Equal Opportunities

by Mathilde Madden

  I have to stop that thought right there, before I turn into a puddle on the floor and have to go back to bed, because I am already stupidly late for my tutorial with Mercury. Late enough, in fact, that fifteen minutes of fantasising really isn’t going to make a lot of difference, but there’s no point in taking the piss.

  And anyway, I know that Dr Milo Mercury, or Mercury as he insists on being called, isn’t actually going to be worried about my hour and a half (and counting) of lateness. Not when I tell him why – in unnecessary detail.

  And details are forthcoming, when half an hour later, Mercury and I are not talking about semiotics, or even about English Literature in general, but about hot sexy boys and, more specifically, hot sexy David.

  ‘I’m so happy for you, darling,’ Mercury says, gushing, totally, but he is allowed to, being just the right amount of gay and just the right amount of old to get away with it. ‘You know, I was starting to think your strange little obsession for having sex with the unfortunate was going to be a lost cause. I’m glad you finally found a specimen that was worth indulging your vileness for. After all, you were never really the one for turning nunwards.’

  ‘Nunwards? You’re an English professor and you happily use the word nunwards?’

  Mercury makes a noise that sounds worryingly like ‘Tish’.

  I shrug.

  ‘In any case, you flatter me. Professorship is still maddeningly unreachable. I am, and am likely to remain, nothing more than a humble lecturer in a ridiculously provincial university.’ Mercury sighs melodramatically. I’m sure he’s putting on this little poor-me performance for my amusement. Which is kind, but I’m the one with all the amusing stories today, and Mercury can’t keep the floor for long – not without missing out on the best story I’ve had for months. And he knows it. ‘So, sweetie,’ he says, with a jangle of his cup and saucer, ‘are you going see Mr Gorgeously-Unfortunate again?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ David’s elegantly muscled arms are still woefully high on my things-to-think-about agenda, but I know I can’t keep going there. ‘It’s not really a good idea, is it?’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘Well, no. I mean, it isn’t fair. I can’t just have sex with him because I’m kinky for his misfortune. He is a real person, after all.’ I take a big gulp of my now rather lukewarm tea.

  ‘I would say his realness is more of a reason that you should be having sex with him than a reason that you shouldn’t. I think, darling, when it comes to your kink for gorgeous young cripples, you’ve had more than enough sex with imaginary people.’

  ‘But you’ve got to agree, it’s not right.’

  ‘Not right? Not right to have sex with someone that you find sexually attractive, and who appears to be attracted to you right back? How is that not right? Unless you have suddenly become a member of some reactionary religious sect.’

  I make a sort of protesting noise here, half remembering something David might have said last night about me not being his usual type.

  ‘Well,’ say Mercury, acknowledging my objection, ‘whatever you might think about that, from what you’ve said he certainly seemed happy to accept your kind offer of sex, so why should he complain?’

  I put my cup of tea down on top of a pile of glossy hardbacks that are teetering, rather worryingly, on a small table. It is far too cold to drink now. I don’t know how it got so freezing so fast. Maybe Mercury made it for the time I was meant to turn up rather than the time I actually did, for spite. (He really might have. Mercury can be a bit weird sometimes.)

  As I look over at him, not knowing what to say next, Mercury smiles, a playful boyishness rippling over his worn-out old face. I feel instantly happy, all warm inside – partly because I know that Mercury has seen it all, he’s cast-iron unshockable, but mostly because there is something in his manner that makes me feel so yummy I just want to hug him. (I don’t though. Ever. Neither of us is the hugging kind. Well, I’m not and Mercury claims that he doesn’t hug girls because they smell of perfume and that makes him cough.) Somehow, when Mercury smiles at me, the prospect of David – and, specifically, more sex with David – seems so much more real and possible than it did before.

