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  She’s in another world. Her head full of her plans, plans for me, whatever they might be. Meanwhile I’m wet and I’m cold.

  My kitchen has always been a little cooler than the rest of my house, for some reason. So, even though the combi-boiler is roaring away in the corner, and the thermostat is cranked up to keep the March winds out, there’s enough of a chill in the air to make me shiver as water continues to drip from my hair down on to my chest and my nipples grow stiff and sensitised.

  I’m half-naked, just wearing my jeans. No shirt, no shoes. I feel incredibly vulnerable like this, and almost doped up with frustrated arousal.

  The big window above the sink shows nothing but black sky and silent garden, but I still wish Mary would pull the blind down – someone might look in and see me. My paltry, untended garden isn’t overlooked, but I can’t quite shift the idea that if someone were standing out there, lurking on my lawn for some reason or other, they would be able to see me, squirming with arousal, dripping-wet, half-naked and tied to my wheelchair with emerald ribbons.

  So here I am, feeling extremely vulnerable in the echoey kitchen, which (for reasons I absolutely refuse to examine any more closely right now) I appear to quite like. My cock quite likes it anyhow – it’s viciously hard and eager, and that isn’t just the result of twenty-four hours of understimulation.

  ‘You weren’t there when I came out of the library,’ Mary says in an inexpressive voice, turning away from the stove slightly.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK. You’re not my chauffeur. But, you see, when you weren’t there I went to the Student Union shop while I was waiting. Just for something to do, really. And they didn’t have anything I wanted to buy. So I bought a couple of bars of chocolate. I mean, at the time I just thought it might be nice to eat them this evening, if we were watching the telly or something. But then I thought, on the way home, that you probably wouldn’t want to eat too much chocolate because you like to watch your weight and everything. And I also thought, well, how often do we sit and just watch telly?’ She sighs, as if wistfully imagining a different kind of life, one where she and I sit and watch TV of an evening, rather than shag each other half-conscious every chance we get. Then she turns away to stir the confection on the hob, still speaking.

  ‘You reminded me in the car what a good boy you’d been, waiting all day with your cock all tender and needing, and, well, I had this other idea. A little reward – fun for both of us. A sweet treat.’ Her brow is furrowed as she keeps on stirring the pan. ‘But it doesn’t seem to be working quite the way I wanted it to.’

  She turns back to face me, looking partly peeved and partly amused. Whatever she’s making smells really wonderful now. I’m feeling hungry. Hungry and quite confused. Is Mary cooking something for me? If so, why am I tied up?

  ‘It’s still a bit too thick,’ Mary says, distractedly, ‘I’m not quite sure what to do …’ She looks around my kitchen as if searching for some assistance. I can do nothing but stare dumbly at her, as I don’t have a clue what she is talking about. This is getting annoying.

  Then she suddenly brightens and says, ‘Do you have a cookery book?’

  ‘What?’ I might be starting to feel peckish, but this blend of cookery and kinkery isn’t my idea of fun. I thought I was going to get a mind-melting orgasm, not dessert. Unless, of course, the two are somehow connected. If so I’d like the connection revealed sooner rather than later.

  A curious expression flashes across Mary’s face, half confused, half conciliatory. She’s realised she’s losing me, so she steps it up.

  She comes towards me slowly and bends over, putting her hands on my bound wrists and bringing her face close to mine. She’s got that look, the stern one, and my cooling ardour instantly heats up again. Oh god. When she looks at me this way all I can think is how much I want her to hurt me. And my cock gives a desperate throb.

  ‘A cookery book, bitch-boy, have you got one, or not?’

  I’m about to play along, give her a defiant ‘no’, like a steadfast prisoner under torture, trotting out name, rank and number, when I remember that actually, surprisingly enough, I do have one.

  So I say, ‘Uh, yes. I do, as a matter of fact. In the bedroom, at the bottom of the wardrobe.’

  I’m still utterly clueless, but she leaves me hanging and scampers off happily to get it, returning a few moments later, turning the barely familiar volume over in her hands. Her mouth is already forming a teasing question when I interrupt. ‘Larry bought it for me, OK, one Christmas as a sort of joke because I said she was the only brunette I would ever consider doing…’ My sentence tails off as brunette Mary smirks and raises her eyebrows at me.

