It's Not Good

We're heavy breathing and hot fumbling on the bed and he's hard against me and I know we could fuck again and I would come and he would come and it would be so good, such intense pleasure, everything working like it should and suffusing us both with wonderful sensation and then lying there in warm drifting loving bliss.

So why do I want to make him angry? Why do I push him off me, sit up, casually make another drink, light another cigarette, just to try to make him force me to carry on? Why do I torment him and taunt him, clever nasty carefully-chosen words? Why does seeing his face troubled and twisted up like that make my stomach go hollow?

Our eyes catch each other's; there's a long tremulous moment. Shimmering possibilities. A blur of visions - blood and violence and rape and tears - but we both just sit there, and in the end it's me who cracks and looks down.

It's not good, you know, he says. It's not a game. It's horrible to feel like that. Anger and hatred and violence. I can't just snap out of it.

I know it's not good. It's not like my brain's wired up wrong, I say. Not like that, anyway. It's not that pain feels good. I can tell the difference between pleasure and pain: one hurts and one feels nice.

It's not about the pain as such. It's the structure of thought, the tangled mess of feeling, that I want at moments like this, not a cheery happy mutually-agreed spanking/biting/whipping session. I don't care what he does, as long as he's not ok with it, as long as he hates himself for doing it, and me for making him do it. Hurting me is just an easy way to make that happen.

We are young(ish) and healthy(ish) and there is love and lust and we have time and space and we know how to conjure up sweetness and glowing light. It's all there - it should all be there - it should be enough.

It's just that... when he looks at me like that and his eyes are bluest blue with blackest black tunnels in their centres, and I see the spectres before me, the possibilities, the visions of him grabbing me and slapping me and tearing at my flesh and hating, hating, angry, vicious, hot, cold... the room tilts around me and the world holds its breath.

My Weekend

R and I drive a long way to visit D. It's been nearly a year since we saw him. B is coming too, from a different city. I don't allow myself to believe that he'll turn up: I don't want to be disappointed. But there he is, looking strangely smart and unlikely in his work clothes.

When B and I first reunite on Friday we are polite and keep our distance, physically and emotionally. He kisses me chastely on the cheek. He buys disgusting shots in the pub and we walk back with our arms around each other. I hold his hand where it rests on my shoulder. We keep it light and friendly. We drink bottles of beer and we all make each other laugh a lot.

On Friday night we sleep close to each other, him on the sofa while R and I are sleeping together on the floor. When I open my eyes he is looking right at me. He looks away quickly. Much much later, close to dawn on Sunday morning, when we are sitting outside curled up together with our fifteenth cups of gin and tonic, he tells me that he was watching me sleep.

"You look strange when you sleep."
"Ugly?"
"No, you look pretty. But you frown. You don't look like you're ... in repose. You look more relaxed when you're awake."
"You were looking right at me when I woke up."
"I had a massive erection," he says. "I was wondering if there was any polite way of asking you to help me with it."

But at the time, on Saturday morning, I have no idea if he still wants me at all. He likes my hair a lot: "bewitching Oriental waves" he said once. He touches it as often as he can. On Saturday morning the excuse is that he wants to feel whether it's going dread-y. He puts his hand underneath my hair, on my neck, and tangles his fingers in it. Twists them around. For a long time. And this in front of D, our mutual friend.

"Thanks for that," I say, keeping it light. B is too sleepy (or pretending to be) to restrain himself.

Later, in the pub, I argue with him about the distinction between andros and anthropos. I borrow R's pen and scribble Greek words messily on the back of a receipt. I am fired up and at that articulate stage of drunkenness. Impulsively B kisses my cheek, fast and hard, in front of D and R. The kiss is chaste enough but I wonder if it seems strange to the others.

By the time we are in the almost empty club, he is kissing my face, my hands, my neck: anywhere but the mouth. Every moment the two of us are alone (the smoking ban helps this - it's obligatory to divide the group every few minutes to go off, in pairs, for a fag) he is talking to me, holding me, looking at me in a way that makes me melt. He puts his arms around me and pulls me close to him. Tangles his hands up in my hair and says my name, over and over. Buries his face where my neck meets my shoulder.

I dance to punk remixes and try unsuccessfully to get off with a girl in the club. She's flirting but ultimately says no. I am very frustrated and drunk and horny. The four of us stumble home at 3.30am. B and I walk behind the others with our arms round each other. Back at D's flat, we stand outside smoking. I ask B if he wants to feel something. He says yes. I take his hand and guide it inside my jeans, inside my knickers, til his fingers brush against my deep, damp, desiring cunt. "Fuck, you're so wet," he says.

D and R fall asleep. B and I stay up, refilling our g&ts and smoking whole packets of Marlboro. We sit against the wall, limbs tangled up together, trying to talk it all out. We make each other laugh and tell each other that it's like communicating with yourself, almost - our connection is so transparent and uncensored.

He tells me that he had to leave the room earlier to masturbate because of what I was saying. "I came almost instantly," he says.

I ask him why he hardly ever makes eye contact with me.

"Because then I'd have to kiss you," he says.

I kiss him a few times. He switches rapidly, repeatedly, between resistance and desire. He talks about the stars we can see. I think this is cheesy.

