No, she didn’t want it to end, so she didn’t say no. Nor did she open her eyes. Instead, she moved her head and moaned slightly, this time consciously, which made him pull the cloth tighter, then reach down and pinch her nipple, forcefully—something she’d always hated, squirmed away from, but which sent a hot shot through her midsection, and caused her to arch her upper back into his hand, which he promptly moved to the scarf, fastening it firmly. She writhed, unsure of what message she was sending by doing so (and equally unsure of what message she wanted to send). Again, he reached back, lifting her head slightly as he did so, this time placing a similar fabric on her forehead, no, down, over her closed eyes, quickly pulling it tight and tying it. She offered no resistance this time, though she felt both more frightened and more excited, almost inconceivably so. But as his touch turned more gentle—removing her head from his lap and placing it carefully on a small, hard pillow—and her mind stopped racing, she became fraught with the foolishness of her immediate situation: she had gone home with a man she barely knew, a man with a wife and child (Where? Who knew? Lil; she would ask her tomorrow), whom he had neglected to mention until moments before instructing her to strip. What kind of person did something like that? What else was he not telling her? Were there bodies beneath his floorboards?
Here she was: naked, gagged, and blindfolded, like something out of a movie (a porno? She’d never seen one), or something more risqué than Playboy—Hustler, perhaps, or Screw. Of course, this wasn’t a movie, this was real life, her life, and this man—this virtual stranger—could kill her or rape her or, or, do anything with her that he liked. What did she know about him? Nothing, really, but that he was Tuck’s friend and she barely knew Tuck—really, she didn’t know Tuck at all. A warm trickle of something leaked down from inside her, cooling her thigh. Oh God, she thought again, oh God. She felt his hands part her legs, just slightly. She could feel the soft, dense hairs of his thighs rubbing against the back of her own. He was kneeling on the futon, beneath her legs. And he’d removed his pants. His hands, again, moved up her legs, inside her thighs, which were now embarrassingly moist. She moved to close them, making awful “uhhh-unnn” sounds, like a sheep. “No, no,” he said, firmly holding them apart, and placed his hand there, then slid a finger back. What was he doing? His finger, wet, slipped in behind, then another finger.
Oh God, she thought, not this, she’d never thought of this, never conceived of it as an option, though she’d read about it, of course, most memorably (indelibly, she supposed) in Martin Amis’s London Fields, where the main character—Nicola Six, who really isn’t very much like a real person, but more like a man’s masturbatory fantasy, but that’s kind of the point, she supposed, kind of what the book is about, kind of what all Martin Amis books are about—can’t get enough of it and her doctor, Nicola Six’s doctor, that is, tells her it’s okay, as long as she does it first in the proper place, second in the other place, where one of Will’s fingers now moved gently, as it’s not healthy to do it the opposite way, a girl could wind up with all sorts of infections and things. And then there was Lucy, a strange girl from her grad program (writing her dissertation on BBC adaptations of Austen), with whom she’d made a brief attempt at friendship—a Brit, like Will—and Glyn. One night, two-odd years back, the three of them had gone for drinks at the Gasthaus, and Lucy had started in on the sexual ineptitude of British men. One boyfriend, a cyclist whom she’d otherwise adored, was only capable of doing it… this way, “in the arse,” Lucy had said, laughing.
“Well, clearly he was a fag,” Glyn had said.
“No,” Lucy shrieked, “he wasn’t! He wasn’t. He just had problems.”
Glyn shrugged and swilled his Guinness. “What did it feel like?” he asked, trying to pass this off as a casual question. “Did you like it?”
“Hmmm.” Lucy considered, pushing a bony hand into her blonde, wiry hair. Affecting intense interest in the menu board, Beth had avoided her friends’ eyes and pressed her legs together to stop the throbbing that had started up between them. “It felt a bit like going to the loo, if you know what I mean,” she said. “It felt like there was something inside me that wasn’t supposed to be there, and my body was trying to push it out.” Her thin, serious face broke into a smile. “But I also quite liked it, in a way, doing the taboo thing, you know? It added something.”
That night, Beth had expected Glyn to want to try it. Instead, he’d fallen dead asleep—no, passed out—on her tattered couch. She wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. And now here she was, doing the taboo thing, or on the verge of it, not sure if it would be more sordid or less, for the fact of her being in New York, with someone she barely knew. Her mind raced, health center pamphlets flashing before her eyes like a grammar school slide show: AIDS, HIV, herpes, burst blood vessels, intestinal blockage, something in Story of O about being “rent” by this activity, if the man’s… organ… was too large, rending meaning, she assumed, ripping, though perhaps it was something worse.
But no, these were just his fingers—for now—and they felt strange, not necessarily painful. She could see what Lucy meant, about having something unnatural inside you. Her muscles contracted. And yet there was also this feeling—she fought against it—of his fingers being too small, too sad, of wanting more. Her body rocked, without her intending it to do so. And she felt his body—large, that smell of peppermint and tobacco and maybe shaving cream—hovering over hers, the corner of a worn T-shirt, a brush of boxer short. “Have you done this before?” he asked. His voice, she realized, was low and extraordinarily pleasant. She would not, she thought, have discovered this if not for the blindfold and the gag. It was true what they say about sensory deprivation—block off one sense and it heightens the others. Like Helen Keller. She shook her head no, rather wildly, fearing he might misunderstand. “I didn’t think so,” he said, moving his fingers more deeply inside her. His other elbow (left? right?) rested on the futon, just next to her ribs. Now he moved this hand to her breast again, clamping down on it. Hot and swollen—prickly, almost as if she were getting her period—from all this touching, her breasts seemed to be acting of their own accord, divorced from their owner.
He was holding his body off of her, perhaps not wanting to crush her with his weight, but she wanted to feel his weight on top of her, the smell of him, his body obliterating the thoughts and anxieties of her own, shutting down the system. Instead, he shifted her in one smooth motion and lay down next to her, on his side, his mouth at her ear. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. As one, her muscles went limp at this declaration. She had nothing to worry about. Lil or Emily would never worry in a situation like this. They would strip off their clothes and stand boldly before Will, hips tucked back to lengthen their legs, as models did. Sadie, she thought, would never be in a situation like this.