Page 8 of Second Person

‘Everyone narrates. Mostly in their head. I can hear it anyway. You get a look.’

He thinks about that, genuinely, the way he thinks about a wall that isn’t sitting right. ‘What do I do instead.’

‘You ask. Or you watch my face, which you do anyway, you’ve been doing it since the bar. You already know how to read me. Just don’t stop reading and start deciding.’

‘Right,’ he says again, and this time it lands different, because he’s not filing it, he’s agreeing to it, and that’s a distinction I didn’t expect him to catch and he caught it. Then, after a while, the only follow-up he asks all night, and it isn’t the one I armed the speech against: ‘And if I get it wrong. Reach for the wrong word, or the wrong place, some night, not meaning to.’

‘Then I’ll tell you. That’s the whole point of telling you first. So a mistake’s just a mistake, and not a thing you’ve decided about me.’

He nods, slow. ‘Good system,’ he says, and means it as the compliment it is, from a man whose whole trade is systems that hold load, and something under my ribs does a thing it hasn’t done for anyone I’ve handed this map to before, which is unclench, because he hasn’t taken the rules as a wall he’s been shut out behind. He’s taken them as the drawings. The thing you build from, together, so the structure stands.

‘That’s it?’ I say, because some old part of me is braced for the follow-up question, the one that turns a person’s whole self into an interview.

‘That’s it. Unless you’ve got more.’

‘Not tonight.’

‘Then that’s it.’

I want to be exact about where the rules came from, because the easy version — trauma handed me a rulebook — is a lie by omission, and this whole book is my war on those. It isn’t a wall. It’s a text I authored, revised, and stand behind, about a body I’m the sole living authority on. The men before him didn’t teach me the rules. They taught me I’d need them, which is a different and smaller gift, and I’d not thank one of them for it.

I’ll say the other part plainly too, because the version that only tells you the wound is its own kind of lie: it isn’t only rules and retired words and men who got it wrong. Some nights it’s just good, uncomplicated, the plain animal fact of a body that works the way bodies work, and I’ve stopped apologising for that truth to the part of me that would rather the whole subject stayed noble. It doesn’t make me anything. It doesn’t unmake me either. I carry it, the way you carry any fact about yourself other people form opinions on before you’ve finished forming your own: not a flag, not a wound. Weight. Worn under the clothes same as everything else I don’t lead with.

Some days I don’t think about it at all, which is its own kind of peace nobody warns you is available. Some days it sits wrong, a low hum of somebody else’s idea of me that I can feel even with the door locked and no one else in the room. The organ’s never been the difficult part. The difficult part is what a stranger decides it means the second they clock it’s there — the word they reach for, the box they tick, the version of me they’ve built before I’ve said a single true thing about myself. That’s the actual weight. Not what I’ve got. What everyone insists on reading into the fact of it.

The wanting moves the same way, some nights reaching for control and some for the opposite, and I stopped treating that as contradiction a long time ago. It was never a rule I broke. It’s closer to weather. What changes which one I need isn’t what’s between my legs and isn’t the day of the week. It’s trust — how much of myself I’ve had to spend that day defending, and how much I trust the man across the table to hold the rest of it without narrating it back to me.

The rules hold on the bad days too, which is the whole reason I trust them. There’s a kind of Tuesday — it’s always a Tuesday — where the mirror over the sink hands me back somebody I didn’t agree to be. The temptation is to let the rules go soft: what’s the point of the map when I can’t read the territory. I do the opposite. I keep them harder, because they’re the one document about me that stays true regardless of what the glass is doing. The face can lie to me. The rules can’t. Dignity isn’t a feeling you summon. It’s a procedure you keep, and by the time the kettle’s boiled I’m usually enough of a person again to be worth the trouble.

Two times, before that table. Everybody assumes the map comes first and the body after, and it was the other way round entirely: I had that man in my bed twice before I handed him a single drawing. Both times I started it, which isn’t a boast, it’s a fact about the machinery. I have never once managed to want somebody in the passive voice.

The first was a Tuesday, at mine, and I’d spent the afternoon shift running the negotiation in my head and losing it. It isn’t will he; I’d stopped wondering about will he somewhere around the ark joke. It’s the other one, the one with an answer I don’t get a vote on: whether the version of me that comes off with the clothes is the version he climbed two flights of stairs for.

There’s a paragraph available here about dysphoria and I’m not writing it, because the true account is smaller and duller than the paragraph. I was fine. Then I was standing in a room with a man holding his hands at his sides waiting to be told where to put them, and the fine went sideways for about forty seconds, and what turned up wasn’t disgust — I’ve never had a great deal of that, I’m lucky in it — it was the administrative one. The certainty that inside four minutes he would arrive at a fact about me and have to do something with his face, and that I would be watching for it, and would find it, because I always find it, and that the finding would then be the rest of the night.

So I went first, which is what I do with anything I can’t survive being handed.

The flannel shirt off and onto the floor, then the bra, which is where a stranger’s face does its work if it’s going to, and I told him he could take it off and made myself watch all four seconds of it, fingers too big for the clasp, wrong way twice, laughing at his own hands. There was no face. Not a suppressed one either, and I can spot suppressed at forty paces through frosted glass. There was a large man concentrating on a hook.

He put his mouth on my sternum. That’s the bit I kept — not the chest, the bone, like he wanted the frame and not the finish. Then the rib, the scrape of his stubble travelling ahead of his mouth, then the line of hair down my stomach, and somewhere around there I stopped auditing and started wanting, and those two are supposed to run at the same time and in me they mostly can’t.

Then I said it, with a condition welded on the end, because a wanting with no door in it isn’t a wanting, it’s a summons.

‘I want you to fuck me. If you want that.’

The voice held. The hand didn’t — one tremor on his cheek, quick as a fuse going — and I pressed my thumb harder into the bone to stop it, and he didn’t mention it that night and hasn’t since, and I’ve come to think the not-mentioning was the first real thing that man ever did for me.

He asked if I’d done this and I said not like this, and he told me years afterwards that he’d meant it as a confession and I’d taken it as a fact, and we were both right.

‘Okay. I’ll show you.’

And then the part nobody writes and everybody does. My bag by the chair, front pocket, foil and bottle, packed that morning for a possibility I hadn’t yet said out loud to myself. He got the zip stuck. He said you brought this in the voice of a man discovering something about his own evening, and I said I’d brought options, not assumptions, and watched it go into him like a nail into softwood.

I did the rest myself. I rolled it onto him because I wanted my hands on the decision, and I put the lube on cold and worked him twice through my fist, slow and even, and enjoyed what it did to his breathing. Then I opened myself up in front of him, on my back with my knees fallen open and the lamp on, two fingers, my own wrist turning, taking my time — not for a show, but because he was going to see it eventually and I would rather he saw it the first time as something I was doing than as something being revealed to him. He knelt between my thighs with his fists in the sheet and did not once look away, and I watched him not look away, and that was the moment the evening stopped being a risk assessment.

‘Go slow. I’ll tell you.’

He went slow, being incapable of any other speed with a thing he suspects might break, and there was the stretch and the burn behind it and the long strange minute where the body decides without consulting you, and I made him stop halfway and he stayed stopped, shaking with the effort of it, until the argument inside me came down on the right side.