1 Laurie

"Look, I've come straight from work, and I've had a really long day, and I simply haven't had time to slip into a spiky collar or a mesh shirt or whatever else you deem necessary to get into your haven of safe, sane, and consensual depravity."

That was me, making an arse of myself on the door of Pervocracy, the club that was supposed to be different, and inevitably wouldn't be.

But everything I'd said was true. It had been a really long day. And I'd always hated the requirement to dress up. It was almost as if the Scene ran on fairy-tale logic: A pauper in a ball gown was a princess. A wolf in a nightcap, a grandma. A wanker in a pair of leather trousers, a dom.

The alternative-lifestyle pixie (otherwise known as community volunteer) didn't look very impressed with me. I couldn't really blame her. Even putting aside my lack of interest in communicating my sexual inclinations by wearing a silly hat, I'd been unnecessarily rude.

I tried for a more conciliatory tone. "I'm on the list. Dalziel."

She fingered her iPad. "D-e-e-l—what?"

"D-a-l-z—"

She gave me an Are you fucking kidding? look.

I could have said "Like Dalziel and Pascoe," but there was such a frighteningly high possibility she was barely alive in 1996 that I decided to give up instead. The universe clearly didn't want me to go to a BDSM club. Which was absolutely fine with me because I agreed.

"Forget it."

I turned to make my escape, when the door to the gender-neutral toilets behind her burst open, and the two—for want of a better term—friends who had insisted I come out tonight tumbled into the corridor. Sam seemed to be dressed as a steampunk pirate. Grace was wearing a rainbow-patterned corset and extremely frilly knickers. They had no problem at all communicating their sexual inclinations by wearing silly hats.1

"He's with us, he's with us! Laurie, come back."

I came back.

The pixie hesitated. "He's with you?"

"Yeah, I vouched for him. Look." Grace leaned over in a squish of breasts and lace and tapped the screen.

"But"—the pixie pouted—"costume is mandatory. It's important to the culture of the club."

"I am in costume," I snapped. "I'm in costume as a really tired and pissed off trauma doctor trying to get into a BDSM club in the vain hope of meeting a not-too-cack-handed stranger who'll whip him into some semblance of satisfaction before he goes home again."

"It's a good effort," said Sam, deadpan. "Very convincing."

"Fine. Fine." The ALP gave a despairing wave, green-painted fingernails gleaming. "Go on in."

We went on in. And as I squeezed by, I heard her mutter, "Can't believe he's a sub."

That made two of us.

It had been the best part of a year since I'd bothered with the Scene. About six months ago, Sam had asked me why, but I had no answer for him. No story to tell. No abuse, no drama, no great epiphany. Just glancing round at a party, and realising it could have been any other night. The same people looking for the same things. So I went home and looked up a half-remembered paragraph of Anthony Powell that Robert had once quoted at me: "The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings…moving hand in hand in intricate measure…while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance."2

And thought: Yes, that. Nothing but a dance to the music of time. As meaningless as it was ultimately unchanging.

Besides, with the internet being what it was, you could get degrading sex with people you didn't like delivered right to your doorstep. Unfortunately, Grace and Sam didn't agree. They insisted I needed to get out more. Actually meet people. As if that was ever going to happen at a BDSM club.

But there I was. Not so much out of hope for myself, but in the hope it would make my friends shut up.

Pervocracy fostered a self-consciously carnival atmosphere. And cupcakes. It was like they were saying, See what multidimensional humans we are. We're not just kinky, we're hipsters too. But it was the same faces. Just like always.

Grace went to try and get us drinks, so I stayed with Sam as per the rules. They had a cutesy little acronym for it on the charter, but essentially we were meant to be policing each other. Ensuring nobody got hurt. Or rather, that nobody got hurt in a way that they hadn't explicitly consented to be hurt. All very sensible. All very nice.

So terribly nice.

I was also supposed to have brought a shtick of some kind—like gifts or a Hula-Hoop—to help me be charming and easy to interact with. Except I had about as much interest in being charming and easy to interact with as I did in being nice. Nice had no power over me. It couldn't make me scream or beg or come or feel whole.3

Sam knew nearly everyone. Some of them even remembered me. But I brushed through the conversations. The topics were mainly restricted to art, sex, and ourselves, three things I really didn't see the point in talking about.

