I live in dread of the day when my wife leads me to the other room, the one we don't use; the third room. But of course the prospect also excites me. It excites me more than anything and I constantly imagine how it will be; sometimes just little scenes and sometimes a full start-to-finish scenario. It hangs unspoken over our love-making. Maybe it will never be used, but its mere existence gives a sharpness, an edge, a poignancy to every intimacy, to each caress. Even an ordinary meal must seem so full of exotic flavour to the condemned man when he knows that it might be the last he will eat.
And I am a condemned man. I know that I am guilty as charged and that my sentence is just. Only I am perhaps like one of those hapless prisoners, left to linger on death row, never sure when he will be executed, allowed even to hope that some appeal will succeed. And then one day they come, unexpected, to lead him to that room with the special chair, and he realises that all hope was an illusion; just another layer of punishment.
The waiting. Maybe she has never intended to go through with it; the threat there to keep me 'on the straight and narrow'. Or is it that she is undecided and that she will respond to my actions but perhaps not in a way that can be predicted? Or as I sometimes believe maybe she is just waiting for a preordained trigger point - once I am completely in love with her, infatuated beyond anything I might have envisioned, only then will it be time for the brief walk to the third room.
I should introduce you to the other two rooms, or more precisely bedrooms, in our apartment. There is what I think of as 'my' room, although in another sense it is our room as it is where we spend most of our nights, and not a few afternoons. It is a summer room, facing south onto the park, full of a light that suggests the Mediterranean though that is far from here, the subtle blues of the room and its furnishings combining to evoke all things bright, calm and serene. The balcony with its bamboo furniture, the profusion of plants and the birds and butterflies they attract. Spare in its furnishing, the main item is a generous king-sized bed.
Sometimes while we lay on the bed I think I can hear and even smell the sea, though we are in a city miles from the coast. Always there is the play of the light, the afternoon sunlight on our naked bodies and it seems there are far more nights of bright moonlight than should really occur in a normal month.
Our love-making in this room is also summer-light and sunlit, what someone once called 'ice cream sex'; desultory fucking, unhurried, loving and casual - two healthy animals doing what comes naturally.
But sex only has a present tense, the memory of it a pale echo and the anticipation of it so often a longing never to be fulfilled. With any beautiful and sensual woman, no matter how fully she surrenders to you, however complete your conquest and sexual domination of her, it only exists in the now, free of any past or future. Tomorrow it will never have happened and you will need to master her again, anew.
Then there is the winter room: that of my beloved. It is on the north side with a window into the canyon of a service street, apparently only inhabited by rats and further darkened by the windowless mass of the old warehouse opposite that stretches far higher than our second floor flat.
It is a room of dark reds, rugs and a replica of a medieval suit of armour that for some reason wears a fur coat. There are paradoxically lush colour photographs of tropical jungles on the walls, which should appear incongruous but aren't. Maybe the mind takes them as windows into another world.
And there are the mirrors, many of them antique, not always true, so that when the room is lit by candles, as it always is when I am there, even a couple of candles become a multitude, and more than once I have tried to blow out a reflection.
I never know when we will be spending the night in this room – maybe there are clues but I have yet to work out what they are. All I know is that certain look on her face, a combination of sensual cruelty and amusement, and the black choker she wears around her throat with a dark red jewel hanging from it when she summons me.
Games of dominance, at first even with ties and her wearing a black lace rimmed carnival mask, her always on top – but now the props are gone, and they were never needed to assert her control. Her skin itself seems darker in this room, and her small breasts more pointed. I always enter the room naked. I never sleep there – always expelled having been used and sent to sleep the remainder of the night in my room while the beast, sated, sleeps off its meal.
The sex is different. She never wants me to tongue her pussy in the summer room, while in the winter room it is part of the ritual to sit over my head and demand the pleasure she takes, with a triumphant purring growling orgasm, as her due. Then once done she eases herself down on my cock and almost roughly forces an orgasm from me. Always I try to resist inside, trying not to let it be taken from me without my consent, and always it is futile, as she merely fixes me with her dark glittering eyes, a cruel smirk on her face, steadily accelerating her movements until I come with a despairing groan. And then I am dismissed.
And yet always in the morning I wake to find her next to me, sleeping serenely, bearing no signs of the previous night. It never happened – or at least the unwritten rules do not allow me to refer to it.
And so to that third room. I have seen it only once so far, and it was as specified in the 'contract'. It stays locked but the door is a palpable presence even when I cannot see it. Given its purpose maybe you would expect it to be black decorated, even more darkly, cruelly sensual than the winter room, but in fact it is almost clinically white, with a simple polished wooden floor, no windows and no pictures.
There are just two items of furniture in the third room; a plain low bed, with a white sheet on it but no covers; and a simple but solid high-backed wooden chair with armrests, bolted firmly to the floor, and with belts to hold someone there.
No, not someone. The belts are to hold me there; arms, legs and neck fixed so that I am made to face the bed.
Only she has the key to the third room. It is always with her on her key ring. A perfectly normal key except that I know what it is and so when I catch a glimpse of it there is always that tightening in my belly, and at the same time a flow of blood below.
Sometimes I imagine it as a kind of sacrament. The man 'officiating' like a priest: one who marries so many couples in a year that it becomes routine. Another marriage tomorrow; not even remembering the names a week from now. But he performs his duties with a practised ease, all the easier because this is not his beloved, his sweetheart, but mine. Unlike the groom, fumbling with the ring, unsure where to stand. He has done this many times, knows his role and can be counted on to nonchalantly ruin my life. The very casual brutality of the act makes it all the easier for him.
One very fully imagined scene, part waking dream, part fantasy, departs from the idea of the three stages of drowning, from how the third time of sinking is the last, just like the third room. The first time he positions her, my beloved, my sweetheart, with her hands on the ends of the arm rests, just out of reach of my belt-fixed arms, leaning forward over me, naked of course, not near enough to kiss but she looks as though she might wish to. At least at first.
