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.
The balcony door stood ajar and the city came in through the gap: a tram screeching round a bend far below, a pigeon pacing up and down the railing with its hands behind its back, the smell of grilled fish from someone who had already started on the evening. James lay on the hotel bed in just his boxers, reading the guidebook aloud with the kind of seriousness he otherwise reserved for spreadsheets.
‘It says here you shouldn’t eat at restaurants where someone stands outside waving you in.’
‘Then we won’t eat there,’ said Lucy from the bathroom.
‘And that you should wear comfortable shoes. The hills are steeper than they look.’
‘James.’
‘Yes?’
‘Put the book down.’
He did. She came out in the dark green dress, the one with thin straps that she’d bought for a wedding three years ago and only worn once since, because there had never been an occasion quite good enough. She was thirty-four and a sound designer at a theatre, and she had a way of standing in a room as if she had decided where the light should fall. Now she stood in the window. He sat up.
‘You look lovely,’ he said.
‘I know.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve got something for you.’
It was a small parcel, no bigger than a bar of soap, wrapped in the brown paper the bookshop on the corner back home used. He weighed it in his hand. It was light. He opened it carefully, the way he opened everything, while she stood drumming her fingers on the window frame.
Inside lay a small thing in black silicone, rounded and flat, roughly the size of a thumb. And a separate piece, a clip. He turned them over.
‘It’s a Lovense Ferri,’ she said. ‘One bit goes inside your knickers. The other sits on the outside and holds it in place with a magnet.’
‘Right,’ said James slowly. He looked up. ‘And what am I supposed to do with it?’
She came over and picked up his phone from the bedside table, unlocked it with his birthday – he’d never bothered to change the code – and showed him an app he hadn’t known he had.
‘I installed it yesterday while you were in the shower. I’ve paired it. You’re not supposed to do anything with the toy. You’re supposed to do something with me.’
There was a moment’s silence. The pigeon on the railing flew off. James looked at the screen, which showed a slider and a row of little icons, and then at her. She was blushing, he could see it now, a flush that started at her collarbone and crept upwards.
‘You want me to control it. During dinner.’
‘If you want to.’
‘If I want to,’ he repeated, and there was something in his voice that made her laugh.
They’d talked about it before, in that slightly evasive way you talk about things you want but don’t quite dare. One evening a year ago, after a film, she’d said that sometimes she thought about not being in control. Not really, she’d added quickly. Just a little. Just a game. He’d said he understood, and she hadn’t believed him, and then they hadn’t talked about it again.
Now she sat down on the edge of the bed beside him.
‘Rules,’ she said. ‘If I say the bill, you stop. Immediately. No discussion, no asking why. If I tap the table twice, you turn it down. And you ask me. Often.’
‘The bill,’ he said. ‘Why the bill?’
‘Because it’s the only thing I can say in a restaurant without anyone thinking it’s odd.’
He nodded. Then he took her hand and turned it over and kissed the inside of her wrist, where the skin was thinnest.
‘And what if I don’t want to?’ he asked. ‘What if I think it’s too much?’
‘Then you say so, and we eat fish and go back and sleep.’ She looked at him. ‘I really want this. But only if you want it too.’
He looked at the little black thing in his palm for a long moment. Then he held it out to her.
‘Go and put it on,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a table at half eight.’
The restaurant was in an alley so narrow they could have touched both walls at once. Nobody stood outside waving. Inside it was blue and white tiles from floor to ceiling, eight tables, a waiter with a grey beard and his apron tied high, and a kitchen visible through a hatch where someone was singing, off-key and happy.
They were given a table by the wall. Lucy sat with her back to the tiles, which were cool through her dress, and James sat opposite and put his phone next to his glass, screen down, as if it were any old phone.
For the first hour he did nothing.
She noticed she was waiting. They ordered octopus and bread and a glass of white wine each, and she waited. He told her about a colleague who had married his dentist, and she laughed and waited. The magnet stayed where it was, a small weight against her hip bone that she forgot and remembered, forgot and remembered. Every time he reached for his wine glass, something tightened in her.
‘You’re quiet,’ he said.
‘You’re cruel.’
‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘Exactly.’
He smiled, and it wasn’t his usual smile, the slightly apologetic one he wore when telling her something he thought she’d already heard. This was something else. He turned the phone over, glanced at the screen for a second, as if reading a message from work, and put it back down.
