I tell you what’s going through my head, and you gasp, your breath hot and rapid on the damp skin of my wrist, ‘’ Yes. Please do that, M. I want to wear your marks. Permanent ones. I want the cuts. I hope they spill a little too much blood…’’ you’re talking in low voice, almost whispering, but it’s steady, as if you were out of the daze or in a different kind of daze maybe, slow and fluid and focused, and this steady fluidity make me feel floaty. You are fucking me up so much, still, after all this time. I love it.
You open your eyes and look up at me,’’Serrated blade, M?’’
‘’Maybe not as jagged as a cheap steak knife, something finely serrated. What you might slice a tomato with,‘’ you offer
‘’A small, fine metalworking blade,’’ I suggest, partially in jest, partially in earnest, my fingers resting lightly on your shoulder, my tongue running along my upper lip, my cunt throbbing.
This conversation, matter of fact and yet somehow surreal at the same time makes me giggle, seems as it should break the spell but actually doesn’t, makes me realise how comfortable we are here, doing this perverted thing that we do.
I think of your leaving and my leaving, of both of us going back to our respective realities, soon - too soon, and perhaps for good this time, because we never know when it’s going to be for good so it’s better to think this way, it’s better to think that this is all the time we have and that every time must be made as precious as the first time and must be treated as the last time, because it might end up being so.
I think of the time we have left before the fantasy ends and reality reasserts itself, and all that we will have done here will seem like a story told on a perverted erotica blog. And then I think of how much the lines between the fantasy and the real are blurred just now, so much that maybe we don’t quite know which is which and that if you really leave in two days’ time with a neat row of cuts on your shoulder - one of them perhaps less neat than the others, perhaps left to heal without using butterfly strips to keep the edges together - if you take this mark back to your reality, maybe it will remain blurred forever, the curtain never pulled completely closed, a reminder always there, not just in the neural circuits of your mind but obvious, blatant, palpable in the most literal sense of that overused word, to be felt every time you put your fingers there.
This possibility is making my head spin and my breath speed up in a way that goes far beyond sexual, not that the sexual isn’t there, but it’s morphing into something else, something bigger if just a little lower key, a desire to own you -- or at least that part of you that you have given me -- not just fully but with some illusion of permanence, as symbolic and un-real as these things are.
I’m driven by the same impulse which makes people carve their initials in school desks and in living trees, the same desire that I indulged when I took the sharp little blade of a slightly rust-stained knife to the wind-bent pine tree overlooking the narrows the mainland and the island, with the view of that hill on which the last photo I’d sent you was taken before your arrival here, the same need that drove my request to carve a declaration of your submission in that board that’s now not just sanded and oiled but wet with your sweat, wax and probably quite a few drips of precum and saliva too.
It’s going dark outside but it’s a bright dusk, with pale blue-grey sky and a full moon high and silver above the hills on the other side of the water and, unheard of at this time of the year, it’s snowing. Slow, large flakes sailing slowly down, sliding along invisible air slopes, twirling in vortexes of light from the house’s large plate window.
I leave you there for a minute and return to the workshop, picking up possible tools for what I have in mind. My hands are shaking, just a little bit.
‘’Stand by the window, J. Spread-eagled. Legs wide, palms flat on the glass. Well supported, leaning a little,’’ I launch into instructions as soon as I walk back into the room and although you seem a little thrown by all that, you obey.
‘’Closer. Not as close as to touch glass with your cock,’’ I adjust you, using my words and soon after, my hands, small pushes and pulls to indicate the direction, ‘’Here. Yes. That’s great. Perfect,’’ I run my hands down your sides, then up your outstretched arms, checking the new tensing and flexing of the muscles, the changed way your skin stretches.
‘If anybody came round just now they’d be for a surprise,’’ I snort, my fingers playing with your erection, turning it larger and more rigid. I step away and look. Your body pale, despite the tan, in the low light of the room against the dark that has fallen outside. I switch off the light and now it's just a silhouette, and what seemed to be dark has turned into a purple grey, gently opalescent with the moonlight.
