by Alison Tyler
You haven’t touched me like that in years, I thought.
Jim flung my arm away, then jerked me into an embrace, squeezing me so tightly I fancied he wanted to draw my body into his.
“Oh Christ, Liss,” he muttered. “Christ, you fucking scared me.” He stroked my head vigorously, smoothing down my hair over and over. “Liss. Liss.”
My shoulder throbbed from where he’d yanked me back from death—and my wrist burned as if sore from rope. The thought looped in my head: you haven’t touched me like that in years.
“Watch where you’re going, okay?” Jim squeezed my upper arms, giving me a little shake.
“I’m fine,” I said. “The driver saw me, anyway.”
“One day he won’t,” Jim replied, as if I’m always stepping in front of buses.
Oh, I know my head’s in the clouds at times, but Jim likes to make out I’m witless. He exaggerates my errors and any disastrous acts of rashness to shore up his belief he’s the epitome of competence in a world of fools.
“What would I do without you?” I muttered sourly, but my words were lost on him as he stooped to retrieve our Rough Guide from the road.
Jim waggled the book at me. “Better this than your body,” he said.
Later, back in our hotel room, I lay on the bed in a towel, freshly showered in advance of our evening meal at a small restaurant in Saint Germain, while Jim sat in an armchair by the window reading an English newspaper. Whenever we go abroad, he regularly buys a day-old English newspaper, although he rarely reads one at home. Better this than your body, I imagined him thinking. Better this than lips, hips and breasts. Better the sports pages than your cries of bliss. Better the crossword than making love in Paris.
I sat up, rubbing moisturizer on my freshly shaved legs, wondering if he’d notice I’d made an effort. Seven years ago to the day we’d said “I do,” me in pistachio-green silk, Jim in a morning suit of the most perfect slate-gray. But prior to that there’d been another date we would celebrate, the anniversary—now superseded by the official one—of the night we first got together. Perhaps because Hallmark doesn’t make cards declaring “On the Anniversary of your First Fuck,” we no longer commemorate that event, although my memory of it is crystal clear. We were psychology students and I’d listened, rapt, to Jim’s seminar presentation on Freud’s theory of the death drive. I hadn’t done my reading, so was fascinated to hear Jim contend Thanatos, archenemy of Eros, wasn’t merely a wish to die but rather an impulse toward stasis, peace and calm; toward the comfort of oblivion in a deathlike state.
Marriage, in other words.
After the seminar, I complimented Jim on his talk and we wound up drinking far too much in the student bar. When he walked me home, we stopped to kiss in a shop doorway and I found him unexpectedly and wonderfully forceful. He pinned me to the wall, spanning my forearms with thumbs and fingers as he ground his body against mine. He kissed and groped me, and when I made a resistant move, he saw its insincerity and pushed me back to the wall again, his hand firm on my shoulder, teeth nipping my neck in rebuke or warning, I couldn’t tell. Arousal plucked at my cunt, deep and sullen like the chords of a double bass; and so, feeling my knees were about to desert me, I took Jim home to have my suspicions confirmed. Here was a guy who had what I treasured, a sexual confidence bordering on arrogance and greed, an assertiveness I’d hitherto experienced only in bed with extroverts, sporty types and men who seldom visit the library.
Before long, I was regarding Jim as The One, but that was back when I believed in The One. Now I think there are any number of people we might make our life with and The One is no more than a one whose path happens to cross your own at an amorously convenient time. Oh, don’t get me wrong; I love the very bones of Jim, but sex is not what it was. And there are times when, were a bullish Romeo to come swaggering by, I could be swayed into believing seven years of marriage constitutes an amorously (and yes, adulterously) convenient time.
I don’t believe our failing is due merely to the ring on my finger or being shattered by parenthood (although exhaustion, admittedly, does tend to trample one’s libido). No, I believe love got in the way of us, plain old love. Because once, when we cared less, our sex life resembled a crazed experiment with Jim eager to make me suffer and me hungering to surrender. We were gleefully abandoned, both thrilled to have found the yin to our yang. We invested in some odds and sods—cuffs, blindfolds and a rubber-ball gag I’m now embarrassed to recall—but the real high was from the interplay between us, a connection so fluid and profound it was as if, in preparation for this moment in our lives, we’d been studying the shamed secrets in each other’s brains since the onset of adolescence. I felt I could show Jim everything and I did, and the compliment was returned a thousandfold.
