The Start of a Scene

They finish their tea. They establish a safeword. It’s not even nine: the day is still light outside the window. She draws the curtains. He tells her to get ready for bed, just as she normally would. “Get into bed. Pretend to be asleep,” he says. She does: brushes her teeth, puts on pyjamas, plugs in her phone to charge.

It’s an odd pantomime. It’s not bedtime. It’s not even dark out. Birds are singing. Busses are still going past on the road outside. And she’s awake – almost painfully awake. Nervous to the point, right now, that it’s a low-level buzz throughout her body, just like the jitters from a big cup of coffee.

But she lies down, nonetheless. Reaches out to switch off the bedside light. For a moment she lies on her back, and then curls up on her side, clutching the corner of her pillow. That’s how she normally sleeps. She shuts her eyes and tries to will herself in the direction of unconsciousness.

Instead, quite the opposite happens. She’s more awake that she’s ever been. Her body longs to move. It’s a physical struggle to get herself to lie still, but she does.

It’s several minutes before he enters the room. Time enough for her racing thoughts to settle a little… but they pick up pace again when she hears the door open and his footsteps, barefoot on carpet, padding across the room. He’s at the foot of the bed now, looking down at her where she lies, tucked in and sleeping.

A feeling not quite like embarrassment overtakes her. It’s intimate, this – when she sleeps with a partner she doesn’t clutch her pillow like this. That’s something she only does when she sleeps alone. She did it without thinking as she pantomimed sleep, and now he’s here, in her bedroom, watching her. Noting this tiny vulnerability.

Vulnerable. That’s how she feels. Lying there, under the covers, eyes shut. He can see her. She can’t see him. In the roleplay they’re engaging in, she’s asleep. The idea of being asleep while he stands over her at the foot of her bed makes her heart race. Doubly so when she remembers that, in this roleplay they’re engaging in, he’s not himself. He’s a stranger who has insinuated himself into her apartment. She is asleep. He is a stranger and she is asleep.

She locks onto that thought. I am asleep. I am asleep. She repeats it over and over in her head so that she doesn’t have space for any other thoughts. What is he doing right now? Just watching her? She fights the urge to peek.

For the longest time he doesn’t touch her. Doesn’t move. It’s been so long since she heard a sound, in fact, that she’s no longer quite sure that he’s there. Maybe he’s quietly left? Maybe she’s alone? What would she do in that situation? Lie there, perhaps, until she really did fall asleep.

She’s so lost in this thought that, when he finally does touch her, it’s a genuine surprise. She hears him move, shift his weight, and then he’s on top of her. One hand snakes around her body and locks over her mouth, pressing tight. His weight pins her to the bed, his free hand catching her arm before it can flail.

“Don’t scream,” he says. And he’s not doing a voice but his voice is still different. Unkind. Harsher than she expected, so that for just a split-second again she can convince herself that he really is a stranger. “Don’t make a fucking sound.” His breath is in her ear, warm and wet. The words go down to a place at the very pit of her stomach. “Don’t look at me. Keep your eyes shut.”

Her eyes are already shut, but almost by reflex she squeezes them even tighter closed. At this moment, she feels, she’d do anything he said. The part of her brain that makes decisions about what to do or not do seems to have gone somewhere far away.

His hand is still very tight against her mouth. “You’ve been careless,” he says. “You left your front door open. So I let myself in. Didn’t think there’d be anyone home… but, oh, look what I found. Pretty little thing, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

His arms tighten around her, squeezing, squeezing. She’s shaking. It surprises her how violently. How difficult it is to think. His free hand is under the loose cotton of her pyjamas now, hot against her bare skin. She clutches her pillow. He tugs her tight against him.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. And then he describes to her what he’s going to do. It’s the second time she’s heard this litany of acts. The first was less than half an hour ago, when they sat on her sofa, talking over the scene. It turned her on then. The idea. The dirty wrongness of the scenario he described. But it was a dim kind of arousal. She realises that now.

Now, here, pinned beneath him and with his voice a hot whisper in her ear, her body quaking and contorted, breath tight, legs tangled in the bedsheets, she hears him repeat himself, and she really feels it. A sharp, violent kick of arousal with each new utterance.

“You’re going to lie face down and bite the pillow,” he says, “and not make a sound until I’m done with you.”

He’s a stranger, she thinks. He’s a stranger. And, for a very brief moment, she believes it too.