Unicorns for Jesus

I look up as the door to my office beeps and opens. It's Hannah, of course. She's the only one who never knocks. I'm always leaving her stuff behind when I head home, so she persuaded the IT guys that, since she's my fiancée and co-worker, it was okay to add my door to her card.

"Lunch?" I ask, already closing down the documents on my screen.

"Nah," she replies. "I'm going to have to work through. The team is getting sandwiches delivered straight to our desks."

"Going down to the wire, eh?" I say. "Does that mean we're not going to have a Friday night?"

"Well, that's what I came to talk to you about," she says. "I'd made arrangements. Surprise arrangements. For some of those arrangements, I'm now going to miss the main surprise."

"That's a shame," I say. "Reschedule?"

"Oh no," says Hannah. "I think we can still go ahead. Provided that you trust me and you're not too much of a coward to face the surprise on your own. At least, initially..."

"Mmm, cryptically terrifying," I reply, licking my lips in an exaggerated style. "I don't suppose I get a clue?"

"Of course not," she says with a smile, but she inspects a formula on the whiteboard, changes an 'l' into an 'f', and adds a little two right above it.

"M F squared." I raise an eyebrow. "That's a thing that's happening? Tonight?"

We've talked about this. We've talked about it a lot. I had no idea it was actually anywhere near this close.

And I kind of thought I was going to have more say in how it happened.

"I found the perfect person," she says. "You're heading to an Italian restaurant in Birmingham city centre. Address is here. Seven thirty. Dress to impress. That is to say, imagine what I'd make you wear and wear that. I'll catch up with you later once the project is done and dusted. Oh, and I dropped a bag of ropes, toys and assorted implements into a duffle bag and snuck it into the boot when you weren't looking this morning."

I give her a withering look. "As the dom, surely I should..."

She quickly interrupts. "As a created and talented dom, I'm sure you'll be able to improvise and put whatever you're given to great use. Sorry, I thought I'd be driving up with you and sharing in the surprise. I'm actually gutted to be missing you face."

"I'll have to hustle a bit to get to Birmingham on time straight after work. So what is this? A meet and greet? Make a good first impression? Because I make a much better impression when you're by my side. Besides, packing a bumper fun pack of toys seems a bit presumptuous."

"Don't worry," she says. "It's a done deal. Just go, be friendly, and have a nice meal while you wait for me."

"When you say 'a done deal'...?" I start.

Hannah bites her lip. "Don't say no, alright. Just...it'll work, okay. Just don't veto it right out of the gate."

"I don't think it works that way," I say. "You can hardly veto my veto."

She's nervous. Lip biting has morphed into that thing where she puts one foot on top of the other.

"Yeah...but just...for me. At the very least, don't do anything to blow her off until I get there and we can discuss it properly. Work through any issues."

"Work through any issues...with the perfect person?"

"Yeah, about that...she's perfect. Really. But it may take you a while to come round to the idea she's perfect. This meal...just...if you have to, imagine it's a family meal with my extended family or something. A commitment, in other words. You know how you go to those and smile and make polite conversation, and you do it for me?"

"This evening is getting sexier all the time," I reply warily.

"Promise?" she says.

I sigh and nod.

"Birmingham, seven-thirty," she repeats, opening the door.

"Wait!" I blurt as she's leaving. "How will I know her?"

"Oh, you'll know!" says Hannah, and gives me a wink as she leaves.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Hannah is completely right. I do know. Instantly.

The moment I step in the door, I see her sitting alone at a table for two, and it's both obvious and bewildering.

It's Henrietta!

Henrietta Morgan! Of all people!

How in the ever living fuck can it possibly be Henrietta Morgan?

She spots me instantly, waves, and then beckons me over. My instinct is to bolt out the door. No wonder Hannah defanged my veto!

I make my way around the other tables to the back of the restaurant, she stands, and we hug mechanically and uncomfortably.

"Ben, it's so good that our orbits have finally crossed again," she says.

"Wow," I say. "I did not expect...How are you?"

"Well...er...surprise! I'm thriving, thank you." She gives a little laugh, and we sit down again, awkwardly.

"How long has it been?" I ask.

"Four years," she replies. "No wait, nearly five. You graduated a year ahead of me."

