This is not a nice story.
There are two ways it can be told. The short way, and the slightly longer way.
A hand over a mouth, a dark place underground, wide eyes, naked skin, sex, begging, spanking, kicking, shouting, sweat, even -- yes -- blood. There: the short way.
If you want to come quickly, scroll down a while and start there. After all, for all of you, a story is all this will ever be; you'll never be able to experience what we did. That's ours. But if you're in the mood to take a few minutes, if you want the true, fucked up, physical story of how the darkest fantasies can become reality, it starts now.
Let me rewind a few months. Two figures stand on a dimly-lit platform. Two little birds in the night sky that circle and disappear. The only sparks of color are the orange train times on the screens, and the lit end of a cigarette held by one of the figures; the smaller one.
Or was it a cigarette? The smell of cannabis drifts down the platform. He turns and squints down the darkness at the small figure.
It was the girl. He had seen her several times before. He'd thought she'd been smoking weed last time, as well. But he hadn't been totally sure. On a fucking train platform, what a stupid place to smoke. She could get high all she wanted in the privacy of her own home, but doing it there was just asking to get caught. Always in the same big jacket, with the same big back-pack. The same bare legs- wait. No. She was wearing stockings. She had a thin black line down the back of each leg, and he could make out a possible black ring of lace around the tops of her thighs. They didn't match the rest of her outfit. Had she been wearing them last time?
No, it definitely wasn't a cigarette. He walked towards her down the platform. She was listening to headphones and smoking, oblivious to his presence. Now he was closer, he could also see that it was too long to be a cigarette.
Her expression was vacant, like her mind was in the sky. Her face was tilted to the side. It was a pretty face. Her hair was tied back, and he could see the pale curve of her neck in the dark light.
She didn't notice him approaching.
Although she would have recognized him if she had. The man on the penultimate train. Slightly unshaven, always in a shirt, messy-ish hair, looked her in the eyes instead of up and down. She knew him. He had potentially had noticed her smoking weed, which she had made a mental note of. Something about the way he looked at her made her uncomfortable. His eyes. He was good-looking but there was something cold about him.
Waiting for the train was the first opportunity for her to get high after a long fucking day at work.
She always packed her clothes for the night out afterwards in her backpack, and changed into them as soon as the shift was finished. Most of the time it finished too late for her to go out anyway. There was no point spending money at a club that she'd only get to spend a couple of hours in, and no point turning up to a party where everyone was already a good five hours drunker than her.
She thought she wasn't innocent. She wasn't eighteen, like he had guessed she was. She was twenty-one, and in her opinion those two years had made a big difference.
She liked to think she was pretty sexually experienced. She'd tried all that bondage stuff before. She had lain there, desperately trying to think herself into orgasm, making sure not to tug on the badly-tied fabric around her wrists for fear of pulling it loose, imagining a scene from a film or a teacher or a manager at work, but finding even those boring.
'And all the only good ones,' she'd tell a friend in a resigned, world-weary tone, 'All the ones who know how to fuck a girl, well, they're all fucking dicks.'
There it was. The paradox. The ones who'd get a bit drunk and rough, pulling her hair or throwing her down on the bed, making her heart beat with excitement; they were the ones who treated her like shit.
She'd just been through a break-up, and had decided at twenty-one that men were a lost cause. She had decided to "get to know herself" and was trying to avoid meaningless sex. It wasn't going well.
'Put your hands round my neck!' She'd scream at the latest failed rebound inside her head, while they thrust away fruitlessly. 'Please, just call me a slut or something! Jesus, at least blindfold me so I can pretend you're that guy who-'
'Put it out.'
She could see the man on the platform's lips moving but couldn't hear him. The headphones were playing music too loudly. She stared at him blankly.
'Put it out.'
She blinked.
'What?!' She asked, her voice loud over the music. She grabbed the wire on her headphones and yanked them out of her ears.
'Put it out.'
She suddenly recognized him. It was the man who'd noticed noticed her getting high. Shit. She dropped the half-smoked spliff to the ground. The ground was damp. It hissed.
'That's a fucking stupid thing to be doing,' he said.
She looked him up and down.
'Are you undercover?' She asked, stuffing her hands in her pockets and glaring.
He considered the question, one eyebrow raised.
'What're you going to do, run away?' He said.