  But she brushes off any slight on her hair colour as if it were nothing, meant nothing, and says, ‘Well, I guess the joke’s on Larry, because I think beautiful brunette Nigella is just the person we need right now.’ And she flips to the index.

  A few seconds and some considered page flipping later, Mary says, ‘It seems some cream might help.’

  She turns off the stove, carefully removes the delicious-smelling saucepan, places it gently on one of the unused back burners and turns to speak to me directly. ‘So I’m just going to pop out for a moment.’

  ‘What?’ I say, my vulnerability quotient suddenly increasing by about one million per cent and becoming so not sexy. She cannot seriously mean she is going to leave the house with me tied to my chair like this.

  Unconsciously, I pull a little at the ribbon that holds my left wrist to the armrest and, just as Mary had warned me it would, the wide flat fabric twists into a narrow cord as I put it under strain, changing from a reasonably comfortable restriction into something as vicious as cheesewire. I wince as it digs into my wrist and my breathing gets a little heavier. Mary looks at me and bites her lip. She has a very particular look in her eyes, and I know exactly why. I’m struggling, but I can’t get loose. I really can’t. Even if I want to. And I do want to. And this confirmation of my utter helplessness is turning her on. It’s turning me on. In fact, I seem to be oscillating between being scared and being so aroused I almost levitate out of my chair. I’m confused. Freaked out. Hard as a rock.

  I can tell from the way her mouth twitches that she probably wants to kiss me right now. And I want her to kiss me. It’s one of the things that does it for us. One of our things. Every time there is a little flash of pain. My pain. There and gone. A slap or a pinch or a nasty unexpected bite. A hiss and a struggle and a groan. We kiss. Kiss it better. Kiss it worse.

  But right now Mary doesn’t kiss me. She bottles it up and turns away. She has a plan. She’s double-checking that the stove is off, that the pan is cooling, that the house isn’t going to burn down with me trapped inside.

  ‘I’ll be two secs,’ she says. She grabs her mobile phone from the counter top and pushes it into my right hand, always super-safety-conscious. ‘I’m sure your mum will have some cream.’

  I don’t even get a chance to ask ‘WTF?’ before she’s gone. I look at the little silver mobile phone in my hand. I pull at the ribbons a bit more, but only succeed in making them even thinner and more uncomfortable. Something my cock is still so hard about.

  I look out at the dark garden, trying to make out shapes in the blackness, terrified someone might be there, waiting to pounce. Manipulating the phone with one hand, I keep one finger hovering over the ‘9’ key, just in case.

  And then, not quite within the promised ‘two secs’ window but close enough, Mary’s back, holding a small pot.

  ‘I knew your mum would help me out. She’s the type who’d have cream in. I told her I was making profiteroles for you. I think she approved. She thinks you’re too thin, you know, but, really, what does she know?’ (My mum, it has to be said, utterly loves Mary, and will probably love her even more now she is showing her domestic goddess credentials.)

  She starts pouring the contents of the pot into her pan. ‘Mary …?’ I want to ask her what sh
e is doing, but realise, less than one word into the query, that I am about to find out.

  Mary is smiling at me. She’s holding a saucepan full of chocolate and cream, dipping a fingertip in to check it isn’t too hot to touch. And then she says, half apologetically, ‘It’s such a terrible cliché, I know, but somehow, you’re so beautiful, you make even the hoariest old clichés all new and shiny.’ She sticks her fingers into the warm chocolaty goo, steps forward and, in a sudden urgent movement, smears it from my chin right down my cool, naked chest, smiling a lusty, hazy, heady smile that seems to rush through my body, exactly like the warm chocolate melting all over me.

  ‘I just like the idea of you being, I don’t know, dirty, I guess,’ she says, shrugging lightly.

  We both look at the thick stripe of chocolate that runs down my chest. It’s warm and it tickles a bit where it is dripping. I want to touch it, a rebellious part of me is desperate to wipe it away, clean it off. It’s so sticky and tickly, but I know I’m helpless. And I know better now than to try and struggle against those cruel ribbons.

