Page 75 of Untether

That said, it was more about me pushing my boundaries, going to places I’m not necessarily comfortable. As you say, I’ve always done that in my career, so why not my sex life? This show is calledSearching for Paradise, and the masked ball idea sat so well with that. If my current journey is a quest for pleasure on my terms, then perhaps this is what finding paradise looks like for me.

SIMONE: It seems like you’re taking that idea of what you want and what you deserve up an entire notch fromwhere you started out, and I love seeing this organic shift in your expectations.

ME: Thank you. It’s definitely a realignment, but it really does feel organic. This is an adaptive experience for me. I’m recalibrating as I go along, working out what feels right for me. And I’m partnering with a sex club, for God’s sake. So I may as well provide myself and our viewers with something a little more boundary-pushing than some very safe, very vanilla, choreographed sex. Right?

SIMONE: Amen to that. Now, I despise myself for being so utterly predictable, but did you, ahem, find paradise last week?

ME: [Laughs] I did, thank you for asking. And then some.

SIMONE: Lucky girl. You’ve already told us you had sex with the divine Callum, and I’m sure every woman and a decent number of the men watching are jealous as hell of you right now. But what else can you tell us?

ME: I will say this. Pretty much everything I did that night was outside of my physical comfort zone, and a lot of it was outside my mental comfort zone, even. We all have fantasies, really dark ones, that live in our heads but that we don’t suffer too often. We don’t give them oxygen, and we often shame ourselves for having them, even when simply imagining something harms absolutely nobody.

A big part of my journey to where I am now has been unlearning a lot of the damaging rhetoric that we, especially women, have been told is damaged or perverted or even, if you’ve been brought up religious, sinful. But putting those fantasies into practice last week in a safe space, with a sexual partner who I trust implicitly, was simply incredible.

And I’ll also say this. When you act on your fantasies with other consenting adults, the sky does not fall. I haven’tbeen struck by lightning or burst into flames. It’s all good. The experience was so liberating. It was scary and unfamiliar andfun. So much fun. Kind of like going on a rollercoaster ride. It’s a wonderful human experience when you feel endangered but you know deep down you’re safe. This was similar.

SIMONE: You mentioned how important it is to have a partner you can trust. How much did Callum play into this whole experience?

ME: He was integral, absolutely. I know he was doubtful ahead of the event that it was the right format for our next step, but we both came away very happy. I find him incredibly attractive, obviously, because I have a pulse. [Laughs] He’s caring, and I trust him with my wellbeing. We communicate.

And I know I’m in safe hands, because he’s far more experienced than me. And believe me, putting yourself in the hands of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing is very, very rewarding.

SIMONE: You’re several weeks into this journey. How are you feeling at this point? Do you feel different?

ME: Yeah, I do. First, I feel extremely proud of myself for doing this, because as I’ve said, I push myself for stories, so why not push myself for my own wellbeing? I want to know what I’ve been missing by adhering to deeply ingrained, hetero-normative, monogamous, and you could say, patriarchal, cultural norms. I want to be the so-called bad girl for once, and I’m thrilled to confirm that there’s nothing bad about what I’ve been doing.

I’m also happier. Lighter, I guess. I’m a pretty intense person, and I’m a working single mom, which means duty always comes first. These past few weeks have shown me a whole other side of myself. I’d go so far as to say I like myselfbetter. It seems I’m a nicer person when I’m having regular orgasms.

[Both laugh]

SIMONE: Hallelujah. So, my overachieving angel. You’ve shot the lights out on your last mandate. You were supposed to go off and get laid, but Aida Russell has, of course, to take it one step further and get stuck into an orgy. All that remains, then, is to ask what the utter fuck is next?

ME: [Smiles] Ask me in a week or two when I’ve worked it out.

48

AIDA

God knows, I’ve been intimate with Cal.

I know the guttural roar he makes when he comes. I’ve seen how black that trail of dark hair leading south from his navel to his penis gets when soaked by the shower. I’ve let him inside my goddamn body.

I’ve given him my fear and my vulnerability; I’ve bitten down on my safe word because I trust him to know how far he can push me; I’ve come undone as he’s performed acts on my body even I didn’t know I wanted or needed.

We’ve gotten hot and oiled-up and sweaty and cum-covered.

We’ve beenclose.

But going to someone’s home is a whole other level of intimacy. A less breathless, gasping, desperate one, sure, but a form of intimacy it is.

On the face of it, Cal’s as accessible as they come. His grin is as readily available as his one-liners. He’s a talker, without much of a filter. I suspect he tends towards being emotionally slutty, spilling out effusive declarations withchildlike, unguarded joy and an equally childlike lack of regard for consequences.

(That last one doesn’t bode well for me, given what he said to me at the BBC a week ago.)

Still, it’s all those factors that make me wonder how well I’ve really gotten to know him. That happy-go-lucky persona is as effective a defence as a squad of linebackers. If anything, the closest I’ve been to the real Cal is those unguarded moments where he’s tugging on my hair as I kneel before him or straddling me, glassy-eyed and desperate, jerking himself off on my breasts.

That’s not to say the nice guy act is just that, or the beast he unleashes in those brief, unwary glimpses is the real Cal. I don’t believe that for a second. But I do believe there’s far more to him than meets the eye.

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