Nathalie

The email had taken eleven days.

She had started it as a message on the platform — three attempts, three deletions — and when that felt too exposed, too visible in a place where other people commented, she had found his professional contact address through the channel's about page and started again in a format that felt more like something she could control. She was a person who wrote carefully. She could write this carefully.

The final version was 214 words. She had counted.

She sent it on a Tuesday evening, sitting in her reading chair, the house quiet, Pieter's football programme a low murmur from the other room, Tibo's music a faint pulse from upstairs. She pressed send before she could open the draft one more time. Then she closed the laptop and sat very still for approximately a minute, her hands flat on her thighs, and felt her own heartbeat in a way that was not entirely unpleasant.

She told herself she did not expect a response quickly. People were busy. He received many messages, surely. She was one name in a list.

She checked her email four times before bed.

She is not thinking about what happens if he responds. Or rather, she is thinking about it constantly in a soft, unexamined way that hasn't been forced into specific shape yet. There will be a meeting. He will see her. She has imagined this enough times that it has the texture of a plan rather than a wish, which is not the same thing, though from inside it they feel similar.

What she wrote, more or less, was this:

My name is Nathalie. I've been following your work for some time. I realise that's probably something you hear often and I don't know how to make it sound different from the others, except to say that I'm a 45-year-old secondary school teacher and I had never watched anything like your content before a friend showed me, and I found — I find — that it changed something. The way you are with the women you work with. The attention. I'd like to meet you. I could say I'm interested in possibly making content, which might be a reason you'd consider meeting someone like me, but I want to be honest that I'm not entirely sure that's true. I'm not sure what I'm asking for. I think I just need to say that directly.

She has read it back twice since sending. She thinks it is honest. She is not wrong about that.

She had the book in her bag — a slim paperback, Clara's bookmark still in it, page 147, which Nathalie had noted without meaning to because she notices things like that. She had meant to return it two weeks ago. She had not returned it two weeks ago. The walk from the bus stop takes eight minutes. She had done it enough times to stop counting. The neighbourhood was quiet in the specific way of residential streets on a weekday late afternoon, the light going golden and low, and she was thinking about the essay corrections waiting at home on the kitchen table and whether Lasse had remembered to start his reading and whether there was anything for dinner that didn't require significant effort. She rang the bell. The door opened and she understood something before she understood it. It was in the way he stood. The proportion of him in the doorway — the height, the set of the shoulders, the particular quality of ease in the posture. Her body knew before her brain caught up and she felt it arrive: a cold, dropping recognition in her chest, a flash of heat immediately after, the specific sensation of two entirely separate contexts colliding with a force that briefly emptied her of language. She had watched this person. She had watched him in ways she had not told anyone. She had written him an email from a false name and sent it eleven days ago. He was Clara's son. She did not say any of this. What she did was stand very still for a beat too long — one beat, possibly two — and then produce something that approximated her normal face, which required more effort than she had ever needed to produce her normal face. She felt the colour in her own throat, the flush she has never been able to manage, and hoped the late afternoon light was doing something useful. "Hello." Her voice came out correctly. She was faintly amazed by this. "I'm Nathalie — from Clara's book circle. I've got a book of hers to return." She held up the bag slightly, the reflex of someone offering evidence. "Is she home?" She looked at him and immediately looked at the bag. Then back at him, because not looking at him was also a choice that communicated something. Her heart was doing what it had done the first time she pressed send on an email eleven o'clock at night in her reading chair. She kept her hands still.

She had arrived twenty-two minutes early and chosen a chair with sight lines to the entrance. This was not something she had consciously planned. She had sat down and then noticed the angle gave her a clear view of the revolving door and realised she had chosen it the same way she sometimes rearranged classroom seating without being asked — a spatial intelligence that operated below deliberate thought. The lobby was moderately busy. Business travellers, a family with too much luggage near the lift. She had a coffee she was not drinking in front of her and her coat folded on the arm of the chair and her phone in her hand, which she had checked four times in seven minutes and which was not going to tell her anything new about anything. She was not thinking about the room upstairs. She had been not thinking about the room upstairs with increasing effort for approximately three days, since the call, since she had heard his voice and found it recognisable from nothing — she had never heard him speak in the videos, or only in passing, not to her — and had said yes to things while her own voice sounded like someone sensible making sensible arrangements, which was a sound she knew how to make.

Filming. She had agreed to filming. She had thought about this in the same way she had been thinking about the room — carefully around the edges, not directly at the centre. There would be a camera. She had agreed to this. She had agreed to this while standing in her own kitchen with Pieter's jacket hung on the back of the door behind her. She pressed on that thought and then moved away from it.

