It’s a cliché, Maria knows, but still, she can’t help but think it, even as Aaron wraps the leather belt around her neck. You don’t know what you’ve got, she thinks, and then stops, tells herself to focus on the pull of the leather as it closes in on her skin. She wants to really feel the rough insides of the leather against her veins. The belt is new, as she’d requested. Not expensive. The leather of it doesn’t circle her neck in a smooth circle, but in folds, like an octagon. The places where its folds pinch her skin a little, and she focuses there, on the mean throbs in her neck.
She’s doggie-style, so she can’t see Aaron. If she inhaled, there would be the tanned cow-dirt smell she needs, but also Aaron, who smells, for some reason, of hyacinths and rain. Not like David, who smelled like leather himself. So she doesn’t inhale. Instead, she goes down on her elbows on the bed, lets the leather press into the front of her neck on the way down.
Her movement startles Aaron, who pulls up, probably accidentally, on the belt. There is a second of startled blackness in her brain. It’s a blackness her clit recognizes, and speaks to, with steady pulses.
“Ahh,” she hears herself say. It’s the involuntary sigh of something lost, and nearly found. A gold ring glinting from the bottom of the ocean. If she leans forward into the glint, she might. ..
“Is this okay?” Aaron says, and he might as well have let go of the belt as fast as it brings her back. She opens her eyes, and although the only thing she can see is the dark headboard in front of her, the pillows that probably need to be washed, she can see it all: She is just a woman of thirty-five, ass-up on the bed with a cheap belt around her neck, trying to recapture her youth. Talk about a cliche.
Aaron lets go of the belt, so it goes slack. Anything that had begun to beat in her body shuts down. She pulls the leather off her neck in a single, slick movement. The edge of the buckle catches her shoulder, makes a small mark that she hopes she’ll feel later.
She turns and faces Aaron. He sits in the modified lotus position, although she is sure he doesn’t know it. His hands are spread on his thighs. Between it all, his short, fat cock sits, half-raised, like a groundhog checking the weather.
“Let’s just do it the regular way,” she says.
With her words, the glint she saw before, the simmer of hope, dies down, disappears beneath sand. Aaron is happy to oblige—she knows he only does the belt thing for her, anyway—and he pushes her gently back on the bed, leans into her thighs with his mouth. She touches his short blonde hair while he works, does the breathing her therapist recommended, tries to get lost in the way his tongue feels, there and there, small circles. She can almost fall into the sensation, mentally urging him closer to her clit, making small encouraging noises when he gets close. But when he looks up at her, his face covered with juices, his eyes asking her if he’s doing it right, she loses focus, has to close her eyes against the question.
As he moves up, over her body, positioning himself to enter her, she reminds herself that he is a good husband, a careful lover, and she should be grateful to have him. Hell, she is grateful. She really is. They have a good life, and she is grateful for that too. Dukkha, is what her therapist calls it, this yearning for something she can’t have. These thoughts, even as Aaron parts her, begins his slow slide into her, make her stomach ache.
She tries to focus on her body, the fullness she feels as Aaron enters her, hip to hip. But all she can think of is David; David and leather.
SHE DIDN’T KNOW IT when she met him, but David smelled like sun-warmed soil and leather boots. When she met him, she could only smell the ferment of beer taps and the fry of chicken wings. She was twenty, bartending at the little hometown dive, trying to make her way though college. The bar was past its prime, only frequented by regulars and those who wandered in without knowing any better. The pace gave her time to study, although she mostly took breaks and smoked cigarettes and turned down offers of coke from the guys in the kitchen.
David, who sat in the corner of the bar, was big and dark. She didn’t like big and dark. She liked thin and white, pale angles that contrasted her own mocha curves. And so she’d served him his gin and tonics and flirted, but never anything more. Maybe for six months, a year, she knew his name and his drink and nothing else about him, except that he sat there alone. Not “scary” alone, but as a man who needs time to think, maybe, or to not think.
