The buckles were the hard part. Not the idea of it — the idea had been sitting between us for six months, patient as a dog at a door — but the actual leather, which had four buckles and two straps and no instructions, and which I was trying to fit around my hips while Alex sat on the edge of the bed with her knees together and her hands folded and watched me like I was defusing something.
“Left one’s twisted,” she said.
“I know.”
“You’re doing it —”
“I know.”
She put her mouth against her wrist to keep from laughing. The strap was still twisted. I got it flat, pulled it tight. The leather bit in. Something about the bite settled me, the way a good pair of boots does, and I stopped feeling like a person in a costume.
Alex’s sister had left it in a drawer in her apartment with a note that said don’t ask, just wash it. Alex had texted me at two in the afternoon: she’s out of town, want me to grab it? and I had replied at 2:01: yes. Then I had put my phone face down and gone back to work and not thought about anything for four hours, very successfully.
“You look like you’re about to give a presentation,” she said.
“I feel like I’m about to give a presentation.”
“To who?”
“The board.” I adjusted myself. The thing between my legs was pink and absurd and heavier than I expected. “The board of directors. Of lesbian sex.”
She laughed, put her face in her hands. I loved her so much it was annoying.
“Come here,” I said.
She came. I got a hand around the back of her neck and kissed her. She opened up for it. The harness pressed cold against her thigh before my body warmed it. Her hands went to my waist, then lower, testing. The noise she made into my mouth when she found the shape of it was not a laugh anymore.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.” She pulled back enough to look at me. “Yes. I want to. Do you want to?”
“I’ve been thinking about it since August.”
“The harness or me.”
“Both. Separately. Then together.”
She kissed me again, and then she got up and turned on the lamp by the dresser, and that was when I understood where she wanted this to happen.
She pulled the t-shirt over her head and dropped it on the floor. I had seen her naked maybe forty times by then and it still did something stupid to my chest. She came back and stood in front of me and put my hands where she wanted them, one on her ribs, one on her hip, and let me look.
“You’re nervous,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You are. You’re doing the thing with your jaw.”
I unclenched my jaw. She took my face in both hands and kissed me once, hard and closed-mouthed, the way you’d steady someone before handing them something breakable.
“It’s just me,” she said. “You’ve had me before. You’ve had me with your hand and your mouth and once with the corner of the kitchen table, which we are never telling anyone about.”
“That table’s gone.”
“Thank god.”
“I’m not nervous about you,” I said. “I’m nervous about the — the performance of it. Like I’m supposed to know what I’m doing.”
“You’re not supposed to know. It’s the first time.” She pushed my hair back off my forehead. “That’s the whole thing. We’re learning it.”
the bedroom · a Thursday, late
The mirror was hers. Forty dollars at a flea market in August, gilt frame chipped at the bottom left corner, the glass slightly wavy so that everything in it leaned a little. She had bought it for the bedroom and then spent two weeks pretending it was for the hallway.
She stood me in front of it and stood behind me and put her chin on my shoulder.
“There,” she said. “Look.”
I looked. There were two of us in the glass. Alex in a t-shirt and nothing else, her hair down, her hand flat on my stomach. Me in a leather harness and pink silicone, my face doing something complicated. I looked ridiculous. I looked like someone about to give a presentation.
“Don’t laugh,” I said.
“I’m not laughing.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m allowed to smile. It’s my mirror.”
She reached around, took the silicone in her hand, stroked it once, slowly, watching my face in the glass instead of turning to look at me directly. The harness shifted against me when she did it. There was a pressure where there was no nerve ending to explain it, and my hips moved anyway, once, before I could stop them.
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah.” She did it again. “Oh.”
“Stop, or this is going to be very short.”
She stopped. She took my hand, led me to the bed, lay down, pulled me down after her. I got my mouth on her throat, then her chest, then lower. The harness dug into my hip where I was lying on it wrong. I didn’t care.