Eventually—because it was that sort of club—we were obliged to watch cabaret.

"It's at times like this," I told Grace, looking dismally into my glass of warm lemonade as someone subjected us to erotic performance poetry, "I really wish I drank."

"And I thought you were supposed to be a masochist." She put an arm around me and pulled me briefly into her side. I hated how good it felt just to be held.

I scanned the gathered revellers. And, of course, among all the half-familiar strangers, there was Robert, who time will never make a stranger, no matter how much I wish it could. Whatever magnet drew us once was broken now. It had left me simply spinning, a compass without a lodestone, while he didn't see me at all.4

He was with his new…boy, lover, sub. Who wasn't new anymore.

When the ordeal with the performance poetry was over and the music began again, I broke the rules and slipped away from Grace and Sam. Wandered.

The organisers had tried hard to transform this piece of nowhere East London into a space. There were lots of intricate little corners, apparently designed to encourage play in the purest sense of the word.

The last thing in the world I wanted to do was play. In any sense of the word.

Voices—talking, laughing, screaming, coming—washed over me like the sea. The dungeons and the make-out rooms were less an orgy than a queue. In my experience, one of the less well-advertised secrets of group sex was how often it came down to logistics.

Karmic spite sent me stumbling by the playrooms in time to see Robert and his…his other.

We'd never been public, Robert and I. What we'd had, what we'd done, had been too private and too precious. We wouldn't have displayed it before the world any more than we would have let someone watch us in bed on a Sunday morning, where he would bring me toast and tea and the Times, and lazily suck me off. It'd been ours.

Now his and this other man's.

This other man who suffered for him and begged and wept and carried Robert's marks and kisses on his skin. The secrets that used to be mine.

I stumbled away before I was spotted—staring like a man through a window at something he would never have—and went in search of Grace and Sam. I found them sprawled on a tatty velveteen sofa. They shifted apart to make room.

"I'm sick of seeing Robert everywhere."

"Oh, baby." Grace gave my arm a little squeeze.

"I feel like I'm stuck in a reverse Alanis. Every time he scratches his nails down someone else's back, I feel it."

Sam blinked. "Wow, man, that's a seriously dated reference."5

After six years, they'd pretty much run out of sympathy on this one, and I didn't blame them. There were only so many times you could wipe up someone's tears and tell them there were more fish in the sea.

I used to think there were too, but I was tired of swimming. And either Robert was a merman, or I was just a really weird fish with a particularly obscure mating ritual. Even to other weird fish.

"Nice crowd, though," tried Sam. "Friendly. Safety conscious."

"Kink crowds are the same the world over. The good ones are already taken"—I gestured to them both—"the hot ones only talk to each other, and everyone else is desperate."6

Grace rolled her eyes. "You do know you're one of the hot ones, right? You could have any dom in this room if you looked marginally more approachable than an underfed piranha having a bad day."

"I've had all the doms in this room."

"You're extra specially hot when you're slutty," purred Sam, stroking the inside of my thigh, which, even through my trousers, made me shiver. Which he knew it would. He went on in a very different voice, "Even if you're blatantly lying."

Literally the case or not, it still felt true.

"Oh my God." Grace sat up abruptly. "Look at the foetus."

We looked at the foetus.

He was on the edge of a conversation, not quite part of the crowd, thin and wary and absurdly young. There wasn't much of him from this angle, just a curly flop of dark hair and the pale gleam of his wrist as he pushed it out of his face.

"How does he even know about this place?" Sam sounded fifty percent shocked, fifty percent admiring. "At his age I was still sending laundry back home so my mum would do it, not coming to kinky sex parties."

"He's adorable," Grace cooed. "Like a bijou sub-ette."

"You can't have him, Gracie. No breaking Britain's youth."

"But we could get him a little kennel. Give him his own Converse to chew on. And…and an iPod for listening to Panic! At the Disco."7

I'd only half been paying attention. "Listening to what?"