At twenty, she didn’t think much. She knew what she had— a lot of ass and a lot of mouth, and she wasn’t afraid to use both. She hadn’t been dating then so much as connecting men, dot-to-dot, waiting for some picture of her life to emerge.
The first time David asked her out, she’d spent the previous night with a punk rock boy, a friend of her roommate. Great blue eyes, that’s what had sucked her in, and skin so pale she could see every vein. But the sex had been fast and fumbling; he didn’t touch her except to enter and leave. She wasn’t sure how much more she’d needed—she loved sex but wasn’t sure she’d ever had an orgasm—so she didn’t think she was demanding. But she’d expected more, certainly, than the hip-to-hip job she got.
She was still thinking of the punk, and how badly she’d wanted to kick him out of her bed that morning, when she set David’s second drink in front of him. He nodded his thanks, the way he always did, and she grabbed his bill from beside the register. He never had more than two—she liked that about him.
When she set the tab down beside him, he hesitated before he put down the twenty, holding her there.
“Are you free for dinner sometime?” he asked.
Coming from his quiet mouth, it startled Maria, as though the chair had talked to her. Maybe that’s why she accepted. Afterward, she would think maybe the reason he’d waited so long and still was to surprise her into saying yes.
His face was round, the cheekbones hidden behind muscle or fat. Even his wrists were large in a way that scared her, made her feel like she’d already been broken.
“Tuesday night,” he said. And she wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or scared that he knew her night off.
“Tuesday,” she agreed.
HE DIDN’T TAKE HER to a restaurant, but to his house, where he made dinner while she sat at the table. It was kind of nice that he didn’t talk, or even look at her. The food held his attention, as though it were the only thing in the kitchen. She wasn’t used to it, playing second fiddle, but it allowed her to lean back and watch him. His body was big in the room, all shoulders and belly. As he cooked, she could see how he’d come to be as big as he was, the dark skin stretched so tight over his body. Salad with homemade dressing, mashed potatoes with butter, pork chops that he rubbed all over with garlic and olive oil. His big hands made indents in the meat.
She had a drink—red wine, although she didn’t know enough to know what kind—and she tried not to chug it. Nervous habit. She wished she could smoke but could imagine his face if she were to ask to light up around this food he was making. After dinner, maybe.
David bent down to the stove, his ass wide in jeans, his back wider. There was something graceful in his movements—a man who knew his own country. It lit some pilot light in her stomach, the flame hot and blue. She let it simmer there for a few minutes and then tried to put it out. But watching him set the table around her, gorgeous blue plates and her napkin just so, she couldn’t quench it.
And then he was putting steaming plates and bowls all around, smelling of garlic and cream and oil. She wanted to tell him this wasn’t the way to win her, that she was sex and sex. Food was good but just sustaining. There was no way she could look at those mushrooms the way he had looked at them when he’d dug his fingers in, peeled out their insides, stuffed them with something new. But she wasn’t sure it was the truth anymore. Maybe she didn’t need to love the food, maybe it was enough to watch the way he loved it. She took another gulp of her wine—he’d been refilling her glass in a constant, subtle way that was practiced.
He sat across from her. His face was shiny in the heat and work.
“Shall we eat?” he asked. “Or did you have something else in mind?”
The way he said it, leaning in just a little. Something about his voice, how sure it was of what she really, truly wanted. His hand around her wrist in a way that she thought would be scary, but was not.
“Both,” she said. And he let go of her wrist and picked up his fork. Somehow she had given the right answer, even though she didn’t mean to.
AND THAT’S HOW IT BEGAN. Sex after dinner, a slow languid affair that left her more relaxed than aroused. His big hands everywhere on her body, feeling her like a topographical map of a place he’d never been. Then stretching her, outside and in, until her muscles ached in that good way, like yoga or running.
Lying on his big bed afterward, watching him sleep, she knew she would leave him early. He was too big for her, too dark. Too sweet and perfect and kind. She already imagined what it would be like if he kept coming in the bar after, or if he didn’t come, and there was just his chair, empty.