  Mary bends her head and runs her tongue from my navel, up my stomach and along that neat groove that divides my pecs, licking her way up the chocolate stripe until she’s lapping at my jaw line.

  ‘Mmm,’ she says, indistinctly, ‘tastes nice anyway. Good recipe. Shame you can’t have any, but you are always saying you need to watch what you eat.’

  And it’s true. I am always saying it. Because I do need to be careful. I can’t exercise like I used to and weights don’t burn fat…

  But that train of thought is vanishing. I’m quickly becoming more and more incoherent as my cock gets harder and harder, thanks to Mary’s continued kittenish tongue flicks across my chest, neck, stomach, chin.

  Then she uses her hand to smear the chocolate more, pushing it further into my lap, down and around the waistband of my jeans. Under the denim. My cock strains to meet her hand, desperate for even the slightest graze, but gets nothing.

  Next, she wipes a deliberately chocolately hand across my left cheek. My tongue comes out, half on instinct, trying to lick at the dark sweetness covering my face, but I can’t reach it. Suddenly I want to taste the chocolate more than anything. I stretch, my tongue straining just like my cock was a moment ago. The chocolate is tantalisingly close, but I can’t get at any of it. I moan out loud with the delicious frustration of it all.

  Mary leans closer; she has a little chocolate on her lips and tongue. I think she is going to kiss me, but she stops. She stops just a shade more than a tongue’s length from my mouth. Out of reach. I’m still aching for chocolate. And aching for her even more. I moan again. I don’t have any choice about it. I moan and I writhe. I pull on the ribbons even though I know I shouldn’t. My wrists are already covered in stripes of red soreness.

  And then Mary reaches out, very suddenly, and twists both my nipples at once, hard. She’s done this to me many times before, and every other time she has done it I have cried out as the pain shot through me like a lightning bolt straight to my cock. Hot and jagged and fast and nasty. But this time, in a variation on our usual hurt-comfort games, at the same time as she twists, Mary kisses me, pressing her hot-chocolate lips against mine so that my cry is swallowed up in her mouth and the lightning bolt of pain is twisty and strange, mixed with the pleasure of sweetness and chocolate and desires satisfied. It still reaches my cock, though, which seems to double in size, although that can’t be possible.

  She pulls out of the kiss and smiles at me. I want her to touch my cock. I wish I could touch it myself. But I know her so, so well now. I know that’s still a long way off. So all I can do is squirm hopelessly, pull at the ribbons that are cutting into my wrists and make a noise of keening, desperate frustration.

  Mary dips a finger into her saucepan of smooth glossy chocolate. She leans over me, her hair brushing my shoulders. I can’t tell what she’s doing. The angles are wrong and I can’t quite see. I can feel the warmth again as she smears more chocolate across my chest, grazing my erect nipples, making me twist and squirm.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about writing on you,’ she says, almost to herself as she continues to daub. ‘Marking your body. Marking my territory. It seems so hot to do that. I love your body so much. I want to decorate it. It’s such a beautiful thing. And I can’t quite believe it belongs to me.’

  She moves her head a little and then I can see that she has written the word ‘slut’ right across my chest in chocolate. When I see that I bite my lip with arousal, but I stop twisting. I don’t want to spoil her work.

  She writes all over me. All over my chest and stomach. She writes ‘bitch-boy’ and ‘whore’ and ‘filthy’ and ‘cripple’ and all the while I moan for her, trying not to writhe when hot splatters drip from her fingers and land on my stomach.

  By the end, when there’s no more flesh left for her to adorn, I’m so painfully aroused that I am pleading and begging incoherently. Not asking for her to do any more or any less, just saying, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘please’ and ‘Mary’. Over and over. I so want to come, but there is nothing I can do to relieve my frustration, with my hands tied. I feel even more helpless as she leans forward to play at licking me clean and draws one nipple, hard, into her mouth, nibbling and teasing at my chest, until I’m a frantic squirming mess.