It came like a whisper. Almost nothing. A faint, steady hum right where it lay, so light that at first she wasn’t sure it was real. Then she was sure. She sat completely still with her fork halfway to her mouth.
‘OK?’ he asked quietly.
‘Yes.’ She swallowed. ‘Yes. Green.’
The octopus arrived, grilled and glistening with oil and lemon. She ate. The hum went on, low and insistent, and the strange thing was that it wasn’t too much – it was too little. It was like someone holding a hand a centimetre above her skin without touching her. She noticed she was shifting on her chair to get closer to it. She noticed that he noticed.
He talked about the tram they would take tomorrow, the yellow one that climbed the hills, and she didn’t hear a word. All she heard was a tone, or thought she did, and she wondered whether the couple at the next table could hear it too under the chatter and the singing from the kitchen, and the wondering made it worse.
Then he changed something.
It stopped being steady. It became a rhythm, short bursts with pauses in between, like a heart that had decided to beat somewhere else. She put down her fork. She laid her hands flat on the tablecloth.
‘James.’
‘Mm?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m reading the instructions,’ he said, scrolling with his thumb. ‘There are several patterns. I don’t know which is best. I thought I’d work my way through them. Methodically.’
She laughed out loud, so that an older couple at the next table looked up, and halfway through the laugh turned into something else, an intake of breath she hadn’t planned. She put a hand over her mouth. He looked at her across the table and his eyes had darkened.
‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘If it’s too much.’
‘It’s not too much.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
The waiter came over and asked if everything was all right. Lucy said everything was excellent. Just as she said excellent, the vibrations rose, a whole step up, and the word came out a semitone too high. The waiter nodded kindly and left. She kicked James in the shin under the table, not hard.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and he didn’t look the least bit sorry. ‘My thumb slipped.’
‘Your thumb has never slipped once in its entire life.’
She tapped the table twice. It dropped immediately, back to the whisper, and she breathed out. He said nothing, he just waited, and she liked him so much right then that it ached somewhere under her ribs. It wasn’t the toy. It was that he listened. That he was holding something that was hers and holding it carefully.
They sat like that for a while. The low hum, the food, his foot that had found hers under the table and rested against it. She began to get used to it, and just as she had, when her shoulders had dropped and she’d taken a sip of water, he let it rise again, slowly this time, step by step, and it was like wading into the sea in the shallows and not noticing how deep it has got until the wave reaches your chest.
She held on to the edge of the table. She felt it spreading, the warmth, from that small point outwards, up into her stomach and down into her thighs, and she felt her own pulse in her throat and her wrists and there, above all there. The tiles against her back were cold and everything else was warm.
‘Lucy,’ he said, very calmly. ‘Look at me.’
She looked at him.
‘Would you like pudding?’
She didn’t understand the question at first. Then she did, and she understood that he knew exactly where she was, that he had seen it in her face the way he had seen it a thousand times before, and that he was now waiting to hear what she would say. That was what did it. Not the vibration. The question.
The waiter was heading towards them with the menu under his arm.
‘The bill,’ she said. ‘Please. The bill.’
It went quiet that very second. Completely. She sat there trembling slightly, feeling her blood want to carry on even though nothing was driving it any more, and James had already turned the phone over and put both hands on the table where she could see them.
‘Lucy,’ he said, and now his voice was different, gentle. ‘Are you OK?’
She started to laugh. She couldn’t stop.
‘I actually meant the bill,’ she said. ‘I want to go back. I want to go back now.’
They walked up the hills and the guidebook was right, they were steeper than they looked. The cobbles were worn smooth and yellow in the light of the street lamps, and somewhere above them someone was playing guitar on a balcony. She held his hand. He had put the phone in the inside pocket of his jacket and hadn’t touched it since the restaurant.
‘You can switch it back on,’ she said on a flight of steps where no one could see them.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Now I want to see you when I do it.’
In the lift she kissed him. It was old, with a folding metal gate you pulled across, and it moved so slowly they had time to forget which floor they were going to. His hand lay on her back, on the bare skin between her straps, and she felt him breathing against her mouth.
In the room the balcony door was still ajar. The city had grown quieter. She kicked off her shoes and stood in the middle of the floor watching him as he took off his jacket and took out the phone and laid it on the bedside table, screen up this time, so that she could see it.
