Her Side of the Drawer, Part 3: The Pegging She Planned For

Previously: Part 2: The Fourteen Days

This pegging story spent fourteen days getting to one sentence, so here is the sentence, and here is what it cost. I am Will. I am thirty three. Yvette is thirty five. We have lived together for two and a half years in the top half of a converted mill building with her studio lights folded against the brick wall, and on a Thursday night in October I had to ask her out loud, in words, in a full sentence, with the actual name of the thing in it, for something I had wanted since I was twenty two and told nobody at all for eleven years.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed with her forearms on her knees. Black shirt, jeans, hair up with the pencil, no shoes. The towel was already down. The drawer was open on her left. She had moved the yard sale lamp to the other side of the bed so the light came across the room instead of from behind her, and I understood later that she had done that so she could see my face properly, and that she had thought about it in advance, in daylight, the way she thinks about where to put a light on a kettle.

"Then go on," she said. "Ask me."

What I Said, and What She Did About the Way I Said It

The four seconds happened the way I had told her they would. My jaw worked. My ears went hot. I could hear the radiator and somebody's car alarm two streets over and the small dry sound of her breathing through her nose, perfectly level, waiting.

And then I said it. All of it. The whole sentence, subject and verb and the name of the thing, no gesture, no nod, no half of it left hanging in the air for her to finish.

I said it to the drawer.

She let the silence run for a second or two. Then she said, "Again."

"I said it."

"You said it to a piece of furniture." She did not sound annoyed. She sounded like a woman reviewing a frame and finding the shadow in the wrong place. "I have been waiting fourteen days to hear you say it to me. Look at my face and say it again."

I want to be accurate about this, because it is the part I did not expect. The second time was worse. Enormously worse. The first time had been a feat of engineering, a sentence hauled up out of me by main force, and the achievement of it had carried me through. The second time there was no achievement available. There was only her face, close, lit from the side, entirely unsmiling, her eyes on mine, and my own voice making a request that I had spent eleven years making sure no living person would ever hear.

I got about two thirds of the way through and had to stop, not because I could not say the words but because my throat closed over them.

She did not help. She has never once helped. She sat there with her forearms on her knees and let me stand in front of her in the lamp light with my mouth open and the end of the sentence unfinished, and she did not lean forward, and she did not say take your time, and she did not look away to make it easier, because looking away would have made it easier and she had decided fourteen days ago that it was not going to be.

I finished it.

"Thank you," she said. Not good boy. Not well done. Thank you, flatly, the way she thanks a courier. And then, while I was still standing there shaking slightly in my own bedroom, she said, "Sit on the end of the bed. Hands on your knees. I am going to tell you exactly what is going to happen tonight, in order, and you are going to say yes to each part out loud, and anything you do not say yes to we do not do. Including the whole thing."

"You already know I am going to say yes."

"I know nothing of the kind," she said, "and neither do you, because you have never done any of this. Say the word for me."

"Tangerine."

"Tonight, in ten minutes, in the middle, after we have started, at any point at all, and it costs you nothing and it never gets discussed. Say that you know it."

"I know it."

"And one more thing, which is new." She reached over and turned the lamp a little so it was not in my eyes. "If I think you need it and you have not said it, I will use it for you. That is my half. I am not going to stand here taking your word for it with your face doing what your face does."

The Part of a First Time Pegging Story Nobody Writes Down

What happened next was twenty minutes of the least erotic preparation I have ever been part of, and I have thought about it more than almost anything else that night.

She laid things out on the towel in the order she was going to need them, naming each one as she put it down, in the voice she uses on the phone to a lighting hire company. Both lubricants, the one she had settled on and the second one she had bought on the Friday after the kitchen table conversation. A hand towel. A glass of water, on the floor, on a coaster, because she will not have a wet ring on the boards. Gloves, which she put on in front of me without any ceremony at all and which did something to my chest that I am not going to be able to explain.

The smaller attachment was on the towel. So was the larger one.

"You said the big one," I said.

"I said it would be that one tonight and it will be. I did not say we would be starting there." She sat down beside me. "You have had eleven years to build a film of this in your head, and I have watched you flinch three times in a fortnight at the gap between the film and the furniture. So here is tonight. My hands first, for as long as I decide, which will be longer than you want. Then the small one, which is not a demotion and is not me changing my mind. Then, if I am satisfied, the big one, which is what I named and what I meant. Yes to each of those or tell me which one you are not saying yes to."

