by Cara McKenna
“Thanks. Can I ask you something?”
“Always.” He sits and unlaces his shoes.
“Have you ever considered moving out of Paris? To somewhere calmer, with less traffic and fewer people? It seems strange you’ve chosen to live in such a crowded and chaotic city, and so close to its center.” Not that I want him to leave—quite the opposite. But I’ve always wondered what keeps him here, like someone who’s afraid of drowning living on a houseboat. Maybe the thought of making a jump for the dock is just too terrifying.
He pushes off one shoe, then the other, blinking thoughtfully. “I suppose I never considered it a choice.”
“No?”
“This city has always felt like a spider’s web to me. This is just where I landed.”
Where he got entangled. It’s only fitting, considering what a struggle it is for him to move from thread to thread, always seeing shadows scuttling out of the corner of his eye.
“I wasn’t always this bad,” he reminds me. He was functional up until his mother passed away three years ago. “By the time I was this bad, I was attached to this flat. And to my job, and my routines.”
“Of course.”
“This is all I know.” His mother was agoraphobic as well and rarely took him beyond the city limits. Paris constituted what a psychologist would call her “safe zone”, and it sounds as though she managed well enough inside its bounds. Checking on her had been Didier’s main outside obligation toward the end of her illness, and his safe zone quickly contracted to the size of his flat after she died.
He shrugs. “I’ve been to the countryside and the ocean, and to Portugal when I was young. But nowhere outside Paris since I was seventeen. And not outside the Latin Quarter since my mother’s funeral. Except that trip to your museum.”
“That counts.”
He sighs, and I feel badly. I forced him into exposure therapy for the sake of our date, and now I’m grilling him about his life choices. We’re in the only place where he gets to feel secure, and I’m opening a window to let his troubles blow inside and disturb the calm.
I remember something, a convenient distraction to take the edge off our conversation. “I got you a gift.”
“Oh?” That brightens his expression, and I know he expects a clock or watch or some other broken refugee from a thrift shop. It’s something a bit different, and I feel my chest tighten, hoping he’ll like it.
I lean over the couch’s arm for my tote and fetch a drawstring bag, heavy and lumpy, and a flat, wrapped box.
He accepts them with a raised eyebrow and I settle closer beside him.
“Open the bag first.”
He tugs the bow loose and uncinches the mouth, draws out an old padlock, then another, and two more. He studies the final one and gives me a curious look.
“Now open the box.”
He strips its paper and lifts the lid, taking out what looks like a thin leather-bound journal. He frees the tie, unfolding the case in quarters to reveal two dozen small, gleaming instruments, slender steel rods each in its own tiny pocket, and all with different heads—diamond shapes and circles and hooks.
For a moment he stares, then the warmest laugh tumbles from his mouth. He holds one of the locks up and smiles at me. “No keys, then?”
“I have the keys. I had to make sure none of them were rusted shut or broken. And I’m not cruel, so there’s one more thing.” I reach for my bag one last time to retrieve the book I had to special order, a slim guide to lock-picking.
“Yes, this would be useful.” He flips through a few pages, his gaze catching on this diagram and that. He loves the insides of complex objects, queer little puzzles in need of solving. Hours a day he sometimes spends fixing broken things, and it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to find the metaphor. He sees himself as broken, and I don’t like that. There’s no perfect shining part you can order that’ll make him tick like a so-called normal person. I’d prefer he see himself as a keyless lock—a conundrum, but one that can be solved with patience and gentle experimentation.
He inspects one of the instruments.
“Do you like it?”
“I do.” As he stares at the largest lock, I know what he’s thinking. He wants to see inside and understand how it works.
“I bet they’re really hard to take apart. To look inside, I mean.”
“One would hope so. I will just have to work blind, I suppose. And see with my hands and ears and these little tools.” He sets the items aside. “Thank you.”