But somewhere down the line, tenderness and affection smoothed away the rough edges of our dark delirium. The postcoital gentleness in Jim’s eyes was no longer merely postcoital. He loved me. I became more precious and therefore, to Jim, more fragile. Similarly, I lost the ability to cast him as a devilish bastard determined to have his way with me. He hurt me less often and with less intent, until we were having what I can only describe as efficiently romantic sex where we frequently stroked and kissed, hoping to disguise the truth of what sex had begun to feel like: goal-oriented, mutual masturbation; happy and loving but lacking that head-spinning buzz. The arrival of the children served to bind us within the family unit, leading us to where we are now, so steeped in domesticity and familiarity that our marriage, with its sporadic fumbles under the duvet, is practically functional incest.
Seven years ago I’d said yes. Lying on that blank hotel bed in Paris, I ached to say no. I wanted to be someone’s whore, worthless and wanton, crying “Stop fucking me, please,” and “I hate sucking cock, don’t make me, no.” And he would hold me down, snarling, “Whores can’t say no, it’s not their word, no such thing as no for a whore.”
My groin felt giddy and trifling, almost as if it were happy. Impossible, I know, but that’s how I perceived the sensation. We’d been in Paris for two days but, getting high on my desires, I felt we’d finally arrived. We were on holiday, normality suspended. I could taste freedom and it tasted precisely like that moment before the first sip of a cocktail at five in the afternoon.
“Jim,” I ventured. “Seven years ago today…”
“Christ, I know,” he muttered from behind his paper. “Young, weren’t we?”
I bit my tongue because even as I was thinking well, what’s that meant to mean? I was agreeing with the sentiment. Marriage years feel like dog years, seven for every one (yet the kids grow so fast it’s as if they’re siphoning off our energy) and it seemed a lifetime ago we were united in joy. I knew I ought to count my blessings, be more grateful, but dissatisfaction had become my default, grumbling like a low-grade pain. Jim didn’t seem to care that the two of us simply ticked over, but oh, I yearned for more. I wanted my happiness back and I knew something needed to change, either the situation or my perspective on it. The trouble was, which?
Well, I’d been grappling with perspective awhile and it wasn’t damn well working. At home, I wouldn’t have dared do it, but hotel rooms bring out the stranger in us all, and that five o’clock cocktail was an inch from my lips. Summoning up my courage, I flung off my towel, rose from the bed and crossed to kneel naked at Jim’s feet. The curtains were open, our tall windows overlooking a narrow street whose shabby, folded shutters suggested permanent Parisian sleepiness.
We’d booked the break as a seventh-anniversary gift to ourselves, eschewing the traditional option of wool (well, you would, wouldn’t you?) for romance and adventure. And now I knelt before my husband, hungering for a passion akin to the soul-swelling glory inspired by the city around us; by its subterranean catacombs, bloody revolution and high, shimmering fountains; by that crazed whirl of traffic circling the Arc de Triomphe, lovers in cafés and a history littered with whores and bohemians. All of this I wanted to come pourin
g into me as love and lust, releasing my heart so I could thrive once again.
Jim tipped down a corner of his newspaper, eyeing me with puzzled curiosity.
“Hurt me,” I whispered.
“Liss,” he replied wearily, as if being pestered by the kids.
He snapped his newspaper back. In truth, I think he was embarrassed. Well, so was I. Mortified, in fact. I knelt there, humiliated, alone, and seething with shame. I read a headline: Angry MPs Hit Back. And another: Sunshine Adds Years To Your Life. My nipples were sharp, goose bumps prickling on my thighs, that anticipated cocktail thrown in my face.
How can you know someone so well that rejection ceases to have meaning? Because wasn’t that it? My being turned down was on a par with Jim looking in the mirror and thinking, Hmm, hair could do with a trim. It appeared Jim and I were so enmeshed, he thought I was him; thought I was beyond being wounded by a snub.
