The ring splints click into place like armour. My cock is already hard against the strap. Nothing about tonight is casual.
He runs a thumb down the outside of my left knee, where it folds backward further than it should. “Still a horse?” “Still a horse.” My hands are already sweating inside the gloves.
I’m thirty-one. I’ve been hypermobile since I was nine. My skin stretches further than it should. My joints subluxate if you look at them wrong. For most of my adult life I apologised for how much space I take up. Two years ago I stopped apologising and got a CT instead. Now there’s a scan of my own skeleton on a laptop in Hackney. There’s also a set of carbon fibre ring splints printed to fit my bones, dyed in trans flag gradients, because I’m exactly that sort of person about my own medical devices.
The splints are the reason the insurance wouldn’t cover tonight. Marcus came with a portfolio and a laminated sheet, because he does this for a living. He rigs people up in a studio with a sprung floor and overhead points rated for dynamic load. He sat me down on the low bench and said the words standard anatomy. Then he said the second part, which was that his cover requires it. His policy has no category for the shape of a shoulder that subluxates on the way up.
So I brought my own rig. My own insurance. My own shoulders.
The splints started because of a door in 2019 and my thumb going in a direction thumbs don’t go. A hand therapist in Mile End said, “we’re going to brace the joints that go.” I said braces are ugly. She said they’re functional. I said both. Then a woman named Priya, in a lab in Sheffield, asked whether I wanted them in carbon fibre instead of neoprene. I said yes so fast I embarrassed us both. She scanned every joint I have and printed rings that fit the exact shapes of me. She dyed them because I asked. Then I put them on and went to the supermarket. The cashier said cool jewelry. I said medical device, also cool jewelry. She said oh, that’s so interesting, and rang up my tea and blackcurrant. She didn’t look at my knees once.
Braces to keep the joints from going. That is the whole of my other life. Tonight the rope was doing the going, and doing it on purpose. Nobody was apologising for the shape of me.
He asked me three times before he touched anything. He always does. Are you still a horse. Do you still want this. Is there anything I haven’t done yet that you want me to stop doing. I said no to the third one. He said good, because the third one is the one people lie about.
Then he told me the order of it out loud, which he always does too. A scene nobody can describe afterwards isn’t a scene. It’s a rumour. Mouth first, because I’d asked for it. Then the ropes. Then the strap. Then he’d fuck me hanging until one of us said something that wasn’t the word. I said I wanted the ropes first. He said fine. Then he said he’d still fuck me while I was up there. I have thought about that sentence every day since. I said good. My whole body went hot and stupid at the word hanging.
The safeword is normally zebra, because zebra is the EDS mascot, which is a joke that exactly two people in that studio find funny. Tonight it’s a horse. Tonight I’m not a case with a condition. I’m just a woman who wants to be tied up. If I say horse, everything stops. The fact that we both know that is the whole reason I can say the rest of it out loud.
Then he clicked the splints closed over my elbows and my knees. I felt my own body settle into the shape it’s been trying to hold all my life, which is the shape where the joints stop arguing. My cock got harder. That was the first thing I’d told him about, that I get like this when the braces go on. He said, “good, that’s useful information,” in the voice of a man writing it down.
Then he did the mouth first, because I’d asked for the mouth first, and because he does the order in the order it was written down.
He got down on the sprung floor on his knees, with my hips over his shoulders. He took my cock in his mouth the way you take something that breaks if you’re careless with it. One hand flat on my belly. The other around the base. My hips went further back than hips usually go, because he asked them to. My left shoulder came out of the socket again on the way up. I made a noise through his mouth. He didn’t stop. He didn’t hurry.
He knew exactly what he was doing with his tongue, which I didn’t expect. I’ve been the one doing that in this arrangement for years, and I’m better at it than he is. Being the one being done to turns out to be a completely different thing. I had no idea what to do with my hands. I put them in his hair. He made a sound like a man being paid, and kept going.
My cock swelled in his mouth. My hips went further and further back, because he kept asking them to and because they wanted to. He took it deeper. I said something into his hair that wasn’t a word. My hand tightened. He pulled back just far enough to say, “more?” I said “yes” in a voice I didn’t recognise. He took it again, right down. My throat, his mouth, my cock and the rope overhead all kept going. I came in his mouth with my hands in his hair and my shoulder out. The sound I made bounced off the studio’s concrete.
He swallowed all of it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He said, “mouth first,” like a man closing a line item on a form. I said, “that was in the order.” He said, “everything is in the order.”