"Yes."

"All three separately. Out loud. We are not doing a package."

So I said yes three times, in three sentences, in my own voice, at thirty three years of age, sitting on the end of my own bed in one lamp with my hands on my knees, and that was the fourth or fifth time that night that something I had assumed would be humiliating turned out to be something else that I did not have a word for.

"Last thing," she said. "The instruction sheet is in the drawer and it is staying there. I have read it enough times to know it. I am not reading at you tonight and I am not stopping halfway through to check a diagram, because you would never recover from that and neither would I."

"How many times is enough times?"

"Face down," she said. "Towel. Lamp stays on."

Her Hands, the Towel, and the Lamp She Would Not Turn Off

She talked the whole way through, the way she always has, saying what she was going to do before she did it and waiting for a yes each time, and the first ten minutes were the rehearsal, exactly the rehearsal, nothing in it I had not already had twice.

Except that the drawer was open and empty.

That was the difference and she had built it on purpose. Both times before, the things had been in the drawer and the drawer had been the threat. Now the drawer was open and bare on my left and everything that had been in it was on the towel beside my hip, in the light, and there was nothing left to be afraid of in the future tense. It was all in the room. It was all on the towel. There was no more waiting to do.

She stopped twice, the way she does, and made me say in actual sentences what I was feeling.

The first time I got out that it was not what I thought it would be.

"What did you think it would be?"

"A performance," I said, into the quilt. "Yours or mine. I did not know which."

"And?"

"It is a Thursday."

She made a small sound that I have only ever heard from her at work, when a shot comes together and she does not want to say so out loud in case it stops being true. "Yes. Good. That is the whole thing, and it took you fourteen days."

The second time she stopped I could not get a sentence out at all, and she waited, and then she put her free hand flat between my shoulder blades, which is not affection with her so much as a way of holding a thing still, and she said, "Then nod once if you want me to keep going and twice if you want to stop. I am allowing that for the next five minutes only. After that you go back to words."

I nodded once.

Somewhere in there I asked permission. Properly, in a full sentence, which by then was almost funny, and she said no without any hesitation at all.

"No. Not yet. You asked well, though." A pause. "You are allowed to know that you asked well."

The Middle of the Pegging Story Where I Stopped Keeping Score

I have read a lot of these stories over the years. I said that in the last part and it is still the most useful thing I can tell you, because the stories are wrong about this bit in a particular way and I would like to put the right version down somewhere.

In the stories the man is overwhelmed. There is a flood of sensation and the loss of self and a great deal of language about surrender. What actually happens, at least what actually happened to me, is much smaller and much stranger than that. It happened slowly. She went slowly. She had bought the second lubricant and taken notes in pencil on the back of a photograph of a tap and asked me unromantic questions across a kitchen table on a Friday night with her clothes on, and the result of all that preparation was that there was no moment of crisis for me to be brave about. There was just her, working, talking, asking for a yes, stopping when she decided to stop and not when I told her to.

And at some point I noticed that I had stopped running the film.

Eleven years I had been running it. In the shower, on trains, at my desk, in the two minutes before sleep, the same four or five sequences with the edges sanded off and a woman in them who had no opinions. And on the actual Thursday, with the actual woman, with her glove on my hip and her voice going on above me in the ordinary register she uses for everything else, the film simply was not playing. There was nothing to compare anything to. There was no score being kept.

That is what I had been frightened of, by the way. Not the thing itself. I told her so a fortnight earlier and I did not understand my own answer at the time. I was frightened of being present for it.

She stopped on her own, with no warning, in the middle.

"Will."

"I did not say anything."

"No. Your hands went flat." Her voice had not changed at all, which was somehow the most reassuring thing that has ever been done to me. "One word. Keep going, or stop, or water."

"Water."

So we stopped and I drank the water sitting up on the edge of the towel with a glove on the quilt beside me and a woman in a black shirt looking at my face with professional attention, and she asked me two questions in a row, which she does not usually do, and the second one was, "Is the problem the sensation, or is the problem that it is happening."

"It is happening."

"Then that one I am not going to fix," she said. "That one is the point. Lie back down."

