Page 74 of Handcuffed to the Gargoyle

She threw up her hands. “And again, it’s just my fault.”

“No, I don’t mean it like that. I mean it like what I was trying to say before, when you cut me off. You are worth something, Essence. You are worth everything. You matter.”

That made her want to cry again. She set down the can of seltzer, lower lip trembling.

He came over and sat down on the couch next to her. He started to reach for her.

But she backed away, out of his grasp, shaking her head.

He sighed heavily. “This is what’s going to be the problem, Essence, not me.”

Again, she wanted to punch him. How could he make her feel alternately amazing and livid in the span of moments? “The other thing is that, you know, orgasms with someone else, they’re, you know, not as good as orgasms by myself.”

“Oh,” he said, looking down at the can of hard seltzer in his hands.

It was quiet.

She felt bad. She felt pressure, pressure coming out of his chest, beaming at her, threatening to crush her, to tell him a pretty, pretty lie, that the orgasms she’d had with him had been better than anything she’d had while fantasizing, but… but they hadn’t, and she wasn’t going to do that. It would break something in her to do that, and she refused. She squished herself into the back of the couch, trying to evade the pressure. When she couldn’t, she got up and moved away from him.

“Well, we could work on it,” he said finally. “Maybe tell me, like, why it’s different, and we’ll figure out a plan or something.”

“Sure,” she said.

He waited, looking up at her, expectant.

She didn’t know what to say.

He sighed, breaking eye contact. “You’re going to say it’s because of me being dominant or something, aren’t you? Or choking you or whatever.” He was defeated.

“No,” she said. “No, that’s not it.”

“So?” He looked up.

“It’s just that it’s, um, it’s hard to…” She found her seltzer again, but she didn’t drink it, she just toyed with the metal tab on the top, moving it up and down, fidgeting. “Okay, I know what you’re going to say if I tell you this, and you need to understand that it’s just not that easy or whatever.”

He was still waiting.

“It feels like it’s an inconvenience, my orgasm,” she said.

“What?” He was clearly horrified.

She drank seltzer. “I knew you were going to be like that about it.”

“Well, that’s just bullshit, and I want you to stop thinking that.”

“Right, I’ll just turn it off.” She drank more, and now the can was empty. Oops. She’d really downed that, hadn’t she? She set it down, sighing. “It’s easier for you, and the whole act, it’s, you know, made for your pleasure.”

“It is not,” he said.

“You have to have an orgasm to successfully mate with someone, and I do not.”

“That’s a really reductive and simplistic way to look at sex,” he said. “I’m surprised at you! You’re the one who’s all into these little power games and stuff and then, you’re like this about—”

“Okay, but I feel like the point of sex is sort of…” She shook her head. “No, no, let me be really honest here. It turns me on if I’m kind of… surrendering? The surrender element, it’s part of it. It’s twined into it in some way. And one way to surrender is to… prioritize someone else’s pleasure over mine? Or, um, when they prioritize their pleasure. When they just want to take pleasure and use my body to do it. That makes me really hot.”

It was quiet again.

She steeled herself for him to say something derisive, to tell her to stop doing that.

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