Page 29 of For Real

Over time, of course, I had come to terms with Robert and everything that had happened. I had passed through anger, hurt, and betrayal until only loss remained. And gradually, all there was left to miss was the life we had built and shared. The same life he had destroyed and remade so easily with another. Someone in whose eyes Robert still saw reflected his most idealised self. Whereas at the end I had shown him, what? Too much truth? A single memory he could not bear, one that drove him so far from me he would only find himself again in some other man’s arms. Some other man’s submission.

Yes, I missed Robert. The boys we had been. The men we had grown into. I missed being known, in the simplest of ways and the most sweetly shameful. In our hubris, for I could only call it that, we had actually pitied those who lacked our good fortune. We had found love first and then, almost by accident—though it felt inevitable—this unfolding enchantment: the correspondences of our natures. It had been so easy then, a slow seduction of trust and pain, submission and service. How limiting it had seemed to us, to go the other way—to wring love from correspondence, instead of finding correspondence in love.

In truth, I still believed it was.

But it was nevertheless where I found myself, just some other empty-hearted fool, waiting for hope beneath the falls of a stranger’s flogger.

After Robert, I had tried, at first, to be—for lack of a better word—normal. As if everything we had done together was some expression of us rather than some facet of me. It didn’t work. I met men who might have loved me, and I ached for them to hurt me.

Besides, I was busy. Work had its own demands, and looking for a future was a time-consuming business. I could not consciously recall having given up on love. It was never quite so dramatic. I went to the munches and the clubs. I joined the websites. I had the conversations. I learned the jokes. I gave my body to doms in leather to do with as they willed within carefully negotiated limitations. And it was release. If nothing else, it was release, and it was enough.

And then came Toby Finch. Too young, too thin, too earnest, too everything. With his sharp elbows and his knobbly knees. Hair that wouldn’t stay out of his eyes. Acne on his collarbones. His sulky, kiss-bruisable mouth and the grin he had not yet learned to temper.

Nineteen years old—nineteen.

I had barely known him, but—as the days slipped into weeks—I realised I missed him too. My cruel and tender god-king, still so lost between all the contradictions of adolescence and adulthood.

And suddenly enough was not enough.

When Grace and Sam asked—as they inevitably did—I told them I’d just made sure he got home safely. Which was true, if you ignored the part where I threw him out of my house in the middle of the night, then let him in again, and then fucked him into insensibility.

God.

Toby.

* * *

In December, twenty-something days AT, we made our monthly pilgrimage to Torture Garden, which required wriggling into my only pair of leather trousers, an indignity no nearly-forty-year-old should have to endure to get laid in the way he wanted to get laid. As ever, it was fifty percent fashion show, forty percent club, ten percent sex party, and one hundred percent annoying. But I would have neither chosen nor wanted to go back to Pervocracy, and while I didn’t want to go to Torture Garden either, I was very unlikely to run into Toby, and more than likely to run into someone who would hurt me and fuck me and not leave me missing them.

Over the last year or so, I had preferred to set up my…trysts…online, but with every encounter that had not gone horribly wrong, I was conscious of the mounting statistical likelihood that the next one might. Anonymity and physical helplessness did not seem a fortuitous combination, but even that unhealthy thrill was scant consolation for the inevitable rituals of power and powerlessness, as abstract and arbitrary as dancing for rain or the appeasement of nonexistent gods.

So the music played, and the dancers danced, and we all came round again.

I left my friends grinding slickly at the centre of a sea of rainbow latex and found somewhere, not too dark, not too out of the way, and not too close to the dungeon, where I could wait to be recognised. Inevitably, I was. I’d been around for a long time, but so had everyone else.

Thom? Jon? Tim?

He had a good reputation. And I was relatively sure we’d played (I so hated that word) together before.

So I let him take me home, where we exchanged the usual codes: no unprotected sex, no scat, no piss, no blood play, no breath play, no gags, no blindfolds, no permanent marks or modifications, no kneeling unless I was sucking cock, yellow to slow, red to stop, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. No depth. No truth. No meaning.

He made me strip. Call him master. Display myself to him in ways that might once have left me raw.

And all I felt was a certain social embarrassment. A soft, squirmy self-consciousness, devoid of shame’s sweet-sharp sting or the self-annihilating rush of humiliation. It had been like this before, but I’d always managed to subvert it. I’d even found it slightly piquant—a private scourging of my self-respect—to be so utterly controlled by my physical needs that I would not only allow this, but seek it, and cede mastership of my body to a man who needed a title to claim it. Far better to find ways to enjoy such a truth, than face it.

He made me suck his cock awhile, condom-sheathed, of course, so it tasted of latex and chemicals and nothing. As he fucked my throat, he pulled my hair, and the gesture seemed familiar. I wondered if it was him I was remembering, or simply someone like him.

Everyone was like him.

I tried to lose myself in my own skin, but the anchor points he had given me were not enough, and I was stretched between them, as thin and tight as a grass whistle.

Toby had also curled his fingers in my hair, his spring-cricket legs hooked over my hips. Pulling me close, so close.

Toby.

A withdrawal left me dizzy with sudden breath, and a slap from his cock left a smear of spit and spermicide across my cheek. “Are you with me, boy?”

I hated it when they called me boy, but I couldn’t remember if I’d mentioned it, and it wasn’t worth ending the scene over.

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