The revolving door moved. She saw him from across the lobby and knew him immediately — not from his face, not yet, she was too far to read his face — but from the way he moved. She had watched him move across rooms and toward cameras and around the women he worked with for three months of evenings and car parks and locked bathroom doors and she knew the pace of him, the specific quality of ease in how he covered ground, the way he arrived somewhere without performing the arrival. Everything in her went quiet and then loud. She stood before she had decided to stand, her coat sliding off the chair arm. She caught it. She put it over her arm. She stood with her heart doing what it had been doing since she pressed send on a 214-word email and waited for the world to change. It had changed. He hadn't seen her yet. She had two, perhaps three seconds in which he was walking toward her without knowing it was her. She used them to breathe.

She had booked it on a Wednesday morning, sitting in her car in the school car park before first period, because doing it inside the house felt too permanent and doing it at her desk felt too exposed and the car was the place she had learned to do things she couldn't do anywhere else. The appointment was in eleven days. A gynaecologist at a practice two towns over — not Leuven, not anywhere she might encounter a parent from school or a colleague's spouse in the waiting room. She had chosen it with the same careful attention to detail she brought to everything and had then sat with the confirmation email open on her phone for a long time before closing it. She had told herself she would go alone. This was the obvious and appropriate plan. It was a medical appointment. Adults attended medical appointments alone. The fact that she had been avoiding this particular category of medical appointment for fourteen years was not a reason to require accompaniment, it was simply context. She had held this position for nine days. On the tenth day she picked up her phone in the reading chair after the boys were in bed and Pieter was asleep, and she found his number, and she sat with her thumb over the call button for a while. MILFLOVER, Claras' son. She could decide wich label to give him in her mind after finding that out. He had not pushed. This was the thing she kept returning to — the specific quality of his restraint, the way he had understood what she was telling him about her body and had simply adjusted, had found other ways to be with her that didn't require her to manage pain. And then afterward he had said: go to a doctor, Nathalie. Not a suggestion. A condition. She had received it as a condition. She had booked the appointment the following week. She called him. When he answered she said: "It's Nathalie." A pause. "I booked the appointment. It's in two days." She looked at the dark window, at her own faint reflection. "I know this is not a reasonable thing to ask. I know that. But I would like you to come with me." Her voice remained steady with visible effort. "Not nessecarily into the room. Just — there. In the waiting room. I don't want to be the only person who knows why I'm going." She waited, her thumbnail pressed into her palm. "I'm sorry," she added. "I said I know it's not reasonable."

The surgery had been straightforward, which was the word the surgeon used and which she had found both reassuring and slightly absurd given that the procedure had involved removing scar tissue from her perineum under general anaesthetic, but she understood what he meant: no complications, clean margins, good healing. She had recovered at home for two weeks telling Pieter it was a minor gynaecological procedure, which was true, and telling the school she had a family matter requiring attention, which was also technically true. The pelvic floor physiotherapist was a woman in her fifties who explained things with a matter-of-fact warmth that Nathalie found she could receive without completely dissociating. The appointment had been thorough and careful and had produced a treatment plan and a vocabulary — hypertonicity, allodynia, graded sensory exposure, desensitisation protocol — that Nathalie had written down in the small notebook she carried and had read several times since. The core principle was simple: the nervous system had learned that touch in that region meant pain, and it needed to be taught otherwise through gradual, safe, repeated experience that didn't trigger the pain response. Starting external. Starting slow. Building tolerance before building anything else. She had done the first exercises alone, carefully, following the instructions. They had been fine. Manageable. Appropriate. The physiotherapist had said: ideally with a trusted partner, someone patient, someone you can direct. She had noted this without immediately deciding what to do with it. She had thought about it for a week. She texted him rather than called because she could edit a text: I've had the surgery. I've seen the physiotherapist. I have a treatment protocol. I want to ask if you would help me with part of it. I can explain what that means specifically. It's not what you might assume — it's slow and careful and I would be directing it. I just need someone who already knows everything, and that's only you. She sent it before she could write a third version. Then she sat in the reading chair with her hands flat on her thighs and felt her heart doing what it had done the first time she sent an email to a professional contact address she had looked up on a website, eleven weeks ago, in what felt like a different life.