  I walk to the university library from Mercury’s office. Campus looks lovely. It might still be freezing February, but through my shagadelic-coloured spectacles spring has sprung, and my night with David has left my cockles warm enough that I can’t feel the nasty nippy chill in the air. The green, green grass is so bright in the sparky winter air that it’s almost fluorescent, and edged with glistening dewy silver. The first little flowers are making their pastel presence felt in the dark beds. It reminds me of that super-sexually-charged lap David and I did around the park yesterday as a weird kind of foreplay. The sap is rising everywhere.

  I’m also thinking about what Mercury said, about how having sex with someone who wants to have sex right back can’t possibly be wrong. Turning his words over and over in my mind. Perversely, I can’t help wishing Mercury hadn’t said what he did. It’s just confused me, frankly. I had been hoping that he would help me draw a line under the whole thing by laughing at me for being such a dreadful pervert and telling me I should leave the poor crippled boy alone.

  But he (rather predictably) told me to go for it – in his own roundabout way. Which means I’m stuck, because there’s no way I’m going to be able to say no with only my own willpower to rely on. After all, just what are you supposed to do when you meet someone who could be one of your most pantingly potent sexual fantasies made into flesh and blood and tubular steel and pneumatic rubber? But the problem is – oh god, what is the problem again?

  Because it’s not just his disability. It is a lot his disability; I’m not going to lie about that, least of all inside my own head. But there is other stuff. It’s also about his ability, cringingly cheesy as that sounds. It’s the whole package. The fact that he looks like a superhero as imagined by a glam-rock-addicted comic-book artist sometime in the early 70s.

  I wouldn’t be tying myself up in knots if he was just any old guy in a wheelchair. It’s the fact he’s a fucking wet dream in a wheelchair. And he doesn’t seem to realise it. Not at the moment, anyway. So why shouldn’t I be the one to break the good news to him?

  Also, I really like his arms. Although, when I think about his arms, I mostly think about how those toned sleek muscles would look if they were taut and stretched by the way I’d tie his wrists behind his back.

  I can imagine that quite precisely, because I’ve tied lots of men’s wrists behind their backs. I have found that, if that is the thing one wants to do, there really is no shortage of willing male wrists. Some of them even supply their own slinky rope.

  I even had this boyfriend once – and he was a very big fan of being tied up by me – who knew about my disability fetish and managed to borrow a wheelchair from, well, from god knows where, really. I never asked – gift horses and all that. And anyway, as soon as I saw it I was in no real state to ask about logistics.

  It was a Friday night. I had got home from work, utterly shagged and so not in the mood to be, well, utterly shagged, but then I saw this filthy great wheel-chair sitting there and, frankly, I got so turned on so quick I might as well have been wired up to the mains.

  Gavin (that was the wheelchair-procuring guy’s name – I think) was delighted by my reaction, of course. I’d just stopped dead in the hall, staring, coat half-on, half-off, mesmerised by this wheelchair. Transfixed until Gavin winked and said, ‘You like it then? Happy birthday.’

  ‘It’s not my –’ I started to say, but I trailed off because whatever the calendar might have said, it might not have been my birthday five minutes ago, but it certainly was now.

  So instead I just said, ‘What are you doing?’ My voice sounded low, more than low, more than deep, it sounded like it had just been exhumed from somewhere.

  Gavin wrinkled his forehead at me. ‘What do you mean? You like it, don’t you? I can tell you like it.’


  ‘I mean,’ I said, the words coming out of my mouth before I could even think them, ‘what are you doing standing over there when you could be sitting in that chair right now?’

  ‘Oh.’ And then Gavin smiled the smile of a man who had the key to his girlfriend’s sexuality sitting within easy reach on the living-room carpet, and scooted into the chair with a wink and a smile.

  Of course, during the evening of kinked-out fun that transpired, I never quite managed to forget that he could really walk. And that did spoil it a bit, because I guess my fetish is for the not-being-able-to-walk part as much as the being-sat-in-a-wheelchair bit. (And the fact that he jumped into the chair with such explosive enthusiasm didn’t help my suspension of disbelief.)

  But I was going to make the best of it. My god, was I ever. And there really was a best to be made. Good old Gavin might have been – especially in retrospect – a slightly creepy, slightly over-eager guy who would do anything for a kinky shag, but, as I tied his hands, I knew that this evening was going to provide happy memories for many nights to come. The gift that keeps on giving, and all that.

