Bound to You (33 page)

The waitress set out the menus before us, then came back promptly with our drinks and to take our order. Sebastian offered up his choice first. It was the same thing I had decided upon. Without thinking, I said as much. ‘Oh!’ he exclaimed apologetically. ‘You have it then! I’ll have something else!’ So he was being deferential now too, was he? Better late than never, I supposed. Only it didn’t seem to come from a place of genuine contrition.

The waitress went away again. ‘How supplicant of you,’ I smirked. Sebastian stared back at me, the electric blue of his eyes nearly obscured by the full dilation of his pupils. Was I imagining it or was he turned on by my dismissive contempt right now?

Dinner came. My dish, the one Sebastian had intended on, looked more appetising than his. He had barely taken more than a few mouthfuls of his food when he began to choke, his cool angular beauty contorting into a red puffy mess before my eyes. ‘Too much chilli’ he replied. I sat there watching him suffer and waited a whole thirty seconds before offering him my saki to wash it down.

We finished dinner, splitting the bill as we always did. As we waited for the tray with our change to be returned, Sebastian spoke ‘So, do you want to come back to mine?’ he asked tentatively.

I stared at him. I had never failed to say yes immediately to spending the night with him.

Now I shrugged.

For the first time ever since I’d known him, he actually looked aghast. So he felt hurt and rejected, did he? Finally. A sign of real concern. Inwardly I breathed a sigh of relief. So he wasn’t a robot. I knew all along he wasn’t a robot. We couldn’t have had the kind of passionate, connected sex we’d had, couldn’t have lain there in one another’s arms afterwards, stroking each other until we fell asleep if he didn’t care about me, too.

We both needed reminding of that now, not the awful feeling of lovelessness that the scissor sex had left us with. We needed to go home and remind ourselves of how feverish and frantic and beautiful sex between us usually was.

Back at Sebastian’s, I tossed off my pinching shoes, settled myself on the bed and began to read the newspaper I’d asked him to buy for me at a shop on the way home.

I looked at the window. The funereal drapes. ‘Sebastian, open the curtains.’

‘I never open the curtains,” he replied.

‘Well, please do it for me now. I’m asking you.’

Reluctantly, Sebastian opened the curtains then turned to look at me. ‘You think there’s something wrong with the way I live.’

‘I just want to see the stars for once,’ I replied gently.

He offered me an apple. ‘Sorry it’s not a pomegranate,’ he said, grinning.

‘I don’t want a whole apple to myself,’ I replied. ‘Just a bite of yours.’

‘OK, we can share it, of course, no problem,’ came the reply. I tossed the newspaper onto the floor. He moved my shoes to the other side of the room, rearranging them reverently. Then he lay on the bed next to me and took a bite of its waxy jade skin. Once broken in, he held the apple out to me so that I could continue eating it with ease. I took a small bite, dribbling juice down his fingers. ‘I need more control of it,’ I complained and clamped my hand around his.

‘You can control it, that’s OK,’ he acquiesced. We locked eyes as I bit on it. It was the closest I’d felt to Sebastian all day.

When the apple was done we lay down side by side, and began to talk again.

‘So are we OK?’ Sebastian asked me.

I didn’t know how to answer that. ‘You mean, am I OK with the non-monogamy thing?’

‘Well, among other things.’

The scissors. We still needed to talk about the scissors.

‘Let’s talk about the other things. The scissors, Sebastian. That was very intense.’

He nodded gravely.

‘I mean, I think it was a little too intense, even.’

He nodded again, more hesitantly this time.

‘I’ve played with a lot of people’s fantasies, Sebastian, but that didn’t feel like it came from a good place to me. And afterwards I got that real BDSM low, that thing I’d heard people talk about but never knew existed.’

‘Me too,’ he confessed.

‘So why did you want to do it then? Why would you want to do something that made us both feel so terrible?’

‘I didn’t know it would make you feel terrible,’ he replied. I started to feel bitter again. No, he didn’t think about how it would make me feel. And he couldn’t be bothered to ask either. ‘But as miserable as I felt to begin with, you have to know, Nichi, it was so fucking hot to me. I’ve wanked about it every day since.’

‘But we can’t do it again, Sebastian.’

‘Well, there’s no point putting the scissors away now. It would like trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. It’s my ultimate fantasy and it always will be.’