The first rope goes under my breasts. He doesn’t ask twice. He asks once, waits for me to breathe out, then pulls. I go up onto my tiptoes because the rope took my weight. My shoulders did the thing. The left one slid forward and up out of the socket half an inch, then popped back in with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Neither of us said anything about it.
Other people’s bodies fail. Mine doesn’t fail. Mine just goes, everywhere the pull wants, further than it should. The rope is very good at pulling.
He got me both wrists overhead in about four minutes. Then a second line under my hips, a third across my thighs, and he began to take up the slack. The floor came up to meet me, because I was on my toes. Then my toes left the floor, and the sprung wood took my weight instead of my feet. I was hanging. Properly hanging. My arms over my head, my knees folded backward, in a position that would have had me on a stretcher in any other body.
“Still a horse?” “Yeah.” “Anything wrong with the shoulders?” “Left one’s out. It’s fine. It’s always fine, it goes back in.”
He put his hand flat on my left shoulder and pushed it, gently. It slid out again under his palm. His face did something I couldn’t see. My chin was on my chest. He said, “okay,” and he said it like a man revising a plan he’d already made.
I was already slick. I want that on the record, not as a turn-on but as a fact. Twenty minutes of rope in my shoulders does something to my head I’ve never been able to explain to anybody who isn’t me.
He got behind me and put his cock against my ass, the head of it. I was wet enough that it slid, and he made a sound like he’d been hit. I said, “I know, I’m sorry, I just—” He said, “don’t you dare be sorry about that. I’m going to ruin you for ordinary men.” Then he said the thing I’d been thinking for four minutes.
He said: “Look at where your shoulders go.”
Then he said: “You make me feel so handsome and whole.”
Then: “Good girl. The best girl in the world.”
And I lost about eleven minutes.
He took me down in a controlled drop, one hand on the rope at my hips, until my feet touched the sprung floor. Then he took the slack back up again until they didn’t. He fitted himself into the harness under my ass, and I felt the buckle sit against my tailbone. He said, “up we go,” and took my weight into the ropes. My legs were just there. Hanging. Useless. Spread. Mine to close and not close.
Then the strap, which is the part I’d been thinking about in the taxi. I hadn’t told him.
He put the harness on himself and came at me with the strap on. The shaft of it was thick, blunt, silicone and warm against my ass. I said, “that’s the biggest thing you’ve ever had.” He said, “it’s the same thing as me, with a bit less of me in it.” Then he pushed it into me. My hole took it, and my hips went back to meet it, further than they should have, the way they do. He made a sound through his teeth and wrote something on the clipboard without looking up. He’d never done that before.
It’s different, being fucked by him and also having him inside the harness. There’s a double rhythm and no way to be brave about it. My cock was trapped between my stomach and the rope, and every thrust pushed me up into it. I could hear the strap hitting my ass with the paddle’s sound, the wet slap of it. Same sound as the spoon on my own thigh. I said so. He said, “I know, I’m counting that too.”
It was the first time in my life that holding on was optional.
He fucked me like that. Hanging. Spread. My own weight doing nothing for me. I made a noise I didn’t plan. High and thin. The sound you make when something goes in a place that’s been waiting all evening for it. My hips took the rope’s direction and tilted back into him without me deciding to, the way my body does. The way it did on the bench in the clinic, when the physio moved my leg and I made it go further than it should. She wrote good in the notes. I went home and cried in the shower about being praised for a fault.
He got deep. My cock was trapped between my stomach and the rope, and it was enough. It was so much. It had to be the pressure, the stretch, and his hand on my belly over the rope, pressing me back into him. I said his name, then I said it again with a different shape on the end of it. He took that as permission to go faster. The ropes creaked. The whole rig sang. My left shoulder came out of the socket again and stayed out. I didn’t say anything about it. It doesn’t hurt. It never hurts. It just goes. The pain is the same pain. The meaning is different.
He held me by the hips and made me take it. I could feel him shaking. I could feel the load going all through the points above me, up into the ceiling. A rope doesn’t care what you want. It just holds where you put it. He’d put me exactly where I needed to be held.
He didn’t put me down.
He kept me hanging there with his cock in me and his hands on my hips, and started again. Slower. Deeper. I had nothing left, and he knew it. He did it anyway, because the order had said until one of us said something that wasn’t the word. And neither of us had said it.
He put his hand on my throat and made me take it. My cock was soft and sore, and still he dragged another one out of me, dry and shuddering. I heard myself make a sound like the rope creaking. He said, “there it is,” into my ear. I said, “I’m done, I’m done, I’m done.” He said, “then say the word.” I said, “no.” He said, “no is not the word.” I said, “no, don’t stop.” The rope creaked. He said, “good girl, you’re still on the rope.” I came again like that, on the edge of it, with his cock and his hand and my own shoulder out of the socket.