  I strapped his wrists to the armrests, pulling the rope hard around his left wrist, until it bit into his skin. He moaned to himself and then softly whispered, ‘Tighter, oh god, tighter.’

  I loved that naughty moan, so I obliged. I really shouldn’t have – it was tight enough already and he’d have some nasty marks there later – but how could I resist such a greedy little pain slut?

  As I wheeled the bound and blindfolded Gavin into the bedroom, I realised that wheelchair bondage had some distinct advantages all of its own – above any kink factor – because how else could someone be so helpless but so completely manoeuvrable? It was a revelation and a brilliant bonus.

  A few seconds of rummaging around in the basket of kink I kept under the bed produced all the necessary equipment for a fun evening. It was actually my grandmother’s old picnic basket. I don’t know what she’d have thought about my using it to house a huge messy tangle of leather and chain and bondage gear.

  Suitably equipped, I moved closer to Gavin. He could tell I was there, even though he couldn’t see me. He was so used to being blindfolded that his senses were super-Spidermanlike.

  I touched his mouth with one finger, and he parted his lips enough for me to slip it inside. He sucked. His mouth was hot and wet. And nice. His gentle rhythmic sucking seemed to communicate an urgent neediness, a kind of desperation that got me squirming as I stood there. I liked the way he needed it, the way he was so desperate for this dirty, kinky sex. The way he had to be enslaved so much that it, the desire for it, was what really enslaved him. He didn’t submit to me as much as to his own desire for submission. I really loved that, because I love inescapable bondage and what could be more inescapable than one’s own brain?

  And then I made a snap decision. Literally. I pulled my finger out of Gavin’s mouth and, with only a quick pause for a rummage in the basket, snapped a sharp, hard pair of nipple clamps on to his equally hard nipples. Ignoring his reaction, I left the room and went to make a cup of tea.

  Ah, this part was always the hardest. I was so buzzy with adrenalin. It was so hard to wait on my own, to step outside it, but I knew that with Gavin it was so much better to get a little distance. One of us needed to be the one to hold back, and it was never, ever going to be him.

  I tried not to think about him as I listened to the hiss of the kettle. I tried not to think about him, tied too tightly to the wheelchair. Blindfolded, so he didn’t even know if I was still there or not. Helpless to remove the jagged teeth that were biting harder and harder on his nipples. This hiss of the kettle became a bubbly roar.

  I had to try really hard not to squirm.

  A few minutes later, before my tea was cool enough to drink, he began to call out from the bedroom.

  ‘Mary,’ he said, just loud enough for me to hear. ‘Mary, please.’

  Despite my distance and my attempts at calming myself, I was still slightly shaky from the sex-adrenalin and I would have liked nothing more than to go back into the bedroom and press myself against him. But I needed to steady the pace, take it slow. I ignored him and drank some tea.

  He knew I could hear him. It wasn’t a big flat and he knew I’d never go out and leave him tied. So he knew I was listening to his pleas and ignoring them. I loved that. I wondered if he liked it too. If it was turning him on as much as it was me. I wondered how long I could bear to make him wait.

  ‘Please, Mary. It hurts.’

  I drank some more tea, slowly.

  ‘Mary!’

  But I made myself finish the whole cup before I went back into the bedroom.

  I stood in the doorway. God, I still couldn’t get over the fact he was sitting in a wheelchair. I almost couldn’t bear to look. It was too sexy. So sexy it hurt.

  I could tell he had been pulling at the rough ropes by the reddish marks on his wrists, and his blindfold was all askew, probably because he’d been rubbing it against his shoulder to try and make it budge. He might be able to see a little round the edges of it, but not that much, and I didn’t really care. I had a plan. A bad plan. Those nipple clamps hurt. A lot. He’d be reaching his limit with them soon. And I wanted to play a little game with that.

  ‘What?’ I said, sudden and sharp enough to make him jump a little. ‘What do you want, you dumb little bitch? Are you bored?’

