Her Side of the Drawer, Part 1: The Pegging Question

Yvette asked me about pegging on a Thursday night, in the middle of eating noodles out of a carton, in the same tone she uses to ask whether I have paid the water bill. I want to be honest about my reaction, because the honest version is the only part of this pegging story that still embarrasses me. I said what.

I am thirty three. She is thirty five. We have lived together in the top half of a converted mill building for two and a half years, which is long enough that she can read my face from across a room and long enough that I have stopped bothering to arrange it.

She put her chopsticks down. She did not repeat the question. She just waited, which is the thing she does instead of pressing, and which works on me every single time.

The Night She Asked

I should describe the kitchen, because I have gone over that room in my head about four hundred times since. It is not really a kitchen, it is a counter and a sink at one end of the big room, with her studio lights folded against the brick wall and a roll of grey backdrop paper standing in the corner like a rolled up carpet. She shoots product photography for catalogues, which sounds boring and pays better than what I do. There were two of her light stands leaning against the fridge because she had been out on a job that afternoon and had not put anything away.

She was in the grey sweatpants and one of my undershirts, hair up with a pencil through it, no makeup, a smear of something on her forearm. That is the part I want on the record. She was not dressed for a scene. There was no leather in the building. She was eating cold noodles with her feet on the other chair, and she asked me a question that rearranged the next three months of my life.

"Pegging," she said again, patiently. "You have looked it up."

"Why would you think that."

"Because I use the same laptop you do, and because you do not clear anything, and because I am not an idiot." She said it without any edge at all. "Will. I am not mad. I am asking."

I did the thing men do, which is to try to make it funny. I said something about how that was quite a conversational pivot from the water bill. She let me have it. She waited out the joke, and then she said, "Okay. Try again."

And I could not. I sat there with a carton in my hand and could not get a single true sentence out. It had been in my head since I was about twenty two. I had never said it out loud to anybody, not to her, not to the two women before her, not to a doctor, not into an empty car. It turns out when a thing lives in your head that long it grows a kind of skin over it, and getting it out means tearing something.

She watched me not manage it for maybe twenty seconds. Then she got up, came around the table, and stood behind my chair with both hands on my shoulders, not pressing, just there.

"Nod," she said.

I nodded.

"Out loud is better. But nodding counts tonight."

I got my voice working and said yes. Yes, I had looked it up. Yes, more than once. Yes, for years.

She let out a breath I did not know she had been holding and said, "Thank God, I thought you were going to make me guess for another two years." Then she went back to her chair and picked her chopsticks back up and said, "Eat. It is getting cold and we are going to be talking for a while."

What She Said She Wanted Out of It

Here is what I expected. I expected either a careful, generous, slightly clinical offer, the kind where your partner agrees to a thing for your sake and you spend the whole time watching their face to see whether they are having a bad time. Or I expected a no, dressed up kindly.

What I got was neither.

"I want to be clear about something," she said. "I am not doing you a favour."

"Okay."

"I mean it. If this were a favour I would do it once, badly, and we would both be polite about it afterward and never bring it up again." She pointed at me with a chopstick. "I have thought about this on my own. Before tonight. For a while."

I asked how long. She said she was not going to answer that, which told me the answer was long.

"What I want," she said, "is the part where you do not get to run the room. You run everything. You run your job, you run the car insurance, you run which restaurant, you run me if I let you, and you are tired. I have watched you be tired for two years." She set the carton down. "I want to take a night and have it be mine, start to finish, and I want you to find out what you are like when nothing is up to you. The rest of it is equipment."

I did not have anything to say to that. She let that sit, and then she smiled, and the smile was the first thing all night that made me nervous in a good way.

"Also," she said, "I think I will enjoy it enormously. I want that on the record too. I am not a saint. Finish your noodles."

The Pegging Rules We Wrote Before Anything Happened

She is methodical in a way that borders on a personality disorder. She did not touch me that night. She opened the laptop instead, made a new document, and titled it with the name of the thing in plain words, which made me want to crawl under the table.

"If you cannot look at the word," she said, "you cannot do the thing. That is not a punishment, that is just true."

So we wrote it out. My rules first. She insisted on that order, and I think about it a lot. Before a single rule of hers went on that page, she typed mine.

• Any word I say stops everything, but if I want to be sure it is heard, the word is tangerine. Saying it is never punished and never discussed afterward unless I want to discuss it.
• Nothing that hurts in a way that is not the point. Any pain that is not the ordinary stretch of a new thing, and we stop, no argument, no disappointment on her face.
• Nothing recorded. No photographs, which from her was a real concession.
• Nobody else ever knows. Not her sister, not my brother, not the two friends she tells everything to.
• I can end the whole arrangement at any point, including in the middle, including on a night when I have already said yes.