I said nothing. What was there to say to that? I’d just told him that something we’d done together had really hurt me and yet here was he focusing on how many times it had got him off since, and how he wanted to do it again.

I looked deep into Sebastian’s eyes. For the first time, I was starting to see a hollowness there I’d previously been blind to. And his beauty was rapidly deteriorating in front of me. I realised that I still had one question about the monogamy issue. I needed to ask him it.

‘So, Sebastian, about the matter of monogamy. How does it change when you fall in love? Are you faithful then?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t love.’

What? What was he talking about? How could he not love?

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t feel romantic love. I haven’t loved anyone since Lana when I was nineteen. My friends tell me it’s because I haven’t met the right person but I know that’s not it.’

‘Then what is it?’ I asked in desperate exasperation.

‘I just don’t love.’

He stared at me defiantly as though he’d just informed me he really didn’t like beach holidays. Or voting for the Tories. Or listening to hip hop. Not as though he had just announced he was inhuman.

My feelings for Sebastian, my respect, awe and admiration for him were fast unravelling. What was the point to life without love? There was none. What then, was the point for Sebastian?

Everything and nothing seemed to fall into place. Sebastian saw the disgusted shock on my face. He reached out to rub my shoulder tenderly.

We started to kiss. I am kissing a tin man, I told myself. See how it feels. Admire its novelty. But it felt no different to any other time we had kissed this way. Maybe I was being dramatic. Maybe this could still be OK. Sebastian rolled tighter towards me. Then he lifted up my dress and grabbed at my hips urgently, pulled at the fabric of my knickers clumsily so that I had to help him remove them. He undressed himself and I followed suit. In a minute or so, having barely taken any time whatsoever to touch his skin against mine, he had entered me and we ground against each other, urgently, hard and hot.

But it was like making love to a mannequin. No, forget the making love part. That was never going to come into it, was it? Suddenly I had never felt so detached from Sebastian. I seemed to be hovering a finger’s breadth above my body, looking down on him touching me. He might as well have ordered me in.

As he began to slow-thrust me, I felt something in me release, as though Sebastian had quietly removed my newly acquired armour. His body coaxed mine into relinquishing to him, every single time. Even now, even after every awful desecrating thing that he’d said this afternoon and this evening, even as my head still resisted him, my body responded with love to his touch. His crotch ground tightly against mine, and caught my clitoris rhythmically. His strokes felt even deeper, more urgent this evening, every inch of my insides enlivened to the sensation of him urging up inside me.

And then, as if hit by a wave while I’d had my back turned against the tide, I was sucked into an aching orgasm, a rabid, intense G-spot orgasm, the first I had ever had with him. I lay there, panting. I was confused. Was that my heart’s last ditch attempt at trying to connect with him, even when my head resolutely refused?

Afterwards, I stared at the chink of moonlight that snuck through the gap in the curtains. Loving Sebastian was like letting him massage my heart with sandpaper. Only now he’d ground it right down to a single, tremulous vein.

I turned to face him. He was already asleep. How could he already be asleep? Why didn’t he feel as though all future happiness had quietly, and quickly just had its throat slit before him? Didn’t he feel our abysmal loss?

I turned back to look at the curtains. What was I even doing here any longer? I couldn’t carry on as if we’d had a minor tiff and agreed to work through it. I had to go. I had to get up right now and go and never come back. I lay there and counted to three. One. How I wish I’d never met him. Two. How I wish I’d never submitted to him. Three.

‘I’m going to go.’

I sprang up out of the bed.

Sebastian’s eyes opened.

‘What?’ he exclaimed. He was utterly confused, I could tell.

‘I’m kidding myself if I think I can do this.’

‘You’re going to go now? I can sleep on the floor, don’t go. I thought things were OK?’

I fumbled around for my clothes then flung them on clumsily, nipping my skin in the zip of my dress as I did so. Where were my knickers? Oh, who cared. I just needed to get out of here. What had Sebastian done with my shoes?

‘Come on, Nichi, don’t go like this. Look, let’s just sleep and we’ll talk about it again in the morning.’ He looked up at me. ‘Or not. You can just go then, if that’s what you want.’

If that’s what I want? So Sebastian wasn’t going to even try and persuade me to change my mind? Did he care that little? Could he really be so fatalistic about this? Sebastian hadn’t the faintest idea what I wanted or he would never have come out with such a blasé, feckless statement.