My face heats when he kisses me. When we part, I have to purse my lips to keep my grin from growing too wide and goofy. “You’re welcome.”
“You spoil me.”
“I try to.”
“It’s I who should be spoiling you, to celebrate your good news.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I know now.” He smiles, slow and devious. “Perhaps I’ll find some other way to treat you.”
“Perhaps you will.” I sip my wine, liking the way he looks at me. Liking him, just being with him. If this is my first boyfriend, our romance doesn’t look like how I’d pictured it when I was that gawky mantis in Goodwill clothes. Our courtship is short on carnations and prom dresses, surprisingly heavy on the wine and antiques and orgasms. I missed out on getting groped in the cab of some redneck hockey player’s truck, but here I am in Paris, about to be taken to bed by a man so good-looking and so skilled at sex women pay for the chance to enjoy him for a night.
My first love came half a lifetime later than I’d hoped, and though it may look a bit twisted from the outside, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Didier takes a deep drink then asks, “Would you like to play another game tonight?”
I nod, suddenly shy. It’s been a couple weeks since our first such game—exploring the sorts of things other women come to him to experience. I know he fuses past and present clients together, composites them into anonymity so he can indulge my desire to eavesdrop on their fantasies. Two weeks ago we went further than just storytelling, acting out the scenario. It was exciting, trying on another woman’s kinks. My own sexuality is still forming, and before it gels I want to sample as many people’s appetites as I can.
“What sort of game, do you think?” he asks.
“I’m not sure.” I cuddle closer, pressing my arm to his and taking another sip. I wish we had a fireplace, just now. I wish we were in some tiny stone vacation cottage in Provence or somewhere, with a hearth and stars and crickets. I wish lots of things, but I know not to hold my breath.
“Tell me about some of your clients. About the ones with the most unusual requests.”
“I find very little unusual, when it comes to sex,” he murmurs, but there’s distraction in his tone—he’s already browsing his memories for stories I’ve yet to hear.
He swirls his wine, speaking to his glass, it seems. “I had a client for a while who only wished to come here and do what we are now.” He drapes a warm, strong arm behind my shoulders. “For hours we would just sit or lie together, and I’d hold her. We would kiss, very softly, but for so long my lips would grow tender.”
“Never anything more?”
“For hours we would do that, and sometimes I would tell her how much I wished we could do more. Be naked together. Touch each other. Make love. She wanted me to say these things, but she would never go any further. Then she’d tell me she had to go home, and we would say goodnight and she’d leave me alone in my bedroom. She would pretend to go, but stay just outside my door, watching from the darkness while I masturbated.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t seen that coming.
“We would pretend this was what happened after she left, that she had me so excited and frustrated I couldn’t wait for relief.”
“And that was it?”
“That was it. I would give her the show she wanted, and after I came I would hear her quiet footsteps and the front door would click shut for real. That was all she ever asked of me. And after perhaps a dozen v
isits in as many weeks, she never made another appointment.”
“Wow.” Here I’d thought I was the repression poster girl.
“And ages ago I had another client, a violin teacher. When she was a few years older than you, she’d had a student in another city, a young man of about fifteen, the son of a close friend. She spent two years so infatuated with him and so disturbed by it, she ended up moving to Paris, where she wouldn’t have to see him. It hurt, she wanted him so badly. And the feelings didn’t go away. She came to me many years later, wishing to pretend I was her old student.”
“To pretend you were a teenager?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes to pretend she was giving in to her attraction. Educating a young man in far more than the violin.”
“Ah.”
“More often she wished me to simply be the age that I was, roughly as old as her student would have been. She would have us pretend to have met after those years of separation, me finally a man grown, and one who’d secretly pined for her with the same ferocity and heartache that she had for him.”
“Gosh. That’s kind of romantic.” And kind of heartbreaking… Mostly heartbreaking. And sad and deluded. But all the best romances are tragedies, I’ve always felt.