"A popular beat combo," explained Sam, smirking.8

"Someone should talk to him, though." Grace glanced across the room again, but I could have told her he'd moved away. "He looks a bit lost."

"What are you going to do?" Sam's voice softened. "He'll be fine, honestly. They're pretty careful who they let in. Think of the trouble we had getting Grumpy Bastard here through the door. And he's probably just got a deceptive face. He could actually be forty-two or something. Uh…dude, where are you going?"

That last bit was for me. But I ignored him.

And found myself in the next room, searching for the boy. He was easy to find. Deceptive face. Bollocks to that. He couldn't have been more than eighteen.

I put a hand on his shoulder—so frail and sharp—and spun him round. He seemed surprised but not frightened. If anything, slightly irritated.

He wasn't particularly attractive. He was too unformed, all angles and irregularities, acne divots peppering the edge of his jaw.9

I gazed down at him, into his oddly dark blue eyes, the sort of eyes that would always look as though they had liner round them. And I said, "You shouldn't be here. This isn't Junior Kink-Off."10

He shook me off with a restless kind of ease. "Thanks for the unnecessary, unwanted advice. I think I'm good."

I should have let him go. But I didn't. "Is this your first time?"

"First time at a kinky party? Or first time having a dickhead acting like he knows what's better for me than I do?" He didn't give me time to get out a comeback, which was probably a good thing because I didn't have one. "Yes to the first. No to the second."

Don't laugh. Not something I often had to struggle against. But he was a little bit magnificent in his defiance. A little bit magnificent, and a little bit absurd. "I think I probably deserved that."

His eyes widened, flashing all their blues at me. In a handful of years, I thought he might be stunning. Not pretty, not handsome. But people would look at him.

There was a silence, just long enough to be awkward.

"Wow. Um." He pushed the hair back from his forehead. "I don't know what to say. I wasn't expecting that."

I shrugged. And now I was awkward too. Damn him. "Well, I know I can be kind of a dick. But I try not to actively persist in it."

"Wow," he said again. "Most people just do, y'know?"

I thought about it for a moment. "I suppose you're right. They do."

And now he smiled at me. All teeth. The way only people who hadn't learned self-consciousness knew how to smile.

"I know it sounds patronising but you should be careful."

"Dude, I'm nineteen."

I choked on air.

His hair had flopped again—Get it cut, I thought—and he shoved it impatiently out of the way. "Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking. How can a nineteen-year-old possibly know what he wants. Well, I do. I…feel it like…here." He tapped a closed fist in the incorrect location for his heart. "I feel it, okay? Like being gay. It's just there."11

I stared at him. At this too-thin, too-sincere boy. This person.

Because I knew what he meant. I understood exactly. And I'd felt it too, that interior certainty. But over the years, I'd let all the fervour fade. I'd stopped believing in it, somehow. I'd let it become something I did, not something I was.12

And then I was suddenly deeply, uncontrollably sad. For this boy who might become me.

His still-clenched fist swung into the air, not quite a full Scarlett O'Hara but nearly. His whole body was practically vibrating with frustration. "I know what I want. I really know what I want. I just don't know how to get it."

That sounded all too familiar as well.

"You've never…?" I asked, with a futile attempt at delicacy.

"Well, there's the internet. And I've messed around with boyfriends or randoms or whatever. But"—his words came too quickly now, their honesty its own challenge—"it's not right, or enough, or something. Basically, it's not what I want. It's not even a little bit like what I want."

I needed to walk away. Leave the young knight to chase the questing beast on his own. Maybe he would even find it. Plenty of people apparently did. "What do you want?"

His head came up. God, his eyes. In a few years…in a few years I didn't like to think what someone with eyes like that might do to me. Or make me do.

"What I don't want," he said, "is someone like me. Like, what's the point of that, y'know?"

He was silent a moment, chewing at his lip, hands shoved into his pockets. I had no idea what he was thinking, but it seemed to be quite a big deal to him.

So I waited. I waited for him. As I hadn't for anyone in years.

I didn't know what I was expecting. Some kind of blurted confessional. Not what he gave me, which was his unwavering gaze and his utter conviction. "I want someone like you."

