Page 123 of For Real

He shuffled his feet, nodding.

“Okay, here’s the thing, grasshopper, all parties are basically the same, whether they involve sex, or kinky sex, or drinking, or playing group Scrabble, for that matter. Fun is where you find it. If you just ignore Laurie’s tortured little face and crappy attitude, you can totally have a good time tonight if you want.”

Toby, to his credit, cast an anxious look at me. I didn’t think he was as comfortable ignoring my tortured little face as Grace was. But then, he hadn’t known me as long.

She drew his arm through hers. “You’ve discussed limits and boundaries, right?”

“Oh yeah.” Toby nodded eagerly, as though he was sitting a test and he knew all the answers. “We don’t want to do stuff with other people, and I’m not supposed to give him away, which I wouldn’t do anyway. Because…just no.”

“So you can fuck each other.” She flashed her tomcat grin. “I think a lot of people, myself included, would enjoy watching that.”

Sam put his hand in the air. “Me too! Me too!”

“We…we didn’t talk about that.” Toby had gone very red. I couldn’t tell if he was embarrassed or flattered or some combination of both. “I’m…not sure—”

“It’s fine. Freedom is being able to say yes and no.”7

He gave her one of his crookedest smiles, and I tried my hardest not to be hideously jealous. Maybe I should fuck him—or let him fuck me—in front of everyone. Prove he was mine. And, oh God, which one of us was nineteen? I couldn’t think of a less healthy reason to have public sex. Grace was right. I did have a crappy attitude.

And I wanted to be at home. With Toby.

“Have you ever seen sounding?” Grace was asking, as if that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say to someone else’s boyfriend.

“Seen…sound—”

“Oh, Toby!” She bounced—a slightly dangerous action in that particular dress—and tugged on his arm. “It’s amazing. Come on, my friend Alice was talking about doing a demo.”

Which was how we ended up standing around, watching some guy get a surgical steel rod shoved expertly up his urethra. At least, that was what Toby watched. I watched Toby. He was rapt and bright-eyed, leaning close to Grace so she could tell him how it worked and how to do it safely.

My own feelings were impossibly conflicted.

I didn’t want to stay, but I wanted to please Toby. And right now, he seemed excited to be here, though his burgeoning friendship with Grace was likely to prove dangerous for me. Not because I had any real cause for jealousy, but because she tended to be…inspiring.

The stranger was babbling ecstatically, begging Alice to take it out, don’t take it out, let him come, please, please, please.

In spite of myself, I shuddered. I could too easily imagine Toby’s hands upon me, the slick-slow invasion of metal.

Robert had never done that to me. He liked control, but Toby liked to be under my skin. He wanted to be inside me, in my body and in my mind. In my heart. So similar in some ways, so utterly different in others, the two men I loved.

We left Alice and her partner—or partner of the night—to each other and moved into another room. We were in the basement, which our host had lavishly transformed into a series of smallish dungeons. I might have whispered something to Toby about the sheer lack of imagination on display down here, but I didn’t want to be the play-party heckler Grace had claimed I was. Besides, Toby was still talking enthusiastically about what we’d just seen, bombarding Grace and Sam with questions. They were walking a little ahead of me so I couldn’t hear much of what they were saying over the usual noises—leather against skin, the clank of chains, the occasional gasp or broken cry.

Suddenly Toby stopped. “Oh my God.”

Without even a premonition of misfortune to protect me, I turned to see what he saw: a man, tall and broad-shouldered, gleaming with sweat, wielding two floggers against a blood-flushed back with such consummate skill he made it look effortless, the tails flying and falling in that harsh, wild rhythm that had once been his gift to me.

“That’s amazing.” Toby was still staring at the two men locked in their cycle of give and take, trust and acceptance. “That’s totally fucking amazing.”

He sounded positively worshipful. My own voice seemed to come from some distant place. “It’s called Florentine flogging. Like anything else, it’s just practice.”

“Um.” Grace tried to draw him away. “Maybe we should go somewhere else.”

But Toby was still transfixed. “No way, I want to watch this. It’s like poetry. Who is that guy? Can I talk to him after? Do you think he’d show me how to do it?”

“His name’s Robert,” I said.8

He was using the matched pair of black-and-green bull-hide floggers. He’d had them specially made. I’d been there. I knew them as well as I knew Robert, those rough extensions of his touch, his dominance, his love. His…lover…was bound to a Saint Andrew’s cross, his arms spread wide. I knew how that felt too, that physical openness at once powerful and vulnerable, the sense of waiting to be transformed. His body had the laxity of deep surrender, as if he was falling into every stroke, as if they were part of him now. I didn’t think he was even aware of the sounds he was making, low purring moans, not pain, not pleasure, just the intoxication of pure sensation, liberty and submission, barely audible beneath the swish and slap of leather.

I missed the end of their scene, lost in the torn-open spaces between past and present. When next I looked their way, they were embracing, Robert enfolding his new partner as he had once enfolded me, his heaving chest pressed to all that burning, gorgeously reddened skin.

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