Her Side of the Drawer, Part 2: The Fourteen Days

Previously: Part 1: The Pegging Question

If you are coming into this pegging story in the middle, the short version is this. Yvette asked me the question over cold noodles on a Thursday, wrote the rules down on her laptop before anything physical happened, ran one rehearsal with her hands and her mouth and nothing from the drawer, and then named a date fourteen days out and shut the bottom drawer of her dresser with her foot.

What I did not understand on that first night was that the fourteen days were not a gap between the interesting parts. The fourteen days were the thing. She knew that. I found out slowly, the way you find out that a room is colder than you thought, by sitting in it.

Day Three, in a Corridor by the Bathrooms

Her friend Robin turned thirty eight on the Saturday, which meant a long table at the back of an Italian place with bad lighting and good bread, eleven of us, two bottles of something red that Yvette picked because nobody else would commit.

I want to be clear that she was not performing anything. She was at the far end of the table with her sleeves pushed up, arguing with Robin's husband about whether a station wagon counts as a van. She had the pencil out of her hair for once. She laughed at a story about a dog getting into a bag of flour and put her hand flat on the table when she laughed, which she does, and I sat four seats down with a bread plate and a water glass and thought about the drawer.

That was the whole problem. Three days in and I had stopped being a man at a birthday dinner. I was a man doing arithmetic at a birthday dinner.

Rule one said she decides when. Rule two said no touching myself without permission, and permission has to be asked out loud, in words, every time. Nobody had said anything about where I was allowed to ask. I got up somewhere around the main courses and went toward the bathrooms, and she looked up at me from the far end of the table and then went back to the station wagon argument, and about ninety seconds later she came down the corridor after me with her wine glass still in her hand.

The corridor was narrow, exposed brick on one side, a coat rack, a framed photograph of a harbour. She stopped about a foot closer than she needed to.

"Go on," she said.

"I did not say anything."

"You got up and walked away from a table of food. Go on."

So I asked her. In a corridor, in a restaurant, with someone running a tap on the other side of the wall, I asked my girlfriend for permission in plain words, and my voice did something embarrassing in the middle of it.

She listened all the way to the end. That is one of the things about her. She never cuts in to spare you the rest of the sentence.

"No," she said.

"Okay."

"Ask me properly."

I said it again, slower, and I did not try to make it funny, and when I got to the end of it she took a drink of her wine and looked at me over the glass with an expression I can only describe as professional interest.

"No," she said. "Go back to the table and be good company. Robin likes you. Ask Dev about the van thing, he has been waiting all night for somebody to care."

"Yvette."

"That was not a question, so I am not going to answer it." She reached up and straightened my collar with two fingers, which she has done in front of people for two and a half years and which has never once meant what it meant that night. "Eleven days. Go on."

I went back to the table. I asked Dev about the van thing. He talked for nine minutes. I remember almost all of it, which tells you something about where my attention was, because I have never retained a word that man has said before or since.

Then, about half an hour later, over the plates being cleared, Yvette said down the length of the table, in exactly the voice she uses for anything else, "Will. You went quiet earlier. Are you all right?"

Eleven people. Robin's husband halfway through refilling a glass. A waiter reaching between us for a bowl.

Rule four says when she asks me a question about this I answer honestly on the first try, not on the third try after a joke. She had built that rule for the kitchen. She was now using it at a birthday dinner, in company, in a sentence that nobody else in the room could possibly decode, and she was watching me work out that there was no version of the truth I could say out loud and no version of a lie she would let pass.

"I am fine," I said. "I am just thinking about something."

"Are you going to be able to stop thinking about it?"

"Probably not tonight."

She let that sit for a second. Then she said, "Good," and turned back to Robin and asked whether anybody wanted to split a dessert, and the table moved on, and I sat there with my ears ringing while two women on my left argued about tiramisu.

In the car she put her hand on the back of my neck at a red light and left it there and said nothing at all, and that was worse, and she knew it was worse.

The Thursday That Was Harder Than the Pegging Rehearsal

Day six was a Thursday, which meant hers. Home by seven, showered, phone in the bowl by the door.

I was home at twenty to seven. I had been home at twenty to seven for weeks by then, which she never commented on, and which I have since decided she noticed immediately.

She came in at ten past with a canvas bag of groceries and a roll of backdrop paper under her arm, put the paper in the corner with the others, put the groceries away one item at a time, and ran a bath. Not for me. For herself. I sat on the end of the bed in the one lamp with my hands on my knees and listened to the water for twenty five minutes and understood that this was on purpose.

When she came out she was in a towel with her hair up and she walked straight past me to the dresser and opened the bottom drawer.

She did not take the harness out. She took out the larger of the two attachments, the optimistic one, and put it on the quilt about a foot from my hand.

"Look at it," she said.

"I am looking at it."

"You are looking past it. There is a difference and I can see it on your face." She sat down on the edge of the bed beside me, towel and all, perfectly unhurried. "Pick it up."

