One Step Ahead
For a year, one rule kept me a step ahead of him. I should have walked away months ago. But I kept not walking away.
The condom was always mine. My one rule, the one line I drew the first night and never let move an inch. He hated it. He has hated it for the better part of a year, every single time, and every single time I made him do it anyway, because it was the one thing that kept me a step ahead of him.
You have to understand what he is. He is not my husband. He is not a good man, and he was never going to turn into one. He is the thing I should have walked away from months ago and kept not walking away from. A bad habit with a key to nothing. And he has wanted to lock me down since the first night we slept together. Not because he loves me. Something older than that, and worse. He looked at me afterward that first night, with my heart still going and my legs still useless, and I watched him decide he was going to keep me. Not have me. Keep me. With the patience of a man who already knew he’d get there in the end.
And the means he wanted was never a secret. What he wants to do to me. What he wants to put in me. What he wants to make grow there, so that I can never be a step ahead of anyone again.
So I made the rule. The rule was how I got to have all of him and still keep myself. I could take everything he was, all that want, all that weight, and still walk away clean at the end, because I never let him past the one wall that counted. I told myself that made me the one in control.
I really did tell myself that.
Tonight he doesn’t wait for the ritual.
Every other time, the rule came first. I’d hand it to him before anything else, my little ceremony, my proof that I was the one setting the terms. Tonight he doesn’t give me the chance. His mouth is on me before I’ve finished reaching for the drawer, and his hands come next, and I think, fine, I’ll make him stop and put it on before any of it counts. I have time. I always have time.
That is the last clear thought I’m allowed to have.
Because then he sets out to dismantle me.
I don’t have a better word for it. He has never been like this. Every other time it was him wanting and me deciding how much of that want I’d allow him. Tonight he is the one deciding, and what he decides is to give me almost nothing and make me feel every inch of the almost.
He works me with his hands and his mouth and he finds the exact edge of me and then refuses it. Brings me up to it and pulls back the second my breath changes. Waits while I come down, hating him, then starts again, slow enough that I could scream, and stops again right before.
Again. After that I lose count.
“Beg me for it,” he says. “Beg me to fuck you.”
I don’t. I still have a little pride this early.
He smiles against the inside of my thigh and takes me up to it one more time and lifts his mouth away at the last second, and I whimper. Out loud. The exact thing I just refused him with words, and my body does the begging for me.
By the time he’s done with that I am not ahead of anything. Not ahead of him. Not ahead of myself. Not ahead of the want. He has taken me apart with nothing but his mouth and his hands and he has not let me finish once, and I am past the rule and past the pride and I need him inside me more than I have needed anything in my life.
And that is exactly when he moves up over me and lines himself up bare.
No condom. He didn’t reach for it and he has no intention of reaching for it. He is going to walk straight through the only wall I’ve got while I’m too far gone to do anything but want him to, and he keeps his eyes on my face the whole time, waiting to see whether the woman who made the rule is still in here anywhere.
She is. Barely. From somewhere underneath all of it I get a hand flat on his chest and I get the word out.
“Put it on.”
He goes still. Looks at me. Something moves behind his face that I don’t understand yet, something almost like approval, like I’ve just proven a point that turns out to be his and not mine.
“There she is,” he says.
And then he does the thing that should have warned me. He takes my hand, the one still flat on his chest like it was holding anything back, and he folds it around the condom and guides it down to him.
“You want it on,” he says, “you put it on me.”
He’s almost gentle about it. That’s the worst part. He isn’t angry. He likes this, watching me do the work of my own rule with my own hands, roll it down him myself, enforce my precious wall so I can feel exactly how much of it is left to me. Which is this much. A scrap of latex I have to put on him because he won’t.
I do it. My hands aren’t steady and he watches them shake and he likes that too.
And I lie there afterward, grateful and proud of myself, actually proud, because even like this, even reduced to rolling it onto him myself, I held the line. He pushes into me and it is so good I forget to ask why a man who has argued every single time said yes tonight without a fight. I let myself believe I am still a step ahead.
He moves in me deep and certain and lets me come most of the way back to myself, lets me have the whole illusion of having won, and then, right when I’m there again, right at the edge he kept me off of all night.
He pulls out.
He kneels up between my legs where I can see all of him. And he takes it off.
Eyes on my face the entire time. He peels it off, and he doesn’t drop it on the floor. He reaches down and lays it on my stomach. Sets it there against my bare skin, deliberate, where I can feel the weight of it, where we both can look at it.
A reminder. Not of the rule. Of who was deciding all along whether the rule got followed. He let me have my little victory because he wanted me to feel this part more, the exact moment he took it back, the moment it stopped being mine to hold.
This is it. This is the moment. I want you to know I see it for exactly what it is. The thing is right there on my skin. All I have to do is what I did five minutes ago. One hand on his chest. One word. I have already proven tonight that I can.
I know exactly where the way out is.
