Already Carrying

Sanne’s parties have a particular rhythm. They start with wine and real conversation, tip around eleven into something louder, and by midnight they’ve become a single organism made of heat and noise and the abandon of people who’ve forgotten they have work on Monday. I’ve been coming to them for years. I know where the clean glasses are.

I also know where I keep my strapon.

It’s been in my bag since I left my apartment. Small, curved, deep blue - packed with the same deliberateness I pack everything else, because I’ve learned that the best evenings are the ones you come prepared for. Sanne’s guest lists run to thirty people on a good night. On any given night, statistically, at least one of them is thinking about something I’m specifically good at.

Tonight that person is Milo.

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Sanne introduced us at nine-fifteen in the voice she uses when she’s been planning something. Milo is thirty-two, a friend from her cycling club, and the interesting thing about him isn’t the logistics work or the neighborhood he lives in or any fact that functions as a credential. It’s how he speaks. Full sentences, each one formed before it leaves his mouth. He doesn’t trail off or fill space. He asks questions with the specific weight of someone who actually wants the answer, and when he listened to mine he was so still it was almost rude.

We talked about the city’s cycling infrastructure. Then about a book we’d both read. Then about nothing in particular while I tracked his hands on his glass.

He wasn’t nervous. He was thinking.

By ten-thirty I knew what I wanted to do with him. Not vaguely. That stillness - the stillness of someone used to controlling their own body - I wanted to see it stop working. I wanted to be the one who stopped it. I kept thinking about what his voice would do stripped of all those careful sentences, about pushing that blue toy slowly through all that composure and watching his hands when he had nothing to do with them anymore. I thought about it while I talked. I got a second drink. I stayed very calm about it.

This is a habit I picked up years ago. Carrying the harness to parties, I mean. I don’t advertise it. But I carry it the way some women carry an extra lipstick - because there’s a version of many evenings that wants it, and I find it more interesting to be the one who’s ready for that version. I’d had two nights in the previous six months where I wished I’d been carrying and wasn’t. I don’t make that mistake anymore.

I wanted to peg Milo. I’d known it since ten-thirty and I was wet with it by eleven. The question was whether he’d give me a reason.

He gave me one at midnight.

He put his glass down, looked at me directly - which he’d been doing all night, but this was a different quality of looking - and said he had something to tell me. He’d heard about me from Sanne. Not details, just a general recommendation, enough that he’d been curious. He’d been thinking, he said carefully, about being pegged. For two years. He wanted to know if this was something I - he paused, reorganized the sentence the way he reorganized everything, finished it: if I was someone who did that sort of thing.

He said “that sort of thing” in a voice that could have passed for professional.

Something moved through me that wasn’t surprise. Recognition. The specific pleasure of having read a person correctly. And underneath it, immediate and loud, the want - his face in twenty minutes when the toy was inside him and all the considered language had dissolved.

“Follow me,” I said. “Leave your drink.”