In the morning the picture still hadn’t done with me. I was already at the door heading for work when I retraced my steps, opened the computer and watched it fill the screen once more. A grainy black and white, full of shadows. The shadows gave it a theatrical quality. As if it had been staged for the benefit of me alone. The light source seemed at first glance to be the two shaded lamps that stood on the night tables on each side of the bed. But there must have been a further source behind the camera that lit the woman from behind. She was kneeling, legs apart. She would have toppled forward if the man standing in front of her had not supported her. The fingertips of his left hand rested lightly on her shoulder. But this was not what prevented her fall. Her arms were fixed behind her in steel cuffs. Her back was arched, her head thrown back, as if she had pitched forward, open mouthed onto his cock.

All day, I kept thinking about that room. It was the lightness of his fingers on her shoulder that undid me. Thinking about this gesture, the outstretched hand, the skin they rested on, left me feeling dizzy. She was everything he needed at that moment. He’d guided her to just the place he wanted. He had done this and could hold her there with barely a touch. For the woman denial was a physical impossibility. Her only comfort was to fit her body to the shape he had made for it.

That evening I couldn’t wait to close the door on my bedroom. My reading lamp is too bright so I killed the intensity with a pair of lace panties. I undressed. Arranged the mirror so I could see. I have no cuffs so used a scarf instead, clutching the ends in my hands to simulate the steel. And there alone on the bed I tried to fit myself to the image. Opened my knees, felt the awkwardness, the tug of gravity pulling me forwards. It was difficult at first but then at last, just for an instant, I found it. Equilibrium. A moment balanced on nothing but air. I didn’t fall. Instead I opened to him, relaxed the muscles of my throat, felt his fingertips brush my shoulder, became in that moment everything he needed. And doing this filled up my world.

You know, don’t you. You know who you are.

So I sat and watched each faceless stop pass by. While passengers came and went I stayed where I was. I was in for the long haul. How long would it take him, I wondered, to get round to the real reason for our meeting? Would he call my bluff at the outset and start in as soon as the front door was closed behind me? I hoped not. Which of course didn’t prevent me having precisely the opposite feeling at the same time.

I’d started out feeling a little bit rebellious. I know he likes holdups. So I deliberately went bare-legged. On the train I had time to realise the absurdity of this. Who was I kidding? By the time I arrived at the station I’d decided to fix it. I was out of time, of course. So my first humiliation of the day found me in the Ladies struggling into a pair of Tesco’s Luxury Lace Neutral – the sort of luxury you get for £3.49.

He didn’t put me down on the mat as soon as I walked in. Or push me up against the wall. (Both scenarios I’d considered on the train.) We kissed each other on the cheek like old friends. He invited me in and made me an espresso without even asking if I wanted one. It’s not something I normally drink, but I accepted anyway. So I stood in the kitchen sipping my coffee and he asked me about work and I started to tell him only half way through he interrupted me and told me to put down my cup. Come here, he said and I put down my cup and crossed the kitchen to where he was leaning against the units. He smiled. This is all shit, he said. And when I said what is, what’s all shit he interrupted me for the second time and said lift up your skirt and I felt a jolt of electricity go through me and then I lifted up my skirt. He didn’t move. Didn’t take his eyes off my face while I stood very close with my skirt lifted round my waist. He said tell me why you’re here and I said to see you and he said one more answer like that and I’ll put you back on the train. And so I said you know why I’m here and he said tell me. I said I wanted him to fuck me and he said no, you want more than that, tell me. And then for some reason I started to cry and I thought that would be the end but he just said take off your panties so I did. And he told me to touch myself and I did. And he told me to open my mouth and when I did that too he put his finger in my mouth and I stood there sucking his finger and touching myself and sobbing until till I started to come and he said good, go on and I did and my legs were shaking so much I could hardly stand up. And after that everything was just what I’d hoped for. He told me to tell him what I wanted and I did and he fucked me in the mouth and in the cunt and in the arse and even writing this now makes me want to say to hell with the guilt and get back on the train and go straight back to find him and say here, this is for you, this is yours.

The reason sex was never mentioned could only be because it was bad. So any experiments in that area – like the ones I conducted on my own when the lights were out – were automatically transgressive. Hence the Good Girl guilt. Now of course I recognise that things are more complicated. Because part of the pleasure comes from the very fact that sex was implicitly forbidden. The simple fact that it was transgressive added hugely to the illicit high.