She read them back to me out loud, which I had not expected, and which did something to the inside of my chest.

"Say you believe those are real," she said.

"I believe they are real."

"Again, and look at me."

I looked at her and said it again. She nodded once and typed her own list underneath, and her list was shorter, and her list was worse.

• She decides when. Not me. I do not get to ask and I do not get to hint.
• No touching myself without permission, starting tonight, until she says otherwise. If I want it I ask out loud, in words, every time.
• Thursday nights are hers. Home by seven, showered, phone in the bowl by the door.
• When she asks me a question about this, I answer honestly on the first try. Not on the third try after a joke.
• She is allowed to take as long as she likes. Weeks, if she likes. Nothing is owed to me on a schedule.

I read that last one twice. "How long are we talking."

"You just broke rule four," she said.

I said sorry. She said sorry was not what she wanted either, and then she turned the laptop around and told me to read the whole thing from the top and say yes or no.

I said yes.

She closed the laptop, got up, kissed the top of my head like I was a dog she was fond of, and went to brush her teeth. Nothing else happened that night. I lay in the dark next to her for about two hours with my heart going and my hands flat on the mattress, obeying a rule that was four hours old.

Three Weeks of Nothing, Which Was Not Nothing

I want to be clear about the next part, because if you had described it to me beforehand I would have said it sounded like a waste of time.

She did nothing for three weeks.

No equipment. No shopping. No scene. Three Thursdays went by. On the first one I came home at ten to seven, showered, put my phone in the bowl, and she had me sit on the floor at the end of the couch while she edited photos. That was it. Two hours of her clicking through images of kitchen taps with my shoulder against her shin. She did not speak to me except once, when she turned the laptop slightly and said, "Which of these two is less ugly," and I pointed, and she said "wrong" and went back to work.

I have never wanted anything so badly in my life as I wanted her to look at me during those two hours.

On the second Thursday she had me kneel in front of the chair and talk. That was the whole assignment. Talk about it. Out loud, in plain words, while she sat there in her work clothes with her legs crossed and her chin on her hand and asked questions I did not want to answer.

"When did you first think about it."

"Twenty two. Maybe twenty one."

"And you told nobody for eleven years."

"Yes."

"Why."

I said something about how it was not the kind of thing you lead with. She uncrossed her legs, which is her version of raising her voice.

"Try the true answer."

So I gave her the true answer, which was that I thought she would find it pathetic, and that I thought she would look at me differently across the breakfast table for the rest of our lives, and that I had decided, at some point without noticing I was deciding it, that I would rather have the version of her that did not know.

She let that sit in the room for a long time.

Then she leaned forward and took my jaw in her hand, not gently, and turned my face up, and said, "Look at me. Does this look like a woman who finds you pathetic."

It did not. It looked like a woman who was enjoying herself enormously, exactly as advertised.

"I have wanted to put my hands on you like this for two years," she said, "and you were sitting on it the entire time. So we are going to go slowly, and I am going to take it apart in the order I choose, and you are going to stop apologising for being here."

In the second week I asked permission twice and was told no twice. Flatly, without explanation, the way you decline a second coffee. By the third Thursday I had stopped asking the way you ask for a favour and started asking the way you say a line you have been given, and she noticed that, and she said, "Better," and that one word undid me more than an hour of anything else.

The Box, and the Pegging Inspection That Was Not One

The box came on a Tuesday, which was characteristic. She had ordered it to her studio address so it would not sit in our lobby, and she brought it home in a tote bag with a loaf of bread on top of it.

She did not open it. She put it on the counter next to the bread and made dinner and talked about a client who wanted a kettle to look wet but not splashy, and the box sat there through the entire meal, in my line of sight, unopened, while I tried to follow what she was saying about the kettle.

"You have gone quiet," she said.

"I am listening."

"You are not." She was not even looking up from her plate.

After dinner she washed her hands, dried them carefully, and said, "On the floor."

I went down onto the floor by the counter. She slit the tape with a kitchen knife and took everything out and laid it out in a row on a folded towel, not hurrying, naming each thing as she set it down like she was doing inventory for an insurance claim. Harness. Two attachments, one considerably more optimistic than the other. A pump bottle of the good lubricant, the expensive one, because she does not buy cheap versions of anything. A pair of gloves. A folded instruction sheet she read all the way through while I knelt there and waited.

Then she handed me the smaller one and told me to hold it.

That was the whole of it. I knelt on the kitchen floor in my work shirt with my hands around it and she sat up on the counter above me with her heels against the cupboard door and looked at me for a long time.

"You are shaking," she said.

"Yes."

"Is any of that fear."

I thought about it honestly, because of rule four. "Some."

"Good. Keep hold of it." She leaned down and pushed my hair back off my forehead with two fingers. "Nothing is happening tonight. I want you to be absolutely clear on that. You are going to hold that for a while, and then I am going to put it in the drawer, and you are going to go to bed, and nothing is going to happen."

