The Week She Took the Lead

Kelsey came home on a Wednesday, tired from three days of flying charter routes out of Tucson. He was 42, and the legs ached a little more each year. He opened the door, dropped his bag, and stopped dead.

Alissa was on the couch. She was 24, and she was wearing nothing but his favorite blue button-down, the one with the frayed cuffs. It barely reached her thighs. Taped to her chest was a piece of paper.

"What's this," he said. Not really a question.

"Rules for the Week." She peeled it off and held it out. "Sit down. Read it."

He sat. The handwriting was hers, looped and confident. He read it twice.

"So for seven days," she said, "I decide everything. What we do. When. How long. You don't ask. You don't take over. You just follow."

He put the paper down. "Where'd this come from?"

"You know where it came from." She pulled the shirt hem down over her knees. "You handle me like a teacup, Kelsey. Eighteen months and you still do it. You ask permission for everything, like I'm going to shatter. I want you to shut up and let me want things for once."

"That's not fair. I just..."

"See. Explaining." She pointed at the paper. "One week. Then we talk about it like adults."

He looked at her. She'd started transitioning at 21, two years before he'd met her at Dave's birthday party, and she'd never once seemed fragile to him. But maybe that was the problem. He'd been so careful for so long he'd forgotten she didn't need it.

"You're sure."

"Am I sure." She laughed. "I wrote a whole document. I bought a timer at the thrift store. Yes, I'm sure."

"Okay," he agreed. That was that, and the week began.

* * *

The first test came within the hour.

"Bedroom," she said, standing. "Strip. Then kneel, right there on the floor, by the foot of the bed."

He did it. He pulled his shirt off over his head, kicked his jeans toward the hamper and missed, and got down on the carpet on his knees while she sat up against the headboard in his shirt, unbuttoned now to her stomach. She had a pillow behind her back and a look on her face he hadn't seen in months. Hungry. Patient.

"That's good," she said. "Stay."

He stayed. The carpet was the cheap kind, the kind that bites. After a few minutes his knees started talking to him.

"You can look," she told him. "You just can't touch. Yourself or me."

"That's cruel."

"It's day one. Pace yourself."

She let one leg slide off the edge of the bed, foot flat on the floor, and he watched her fingers drift up her own thigh, slow, stopping just where the shirt ended. His cock was already hard, which he figured she knew without looking.

"Alissa."

"Shh. No questions. Rules."

He bit his tongue. She watched him watch her for a long time. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. He honestly couldn't say. His knees were killing him by the end, and his hands kept drifting off his thighs until she caught him at it.

"Hands. Thighs. I said stay."

"I'm trying."

"Try harder." She smiled, though. She was enjoying this, plainly, and that did something to him worse than any touch. "You're good at this when you stop fighting it."

His knees ached deep, that bruised-bone ache. His cock leaked and he couldn't wipe it. She finally swung both legs off the bed and stood over him, the shirt hanging to mid-thigh, and looked down.

"Okay," she said softly. "Stand up. You did good."

He got up, shaky. She pressed a hand flat to his chest.

"Tomorrow, same time. Don't be early, don't be late." She kissed his jaw. "And Kelsey? Thank you for not arguing."

"Give it a week," he managed.

She laughed all the way down the hall.

* * *

Thursday. That was the night she broke her own longest rule, the one she'd never written down because she'd never admitted it. She'd never let him use his mouth on her. Eighteen months and not once with him. She'd always gone quiet and turned her face away when it came up, and he'd never pushed, because pushing wasn't his thing.

She brought it up at dinner, casually, like she was mentioning the weather.

"Tonight you're going to put your mouth on me."

Kelsey stopped chewing. "I'm sorry, what?"

"You heard me." She pointed her fork at him. "It's my week. I decide. And I decided I want it. I've wanted it for a long time, actually, I just never knew how to ask."

"You could have just asked. Any time. I would have..."

"See, there you go again. Explaining." She went back to her pasta. "Tonight. After dishes. Don't make it weird."

He did the dishes faster than he'd ever done dishes in his life. She watched him from the table, finishing her wine slow, and he could feel her smiling at his back.

In the bedroom she took her time. She stripped the blue shirt off over her head and got up on the bed on her knees and told him to lie down flat, on his back, head toward the foot of the bed. Then she climbed over him on her knees and looked down at him, all of her above him, and something in her face had changed. She wasn't performing. She wasn't even leading, really. She was just nervous, and doing it anyway.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Go slow."

He reached up and pulled her down by the hips and put his mouth on her, and she made a sound he'd never heard from her before. A real one. Not a show. Her hand shot out and grabbed the headboard.

"Oh. Oh, fuck, okay, that's, yeah."