Anyone who has ever had an affair knows this to be true. An act that might be familiar and comforting in a long term relationship is transformed into a gut-wrenching roller coaster. The pursuit of sexual contact generates the most extraordinary risky behaviour. An urgent need hijacks your brain. You spend the day in a state of arousal that can spill over into action the moment a door closes on the rest of the office. Life just becomes an interruption to the delicious process of fumbling and fucking.

Then after a while even this comes to seem normal. And I suppose you have to look elsewhere for your transgressions. You can find them in unexpected places. You start out excited by actions you know other people would disapprove of. You do this without being aware that further down the line is something much more challenging – excitement caused by doing something you yourself disapprove of. How weird is that?

As a woman you spend your whole life battling the assumption that 50% of the human race is inherently inferior. It’s something you know you’re going to have to fight very early on. Soon resisting the assumption of masculine superiority becomes second nature. And then one day a door opens and you find yourself abandoning the contract you made with yourself and diving headlong into a sisterly betrayal that couldn’t be more graphic. That’s when you find there’s still plenty of guilt to go round. But it does beg the question, what happens when even self abasement comes to seem normal?

Yes, all right. I made the call.

Lately I’ve started thinking about him again. I’ve thought about him last night when I was trying to sleep, hoping an orgasm might make him disappear. It didn’t. Today he’s still here.

We haven’t spoken for some time. A couple of years I think. Perhaps more. Not that that matters. Whenever we speak we’re straight back in familiar territory. I have to ration my contact with him. I’m afraid that if I don’t, if I give in entirely to his expectations – and sometimes there’s nothing I want to do more – I might lose touch with myself altogether. He will ask for things no one else would ask for. And I find I can’t say no.

It’s as if I have another self. Someone who is as far from the civilised socialised version of myself I show to the everyday world as its possible to be. Someone who answers to impulses that most of the time stay hidden. Dark, hungry, sexually all-consuming. She’s quiet most of the time but at others her voice is so insistent it drowns out everything else. And that’s what makes me want to pick up the phone now. Because he refuses to allow me to forget her. He speaks only to her. And just now that feels exactly what I need. The sound of his voice telling me what to do.

I’m angry with him and grateful at the same time. Angry because he won’t be the lover I need him to be. Grateful because I owe him so much.

There’s something immensely reassuring in the simple fact that someone out there understands this about me. For that reason alone I know that sooner or later I’m going to make the call. At the moment it feels like sooner.

Ask a child to draw you a house and she’ll draw four windows, a door, a pitched roof. This isn’t any house she’s ever seen. It’s an archetypal house that satisfies her inner sense of what a house should be. It’s all the houses she’ll ever know distilled into a single satisfying image. In much the same way I recognise this photo as a picture of me. I’ve never looked this good of course. Even when I was younger. But I still keep coming back to it. There’s something in the soft architecture of this body that satisfies a sense of myself as a woman. If I was free to choose the house where I could live, this might very well be the one.

The man can write.

THE GIFT

She lies beneath him
breath staccato
eyes closed
legs trembling
Bathed in sweat
and the sweet
afterglow
of being fucked
raw

His ego would like him to think
that this is all him
That this is
his gift to her

That when every muscle
contorted
and every synapse
illuminated with
pleasure

that it was his hands
and mouth
and cock
in all it’s supreme glory
that is responsible
for bringing her
to this sacred place

then he realizes
as she gazes up at him
a knowing smile on her face
that it is her submission
her relinquishing
of power
if only for a time

that was her gift
to him

He wasn’t a big man. Round shouldered. About 45.  She could see the hair curling on his neck and imagined the pelt that must cover his back under the tee shirt. But there was an energy about him.  Something animal-like.  A heavy gold bracelet bumped at his wrist.

He turned to look at her for the first time.

“Hi”, she said, more confident than she felt. “I phoned this morning…”

When it comes to most areas of my life the boundaries are clear.  I work. So any domestic tasks – cleaning, cooking, and shopping – are going to be shared. This is important. I won’t take on a disproportionate share of running our home life simply because I’m a woman. It matters to me that the world has changed and an arrangement that suited my parents is simply not acceptable to me.

So why doesn’t this equality carry over into my sexual life? Surely it shouldn’t be different here?

But this is where it gets complicated.  Because I know that giving brings me pleasure. I like to give. I enjoy it. I’m most myself when I’m giving.  And for that pleasure to work I suppose there needs to be someone around who is most himself when he is receiving.

Part of me wants to deny this. It feels like a betrayal of my principles. But however finely I dice the arguments I’m damned by my own body. Because I know that the right man has only to say, I want you to do something for me… and before he’s even opened his mouth to tell me what it is, the molecules of arousal are flooding my bloodstream.