In at the Deep End

by Kate Davies

  Virginie saw me noticing them. ‘They are friends of ours,’ she said. ‘They are in a 24/7 sub-dom relationship. Elodie dominates Sophie all the time, not just during sex.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem very practical,’ I said. ‘What does Sophie do at work?’

  ‘Oh – she doesn’t have a job.’

  I wished I could get Sophie on her own and ask her about the choices she had made and why she had made them, or even if she had made them, but the lead was a bit off-putting.

  Sam came up behind me and put her chin on my shoulder.

  ‘This is where we check each other out,’ she said. ‘Because it’s pretty dark, down in the dungeon.’

  I turned to look at her. ‘There’s an actual dungeon?’

  ‘It’s a wine cellar most of the time. But they take out the barrels and put in a few slings and things for the party.’

  ‘I think wine cellars are sexier than dungeons,’ I said. ‘More aspirational. Not so many rats.’

  ‘It’s not really meant to be aspirational,’ Sam said. She looked a bit impatient, like she was bored of me making a joke out of everything. ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘I just want you to know, you can play with someone else tonight if you want to.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  She put her arms around my waist. ‘I want you to be the first one to play with someone else. I think it’s important.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘We can start with a threesome,’ she said.

  ‘Not with Virginie or Charlotte,’ I said.

  ‘No, obviously,’ she said. She nodded to a woman across the room with long dark hair and a big laugh and a big body, her curves defined by the firelight. She turned and looked at us, and raised her glass.

  ‘What do you think of her?’ Sam asked.

  ‘She’s hot,’ I said, because she was, objectively. I wouldn’t have thought of her in a sexy way if Sam hadn’t suggested it. But she had suggested it, and there was something thrilling about the thought of fucking someone so different from Sam.

  ‘Let’s just see what happens, shall we?’ said Sam, and she turned me around and kissed me again. I could feel the woman watching us.

  As the hours passed, the party got louder and looser and drunker. People kept refilling my champagne glass.

  ‘I’d better stop,’ I said to Sam at one point. ‘I’m going to feel like shit tomorrow.’

  ‘You can’t get a hangover if you just drink champagne and nothing else,’ she said.

  ‘Bollocks,’ I said, but I kept drinking anyway.

  Before long, people started taking their clothes off, heading downstairs in various combinations of twos and threes and fours. I saw one group of five women heading off together. Ambitious, I thought. Virginie and Charlotte disappeared with the 24/7 BDSM couple, probably to try out some sort of pet shop-themed sex that I wanted absolutely nothing to do with. I felt much lighter and happier without them there.

  Sam and I danced by the fire for a while, kissing, and I felt fizzy with wine and bolder than usual. I put my hand on Sam’s arse, experimenting with taking the lead. Sam kissed me harder in response. And then, because I was feeling powerful, I said, ‘Let’s go downstairs.’

  ‘All right then, babes,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  Downstairs it was dark and the music was loud and everywhere I looked I saw naked flesh, everything luminous in the gloom. I took Sam by the hand and led her around the main dance floor to the dimmest corner I could find. To our left, a woman was tied to a column, wearing nothing but a thong and heels. She had clothes pegs attached to her nipples, and her partner was lashing her breasts with a whip, apparently trying to remove the pegs. A few feet away, a woman paced the floor with a tray of cutlery, tossing forks and spoons onto the floor while another woman scrabbled around on her hands and knees, trying to pick them up. The scenes all seemed oddly domestic, what with the pegs and cutlery. Was that because we were women? I wondered. Did men toss spanners around and lasso each other with car tyres?

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam said, as the scenes played out before us. ‘Sometimes SM isn’t actually that sexy to watch.’

  It didn’t look like it would be that sexy to do, either.

  And as I was having that thought, the woman with the big smile walked up to us and said something to me in French.

  ‘Je ne parle pas Français,’ I said, feeling stupid and English and not very sexy.

  ‘English?’ she said, still smiling. ‘Do you want to play?’

  Sam put her arm around me. ‘We’re only playing together today,’ she said, possessively, I thought. I felt a pleasant sense of sexy power.