He worked her slow, the way he'd wanted to for a year and a half. Her cock stiffened against his tongue and he took her in, careful, and her whole body shivered above him. Her hand came down and found his hair. She didn't guide him at first. She just held on.

"Kelsey. Kelsey, wait." He stopped.

"Sorry. Sorry, it's just, nobody's ever, I've never had this." She laughed, shaky. "Three years transitioning and I thought I'd hate it. I thought I'd feel wrong. I don't feel wrong. Keep going. Please keep going."

He kept going. She started moving her hips, small at first, then not small, and her fingers tightened in his hair and began to pull, setting the pace. Harder when she pulled. Slower when she eased up. He figured out the rhythm of her hand and matched it, and after that she stopped thinking, he could tell, because the words coming out of her stopped being words and started being sounds.

"Yes. There. Right there, don't, don't stop, don't you dare..."

Her voice had gone tight and high. Her thighs were shaking against his ears. She pulled his hair hard enough to hurt and he loved it, honestly, he loved every second, and when she came it was with her whole body locked up and her hand fisted in his hair and a cry she bit off halfway, like she'd surprised herself with it.

She stayed over him for a minute, breathing. Then she rolled off and lay beside him on the cheap comforter, staring at the ceiling.

"Well," she said. "That took two years off my life."

"Good two years or bad?"

"Kelsey." She smacked his chest without looking at him. "It was incredible. You know it was incredible. Don't fish."

He was hard and aching and she knew it, and she reached over and took care of it with three lazy pulls and a look in her eyes he'd remember for a while.

"There," she said, wiping her hand on his shirt. "Day two. Tomorrow's going to be worse for you."

* * *

She wasn't kidding about the worse.

Friday didn't start until evening, because Thursday had gone late and she'd slept like a rock. But when Friday came, she came home from the studio with a duffel bag she wouldn't let him look inside, and she set it on the bed and told him to shower first.

"Shower?" he called through the bathroom door. "Since when do I need to be clean for..."

"Rules. Shower."

He showered. When he came out, she'd cleared a space in the living room, pushed the coffee table against the wall, folded the big quilt flat on the floor in front of the couch. The duffel was open. There was a harness in it, and something attached to the harness that made his stomach do a slow flip.

"Alissa."

"Mm." She was buckling it on like she'd practiced, which she probably had, in the bathroom, on the quiet, when he wasn't home.

"Eyes forward."

She had a blindfold too. Soft black cloth, from somewhere, and she tied it on him herself, standing on her toes to reach, and the world went dark.

"Okay," she said, close to his ear. "New rule. You don't speak unless I ask you a direct question. You brace on the couch. You take what I give you. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

"Yes, ma'am." He felt her grin against his jaw.

She turned him around and bent him over, hands flat on the couch cushions, and for a long while she just touched him. Her hands on his hips, his back, the backs of his thighs. Something cool and slick between his cheeks, her finger first, slow, patient, working him open while he gripped the couch and breathed. She talked the whole time, low, that new voice of hers.

"Look at you. You're shaking already and I've barely started." A second finger. He grunted. "I know. I know. Breathe. I've got you. I read about all of this, you know. Watched things. Practiced. I've been planning this for weeks and you had no idea, sitting right there eating dinner."

"Alissa..."

"That wasn't a question." She pulled her fingers out and he felt the blunt press of her against him, bigger than her fingers, a lot bigger, and his breath went ragged before she even pushed in.

She went slow. She went so slow it was almost unbearable, inch by inch, one hand flat on his lower back, murmuring at him to breathe, breathe, there, there it is, until she was seated fully and they were both shaking. His arms trembled against the cushions. His cock hung heavy and untouched, leaking onto the quilt.

"Oh my god," she whispered. "Oh my god, Kelsey. You feel, okay. Okay. I'm moving now."

She moved. Slow at first, long careful slides, and he heard his own voice coming out of him in pieces, and she asked him once, "Good?" and he said "God, yes," and that was the last full word either of them got out for a while. She picked up the pace. She gripped his hips and drove in, and the slap of her skin against his filled the room, and every thrust pushed a sound out of him that he'd be embarrassed about later, if he ever got around to being embarrassed, which he doubted.

Her hand came around and found his cock and stroked him in time with her hips, and that was the end of him. He warned her, or tried to, some broken syllable, and she said "Yes, come, come for me," and he did, hard, all over the quilt, his arms nearly giving out while she kept going, chasing her own end, and when she found it she collapsed forward over his back with the harness still buried in him and her teeth in his shoulder.

They ended up on the quilt in a heap. The blindfold was somewhere. She pulled it off his eyes and the lamp light was brutal and beautiful.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi." His voice was wrecked.

"Still with me?"

"Ask me tomorrow. I'll let you know."

She laughed and kissed his shoulder, right where she'd bitten it.