  ‘Mary,’ he said, his voice cracking and desperate. ‘Mary, please.’ He was pulling at the ropes around his wrists while he talked. His legs weren’t tied (that would have spoiled it), and I could see him twitch his left leg a little, even though he was probably trying not to move them. It was clearly hard, though. Hard for him to keep up the pretence when I was putting him under so much duress. Mmm, those clamps. They really did hurt.

  ‘What?’ I asked again. Pretending I didn’t know what the problem was.

  ‘Please, Mary, please take the clamps off.’

  Oh dear. His poor little tortured tits. They’d gone nearly white. Those clamps were so nasty, and it had been, what? Ten minutes? Ouch. Poor baby.

  I didn’t answer, though. I just looked at him, tied there. He was mostly dressed. Well, he had lost his trousers somewhere along the line, but his neat white underpants were still on – with a satisfying damp patch of delicious boy-come spreading across his crotch – and his shirt was still there, just, open and pulled back, bunching down his arms, almost adding to his bondage. There was something very particular about Gavin – so neat, so clean-cut – that made me want to keep his shirt on, one way or another. He wore a shirt to work every day. Always clean, always ironed. I liked to dirty them up. Like I dirty him up. Spoil my clean-cut corporate drone. Break him down completely, but keep a little token there, a little evidence of who he used to be before I took everything away from him.

  He must have been getting quite uncomfortable by now. OK, the wheelchair itself was quite comfortable, designed for hours of use, and apart from his wrists I hadn’t tied him particularly tight, but those clamps, with their nasty, angry little teeth, were digging into him. Clamps and a blindfold were the combination he hated most. And so that was what he got, more often than not.

  I took a step nearer, still not speaking, and stroked one of his tightly pinched nipples.

  He flinched so hard he almost made the chair tip over. Then, to steady him, I put my other hand on one of the chair’s tyres. When I touched it, everything seemed to liquefy.

  ‘Does that hurt?’ I said, worrying the nipple a little more, a measured, gentle inquiry.

  ‘Y-y-yes,’ he said, finding it hard to speak, forgetting to use any of the niceties that he was normally only too eager to embroider every exchange with, much to my annoyance.

  I took the little piece of his flesh between my fingers and toyed with it, making him hiss and roll his head from side to side. ‘Oh dear,’ I commiserated, ‘does it hurt that much?’ And then I pinched him really hard.

  He scr
eamed out loud and then said, with a gratifying note of real panic, ‘Please, please take them off.’

  I laughed softly. I was close enough to him now that most of my lower body was touching the chair. The metal was cool and frighteningly real against my legs. ‘Take them off? Why on earth should I do that? They look so pretty.’ I ran my finger along the chain that connected the clamps until I reached the centre, and pulled gently.

  Gavin yelped, struggling as far as his bondage would allow. ‘Please, please, I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Well.’ I paused to swallow, as if taking my time weighing up my options. ‘I suppose I could consider it. What will you do for me? If I take them off?’

  ‘Anything!’ The answer came without a moment’s pause.

  ‘Really? Anything?’ Thoughtfully, I placed each hand on one of the clamps, poised to remove them. ‘You do realise, I suppose, how much it is going to hurt when these come off, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I do,’ Gavin said, nodding impatiently, almost angry at my constant teasing and delaying.

  ‘And you still insist you want them off?’ As I spoke I played around with the clamps some more, twisting and tugging them a little, watching the reactions.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And in return you will do anything?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  ‘OK then, say when.’

  Gavin was silent for a moment, letting my words sink into his endorphin-fuzzed little brain.

  I smiled. Oh, yes, my darling, I thought to myself, warm fuzzies rushing all over my body, if you want them off, you are going to have to tell me exactly when to hurt you.

  A few more moments passed, and then his lips moved, slowly at first. I could almost see the strain of his need to obey me wrestling with his better judgement; could almost see his mouth begin to form his safe word. But when that swollen red mouth eventually did open he said, distinctly and defiantly, ‘Now.’