Didier smiles suddenly, melancholy lifting like a blind. “And I used to have a client whose only appetite was to baste my cock with honey or sweetened cream and suck me clean, again and again.”
A shock of pleasure contracts deep in my belly. Didier raises a playful eyebrow at me, one that says, I have a very strange job, don’t you think?
So many women he’s been with, with so many tastes I’ve never even conceived of. And I have a good imagination.
I picture the chest that sits at the foot of his beautiful old bed. It’s not off-limits, but I’ve only ever peeked inside when he’s in the shower, and afterward wondered if he noticed my acting shifty and shy upon his return.
The chest is full of toys, as he readily told me. I was his client then, after all, and those toys were as much for me as any other visitor to flat 5C. I was also a virgin at the time, though a terminally horny one, and I owned a vibrator. An unassuming, minimalist thing with a few speeds that I only ever used to stimulate my clit. Now I never use it, too spoiled by what Didier can do to me. Kind of like how I used to love Kraft Singles, but now that I’ve tasted fresh chevrotin from Haute-Savoie, it’s painful to imagine going back.
It took me a long time to work up the nerve to look inside the chest, and I hadn’t found what I’d expected. Garish stuff—that’s what I’d imagined, but actually many of the items look like art objects. No neon colors or veiny rubber dicks of frightening proportions. Beautiful things. There was a paddle made of beech and honey-colored leather, silk scarves as nice as you’d find at a boutique, a glass dildo swaddled lovingly in a soft towel. There were quite a few rolled towels, but I had a vision of snooping too clumsily and Didier walking in from the shower to find me blushing with shards of cock littering the floor at my feet, so I hadn’t peeked inside more than a couple.
The only thing in there that’s truly haunted me is what I know must be a strap-on. Given that he has a perfectly serviceable cock of his own and all his clients lack that apparatus, I can only assume it’s for… Well, for stuff I don’t entirely get.
“You know the chest, by your bed?”
He smiles, a weird little smile I’ve only rarely seen him wear, all mischievous, like he ought to be licking his lips. It makes me want to smile myself.
“Yes,” he prompts.
“What do your clients like to do with…you know. The stuff in there.”
“Their tastes vary as widely as the objects. Have you looked inside?”
I nod, blushing.
“Did anything spark your curiosity?”
The strap-on springs to mind, but that’s more confusion than curiosity. “I only saw the stuff on top, really. I was afraid I’d put things back messily and you’d know I looked.”
“Did you think I’d be upset that you looked?”
“No, I was just embarrassed. Or afraid you’d think I was interested in something I wasn’t ready for.”
“But now you bring it up, so does this mean maybe you’re interested?”
Pandora’s box, my brain whispers. What if we open it up and I find out I’m some crazy kinky woman, with weird fetishes no regular man will ever abide? Or worse, find out I’m utterly, incurably vanilla and be stuck worrying that for this man who probably maintains a rotation of a dozen or more regular lovers at a given time, no one woman could ever provide enough variety?
But I didn’t come to this flat—not tonight or that first evening, back in March—looking to maintain my sexual status quo.
I drain my glass, nodding as I swallow. “I think I am.”
Chapter Two
In the bedroom, Didier lights candles and draws the curtains, blocking out the twinkly skyline and the round shapes of roosting pigeons. I sit cross-legged at the edge of the bed, fidgeting with my nails.
“I will show you what I have,” he says, setting a chair before me then hefting Pandora’s sex-toy chest onto the chair. “If something sparks your interest, perhaps you would like to hear about the sort of woman who requests it?”
“Sure.”
“And if our bodies end up being all we need from each other tonight, then we are not so very unfortunate, no?” He gives me a teasing look, quieting my buzzing nerves some.
“Sounds good.”
He sits, leaving room between us, and leans forward to open the lid. “Here. You choose, my little curator.”
