Mara asked me on a Tuesday, in the kitchen, while I was trying to find the good mug, and I dropped the other mug.
“Careful.” She caught it against her hip. “I’m not asking for a decision. I’m just asking if you want to talk about it.”
“About what.”
“About me, you, the harness in the closet, and whether you’d like to try it. And if so, how.” She put the mug on the counter. “I’m only asking now so I don’t spring it on you at ten o’clock on a Friday when you’re tired.”
Here’s what you need to know. I’m a trans man, and I’ve been on testosterone for a while, and I’ve been with Mara for just under a year. Most of that year, I’d been the one doing the topping. Hand, mouth, strap, whatever. It felt easy. It felt like I knew who I was when I was on top of somebody. And the other way around, me being touched in the places that bodies like mine get touched, I’d kept in a locked drawer. Not because I didn’t want it. Because I wanted it so much that I was scared of getting it wrong, of a word landing like a slap, of being pulled out of my own skin in the middle of something I’d been dreaming about for years.
“I want to,” I said, to the mug. “I just don’t know if I can do it without it going bad.”
“That’s fair.” She was leaning on the counter, not crowding me. “Then let’s make a plan so it doesn’t. You get to design it. Which words feel good, which ones don’t, what I touch, what I don’t. You can change your mind halfway. You can change it at the start of the sentence. You just tell me and I stop and we do something else, and nobody’s in trouble.”
I looked up. She meant it. She had this steady look, the look she gets when she’s reading a recipe all the way through before cooking.
“Can I write it down?” I said. “I’ll mess it up if I try to say it out loud.”
“Please write it down.”
I wrote it down on the back of a takeout menu, because that’s what was on the counter. I’ll spare you the full list, but it went something like: cock, never anything with girl in it, never pussy unless it’s the kind of dirty talk where I’ve asked for it. Hole, yes. Front, yes, if I say so. Good boy was an absolute yes and good girl was a hard no, which I underlined. I put that she could call me baby. I put that she could say you’re so good for me, and that I wanted her to say man once, out loud, when she was inside me.
She read the menu twice. Then she folded it and put it in the pocket of her jeans.
“Friday?” she said.
“Friday.”
“I’ll bring wine and the good lube. You get to say no to either.”
“I’m saying yes to both.”
Friday took about a hundred years to arrive. By the time I got home from work my hands were doing a thing, shaking a little, and I stood in the shower for twenty minutes letting the water run on my neck. When I came out, Mara had lit the candles in our bedroom, the dumb vanilla ones, and she was sitting cross-legged on the bed in a gray T-shirt and nothing else, a glass of red in her hand.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Want to start with just kissing? We can just kiss. We can kiss for an hour and watch the news.”
“I don’t want the news.”
“Good, because I forgot to turn it on.”
I laughed and climbed up onto the bed and kissed her. She tasted like wine and the cinnamon gum she chews when she’s nervous, and I realized, with a swoop of tenderness, that she was nervous too.
“You okay?” I said.
“A little. I want it to be good for you. I want it so much. That’s the whole thing.”
“It’s going to be good.” I touched her jaw. “Because you asked.”
We kissed for a long time. I’m not going to rush through this part, because it mattered. Her hands moved over my chest, over the flat of it, and she said, “Is this good?” and I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “You’re beautiful,” and for the first time the word didn’t snag. She slid her palm down my stomach and stopped at the waistband of my boxers.
“Tell me what you want here.”
“Take them off,” I said. “And then touch me with your hand first. Slow. Like we practiced.”
“Like we practiced.”
That was the other thing: over the last few weeks, she’d let me guide her hands, over and over, through all the ways to touch me without anything going sideways. She knew now. She knew the pressure, the circle, the slow drag at the edge. She knew I liked to be told this is yours with one hand at my hip.
She pulled my boxers down, and I felt the cool air, and then her hand. Warm. Careful. She was watching my face.
“Is this good, baby?”
“God, yes. Don’t stop.”
“You’re so wet.” She said it in a low voice, then checked herself. “Is that okay to say?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s okay.”
“Good.” She slid her fingers lower and tested at my entrance, gently, a question with her whole hand. I made a sound I’d never made. “Okay?”
“Okay. More. Please.”
She used one finger, slow, with plenty of lube, curling it carefully, her thumb working my cock in a lazy circle, and my back arched off the pillow. She kept talking to me. That’s it. You’re doing so well. You’re so good for me. Every word she used was a word I’d picked. I could feel something loosening in my chest, a pressure I’d been carrying for years, and I started crying a little, quietly, which was embarrassing, and she stopped.
“Hey. Hey. Do you want to stop?”
“No,” I said, wiping my face. “No, God, don’t stop. I just. It’s just really good. I didn’t know it could feel like me.”