"Oh, that's right," I say. "You took that year out for health reasons."

The word I've strenuously avoided dropping into that sentence is

mental

. Henrietta was always emotional. In that first year, I lost count of the number of times I heard her crying. Sometimes she'd just have a breakdown at a party or a dorm-room drinking session, usually early enough in the evening that there was no way to reasonably blame it on the booze. And you couldn't pin it on PMT either unless she had a cycle that ran weekly rather than monthly. Sometimes I'd pass her dorm room at midday, and there would be sobbing. Hell, sometimes I'd pass her in the library and, even though she was silent, I would see her eyes were wet. More common than any of those, though, was giving Hannah a call and being connected straight through to the middle of a total breakdown. Nine times out of ten, Hannah couldn't tell me clearly what the issue was, even after having spent multiple hours trying to comfort her neighbour.

"Yeah," Henrietta replies. "Uni was kind of an emotional nadir for me. It was before I had a true conception of my real self."

"I think that's actually true for a lot of people, actually," I say. "They tend to hide it because you're supposed to be having fun, right? I was lucky that I had Hannah the whole way through. It meant that I never had to make quite the same adjustment."

She nods and smiles. I'm being sympathetic for Hannah's sake, but every second, my heart is sinking further into quicksand. Now that I'm sat down and starting to deal with the fact that I'm actually on a 'date' with Hernietta Morgan, I'm also wondering about when her language became so flowery. I remember her always being a shy, stammering kind of girl. Still, I want to try to keep things so I try to keep the conversation going forward in a positive manner. "You still play the flute?" I ask. That's the thing I remember most about Henrietta, apart from all the tears.

"Yes, although I've moved on from classical music into more improvisational and expressionist stuff." I expect her to launch into a lengthy discussion of Sun Ra or Ivor Stravinsky or to tell me about some fusion quartet she's part of, but instead she just clams right up again. That, at least, is more like the Henrietta I remember.

God, that fucking flute! Hannah and I would be in bed in the morning, having whatever level of intimacy, and that flute would start endless fucking scales, up and down, up and down. However long it went on for, I was never allowed to bang on the wall and yell "Learn some Jethro Tull for Christ's sake!"

"Leave her alone," Hannah always said. She was right. Anything I did to set Henrietta off would just result in endless drama and a missing girlfriend for the rest of the day.

I cast my mind round for something else brief to say and come up blank. "Shall we look at the menu?" I ask. At least get the food on the way before I start to dig into her life after uni. I order mushroom and bacon pasta. She orders the plain cheese pizza and then frets if there's going to be too much cheese on it.

The mundanity of ordering gives me a moment to sit back and try to look objectively at the situation.

Henrietta isn't ugly. She's not exactly beautiful either, but there's nothing actually wrong with her. She's quite a small girl, both in height and in curves. Can I describe her as nerdy? It'd be great if I could because nerdy is my exact type. Hannah is the Queen of the Nerds.

The word 'frumpy' forms unbidden in my mind.

That's not fair, though. It's a memory. The woman sitting in front of me has clearly made an effort. She's curled her hair and put on fairly striking red make-up. She's wearing a long red dress that is more classy than revealing, longer sleeves than you'd expect in summer and a collar rather than a neck line.  There's still an air of fifties suburban housewife presiding over a dinner party about her, but that's actually kind of cute.

I'm suddenly visualising the image of both Hannah and Henrietta standing in front of me naked, and I realise that they must be pretty similar physically. Not twins, for sure, the faces are completely different, but close enough to add a particular frisson to this proposed threeway. Nevertheless, this concept is one that I'm still struggling to get my head around.

I open up my mouth and ask another polite catching-up question. I do my best even though she makes me work for it. I'm not one for scintillating conversation at the best of times, but, with all the ease of pulling teeth, I discover that she now works in an HR department for a large retail chain, her job is fine, her hours are fine, her colleagues are fine, and her commute is fine. I try to make my world of data analytics slightly more intriguing, but I'm not sure I succeed much. I launch into a lengthy description of a trip we took to Iceland a few years ago, and then start to tell her about the fantasy comic Hannah is drawing. I'm killing time, hoping for a message from Hannah saying she's on her way. If Henrietta is ever unhappy with the thrust of my conversation, she makes no attempt to guide it anywhere else.

