Chapter 69: Chapter 69

We were in Valentino’s Bar, first date, third martini.

It was going well so I told him how, as a kid, I used to fantasize about getting tied up by cowboys outside a saloon bar.

In return, he told me when he was a kid, maybe slightly older, he used to think bondage involved two people tying themselves together. He’d thought it was like marriage but naughtier and more fun. If you did bondage with someone, it meant you loved them.

“Kids,” I said. “So sweet.” “Yeah,” he said. “Not really.”

A new year was starting, and we didn’t want to fall in love. When the snowdrops were pushing through, we brought a little light bondage into the bedroom, still shy like the flowers. His marriage had recently ended.

He hadn’t come into his own yet. He kept twirling the emptiness on his finger where his wedding ring used to be. I was worried I might be his rebound.

By the time the crocuses arrived, splashing yellow and purple across hard, blank ground, we’d moved on to more dangerous territory. He would hit me, twist my nipples, tie my wrists to my ankles and fuck me. Some- times I would cry afterward and so would he but for different reasons. My tears were a glorious release after zoning out in that taut, trapped place of being subjected to pain. His tears were the pain of loss and fear.

When the daffodils grew tall and bright, trumpeting spring, he grew tall and bright too. His finger no longer had the pale, sickly waist of his invisible ring. Then the tulips came along, tender spears turning to heavy- headed blooms, their throats bared in offer of vulner- ability. He began to care less about what I wanted in bed and more about what he wanted, which actually was what I wanted anyway. I like feeling used.

Paradoxically, he got off on me getting off, and the more he seemed to get off, irrespective of me, the more I got off. It was an unvicious circle, even when he was vicious.

Now he was sitting naked on the edge of my bed and I was on my knees between his open thighs, sucking him. I had some bondage tape in my toy box, that stuff that sticks to itself and doesn’t leave you gummed up with adhesive. He reached for it, dislodging his cock from my mouth, then said, “Hands on my thighs.”

DEEP THROAT, DEEP LOVE 161

I followed his order. The tape made a ragged squeak as he pulled it from the roll. He wrapped it tight around his thigh and my arm, bent to tear off the strip with his teeth, then repeated the action on the other side. I was left kneeling between his spread, muscular legs, my arms bound to his thighs.

“Now carry on,” he said. “All I want is your mouth, no hands.”

I continued, missing the use of my hands when I needed a backup or a breather. It made me work harder for him, made me keep going when my jaw ached or I felt a little choked. I flooded him with liquid spilling from my mouth. He sat there like a king on his throne, relishing his might.

In recollection, I think of that line from one of Shake- speare’s sonnets: Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?

But at the time there was no poetry save that of cock, spit and grunting, and the desire to take him fully in my throat. I think that’s a kind of poetry too, a space of being absorbed in a moment that language can weave patterns around but never hold.

I went far, far down. At the final push, my throat opened like a tiny gate and I held him inside me. With my gag reflex subdued, I was also subdued, at ease and wide open to him, connected and silenced. I sucked back along his length, feeling calmed, slurped on his end, then went down again.

He didn’t sound at all calm. My nose nuzzled his

pubes and he said stuff like, “Ohhh jesusfuckingoh… yes, oh there, ohgodmy, ohh, ohhhh…”

His incoherence affected me as strongly as a tongue on my clit. When he came, he was so deep inside my mouth I didn’t even taste him. I drew back, coughed, and blinked tears from my eyes. “I think I’ve got come up my nose,” I said.

He laughed. I expected him to free my hands but instead he leaned to tug a tissue from a box, doubled it and pinched it to my nose. He made me blow like a child. “Better?”

I nodded. He cupped my head to his groin, stroking my hair, my arms still taped to his thighs. After a while, he said, “Remember Valentino’s when I told you what I used to think bondage was?”

“Uh-huh.”

I looked up at him as he swept my hair from my face.

“I think I was right,” he said.