Too much, too soon

Fiction, about adults over 18. Twenty years of not doing it and then eight weeks of doing very little else, and the morning she could not remember which bruise came from whom.

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

A story by the editor.

Six sessions. Eight weeks. Three people.

Written down like that it looks like a confession, and I want to say at the top that nothing bad happened to me. Nobody hurt me. Nobody ignored anything. I came out of those eight weeks with a sore backside, a flat sort of feeling, and a very clear understanding of how easily it could have gone the other way, and the only reason it did not is that I got lucky three times in a row.

You have to understand what the twenty years before them were like.

I was thirty-nine, and for twenty years this had been a thing that lived in my head and nowhere else. Not a hobby. Not a preference. A private fact I had assumed I would take with me, in the same category as the recurring dream about the house with the extra corridor.

And then one evening in February I said it out loud to a man in a pub garden in Sheffield, and eleven days after that it happened to me for the first time, and I walked to the station afterwards feeling like somebody had taken a bag off my head.

That is the bit the sensible pages do not quite capture. Not the wanting. The relief. Twenty years of assuming you are the only one, and then somebody treats it as a normal Tuesday.

So of course I wanted it again. I would defend that to anybody.

What I would not defend is the order I stopped doing things in, which was so gradual that I never once made a decision.

With the first man I did everything. Two references and I messaged both of them. A video call. A coffee that was only a coffee, in a place with other people in it, and my friend Suzanne holding the address and a photo and a time to hear from me by. I was, frankly, insufferable about it. He said afterwards that it was the most thorough vetting he had had in nine years and he had rather enjoyed it.

With the second man I asked for references and did not chase them when he sent one name and a paragraph. I told myself that the paragraph was very detailed.

With the third I skipped the video call. He had a long profile, we had been talking for a fortnight, and asking for a call felt like implying something, and I was very conscious of not wanting to look like a woman who thought she was a prize.

By the sixth session I went straight to a flat in Chapeltown that I had not been to before, on a Wednesday, having told exactly nobody where I was.

I want to be precise about the state I was in when I made that choice, because it was not recklessness in the way people imagine it. I was not thrilled or reckless. I was tired. Doing the whole protocol properly takes a fortnight and a lot of nerve, and I wanted the thing itself, and the protocol had started to feel like queuing.

The sixth one was fine. He was pleasant, he was competent, he did what we had agreed and stopped when he said he would. I could not tell you now what we talked about beforehand, and we must have talked about something for at least half an hour, because I remember the mug.

I lay there afterwards, being looked after by a man whose surname I was not sure of, and looked at the ceiling and felt absolutely nothing at all.

Not bad. Not upset. Nothing. The same nothing you get at the end of a box set you have been half watching.

The thing that actually stopped me was in the bathroom the next morning.

There were marks from Wednesday on top of marks from the Saturday before, and underneath both of those, going yellow at the edges, the ones from the man in Hull ten days earlier. Three sets. Different shapes.

And I stood there with the shower running and could not work out with any confidence which was which.

I have thought a lot about why that was the moment rather than any of the more obviously alarming ones. I think it was because it was arithmetic. You cannot argue with arithmetic the way you can argue with a feeling. My body had a ledger on it and the ledger said that nothing had healed since the middle of March, and that I had been treating a thing that leaves marks as though it were a pint after work.

I stopped for eight weeks. Not as a punishment, though I will admit the first fortnight had a bit of that in it, and I had to talk myself out of the idea that stopping was proof I had been dirty about it.

The fear underneath, which took me about three weeks to be able to say to Suzanne, was that if I put it down I would not be able to pick it up again. That the whole thing had been a door that opened in February and might quietly shut, and that the woman who spent twenty years not saying it out loud was still in there and would be delighted to have the excuse.

I think that is why I kept booking things. Not appetite. Insurance.

It did not shut. That is worth writing down for anybody sitting in the same fortnight. It was exactly where I left it.

What I did instead was unglamorous. I wrote things down. What I had actually liked, which turned out to be about four specific things and not the volume. What I had been doing to fill an evening rather than because I wanted it. Which of the three I would see again, which was one.

And I worked out, on paper, in a notebook, at a kitchen table, that what I had been chasing for eight weeks was not the spanking at all. It was the eleven days in February. The relief. The bag coming off. And you cannot get that again by increasing the dose, because it was never the dose. It was the first time anybody had known.

It is a year on. I see one person, roughly once a month, and it is better than any of those six were.

Once a month sounds thin when you have just found this out about yourself, and I would have been appalled by it in March. What I did not understand then is that the anticipation is a large part of the thing, and anticipation needs a gap to happen in. Three weeks of knowing it is coming does more for me than another Wednesday in another flat ever did.

The line I use on people who are eight weeks in and lit up like a fruit machine, which I say gently because I was one of them, is this. Nothing that happened to me was a disaster. I simply was not doing this. I was collecting it.