Harness

Hannah Roels - short story in Extra Extra Magazine - issue n° 20

She was surprised by the attention she got. The sex appeal of male writers increases as they become more famous, but it doesn’t seem to work that way for women. The Harland Award and the success of her latest books had created a distance. She felt the admiration of men in the audience but she had become unapproachable; a chasm had formed and no one seemed willing to bridge it. The fact that she wrote fantasy did little to change this.

So this man and his letter, with its erotic overtones, had really taken her by surprise. The unexpectedness of it all was the reason she had agreed to go out for dinner with him, although admittedly the entertainment factor also played a role. She had taken a good look at him during the Fantasy Novel Convention and, although he was handsome, he wasn’t her type. She tended to go for androgynous men, her theory being that men who appear feminine at first glance often turn out to be extremely virile, and even a little threatening, in bed. Just the way she liked it. But this admirer, shovelling down his noodle soup with a healthy appetite, a man with medium-length hair and stubble, his broad shoulders curved like a flat-lying hook, seemed like a typical man. When she saw him at the convention he reminded her of a knight. His profile had something medieval and righteous about it, which amused her.

He drinks his beer and tells her about the book he is reading: Shardik by Richard Adams. He thinks it’s great.
An utterly harmless man. She feels like doing something radical, changing the situation. She puts down her chopsticks and says, ‘I can’t have normal sex.’
He forcefully swallows his beer. ‘Excuse me?’
‘I can’t have normal sex,’ she repeats, watching him closely.
His gaze softens.
‘Well,’ he says, taking a crunchy bite of a spring roll, ‘what’s normal sex anyway?’
How can she take him out of this imagined comfort zone? He looks so intact. A clean, hairy animal.
‘You arouse mad fantasies in me,’ she says. ‘A desire to be wild.’
‘Wild?’
‘Like the pagans with their horns.’
He regains his composure.
‘What are your fantasies?’
‘In one of them,’ she says, as she fishes for scampi in her soup, ‘I join a tribe in the jungle. Men with dry, painted skin push me to the ground and overpower me. They ignore my resistance; I am terrified. I also fantasise about a masked man hurting me, and about a group of miners. Shall I continue?’
He stares at her fingers as she takes the shells off her scampi. She thinks: Maybe I should protect him from me, a thought that excites her.
‘I thought you were a feminist,’ he says, confused. ‘The women in your books are so strong and free.’
‘Submitting to being overpowered is also a kind of freedom. Besides, it’s a game.’
He ponders this.
She thinks: If he asks me now if I have been abused, I’ll throw a clump of noodles in his face.
‘Have you always had such… desires?’
‘It’s you who awakes them in me.’
‘That can’t be true!’
She smiles. There are specks of sauce on his shirt.
‘I mean… Sex to me is a positive thing. It’s a way of being connected and intimate.’
What is this thoroughly healthy guy doing at her table? She thinks: Sex is linked to self-destruction in so many ways. To cruelty.
‘I’m not sure,’ he says hesitantly, ‘if I can help you with this. I suppose we could try.’
‘That doesn’t sound very threatening,’ she says.

That night, she thinks of him while masturbating. They are lying in a forest. She is excited by the leather wristbands that he takes off, by the hard, shiny metal of his armour in contrast to her flesh. Towards the end, she feels something ice cold against her labia and gets a sense of pulling. She comes like a bleed, a bloodletting.

The strange thing is, she doesn’t need violence. Usually, she thinks of aggression to excite herself, but now she can do without it and feels comfortable after the orgasm, suffused with warmth. As if something has melted away.

She is startled when, a week later, his name appears on her phone’s display.
What a nice surprise.
She tries to keep her voice in check.
‘Do you prefer the Paraiso Hotel or the Warwick?’ he asks directly.
‘The Paraiso,’ she says, because she sometimes passes its old neon letters in the city centre and they exude a poetic promise, especially when it is raining.

The next day, she goes to buy new lingerie. Desire licks up along the insides of her thighs and it’s been a long time since that happened. She muses about chainmail, hears soft lute music in her mind.

When she sees him standing there, waiting with his hands in the pockets of his long coat, she feels the first flicker of doubt. He has had a haircut and his beard has been trimmed. Suddenly, she considers walking away. But then he turns around and looks at her without smiling.

The hotel room is worse than she expected; their laces tap on the laminate. He is silent. She puts down her bag and pushes open the window. It looks out on a brick wall and there is a smell of food rising up.

Just when she is about to say ‘I’m not really in the mood, I’m afraid,’ he grabs her by her shoulders and drags her backwards to the bed. He sits on top, pushing her into the mattress.

He puts one hand on her throat and pulls at his belt; he is much stronger than she thought. She looks at his shaven face and realises that she doesn’t know this man. Worse, that she may not know herself and her own desires. He is not a knight. ‘Stop!’ she squeaks, ‘stop.’ But then she feels the city with all its sounds and movements, this city where everyone is connected by breathing so closely together, penetrate her through the window.

She closes her eyes and he hesitates. ‘Hey, girlie,’ he whispers. It’s the first thing that he says, and it makes her crack up. She begins to cry. She is not in a forest but in a hotel room, a neon palm tree flashing on the wallpaper above her head, and a man beside her who has torn her new brassiere, its metal clasps pressing into her back.

He tries to soothe her. He slips a book from his coat pocket and points at the bear on the cover: Shardik. He asks if he can read her a bit.