As I offer her more wine from the bottle on the table, she raises her arm, and I see a dark mark peeking out from under the long sleeves of her dress. I glance at it, then fill her glass and then glance at it again, trying to make out what it is. She tugs the sleeve down and then gives me an embarrassed smile. Whatever it is, she's clearly self-conscious about it, and I'm going to let it pass, but then she explains anyway. "A tattoo," she tells me.

"Oh, can I ask what of?" I ask.

"Nothing," she says quickly. Her hand stays resolutely on her sleeve. "It's just a bible verse. Peter 5:7. I got it years ago."

That's one of the chief reasons why Henrietta has to be an impossible candidate for this threesome. In our first year, when she was on Hannah's floor, she was inevitably around all the time. When we advanced an academic year and she didn't, we lost contact with her. Then, when she came back, we used to bump into her every now and then on various corners of the university campus handing out flyers for some religious event for this weird university society --

Youth for Jesus

. Hannah would still make an effort to talk to her and even took a leaflet or two. Needless to say, I never went to any of them, although Hannah attended a couple, coming back and telling me how ridiculous they all were. And just like that, Henrietta was suddenly almost around socially again, just occasionally, just round the edges of our group and usually just disapproving of any fun we happened to be having.

"So," I ask gingerly, "does that mean your religious beliefs have changed? You were quite into all that back in the day."

Henrietta sighs. "There's a lot of hypocrisy around most organised religions. These days, my relationship with the divine is more personal. Spirituality is a journey, and I've found that my early years weren't so much a wrong turn as it was the long way round. I don't regret my time with them exactly. There was truth even amongst all the lies, and that was valuable, but my view of spirituality is now one that embraces the whole of human experience rather than represses it, and the Goddess I now worship is all-embracing and pansexual. I believe enlightenment is personal for every individual, and we must intuit both right and wrong and our own destinies from what the universe tells us."

"I see," I reply. It's ironic that the longest, most detailed answer she's given tonight is completely meaningless. What I got from all that is that she's still on the woo. Hannah knows how much I hate woo. Still, in my search for clues as to how on Earth Henrietta of all people is here eating dinner with me right now and apparently offering us a casual sex and bondage platter later, one word of that stew particularly jumps out. "Pansexual?" I ask, feigning only mild curiosity.

"I've come to realise that the way I was brought up, the indoctrination and the monolithic texts of organised religion are a chain around the necks of a free spirit. That God can be found through free sexual expression. These days, I practice transcendence through physicality."

I almost choke on my fusilli. "That is quite the change! I remember at uni you were quite shy," I say once I'm able to formulate a sentence. "How long have you been practising this...physicality?"

Henrietta suddenly blushes and almost clams up yet again. "What I meant to say is I intend to practice transcendence through physicality. It's a road I'm really just setting out on," she says eventually.

"Well, I guess we all have to start somewhere," I say. I'm curious to learn more, but I'm also struggling a bit with how much is polite to ask. I try another approach.

"So, I wasn't aware you were back in touch with Hannah," I said. "It was a pity we lost contact, but who reached out to who?"

"Oh, we never really lost contact. Hannah always sends me a Christmas card every year. But recently we really got chatting properly again, and now here I am," Henrietta says with a smile.

"Here you are," I say. Yes, Hannah always sketches her own Christmas Cards and sends out lots of them. On the other hand, I can always spot Henrietta's card as the most Christian, least festive on any given mantelpiece. As usual, her answer hasn't really told me anything. I press on regardless.

"Look, Hannah was going to be here, and she's got this thing for surprises. She loves keeping me in the dark, but I am kind of curious about what she's got planned. What are you hoping to get from tonight?"

That fixed little grin of Henrietta's stays on. "Deeper human connection," she says. "Transcendence, spirituality, physicality."

"Go on," I say, making an encouraging circling motion with my fork.

There's a pause, and she suddenly blurts out "Orgasm," just loud enough that I look around to see if any of the other customers heard. Luckily, the two tables closest to us are empty, and there's a party of six nearby that is noisy enough on their own to provide aural camouflage for us.  She puts a hand over her mouth.

"It's okay," I say.

"Pain," she says finally. It's funny how neutrally she pronounces that word.