I look right at it.
And I leave it where it is.
I don’t lift it off my skin. I don’t drop it over the side of the bed. I leave the thing lying on my stomach where he put it, and I open my legs wider, and I let him read the yes off my face.
“You think you can handle this? You think you’re man enough to fuck my tight cunt raw and actually finish what you start?” I’m staring right at him and barely seeing him, talking to him, talking past him, half to myself. “Go on, then. Nothing between us. Prove it. We both know you won’t last ten seconds once you feel me with nothing on. You’ve wanted it too long. You’ll go off the second you’re inside.”
I hear myself say it and I don’t flinch. I tell myself I’m trying to scare him into stopping. That if I turn it into a challenge to his pride, maybe he answers it by being the one to walk away. That is the lie I get to keep for about a second. I am not trying to make him stop. I am trying to make him lose. The proof of my one rule is still sitting on my belly where he left it and I don’t move it, I just lie here and dare him to break it, out loud, in my own voice, like it was what I wanted all along. Maybe it was. That’s a thing I’ll turn over later, on some other night when my blood isn’t this loud.
He pushes back into me bare and we both go still at the same second, because we both feel the difference, the exact thing the rule existed to keep me from feeling. It is so much worse than I let myself imagine. So much better. I can’t get the two words apart anymore.
The condom is still on my stomach. I feel it there with everything he does, sliding on my skin and staying, the small dead weight of the rule I kept for a year, and I don’t brush it off. I want it there. I want to feel exactly what I’m giving up, the whole time he takes it.
He starts to move, and he talks the whole way through it, because the rule kept this conversation pretend for a year and now it isn’t pretend.
“Feel that,” he says against my throat, and he doesn’t sound steady anymore. “A year you made me cover it up. Tonight I’m going to empty every last bit of myself as deep in your cunt as I can get, and you are going to lie here and let me.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
It comes out as a challenge, because the dare is the only weapon I have left, and because some sick part of me needs to hear him answer it.
“No?” His hips drive in harder, deeper, making the point for him. “I’m going to breed you like the little bitch you are. And you’re going to thank me while I do it.”
“You don’t have it in you.” I’m pushing up into him while I say it, which makes a liar of every word. “You’ll lose your nerve. You always wrap it up. You’ll finish covered the same as you always have. You wouldn’t dare finish inside me.”
“Keep saying it.” His rhythm’s gone ragged, he’s close. “Keep swearing I won’t while you fuck yourself onto me trying to make me. You want it so bad you can’t hold still.”
He’s right, and that is the part I came to confess. I know exactly what this is. I run the cold math the rule existed to make pointless, and I want the answer to come back the dangerous way, I want the wrong number, and the knowing it is a mistake is wound so tight around the wanting that I can’t get them apart. The knowing is what has me grinding against him like this. The danger is the whole point of it.
“Say you want a baby,” he says. “I want to hear you admit that’s what you want.”
I can’t. The word sits right there and I cannot make my mouth form it, and he watches me try and fail and keeps moving, because the trying is enough for him. What comes out instead is worse than the word ever could have been.
“Please. Please. Yes. I want.”
He takes that as the answer. Because it is.
“Then take it.”
His rhythm goes, and I feel him reach the place he can’t pull back from, and that is when the last of the rule leaves my mouth. I hit him. The flat of my hand against his shoulder. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.” Even now. Even as he’s already going. And every other part of me does the exact opposite. My legs lock around the backs of his. My heels drag him down. My hips work him deeper, holding him exactly where I swore for a year I’d never once let him finish, because if he is going to do it then I want it to take, I want all of it, I want every drop he has.
He buries himself and lets go.
I feel the first pulse of him spill into me bare, and I do not lie still and take it. I pull him into it. Still hitting his shoulder. Still saying don’t. Wringing myself tight around him so that not one drop goes anywhere but where my mouth keeps swearing it can’t.
I feel it.
I name it to myself in the dark. The real word. The one my rule was built to keep out of my life. I don’t flinch from that either.
He stays in me. His hand comes flat to my stomach, next to the useless thing I left lying there, and presses, like he is already holding what he put in me instead.
“Now you’re not ahead of me,” he says.
He’s right. I’m not.
And here is what I came to confess, the part I can’t get clean of. I should have felt trapped. I built the entire rule so I would never once feel trapped.
I felt the opposite.
That’s the obsession now. Not him. Not even the thing that may already be happening inside me. The recklessness itself. The going too far. He found it the night he stopped letting me stay ahead. I found it the night I let him.
We are going to do this until something takes.
I’ll hand him the condom next time too. Same ritual. Same proof that nothing’s changed.
We both know what I’ll do when he takes it off.
And the worst of it, the part I can only say to you, is that I’m already counting the days.
—Sloan
I left it lying there and opened my legs wider. You read that and felt something.
The paid ones are for those of us who are done pretending they didn’t.
Damn!!!! That’s all I got