* * *

Saturday morning he woke up to movement.

Warm. Dark, early, the gray before the gray. Her hand was on his chest, and he opened his eyes and Alissa was kneeling over him, watching him.

"Hey," she whispered. "Is this a yes?"

"Yes," he said, before he was fully awake, and meant it.

She hooked his boxers down herself and settled astride his thigh, moving against it in a slow grind, and she was wet and she wasn't hiding it, her hand flat on his chest, holding him there.

"Don't wake up all the way," she whispered.

"Too late."

"Shh." She leaned down close, her mouth at his ear, still moving. "I want you inside me. That's all. I woke up and I wanted it and I decided you don't need to talk for it. You just need to be hard and stay quiet."

He was hard. There wasn't a lot of debate about that part. She rolled the condom on him herself, quick and businesslike, and then she sank down onto him, slow, both hands on his chest, and they both went quiet in a different way.

She rode him slow. Really slow, unhurried, like she had all morning, which she did, and her hand came up and covered his mouth. Not hard. Just there.

"No talking," she murmured. "I mean it. I want to hear you, but not words. Just... just this."

So he breathed against her palm and watched her in the gray light, her hair a mess, the hickey on her throat from Thursday, her eyes half closed, moving on him like the ride itself was the whole point and not the ending. It went on a long time. His hands stayed on her hips because she'd put them there and he didn't dare move them. She sped up a little, then a little more, her breath going short, her hand pressing harder over his mouth.

"Kelsey," she whispered, not really a word, just his name, over and over, and he felt her clench around him and he went with her, quiet, like she'd asked, his whole body straining up off the mattress while she rode it out on top of him.

She stayed there. Slumped forward, cheek on his chest, her hand finally sliding off his mouth.

"Okay," she said into his skin. "Now you can talk."

"I can't feel my legs."

"Good." She yawned. "Timer says the week's not over. Three days left."

He slept again after that. When he woke the second time it was full daylight, and the bed beside him was empty. He could hear water running in the bathroom. He lay there a while, looking at the ceiling, feeling the dull sweet ache everywhere from two nights of being handled like she owned him.

He did own it, in a way. He'd signed up for it. He'd said give it a week with his whole chest, and she'd taken him at his word.

The water shut off. A minute later Alissa came out with wet hair and his blue shirt on again, the frayed one. She had a mug of coffee for him.

"Hey, sleeping beauty."

"Hey yourself." He took the mug. She was 24 and had been running him like a drill sergeant for four days and he'd never felt better and never felt stranger.

"What time is it?"

"Almost noon. Somebody wore me out last night." She grinned and sat on the edge of the bed.

"Somebody wore me out at dawn."

"Both of us, then. Martyrs, the two of us."

She drank her coffee. He drank his. The light through the blinds made stripes on the quilt, and he should have just enjoyed it, and mostly he did, but there was a splinter in it that had been working deeper all week. He turned the mug in his hands.

"Can I ask you something? Off the clock."

Her face did a thing. Small, quick, gone. "Sure."

"This week. Is it for you, or is it for me? Are we doing this because you want it, or because you're trying to prove something to me?"

The room got quiet. She set her mug down on the nightstand and looked at the blinds instead of him.

"What makes you think that?" she asked.

"Because Thursday, when I had my mouth on you, you said nobody had ever done that before. And you said it like it was a confession. And Friday you barely let me talk. And this morning you literally covered my mouth." He kept his voice level. "I love it, Alissa. All of it. But it feels like there's a wall in there somewhere, and I keep walking into it."

She picked at the frayed cuff of the shirt. He waited. This was one of the things he'd learned about her in eighteen months, that she would talk if you gave her the silence to do it in.

"Okay," she said finally. "Here it is." She pulled her knees up onto the bed, sitting cross-legged, facing him. "I'm scared."

"Of me?"

"Of what you're seeing. During. When it's just the two of us and nobody's performing anything." She took a breath. "I started transitioning at 21. I'm 24. Three years of this. And every guy I've been with, at some point, there's a moment. A flinch. Something in the eyes. They wanted me up to a point and then the part of me they weren't expecting showed up and I watched them renegotiate. Every single time. So this week, yes, part of it is for me. Because if I lead, if I set the pace, I never have to see the flinch. I never have to find out."

Kelsey put his coffee down. "You think I'm going to flinch?"

"I think you're careful with me." Her voice cracked a little and she hated it, he could see she hated it. "You've been careful since the day we met. Like I'm glass. You fly airplanes for a living, Kelsey, you handle three-hundred-mile-an-hour machines, and you touch me like I might dissolve. What else is that?"

He didn't have an answer ready. He reached across and took her hand and she let him.

