The Rules for Saturday

They wrote the rules on Thursday, at the kitchen table, with the laptop shut and the good pen. Helen read them back. Callum initialled each line. He was forty-one. She was thirty-nine. They had been together six years, and the Saturday idea had been his before it was hers, which mattered to both of them.

From nine until four she decided what he wore, where he sat, when he spoke, and what his hands did. He could stop the day with the word red. She could stop it for any reason and owe him no performance of disappointment. No guests. No photos. Lunch happened. Cruelty did not. At four the rules ended whether or not they had finished what they started, and they would eat something ordinary and say, out loud, that the day was over.

On Saturday he woke before her and lay still, already hard, annoyed with himself for it. The list was on the dresser under her watch. When she came out of the shower she did not kiss him good morning. She set the clothes on the bed: the grey T-shirt he slept in, nothing under it, and the thin leather cuff they used on his left wrist because a collar still felt like a costume to him and the cuff did not.

"Wear that. Kneel by the table. Hands on your thighs. You can look at me. You don't speak unless I ask or unless you need red."

"Yes."

"That was the last free answer. Go."

The flat was bright. Someone downstairs was practising scales. Callum knelt on the rug where she pointed and felt ridiculous for three minutes and then, worse, not ridiculous at all. Helen made coffee. She did not offer him any. She sat, drank, read a page of the paper, and only then looked at him as if she had remembered he was in the room.

"Colour."

"Green."

"Good. Stay."

She answered an email. She ate toast. The cuff was warm. His knees began to complain and he did not move them, and the not-moving got into him more deeply than her voice had. When she finally set a cushion down and told him to use it, the relief was so sharp he made a sound.

"Too much?"

"No. I didn't expect the sitting to be the thing."

"Note it. Quiet again."

She had him load the dishwasher, then stand at the sink while she washed the pan she did not trust him with. Ordinary work, except he waited for the next instruction before he dried his hands. By noon his cock had softened and hardened again twice without being touched. Helen noticed and did not mention it. That was worse. She put him in the armchair, which was his chair on every other day, and told him not to cross his legs and not to cover himself.

"Read to me," she said, and handed him the novel on the side table. "Page where the bookmark is. Stop when I say."

His voice was unsteady on the first paragraph and plain by the third. She listened with her feet in his lap, not sexual, proprietary. Halfway down the page she pressed her heel lightly against his cock. He lost the sentence.

"Back a line."

He found it. She kept the pressure there, absent-minded, while he read. When she said stop, he stopped mid-clause. The unfinished sentence sat in his mouth. He understood then what she had meant on Thursday about ordinary choices. It was not the pain. There was hardly any pain. It was not being allowed to decide that the sentence should end.

After lunch, which he ate on the cushion because she said so, she took him to the bedroom. The rules card came with them. She had him stand at the foot of the bed, shirt off, cuff still on.

"You can speak for this part. What do you want?"

"To be told."

"Specific."

"I want you to use my mouth. I want to stay where you put me. I don't want to come until you say."

"Agreed. Red still works. On the bed, on your back, hands on the rail."

She straddled his face still in her shirt and nothing else, and lowered herself until his mouth was where she wanted it. Callum licked as he had learned she liked, slow at the clit, then broader, and she corrected him with a hand in his hair and a shift of her hips. No praise yet. She used him. When she came she did it quietly, grinding down, one hand braced on the headboard, and she stayed there until the aftershock passed.

Then she stroked him. Not kindly. A firm grip, thumb over the head, stopping whenever his thighs tightened.

"Ask."

"Please let me come."

"Not yet."

She did it twice more. The third time she climbed onto his cock and rode him at her pace, the cuff knocking the rail when he forgot and reached for her. She put his hand back.

"Hold."

He held. She came again with him inside her, tighter, and only then leaned down and said, "Now."

He came hard enough to shake, still not grabbing, the instruction doing as much as her body. Helen stayed on him until he softened. She undid the cuff herself. That was in the rules: she put it on, she took it off.

At four she made tea and put his jeans on the chair. Callum dressed. His knees ached. The flat sounded normal. She sat opposite him and waited.

"The day is over," she said.

"The day is over." He turned the mug once. "I thought I would want the sex to be the point. It was the not choosing. Where to sit. Whether the sentence finished. I didn't know it would land like that."

Helen nodded. She did not look triumphant. She looked as if she had been paid attention to.

"Thursday," she said, "we can change the list. Or we can leave it."

"Leave the speaking rule," he said. "I want that one again."

She wrote it down before either of them could turn it into a joke.