Well then. Might as well put it all on the line. ‘Sebastian,’ my voice was threatening to break at any moment. I wasn’t sure if I could even get the next sentence out but it had to be said. ‘I’m heartbroken.’ I paused and forced a steady breath through the fast forming tears. ‘I never thought I could feel like this about anyone ever again after Christos . . .’

Sebastian lay stock still on the bed, looking as though someone had just indicted him of a terrible crime he had not committed. And then he hit back with impossible coolness.

‘I do care about you, Nichi, just not in the way you might want me to.’

At that moment, something inside me gave up. I grabbed my bag and edged out of the room. ‘Honestly, I rue the day you ever darkened my door.’ So it had been Violet’s door but the point remained.

I thought back to that night. He’d positively glowed in the lamplight. He’d made me believe again, in just those first few seconds, that love at first sight was more than just a naïve fantasy but a raw, real wonder that, when it came, could sweep your soul off its feet.

‘Come on, Nichi!’ He was defiant, irritable, almost angry. That kind of incantation, that desire to wish him away, had shocked him. Well, good. Maybe now he might start to understand what he meant to me, and what a terrible thing he’d done by leading me on all this time.

I felt one final sentiment in me rise, and let it burst out. ‘You can’t love me, Sebastian!’ I waited for his rebuke. But it didn’t come. Then I said it again in quiet agony. ‘You can’t love me!’

His silence confirmed the truth of my cry.

There was nothing more to say. And so I left.

When I left Sebastian’s that night, I knew the best thing from hereon was for me to never see him again. The thought of not having him in my life was unbearable. But what good could come of any kind of relationship with an emotional leper? Still, the memories were seared into my body. Sebastian would be with me for God knows how long.

On Tuesday morning I arrived at work to find a large box waiting for me on my desk. My heart knotted around itself. There it was. My make-up bag, as requested. So Sebastian could at least do this for me. I approached the box and slid my fingers over the ends, holding the box there for a moment before I opened it, holding it where Sebastian must have held it before he sent it on its way to me. I felt as though my body might cry soft tears from every pore, and soak the cardboard.

He’d texted me again in the early hours. ‘I’ve sent your things. Look out for the toothbrush; it’s wrapped separately. Sx’ And then there’d been a second message. ‘Let me know at some point if you want to meet up and talk, although I understand if not. I just hope last night was not the last time I’ll ever see you.’

I opened the box. There, wrapped inside tightly scrunched newspaper, was my old dusky pink make-up bag, painted flowers flaking from its tired-looking leather skin, as if they’d withered away under the blast of the argument with Sebastian. The newspaper was the one I had flung away before we had gone through the motions of something other people called making love. My things were charged with Sebastian’s lovelessness. To touch them drove me to tears.

There was no note. I traced my fingers over my name written on the packaging in Sebastian’s careful scrawl. I’d never seen his handwriting before. I lingered there for a few more seconds, then stored the cardboard box carefully under my desk. I would keep it there for weeks to come.

Once I had thanked Sebastian for the safe return of my bag, there was no reason to be in contact about anything else. And so we weren’t. In the weeks that followed, I felt as though someone had gently draped a shroud over me and was waiting patiently for me to give up on life.

During working hours I somehow managed to muddle through. I worked ferociously until my eyes stung from staring at the computer screen, and broke only to make camomile tea and smoke. Bar the odd shared fag at a party, I’d never ever smoked before. But I may as well. What did it matter if I ruined my face with wrinkles?

I couldn’t eat. Food felt as though it were feeding my agony.

My lack of appetite felt like more than the archetypal response to heartache. For the first time in years I was driven to actively starving myself again. I wanted to starve away the pain of Sebastian not loving me. But I also wanted to whittle away at myself until I resembled the radiantly lithe Queen Rania or any one of the slender, raven-haired, olive-skinned beauties that populated Sebastian’s fantasies. As the time passed, my agony latched on to the memories of those awful humiliating discussions we’d had. I felt jealousy and heartbreak and self-loathing tearing at me. Late at night I lay awake and imagined Sebastian making love to other women. They were always exotic-looking. Back in the days when I had been domming, the clients had sometimes told me about their cuckolding fantasies, which involved them imagining their wives being ravished by better-looking men as they were forced to watch in humiliated agony. With my torturous thoughts, I realised I was inflicting a similar imaginary cuckolding on myself.