A Note to a Lover Under Locdown

Sex is a dull and pedestrian concept.

Others might spice things up by nibbling away at the edges of monogamy. We never have, but how are you supposed to make love to the same person for the rest of your life?

Even the words are wrong. To "make love" sounds clunky, as if some non-native English speaker were inviting you to make fuck.

I love you all day, every day. But when we screw, you and I are both very different people. Kaleidoscopic in our wants and needs - and in what we give. Respect; gentleness; kindness; friendship... of course. But I think we both agree that twenty-three hours a day is more than enough time for those things.

Then there is something else. Not the self-conscious spluttering and moaning of a partner who is, if truth were told, a little ashamed at their orgasm. That other kind: the sex that annihilates. The sex of surrender, and being well and thoroughly used, where no thanks or apologies are necessary.

But sex in lockdown is hard.

When every day is the same, every night is the same as well.

No sleepover with grandparents for the kids. No weekend trip to a country hotel. No more days spent "fucking from home" while the school system serves as babysitter: occasionally refreshing the screen, or sending a short message, giving our employers the impression that they exert mastery, somehow.

No more: the girls are in the next room.

Quiet sex, then?

Simple, basic, vanilla sex where we each keep a pyjama top on, so we can roll apart and feign innocence at the first hint of a childish footstep.

The innuendos we whisper about "lockdown sex" hint at what we really want.

I want to feel the tightness of the locked collar around my throat, holding the hood in place. I want to be blind. I want to be helpless.

I want my arms to be fastened - uncomfortably - beneath me, each hand at the opposite elbow. Freed from the niceties of mere "lovemaking", such that I don't have to return each caress.

To be objectified is astonishingly self-indulgent. When you have surrendered yourself so completely and movement is impossible, there is no remaining obligation to move. There is only pleasure. When I give myself up I am selfish and selfless, simultaneously.

This is confusing. Thank goodness I no longer have to think.

Can't I please just cease to be a person? Just for a little while: I want to be an object. One of your sex toys.

Just one of your sex toys.

I want to wait, in my blindness, while perhaps you tease me by doing nothing at all. I am just one toy. Perhaps you will pleasure yourself with another, or with none, or not at all.

It's not for me to say. I am a thing. I am an object.

For a little while, I don't want to be a person. I don't want to read the news to discover the latest death toll. I certainly don't want to spend my time coming up with new ways to entertain the girls, or to cajole them into doing a little more of their schooling-at-home.

I don't even want you. Not really: I see too much of you now. Instead, I want to be apart from you, in my darkness. I want to sink into that headspace of acceptance, where time is nothing because I have no choice as to when it ends.

Or if.

Lockdown. I am locked down.

Perhaps you will startle me out of my blissful nothing with a tweak or a lick at one of my nipples. Perhaps you will ease a well-lubed plug into me, enjoying how I start at its first, cold touch.

But I can relax again, once I am plugged. It's just one more accessory, for one of your sex toys.

I am locked.

I am locked down.

The flick of a riding crop against my thigh would bring me back: the pain like a flash of summer lightning, searing my blindfold vision. The irregular pauses between these strokes: sweet torture. Is it the pain, or the anticipation?

I creak in my bonds, like a ship at moorings. I, too, am tied fast. I will not go with the current.

Or perhaps, at last, you will permit me to disintegrate.

I can't beg. I am not a person: just a thing. The rubber cock that you pushed into my mouth, right after that last kiss, made me into a mute thing. At best I can grunt like an animal.

I cannot speak. But I don't have to speak. I don't have to explain myself.

If the moment should come, I would grunt my intense, muffled pleasure into that gag, strapped and locked into place.

But none of this is happening. I am stifled in a different way.

This is lockdown.

The girls are two metres away: the flip-side of social distancing.

There will be no sex. Or if there is, then only sex of the dull, pedestrian kind that neither of us want.