But then he woke her in the morning by pushing those big fingers inside her. He hadn’t even waited to see if she was wet, or even awake. By the time he had two fingers in to the knuckles, she was both, and bucking against his hand in a way that shamed her. She didn’t come, but there was a new pulse in her clit that gave her hope.
The belt didn’t come until later, maybe a week, maybe two. She can’t remember now. What she does remember is this: Her, doggie-style on David’s big bed. Him under her, still dressed, his mouth at her clit, one finger inside her ass. The exquisite combination of his warm tongue and his cool finger. The way the top half of her felt lonely, her nipples puckering against the air, her throat and lips alone. And then, David sliding from beneath her. The shrripp of his belt sliding out of his jeans. She thought he was getting undressed, but he wasn’t. He’d just wanted the belt.
His voice dropped to her ear when he said, “I’m going to make you come.”
Her own surprise, the way her face felt hotter on top of the sex flush—she didn’t know that he knew. And then he’d put the belt around her neck, around the part of her that had felt exposed, empty. She could smell herself, pungent and sweet, on David’s fingers as he fastened the leather, and then the smell of David and the leather mingling. Her neck felt pressure from the belt, like the pressure of his finger entering her ass, which he did now. Rotating his finger, he slid back underneath her, put his mouth back to her clit. His tongue flicked her clit with a steady rhythm that made her afraid, but when she tried to back away from his mouth, his finger in her ass held her there.
She breathed deep the leather, let herself feel the tight pull of the belt around her neck. It was like having David everywhere at once, around and in every part of her body. He kept the steady rhythm on her clit, worked his finger inside her ass, pulling her closer and tighter to his mouth, holding her there. Her head felt like it was filled with some heavy, dark gas. She had trouble holding it up. Her head, her body, none of it felt like it was hers anymore. It belonged to David. And to pleasure.
AFTER THAT, SHE WANTED the belt every time, the way it felt like his hands around her. Sometimes David would oblige, would buy a new belt, expensive or cheap, sometimes with a huge silver buckle that he would wear as a promise, or a threat. He knew how to use the leather other ways, not just around her neck, but against her ass, the sides of her thighs, pinching her nipples between the leather until she’d scream. His belts all smelled like her, and she smelled like David and his belts.
Other times, he’d say no to her pleas, which made her crazy. He’d slide off his belt, hang it on the back of the bedroom door, come to her empty-handed.
“We’ve got to save something for the future,” he’d say. “I can’t do everything now and have you bored when we’re forty.” She liked to imagine them forty, what they might do, what he might do to her, but it wasn’t enough to keep her from begging him to get his belt.
When she masturbated, she’d hook a belt around her own throat or run a thin one across her clit. And she’d come, just thinking about what was left, what might happen in the future.
And then she’d fucked it all up. She couldn’t wait—she’d found a man on the side, one who’d fuck her with belts and hands. She told herself it was just to hold her over, until David would give her what she needed again. It wasn’t the same as David, but it made it easier to bear the wait.
But David found out, and he wouldn’t take her back.
BY THE TIME SHE MET AARON, years later, she thought she was over David, over the leather. Sex was just . . . sex. Neither amazing nor awful. Just sex. But lately, it’s changed. It’s all come back to her. That’s why she started seeing the therapist.
Now, with Aaron above her, she turns her head to the side and her cheek comes to rest on the strap of leather. She inhales deep. The tang of shoe polish and hide smells like home to her in a way she can’t explain to Aaron, that she can barely explain to herself. The leather rubs against her cheek with Aaron’s thrusts. She imagines that it is releasing ghosts. David. Her younger self.
Above her, Aaron makes a sound, low, like an animal and she echoes him. She won’t come, not this time, but she can bear it, and that is enough. When it is over, he rolls from her, wraps her body in his arms. She pulls the comforter up to her shoulders. Dukkha. What does it matter? She wants and she wants. Her therapist isn’t helping her; she knows that, has known it since the beginning. But when she goes there and he folds his hands in front of him, sometimes she can smell his fingers. Leather and oil filling her nose, until she can finally cry.