What She Did With the Big One, and the Permission I Had to Ask For Twice

She was satisfied. She said so in exactly those words, which I will hear for the rest of my life in her flat work voice, and then she picked up the larger one, the optimistic one, the one she had decided on while shooting a sink on a Thursday afternoon, and she held it where I could see it and said, "This one, now. Yes or no, in a sentence."

It is heavier than you expect. I have said that before. It was heavier again in her hand.

"Yes," I said, and then, because she waited, I said the rest of it in a sentence.

What I want to record about the next part is how unhurried she was. There was no triumph in it anywhere. She had the lamp where she wanted it and the water within reach and the gloves on and the second lubricant open, and she went at the pace of somebody doing a job she had prepared for properly, narrating, asking, stopping once of her own accord to put her hand flat on my back and say nothing for about fifteen seconds while she decided whether I was all right. Not asking. Deciding. She has always reserved that to herself and that night I finally understood why, because I would have lied. I would have lied cheerfully and comprehensively rather than let it stop, and she knew that about me before I did.

And twice in the middle of it she said, "Tangerine still works."

"I know."

"Say it back."

"Tangerine still works."

I never used it. I want to be clear that I was not being brave. There was nothing in that night that needed stopping. I say that as a man who had spent a fortnight building a cathedral of dread, and I would say the opposite if the opposite were true, because the only rule of hers I have never once been tempted to break is the one about answering honestly on the first try.

She made me ask permission twice. Once about halfway, which she refused, and once at the end, which she granted, and the thing I had not anticipated was that by then the asking had stopped costing anything at all. It came out in one piece, in plain words, in my own voice, with the lamp on and her looking at me, and I did not hear myself do it, which after eleven years of silence is the strangest sentence in this whole account.

That was the trick. That was the fourteen days. She had not been building suspense. She had been grinding the sentence down against ordinary Tuesdays and kitchen tables and corridors at birthday dinners until it was just a thing a man says to the woman he lives with.

Afterward, With the Drawer Still Open

She did the aftercare lying on her back on the floor on the towel with her knees up, which is not what she normally does and which I have decided she chose so that we were not looking at each other. Gloves off, in the bin, hands washed, lamp still on. She put the water in my hand and waited until I had drunk all of it before she said anything.

"Ask me something," she said. "You have been allowed to since the beginning and you never do."

So I asked her what she had actually got out of the fourteen days, because she had promised me a long time ago that she would say it out loud eventually and she had admitted she would do it badly for a while.

She took a long time.

"I spend my whole working life making other people's taps look wet," she said. "Somebody else picks the product, somebody else picks the date, somebody else decides whether it is good. I have been doing that for eleven years as well, which you have never once noticed." A pause. "This was mine to compose. Start to finish. I picked the day and nobody moved it and nothing about it was a favour to you."

"That is quite cold."

"Yes," she said. "Do you want me to pretend otherwise, or do you want the first try."

I lay there on my side on the floor of a converted mill building with a glass in my hand and looked at the open drawer, which she had not shut with her foot, which she has shut with her foot every single time until that night.

"You did well," she said, to the ceiling. "You are allowed to know it. You said a sentence twice in one night that you had not said once in eleven years, and the second time was harder, and you did it anyway, and the thing I am grading is not the part where you shook."

Then she got up, with the towel over her shoulder, and went out into the main room and came back with her laptop, and sat down on the floor against the end of the bed with it open on her knees, and the blue light of it was on her face while I lay there and could not keep my eyes open.

"Not tonight," she said, before I had asked. "Sunday. There are three things on this list that do not make any sense now, and one that makes more sense than it did, and I am not deciding any of it at eleven o'clock with you on the floor."

"Are you taking them off?"

"Go to sleep."

She typed one line, and then she turned the screen away from me, which she had never done before, and I went to sleep on the floor like an animal with her foot against my back and the drawer still open on the other side of the bed.

I will tell you what was on the laptop on the Sunday, and which three rules she cut, and the one she added instead, in the last part of this.

If you have been on either side of a night like that, the one asking or the one who had to be ready, post it at /submit/ and let the rest of us read it.

More accounts from readers are at User Submitted Stories, the rest of the fiction lives at /fantasy-stories/, there is a companion piece about a woman who decides the date and will not move it in The Keyholder and the Thirty Day Lock, and if the part of this you recognised was the asking and the being refused, we wrote a guide on orgasm control in femdom and how to start.