  The woman shrugged. ‘Three is good for me. It’ll be fun.’ And in that moment, I felt that it would be; unlike most of the people in the dungeon, who were yelping or moaning or doing unspeakable things with wooden spoons, she didn’t seem to take sex or herself too seriously. I was attracted to her confidence, and to how completely different her body was from mine and from Sam’s.

  ‘I’m Julia,’ I said to her. For some reason, I felt it was important that we introduced ourselves before the sex got under way.

  ‘Emma,’ she said. ‘Enchantée.’

  ‘Enchantée as well,’ I said, which obviously wasn’t the standard response, but I was preoccupied, wondering how the mechanics of this encounter would work.

  I didn’t really know how to have a threesome. I should have done some research in advance, or at least paid more attention to the logistics on Pornhub. I stood there stupidly for a while, but then Sam took control. She kissed me and unzipped my dress – there was an awkward moment when I tried to step out of it, and got my heel caught in the fabric. Emma started playing with my ponytail, which reminded me of the way my friends and I had plaited each other’s hair during school assemblies. And then Sam stopped kissing me and made an ‘after you’ gesture to Emma – the sort of gesture men in suits make when you’re queuing for the bus. And then Emma kissed me, and I stopped thinking about assemblies.

  Kissing someone new is always strange – it can take a while to get the rhythm right, and the other person’s mouth can be too wet, or oddly full of teeth. Emma was a good kisser, but it still took me a while to relax into it. Her mouth felt bigger than Sam’s. She tasted of peppermint. And then, of course, there was the fact that Sam was watching us. I didn’t feel as self-conscious as I thought I might. I felt powerful, like I used to feel when I was onstage. And then Emma pulled away and started kissing Sam instead. I waited for the jealousy to hit me. But it didn’t. And that gave me a rush of elation. Maybe I could do this, after all! Maybe I had ascended to a higher, jealousy-free plane!

  Emma took her dress off, too, revealing some very impractical underwear – more holes than fabric. She had let her underarm hair grow and I loved how womanly that made her look. I felt small compared to her, and I liked that too. She started kissing me again, and I heard Sam say to her, ‘I want you to fuck Julia.’ Which pulled me back into myself for a moment. Why was she the one giving the orders? But I didn’t want to contradict her in public, and anyway, by this point I wanted Emma to fuck me too, so I didn’t object when Emma pushed me up against the brick wall of the dungeon, or when she pushed her fingers inside me. Her breasts were pressed up against me, and I stopped thinking about the politics of what was going on, and I closed my eyes – but then Sam said, ‘Look at Emma,’ and I did, because I’ve always been good at following instructions, and I noticed that a crowd had gathered to watch us. Virginie and Charlotte were there, arms round each other’s waists. I didn’t want to stop the sex, but I didn’t want to think about them when I came, so I turned around and leaned on the wall. It was warm and clammy. Emma kept fucking me from behind, and then someone – Sam, I think – started to finger my arse, and as soon as she did, I came, an orgasm that left me weak and shaking and out of breath.

  I wondered whether Emma would try to fuck Sam after that, or whether Sam would fuck Emma, but there seemed to be a tacit
agreement that everyone had got what they came for.

  ‘I feel bad,’ I said, as Sam and I walked upstairs. ‘I feel like that was all about me.’

  Sam grinned and kissed me. ‘Watching you have fun gets me off.’

  It was just after 3 a.m. The party was beginning to wind down; people began drifting to the bedrooms upstairs or catching taxis home. There were a few knots of friends still drinking and laughing together in the living room.

  Virginie took my hand as we waited for the taxi. ‘I am so pleased you enjoyed yourself,’ she said. ‘Emma is a good fuck, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly assaulted by images of Virginie and Emma together.

  ‘And you, Sam?’ said Virginie. ‘Did you play with anyone?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘Not really.’

  ‘You joined in with Emma,’ I said.

  ‘Barely,’ she said, kissing me on the head.