"I'm not glass," she said. "And I'm not a test you're passing. I'm a woman who is crazy about you and terrified that if I stop running the show for five minutes you'll see something you don't want."

"Alissa."

"Let me finish. I've been watching your face all week. Waiting for it. That's the truth. That's the wall you keep walking into, it's mine, and I built it, and I don't know how to take it down."

The timer sat on the dresser where it always sat. He looked at it, ticking away the last three days.

"Okay," he said. "My turn."

She nodded, braced.

"I didn't meet you at Dave's party and think, well, here's someone I'll be careful with. I met you and thought, oh, there she is. That's it. First time in my life, by the way. I've been in relationships before. I've been engaged once. Nobody ever made me feel wanted the way you do. Not once. You look at me like you picked me." His thumb moved over her knuckles. "So no, I'm not careful because I think you're fragile. I'm careful because I've never had anything this good and I didn't want to blow it by being the same clumsy idiot I've been before."

"That's not clumsy," she said. "That's just you."

"Maybe. But I hear you. I hear the wall." He shifted around to face her the same way she was facing him. "So here's what I want. Keep the rules. Keep leading. I'll follow you anywhere, I mean that. But do it as a game, not a wall. We play it because it's fun and it's ours. Not because you're afraid of what happens when you stop."

Her eyes were shining. "You'd keep doing it? Even knowing?"

"Alissa. I knelt on that carpet for fifteen minutes on Wednesday because you told me to, and I would have stayed an hour. There's nothing to flinch from. I've seen all of you and I'm still here, asking for more."

She made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob and launched herself at him. The coffee mug survived by luck. She ended up in his lap, knees on either side, her forehead against his.

"Okay," she whispered. "Game, not wall. But I have a condition."

"Name it."

"New rule, starting today. Each morning, one of us picks the other's role for the day. You lead me or I lead you. Coin flip or arguing or however we want to decide. That way it's both of us. All week and after, if we want."

"After?"

"After. Obviously after. You think this ends Tuesday?" She kissed him, quick, then again, longer. "This is just the first week, dummy."

"God, I hope so."

"Promise me one thing, though. If I ever do something you don't want, you tell me. Even if I told you not to talk. You tell me anyway. That's the real rule. Above all the other rules."

"Deal. Same goes for you."

"I know. I'm the one who made it up, obviously it goes for me too." She rolled her eyes and he laughed and she kissed him again and this one didn't stop.

* * *

They got up late and ate lunch on the couch and didn't do anything about the new rule until evening, because afternoon happened the ordinary way, dishes and laundry and Alissa painting at the kitchen table while he read in the chair nearby, her foot hooked over his ankle the whole time. It was the best boring afternoon he could remember.

Around seven she put down her brush and looked at him.

"Okay. New rule. Tonight. Who picks?"

"You pick. It's your game."

"Then I pick you." She stood up, wiped her hands on a rag. "Tonight you lead me. One night. Show me what careful looks like when it's not scared."

He stood up too. His heart picked up and he let it. "Okay. But I've been following orders all week. I might be rusty."

"You've flown a plane for three days straight before. You'll manage."

He took her hand and led her down the hall, and at the bedroom door he stopped and turned and looked at her, really looked, the blue shirt and the wet-combed hair and the eyes waiting on him, and whatever she saw in his face made her smile go soft.

"No flinch," she said quietly. It wasn't a question but it was.

"Never was one."

He kissed her then, slow, both hands on her face, and walked her backward into the room. He peeled the blue shirt off her the way he'd wanted to Wednesday, gently, no hurry, and laid it over the chair like it mattered, because it did. He laid her down on the bed and followed her down and took his time. Every inch of her got his mouth or his hands or both. Her back arched off the mattress when he got between her thighs, and he stayed there a long while, unhurried, listening to her come apart under him once and then again, her fingers twisted in his hair, saying his name in that broken way he'd only heard since Thursday.

When he finally pushed into her she was gasping and gripping his shoulders and looking up at him with her whole face, no wall anywhere in it.

"There he is," she breathed. "There's my Kelsey."

"Here I am," he said, and moved.

Afterward she was sprawled across his chest, boneless, drawing circles on his skin with one finger.

"So tomorrow," she said. "I pick."

"You picked tonight."

"That was tonight's pick. Tomorrow's is separate. I'm thinking you're the one on your knees again. I liked that."

"God, you're greedy."

"You have no idea." She tipped her head up and kissed the underside of his jaw, the spot she'd kissed Wednesday night when she'd said tomorrow, same time. "And Sunday? I'll pick something nice. Something slow."

"And the week after?"

"I'll pick that too." She yawned against his neck. "I'll always pick you, Kelsey. Get used to it."

He held her until she fell asleep, and then a while longer, because she was warm and she was his and she had chosen him, out loud, twice.