The Terms

The rain had been going since lunchtime, and the studio smelled of it: wet clay, damp concrete, the faint warmth of the kiln cooling in the corner. Jess sat at the wheel with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a bowl in front of her that refused to come out round.

‘You’ve got clay in your hair,’ said Kate from the doorway.

‘I’ve got clay everywhere. That’s sort of the point.’

Kate put her briefcase down on the only chair not covered in newspaper and hung her coat on the hook next to Jess’s aprons. She had come straight from a negotiation; you could tell from the way she held her shoulders, as if she were still sitting at a table waiting for the other side to blink first. They had been together four months now, and Jess had learned that it took about twenty minutes for that posture to let go. Sometimes less, if you helped.

‘There’s a parcel on the shelf,’ said Jess without looking up. ‘Behind the glaze jars.’

‘For me?’

‘For us. Sort of.’

The wheel spun. Jess held her thumbs to the rim of the bowl and felt it finally give in, felt the wall rise even and thin between her hands. Behind her she heard the box, the tape coming away with a tearing sound, and then nothing at all. The silence went on so long that in the end she had to switch off the wheel and turn round.

Kate was standing with a black harness in one hand and a heavy, pale silicone dildo in the other, and she was holding them roughly the way you would hold two exhibits you hadn’t been given any instructions about.

‘OK,’ said Kate.

‘OK good, or OK as in “I’m calling my solicitor”?’

‘I am my solicitor.’ She turned the dildo over and let it rest in her palm. ‘It’s … ambitious.’

‘It’s silicone all the way through,’ said Jess. ‘Soft on the outside and firm inside. I read up on it. I read up for three evenings, actually, and then I thought that if I read for one more evening I’d never dare order it.’

Kate laughed – that short, surprised laugh Jess liked more than almost anything else about her. Then she sat down on the stool next to the wheel, the things in her lap, and looked at Jess the way she did when she was really listening.

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What were you thinking?’

Jess wiped her hands on her apron, which didn’t help. The clay had dried in the cracks round her nails, grey and rough.

‘You said something. Last summer, on the balcony, when we’d drunk all the tea and it was starting to get light and neither of us could be bothered to go to bed. You said you sometimes missed being filled. Taken, you said. And then you got embarrassed and said it sounded like a bad novel.’

‘It did sound like a bad novel.’

‘It sounded like you.’ Jess took a breath. ‘And I thought I want to be the one who does that. Not to replace anything. Because I want to see you like that. But only if you want to. If you don’t, I’ll put it next to the glazes and call it a sculpture.’

Kate was quiet for a moment. The rain drummed on the skylight. She stood the dildo on the workbench – it stayed upright on its own on its suction cup, straight and solemn between two unfired vases, which set them both off giggling – and unfolded the harness in her lap. Three metal rings clinked in a little pouch.

‘Three rings,’ she said.

‘Four, five and six centimetres. You pick the one that fits.’

‘You really have read up on it.’

‘Three evenings.’

Kate fiddled with the buckles. Jess could see the thoughts moving behind her eyes: how she weighed things, tested them, rephrased.

‘I want to,’ Kate said at last. ‘I think I want to very much. But I’m thirty-six and I’ve never done this, and I don’t know how my body’s going to react, and I don’t want it to turn into a performance. I have enough performances.’

‘Then we won’t make it one.’

‘How?’

Jess thought about it.

‘You’re a lawyer,’ she said. ‘Draw up some terms.’

Kate looked at her. Then she reached for the pen lying among the glaze tests and the first scrap of paper she could find – a brown bag from the bakery on the corner – and began to write in her neat, slanting hand.

‘Clause one,’ she read aloud as she wrote. ‘Either party may stop at any time without giving a reason.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Clause two. The word for stopping is “pause”. Not “no”, because I say no when I mean oh God, and you know that.’

‘I know that.’

‘Clause three. Laughing is permitted.’

‘Required, more like.’

‘Clause four.’ She hesitated, pen above the paper. ‘We start with your hands. And that thing –’ she nodded towards the workbench ‘– only comes into the picture when I say so.’

