Page 73 of For Real

He bounced off the bed, an entirely different creature to the shivering boy who had clung to a towel and refused to let me see him, and claimed my dressing gown. Somewhat more reluctantly, I cast aside the Times, pulled on some trousers, and followed him down the hall.

The room was exactly as I’d left it. The first memory that surfaced was not of Robert, but the night I’d met Toby. When I’d stood here, shamefully weeping, for myself, and perhaps for Toby, if only I’d known it then.

Right now he looked confused, his face turned up to the skylight. “Um…I was kind of expecting…not like a dungeon…but…like something…”

“I told you there was nothing here. Once, it was a space we used. Now it’s just a room I don’t.”

“There’s that.” He pointed to the wooden chest shoved against the far wall. “It’s not got a body in it, ’as it, Mr. Todd?”

I wasn’t in the mood to be playful. “It’s full of things, Toby. Things I used to use with Robert, all right?”

“We don’t have to do this. I was just interested, but not if it’s going to make you pissy.”

God. I could hear the hurt in his voice. “No. No, it’s fine. Sorry. Here.” I crossed to the chest and threw it open, revealing…everything. Topped by the cuffs I’d given him when he’d asked to tie me up and I’d…let him. Even thinking about what he’d done to me that night made me hot with fear and humiliation and bliss.

Toby crept over, peered inside, and gasped. I hadn’t been particularly careful. I’d simply bundled up the ropes and chains and floggers and toys and dumped them into the box, and now they lay tangled up together, neglected, stripped of context, frankly peculiar. I’d been vaguely intending to throw them away for years, but somehow I’d managed not to. It hadn’t felt like I would be moving on. It’d felt like I would be giving up hope. Not for Robert, but for something.

“I don’t even know what half this stuff is,” said Toby. I couldn’t tell if he sounded horrified or awed.

“Well, you can ask me, and I’ll tell you.” I was so far away, so very far away, right now.

“You’ve got a lot of rope.”

“Yes. Robert… He…he liked it.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “That was your boyfriend?”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend.”

“You’ve got a serious bee in your bonnet about that word.”

“It’s facile. I mean, he was my friend, but he was my lover and my partner, the man I would have chosen to live my life with.”

Toby straightened and the lid of the chest fell shut with a muted crash. His face was oddly still, reflecting nothing, his eyes flat and stripped of their brightness. “You’re seriously not over him, huh? After…how long?”

“Six years, almost. Together for twelve.”

“You don’t think that’s edging on…y’know…pathetic.”

I was too weary to even be angry with him. “Probably, Toby. Very probably.”

There was a long silence.

“What? That’s it?” One of his arms flapped in a gesture of frustration so profound it was almost comical. “That’s all I get?”

I could have pretended I didn’t know what he meant, but I did, and he was right. He deserved more. “It’s not him I’m not over. I mean, I loved him, and love doesn’t just go away when it becomes inconvenient. But it’s the loss of…a whole life, I think.”

I sat on top of the chest. Too late, Pandora.

After a moment, Toby squeezed on next to me, pulling up a knee and hugging it. “Plenty of people have multiple successful relationships. Some divorcées even get married again. Crazy shit like that.”

“No, I know that. But”—I patted the chest—“there’s this. Early on, I told myself it didn’t matter. It was just sex. So I went out, and I tried to meet people I could fall in love with. But it always came back to this.”

“Because,” he asked uncertainly, “you need it?”

I’d never liked to think of submission as need, because it stripped away too much agency and reduced to helpless compulsion everything I craved and wanted and thrilled to. What I needed was the choice to share these things, not simply to have them fulfilled. How long since I had thought about this? And longer still since I’d had to articulate it to someone else. But then, usually I didn’t offer, and people didn’t ask.

Except today I’d come as close as I ever could to offering, and Toby had asked.

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