I once briefly knew a girl who ran with a group of my friends. She was in those years between twenties and babies, a good corporate box ticking pleaser-girl, in so many ways, but who was also of an uninhibited and exploratory nature. Perhaps there was a vague understanding that curtailed by encircling societal expectations, her season of libertine bloom might be short. She discovered, and enthusiastically embraced the pleasures of attending London’s many Fetish nights.

Perhaps the contrasts of constriction and liberation of such an environment appealed to her. Observing strict dress codes she would go again and again, her gym-taut body encased in a tight latex sailors uniform. There she would set sail; watch and enjoy, dance, flirt and play in the scented, sweating darkness.

Along the way, as girls of this kind often do, she picked up a young, gay boy. He acted as co-conspirator, friend, plus one, confidant, partner in crime and procedural ward against the unwelcome. Together they would go, attending this night and that. He with his shaved head, in his little black rubber shorts and shiny black T-shirt, she in her blue and white striped rubber uniform.

He was emphatically there to meet boys of a similar disposition and bent, she was after something not dissimilar and with common purpose they sailed the seas together.

The consistency of his presence, and unflappable enthusiasm for their social round provoked the side-eyed comment of others, long before the shadow tensions in their relationship broke the surface.

They would compare notes in coffee-and-cigarette debriefs at her place, sit in laughing huddles of bitchy assessment of size and disposition at the clubs, the space between them untroubled by complexity beyond friendship, or so they both avowed.

But the boy had feelings, which boiled up from the depths. Volcanic vents from the bed roiled beneath the mill-pond smoothness creating contradictory rip tides of desire and self-definition. When one is one thing, but at the same time sometimes something else entirely, more fluid than one might have hoped, all at sea when one is reaching for certainties. A turn of a dancing, blue striped latex clad body, a laugh, a shared notion of desire, a cats-pupil gaze held a second too long. Strobe flashes of inconvenient arousal, and throbbing lust unwanted and un-ignorable in tight rubber… leading to things that sat with mocking, squeaking discomfort, in a place that was an apparently… supposedly fire Free in the Free-fire zone of latex and lust intimacy.

The aggregating furnace of feeling was inflamed. These things emphatically had to be discussed, must, and yet could, not. Unwelcome and welcome, wanting to see her and not, wanting her and not, trying to get away into the safety of conventional habit, going home with boys just because… fucking and seeing her face and coming back to where he had been before, remorselessly. Debriefs over coffee, with her, phone calls with her, nights out dressed up, with her; the metronome of this commonality, her, her, her pounding in rhythm with his beating little chest. Steam forming, driving a kettle whistle of desire. He would squeak after her across those clubs the latex stretched and screaming, watch her leave with another, cast aside and bobbing in her wake, his arms empty as he watched them walk out through the door.

For her part, well.. still waters run deep, she was quietly aware. The tension was impossible to ignore, her little rubber band playing an ever higher note. And there were tensions within her.. of another kind. She was by turn laughingly aghast at herself, and then intrigued by her own extending license. And in moments of pill-come-down-illumination she understood the rim they both traced with choreographed steps of unconscious precision, and the joy in this life that should and can consist of melting snowflakes of excitement captured and lost, in warm, excited hands

Inevitably there was “the conversation” amongst the autumn leaves in the park. He, heartfelt and shaking, she overtly distracted and… ‘actually disappointed’, and yet distantly fascinated.

‘I don’t feel the same way’,

‘why complicate this?’

‘but you’re gay’,

Her little laugh, her perfume and the way the sun caught her chestnut hair.

‘We’re still friends, right?’

The question mark more of a statement, and challenge to be met with effusive affirmation.

And good friends they were despite, or because of, this… this thing and the teasingly remote dispassion that had crept between them.

And the voyage continued, as he had been before. Where they had been before, but with the occasional conflicted and easily-rebutted upsurge on his part, with her now more overt acknowledgement of his constricted desperation, and bruised and aching heart, and how that might be managed with cats-paw tenderness.

Sexual contact was a ‘no’ for reasons discussed, and not to be re-aired. Frankly, she increasingly felt it a little self-indulgent on his part, but something she would indulge, as was her gift. So from time to time, according to caprice, she would grab him by the hand and drag him to the ladies where he compliant and at straining and filthy peace.. he would angle his head back over the bowl and she… stretching the rubber of the gusset to one side and baring her waxed and unreachably tempting cunt, she would laugh down at him and piss into his open mouth.

And beyond a procedural toilet-paper lick, she would never allow him anything more. And he hoped and he hoped, but she never did.