"Yvette."

"Say the thing you want to say."

"Please."

"No," she said, and the way she said it was almost tender. "Not tonight. You have waited eleven years. You can wait for me to be ready."

She let me kneel there a few minutes more. Then she took it out of my hands, wiped everything down, put the whole lot in the bottom drawer of her side of the dresser, and shut it. She did not lock the drawer. She did not need to.

In bed she asked permission questions in the dark, slowly, in a flat voice, and the answer each time was no, and by the fourth no I was saying thank you without being told to.

The Pegging Rehearsal

The following Thursday she ran what she called a rehearsal, and she used that word on purpose, and she told me in advance exactly what would and would not happen, which I have come to understand is not kindness but strategy.

"Hands and mouth," she said over breakfast. "Mine, on you. Nothing from the drawer. I want to know what you do before I do anything that cannot be undone in a second."

I said okay in a voice that came out wrong and had to drink some coffee.

I was home at six forty. Showered. Phone in the bowl. She came in at seven fifteen having clearly stopped somewhere on the way, in a black shirt and jeans, and she looked at me standing in the middle of the living room not knowing what to do with my arms, and she laughed at me. Not unkindly. She said, "God, look at you," and hung up her coat, and took her time about it.

She put me on the bed face down with a pillow under my hips and the towel underneath because she thinks about things like towels. She left the lamp on. She said she wanted to see.

What I remember is how unhurried she was, and how much she talked, and how little of it was dirty. She narrated. She said what she was doing before she did it, every time, in a low conversational voice, and asked me to say yes before each new thing, and I said yes so many times that the word stopped being a word. Her hand flat on my lower back the whole time, warm, anchoring, there. Gloved, careful, patient to the point of cruelty. When something was too much she felt it before I said it and stopped on her own, and when I said it was all right she said, "I will decide that," and waited anyway.

Twice she stopped entirely and made me tell her what I was feeling in actual sentences. The second time I could not manage sentences, and she said that was fine, that one word was enough, and I said good, and she said, "Yes. You are."

I asked for permission at some point. I do not remember how I asked. I remember the answer, because she said it with her mouth against my ear and her hand not stopping.

"No. Not tonight either." A pause. "Say thank you."

I said thank you.

"Again."

I said it again, and meant it the second time, and that was the moment, if you want the moment. Not the equipment. Not the box on the counter. Me face down on a towel in our own bedroom under a lamp I had bought at a yard sale, thanking my girlfriend for not letting me have the thing I had wanted for eleven years, and meaning it.

She took the gloves off afterward and lay down along my back with her arm over my shoulder and let me shake. It went on a while. She did not say anything clever. At some point she got up and brought a glass of water and a warm cloth and sorted me out, and then came back and put her chin on my shoulder blade.

"Was any of that a no," she said.

"No."

"Would you have said tangerine."

"I did not need it."

"That is not the question I asked."

I thought about it. "Yes. I would have said it."

"Good." She was quiet for a bit. Then she said, "You did very well. You are allowed to know that."

What She Said at the End

I thought that was the end of the evening. I was wrong about that in a way I should have seen coming, because she had been building to something all night the same way she builds a photograph, moving one light at a time while you are watching the wrong corner of the frame.

She got up, pulled on a shirt, and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser. She did not take anything out. She just left it open and sat down on the edge of the bed where I could see both her face and the drawer at the same time, which was deliberate, because everything she does is deliberate.

"Two weeks from tonight," she said.

I said something that was not a word.

"Two weeks. Not sooner, no matter what you say to me in between, and no matter how you say it. The rules stay. You keep asking, and I will keep saying no, and when it happens it will happen because I decided it was time and not because you wore me down. Are we clear."

"Yes."

"Say the date out loud."

I said it.

"Good." She reached over and shut the drawer with her foot, and the sound of it closing is the loudest thing in this entire story. "Fourteen days. Go to sleep."

She was asleep in ten minutes. I lay there and did arithmetic in the dark like a man counting down to a hospital appointment he had booked himself, and I understood for the first time what she had meant about equipment, and about who runs the room, and about the difference between wanting a thing and being made to wait for it by somebody who is enjoying herself.

Fourteen days. I will tell you about the fourteen days, and about what she added to the list on day nine, which I did not see coming and did not like, in the next part.

If you have a pegging story of your own, or any first time you spent years working up to, post it at /submit/ and let the rest of us read it. If you want another piece about a woman who sets the terms and then makes a man wait out her timetable, read The Keyholder and the Thirty Day Lock, and if you are the one sitting on a conversation like this, we wrote a guide on how to ask your partner to dominate you. The rest of the fiction lives at /fantasy-stories/.