Quench

Its 33 degrees on the streets, but underground is much hotter, maybe 38, maybe 40. The other passengers and I hang limply from the handrail, willing the journey forward so that we can ride the escalators out into the fresh air. But nobody is willing the journey forward more than I. I need the destination.

I’d already been edging for him for a week when he texted me;

“Come over, I’ll give you some relief”

“Oh, yes please!” (my neediness bleeds through my words) “I’ll come over straight after work.”

“No, I’m working from home today too. Wear your new butt plug and come now, right now, just as you are”

That’s eight stops on the Central Line, one of the busiest, hottest, oldest underground lines in the city. It’s not built for hot days or modern London. It’s an ordeal on any day, but in the summer it’s hell.

I could refuse, of course, but I love to please him and I’m so very hungry for relief. I want to run to him like a puppy called to heel. His is a special sort of sadism, it catches me in a web spun from my own need. It makes me my own punisher, willingly stepping up to the challenges he sets me as route to my own intensity and peace. I put on a simple summer dress and cringe at my own wantonness as I slip the butt plug in and message him that I’m leaving. He doesn’t reply by phone, but I know he’s received my text as the plug starts to buzz a low hum in my arse.

I walk with quiet purpose to the tube, I’m smugly pleased and ashamed both at once; it’s a tight rope balance between being a such a good girl and such a bad girl, it’s vertiginous and dizzying. Halfway down the escalator there is a feeling of being lowered into a warm water as the air becomes thick with heat, breezeless and stagnant. The people coming up on the facing stairs look flushed and wilted – their hair stuck to their faces and their eyes uplifted to the light at the end on the tunnel. But I descend.

It’s fairly quiet on the platform, I stand a little away from the other people as I’m nervous that they’ll hear the buzzing, the maddening, incessant buzzing, that they’ll see me for what I am; lascivious and libidinous, shameless and yet still ashamed.

The coming train pushes a chunk of hot air forward and it animates everyone on the platform who were, until that moment, static. A suited man, tie undone, looks up from his phone and takes a step towards the edge, a woman holds her billowing hair away from her face and picks up her shoping bags. I press the hem of my cotton dress to my thighs. They mustn’t see, nobody can see.

The train is busy, no room to sit, maybe that’s a good thing, no, maybe that’s a bad thing, will I hold it? I think I can hold it. Imagine the alternative. No, don’t imagine the alternative. Concentrate. Be calm, poker face, nobody will suspect you. I hold the hanging handrail above me and look into the middle distance as the doors close.

I try to zone out during the journey, it seems best to try not to engage with my longing, my predicament. Not to dwell on the buzzing in my arse, not to think about how pleased he will be with me, of all the ways he might reward me. I can maintain it; it’s a mind trick like willing yourself not to be ticklish, I press the rising need to moan, to flee, the wriggle down inside myself with mental force. It’s possible until the train jolts or new passengers alight or disembark and I’m jostled about and required to make eye contact or polite engagements like “sorry” or a smile. One person even makes the ‘you know it’s illegal to transport sheep in heat like this’ comment to me. Each time I have to reassemble my in armour and find a way to disappear back into myself a little.

I like to arrive to him elegantly calm and delicately scented with the cucumber freshness of Issey Myake, but right now I’m wet and I smell like like sex and sweat and flesh. I’m wet on my temples and I’m damp behind my knees. I’m wet under my arms and between my breasts and my hair is sticking to the nape of my neck. I’m wet in the small of my back; at White City I felt a rivulet run down into the crease of my bottom.

I’m wet in my knickers too. I stand with my legs crossed, convinced that a drop might run down my thigh, but then that makes me unbalanced and I have to dangle from the ceiling too much while the train makes its rattling scream as it banks around a subterranian corner, so I uncross them. And then I cross them. And then uncross them and close my eyes. Please let this stop next stop be Holland Park.

I walk carefully to the escalators and as I rise into ’phone connectivity a text arrives.

“Let me know when you get this.”

“just got this.”

The intensity of the buzz in my bottom increases, and I accidentally let out a whimper. It’s a sex noise or a pain noise, I don’t know quite which but its definitely not a London Underground noise. Oh god, I’m so close now. My fingers are white knuckled on the handrail, I look at my feet. I don’t know if I can do this, I’m so thirsty and I feel like I’m pulsing with heat and longing; just teetering on the edge of my capability.

I buzz his flat from the white painted portico of his building, and he answers

“hello?”

Fucking ‘Hello?’ Like a question, like he doesn’t know its going to be me, I lean into the intercom and just implore him with a single breathy

‘please’

I could cry... I might be.

He’s got me just where he wants me, needing him in every physical way and begging for it on his doorstep. In this moment I, again, am his.

He buzzes open the door and meets me on the stairs, he is cool to touch and calmly gentlemanly in a fresh linen shirt. I look more bedraggled and waif-like than ever in his presence.

“Look at you” he says, taking me under his arm “You’re such a good girl. Such a good, brave girl” and I feel like I am home.

Inside his flat he lifts my dress off over my head and push-rolls my knickers down my legs to the floor. He pours me a long glass of water from a bottle in the ice bucket. He wipes me down with a cool flannel, My wrists and my back, my neck and my breasts. I stand limply; pliable in his hands as he manipulates me to access everywhere, lifting my arms and spreading my legs, moving my hair to the side. I moan and whimper in the quenching pleasure of it. He takes an ice cube and puts it in his mouth and I welcome his cool tongue into me as he kisses me. He stoops to my nipples and runs his cold, cold lips over one and then the other and it is heaven. The white gauze curtains billow in the breeze like the very epitome of cool and I close my eyes and give myself to him. He puts a thick glass dildo into the ice with wine and water and picks up the bucket, holds my hand and says

“Let’s move this to the bed” I am proud and I am glad.