“It’s you.” She kissed my forehead. “It’s all you. Cry if you want. I’ve got you.”
“Okay.” I breathed. “Okay. Keep going.”
She worked me open, patiently, with two fingers and then three, long past the point where I’d have given up, my thighs shaking, my hands fisted in the sheets. I was making noises I’d have been mortified by anywhere else. She never hurried me. She’d ask, More? Slower? There? and I’d answer, and the answers got shorter and wetter and more honest until I was just saying yes on a loop.
“I want the strap,” I told her. “Now. Please. I’m ready.”
“You sure?”
“Mara. I’m so sure I’m going to cry again.”
“Then cry. I’ll go slow.” She slid off the bed and I watched her step into the harness, the black one, the one I’d picked out online for her, the silicone cock in the soft purple I’d chosen because it made me smile. She buckled it with a competent click. She looked unbelievable. She looked like someone who loved me.
She came back to the bed and knelt between my knees. I pulled a pillow under my hips, and she poured more lube onto her hand and onto the toy. The candle flickered on her shoulders.
“Last chance to change anything,” she said.
“Don’t change anything.”
“Okay. Tell me if you want me to stop, and I mean right away.”
“I know.”
“Say it back.”
“If I want you to stop, I say stop, and you stop.”
“And?”
“And nobody’s in trouble.”
“Good boy,” she said softly, and it hit me like warm water. I closed my eyes. She guided the tip against me, and pressed, and waited, and pressed, a fraction of an inch at a time, her free hand stroking my stomach. “Breathe. That’s it. Let me in. You’re doing so good.”
It felt enormous. It felt like a door in me opening that I’d leaned against my whole life. There was a stretch, hot and bright, and I gasped and she went absolutely still.
“Too much?”
“No. No. Stay. Just stay a second.”
She stayed. We breathed. Then I nodded, and she slid in a little more, and a little more, until her hips were flush against me and she was fully inside, and neither of us moved. I opened my eyes. Her face was right above mine, flushed, her hair falling around us in a curtain.
“Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi.”
“You’re taking me so well.”
“Say it. The word.” My voice cracked. “You know the one.”
She kissed my mouth, slow. “My man,” she said, right against my lips. “You’re my man. You’re so good for me, my man.”
Something broke open in me, and it wasn’t pain. I started laughing and crying at the same time, helplessly, and she held my face and kissed the tears off my cheeks and started to move.
It was slow. It was so slow. She rolled her hips in long steady strokes, and each one lit something up that I didn’t have language for. I wrapped my legs around her and pulled her in. I wanted more. I told her so, in a ragged voice. Harder. Please. Mara. Baby, harder. And she gave it to me, steadily, deeper, one hand sliding between us to rub me with firm circles where I needed it. The sounds we made were wet and shameless and wonderful. The headboard started tapping the wall. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.
“Say it again,” I begged. “The word. The one you picked. I want to hear you use it on me.”
“You’re my man.” She thrust deep and held. “You’re my good man. You take it so well, you take it for me, you look so good.”
“Don’t stop. I’m going to. Mara, I’m going to.”
“Come for me. Let go. I’ve got you.”
It hit me in a long, rolling wave that started in my gut and went right through my body, up my spine, down my thighs. I shouted. I couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried. I came clenching around her, my hands clutching her shoulders, my whole body arching off the bed in a way I’d read about and never believed. She held me through it, steady, her strokes slowing to a gentle rock, murmuring praise into my ear until it was over.
For a few minutes neither of us moved. She was shaking too. I could feel her heart pounding against mine.
“Are you okay?” she said, finally, very quietly.
“I’m,” I said. “I don’t have a word.”
“That’s allowed.”
She pulled out carefully. She got rid of the harness, and cleaned me up with a warm washcloth, so gently that I started crying again for a completely different reason. She wrapped me in the quilt. She disappeared and came back with a plate of toast with butter and honey, which is what she always makes me after anything big, and a glass of water, and she climbed in beside me and held it up to my mouth like I was a baby bird.
“Eat,” she said. “Doctor’s orders.”
“You’re not a doctor.”
“I’m your girlfriend. I outrank doctors.”
I laughed and ate the toast. She stroked my hair. I told her what it felt like, as best I could, the fullness, the weirdness, the way it felt like a missing room in a house I’d been living in. She listened. She asked questions, and told me she’d been scared, and told me she was so proud of me that it hurt. We talked until the candles were stubs.
“Next time,” I said sleepily, “can we do it with me on my stomach?”
“We can do it with you on your stomach.”
“And can you do the voice again?”
“The my man voice?”
“That one.”
“I’ll use it all day,” she said, and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll put it on a mug.”
I fell asleep with her arm around me, the honey still sticky on my fingers, feeling for the first time like a body that had finally come home to itself.