I want to leave you like this, forever, spread-eagled across the window, in the eternal violet charcoal of dusk. I want to keep you like this, forever, in the eternal glass case in the library of my mind. And although some part of you, some version of you is there, just like this, in some version of some reality, it is only a sliver, a lab slice of a symbolic specimen that defies what must be and what is.
I shake my head, almost violently, my hair spilling in a tangle rather than a stylish swish, step back. My palms on your shoulders, fingers moving to meet on your throat, thumbs pressing down, my mouth near your ear ‘’Quiet now. Quiet and still.” You whispermoan a ‘’Yes, M’’ and I start touching you. Methodically. Systematically. As if I was doing everything possible to memorise it all, as if there were obvious and crucial differences between the skin along your shoulder-blade and that covering the tendons of your neck and that over the soft flesh below the ribcage.
The touch varies. I press and stroke. I pinch and scratch. I move my face so close to you that my breath condenses on your skin, blow on you gently or fast, and brush you with my lips. I bite and lick. I leave trails of what remains of my lipstick and saliva and breath, pink grazes and teeth indentations and hickeys.
The cuts come fast and sure, as if out of nowhere, shallow, closer to symbolic nicks than slits designed to leave obvious scars, but there is a spreading net of blood trickles blooming on your back and there is a humming in my head. I take my eyes off you for what’s intended as a split second but ends up much longer.
It’s still snowing. Huge flakes whirling down slow and thick to settle on the grass, to cushion everything, to muffle time and slow down sounds.
I pull the belt out of the loops of my skirt, double it up in my hand, position myself and take aim. The crack of leather on your butt makes me shiver, as much as your stifled moan, a violent twitch and the way you move your hips in an instinctive flight response to then return to position, your back maybe arched a little more, your knuckles maybe a little whiter on the narrow window frame.
‘’Count.’’
You do, your voice sometimes steady and sure, sometimes breaking, sometimes hardly there, the welts merging together into a greater field of red, hot and tender to my hand when I touch it after the belt is dropped.
‘’Well done, boy,’’ my left hand on your just-belted butt, my right one on your dripping cock, your long moan making my nipples harden against the lace of my bra.
It’s still snowing.
A little later, I lay you down out there, the cold of snow a welcome soothing for your tormented skin, at first, the pink dissolving into dirty green mush under the combined weight of our bodies, I fuck you slow and urgent, deliberate and messy, until we both cry out and come to.
We return inside to tend to the cuts and bruises, to sleep - together this time, the toes of my left foot touching your calf, the fingertips of my left hand nearly-brushing your right one - to wake up to late morning of a pale blue skye, a small, white sun and a huge daytime moon above us, the last night’s snow all gone, to the tidying up of the workshops, to the locking up of the house, to the long drive to the airport.
***
We are standing in the departures, upstairs, just before the security, facing each other, a couple of steps off the main stream of passengers walking past with their plastic bags for liquids and gels, their belts and boots in their hands.
There is a silence around us, a bubble, similar to the one that we stood in, shivering, the first time we met, that day when I slapped him in the middle of the arrivals hall and he dropped to his knees and kissed my feet in fishnet stockings and ridiculously uncomfortable shoes.
I am wearing old jeans and tattered Converse hi-tops today and neither of us is shivering. But I still reach out to touch his face, my palm on his cheek, my fingers near his ear, my thumb brushing his lips, spreading them apart, briefly running along the damp inside, then withdrawing.
''Fuck. I guess this is it,'' he looks briefly at the ground as he says this, then back at me, our eyes locked gain.
''Fuck. I guess it is,'' I am somewhere between a giggle and tears.
We embrace, quickly, then he turns away, makes his way to the end of the security queue.
''Be good for me, J,'' I call to his back.
He glances at me over his shoulder with a somewhat sad-looking ghost of a smile.
''I will. Endlessly, M.''
