Alexandra Rourke

In three years of friendship and six months of sharing a roof, he has asked me for exactly one thing.

Never go through that door.

I'm standing in front of it now, in the dim hallway of a house that is much too big for two unemployed twenty-one-year-olds, wearing a black robe and absolutely nothing else, with my right hand raised to knock and my left clutching the collar closed as if someone might see.

Rewind. Do the thing where you start from the beginning. You always do your best thinking from the beginning.

I met him in the first week of university. He was the popular one. Not loud-popular, nothing like that, but the kind where rooms rearrange themselves a little when he walks in. He was quiet. Private. If you asked what he did at the weekend, you got a shrug and a very good sandwich. I decided in about four days that I'd be his best friend, and he let me.

I was there for all of it. His first serious love, which lasted a spring. His first proper heartbreak, which lasted a summer, and for which I brought soup. After that, a long, unbroken run of Saturday mornings with someone new at the breakfast table. A girl in a band. A man twice his age who left a very expensive scarf. A woman who taught him, I'm fairly sure, how to cook. He went through partners the way other people go through socks, and every time I sat on the sofa with popcorn and gave him bad advice, and every time he never once bragged about it. He never told me a single thing. I always had to work it out from the glow on their faces.

And he never made a move on me.

That's the thing I've never said out loud. He never did. I never did. We just stayed exactly where we were, shoulder to shoulder, on the sofa, for three years.

We graduated in June. And through a series of events that still seems faintly ridiculous, we ended up living in a mansion his parents own, in the kind of neighbourhood where the hedges have opinions. We both applied for jobs. We both got rejected. We eat cereal for dinner. We steal each other's hoodies. We have long, stupid arguments about what counts as a sandwich. Nothing about it has changed.

Except that he still brings people home.

One after another, every few weeks. Every age, every type. I've stopped counting, partly because it doesn't matter and partly because I've started noticing something I can't explain. Every single one of them leaves the next morning glowing. Thoroughly, ridiculously satisfied. And a little bit shaken, like they've come back from somewhere.

And he never takes them to his bedroom. He takes them to the den.

The den is a dark-panelled room on the ground floor, with a leather chair and a bar cart, and at the back of it there's a door. A heavy, plain door that has been locked since the day we moved in. The first night, over cold pizza, he asked me for one promise. He didn't say why. He looked at me, serious in a way he almost never is, and asked me never to go through it.

I said yes. Of course I said yes.

And then, yesterday, a rejection email arrived at nine in the morning, the third of the week, and by noon I was in the kind of mood where rules are only suggestions. I watched him walk a woman out the front door, a gorgeous, windswept, glowing woman in her forties who could barely stand. I heard his bedroom door close. He was asleep. The den was empty.

I just wanted to see. That's all. One look.

It wasn't locked.

The room was dark, and I stood on the threshold with my hand over my mouth. Ropes. Coils and coils of them, hanging from hooks along one wall, in red and black and natural hemp. Strange metal frames. A bench. Something that looked like a leather lounge with rings in it. A pole. Floggers in every length, belts, a whip curled on a hook, a row of cuffs, a shelf of tools I didn't have names for. And in the middle of it all, almost absurdly, a small, tidy side table with a stack of folded blankets and a tray of water bottles.

Surely my best friend isn't... surely he isn't into... oh my God.

I went scarlet from my toes to my ears. I backed out and shut the door and ran upstairs and sat on my bed with my knees up for twenty minutes, staring at nothing.

And then I did what I always do when I don't understand something. I looked it up.

I read for the entire day. Bondage, power exchange, impact play, negotiation, safewords, aftercare. I read about colours. I read forum posts and a long, careful essay by a woman who'd been doing it for fifteen years. I read until my eyes burned. And somewhere around the fourth hour, I noticed I'd stopped blushing. I'd gone very quiet instead. And I was picturing him in it.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't interested. I'm a bit more interested than I'd like.

He knocked on my door at ten that night. I was lying on my bed with my laptop closed and my heart going like a drum. He asked me, in the careful voice he uses for important things, if I'd gone into the room. I nodded. I couldn't look at him. I could feel my face burning. He sighed, long and quiet, and then he said I could ask him anything I wanted, and he'd answer.

I only had one question.

"Can I join?"

He didn't answer right away. I'd never seen him look like that. He sat on the end of my bed and told me, slowly, what it actually is. That it's not what the films show. That it's built on trust, and talking, and rules, and that every single thing is agreed beforehand. That in the room I wouldn't be his best friend. That there would be a version of him I'd never met. That he might have to hurt me. He said it plainly, and watched me while he said it.