She was already wet. I got two fingers in her and she made a noise into my shoulder. I put my thumb where she likes it. She said there. I kept my hand moving, got my mouth on her nipple, and she arched up, her heel finding my back. She came with her hand fisted in my hair and her heel digging in, and I had to put my forehead down on her stomach after, breathing, the leather creaking every time I moved.
“Okay,” she said, after. Her voice had gone to pieces. “Now you.”
“Now me what.”
“Now you fuck me.” She said it plainly, the way she said everything she actually wanted. “In the mirror. Both of us.”
I got up. My hands were not steady. I got the lube off the nightstand. The logistics took longer than either of us wanted; she laughed into the pillow and I said “this is not sexy” and she said “it’s a little sexy.”
Then I was behind her, one knee on the bed, and I pushed into her slow and she said oh — a small sound, surprised, like she hadn’t been sure it would work either — and then a longer one, and her hand came up and found the mirror frame.
I watched myself do it. That was the part nobody had warned me about. Not the sensation, which was mostly pressure and heat and the harness grinding against me with every thrust. The watching. My own arms, my own shoulders, the muscle in my jaw. The way my hips found a rhythm I hadn’t been taught. Alex under me with her mouth open and her eyes open and fixed on the glass, watching me watch myself, and the two of us making a shape in the wavy mirror that leaned a little to the left.
“Harder,” she said.
I gave her harder. The bed complained. Somewhere in the apartment a door was open and the hallway light was on and neither of us got up to close it.
She got a hand under herself and I felt her tighten and then she was coming again, her whole back bowing, and the mirror jumped against the wall. I kept going because she hadn’t said stop. I came maybe thirty seconds later, which surprised me — I hadn’t known that was going to happen at all, and it happened with the harness grinding against me and my hand flat on the mirror over hers and the glass warm where she had been breathing on it.
Then my knee gave out and I sat down on the floor.
She rolled off the bed and came down onto the floor with me and got the first buckle open before I understood what she was doing.
“Off,” she said. “I want you. Not the thing.”
It took a while. Four buckles, and the leather had gone warm. When it came off I felt lighter and also exposed, sitting on the bedroom floor in a t-shirt with my knees up.
“Get on the bed,” she said. “On your back.”
I got on the bed. She came up after me, knelt between my legs, and looked at me for a second — actually looked, the way she does, like she was checking the wiring.
“Tell me what you want,” she said.
“Your mouth.”
“Where.”
“You know where.”
“Say it.”
“Your mouth on my cunt,” I said. My face went hot. She smiled like I’d handed her something.
Then she put her mouth on me and I stopped being embarrassed about anything.
She was better at it than I am. She went slow, then slower, holding my hips down with one hand when I tried to push up. She got two fingers in me and curled them and I said her name. She hummed against me, which was unfair. I got a hand in her hair and the other fisted in the sheet, and I came with my heel drumming on the mattress and my eyes open, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the mirror.
She crawled up and lay on top of me, her mouth wet on my shoulder, and I could feel her grinning.
“Educational,” I said.
“Told you.”
the bedroom, in front of the mirror · later
We didn’t clean up right away. We lay on the bed with the sheet pulled over nothing in particular and the lamp still on, and Alex put her leg over mine and said, into the pillow, “educational.”
“Your sister’s going to ask.”
“I’ll tell her it was fine.”
“You’ll tell her it was fine?”
“I’ll tell her it was fine and then I’ll never look her in the eye again.”
I laughed so hard my stomach hurt. The harness was still on. I got it off eventually, one buckle at a time, and the leather had left a line across my hip.
There were red marks on my hips the next morning, four of them in a row where my fingers had been, and a bruise coming up on my thigh from the dresser handle. The mirror had fingerprints on it at hip height, and Alex wiped it with her sleeve and then stood there looking at where they’d been. The harness went back into its pouch washed and dried and powdered, and the pouch went back into the bag, and the bag sat by the door for three days before either of us took it over there. My phone still had the playlist on it. The lamp by the dresser stayed where she’d moved it, which was closer to the bed than it had been, and neither of us moved it back.