He saw under the oversized coat she was wearing a tiny black dress. And yes, definitely stockings. She had a small bruise on her thigh. She noticed him noticing. She looked to the side.
'Take off your backpack.' He told her.
Her face changed.
'Why? You're going to search me? I don't have anything on me, look man, it's just been a long day at work.'
He stared at her expectantly.
She reluctantly took off the backpack, offering it to him. He shook his head and motioned to the ground. She put it on the floor, looking nervous and confused.
Her heart was beating fast. She knew her weed was in her bra, not her bag. She wondered whether she should ask him to see his badge.
'Turn around.'
He said it so assertively and matter-of-factly that she obediently began to turn around.
She realized what she was doing.
'Wait, what?'
'Turn the fuck around.' His voice was low and precise in the darkness behind her. 'Now.'
A deep, warm, nervous feeling raced through her. For some reason, she stayed facing away from him. She stood completely still.
'Put your hands on the top of the bench.'
She closed her eyes while she did it. Thoughts raced through her head. What's he going to do, what's he going to do, what's he going to do...
Of course she knew.
He left her waiting for a good few seconds.
When his hand met the cheek of her ass the only sound she made was a small gasp. Another few seconds passed before she came back to reality.
She whirled around, staring up at him accusingly.
'You're not a fucking policeman!' She said, outraged.
He couldn't help it. He started laughing.
The train pulled up of the night in a rush of light and noise. Her eyes met his for an instant before she turned and ran onto it, leaving her bag on the platform floor next to him. Once she was on the train she hurried down the deserted carriages, to get out of sight quicker.
She had known he wasn't an undercover policeman from the moment he'd sworn at her. Something in his voice had changed. Something had changed in both of them in that moment. And that last look. His eyes, his expression... he had stared at her like he was in slow motion, like in a scene from a film, like it was the last look she'd ever get...
So now the two versions of our story had begun to combine, for a brief moment, at least: like the spark of something strange that flickers only in the silent minutes before the second-last train.
The next few months involved him asking certain people for certain rather delicate favors, a bit of thinking, and a lot of reading. For her, they involved very little. Shifts at work, a bit of shit sex, and a lot of frustrated nights alone in her flat.
She had started smoking weed in public recklessly, like she was uncatchable.
And, she had had a weird dream, that made her worry for a few days, before she finally gave in and locked herself in the bathroom at work and closed her eyes tight and allowed herself to think about it as hard as she wanted for a few minutes...
This is where the story starts to get less nice.
She had been fired from that place. She never took the penultimate train home anymore.
But he knew where to find her.
A few facts that can change lives:
She kept a diary. She believed this diary to be at a friends' house. It was at this house that she had stayed the night after the platform incident, not wanting to be alone. She never mentioned the event to her friend, or to anyone. That day, she suddenly stopped writing her diary. It had mostly been full of boring stuff, facts she thought she'd forget one day, little drawings, strange dreams, sexual fantasies that seemed too private and weird for Microsoft Word. But she suddenly lost the desire to write it the day she met him.
Even in her unconscious, it was like he was filling a gap.
Is it ironic that the loss of her diary led to the loss of her life, or at least, her freedom?
A few facts that give you someone's life:
Her diaries were in the bag. She had not left her bag with her friend. It had stayed forgotten on the platform, next to him.
How could she have forgotten such a central part of the story?
So tonight, he knew what bus she'd be waiting for. All her stories had become his. Her worst fears, her truths, her childhood, her postcode. And she has absolutely no idea, and did not work it out until much later.
This part of the story takes place underground, somewhere where nobody can hear you, before she got to know him at all.
She is tied up. Arms pulled behind her. Her wrists in the small of her back. Rope pressing her arms into her body. He can control her movement with how much slack he gives to the rope in his hand, the other end of which is knotted around her wrist.
She is on her knees. Her legs are tied together and bent under her. A rope hangs between her ankles and her wrists, making attempts to stand futile. She is kneeling down in front of a shallow container of water.
The container only needed to be shallow. It was surprisingly easy to thrust her face down and press her face into the floor. It was only a few inches between air and drowning.
He wasn't going to kill her. But he knew she didn't know that. He needed her to be tired, and he needed her to respect him. He was stronger than her, but not by enough to keep her down if she really wanted to fight him.