I smile at that. It does feel a bit like opening a crate of new arrivals at the museum, and my anxiety turns to giddiness. I choose a rolled towel, unfolding the soft terrycloth to reveal the same smooth glass dildo I’d peeked at weeks ago.
“I saw this one. It’s beautiful.” It’s crystal-clear save for a ribbon of deep blood-red spiraling through the core. There’s the vague suggestion of a head, but other than that it’s pretty innocuous, an eight-inch cylinder, slightly curved and slightly tapered. I turn the gleaming glass around in my hands so the candles’ glow lights it from within. Knowing Didier, caring for these objects goes far beyond the chores of sterilization. I bet he polishes this glass reverently with a soft cloth, oils any leather he owns, buffs any brass or copper rivets the way he dotes on his precious watches and clocks. I bet he wraps them in the cleanest, fluffiest towels and stows them gently, as if putting them to bed.
I pass him the dildo. “Do lots of your clients like that one?”
“They do. I like it as well. If I’m in charge of choosing, I often pick this one.”
I hadn’t thought of that—surely many of his clients would leave the decisions up to him. I remember what we did the last time we pretended to be other people. He’s perfectly capable of taking charge. He’s perfectly capable of being whatever a woman wants.
“Do…”
“Yes?”
“Do any of your clients ever…” I stare at the dildo. “Have any of them ever used it, you know…”
“On me?”
I swallow, nodding.
“They have.”
“Do you like it?”
“If it excites the woman I’m with, then it excites me.”
Of course, that old refrain. I’ve heard it a dozen times or more, and I don’t know why it rubs me wrong. I suppose because it makes me feel incidental, wrecks any starry-eyed belief I want to hold that he and I are perfectly suited.
“But it feels good?” I ask.
He nods. “Physically, yes, with the right preparation. And psychologically… It’s a bit like a drug, I suppose. Not that I have very much experience with such things.”
“How so?”
He eyes the glass. “You start to tinker with gender roles, with dynamics as basic as who is penetrated…you feel a bit out of control, but also uninhibited. It’s like Halloween, maybe. It feels awfully wicked, modifying your identity for a little
while. Shunning what society expects of you.”
“What does the woman get out of it, do you think?”
He makes a thoughtful face. “I think for some it is simply a kink, picked up from who knows where.”
I nod. I’m not a stranger to gay pornography. In fact, it’s the only kind I’ve really watched much of, since the men tend to be far nicer looking and there aren’t any women for me to compare myself to. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t turn me on, beyond the mere presentation of naked, aroused men. The idea of a guy getting sodomized doesn’t turn me off, but…
I glance at Didier, the man who embodies my entire non-solo sex life. He’s always been my teacher in this, the one who knows what he’s doing, and me the vessel. I’m not ready to see him as a vessel, so I reach for another object and a change of topic.
“What about this?” I ask, turning the paddle around in my hand. Its blond wood grip is perfectly weighted, full of authority, the business end made of thick leather, flaring out like a fish tail. It’s not too big, only as broad as a spatula. Not too scary. “Do you use this a lot?”
“Fairly often.”
“On your clients and on you?”
“Yes, both. Typically the former, if only because typically women’s appetites tend to lean toward the submissive.”
It’s weird to hear him talk about bondagey things. I always knew he must dabble in that, but he and I have always been so…basic. All at once I feel very naïve. “How hard?”
“Depends,” he says, taking the paddle from me, studying it as though he’s never seen such a thing before.
I imagine him using it on me. I’ve felt his palm before—not very hard, but a sharp little slap on my hip once or twice when he was behind me. I liked how it felt. Like a kiss of pain and heat, but even better because I never asked him for that. It was proof he has desires that don’t hinge on a woman’s express request.
“I’m interested in that one,” I say, and set it elsewhere on the bed. “And maybe these.” I draw a pair of silk ties from the box and set them beside the paddle. It’s liberating, choosing things, admitting to being curious. And it’s fun, like shopping. I’m good at shopping.