He tells me he was worried I was falling in love with him. That he loves his girlfriend and that he has had enough of turmoil and passion and it always ends badly. That yes, he and I have something unique, but so do he and his girlfriend. And so do me and R. He has difficulty reconciling his different selves.

Eventually we go inside. The sky is already light around the edges. In the hallway we kiss again, briefly. I try to tempt him further but he refuses.

Inside, R is asleep on the floor. B sits on the sofa and pulls me down next to him. He holds me more tightly and for longer than I can remember being held. Eventually his breathing deepens and I realise he's asleep, head on my breast, arms locked around me. I disentangle myself and change into sleeping clothes. I take his shoes off with a maternal ache inside. Then a struggle to wake him up and convince him to take his jeans and jumper off and to get into his sleeping bag. I am ready to go to sleep on the floor but, barely conscious, he puts his arms around me and pulls me into him. We lie pressed close together, my legs sandwiched between his, my head on his shoulder. I can feel his cock throbbing against my leg. Barely awake myself, I let my hand stray there and (finally!) hold it through his boxers. He moans quietly. His hand finds its way to my breast and he strokes my nipple, slides the bar back and forth, circles it with his thumb. All the while I have his cock in my hand, I'm holding him gently but firmly. Lying like this, we drift off into sleep.

I wake up some time later. It's light and R is still asleep on the floor only a few feet away. Reality knocks, distantly. This is dangerous. I readjust my clothes and try to get up, but deep in inebriated sleep, B tightens his arms around me. Eventually I extricate myself and fall asleep where I should be, next to R.

In the morning R is horny and I am still drunk and still hot. To ward off the hangover I swig gin and tonic and suck his cock inside the sleeping bag. B is asleep - I think. But I like the possibility of him seeing us, hearing us. I know he thinks about me doing it to him; he's told me. R fucks me with his fingers and I let myself moan and wriggle, just a little. It's inconclusive though, and we both fall back asleep.

We spend Sunday trying to ease our way back into reality. D and R don't drink. B and I keep knocking back the gin, the vodka, the beer, and holding each other whenever we get the chance. He says he doesn't remember much of what happened after we went to bed. I half-believe him.

We decide we are very grown up and have dealt with this in a mature way and we're not going to agonise over it any more. I half-believe this.

We part ways on Sunday evening with a quick hard kiss on the mouth and then he's gone, and R and I are driving home through end-of-weekend motorway rain, listening to The Streets and bracing for the rude shock of real life.

Blood, Biting and Badness

It's a cliche that sex is better when it's wrong. But I understand it. Because, if you shouldn't do something, but you still end up doing it, you must really really want to.

It's come into play a lot recently with B. For him, every aspect of his desire for me is wrong. It makes him feel bad and guilty. And that turns me on. A lot. Not so much the real-life badness when it starts to fuck up our friendship, but the "oh god I shouldn't but I want to so much" badness.

Way way back in 1996 when I first met R, I was really into blood. I used to cut myself, badly enough that I ended up in hospital, but I wasn't angsty about it. I had quite a detached relationship to my own body and could cut or burn it (or have someone else do it) without feeling any particular emotion. I liked the aesthetic.

Sometimes I wrote him letters in blood. I used a ceramic cup which I'd smashed up. I kept the pieces in a plastic carrier bag in my bedside table, and used their sharp edges for both cutting and writing. The variation in the shape of the pieces, and in the viscosity and colour of the blood, created nice calligraphic effects. From his perspective, the strangest thing was that the content of the letters was mundane: just scraps of institutional news and thoughts about what had been on telly. But - incongruously - scrawled in blood.

At times, with R, this cutting spilled over (sorry) into something like sex. The first time I ever went to his house was around my 16th birthday. We stayed up all night talking. Eventually, around dawn, the inevitable sofa snogging session began. There was fumbling and groping and heavy breathing, but it only got properly heated when I persuaded him to bite me. The harder he did it the more turned on we both got. There was something in his savagery which made me lose my mind a little bit. Something about being meat. The smell of blood and sweat. His absorption in his own violence.

Then the fateful moment: he looked up momentarily and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror above the sofa. The sun had risen and he saw his own face, pale, his skin and teeth stained with my blood. I saw the horror in his eyes and felt him growing cold. I took him by the arms, tried to pull him back to me, to relight the fire. But it was too late. He was scared, disgusted, by himself and by me. He stood up and went to make tea instead, refusing to go any further down that road.

Writing this eleven years on, what sticks in my mind is the look on his face when he saw himself. Not because I liked the horror, not because I wanted him to stop, but because... If he looked like that, if he was so horrified by himself, then it meant he hadn't quite known what he was doing. That he had, somehow, lost control. Lost his presence of mind. Was carried away by desire and by the physical. He'd betrayed himself, betrayed his better judgement and his reason, to blindly follow the urges of his body.

I'm not really into blood anymore, but that doesn't matter. Some people have a thing about specific acts, specific objects, but I don't especially. Whether it's biting or choking or groping in an alleyway, it's making someone do something they know they shouldn't. Divided between their own desires. Driving them to the point of savagery and violence. I want to make them break themselves.