Queenie(32)

Darcy

Should have said, you’ll be late and will definitely miss the surprise element at nine, but can you at least get here before eleven? The venue is kicking us out by one



I couldn’t bear to eat anything, so watched Insecure and then Atlanta in bed, then pulled some clothes on and threw a bit of glitter on my face. I got to the party at ten to eleven, thank you very much, and found Darcy. She was sitting with Simon, and although it kills me to spend any time with couples, these two weren’t happy so it didn’t really count. Simon’s age was showing more and more these days; it looked like Darcy was sitting with an uncle. Not a very old uncle, more like her dad’s youngest brother or something.

After again drinking more than I’m used to, and on an empty stomach, then forcing all of Darcy’s friends to form a circle around me while I danced very sloppily to “LMK” by Kelela, I stumbled off to the bar to get some water. On the way there I tripped over my own foot and reached out to steady myself, but instead of grabbing onto something solid like a table or the back of a chair, I grabbed onto a thigh. I looked up at its owner, mouth wide open, and locked eyes with the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

He pulled me back up, mainly so that I would take my weight off his leg. “Come on, let’s get me some water?” I said, grabbing his arm. I wasn’t sure I could make it to the bar alone.

“Er, sure? Yeah, okay,” he said, in the strongest Welsh accent I’d ever heard and definitely wasn’t expecting. Unlike the Irish, who have a long-standing bond with us since “No Irish No Blacks No Dogs,” I’m not sure how the Welsh feel about black people, but I decided to go with it. I led him over to the bar, not entirely sure where this surge of confidence was coming from. (Probably the alcohol.)

“I like your, uh, hair. All this,” he said, awkwardly patting the bun on my head.

“Don’t touch it!” I ducked out of his grasp, losing my footing and falling again, this time against the bar. He picked me up.

“Sorry, you aren’t meant to touch a black girl’s hair, are you?” He put his hands in his pockets as if to restrain himself.

“If you could try not to.” I smiled, captivated by his nice face.

Approximately three minutes later, we were kissing against the bar, with the Welshman pausing to tell me that he’d worked in Cameroon for a year so had a thing for black girls. I wasn’t sure if his background meant that I was being fetishized or actually I was just his type, but pushed it to the back of my mind because he was a good kisser.

Suddenly remembering that I wasn’t in the privacy of my own home, I pulled away from him and looked across the bar. Many, many people were looking. The Welshman looked around too.

“Maybe I should come back to yours?” he asked, pressing his hand into my lower back.



* * *



“So. What do you do?” The Welshman slid down next to me in the Uber.

“Does it matter?” I replied, looking out the window as the driver moved off. Why was I doing this? Was I so attention-deficit that I needed this? I knew that I should probably push him very gently out of the car when it stopped at a traffic light, but that meant going home alone. It meant going home alone, getting into a cold, empty bed, and falling asleep wrapped in Tom’s T-shirt. And I really didn’t want to do that, not again. Maybe tonight would be good for me, as long as there were boundaries. No personal details necessary, this was nothing but a fling, I told myself. He put a hand on my thigh and moved it higher, digging his nails into my skin. That’d be a pair of tights gone.

He turned my head to face him, and instead of kissing me on the mouth, bit me hard on the cheek. At least it sobered me up a bit. He moved his lips to my mouth and grabbed the back of my head, forcing our faces together. I couldn’t breathe.

I punched him on the leg in an attempt to make him stop. “Ow! Jesus, you’re strong. What’s wrong?” he asked. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s not that I don’t like it, more that I can’t breathe,” I told him. “Just ease off about thirty percent.”

When we got back to my house, the door was double-locked. Rupert and Nell were out, so after I’d showed Welshman around the house, he suggested that we have sex in the living room. This was met with a firm “no” and a nod to the horrible sofas.

As I led him up to the bedroom, he smacked my bottom the hardest it has ever been hit. Now, I am no stranger to pain. I had my hair relaxed every two months from the age of eleven to twenty-three, and the feeling of your scalp burning away so that it weeps and scabs over the next day has set me up to deal with any injury you can throw at me. Sexual or otherwise.

Tom wasn’t so adventurous, but in the last few weeks, I’ve learned a lot about my preferences and my pain barriers. Spanking, I like it. Hair pulling, I’m not mad for it, but I’ll take it if you let go of the ponytail if you think it might come off in your hand. Biting, I’ve really learned to love it. Choking is dependent on the choker, and how long his nails are. So on and so forth. When Welshman pushed me onto the bed, facedown, and hit my bottom with the back of his hand as hard as he could, I realized that there was a pain that I couldn’t take. I gritted my teeth and said nothing.

“Take your clothes off,” he sneered, removing his shirt and then his trousers. “Hurry up, come on, I haven’t got all day.” I lifted myself onto my knees and, still facing the pillow, pulled my dress off, wondering if it had been my encounter with Adi that had turned me into some sort of male-voice-command-activated sex-bot.