Blindfold

Perhaps the blindfold was just one step too far. He was up for it, of course. He knew I would take him somewhere secret. He let me tie the cloth around his face, inching his crotch towards me, eager to begin the night's proceedings.

I had arranged a driver. He didn't expect this, and as he heard her voice, a whispered call to action, I felt him shrink. By this time I had tied his arms behind his back, tightly enough to make it difficult for him to escape.

I was new to this. Until now it had all been one more petal pulled off a fragile flower. He loves me or he doesn't, the flowers all tacked together like a daisy chain. I looked back on my insipid handful of lovers and they were all smudged over as if they had been shot in soft focus and with Vaseline smeared on the lens. They were David Hamilton photographs, and I in my billowing black dress, running through some field or other.

I tied his hands and he was shaking, half with pleasure and half with a kind of nervousness. He barely knew me and he was putting himself at my mercy. His edginess made me feel warm, a little inflated with the possibilities that I had never even considered before this.

I took him to the mountains.

He tried to speak in the car and I told him not to. I told him that he should just listen to the sound of the tyres on gravel, the sound of the sealed roads slipping away, the pungent scent of the country climbing in through the windows.

I lay him on an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar house and left the blindfold on him, left his hands tied. I undressed him. There was no way to take his shirt off without releasing his hands. I could have ripped it. They do that kind of thing in movies and in books. I could have found the scissors and cut the fabric at a seam. It would have added to it all, the sound of the scissors scraping metal against metal, snip snip. It looked like an expensive shirt. He was an architect and on a reasonable wage. I could never have saved up enough out of my Austudy to replace it, so I left him with his shirt unbuttoned. I licked his chest, found the rising buds of his nipples and sucked on them, one at a time. It is not the same as the nipples of a girl, man's tits are tight and mean and leave you wanting.

I moved lower, concentrating on the straining penis, just enough spit to lubricate the inside of the condom. I was going to concentrate on my own pleasure. This was something that I had never done with a partner before.

It was because of the blindfold.

I stood and watched his body unobserved. It was a fine collection of skin and muscle and bone, a strong body, thin but well-formed. I watched it, but there was no quick lurch of desire in my stomach at the sight of his erection. When I turned him over on the bed I saw the tight curve of his arse and it was fine and quite beautiful but I felt no emotional attachment to the thing. I touched it. I settled myself on top of it, straddling the curve of flesh. I traced the indentation with my thumbs. He bucked back against me. He wanted me inside him. This is something we had done before, something I enjoyed, but his insistence turned me off the whole Idea.

I lifted myself off him and went to my overnight bag. My vibrator was a small finger of black plastic. Nothing special, just one adjustment, on or off, a minimum of fuss. Tonight I would focus on my own pleasure. Just me, my vibrator and the blind body of this other person.

I would take my pleasure.

He wriggled in frustration. He was a landed fish. There was of course the quick image of a short knife gutting. In this new role, an aggressor, there was an underlying possibility of violence simmering around us.

I lowered myself onto him and I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the power of it, but something shifted between us. We would never again become the kind of lovers we might have been. I think that night in the woods was the beginning of the end between us, but for me, perhaps it was the beginning of a whole new thing.