Well, I wouldn’t stand for it. I snatched at his paper, the crash as it crumpled detonating in the silence, a bomb blast in the numbed contentment of our marriage.
“Hurt me!” I sobbed. “I nearly killed myself today. I could be dead right now. Dead! Or, oh God, maybe I am. Maybe… Hurt me! I want to know I’m alive! Fucking hurt…”
Jim stared. Perhaps he was contemplating how to hurt me, but the delay of no more than two seconds infuriated me. So I knelt forward and slapped his face, another bomb. Stunned, Jim glared at me, the flush of my handprint rising in his cheek, a lick of displaced hair hanging over his freckled forehead.
For several seconds, the world was on hold. All the clocks stopped, traffic froze, birds hung in the air, poised midflight like picture-book birds, and the population of China didn’t increase. Then Jim drew breath, restarting the world with a jolt. His hand was flat and fast and he struck me hard across the face, knocking the room sideways and flinging my hair about the place. I heard someone laugh, a low, dirty, triumphant laugh, and realized it was me. The room righted itself and my cheek flamed, the buzz of disorientation percolating from my brain down to my groin.
I gazed at Jim, exhilaration lifting my heart. As ever, anger made Jim doubly handsome, but despite the intensity smoldering in his eyes, confusion shadowed his fury. For one terrible moment, I thought he might turn tender and smear regretful kisses across my forehead, holding me close as he promised to make love to me more often, perhaps tonight after dinner, when we were both slightly hammered.
He squared his shoulders, his stubbled neck pulling tighter as he raised his chin. Being on holiday, he’d allowed himself to shave less often, and the pale peppering on his jaw enabled me, with a little imaginative will, to cast him as a nefarious villain or ruthless brute. He looked down his nose at me, eyes narrowing as they focused on mine. I hardly dared breathe. A man and his wife, lost together in a room in Paris. Jim’s nostrils flared fractionally before he spoke, a single word whose tawdry thrill came charging down the years to ignite a remembered fire in my cunt: “Slut.”
I smiled, unable to conceal my delight. With measured slowness, Jim put his newspaper aside. Leaning forward, he angled my face toward his, tilting my chin with a featherlight fist. In a softly menacing voice, he said, “Something amusing you, is it?”
My pulse raced, an answering throb drumming between my thighs. I was alone in a foreign city, meeting a man I used to know. I opened my mouth, but he cut in with a quietly vicious, “Shut up.”
I swallowed hard, feeling nervous and uncertain, much as I had in our early days before habit set in. He stood, moving the chair away and leaving me isolated on the carpet, with no nearby furniture for security. Strange, but he seemed so tall, taller than I recalled. I remained on my knees, keeping perfectly still as, with ponderous and authoritative strides, Jim circled me. I could feel his eyes on my flesh, and when he walked out of my range of vision, his gaze seemed as tangible as a touch, his fingertips scooting across the width of my shoulders, then sliding down my spine to linger on the curve and crack of my buttocks.
“Clasp your hands behind your head,” he said.
I did, opening up the stretch of my belly and breasts to exposure. Knowing I was under Jim’s scrutiny rendered me awkward and shy, and the folded shutters beyond the window didn’t help, either. My armpits seemed to tickle themselves, while breath from no place floated across my skin. I wanted to brush something from my stomach but there was nothing there, not even an itch. All the air around my flesh made me feel insubstantial. Half fearing I might fade and disperse into dust motes, I squeezed my locked fingers for ballast. I had an urge to sit back on my heels, clamp my hands to my breasts, curl up in a ball and hug my solidity. But, no. I had to tough it out, had to ride the waves of vulnerability as Jim turned me over in his mind, prowling while debating what to do with his slut.
At length, he returned to stand in front of me. I was hyperaware of my nipples, both so hard an invisible mouth might have been sucking them to erection. Jim bent to tap me under each breast, his touch efficiently brisk as he set my flesh jiggling. “Look at you, all on show,” he said. “So obvious.”
