WARNING

Valerie Alexander

This is how it starts. It’s just the two of you—in your bedroom, in the dead of night. All those exciting new toys are there, the leather cuffs and leash and collar, the state-of-the-art thigh restraints, maybe even bondage furniture if you’ve splurged. But those other comforts are there too: your pillows, your bedside clock, and the button-down you wore to work that day. Signifiers of a banality that you can step back into at any moment, if you need to.

But of course you don’t need that, you’re on fire for each other. You slap his face, pull on his leash until you’re trembling as hard as he is. It’s no longer a game. He’s lost in submissive euphoria as soon as the spreader bar locks around his ankles. Kissing him, you bite his lips until pain shoots to his cock and stiffens it. I’m not taking anything up my ass, he announces early on and you respect that limit until you notice over the summer how his ass keeps rising up like an offer at certain moments. So you present a ridiculous ultimatum: if he fails to obey, his beautiful ass is yours for the plundering. He agrees, then fails to obey. And presents himself for defilement.

You’re the only ones who know. There’s a wall between your scenes and your daily life. But the wall starts to disintegrate on the day you force him to wear your black underwear to work, or maybe it breaks through with a crash when the neighbors watch from their upstairs window as you order him to crawl around your backyard. He keeps his eyes downcast when you run into them at the neighborhood block party, the humiliation making him hard right there—harder, after you casually insult him—and then you hustle him back home, where you bind his hands and tell him how the neighbors are laughing at him, mocking what a weak and desperate slave he is. And he comes without being touched.

“You’re a joke,” you tell him as you strip off his jeans in the laundry room. “A pathetic spectacle.” But what you’re really thinking is that this is getting out of control.

You can’t stop fucking him in the shower, up against the tiles with a knife at his throat. He’s so luscious to behold when he’s tied to a chair, gagged and hard as you rumple his hair. You like the captive stoicism of him in chains, silent and pouting beautifully. You like the reddish marks imprinted on his skin. You love the way his eyes go dreamy when you take out the black rubber slapper. The way he grunts with relief the first time it cracks against his skin.

He doesn’t know who he is anymore. You don’t know who you’re becoming.

Autumn arrives in a shower of scarlet leaves. In the firelight, him painting your toenails or serving as your footstool, there begin to be things unsaid. Are you mine? How far would you go for me? How much can I hurt you? His thigh muscles look more sculpted when he rakes your front yard. Maybe he’s working out for you, you don’t know, but you do know you love the uxorious votary he is becoming: bringing you gifts, pouring your iced chai, rubbing your feet. This wasn’t part of the map you thought you were following as a couple but it’s rising up in both of you like a fever. His devotion, your expectations.

You walk toward him naked in spike heels. An uncertain smile; your favorite kind. You kiss him. He knows enough by now not to kiss you back, that his mouth is yours to command. You’re so tender with him. Then you push him to his knees and fuck his mouth, his fingers moving inside you until that feral hunger in your blood goes electric and you ejaculate into his mouth. “Hold it,” you command—and he does. You leave him like that, with a hard dick and a mouth full of your come. Because his happiness is yours to dispense and dismiss, and you want him to remember that.

But later you give him everything, because he is so very beautiful and obedient after all. “My lovestruck little bitch,” you say, tracing the imprint of your teeth on the back of his neck, where earlier you bit him like a mother wolf disciplining her cub. The next day, you order the barber to cut the soft curls hiding his nape so your ownership can be seen.

His hair is still short for his office Christmas party, which is at a fancy hotel downtown. Dancing in the bluish lights while an orchestra plays, his body shakes as he holds you tight and his cock presses against you. It’s been months now since you fell together down the rabbit hole into this dark wonderland and nothing will be stable again, everyone else shrinking as the two of you grow more enormous in each other’s eyes. Blotting out the world until all that’s left is a private temple of beautiful cruelty.

Up to the room where you order him to strip and get on the hotel bed on all fours. His body looks like marble in the diffuse city lights. He looks so trusting that you don’t quite know how to be worthy of him. You don’t know how to deserve this invitation to subjugate him, own him, control his worship. That’s the night you bind his wrists to his ankles so he’s on his knees facing the hotel room mirror while you slowly fuck his ass from behind. He stares at his reflection as if he’s in a white-hot dream of degradation, as if the naked boy in the mirror is his beautiful and carnal hero. You want to tell him that you’re in love with everything someone else might recoil from in him, so you say it wordlessly with a hand on his cock and your eyes on his in the mirror, fucking him faster until he cries out and comes on his stomach. Afterward you press his feverish body against the cold windows and say, pointing to the city lights beyond the falling snow, “I’m the one who gives you everything and the one who takes it away.” And he looks back at you with a gratitude that says he will follow you long after you’ve both gone blind with this need.

At least, that’s how it started for us.