Her hair was shorter. Way shorter. I’d always remembered her the way the photos in my phone did; long dark hair hanging down, pinned up, braided, lying in tangles across white pillowcases. But those days were over. It had been a year. A year and two months, in fact. What was it she’d said? Something about not feeling safe, secure, something about me being the bad guy, about magnets attracting and repelling. God. An eloquent excuse for ending six months of madness.

Eloquent. The word didn’t really suit her. It was too fancy, reserved, like some Downton Abbey woman. Maddie wasn’t like that. Sure, she spoke well, she wrote well, she knew how to win every goddamn argument we’d ever had but she wasn’t as clean and polished as she liked everyone to believe.

We’d met at a party. Not a regular party but what the regulars liked to call a ‘play party’ - the kind where people showed up in masks and leather and all the assorted shit that gets grouped up into places like that. I was there because I didn’t have any self control and Maddie was there because she wasn’t Maddie that night but some alter-ego version of herself which I’d never really understood. But it didn’t faze me. After all, girls are complicated, right?

Very complicated. And in my experience, Maddie was more complicated than most. For a start, she wasn’t even inside the club, instead hovering on the sidewalk outside, looking more like a lost girl from out of town than someone wanting to unleash a sexual fantasy. Averse to conversation, mouth smarter than she was in that moment but it worked out. Life works itself out. If two people are meant to figure the hell out of each other, they find a way to do it.

Not that it was easy. The sex was one thing. Maybe that part was easy - once we’d tapped into the same level and became contemporaries. But life is more than sex. Life is work and families and taking out the trash and relationships with so many add-ons, like trust that isn’t implied and the acceptability of PDA’s and dealing with one another’s histories. It makes it all so much harder than it needs to be.

We connected physically, emotionally, and on an intellectual level too. It wasn’t as if we were kids. She was almost a quarter century, and I was fast approaching thirty but it didn’t feel that way. And yet it did. Some of the time, it felt like we’d been together for decades and then at other times, she was a total stranger to me.

But one year and two months later, she didn’t look like a stranger. She looked familiar and yet fresh, like a favourite t-shirt that’d just been washed and pressed. Her hair suited her. It was still long enough to pull but it made her face more of a feature, made her stunning rather than just pretty.

Of course, I hated it. I hated it because it meant everyone was looking at her. It’s like when the musician you’ve been listening to on YouTube for five years suddenly gets a Top 10 hit and suddenly everyone becomes their new biggest fan. You didn’t discover her. You don’t know her. She’s mine. I knew her before you.

Possessive. Apparently, it’s a bad thing, being possessive. But what does it mean? Being selfish? So be it. I didn’t want to share Maddie when she was mine and even now that she wasn’t, I wanted her all to myself. It made me feel sick, guilty, gave me a violent shock to see her with someone else.

People move on. How could she move on when I hadn’t? Men were the ones who got over things, got into new things, forgot the past while girls were meant to take longer, using up boxes of tissues and watching fucking rom-coms while eating chocolate, getting fat and listening to power ballads.

But Maddie looked fine. She looked like a new version of herself. When we were together, she never bought regular coffee. She’d buy packets of the little capsules that you’re supposed to put in Nespresso machines. Only she didn’t have a regular coffee machine, let alone a Nespresso. She’d use the coffee like instant coffee and even though it didn’t dissolve, she’d somehow drink every last bit. In that moment, I found myself wondering if all that strong coffee had burst through and filled her with life.

It wasn’t as if she’d been a wallflower before but she’d never been keen on socialising beyond her circles. Her life was in compartments, neat, tidy, organised. Her social circles were tight, limited. Friends from work. Friends from school. Family. And me. But I was out. It scared me to think of my space getting filled. It wasn’t as if my seat was reserved. From here to wherever the hell her life was headed, the seat next to her was empty and my name wasn’t on it. I couldn’t bear the thought of there being somebody else.

Maybe there already was. Maybe that was why she was drinking fucking beer from a can and laughing. She looked too good. Way too good. Her teeth were too white for someone who drank so much coffee, and her eyes were too alive for someone who stayed up so late.

I had memories of pretending to be asleep, watching as she scrawled things in her endless collection of notebooks. She’d never let me read them cover to cover like I wanted but sometimes she’d give me a quick glance at a page. Ideas, stories, recipes, poetry, pictures. It didn’t make any sense but it felt powerful, like some strong, serene secret. Things that only she would ever know or understand. People are unique, people are incredible but I’d never met anyone like Maddie.

