joe part 03
There are two keys. One is in my possession. One I made a special effort to show you. It lives in the middle of a frozen bottle of water in your freezer. The idea is that if you need to get it you can, it’ll just be a lot of effort. What you don’t know is that the water is slightly sweet with sugar. I know how wildly hungry you get and if you’re going to cheat and try to hide that fact I want to be able to detect whether you melted and refroze the key from its prison.
When you get home I’m sitting on the couch scrolling through something on my phone. I jump up when you come through the door. Would love to be properly serious and Domly, but right now I’m just too excited to see you. I scan your body from top to bottom as I cross the room to greet you, taking in the slight giveaway where the rope crosses your shoulders, the curiously indented silhouette at your sides when your top pulls tight against it. Your collar gleams, seeming like an oddly heavy-duty choker. Lacking any leather or black lace it’s not definitely a collar, which is enough for plausible deniability.
I kiss the corners of your mouth. “How was your day?”
You press against me and return the kiss directly, invading my mouth, making my breath catch. Your belly feels like separate cells of flesh squished between us. “All this is doing,” you say when you break away and push past me into the living room, “is making me super aware how tight I’d be if I ate you.”
That certainly doesn’t help me get my breathing back under control. I see you’ve flopped on the couch and have picked up my phone.
“Tinder?” You flash me a smile and bat your lashes at me. “Bored of me already?”
I smile guiltily, but it’s the smile of someone caught wrapping a present. “Making friends. Got to have someone lined up to celebrate with when you finally reach 50.”
“Allison,” you read, scrolling. “Cat in the profile picture. Board games. Pretty face. You happy with your catch?”
“I think so. She’s Allison Bethel. Creepy detective work got me some pictures her friends didn’t crop so carefully, from Facebook.” I lean across and switch tabs to show the feed of a girl wearing a lot of makeup. It’s scrolled to a picture of her in the Student Union. Also in that picture, ducking her head slightly as if uncomfortable to be photographed, is Allison’s head and a lot of Allison’s body.
You raise your eyebrows and scroll down to see if there are more pictures. Like it’s a JustEat page. Only one of Allison, though.
“When I’m eight stone?”
“Mmhmm.”
You look up. When you sneer with disbelief I catch a peek of your fang. It’s indescribably cute. “She’s, like, twenty stone. I’ll be like a wrapper around a toffee. I’ll burst.”
“Oh, I’ve seen your guts absorb a kicking, I’ve seen you in the aftermath of that monster you caught when I—y’know, the garage. I think you’ll manage.” I lean over you where you’re sitting on the couch, hands either side of your shoulders. “Can you imagine squeezing her down inside you? How immense she’ll be in your tummy? She’ll be two and a half times your size. Like, at first she’ll be five sevenths of your combined living flesh. And then you’ll pump her down through your guts and she’ll become a smaller and smaller proportion and you’ll get bigger and bigger—”
Your lips are shining from where you couldn’t help but wet them. “I want to meet her now.”
“Can’t, she’s in Holland. And you can’t till you’re 50 kilos.” Our faces are hovering inches from one another, each daring the other to kiss first. “Use that thought to push yourself in the gym later.”
“I can if I swipe right on her first,” you say, parted lips so close I can feel the heat of them. You smirk, seeing me look surprised. “Didn’t think of that, did you?”
“No,” I admit. My expression melts from disappointment to grudging admiration. You don’t understand how I can find your most willful excesses cute, but it always seems to happen. You reward me by closing the gap, pulling me in for another hot, lingering kiss.
With your hand on my chest you push me away. I stroke your face affectionately. “What’s for dinner?”
“Burgers. Trying to recreate McDonalds secret sauce.”
“How many,” you say sceptically.
“Two.”
“Hmm. Tinder it is, then.” You fish your phone out of your bag. I think it’s just for show.
I’m heading to the kitchen to cook. “Good luck getting Allison past your collar!”
“More ways inside that just that one,” you mutter, realising you have to decide now if you’re seriously going to cheat.
So far you haven’t. You booted up Bloodborne for an easy mind-occupier after work. The smell of frying meat wafts in from the kitchen and makes your insides feel sharp. Empty after yesterday, you are surprised to find that the gurgling announcement from your middle faintly annoys you, where you would usually take pleasure.
Fuck, you died again. This guard keeps wandering by at the wrong time. You’ve played this so many times. Why is it going wrong?
I’m singing to myself in the kitchen. My go-to recently has been Creep, by Radiohead. “I’m a weirdoooo…”
You grit your teeth and respawn. This time the guard goes down but something else goes wrong. It’s like your thumbs are jumping all over the place and you hate it.
Singing wafts in with the meat smell. “What the hell am I doing heeeere…”
Your palms on the controller are clammy and the annoyance is blossoming into upset. You don’t like how I’m occupying myself in the other room. Then you feel clingy and tell yourself off.
Nothing seems to feel right. The collar chafes and you have to adjust how you’re sitting for the fortieth time to get the rope not to rub raw the crease of your inner thighs.
Nothing seems to feel right.
I swing in bearing two plates of homemade McD’s. “Dinner’s read— oh, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” You hunch over the controller, focused completely on the screen.