‘May I?’ he asked.
She nodded. She wanted him to hear it too.
‘Yes.’
He touched the slider and the vibration came back, low and soft, and she closed her eyes. He came over to her and slipped the straps off her shoulders, one and then the other, and the dress slid down over her hips and lay round her feet like a green pool. She stood there in her knickers with the little black magnet in its place, and he knelt in front of her and kissed the skin just above it.
‘It’s humming,’ he said against her stomach, surprised. ‘I can hear it now.’
‘Don’t say that. I’ve been wondering about that all evening.’
‘There was the chatter and the singing from the kitchen there. It’s quiet here.’
He gently undid the magnet and laid it and the little vibrator on the bedside table next to the phone, where they carried on humming to themselves until he reached for the phone and switched it off. Then he drew her knickers down and she stepped out of them, and he looked up at her and she thought that never, not once in nine years, had she seen him look like that.
He kissed the inside of her thigh. Then higher. He took his time, as methodically as he had worked his way through the patterns, and she put her hand in his hair and felt that she was more than ready, that the whole dinner had been a long road to here, and when his tongue found her it was like someone turning up the volume in a room where everything was already too loud. She steadied herself against the chest of drawers. A bottle of shampoo toppled over and neither of them cared.
‘Bed,’ she said. ‘Please.’
She pulled off his shirt, the buttons took an eternity, and he laughed at her impatience and helped. He was warm and smelt of lemon and of the night out in the street. She lay back on the cool sheet and he lay on top of her, not yet inside her, just there, and she felt how hard he was against her hip.
She reached for the washbag on the bedside table and fumbled out the little bottle of lube, a pjur Aqua she had packed without saying anything about it, poured a little into her hand and took hold of him. He breathed out through his nose, a long, shaky exhale, and rested his forehead against hers.
‘You planned this,’ he said.
‘I’m a sound designer. I plan everything.’
He laughed into her neck, and then he stopped laughing, because she guided him to her, and he sank into her slowly, so slowly, and she lifted her hips to meet him and they lay like that for a while, perfectly still, just feeling it.
‘OK?’ he whispered.
‘Green,’ she whispered back, and he smiled against her cheek.
Then he moved. She wrapped her legs round him. She didn’t want it slow any more and she said so, and he listened to that too, just as he had listened to everything else all evening. It was his rhythm now and no app’s, deep, steady strokes that built on what she was already full of, and she felt it coming long before it came, the same slow rise as in the restaurant, the sea getting deeper without you noticing.
She reached out, took the phone from the bedside table and pressed it into his hand.
‘Again,’ she said. ‘Put it back. I want both.’
He looked at her for a second, questioning, and she nodded. He drew out of her for a moment and she put the little vibrator in place against herself with her fingers, on the outside, exactly where it belonged, and when he came back into her his body pressed it against her and he raised the intensity a step with his thumb, and then another.
It didn’t take long after that. She came with her face against his shoulder and a sound she didn’t recognise as her own, and it went on for a long time, in waves, and he held her through it and didn’t stop moving until she said his name, and then he came too, heavily and with her name in his mouth, and the phone slid out of his hand onto the floor, where it lay buzzing against the rug until she reached over the edge of the bed and switched it off.
Afterwards they lay in the striped band of street light falling in through the balcony door. Someone walked past down in the street, singing. James lay with his head on her stomach and she ran her fingers through his hair.
‘I forgot to ask something,’ he said after a long while.
‘What?’
‘What happens if I say the bill?’
She raised her head and looked at him.
‘Then I stop,’ she said. ‘Immediately. Is there something you’d like us to do?’
‘Not tonight.’ He turned and kissed her stomach. ‘But tomorrow we’re taking the yellow tram up the hills. And I thought you could bring it with you. And that you could hold the phone.’
She said nothing for a while. Then she began to smile, slowly, in the dark.
‘Give me your thumb,’ she said. ‘I need to practise.’
Before they fell asleep she got up and rinsed the little vibrator in the basin with lukewarm water and soap and laid it on a towel to dry next to his toothbrush. He lay in bed watching her through the doorway. Outside, the sky over the harbour was slowly turning grey, and they had three days left.
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 · 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.
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.