The nights worked. They always worked. Bed. Sheets. Handcuffs. Rope. She always used to ask me why I enjoyed restraining her and I could never give her an answer that felt honest. It went beyond the physical, of course. And it was shaded with darkness. Why would I want to tie her up? Because it made me feel like I owned her? I write that as a question but it’s an answer, really. And of course owning her body didn’t mean I owned her mind but the way she’d look at me when I was on top of her made me feel like she was giving her whole self to me.

She was so good at it that it obviously wasn’t any kind of act or lifestyle choice. She was submissive. She didn’t like to talk about it when the sun was up, but neither did I. Night was night. Day was day. The day was for working or walks in the park, cooking and bright laughter, other people in coffee shops and bars. The night was just the two of us.

We never argued at night but arguments from the day sometimes got carried forward after sunset. We always fucked harder when we were mad at each other. Somehow, it gave me a kick to tie the ropes tighter, to not hold back as my palm cracked against her ass. I knew I loved her more than life itself but I wanted to impose myself on her, make her see like I saw, to stop her from coming up with all the pointless arguments that ruined our time together. Sometimes when I went harder, she’d resist, as if sex couldn’t fix things, as if she needed more from me than hard lust but I didn’t know what she wanted and I was too gone to try to find out.

She never pushed me away, never said she didn’t want me but there was an infinitesimal shift in the dynamic between us; the way her eyes might not feel so open, the way she held herself. I fucked harder, trying to get past it, trying to get past all the walls and I’d make her come every time but it wasn’t the same as when she surrendered herself to me totally. We were good, but not great.

***

I was obsessed with her. I’d had girlfriends before, some submissive, some not and for a while I’d hated myself for being so fickle. If two people were moderately attracted to each other, they should get together and stay together, right? It was a loose moral idea, the fading influence of generations before me, ideas about marriage and loyalty. Through every one of my relationships, I’d felt like I should have held on but didn’t have the zeal to actually do it.

With Maddie, the idea of ever letting go was ridiculous. I knew I’d found what people often refer to as ‘The One’ and yet that title came without any clichéd feelings or perceptions. Maddie made my life complete. But I made her life ‘complex’ as she politely put it. She gave me diluted excuses, things that I couldn’t really concentrate on.

“It just feels dangerous.”

“I don’t see a feasible future, you know.”

“You feel the same, right?”

I didn’t feel the same. I didn’t know what was dangerous. I could see the future. We had different minds. Her elbow was pressed against mine. We were sitting on a bench outside a coffee shop. Autumn. Leaves breezing slowly down, mockingly almost, like they were drawing comparisons between their demise and the demise of my life. How could it be over? How could she not feel what I felt?

You can’t force feelings on another person. You can’t figure out why they’re saying what they’re saying. It makes you feel helpless, and then useless.

***

I hadn’t seen her since that day. Maddie was efficient, quick to get things done without making a fuss. Her few personal items were in my apartment one morning and had disappeared by the time I got home in the evening. Her key was in my mailbox. At first I thought she was limiting contact with me because she’d suddenly begun to despise me for some reason. And then I thought that it was more likely that she wanted to avoid me so she could move on more easily. Either way, I didn’t like it. And worse, I couldn’t do anything about it.

***

Everybody else is grey. They’re having vanilla sex and eating vanilla ice-cream and cake with vanilla frosting whereas all you want is some crazy, colourful Funfetti cake. It doesn’t make you wrong. With Maddie it never felt wrong. But now I was alone, and jacking off with ropes that still held a trace of her perfume made me feel like a pervert.

There was something beautifully settling about having someone to be crazy with, someone who got the same kick out of a new set of handcuffs or the smell of a leather belt or even just a coil of goddamn rope. We’d learnt together. We’d made each other. And it had happened so quickly, so seamlessly and then disappeared at the same pace.

We were at the same party but not together. She hadn’t even seen me. I’d only gone because a friend of a friend had said she’d be there. Even then, it’d been a long shot. Why show up? What was I planning to do? Beg her to take me back? I wasn’t even sure why she’d ended it in the first place.

It wasn’t a play party this time and Maddie wasn’t outside. She was in the middle of the room, talking, laughing and all with someone else. With another man. How could it be? How could it ever make sense? He was so desperate, so eager, so textbook pretty, with blue eyes and blond hair and a dentist’s smile. For god’s sake! It made me panic, think about whether she’d somehow changed herself, or worse, had some way of morphing into expectations. Maybe she’d been the sub that I wanted, and was now the girl next door that he wanted.