He came first, which I didn’t expect. I felt him cum inside me before he got his hand around my cock, and that was me. That was the whole rest of it. My back arched off nothing. My heels scrabbled at the floor that wasn’t there. The sound I made bounced off the studio’s concrete. He held me through it with a hand under my jaw, turning my face so I had to look at him while I came. I did. I looked straight at him while I came. What I saw was a man who wasn’t bored.
Then he reached up and undid the cuff on my right wrist, the one I couldn’t feel any more. He slid my arm out of the rope, then did the same for the left. The blood came back into both hands in a hot rush that made me gasp. He held my wrists in his fists while the blood came in. My fingers started to move again, one at a time, like something waking up.
“You gave me everything,” he said, and he put his cock back into me one more time. Slow. It was different. Soft. Hot. Enormous. My hole was so open after everything that it took him in like nothing. I felt his shaft slide all the way to the back. My hips rolled and took him. My cock was hard again. I thought that wasn’t physically available to me.
He fucked me like that for a long time, with my arms down and my hands open. I could feel him swelling, and I begged for it. He said, “ask properly.” I said, “please come inside me, please, please.” He came. I felt him cum, and then he didn’t stop thrusting. I came again on his cock with his cum inside me, my hand on my own throat and my teeth in my own wrist. The sound I made was one I’ve never made before.
He put me down gently after, and my knees didn’t work. I laughed about it. This stupid wet laugh. He said, “yeah, that’s the point. You don’t have to do anything else tonight. That’s the entire point. You gave me all of it, and now you’re done.”
And I said, “again.”
He said, “you’ve got another hour in you at most, and we haven’t even done the rest of the rope.”
And I said, “then do the rest of the rope.”
He took me off the ropes and I cried, which I always do, which he knows. The ket was already out. The weighted blanket was over my knees. He’d got the ring splints off my elbows one at a time, clicking them off like he clicked them on.
Then the gloves, the compression ones. Then he reads to me. He’s a rigger, and he’s also, apparently, someone who reads orthopaedic papers out loud at eleven at night in a studio in Hackney. This is the part nobody warned me about. He reads about hypermobility like it’s the most interesting thing in the world. He read a paragraph about collagen. The thing my body does isn’t a malfunction. It’s a variant. The variant has a name and a literature, and a set of people who have written down that it makes certain kinds of movement possible. Other bodies can’t.
“You can go further than I can,” he said. “That’s not damage. That’s geometry.”
Then he showed me the photos, which is also part of it. I can see myself hanging with my elbows at an angle that makes my stomach turn. My face in the picture is doing something I’ve never seen on my own face. Smiling. Like a person doing a thing they’re good at.
And he’d written, on the back of the printout, in the space where the invoice goes: Best load distribution I’ve ever engineered. Body is the geometry.
Marcus said his insurer wouldn’t cover it. Marcus was wrong about the geometry.
I’m going to write him an email with the photographs attached. I’m going to use the phrase dynamic load distribution, so he has to read the word load twice. I’m going to attach the printout with his own handwriting on the back of it. If he wants to argue with the geometry, he can argue with the man who engineered it.
The ket was doing its slow work down my spine. The blanket was heavy. I lay there in his studio with my knees folded and my elbows loose.
The ropes had left two grooves on my wrists where the cuffs bit. The skin under them was raw and hot and sweating. By Monday they would be bruises in the exact shape of a line. I would wear a watch over them at work. Nobody would know except me and whoever I tell, and I’m going to tell exactly one person.
Ten hours of being a case and four hours of being a marvel. The difference was a man with a laminated sheet who was wrong.
I fell asleep on his floor with the blanket over me and the ket under my tongue. The splints were lined up on the bench beside me like a set of teeth. The last thing I heard was him, on the phone to someone, saying, “no, I mean it. I’ve never had a client who made the rigging better. I mean better. Get me the invoice template.”
I woke up at four with my shoulder out again, the way it does. I put it back in myself the way I always do. One hand. A small sound. And back to sleep.
Then I sat up at six and put the splints back on, and walked out into Hackney. My knees were fine. My shoulders were fine. I stopped at the corner shop for a tea and blackcurrant. The man behind the counter said, “you’ve done your nails.” I said, “no, they’re carbon fibre.” He said, “ah,” in the voice of a man who has decided not to pursue it. I drank my tea on the wall outside the shop, with the sun coming up over the estate. My hands were shaking. And not because of the ket.