Jess took the pen from her hand and added a fifth clause with her clay-stained fingers, which left grey prints on the brown paper: Loads of lube. Water-based. Silicone on silicone is not a good idea.

Kate read it and smiled.

‘Three evenings,’ she said.

‘I told you.’

Kate folded up the bag and tucked it into the inside pocket of her blazer, where she usually kept her business cards.

‘Saturday,’ she said. ‘My place. I have better sheets.’

6.6

The harness in the story

You2Toys Universal Harness

O-ring harness with three interchangeable metal rings of 4, 5 and 6 centimetres and a waistband that goes up to 155 centimetres. The dildo is sold separately.

Search at Lovehoney

Read the review →

✦ ✦ ✦

Kate’s flat was at the very top of an old stone building, with sloping ceilings and a window onto the courtyard where the rain gathered in the gutters and talked to itself. Jess had been there many times, but tonight she saw everything as if for the first time: the lamp with its yellow glow, the bed with the white sheets Kate had boasted about, the brown bag with the terms smoothed out on the bedside table under a glass of water.

They had washed the dildo together in the kitchen, in lukewarm soapy water, and it had been more intimate than Jess had expected: Kate’s hands round the silicone, her own round Kate’s, the laughter when it slipped out of their grip and bounced in the sink with a noise that set the neighbour’s dog barking. Now it lay on a towel on the bed, next to the harness and a bottle of water-based lube.

‘You first,’ said Kate. ‘I want to see how it fits.’

Jess pulled off her jumper and jeans and stood there in just her knickers, suddenly aware of every centimetre of skin. She stepped into the harness, pulled it up over her thighs and fastened the waistband. It took three attempts to get the leg straps right, and on the second the whole contraption sat so crooked that the metal ring pointed straight at the wardrobe.

‘It’s aiming at your winter boots,’ said Jess.

‘They can fend for themselves.’

She chose the five-centimetre ring and pushed the dildo through it from underneath until the suction cup sat snug against the plate. It held. She let go of it carefully and it stayed put, heavy and pale against her stomach, moving only when she breathed.

Kate had sat down on the edge of the bed. She said nothing, and Jess was about to joke the silence away when she saw Kate’s face: the open, almost astonished look, the parted lips.

‘Come here,’ said Kate quietly.

Jess went over. Kate put her hands on her hips, just above the straps, and drew her closer until the dildo rested against her breastbone. She tipped her head back and looked up.

‘How does it feel?’ she asked.

‘Strange. Good. Like wearing someone else’s clothes and finding out they fit.’

‘You look like someone who makes the decisions.’

‘I don’t. You wrote the terms.’

‘Clause four,’ said Kate. ‘Start with your hands.’

She lay back and Jess followed, kneeling between her legs with the harness on, and the first minute was clumsy in the way that is only tender: the dildo getting in the way when she leaned in to kiss her, Kate giggling against her mouth, Jess eventually having to move it aside with her hand, like a branch you bend out of the way on a woodland path.

Then they stopped laughing.

Jess kissed her neck, her collarbones, the soft skin beneath her breasts. Kate smelled of her soap and of something warmer underneath, something that was simply her. Her breathing changed when Jess drew her knickers down over her hips – slower, deeper – and when Jess let her fingers slide over her she was already wet and warm as a mug you cup in both hands.

‘OK?’ whispered Jess.

‘More than OK.’

She touched her for a long time. Circling, sliding, letting two fingers find their way inside and stay there, curled, while her thumb stayed against her clit. Kate moved her hips against her hand, carefully at first, then less carefully. The rain beat against the window. Somewhere in the building someone turned on a shower, and the sound ran through the pipes in the walls like a distant waterfall.

‘Now,’ Kate said at last. Her voice was thick. ‘I want it now.’

Jess drew her fingers out, slowly, and reached for the lube. She poured it into her palm and warmed it for a moment before stroking it along the dildo, from the tip down to the ring, and Kate watched, propped up on her elbows, her cheeks flushed.

