It’s late. I wasn’t staying up for you because I didn’t know you were coming home, but at 2am I hear the door open. You find me in the living room, laptop still warm from where I closed it, sat at the electronic piano. I look surprised but delighted to see you. You stride in and bring the night in with you. You stop so abruptly that your dress still swirls around you, dark red and black, pleats and folds settling like a jealous lover’s touch around you.

You’ll be out tonight. I knew you would be but found myself feeling jealous. I laughed when I realised. The absurdity of it: the mouse possessive of the cat! Naming the emotion cured the pain and opened me to acceptance: the truth is, I love your independence and wildness. So now when I think of you with others it fills me with joy, and I think how lucky I am that you choose to spend some of your time with me.

Tonight is a quiet night in. We played guitar hero because I’m a nerd and sometimes you humour me. I fed you, of course. Dinner was pizza I made from scratch, one for me, two for you because you were peckish. I hit upon the trick of pre-cooking the meatballs and ham before putting them on the pizza, to give them the ashen taste you prefer in non-sentient flesh. I ate mine quickly, so you still had a pizza and a half for me to feed to you, slice by lucky slice.

You feel both my hands stretch apart your cheeks to leave you fully exposed. You are thankful you’ve relieved yourself of the clubber and that together we gave you a good, clean douching. Tickling sensations rip through your anus and melt your pussy as my lips brush against the sensitive skin of your butthole. “Truly perfect. Entrance to… What was it? Your nasty, shit-filled intestines?” “‘Nasty, shit-stuffed a—’ oooooh~” I don’t seem to find it nasty.

Overpreparation is my watchword. Let us examine the tools at our disposal, and then try to imagine the end to which they will be turned. Our bed sports a climbing harness and thick climbing rope split into two. Not a lead rope: a static one, so no stretch. One is tied to the solid oak banister on the landing, one is tied to a mount point I have drilled into the frame of the house.

Hour -3 I bundle you giggling into a taxi. You’re meeting friends and insisted on pre-drinking with me. We did body shots except you insisted on me shaving first, so now I have the body of a professional swimmer and you are five tequilas down. I don’t mind. I spilled one of mine, a plum Schnapps, and though I managed to lap up the flow before it hit your womanhood (wouldn’t that have stung!

It takes ages for you to shed the shadow of the nightmare completely. You tend more towards the melancholy. Normally independent as a cat, you’ve been unusually keen to hang around today. Occasionally you touch me out of the blue and I gather it’s just checking I’m still here. While I relish the attention, and I take your poking hand and kiss the fingertips in turn, your disquiet unsettles me. So I decide to distract you.

You dream… We met in a pub near your place. Your friend knew you were meeting someone and assumed Tinder, so if by some weird inversion of roles you went missing, there’d be a trail to follow. I was an odd mix of lots of things. I talked like I write: needlessly long words, jags where I’d get stuck on one topic and wax lyrical, lots and lots of questions. You could see me trying to hide just how much I liked you in the moments between trying to articulate some overwrought concept or engage you on something you said, when I’d stop and look at you with smiling eyes.

Someone’s coming. At first it doesn’t sound like me—the gait is too slow—so your post-gorging haze in the late twilight is interrupted by having to summon knives. But there I am, rounding the corner. Oh yeah, you drank me half way to death. Of course I’m on the go-slow. You experience a pang of guilt for dragging me out here, but then smother it. I’ve told you often that your pleasure and happiness is paramount.

You find her alone. She hears you coming and gasps in astonishment and guilt. The girl, scarcely out of teenagehood, is sprawled out on the leaf-litter floor. Her top has rolled up to her boobs and her custom daisy-painted shorts are already unbuttoned. Between them her lover still squirms, wearing the flesh of her smooth, olive-committed belly like a smothering coat. The predatory girl tries and fails to get to get feet.