  I put my head on Sam’s shoulder as the taxi rumbled home, listening to Virginie and Charlotte tell Sam about the sex they’d had at the party, and the scenes they’d seen, and the toys they wanted to buy – ‘I saw a woman with a butt plug with a little fox-fur tail coming out of it. I think we could have a lot of fun with that!’ The sex and the champagne and the movement of the car and the murmur of the voices lulled me to sleep, and I dreamed that Virginie and I were having a cup of tea together, sharing a piece of cake, such good friends.

  32. POLYAMORY FOR BEGINNERS

  I woke around noon the next day, dry-mouthed and heavy-headed. Unhelpful tabloid-style headlines about the night before were sloshing around inside me, along with all the champagne I’d drunk, phrases like LESBO LOVERS IN SLIGHTLY AWKWARD THREE-WAY ROMP and BUSTY BRUNETTE BEDS LESS BUSTY BRUNETTE IN MOULDY WINE CELLAR. I wasn’t feeling a hundred per cent fantastic about what had happened, in other words.

  I looked at Sam, lying next to me, curled in on herself with her back to me. She wasn’t moving. I was suddenly afraid that she had died during the night. I put my hand in front of her mouth to feel for breath.

  ‘Babes. What the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘Sorry.’ I pulled my hand away. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  ‘You’ve woken me up now.’ She turned onto her back and covered her eyes with her hand, against the sun.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again.

  She shifted onto her elbows and smiled at me.

  I smiled back. I felt shy.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘you popped your non-monogamy cherry.’

  ‘I suppose I did!’ I said, extra cheerfully.

  ‘Did you have fun?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was glad you were there, though.’

  ‘Hardly. You were like a kid learning to ride a bike. I let go, and you didn’t notice, and kept on riding.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s very sex-positive to compare a woman to a bike,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ she said, grinning. ‘What, are you more sex positive than I am now?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  She kissed me. ‘You know I’ll be sleeping with Virginie tonight? You OK with that?’

  She was just being honest, I suppose, but I am actually quite a fan of denial. I would much rather she’d pretended that she and Virginie were going to stay up late watching Golden Girls and doing face masks.

  I nodded, but it can’t have been very convincing, because she said, ‘You kind of have to be OK with it.’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘You’re not. I can see you’re not. That’s really not fair, babes.’

  ‘What am I supposed to say?’ I asked. ‘“I’m thrilled you’re going to be having sex with another woman tonight. Make sure you knock on my door as soon as it’s over and tell me all about it, especially the anal?”’

  ‘We probably won’t be—’

  ‘Please don’t tell me what you will and won’t be doing,’ I said, closing my eyes.

  Sam stood up, shaking her head. ‘You’re such a hypocrite! You fucked someone else last night!’

  I felt absolutely alive with injustice. ‘But you told me to fuck someone else! You wanted me to be the first to fuck someone else!’

  ‘Right!’ she said. ‘And you literally just said that you enjoyed it! And did I give you a hard time about it?’

  ‘No …’ I crossed my arms; I felt too naked, now that we were arguing. ‘I’m not telling you not to sleep with Virginie. But I can’t help feeling weird about it.’

  ‘It’s not fair to make me feel guilty,’ Sam said. ‘I’m not having that.’ And she opened the door and slammed off to the bathroom.

  I sat there on the bed, tingling with rage. I ran over the facts in my head, to reassure myself that I wasn’t going mad: Sam had actually encouraged me to fuck someone else. She had picked Emma out for me. And then she had choreographed the whole encounter, like a kinky Twyla Tharp. It wasn’t fair of her to compare that to what was going to happen tonight. Virginie wasn’t a stranger and I hadn’t been invited to join in. Not that I’d have RSVPd ‘Yes’ to that particular invitation.

  I worried I was going to slide into a panic attack, right there in the bedroom, which would have been embarrassing – not ideal weekend guest behaviour. I walked over to the window and held onto the sill to steady myself. Outside, it was a lovely blue-and-yellow day, the trees and houses in sharp focus, like a vivid memory. I could get through this. I had been through worse. Soon this would all just be a memory too.