It felt as though he'd pulled the entire universe out from under my feet, shaking me loose and into a terrifying free fall. So I tried to make light of it. "Someone far too old for you?"

"Someone who knows who he is, and acts like he owns the whole fucking world."

Ah. "Look, I…" I blushed. I actually fucking blushed. "Look, um, I don't…really switch. At all. It's not…my thing. Not that you aren't—"

"God, no." It was almost a relief when he cut over me. Almost. "Not like that. I'm not interested in that. I'm a dom."

It should have been ridiculous. It was ridiculous. A skinny nineteen-year-old with his adolescence still written on his skin. I nearly said, You're not a dom, you're a child.

His expression grew sheepish, and I was glad I'd held my tongue. "Well, thanks for not laughing. It's the best reaction I've ever got." He sighed. "I'm so confused. I don't know what to do."

This was officially beyond me. Telling him to go home, I could deal. Being sort of bluntly hit on, maybe. Giving him a spontaneous personal, social, and health education class in the middle of a BDSM club, absolutely not.

"It's like," he went on tormentedly, "you're not allowed to be a dom until you're forty and six feet tall and own your bespoke bondage dungeon. But I'm probably not going to get any taller, and forty is forever away, so what the hell am I supposed to do now?"13

"I have absolutely no idea." I'd been with Robert, and we'd somehow figured it out together.

"I just want to know what it feels like, y'know?"

"What?"

"Anything. Any of it. Something really basic. Like"—he drew in a deep, surprisingly steady breath—"I want to know how it feels to have some guy on his knees for me. And not a kid. I want a man, a strong, hot, powerful man, doing it because he wants to and because I want him to."14

When I'd thought he'd be stunning in a few years, I was wrong. He was stunning now.

He twisted both hands into his hair until he was all edges and angles, fingers and wrists and elbows. "I think about it all the fucking time. When I jerk off at night. But I'm so bored of the fantasy. I want something real. I fucking need it. I need to know how it really feels."

I didn't know why I did it.15

Maybe because he was beautiful then, so earnest and vulnerable and unafraid.

I couldn't believe that lack of fear. It gave me vertigo, as though he was the edge of a cliff and I couldn't bear the view.

Or maybe it was because Robert was there, Robert and his lover, and I'd never done this for anyone but him. I'd been with others, yes, but I hadn't given them what I'd given Robert.

And maybe, at last, I was going to take it back.

So I did it. In the middle of some East London party, beneath the eyes of untold strangers, for a nineteen-year-old boy whose name I hadn't even bothered to ask, I mustered what little grace I could remember, and went to my knees.

Clasped my hands behind my back.

Some doms, maybe even most doms, might have wanted me to bow my head, but I still wasn't sure who I was doing this for, and I wanted—I wanted—to look at him.

There was a stillness in the room. Because nobody had ever seen me on my knees before. I'd bled and screamed but never knelt.16

And in the silence, my boy just gasped. It felt like his mouth on my cock. His eyes were wide, as hazy as stained glass on the brightest imaginable day. He swayed a little and put a hand against the wall to steady himself.

"How does it feel?" I asked.

He swallowed. "Perfect. It's…perfect. Can I touch you?"

Oh God. Too complicated. Don't. Yes. "Not if you ask me."

He stepped into the space between my legs, and I had to crane my head right back to hold his gaze. My height counted for nothing now. Here, at his feet.

He ran a finger down the exposed line of my throat. How did he know to do that? I made a sound for him, rough and low and helpless. Then he collared me, his palm warm against my neck, and it was all I could do not to push forward into the safety and the threat of that simple, instinctive touch.

What had I done?

"How does it feel?" he asked.

Perfect. I swallowed under his hand. "Like I'm indulging you."

But he only grinned and tightened his grip just a little, not enough to hinder my breath but enough that I felt my every inhalation. As though it was his choice to give them to me. The racing of my pulse filled my head like the beating of a thousand wings.17

"Liar." His foot nudged my cock.

Oh God. I was so hard for him. For this.18

"Fuck." He gave a soft and lovely little moan. "Fuck. I could come from this."

I had no answers for him.

Except, suddenly, I did, my voice hoarse beneath his hand. "Come home with me, and you can."