I'd like to say I was calm. I wasn't. My heart was hammering, and my palms were damp, and a small, sensible voice in my head kept saying "run." But the more he talked, the more I leaned in, and the more curious I became. I didn't care. I wanted to know what he knew. I wanted to feel what all those women felt when they came back from wherever he'd taken them.

He taught me the colours. Green, keep going. Yellow, slow down. Red, stop everything, and he would, instantly, no questions, no matter what. He made me say them back. He made me say them twice.

We decided to start today.

And here I am.

I've been awake since five. I've had two showers. I've changed my mind eleven times and put on and taken off three different outfits, and in the end I put on the black robe, because it felt like the only thing that fit. My hair is down. My feet are bare on the cold floor. My heart is going so hard that I can feel it in my throat, my wrists, the backs of my knees. I'm terrified. I'm absolutely, completely terrified.

And I want this. I want it so much that it frightens me more.

I take a long, slow breath, and let it out. Three years of friendship are behind this door. Soup and popcorn and stolen hoodies and two hundred arguments about sandwiches. Once I knock, every one of them will stand differently. We'll never be quite who we were this morning.

Green. Yellow. Red. Green, yellow, red.

I raise my knuckles to the wood, and hold them there, one inch away.

I can hear my own pulse in my ears.

It's the fourth night. I've lost track of what day of the week it is, but I know it's the fourth night, because I've learned to count in this room. The first night was talking, and a rope around my wrists so loose I could have slid out of it. The second was a lesson in how to kneel. The third was the first time I said the word "yellow" and the whole room went still and kind and quiet until I said I was ready again.

Tonight, I'm standing in the middle of the playroom with my wrists tied above my head to a steel frame, and my robe is a black heap on the floor. The air is cool on my bare skin. My toes are curled against the polished boards. The lamp is low and amber, and everything in the room casts long, soft shadows: the coils of rope, the dark leather lounge, the shelf with its neat row of water bottles.

Breathe. In for four. Out for four.

The rope is knotted firmly, but it isn't tight. I've tested it twice with my fingers. There's a pair of safety shears hanging on the hook by the frame, within reach of him and not of me, and I looked at them for a long time before I decided I wasn't scared of them. The colours run through my head like a prayer. Green, yellow, red.

My thighs are trembling. I'm not cold. My heart hasn't slowed in ten minutes, and my skin feels like a plucked wire, every inch of it awake. I bite my lip, and it stings, and I let go.

The flogger is in his hand. I can see it from here, a long fall of dark braided leather, hanging loose against his leg. I've seen it a hundred times. I've never seen it like this, held, with weight behind it. My stomach drops straight through the floor.

He's standing very close. I can feel the warmth coming off him, and his shadow covers me from collarbone to knee. I don't look up. I'm not ready to. I look at the third button of his shirt, at the edge of the floor, at my own bare toes.

It's him. It's still him. It's the same person who made me tea on Sunday.

It's not. It's not the same person at all.

A shiver runs down my spine, and I flinch, though nothing has touched me. A breath shudders out of me. My hands flex in the ropes, and I make myself open them. I take another breath, in for four, out for four, and my voice, when it comes, is very small and not very steady.

"Green," I whisper, before he's asked. "I'm... green."

My eyes close. I wait.

I can't see anything. That's the first thing, and it fills everything.

The blindfold is black silk, folded twice and tied snug at the back of my head. It's cool where it presses on my eyelids and warm at my temples. When I open my eyes, there's nothing. When I close them, there's nothing. I've been in this dark for what could be two minutes or twenty, and I've already forgotten what the room looks like.

Breathe. You know where you are. You know where the door is.

My hands are bound in front of me with soft leather cuffs, clipped to a ring somewhere above my head. I can feel the ring when I flex my fingers, small and cold. My arms are stretched out, my elbows bent. The cuffs are snug and not tight. I tested them with my thumbs before the silk went on. I'm sitting on something low and padded, my knees together, my feet flat, and my robe is somewhere I can't find.

It's quiet. It's so quiet that the quiet has a texture. The only things I can hear are my own breathing, a faint hum from the vent, and a very small, distant creak of the house settling. I strain for any other sound, and I can't find one.

Where is he?

I don't know. He didn't say. That's the part I didn't expect. When you can't see, the room stops having edges. There's only me and the air against my skin, and the thing I can't locate.

Every inch of me is listening. The air on my shoulders is cooler than it was a moment ago, and I notice it. A bead of sweat slides slowly between my breasts. The silk smells faintly of cedar. My lips feel dry, and I lick them, and I can taste salt. A faint smell of leather reaches me from somewhere to the left. I turn my head toward it, and then away. I can't tell if it's near.