I picked it up. It is heavier than you expect. Everyone says that and everyone is right.

"Eight days," she said. "That one, not the small one. I decided this afternoon while I was shooting a sink."

I made a sound.

"Was that a question?"

"No."

"Good, because the answer is still eight days." She took it out of my hands and put it back in the drawer and left the drawer open, which she had not done before, and then she said, "Face down, towel, lamp stays on," and did the whole rehearsal again.

And it was harder. I want to try to say why, because at the time I thought she had simply decided to be crueller and she had not. Nothing she did with her hands was any worse than the first time. What was different was that the drawer was open on my left and I could see into it, and she had already told me which one, and she had already told me the date, and so every single thing that happened that night happened in the shadow of a specific event on a specific Thursday involving a specific object I had been made to hold twice.

The first rehearsal had been a question. This one was a countdown with her hand flat on my lower back.

She talked the whole way through, the way she does, saying what she was going to do before she did it and waiting for a yes each time, and twice she stopped dead and made me say in actual sentences what I was feeling, and the second time I got out four words and they were not clever words and she said, "Yes. That is what I thought."

I asked permission once, late, badly.

"No."

"Please."

She stopped moving entirely. In the whole of this, that is the only time I have ever managed to make her stop and think about something I said instead of about something she had planned.

"Here is what I am going to do," she said, after a while. "I am going to let you say that one again, properly, and I am going to say no again, and then we are going to be finished for tonight and I am going to go and get you some water. Not because I am annoyed. Because you have about one of those in you per week and you just spent this week's one in a corridor at Robin's dinner."

So we did exactly that. She said no. She got the water.

Afterward she lay along my back with her arm over my shoulder and let me shake, and I said, into the pillow, that I did not know how I was supposed to get through eight more days of this.

"You are not supposed to," she said. "You are supposed to be exactly like this. This is the part I wanted."

Day Eight: The Pegging Homework She Did at the Kitchen Table

I came out on the Friday night and she was at the table with a cup of tea and the folded instruction sheet from the box, flattened out under her hand, reading it again. Not hiding it. She had a contact sheet of bathroom fittings face down beside her and she was making notes on the back of it in pencil.

I stood there in the doorway like an idiot.

"Sit down," she said, "I have questions, and I would rather ask them on a Friday with my clothes on than on a Thursday with yours off."

So we had the most unromantic conversation of my adult life across a kitchen table under a bare bulb. She asked things in the order she had written them down. Practical things. Which of the two attachments I had actually been thinking about for eleven years, as against which one I thought I was supposed to say. Whether I had ever done anything on my own, and how much, and when, and what had gone wrong the times it had gone wrong. What the difference was between the sensation I did not like and the sensation I was frightened of in advance, because she said those are not the same problem and she needed to know which one she was managing.

I answered all of it. Badly at first, then properly. There is no way to make any of that sound erotic and she was not trying to. At one point she said, "Right, that is the lubricant settled, I am buying the other one as well," and wrote it on the back of a photograph of a tap.

And somewhere in the middle of it the thing turned over in my chest, because I understood that she had spent fourteen days not just making me wait. She had been doing the reading. She had been working out angles and quantities and what to have within reach, the same way she works out where to put a light so a kettle looks wet and not splashy, and the reason she would not move the date was not theatre. It was that she had not finished her preparation and she was not going to do a thing like this to me half ready.

"You have gone quiet again," she said, without looking up from the sheet.

"I am allowed to be quiet when it is not a question."

"True." She turned the page over. "Six days."

Day Nine: What She Added to the Pegging Rules

She added it on a Sunday morning, which is the detail that still gets me, because by day nine I had built myself a whole theory that the rules were finished and sealed and the only variable left was the calendar.

We were at the counter. She was eating toast standing up with the plate in her hand and reading something on her phone, hair wet, one of my undershirts, a coffee going cold next to her because she always makes it and then forgets it for ten minutes.

"One more thing goes on the list," she said, not looking up.

I waited. I had learned by then that asking a question at that moment was the fastest way to make her put her phone down and look at me, which sounds like a reward and is not.

"On the night," she said, "you ask me for it. Out loud, in words, in a full sentence, with the actual name of the thing in the sentence. Not a gesture. Not a nod. Not please. Not the thing where you say half of it and look at me and wait for me to finish the sentence for you." She put the phone face down and picked up the cold coffee and drank it, which I hate watching. "And if you cannot say it, nothing happens that night, and we go to sleep, and I pick a new date two weeks out, and we do all of this again."

I said, "That is not fair."

She considered that seriously, which was somehow worse than if she had argued.

"No," she agreed. "It is not fair. It is also not a punishment, and I want you to hear the difference. Everything else on that list I wrote because I wanted it. This one I wrote because of what you told me on the second Thursday, on your knees, about why you did not tell me for eleven years."

