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.
The risotto had gone wrong again. It was practically a tradition by now. Tom stood at the hob, wooden spoon in hand, staring down into the pan with the same expression he’d worn fourteen years ago, when he’d tried to impress a landscape architect he’d met at a friend’s thirtieth and served her something that mostly resembled porridge with parmesan.
‘It’s perfect,’ said Kate from the kitchen table.
‘It’s gluey.’
‘It’s perfectly gluey. It’s exactly as gluey as the first time. That’s romantic, Tom. You’ve preserved something.’
He laughed and spooned it onto two plates anyway. Rain lashed the kitchen window in long, slanting streaks, and down in the street the buses hissed past on wet tyres. They’d lit candles in his grandmother’s old candlesticks and laid the table with the good glasses that only came out for the big birthdays. In the middle of the table, propped against the salt cellar, sat a small parcel wrapped in brown paper. The label said, in two different hands: TO BE OPENED ON THE ANNIVERSARY. NOT BEFORE. (THIS MEANS YOU, TOM.)
They’d bought it together one Sunday evening three weeks ago, lying in bed with the laptop between them and a bag of liquorice, and it had taken two hours. Not because choosing was hard, but because they kept getting sidetracked reading things out loud to each other. Kate had read a review in a grave voice, as if she were reading the news, and Tom had laughed so hard he got hiccups. In the end they’d settled on a We-Vibe Sync O. It was the O that clinched it. Kate had owned a different model years ago, one that slipped out every time they changed position, and Tom had spent a good part of one holiday hunting for it in a hotel sheet.
‘This one’s apparently meant to stay put on its own,’ she’d said, pointing at the screen. ‘It’s got a loop instead of a clip.’
‘A loop,’ he’d said. ‘Like a bond of trust.’
‘Like a loop, Tom.’
Now she sat turning the parcel between her fingers while he ate his risotto with ostentatious relish.
‘You know it’s charged,’ she said. ‘I charged it yesterday. The cable attaches with magnets. It makes a little click. I stood in the bathroom clicking it on and off for five minutes.’
‘You opened it? Before the anniversary?’
‘I opened the box. I didn’t open the mood. There’s a difference.’
He put down his fork and looked at her over the candles. She’d turned forty-one in January and had grey at her temples now, which she’d stopped colouring in the spring, and it did something to her face that he still hadn’t got used to, as if she’d become more herself. She met his eyes and stopped turning the parcel.
‘Shall we skip pudding?’ he said.
‘We haven’t got any pudding.’
‘That makes it easy, then.’
The bedroom was cool. They’d forgotten to shut the window, still open a crack, and the rain was louder in here, a steady hiss against the metal of the sill. Tom didn’t close it. He switched on the lamp on the chest of drawers and dimmed it until the room was golden and half-dark.
Kate sat on the edge of the bed with the parcel in her lap and tore off the paper. Inside lay the little vibrator in its cotton pouch, green and soft, and a remote that fitted perfectly in the palm of a hand. Tom sat down behind her and rested his chin on her shoulder.
‘So that one,’ he said, ‘is already paired with that one.’
‘Straight out of the box. You don’t need an app. I read that.’
‘You read the manual.’
‘I read the manual twice, and then I read it once more in bed last night while you were asleep, and there are things in it you don’t know. For instance, the toy itself has just one button. One press turns it on, and then you cycle through ten patterns. But if you want to change the intensity, you need the remote.’
‘So whoever has the remote decides.’
She turned her head and looked at him.
‘Whoever has the remote suggests. The other one decides.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said, and kissed the nape of her neck, where her hair began.
She leant back against him. He took it slowly, the way he always had, unbuttoning her blouse from the top and kissing every bit of skin that appeared, her shoulder, her shoulder blade, her spine. His hands were warm from the washing-up water. She felt herself soften, felt the day loosen its grip on her muscles, the meetings and the emails and the drawing that had to be finished by Monday. She turned in his arms and pulled his jumper over his head, and when he came out the other side his hair was standing on end and she started to laugh.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. You look like you did when we met.’
‘Confused?’
‘Hopeful.’
They helped each other with the rest of their clothes, and it wasn’t elegant, it never was. One of his socks landed on the lamp and they had to get up and take it down before it started to smell of burning. She lay on her back on the duvet and he lay on his side next to her, stroking his palm over her stomach, her hip, the inside of her thigh, lightly, again and again, until she began to move against his hand.
The lube was on the bedside table. That was new too. The manual had said not to use silicone-based lube with the toy, and their usual one was silicone-based, so they’d bought a bottle of pjur Aqua at the same time. Tom squeezed a little into his hand and warmed it between his fingers.
‘Shall I?’
‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘I want to see how it works.’
She took the Sync O and held it for a moment, weighing it, gently bending the inner loop so that it folded in on itself the way the manual showed. She slid it in slowly, knees drawn up, and he watched her with a tenderness that had nothing to do with sex, or that had everything to do with it. She let go and felt the loop unfold inside her, felt the outer part settle into place against her clitoris.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘It’s staying put. It just stays. It’s sitting exactly where it should.’
She pressed the button. It woke with a soft pulse, and she drew a breath through her teeth.
‘Well?’
