Tied

Fiction, about two adults over 18. Eleven years in, she found out that most of what she thought was her being brave was actually her wrists, her shoulders and a fistful of duvet.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I asked for it, which surprised us both. Eleven years of doing this perfectly happily without anything holding me anywhere, and then one evening in September I said, out of nowhere, that I wanted to try being tied.

He said, "Right," and then, "give me a fortnight."

I did not know what the fortnight was for at the time. I know now. He spent it reading, buying two padded cuffs rather than using anything we had lying about, and, I later discovered, practising getting them off one-handed with the lights off, which is the single most attractive thing anybody has ever done for me and he did it in a spare room while I watched television.

Here is what I had not understood, and I do not think you can understand it until it happens.

I thought the difference between being held and not being held would be psychological. Some business about helplessness. I had read the word helplessness and assumed it was a mood.

It is not a mood. It is an inventory.

Over eleven years I had built, without noticing once, an entire system for getting through a hard stretch, and every part of it was physical. I shift my weight from one hip to the other. I turn my head from left to right, and something about the left is better, which I have never questioned.

I grip a handful of the duvet and let it go. I tense right up through the shoulders half a second before, then dump it. And when it is really bad I put a hand back, not to stop him, just to touch, and then take it away again.

That is five things. I would have told you before that September that I coped with this by being calm. I coped with it by fidgeting in five specific directions, and I had no idea.

There is a sixth, which I only worked out afterwards and which is the one that embarrasses me. At some point in most sessions I move about a hand's width along the bed. Not away from him exactly. Just a small administrative shuffle, negotiating myself a slightly better position, the way you do in a dentist's chair. Eleven years of that and I would have sworn on anything that I lay perfectly still.

So there I was face down with my wrists fastened wide and my hands on the outsides of nothing at all, and the first stroke landed, and the whole system went to reach for its tools and found the cupboard empty.

It is not that it hurt more. This is the thing I keep trying to explain. It hurt exactly the same. There was simply nowhere for it to go.

Ordinarily a stroke arrives and I do my five things and it disperses, out through my hands and my shoulders and the duvet, and by the time the next one comes I am somewhere near level again.

Tied, it arrived and stayed. It sat where it landed and waited, and then the next one arrived and joined it, and after four I understood with total clarity that I was going to have to take these with the inside of my head, because the outside of me was not available.

Around stroke eight I panicked.

Not screaming. Nothing dramatic. A cold thing went straight up my spine and I thought, with real conviction, that I had to be out of this immediately, that I had made a serious mistake, and that I could not breathe properly, which was untrue but felt enormously true.

I did not say anything. It lasted, I would guess, six seconds.

In the middle of those six seconds his hand landed flat between my shoulder blades and stayed there, and he said, "I have got you. Breathe out."

He had seen it. From behind me, in bad light, in six seconds, he had seen a thing arrive in my back that I had not put into any word. When I asked him afterwards what the tell was he said my feet had stopped moving. Apparently my feet move constantly and I did not know that either.

It passed. He waited it out with his hand where it was and did not say anything else, and when I breathed out properly he said, "Still yes?" and I said yes, and meant it more than I have meant most things.

What I keep coming back to is that he did not undo anything at that point. He could have, and a version of him that was frightened of me would have, and it would have been the wrong call.

What I needed was not to be let out. It was for somebody to stay put while it went past. Being released in the middle of six seconds like that would have told me the six seconds had been correct, and they were not correct, they were just weather.

He told me later he had counted to ten with his hand there and had decided that if I was still rigid at ten he would have had me out regardless of what I said. I was not rigid at ten. I have no memory of a decision being made anywhere near me, which I suppose is the entire skill.

Twice, without my asking, he undid my hands.

Once around stroke fifteen and once near the end. Both times he did it the same way: off, both wrists rubbed, a look at the colour, "wiggle your fingers for me," and then, only if I said so, back on. It took maybe forty seconds each time.

I found it faintly irritating in the moment, if I am honest. It broke the thing. I remember thinking, rather ungratefully, that I had not agreed to be checked like a casserole.

Afterwards I thought about the fortnight, and the lights-off practice, and the fact that the man had built the whole evening around being able to have me out of it in four seconds, and I stopped finding it irritating.

The part I did not expect at all came later, in the bath, and it is the reason I am bothering to write this down.

Nothing that was done to me that evening was remarkable. It was our usual implement, and fewer than usual, and he was noticeably more careful than he would normally be. On any measure you could write down, it was a mild session.

And it is the one I think about. Constantly, in fact, in a way that has slightly annoyed me, because I have had evenings with him that were vastly more intense and they have not lodged like this one has.

The lodging bit was not the implement. It was those forty minutes of having no way to help myself and finding out that I did not fall apart.

Eleven years of fidgeting in five directions had been, I realise now, a small ongoing project of keeping a bit of myself back. Take the five things away and there is nothing left to hold on to and no way to look after yourself and you are simply there, entirely, with somebody, and either that is bearable or it is not.

It was bearable. That is what I found out, and I paid about eighteen strokes for the information, which strikes me as good value.

We do it perhaps one time in five now. Not more, because it would stop meaning anything, and because it is genuinely more work for him and I would rather he had the easy version most of the time.

He still undoes my hands twice. I still find it faintly irritating. I would be upset if he stopped.