"I said that to you in confidence."

"You said it to me on a Thursday," she said, "which makes it mine."

I went and stood by the window for a bit. It was a grey morning and there was a man in the lot below putting a bike rack on a car with the wrong allen key.

"Tangerine stops everything," she said behind me, calmly. "It stops this too. You can say tangerine right now, standing at the window on a Sunday, and the rules come off the laptop and we have breakfast and I never mention any of it again. That is real. You know it is real because it is the first thing I typed, before any of mine."

"I know."

"Is this a tangerine."

I thought about it honestly, because of rule four, and because she deserved the first try and not the third. "No."

"Then come and finish the eggs, they are going rubbery."

She came back to it that night, in the dark, in the flat voice she keeps for the questions she actually wants answered.

"What are you afraid of about Thursday. One answer, first try."

I lay there and looked at the ceiling and gave her the true one instead of the respectable one. I said I was not afraid of the thing itself. I said I was afraid of the four seconds before I was supposed to say the sentence, and of what my face would be doing, and of the fact that she would be looking straight at it, close up, with the lamp on, because she always leaves the lamp on and she always says it is because she wants to see.

She was quiet for a while.

"That is the right answer," she said. "Not the brave one. The right one." Then she rolled over and put her hand flat on my chest, which is not affection with her so much as a way of holding a thing still. "I am going to be looking at your face. I am not going to pretend otherwise. You can be frightened of that and still do it. Those two things go together more often than people admit."

"That is not comforting."

"No," she said. "Go to sleep. Five days."

The Sentence I Could Not Say

She tested it once. Day eleven. Tuesday. No ceremony at all, which was the method.

We had eaten. The plates were still on the table. She had a pen in her hand because she had been writing on the back of an invoice, and she put the pen down and said, "Say it now. Not for tonight. Just so you have said it once in your life before Thursday."

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

I want to put this down accurately, because I have read a lot of these stories over the years, and in all of them the man is choked up with want and the words come out in a rush. That is not what happens. What happens is far stupider and more physical than that. My jaw worked. My ears got hot. The room was perfectly ordinary, two plates and an invoice and a woman in grey sweatpants waiting, and I sat in my own kitchen at thirty three years of age and could not produce one sentence in my own language about a thing I had wanted since I was twenty two.

She did not help. That is the part I think about most. She did not lean in, or soften her face, or say take your time, or any of the things a kind person does. She sat there with her chin on her hand and let me fail in front of her, all the way, for as long as it took me to stop trying.

I got out about six words. One of them was the word. Then I stopped and looked at the invoice.

"That was closer than I expected," she said.

"It was not a sentence."

"No." She picked her pen back up. "Then we have three days."

"Yvette. What if on Thursday I cannot."

"Then I will mean the thing I said about two weeks," she said, "and I will not be angry, and you will hate it, and we will find out what you do with that." She wrote something on the invoice. "Do the dishes. You are allowed to know that you are doing well, by the way. You keep waiting for me to say it so I am saying it now while you are upset, which is when it counts."

The three days were the worst of the fourteen and I was not even allowed to call them unfair, because she had told me the exact terms in advance on a Sunday morning over cold coffee, and I had said no, this is not a tangerine, and I had meant it.

I did not practise out loud. I want that on the record too. I had the apartment to myself on the Wednesday for four hours and I thought about going into the bedroom and saying it to the lamp, and I did not, because somewhere in there I had worked out that the version she wanted was the one that cost something, and a rehearsed one would be a counterfeit and she would hear it immediately. She hears everything immediately.

Day Fourteen

I was home at six thirty. Showered. Phone in the bowl.

She was already there, which had not happened once in the whole fourteen days. Black shirt, jeans, hair up with the pencil, no shoes. She had moved the yard sale lamp to the other side of the bed so the light fell differently, because she is a photographer and cannot help herself. The towel was already down. The drawer was already open.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her forearms on her knees, perfectly relaxed, the way she sits when a client is late and she has decided not to mind.

"Come here," she said.

I came and stood in front of her. From there I could see into the drawer, which was deliberate, because everything she does is deliberate.

"Tangerine still works," she said. "Tonight, in ten minutes, in the middle. It costs you nothing and it never gets discussed. Tell me you know that."

"I know that."

"Good." She sat back a little and looked up at me, and she was not smiling, and she was not being kind, and she had been waiting fourteen days for this with more patience than I will ever have for anything. "Then go on. Ask me."

I will tell you what I said, and what she did about the way I said it, and what the fourteen days turned out to have been for, in the next part.

If you have been on either side of a wait like this, the one asking or the one deciding, post it at /submit/ and let the rest of us read it. For another piece about a woman who writes the rules down before anything happens, read My Femdom Wife Started Making the Rules, Part 1, and if you are the one who has not said the sentence yet, we wrote a guide on how to bring up pegging with your partner. The rest of the fiction lives at /fantasy-stories/.