He. Who was he? A nameless stranger. Someone who looked too clean, too perfect, too dangerous in the way that rich white people sometimes are. You know the kind. The kind who think nothing of having their maid deported if she forgets to clean the sink. I hated him without knowing anything about him. The fact that he hadn’t moved from Maddie’s side was enough for me.

It was almost Christmas. Fairy lights were up. Mince pies. Mulled wine. Scented candles. That feeling of warmth that only a celebration can bring to the middle of December. It felt like the time of year where you HAD to be with someone. You can’t be a loner during the holidays. I’d tried moving on, of course I had. A couple of months back, I’d bought a wall chart, planning to cross off every day that I managed not to jack off thinking about her. I didn’t even last twenty four hours.

How long do you keep chasing someone? What if you lose sight of them, don’t even know which direction they’re headed in? Do you still chase them? Maddie was right in front of me but maybe she wasn’t the girl I thought I’d known. Maybe she’d changed, become one of them, someone that wasn’t into what I was into, someone who was disgusted by the whole idea of BDSM.

Sometimes it felt like sex was just a tiny part of life but at other times it was all that seemed to matter to me. Worse, since I’d met her, Maddie was the only person I could associate with the kind of sex I enjoyed. Girls are girls, bodies are bodies and yet every time I wrapped my hand around my cock, all I could think of was her.

The way she jolted when the leather belt hit her ass. The slim muscles in her arms fighting against her restraints. The way she gasped when I put my fingers inside her. Her mouth around my cock as I held her on the edge of orgasm. The way she tried to close her legs even as they were tied wide apart. Her pristine little asshole and the way she always started when I pushed my thumb against it. I wanted to touch her, lick her, spank her, bite her, make her beg me for more. I wanted her voice in my ear, her pussy around my cock, her tongue in my mouth.

***

There I was. A Christmas party. While everyone else talked about work and the events of the last year, all I was thinking about was whether I’d ever have sex again.

Small talk. Paper cups. Gingerbread men. Wine glasses. Cola, lemonade, vodka, beer. Couples holding hands. People flirting, sitting on the kitchen countertops. I talked to people I knew, people I didn’t know, said things that made them laugh, though I knew I’d never remember what we’d talked about. Probably mundane stuff like Christmas plans and New Year’s resolutions. I could have been into it if Maddie wasn’t there.

She took her time noticing me. Every time I glanced over in her direction, she was deep in conversation with someone else. And then I felt her eyes on me. I always knew when she was looking at me. It was as if her gaze seeped inside me. I turned, caught her eye and she looked away fast, edgy all of a sudden, her poise dissipating before my eyes. I watched her make her excuses and then she was heading for the door, grabbing a jacket and leaving before I even knew how to react.

I followed her. The blonde guy watched me. The fact she’d left him behind gave me hope. Maybe I’d been overthinking it. They weren’t an item. They couldn’t be. She was so much better than him. I shut the door behind me, looked for her silhouette, and followed, my heart thumping.

The kind of sweat that no amount of deodorant can stop. I felt it on my lower back, my t-shirt sticking there, even though it was minus degrees out on the sidewalk. There was no snow yet but I knew it was coming. I always felt it in the hours before, the cutting chill of suspended glitter. I was thinking like Maddie talked now but while she made the words sound sweet and lyrical, I just felt pretentious.

The tap of her high heels became more frequent the faster she walked. Did she know I was behind her? She didn’t look back. The streetlights caught the sequins on the hem of her dress. I couldn’t remember that dress. Maybe it was new. It skimmed the back of her legs, short enough to make me feel uncomfortably hot.

My shoes didn’t make a sound. I didn’t make a sound. I stalked her in and out of the city streets, wondering what she was thinking, wondering what the hell I was doing. I stuck to the shadows of buildings, not wanting her to see me if she happened to look back. She didn’t. She walked fast, purposefully. I knew from the route she was taking that she was headed home.

The same apartment.

We’d fucked every which way inside that one-bed studio. It came back to me fast. Her bed, her windowsill, her couch, the rug, the kitchen counter, the granite coffee table, in the shower and even against the goddamn front door. How many times? Countless times. So many times that she’d given up making notches in the bedpost.

The streets were busy with traffic, stores open late for Christmas shopping, lights colourful and blinding, but I hardly noticed any of it. I trailed Maddie through the town, out the other side, past brownstones until we reached her block. I...