"Ahh," I say. "I'm guessing that Hannah has told you that we dabble a bit in BDSM. You know what that is, right?"

"Of course," she replies. I feel like I'm patronising her, but I also can't help but wonder if she knew before Hannah discussed it with her. I have memories of us sitting in halls back at uni with Hannah trying to explain to her what that tired joke about men not being able to find the clitoris was all about. I wasn't completely convinced at the time that she'd ever found hers herself.

"And you're interested in joining with us when we do...that?" I say, trying to pick my words carefully.

"I am," she replies.

"Just a second." I quickly check my watch and phone. Still nothing from Hannah. "We've never invited anyone to join us before," I say calmly. The thought flashes through my mind that that isn't strictly true, but that one minor exception isn't something I want to dwell on.

"Hannah thought it would be okay. She said you were looking for someone and that I'd be perfect."

I start to nod as a way to demonstrate that I'm listening, worry that it could be construed as agreement that she's perfect and then try to slowly stop nodding without it appearing like I'm contradicting myself.

"Ah, well," I say, "I'm glad she's so keen. It might be a good idea for us to talk. Normally, I'd suggest waiting until all three of us were here, but since she's delayed and you two seem to have already gone into detail, would you mind if I ask you a few questions?"

"No, that's okay," she replies. "Are there going to be a lot?"

"Just a few," I reply. I read a lot of online articles about various forms of kink. I'm sure I've seen tons of articles about how to have a conversation with a new partner. Hannah and I kind of stumbled into the lifestyle, so, while we talk a lot, we've never had to take it from the top. I try to remember what I'm supposed to ask in this kind of situation. "I don't want to get too serious, but there are some pretty fundamental things that you have to know and be in agreement with before you can decide if this is even a good idea or not for us."

"Hannah seemed to..."

"Yes, I know," I say. "Please just humour me."

Nominally, you'd want to inject a whole bunch of warmth and friendliness into what can be a very serious conversation. I haven't been able to do that with anything else we've talked about this evening, so I'm not hopeful. Still, I make a start. "Okay, I'd like you to answer any questions as honestly as you can, but if there's anything you feel uncomfortable answering, just let me know."

"Sure," replies Henrietta.

"Are you in a romantic relationship right now?" I'm pretty sure I know the answer, but I want to start out with an easy question.

"No," she says.

I decide not to pry further into previous relationships. I already know about two.

The first was a guy called Peter. He was one of those people you meet in your first week of university, and for just a moment, you think they're going to be your friend forever. As it turned out, not so much. A loser amongst losers, he nominally dated Henrietta on and off for about two months. They would go out on a terrible date, Peter would decide she just wasn't worth it, and then his sex drive would collide with his total lack of other options, and he'd have another go. He'd use the word 'frigid' to describe her but only when Hannah wasn't around -- at least not after the first time she explained that 'frigid' and 'not wanting to fuck your sorry arse in particular' were two very different concepts. Peter knew Henrietta was a flautist, American Pie was only a few years old at that time, and I think he was always waiting for a 'This one time at band camp...' moment that was never actually going to come. Still, my understanding was that, frigid or not, he'd eventually gotten his way with her one evening only for them to completely avoid each other for the rest of their time at uni.

Hannah hated him. I stood up for him not being a total creep until an incident not long after. Hannah and I had a spat. It wasn't anything serious, but I'd spent a few too many evenings out with just the guys, and she'd ambushed me about this on my return from the pub. I was just drunk enough that instead of just acknowledging her point, giving her some TLC, and quickly scheduling a romantic evening to follow on with, I'd blown up about how she was cramping my freedom. It was dumb, and the whole fracas didn't last more than a weekend and change. But Peter had seen that sliver of a window as an opportunity to put moves on Hannah in a fashion that she described as 'deeply disturbing.' Of course, he denied ever having done anything at all, but after that, he was dead to me.

The second was this weird 'pledge' relationship she'd had in the cult with this older American who'd been doing his PhD there for nearly a decade. I've got no idea what happened with that in the end, but I wonder if Henrietta's sudden discovery of the hypocrisy of religious organisations has anything to do with it. He always made me weirdly uncomfortable. I can only guess what kinds of other guys she's been dating since then, if any.