‘Stop saying well.’
She handed him the remote. He looked at it as though he’d been given a royal commission.
‘You tell me,’ he said.
‘I always tell you.’
It was true. It was one of the things he loved most about her. She had never faked it, not once in fourteen years, and she’d taught him to ask instead of guess. He pressed it up a notch and watched her face change, her lips parting, her hips lifting slightly off the mattress.
‘Another?’
‘Another.’
He moved over her, up on his elbows, and she took him in her hand and guided him in, slowly, and they both went still and held their breath. The vibration was everywhere now. It was in her, and it was in him through her, a deep hum that ran straight up his spine, and he lost his breath and said a word that wasn’t a word.
‘You too?’ she whispered.
‘Me too. God. Me too.’
They moved slowly. There was no hurry. The rain drummed on the windowsill and their breathing grew heavier, and she held him round the back and felt his muscles working under his skin. She said his name. He kissed her and said hers. He was still holding the remote in one hand, against the pillow beside her head, and when she nodded he turned it up again.
Then she wanted to be on top. She told him with a nudge to his shoulder, and they rolled over in a tangle of arms and duvet, and she straddled him with her hands on his chest. The Sync O stayed where it was. It hadn’t moved a millimetre. She started laughing in sheer surprise.
‘It’s staying put,’ she said. ‘Tom. It’s staying put.’
‘Told you. A loop. Like a bond of trust.’
‘Where’s the remote?’
Silence. He patted the sheet with his hand. The pillow. Under the pillow.
‘It was here a second ago.’
‘Tom.’
‘It was here. It was in my hand. Then we rolled over.’
She stayed on top of him and laughed so much she had to hold on to the headboard. He searched blindly through the duvet with one arm, underneath himself, beside himself, and she could feel him shaking with laughter too, inside her, and it was so absurd and so intimate at the same time that her eyes filled with tears.
‘Wait,’ she said, ‘I’ve got the button. I can change the pattern from here.’
‘But not the intensity.’
‘But not the intensity. But I can find that pattern from before. It was three, I think. Or four.’
She pressed. The new pattern was a jerky, bouncing staccato that made them both jump. She pressed again. Something slow and rolling, like the tide. Again. Something fast and insistent that was rather reminiscent of an electric toothbrush.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not that one, not that one.’
‘I’m counting! You’re putting me off my count!’
She got to ten and started again at one, and on the third press it came back, the deep, slow pulsing from before, and she closed her eyes and stopped laughing. She began to move again. He stopped searching. He put both hands on her hips and looked up at her, at the laughter still lingering at the corners of her mouth and the seriousness returning to her eyes, and thought he had never seen anything more beautiful, and he thought that every time, and it was true every time.
She leant down and kissed him. She moved more slowly, more deeply, and he met her. The vibration grew between them even though nobody touched any buttons, because everything else was growing. She took his hand and placed it where she wanted it, over the little toy, and pressed, lightly, and he understood and held it there.
‘Like that?’ he said.
‘Like that. Stay there. Stay right there.’
She came first, her hands knotted in the sheet and her head tipped back, and he felt it inside her, every contraction, heightened by the vibration, and it carried him with her almost at once. They held on to each other through it. Afterwards she collapsed on top of him, warm and damp and breathless, and he wrapped his arms round her and held her while their pulses slowly settled. She pressed the button and switched it off.
They lay like that for a long while. The rain had eased to a quiet dripping.
Then she shifted, and he gasped and pulled something hard and flat out from under one shoulder blade.
The remote.
She laughed until the bed shook, and he laughed with her, and they couldn’t stop, and they lay there with the remote between them on the pillow like evidence in a court case and laughed until their stomachs ached.
It was after midnight when they finally managed to get up. Kate stood at the bathroom basin washing the Sync O with mild soap and lukewarm water, taking care where the outer part met the loop, because that was where moisture and lube lingered. Tom stood in the doorway in just his boxers, holding the remote in a firm grip, high up and well away from the water.
‘It mustn’t be submerged in water,’ he said. ‘It says so in the manual.’
‘So now you’ve read the manual.’
‘I read it on my phone while you were in the loo. I felt I had some catching up to do.’
She dried the toy with a clean towel and put it in its cotton pouch. She attached the charging cable, and the magnets found their place with a little click, and she looked at him in the mirror and smiled.
‘Do you remember the first time?’ she said.
‘The neighbours’ dog.’
‘The neighbours’ dog that howled the whole time. Every time we got going. As if it knew.’
‘I thought you’d never want to see me again.’
‘I laughed so much I had to see you again. I needed to know whether it was you or the dog.’
He came over and put his arms round her from behind, and they stood there looking at each other in the mirror. Two people around forty with tousled hair and flushed cheeks, in a bathroom that needed repainting, with a remote that had finally ended up safely on the shelf next to the toothbrushes.
‘It was you,’ she said. ‘It was always you.’
They went back to bed. He pulled the duvet up over them both and she lay with her head on his chest, where she always lay, and listened to his heart slowly winding down. Water dripped from the gutter outside. Somewhere in the street a car door closed.
‘Next year,’ he said into her hair, ‘I’m making something other than risotto.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ she said, and fell asleep smiling.
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