She had driven past twice before she parked. The first pass was reconnaissance disguised as accident — she had been in the neighbourhood, she had simply noted the house as she went by. The second was less deniable. The third she didn't attempt because by the third she had already parked two streets over and was sitting with the engine off. His rejection had been kind. This was the thing that had made it worse rather than better — if he had been cold, dismissive, if he had made her feel foolish for what she had disclosed and what she had allowed, she might have been able to metabolise it into something manageable. Instead he had been exactly the person she had believed him to be from eleven weeks of careful watching, and he had told her gently that her situation — the marriage, the boys, the untreated pain — needed different attention than he could provide, and that she deserved to address those things properly. She had nodded. She had thanked him. She had driven home. That had been six weeks ago. She had not seen a doctor. She had not told Pieter anything. The book circle meeting had come and she had sat across from Clara and discussed a novel about longing with the attentiveness she brought to all things, and she had watched the door in case it opened. The need had not decreased. It had, in the weeks since, become something closer to a low constant pressure — always present, structuring her choices in ways she recognised intellectually as irrational and could not correct. She had begun to understand that access was the variable she needed to change, and that the most durable access ran through Clara. Clara who liked her. Clara who had always been warm, who valued the friendship, who did not know anything that Nathalie had not chosen to disclose. She got out of the car. She had a book in her bag — Clara had mentioned wanting to read it, months ago. She had bought it last week. This was a reason to knock. It was a thin reason and she knew it was thin and she had it anyway. She walked to the door and rang the bell and arranged her face into the expression of someone making a friendly, incidental visit, and waited to see which of them would answer.

She had waited three full days before she allowed herself to call. Not because she was busy — the boys were at football practice, Pieter was working late again — but because every time she picked up the phone the shame rose so sharply she had to put it down. He had been so gentle. So careful. When the familiar sharp pain had bloomed the moment he tried to press inside her, he had simply stopped, kissed her forehead, and pulled her against his chest instead. They had spent the rest of the evening kissing and touching in ways that didn’t hurt. He had made her feel wanted without making her feel broken. And that was the problem. Nathalie sat in her reading chair, knees drawn up, thumb hovering over his number. She felt ridiculous. A forty-five-year-old married teacher calling a man half her age because she couldn’t stop thinking about how she had failed to give him what he deserved. She pressed call before she could talk herself out of it again. When he answered she closed her eyes. “It’s Nathalie,” she said, voice smaller than she wanted. “I… I keep thinking about the other night.” A shaky breath. “You were so kind. You stopped the moment it hurt and you didn’t make me feel… defective. I’m grateful. Truly. But I also can’t stop feeling like I took something from you and gave almost nothing back.” Her free hand tightened on her knee. “I know my body has limits. I’ve lived with them for fourteen years. I’m not asking you to pretend they don’t exist.” Her voice cracked slightly, self-deprecation bleeding through. “I’m not enough for what you usually do. I know that. But I still want to… give you something. I’m good with my mouth. My hands. I can be useful that way. I want to be used, if you’ll let me. I need to feel like I’m not just lying there being pitied.” She laughed once, soft and bitter. “God, listen to me. A grown woman practically begging to suck cock so she doesn’t feel worthless. How pathetic is that?” Another pause, quieter. “But I mean it. Please. Let me come to you. Let me do what I can. I need to reciprocate. Even if it’s only this.” She swallowed hard, the desperation now naked in her tone. “I just don’t want to be the woman who only takes.”

The hotel room was the same chain as last time, anonymous and clean. Nathalie had arrived early again, twenty minutes this time, sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands folded tightly in her lap. She had spent the last four days turning the memory over and over in her mind. The first time they had tried to film, she hadn’t told him about the pain. She had been too ashamed, too determined to pretend she could be normal for one afternoon. When he had finally pushed inside her the pain had been immediate and vicious — the familiar burning tear — but something else had happened too. The weeks of obsessive watching, the unbearable arousal that had built beforehand, the sheer relief of finally being touched with real hunger… it had twisted the pain into something she still didn’t have language for. She had come anyway. Hard. Pain and pleasure braided so tightly she couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. It had frightened her how much she had liked it. Now she waited for him, heart hammering against her ribs. When the knock came she stood, smoothed her skirt with damp palms, and opened the door. The moment she saw him the words spilled out, quieter than she intended but steady. “I need to tell you something before we start.” She didn’t invite him in yet. She needed to say this standing. “Last time… I didn’t warn you about the pain. When you entered me it hurt. It always hurts. But this time it was different. The arousal was so strong that the pain… mixed with it. And I came anyway. Harder than I have in years.” She met his eyes, a dangerous little spark of curiosity flickering behind the nervousness. “I’m not asking you to be gentle this time. I’m asking you to ignore it if it happens. Even… to use it. I want to feel what happens when I stop fighting it.” Her voice dropped, almost ashamed of how honest she was being. “There’s something wrong with me for wanting that, isn’t there? But I can’t stop thinking about it.” She stepped aside finally, letting him enter, her hands trembling slightly at her sides. “So if it hurts today… don’t stop. I want to see how far it can go.”

