The parcel was still by the door

The parcel was still by the door where the courier had left it at lunchtime. My husband hadn’t touched it: my deliveries are mine to open. I stepped over it without taking my shoes off and went straight to the bedroom.

It had been one of those days after which you want neither dinner nor conversation. Three meetings back to back, then the drive, then an hour stuck on the bridge. My shoulders were set like concrete. He followed me and said nothing, because he knows that on evenings like this I speak first.

“Tea. Bring it here.”

He brought the mug and set it on the nightstand next to the key to his cage. The key always lies there, in plain sight, and that evening I looked at it longer than usual. Then I lay face down across the bed, face in the bedspread, and said one word:

“Undress me.”

He unbuckled my shoes and took them off, peeled my tights down without hurrying so as not to ladder them. The skirt he left on, pushed up to the small of my back. Knickers down to my knees, then off. I didn’t help and I didn’t turn round. He has been doing this for three years, and I don’t need to look to know where his hands are.

My back

He started where I told him to start the very first time: both palms on the small of my back, heavy, not moving, for half a minute. Then his lips on my tailbone. Then his tongue.

I’ll tell you how it went the first time, because readers ask. Two years ago I lay exactly like this after exactly such a day and said to him: “Lower. Your tongue. There.” He froze. Not out of disgust — because I had said it out loud, flatly, the way I ask for a glass of water. He waited for me to explain. I didn’t. A minute later he did as he was told, and he has never once asked why since.

His tongue is warm and patient. Flat and wide first, along the whole cleft from bottom to top, as if he were wiping the day off me. Then the tip, in circles, around and not in. His breath is hot, and I feel it on my skin before I feel the tongue. He kneels on the floor between my legs, which hang off the edge of the bed, and I hear the parquet creak under him when he shifts his weight.

“Deeper.”

He pushed his tongue in as far as it would go. Something answered inside me, slowly, a wave from the tailbone upward all the way to those shoulders. I breathed out into the bedspread. This is not the kind of pleasure that makes you cry out. It’s the kind that makes you stop holding your back.

“Slower.”

He slowed. Didn’t ask again, didn’t move elsewhere. He stayed where he was, tongue inside me, moving so slowly that I could hear each stroke rather than feel it. My legs began to tremble behind the knees. They always tremble when I let go, and he knows it, and he doesn’t stop until I say.

I didn’t turn round once. That is the whole point: I shouldn’t have to see his face to get what I need, and he shouldn’t have to see mine to do his work. Sometimes I think this position is easier for him than kneeling in front of me: there he has to hold my eyes, here he only has to listen.

On evenings like this, he says, he can “hear” the cage. I don’t ask what he feels. I know from his breathing: it stumbles when I moan and evens out when I’m quiet. So his body is answering my voice, not its own wants. That is how it should be.

I came slowly and quietly, from his tongue and from my own hand, which I had slid under my belly. He didn’t pull back while I shook, just held his tongue where it was, flat and still. Then I lay and listened: he was breathing into my skin, short and fast, waiting for the word.

Enough

“Enough.”

He stopped at once. No “finishing off”, no goodbye kiss, no last stroke. I set that rule in the first month: “enough” means enough that same second. He broke it once, and we talked about it in a way that made sure it never happened again.

I turned onto my side. He was kneeling as he had been, his face wet from chin to nose, lips shining, eyes calm and a little damp. I wiped his chin with my thumb and left my hand on his cheek.

“Are you tired?”

“No, Mistress.”

“Liar.”

“A little. My legs.”

He didn’t get up, because I hadn’t said so. The tea on the nightstand had gone cold; I hadn’t touched it. The key lay next to the mug, and he wasn’t looking at it. Five years ago he would have been. Now the key is like a light switch on the wall to him: it’s there, it isn’t up for discussion, and it isn’t his hand on it.

I had one doubt that evening, and it wasn’t about him. I thought: am I taking what I need too easily, giving nothing back, not even a word? Then I looked at his face and understood that he doesn’t need a word. He needs me to take. That is his part.

“A towel. Then you may get up.”

He brought one, wiped my thighs with it, warm, then kissed the back of my knee and stood. His knees were red, printed with the seams of the parquet. He took the tea away without asking, brought a fresh one, and that one I drank.

Morning

The parcel was still by the door. I walked past it to the bathroom, then to the kitchen, and only with coffee in my hand did I say:

“Open it.”

Inside was a pillow: a wedge of dense foam, the kind you put under your hips. I had ordered it a week earlier, after an evening when my lower back had seized up, and hadn’t told him what it was. He took it out, turned it over, looked at me.

“Under my belly. So you don’t have to reach and I don’t have to hold my back. We’ll try it tonight.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

He carried the pillow to the bedroom, put it on my side of the bed and threw the box away. By evening I already knew I’d be ordering a second one, for the sofa.

• Say it in words: where and how. “Lower” and “your tongue” sound blunt only the first time; after that it’s a command, like “tea”.
• Three commands for the whole evening: deeper, slower, enough. More words is a conversation, and you didn’t lie down to talk.
• Don’t turn round. You don’t need his face to let go of the day, and he doesn’t need yours to do his work.
• Leave the key on the nightstand where he can see it. He licks you locked, and that is part of what you take.
• “Enough” means stop that same second. If he “finished off”, talk about it in the morning; don’t cancel the evening.