I glanced at his face, not wanting to meet his eyes in case it broke the spell. I could tell he was still mad at me for the slap, and consequently, I didn’t know if he was acting out of lust, love, resentful obligation or even hate. I wondered if perhaps he was going along with this to deny me any conjugal complaint and earn himself a victory. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I’d be able to tell. When his heart’s not in it, Jim fucks like a martyr.
“You ought to be ashamed,” he said. “On your knees, begging for a fuck.”
I shook my head. I liked this game. “I’m not begging,” I murmured. “I don’t want it.” I struggled to get the words out, embarrassed to be role-playing after such a lengthy absence. “You’re forcing me, making me kneel.”
“That right?” asked Jim, haughty and cynical. He’s always been better than me at dirty talk and role-play, able to turn the act off and on much as he’s able to turn sex off and on. He stooped and reached between my thighs, finding me wet and swollen. “Well, your pussy tells me a different story.” Crouching down before me, he fingered my folds as he examined my face. “Tells me it wants fucking. You’re soaked down here, Liss. Can’t pretend you don’t want it when your pussy’s dripping wet.”
In a whisper, I said, “You made me wet. Forced me. I don’t want—”
Jim drove two fingers into my hole. I groaned lightly, my juices clicking in the room’s silence as he thrust up and down. “You don’t want it?” asked Jim. “Don’t want fucking?”
“No,” I breathed.
“Gonna have to do something about that then, aren’t we?”
Jim withdrew and stood. My cheeks were hot, my body taut and tingling. Jim’s buckle clinked, leather hissing through the hoops of his jeans as he whisked off his belt with a snap. My cunt flared at the sound.
I gazed at Jim’s bag by the dressing table, seeing him in the corner of my eye and expecting him to double the belt for a nostalgic thrashing. Our flight number was still attached to his bag and I thought how odd and yet ordinary it was that Jim and I were at once this—a couple locked in their game-playing privacy where two invent the world—and also that—numbers among the thousands passing through Charles de Gaulle Airport, day after day, year after year, not a trace of us remaining save for a bunch of pixels on CCTV.
Jim didn’t double the belt. Instead, he wrapped it around my upper arms and fastened the buckle behind one shoulder. “There,” he said, sounding satisfied. “Collared your body.”
The words alone were enough to excite me, but the feeling was something else. My arms were trapped by my sides, the brown leather forming a strap across my breasts, my nipples jutting below. Clasped in that leather embrace, I felt at once safe and defenseless, the security of being held working in curious harmony with the assumed cruelty of my captor. Well, I wouldn’t get that from a bullish Romeo, I thought, and felt momentarily guilty for all the times I’d considered such a trite
alternative to our years of love and trust.
Jim jerked the tail of the belt and I lurched sideways. He laughed, evidently pleased with his new powers. “Come on,” he sang, pulling on the belt. “This way. Good doggy.”
On my knees, I shuffled after him, my bound arms making me feel not unlike a penguin. My comic lack of dignity perturbed and embarrassed me, and yet as ever, that very ambivalence, that excruciating humiliation fueled my lust for shame-tinged pleasure. Jim led me to the bed where, with a tap of his foot on my bottom, he indicated I should climb up.
“On your back,” he said, unbuttoning the fly of his jeans. “Legs spread.”
His eyes shone, all his attention on me, no part of him reserved for listening out for the kids. Likewise, he’d captured my attention, too, transforming the hotel room into our everything and our everywhere. I wobbled and wiggled into position, hampered by my inability to balance, while Jim released his hard-on. He has such a strong, handsome cock and the sight of its flushed tip peeping through his fingers had my juices pooling in readiness.
“You don’t look like someone who doesn’t want it,” Jim sneered. The mattress bounced as he sprang onto it, then positioned himself between my thighs, cock at the ready.
“You ordered me,” I countered, but my voice was a whisper. “I’ve no choice.”
Jim hitched my buttocks higher and rubbed the heavy end of his cock along my crease, slicking himself with my wetness. I was wide open for him, my bound arms distorting my sense of my body and turning my cunt into my most significant physical feature, a giant blossom pouring a slow, warm waterfall between my thighs. I felt myself a cocoon or enormous grub, my flesh no more than a necessary backdrop for the cunt he sought.
