand. He strained upwards into her hand and she let go of him at once.
‘Still.’
He sank back. She started again, and this time he didn’t move, though it was almost impossible; her hand was slick and warm and she moved it with a kind of indifferent slowness, as if she had all the time in the world and he was just something she happened to be holding. It was the most arousing thing he had ever experienced.
Then she raised herself and lowered herself onto him, a little at a time, and stopped halfway.
‘Look at me.’
He looked. She was dark against the light from the hall, glossy, with a loose strand of hair across her cheek. She took him the rest of the way in a single breath and they moaned at the same time.
She rode him slowly, her hands on his chest. Every movement made the skirt rustle and the vinyl sing against his hips, and she kept the rhythm herself, stopping when he began to meet her from below, carrying on when he lay still. He gripped the headboard so hard his knuckles went white. The heat crept up through him, faster than he wanted, and he felt himself starting to tip towards the edge.
‘Yellow,’ he said.
She stopped immediately. Not a single movement. She leaned forward and laid her hand against his cheek, and her voice was different now, her ordinary one.
‘Hey. What’s going on?’
‘Nothing bad.’ He gave a breathless laugh. ‘I’m just too close. I don’t want it to be over yet.’
She smiled, and he saw the relief in her eyes, and then he watched her step back into the role, like putting on a coat.
‘Then it’s a good thing you’re not the one in charge,’ she said.
She sat perfectly still on him, with him deep inside her, and waited. She stroked his chest, his arms, up towards his wrists, and let him breathe. The rain drummed on the windowsill. A car went by in the street below and its lights slid across the ceiling. When she felt his breathing settle, she began to move again, even slower now, in small circles that were more for her than for him. She slipped her own hand down between them and touched herself, and he was allowed to watch but not to help, and it was almost more than he could bear.
‘Now,’ she said at last, her voice thick. ‘Now you can touch me.’
He took her by the waist, over the slippery vinyl, and pulled her down against him, and she let him. She came first, her forehead against his shoulder and making a sound he would carry with him for days, and he followed her only seconds later, his arms tight round her and his face buried in her neck.
Afterwards they lay for a long time without saying anything. The dress had grown warm and damp against her skin and she asked him to undo the zip, and he did it just as slowly as the first time, though for a different reason now.
She fetched two glasses of water and a towel. He lay on his side and watched her as she came back naked across the room.
‘How was it?’ she said. ‘Honestly.’
He thought about it. She liked that, that he didn’t answer straight away.
‘The best bit was when I said yellow,’ he said. ‘That you stopped. That it worked. It felt like I could let go of everything else because I knew we could stop.’
She crawled in beside him and pulled the duvet over them both.
‘For me it was you not moving your hands,’ she said. ‘I knew you wanted to.’
‘I wanted to very much.’
‘I know. That was the point.’
On Saturday morning she stood in the bathroom washing the dress by hand in lukewarm water with a mild detergent, wiped it down with a lint-free cloth and laid it flat on a towel to dry, inside out first. He appeared in the doorway with two mugs of coffee and stopped.
‘You know you look like you’re planning the next time,’ he said.
She took a mug from his hand without looking up.
‘Fetch the notepad,’ she said.
Short story · Couples
Kate and Tom have been together for fourteen years and still find it easier to laugh in bed than almost anyone they know. Tonight they’re opening the parcel they bought together three weeks ago.
Short story · Couples
Lucy and James have been together for nine years and know almost everything about each other. Almost. A dinner in a foreign city, a little magnet under her dress and a word that means stop.
Short story · Couples
Oliver has been reading about the prostate. A lot. He even has a folder. Now he wants to find out what it is he can almost reach – together with Matt.
