Page 43 of Monarch
“Hello, beautiful,” I say. I can call her beautiful. Sheisbeautiful. That doesn’t mean I’m falling for her.
I push that box further out of reach.
“Are you ready for this?” she asks as she folds her arms over her wool coat, shivering.
“A queer sex club in the middle of Amsterdam?” I ask, unravelling my scarf from my neck and wrapping it around hers. “I’ve never been more ready for anything.”
“Come on then.” She finds my hand and pulls me across the cobbles and back onto the pavement.
“You still feel the same way about how you want to play?” I ask as we walk.
“You mean do I still want to be topped to within an inch of my life tonight?” She gives me a mischievous look that makes her eyes sparkle in the sepia streetlight. “Fuck, yeah!”
I giggle with her.
“And do you still not mind if I play with someone else?” she asks.
“No, I don’t mind,” I say, and it’s the truth. We’d spoken on the phone earlier, during Roos’ lunchbreak and while I’d been strolling around the exhibits I’d not yet seen at the convention. She talked about what she wanted tonight, and I did the same. She made it very clear from the outset that she wanted to be free to play with whoever sparked her interest at QISS, and she had asked me how I felt about that.
At the time, I didn’t really have words for how I felt. I’d been very aware of an immediate knot in my stomach tightening, and I’d felt my walking pace slow, but I knew I had no claim over Roos. Frustratingly, Lex’s words echoed in my mind –“you’re wrong if you think she’s onlyyourspecial thing”– and that had me telling Roos that I wasn’t going to stop her. That it was the last thing I wanted to do.
I didn’t want to be somebody who held her back. I didn’t want to be somebody who made her a comfort blanket in the same way I’dmade my mum and Dove and the tattoo studio some safe anchor that would always ground me.
But still, after we spoke, I found other feelings coming up. Jealousy. Anxiety. Fear.
What if Roos had more fun with someone else than with me?
What if Roos was more attracted to other people than me?
What if the sex and the play were better with other people than it was with me?
What if her wanting to play with others was her way of telling me she didn’t want me as much as I wanted her?
And then I noticed the voice these questions were being asked in. It was my voice, yes, but it wasn’t a voice I was proud of. It was the voice of a heartbroken soul who was terrified of being left alone. It was the voice of someone who didn’t yet know themself and their power. It was the voice of Mari, aged nineteen, when Lex left me.
Fuck that voice.
Sure, it wasn’t as simple as cursing my insecurity out, and then, magic! I was cured and completely at peace with the idea of Roos playing with others right in front of my nose, but there was a new curiosity about it. There was some strange comfort in the challenge of it. There was the potential of triumph – of proving Lex wrong – if I could support Roos in what she wanted and keep that voice quiet.
Also, I saw Roos’ desire to be topped by others as both a test and a sign. If I could survive this, maybe we truly were meant to be.
“I’m actually looking forward to it,” I tell her. “Although…”
She glances at me. “Although?”
“I am kind of in a Dommy mood. I kind of want to take control tonight. Could I be one of your tops?”
Roos stops walking, pulls me against her long, lean body. She smiles at me as she bends down and kisses my lips in a way that ignites my cunt. “I was hoping you’d want that,” she says when she leans back.
“Good,” I say, and when we start to walk again, I’m a little lighter on my feet.
“Here we are,” Roos says not two seconds later. She gestures with our joint hands to a grand canal house that looks like all the others on the street, apart from a ramp covering half of the old stone steps leading to the huge front door. There is a golden plaque to the side of the door, but it’s impossible to read what it says there in the dark; it’s almost like they chose a typeface that is hard to read by the average passerby.
Nobody is standing outside, and there are closed curtains in all the regal 18th-century rectangular windows built into the black brickwork.
“Where’s HungTransMan?” I ask.
“Joel?” Roos says with a soft laugh. “He’s inside.”