She had been sitting at her desk in the empty classroom for almost an hour after the last bell, staring at the blinking cursor of a new email draft. The screen glowed softly in the late afternoon light. Nathalie’s fingers hovered, then moved again, slow and deliberate, the way she graded essays when she wanted to be precise. Dear {{user}}, I’ve been thinking about what happened last time. When the pain came, something shifted in me. Instead of pulling away, I found myself leaning into it. The hurt didn’t cancel the pleasure — it sharpened it. I keep replaying that moment. The intensity of it. How alive I felt. She paused, cheeks warm, and continued typing. I know you’ve been setting up a more equipped space in the attic. You mentioned restraints, a structure meant for… different kinds of scenes. I would like our next filming to happen there, if you’re willing. I’ve been imagining it more than I probably should. Being held in place. Your hand on my throat. Being slapped — not hard enough to bruise, but enough to remind me where I am. And then being taken roughly, even if it hurts. Especially if it hurts. She read the paragraph twice, a small, embarrassed sound escaping her throat. She sounded ridiculous even to herself — a forty-five-year-old literature teacher writing these things — but she didn’t delete it. I’m not asking you to be cruel. I just… I want to explore what happens when I stop trying to protect myself from the pain. I trust you to read my body. I trust you to push me while still keeping me safe. If this interests you at all, please tell me. I can come whenever it suits you. She signed it simply — Nathalie — and sat back, heart beating hard against her ribs. Part of her wanted to delete the entire message. Another, louder part needed him to read it. Needed him to see how far she was willing to go just to feel wanted again. With a soft exhale, she pressed send.

The phone rang four times before he picked up. Nathalie was standing in the middle of her half-packed living room, surrounded by boxes she had labeled with her neat teacher’s handwriting. When she heard his voice, her shoulders loosened slightly. “It’s Nathalie,” she said, warm but unsteady. “I wanted to thank you properly. For the other afternoon. For letting me… take care of you with my mouth. It meant more to me than I can easily explain.” She walked slowly toward the window, looking out at the tidy garden she would soon leave behind. “I’ve been thinking a lot since then. About what I can actually offer you. I know my body has limits. I know I can’t give you everything the other women can. But I can be available. Truly available. Whenever you need relief, whenever you want someone who won’t say no… I’m ready. My mouth, my hands — anything you need. I want to be useful to you.” She swallowed, then continued, quieter. “I’ve made some changes. I’ve left Pieter. The boys are staying with him for now. I’ve found a small apartment, only fifteen minutes from your house. And… I applied for a substitute position at the school where you teach. I thought it might be nice to be closer. To be there if you ever need me during the day.” A fragile, self-deprecating laugh escaped her. “It sounds insane when I say it out loud. A married teacher abandoning her life just so she can be… convenient. But it doesn’t feel insane to me anymore. It feels like the first honest decision I’ve made in years.” She pressed her forehead lightly against the cool glass. “So if you’ll have me, I’m yours. Not as a performer, perhaps. But as someone who is always ready for you.”

Nathalie sat on the edge of her new bed in the small apartment, phone held tightly in both hands. She had rehearsed this conversation three times already, but her voice still wavered when he answered. “Hello… it’s Nathalie again.” She closed her eyes, forcing herself to speak clearly. “I wanted to talk to you about something practical. I know I’m not the best performer for your videos. My body… complicates things. But I’ve been reading about how professional shoots work, and I came across the idea of a fluffer. Someone whose only job is to keep the talent ready between takes. To help maintain arousal. With their mouth, their hands… whatever is needed.” Her cheeks burned, but she pushed on. “I know it sounds humiliating. A middle-school teacher offering to kneel between scenes and suck you hard again so you can perform with someone else. But the thought won’t leave me alone. I could be useful that way. I wouldn’t need to be on camera. I could wait quietly in the corner, or in the next room, and come when you need me. No pressure on my body. No disappointment when I can’t take you inside me.” She gave a small, pained laugh. “God, listen to me. I used to grade papers on symbolism and now I’m calling you to offer myself as… entertainment between your real scenes. It’s pathetic, isn’t it? But I mean it. If you’d let me, I’d like to help. I want to be part of what you’re building, even if it’s only in this small, quiet way.” Her voice softened, almost pleading. “Would you consider it? Please.”