  Sam came back into the room ten minutes later. I was still standing by the window, not sure what to do with myself. She hugged me from behind. She was damp. She’d had a shower. I let myself lean back into her. I felt better when I was touching her.

  ‘Sorry, babes,’ she said, into my hair. ‘I guess it was harder than I thought it would be to see you with someone else, last night.’

  And the anger was back again. ‘But you told me to—’

  She held me tight, so I couldn’t pull away. ‘I’m not blaming you, babes. But you have to let me do this tonight. Even things out. Fair’s fair. Yeah?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t want to argue with her, not today, not when she was going to be spending the night with Virginie.

  I didn’t say much at breakfast. The others chatted about the sex party – about how they shouldn’t have drunk so much, and how much fun they’d had with the 24/7 sub-dom couple, who were experts in Japanese rope bondage, and about their friend Sylvie, who’d burned all her arm hair off during fire play. I focused on the coffee and croissants and cheese and ham and jam (raspberry), all of which were extremely restorative and delicious.

  ‘And Julia,’ Virginie said, ‘you were so hot!’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, looking down. I’d spilled jam on the table.

  ‘That reminds me,’ Virginie said, standing up and walking to her overcrowded bookshelves. She pulled out a worn paperback and handed it to me.

  Sam leaned over to see what it was and nodded approvingly.

  I looked at the cover and almost laughed – it featured hyper-real illustrations of naked, mulleted people holding hands, apparently all orgasming in unison. There was a cat on there, too, for some reason. The title – Polyamory for Beginners: Infinite Pleasure Minimal Pain – was in a font that looked worryingly like Comic Sans.

  ‘Someone should reissue it,’ Sam said, correctly interpreting my reaction.

  ‘This book changed my life,’ Virginie said. ‘It freed me from the pressure of being monogamous.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You will love it,’ Charlotte said, smiling at me. ‘I used to be a very jealous person, but this book, it totally cured me of all that.’

  ‘It’s pretty much the non-monogamy bible,’ Sam said.

  ‘Well, I’m looking forward to reading it,’ I said. And I was. I wanted to be cured.

  That day passed very quickly; days do when you’re dreading what’s at the end of them. Virginie and Charlotte gave us a proper guided tour of Lyon – a beautiful city,
full of apothecaries and sweet shops selling incredibly strong liquorice – but I couldn’t relax. Live in the moment, Julia, I told myself. Listen to those melodic French accents. Smell that buttery French air. But my mind kept flashing forward to the night ahead when the others would once again be experiencing infinite pleasure and I would be trying to cure myself of monogamy by reading an Eighties self-help book.

  Dinner that night saved me; the food was so delicious that I was completely absorbed in every mouthful and the three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc I drank silenced the voice in my head that screamed, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  We finished eating at about 10 p.m. and went to a lesbian club. Sam put her arm around me as we walked in. ‘OK?’ she said.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You’re amazing. You know that?’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no one in this world I love or desire more than you.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I mean it,’ she said. And I believed her. That’s what made the whole thing so complicated. ‘I want you to feel free to take someone home tonight, if you want to.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ I said quickly. The very idea exhausted me; I’d had enough random sex for one weekend.

  But after Charlotte had ordered us a round of tequila shots and Sam had started dirty dancing with Virginie, taking someone home started to seem like a pretty good idea. Charlotte wandered off to chat up a boyish-looking woman at the bar, and soon they were kissing, pushing each other up against the wall. I was left alone, bouncing along to the music in a manner that I hoped said ‘I’m broad-minded and open to casual sex.’ It worked; after a couple of minutes an attractive older butch with kind eyes and a nose piercing tapped me on the shoulder and said something in French.

  ‘My name is Claudette,’ she said, after I’d explained about my lack of French.

  ‘Julia,’ I said. I looked at her; she reminded me a little bit of my GCSE physics teacher, who probably was a lesbian, I realized now, just like the rumours had suggested. There was something attractive about her, though.

  ‘I can kiss you?’ said Claudette.