‘That,’ said Kate, ‘is the hottest thing I have ever seen in my entire life.’

‘I’m putting lube on a toy.’

‘Exactly.’

Jess moved closer, settled between Kate’s thighs and guided the tip with her hand until it rested against her. There she stopped.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘Slowly.’

She pressed, barely. Felt the resistance and then how it gave, how Kate opened around it, and she saw it more than she felt it. That was the strangest thing: moving and feeling nothing in the toy itself, but feeling everything else. Kate’s thighs tightening against her hips. The small sound in Kate’s throat. The straps pulling and the plate pressing against her own pubic bone.

‘How does it feel?’

‘Big,’ said Kate, breathing out. ‘Wait.’

Jess waited. She held completely still, her hands either side of Kate’s shoulders, and watched Kate close her eyes and breathe. Three times. Four.

‘OK,’ said Kate. ‘A bit more.’

It took time, and Jess was in no hurry. She had been sitting at the wheel for eleven years and knew that what you forced would crack; you waited for the material and let it come to you. She slid in a centimetre at a time, stopped, drew back a little, went a little further, and when at last she lay still against Kate, hip to hip, she heard Kate laugh, low and full of wonder, straight out into the room.

‘Clause three,’ said Kate. ‘Sorry. It’s just so … full.’

‘Good full?’

‘So good.’

Jess began to move. Short and slow at first, barely more than a rocking, and Kate answered with her hips. The rhythm found them rather than the other way round. With every movement the plate rubbed against Jess herself, a blunt, insistent pressure that built something in her too, and she hadn’t counted on that – she had thought this would be about Kate. But it was about both of them. About Kate’s nails in her back and her own breaths growing shorter and shorter.

‘Deeper,’ said Kate. And then: ‘No – oh God – no, keep going, that was an oh-God no.’

‘I know,’ said Jess, and couldn’t help smiling. ‘It’s in the contract.’

Kate brought her own hand down between them and stroked herself, quick and precise, and Jess watched as she moved inside her with deep, slow thrusts that Kate met, and thought she had never seen anything so beautiful: the woman from the negotiating table, completely undone, head thrown back against the good sheets and her hair spread out like ink.

Kate came with a sound Jess had never heard from her before, long and broken, and her body clenched around the dildo so that Jess felt it right into the harness, through the plate, like a wave running through a jetty. Jess held still through it and held her, and when Kate finally sank into the mattress and drew a shaky breath she pulled out, slowly, slowly, while Kate reached for her wrist.

‘Stay,’ said Kate. ‘Not in me. Here.’

Jess lay down beside her with the harness still on, and the dildo bobbed absurdly at the ceiling, and they laughed until the bed shook.

8.6

The toy in the story

King Cock Elite 20 cm Silicone Dual Density Cock – Light

Dual-density silicone – a soft outer skin over a firm core – with a suction cup that the manufacturer states works in most harnesses. The manufacturer recommends water-based lubricant.

Lowest price £84.99

See price at Harmony

Read the review →

Price checked 26 September 2026

✦ ✦ ✦

Afterwards they stood in the bathroom, each in a towel. Jess washed the dildo in the basin with lukewarm water and soap, thoroughly, and Kate sat on the closed toilet lid with the harness in her lap and wiped it down with a damp cloth, buckle by buckle, as if she were working her way through an appendix.

‘It mustn’t be put in water,’ said Jess. ‘Just wiped down.’

‘Three evenings,’ said Kate.

‘Four, if you count tonight.’

Kate hung the harness over the radiator and stood there with her hand still on it. She looked at Jess in the mirror, and Jess saw that her shoulders were down now, all the way down, the way they seldom were.

‘I’d like to add an amendment to the contract,’ said Kate.

‘Now?’

‘Now.’

She went out to the bedroom and came back with the brown bag and the pen, and wrote with the paper against the tiles. Then she handed it over. Beneath Jess’s clay-smudged fifth clause, in the neat slanting hand, it now said:

6. Next time I wear it.

Jess read it twice. Then she folded up the bag and put it in Kate’s hand.

‘Agreed,’ she said.