“Okay… Well, here you go.” I set the plate on the coffee table in front of you. You don’t take your eyes off the screen. Your character dies again.
I put my plate down and sit beside you on the couch. I watch the screen for a few moments. Then I turn to you.
“Raven, stop for a moment please.” I’m using my serious voice.
“Lemme do this first,” you insist. Maybe your save got corrupted or something, your character can do nothing right.
“Raven, it’s important. Look at me.”
“What!” You turn on me, practically snarling. Say one thing for fangs, say they give you a fearsome anger face. “What’s so important it can’t wait five minutes?”
My own voice remains calm and controlled. “How do you feel?”
“Pissed off! My game’s fucking up and now you’re asking stupid questions and it’s red hot in here—”
I nod and hold out a hand to put on your thigh. “You’re also sweating and pale. Paler. How long have you felt like this?”
You start to panic something’s wrong, with the questions I’m asking. “I don’t know… When I reached this fucking outpost. The controller stopped reacting normally. Why?”
“Here…” I take one of your hands. I feel red hot to the touch. “Your hands are cold. Colder than normal, and clammy. Raven, I think you’ve got Drop. How else are you feeling?”
I’ve talked with you before about Drop. Described it as chemical fallout from the extreme feelings and things we were doing. Said it looks like mood swings, shakiness, sadness, even fainting and paranoia.
Sadness comes to the front. You frown, feeling unexplained tears sting the corners of your eyes. “Like I did something wrong and now you hate me.”
My smile is gentle. I place that hand on your thigh. “It does sound like Drop, and it’s okay. I don’t hate you. The opposite is true. I think you are wonderful. And I’m so proud of how you acted when I tied you the other day. You were so strong!”
The more I talk the more you find you want to cry. You don’t yet believe any of it but you like that I’m saying nice things. The controller clicks onto the coffee table and you hold our your arms, demanding a cuddle.
I oblige swiftly, sitting sideways on the couch and pulling you between my legs, to rest the side of your head on my chest. Arms and legs squeeze you reassuringly, and a gentle stroke of your hair makes everything feel tight and safe.
“You left me alone…”
“I know, my love, and I’m sorry it’s made you feel like this. I won’t leave you alone in future if you don’t want me to. I won’t leave you alone now.” Kisses in your hairline join the stroking.
Something inside you begins to relax. “You don’t think I’m gross now?”
“No, I think you’re beautiful—so beautiful. I made you do those things, so you know I wanted you to do them. You made me very happy.” A thought seems to occur. “And you know what’s good about Drop?”
You peek your head up, looking through stray long hairs at my smiling face. “’t?”
“You get everything you want!” The squeezing intensifies drastically and I rock you back and forth in a massive cluster hug. There in my embrace you can relax and just let it all flow out. Your eyes are wet but you no longer want to cry, the emotional volatility switching to contentedness as quickly as to sadness.
“McDonald’s.”
“Real McDonald’s?”
“Yeah. And chocolate. And ice cream. And gin. And I don’t want you to move. And I want you to say nice things about me and call me cute.”
I laugh a gentle laugh and lean down to kiss your crown again. “You shall get all of these things, except maybe gin will happen in a while, when you feel a little better, and I’ll have to get up to fetch you chocolate and something to drink. You want to come with?”
You shake your head, frowning hard at the idea like a child being told to go to bed.
I’m quick. Drink comes in the form of lemonade and coke, to drink from as you wish. Sugar is important in Drop. Chocolate comes in the form of Lindt chocolate bunnies. With you safely ensconced again in the full-body cuddle I unwrap them one by one and make them hop away from you over the soft swell of your belly. You laughingly chase them with your hands and guide them into your mouth while I give them voices: “aaah! no! don’t eat me!” “this isn’t my rabbit-hole!” “oh no! a big scary wolf!” “have you seen my husband?” They all share the same fate, melted and chewed, your throat their warren. You lick the melted chocolate from my fingers.
The problem of McDonald’s, specifically driving there, is solved by the miracle of Deliveroo. I pretend to be a drive by operator and you gleefully place your long, rambling order. Between us we order enough food for six, eight people, but like I said: Drop means you get everything you want.
With food, drink, sugar, love and cuddles, you begin to feel better. I tell you all the things I love about you—from the obvious, like your physical beauty, to the less-obvious, like the casual way you assumed control and drank from me the other day. The list keeps coming over the evening: your sense of humour, your irrepressible mischievousness, the way you love your body, the way you take life, the way you take care of me. Eventually I’m on the weird stuff, like how cute I find it that you don’t even like looking at feet, how cute I find it when you baby-talk. I call you hot twenty times and cute a hundred.
When the food comes I feed you fries and burgers and chicken nuggets. A coke makes you belch mightily. After food I pour us both gin and tonics since you seem much better. I offer to play the game where you left off and you snatch the controller and beat that section easily.
“I’m going to get you back, you know,” you say, out of the blue with a butter-wouldn’t-melt smile. “I just have to think of something a notch below melting you down inside me.”
There’s no way I’m not kissing you after a statement like that.