  And finally her tongue creeps downwards. She opens up the buttons of my jeans, slowly, one by one. And then, at last, I feel her. Warm and wet and smooth against my poor, swollen cock. When she opens her mouth around it, it’s almost too much for a moment, almost too much to bear. I yell and scream and cut my wrists some more on the tight ribbons, as she glides up and down, her throat feeling like hot, damp velvet. And it’s not long – less than a minute – before Mary is licking me clean of come as well as chocolate.

  And this is pretty standard for Mary and me. I’m a fretting confused, mixed-up boy by day, worrying about every aspect of my relationship, but a panting mess at night, giving it all over to her, leaving all my doubts outside the bedroom, along with my clothes.

  As our relationship rolls on well into March, past the six-week mark and beyond, and the weather starts to warm up a little, we still show no signs of cooling down.

  When I’m with Mary, wrapped up tight in her little sex cocoon, where only rules of Mary-logic apply, I forget about those dark little clouds that keep on floating into view as I joyously expand my sexual horizons. I just forget.

  I forget about Larry and his continued presence on the periphery of my life, reminding me of The Way We Were, and how everything I used to think was so cool, was, in fact, so not. And I forget about Eleanor and her sexy undulating walk and flippy blonde hair and the way that, one strange day, I thought she might be trying to come on to me, though I’m now almost sure she was just teasing me for having an erection from her touching me. I’ve worked with Eleanor at physio once or twice since that incident and nothing else has happened – although that could be because Mary hasn’t repeated her particular brand of evil cock-teasing. Unfortunately.

  I forget everything else because Mary seems to know how to switch off my brain as effortlessly as she switches on my cock. She’s just unstoppable. It seems like every night she has a new twist on our already twisted relationship. She just keeps on pulling it out of the bag.

  She does indeed, as promised on our very first meeting, get on her knees one night and lick my footplate. And it is one of the most erotic things I have ever seen. She moans softly as she runs her tongue along the bright metal, caressing the tread of my tyres with her hands. It feels almost like she’s licking and caressing a part of me. And I’m frantic for that mouth to be on my cock, long before she has done all she wants.

  Another night, a night of coffees and insomnia and wrongness, she keeps me up into the darkest, tiniest hours of the morning, asking me questions. She asks me about what happened to me, about the accident, about how it felt then, how it feels now. She touches my body and asks where I have sensation and wh
ere I don’t and where it varies. She makes me describes Being-David-Malkovich over and over until I run out of adjectives, out of words, out of thoughts. I keep going until I feel like she could step inside my body and feel every feeling I do, and nothing would be a surprise. She shows me that my body – my changed, spoiled, abnormal body – is her own personal Song of Solomon. It’s a very weird feeling, and one I’m not sure I’m used to yet.

  As the night gets darker so do her questions. She says, ‘If you weren’t in your chair, how would you move?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I roll over in the bed so I can rub against her, pressing close.

  ‘I mean, well, would you crawl around? What could you do?’

  ‘I couldn’t really crawl, like, up on my knees. I could pull myself along though. My arms are pretty strong.’ I feel her shiver against me.

  She swallows slowly, and then says, ‘So, sort of on your belly?’

  ‘Yes, just like that.’

  ‘I’d like to see you doing that.’

  ‘Why?’ I say with a teasing smile. Because, of course, I know why.

  ‘I just would. Show me.’

  So I do. Suddenly the lights are on and I’m in my chair, heading into the living room where there is most floor space. I let her gently help me on to the carpet and watch me drag myself across the floor on my stomach, the best I can. I’m still naked and I feel utterly vulnerable. My whole world contracts. I suddenly feel this strange wave of sensation, as if I am utterly dependent on Mary right now. And I like it. It’s everything I shouldn’t like, but I do. I feel like I need this. Like I’m addicted to her. And her bizarre way of thinking.

  I’m crawling for her. A weird, fucked-up creature dragging itself across the carpet. And, god, I really shouldn’t like this so much. It’s every kind of objectification. But sparks of arousal are flying all over my body. I can scarcely tell which parts of me are which. I want to scream at her to take me. Use me. Make me into a mere thing. I want her to stride across the floor to me and fuck me. Force herself inside me. Own me.