My heartbeat is deafening. A flush spreads up my chest and neck, and there's nobody to see it. I'm sitting here, bare, bound, blind, and I've never felt so completely seen.

Don't speak. Don't ask. He'll talk when he talks.

A shiver ripples through me, and my toes curl against the floor. My breath catches, and I hold it, to listen, and let it out in a rush because there's still nothing. A tiny, involuntary sound slips out of me, half a whimper.

I clench my fists in the cuffs, and the leather creaks. My lip is between my teeth. I'm waiting for a hand, a voice, a footstep, a touch, anything at all, and I can't tell which direction it will come from.

There are two answers, and I've decided which one I'm going to give.

I'm bent over a padded bench in the middle of the room, with my chest resting on the leather and my hips raised, my knees apart on the boards. My wrists are tied to the front legs of the bench, in soft rope, snug and secure. My ankles are cuffed loosely to the back. My hair is down around my face, damp at the temples. I'm bare from head to foot, and the air touches everything.

There's a ball gag in my mouth. It's red rubber, strapped behind my head, and it presses my tongue flat and holds my jaw wide. Spit gathers at the corners of my lips. I can't say a word. I can't even say my own name. I tried, just now, and it came out as a muffled, wet hum.

That's the point. That's what it's for.

I have my signal. It's a small blue rubber ball, about the size of a walnut, tucked into the palm of my right hand, and I'm gripping it so tightly that my knuckles ache. If I drop it, the whole thing stops. It's red. It's the word. I made him show me twice that he'd hear it hit the floor, and he did, and I tested it, and the room had gone silent and still, and he'd stood very still until I told him with my eyes I was joking.

And there's the other thing. A nod for yes. A shake for no. We practised that, too.

He's going to ask me. Any second. He told me he would.

My heart is going so hard that it shakes the bench. My thighs are trembling. I bite down on the gag, and the rubber gives a little, and a hot flush crawls up my neck. I can hear the sounds the room makes when it's waiting: the hum of the vent, a floorboard, the slow tick of the clock in the hall.

I think about the two options. The paddle, broad and smooth, with weight and a deep, flat kind of sting. Or his hand, which I know. His hand, which I've known for three years, pushing hair off my forehead, passing me tea, steadying me on a icy step. His hand, which has never hurt anybody.

I know what I'll say. I know which one.

I tilt my head against the leather. I take a breath through my nose, a long one, and hold the ball in my fist. A tremor runs through my arms. My eyes squeeze shut, and open again.

There are footsteps behind me, slow and even, and they stop.

I know the next thing I hear will be a question. And I know my answer.

Green. Green. Don't stop.

I can't say it anymore. I've lost the shape of words. They're something that belonged to a different girl in a different room, and what's left is a body on its hands and knees on a leather lounge, soaked in sweat and shaking, with a hand wound tightly in her hair and a hard, deep, relentless rhythm that has not changed in twenty minutes.

My arms are trembling. My elbows are giving out. The leather is slick under my palms, and my knees are raw where they've slid against it. My hair is stuck to my face and neck in damp ropes. There are marks all over me. I can feel every one, a map written in heat: stripes across my back from the flogger, a broad blush on my ass from the paddle, a ring of fingerprints on each hip, and a bruise on my thigh that I'll find in the mirror tomorrow.

I bite my lip until I taste copper.

"Ah! ...Please."

It comes out ragged and thin. I don't know what I'm asking for. It doesn't matter. The hand in my hair tightens, and my head tips back, my spine bowing, a sound tearing out of me that I'd never have believed I could make. It's wet and broken and I don't even try to hold it in.

He's not slowing down. He's not going to slow down.

Green. I don't want him to.

Every thrust drives the air from my lungs. My whole body is lit from the inside, nerve endings burning, my thighs clenching around nothing. A flinch goes through me when his other hand cracks across my skin, bright and sharp, and I gasp, and clench, and cry out, and my fingers claw at the leather.

"Green," I manage, finally, in a croak, to nobody, to the room. "Green. Don't... stop."

Tears are running down my cheeks. I couldn't tell you whether they're from the pain or the pleasure or the sheer, overwhelming size of it. I'm not sad. I'm not scared. I've never been so fully in my own body in my whole life. Everything I am has narrowed to this: the weight of a hand, the rhythm, my own ragged breath.

My legs are shaking so hard that they might give out. A pressure is building low in my belly, huge and bright and terrifying. I screw my eyes shut and press my forehead into the leather.

Three years. Three years on a sofa, and I never knew.