I knew I wanted to beat Charlotte. To bruise her. To hurt her.
Not because I was angry. Because she wanted it, and I wanted to give her what she wanted not as punishment, but as reward.
Charlotte had been a good girl in the days leading up to this particular date. She had been generous and attentive, compliant and accommodating. She had consistently demonstrated to me that I was in her mind, that she was thinking of me.
There’s an aspect to all this that is a little difficult for me – that Charlotte gives me this particular set of gifts precisely (and only) when it serves her purposes to do so. That she doesn’t give it to me because I want it; she gives it to me because, in certain moments, she uses me to feel alive – uses me in a way very similar to the way I use her to feel alive. I don’t mind if she uses me. I do, however, mind when she stops. And she does stop, when another man distracts her.
In the lead-up to this date, another man, M1, was distracting her.
Charlotte had been away for a bit with yet another man, an ex of hers – S. This trip had been less than dreamy for Charlotte, and she had been very attentive to me during it (using me to distract her from her boredom, from the trip’s less-than-dreaminess). Prior to her departure, I had told Charlotte I was sorry she wasn’t returning a few days earlier, that there were at least 2 sex parties I would have considered taking her to on the last Saturday night she was scheduled to be gone.
Turns out, this all was based on a misunderstanding: Charlotte told me the wrong dates she’d be away. I internalized those dates. In fact, by the time she left, I knew – or should have known – the correct dates. Somewhere along the line, Charlotte’s plans changed, and she scheduled her return for that Saturday afternoon. She had shared a screenshot of her itinerary with me. I didn’t, however, manage to make the correction in my brain. (She hadn’t called my attention to the change – if not in plans, in the actual dates she would be gone – and I hadn’t noticed. Rather, I just had the original date she had told me of her return fixed in my head.)
And then, two things happened at once: first, I realized she was going to be home that Saturday, and second, at almost precisely the same moment, she told me she was considering going to a sex party with M1 that night. Not one of the parties I had had in mind, but a different one. SNCTM. I had read about this party somewhere, and somewhere along the line had been added to their email list. What I knew about it was that it marketed itself as ridiculously upscale and ridiculously international. L.A. New York. Miami. Moscow (!). Kiev (!!). In my mind, this was sort of the Short Bus/swanky sex club that only exists in films. I was envious. I was jealous. And, I was mad! Their membership page lists membership as costing anywhere from $12,500 to $50,000.
Mostly, I was mad at myself, for not having noticed that she would, in fact, be home on that particular evening, for not having snatched it up. And it was an evening, incidentally, which would have worked uniquely well, in theory, for such a plan. (And/though, in the event, which would have worked uniquely poorly.) But I also was mad at, or really, hurt by, Charlotte. Her not having told me that she would, in fact, be home on the night in question revealed a lack of enthusiasm for my proposed plans. And, she was unmistakably excited, titillated, by her plan with M1.
So that all felt bad.
I’ll rush through the denouement of the lead up to the date:
– We talked through my feelings about her return, her excitement for the date with M1
– I cautioned her that her feelings for M1 and their recent history made a sex club a potentially challenging next date (for her), and advised her, at a minimum, to have a substantive conversation with M1 both about their relationship and about sex club ground rules, not just prior to the date, but more than a few hours prior to the date, in a conversation/date specifically for that purpose
– We had an unpleasant discussion about Charlotte’s lock and key necklace, something that’s become a bit of a venue for our power struggles. I want my collar on her neck. She wears it often. But other times, she wears her lock and key. I’ve asked her to remove the key, told her it feels a bit like an advertisement of availability that exceeds my comfort. She has complied at times. At others, not. I am deeply reluctant to attempt to exert this kind of control over Charlotte outside the bounds of our time together, absent her explicit consent. But I was unhappy to see the key in her necklace as she showed me her pretty face before heading out the door to meet M1. I didn’t ask her to remove the key. I told her it turned me off that she was wearing it. A bit manipulative, this (I apologized later), but nonetheless true to the point of being a radical understatement. It doesn’t turn me off. It repulses me. Grosses me out.
– She met M1, had a meal, and went to the club, without any discussion of their relationship, and only a cursory one about sex club rules of engagement
– The sex club was a fiasco in every way, and a comedy in at least one:
– M1 failed to care for Charlotte extravagantly. He left her unattended and disregarded – and unsatisfied
– Charlotte – a beautiful, sexy woman – felt somehow less than many of the numerous beautiful, elegantly (if upscale whorishly) dressed other women
– When they went back to his place he was uninterested in fucking her
– And when she debriefed with me, she came to understand that the business model of SNCTM is a little different than she had imagined – that the women being comped at a party that men ostensibly pay 10s of thousands of dollars a year to attend are, um, likely there for some combination of business and pleasure. “You think it was a HOOKER party?!?” she said to me. Or really, yelled at me.
All that was two days before we had a quick drink, and three before we had our own proper date. About which you may read shortly, in part 2.