Safe
The first stage of the plan worked perfectly.
Peter and Sue sat in the Student Union coffee bar, as had become their habit on Tuesday mornings. Now that they no longer lived in the same hall of residence, and their digs were in separate parts of town, they couldn’t spend as much time chatting and indulging their shared love of absurd humour as they had in the previous year. Still, once a week they both had a gap between tutorials at the same time, so they made the most of that one-hour window of opportunity to catch up on life, have a laugh, and occasionally vent about their frustrations.
Just after concluding an anecdote about filling a friend’s boots with polystyrene packaging chips, Sue steered the conversation in a more serious direction.
“How are you getting on with the course?”
Peter shrugged. “Not bad. It gets a bit heavy in places, but I’m doing okay so far. How’s yours going?”
“Oh, I’m fine. But I’m getting worried about Barbara. She’s struggling a lot right now, and it’s causing a bad atmosphere at home.”
Barbara was a mutual friend of theirs: one of Sue’s housemates, and a fellow student on Peter’s course.
Peter thought back to recent classes. “Yeah, she has seemed a bit tetchy of late.”
“The problem is, that creepy Professor of yours… Is it Burnside?”
“Bernstein. Like the random Leonard in ‘It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine)’.”
“Whatever. Anyway, he goes through everything too quickly for her to keep up, and she’s too intimidated to say anything when she can’t follow him, so a lot of the time she hasn’t got a clue what’s going on.”
“Bernie’s not so bad, really. Just a bit intense.”
“Maybe so. But she doesn’t see it that way, and she’s getting bad grades and stressing out and making things bloody unpleasant for Jacqui and me in the evenings and at weekends.”
He sighed. “That sucks. I don’t know if I could do anything to help.”
“Such as?”
“Well, I do understand what we’ve been going over—at least, I think I do, and my marks seem to bear that out. So if she doesn’t mind a bit of extra-curricular study, I’m okay with giving up a few hours to try and clear up whatever’s confusing her.”
‘Re-sult!’ Sue inwardly gloated. ‘And he thinks it’s his own idea.’
She feigned casualness. “That could work. Do you want to talk to her about it, or shall I?”
“Probably better if you do. That way it’s less likely to come across as,” he adopted a stereotypical American gameshow host accent, “‘Hey, I hear you’re failing the course! D’you want me to patronise you and show off how smart I am?’”
Sue smiled. “I’m sure I can come up with something more tactful.”
“Hey, Babs! You know that ‘study’ date you wanted me to try and set up for you with Pete? Friday night all right for you?”
Barbara confirmed the arrangements with Peter at the end of a lecture the next day, and at the end of lectures on the Friday, the two of them piled into Sue’s car for the 20-minute drive to the women’s digs, a house near the top of a steep hill on the outskirts of town. Once she’d dropped off her passengers and quietly wished Barbara good luck, Sue drove off to see her boyfriend Brian.
Many hours of study (and one Chinese takeaway) later, Barbara’s patience had all but run out. Sue hadn’t lied to Peter about Barbara’s having difficulties with her studies, and going through everything again with Peter had significantly improved her understanding of the subject, but he appeared to be totally clueless about the main reason why she’d wanted an evening alone with him. The problem couldn’t be lack of interest—she’d noticed him embarrassedly averting his gaze from her cleavage and legs often enough to be certain that the attraction was there. So why did he keep ignoring the increasingly obvious signals she was giving him?
He checked the time. “Any idea when Sue’s getting back from her date with Brian? I don’t think there’s anything more I can help you with right now, so I’d better start thinking about getting home.”
Perhaps she ought to try spelling things out for him a bit more clearly. “Not till tomorrow. They’re spending the night together.” And so should we.
A slight frown furrowed his brow. “What? So is Jacqui taking me home, then?”
How could someone so smart be so stupid? “No, she’s away for the weekend. Visiting an old school friend, I think.”
“She could have told me I’d have to make my own way home. I wouldn’t have stayed so long if I’d known. I can’t afford a taxi, so it’s gonna take hours.”
“Don’t be silly. You can spend the night here.”
Barbara had never heard a man squeak before.
He cleared his throat and, looking down at the floor, said, “That’s very… kind of you, but I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“It wouldn’t be safe.”
“What do you mean, ‘safe’?”
He squirmed a little. “Well, you know, I’m a man and you’re a woman…”
“I was beginning to wonder if you’d noticed that.”
“So I can’t risk being in a situation where I might… lose control.”
She suppressed the urge to facepalm. Okay, it was great that he was properly on board with ‘No means no’, but he appeared not to have grasped that there were options other than ‘no’, let alone that she had already progressed some way past ‘yes’ and into the vicinity of ‘shut up and fuck me already’.
Peter looked up, made eye contact. “I should go.”
Barbara moved between him and the door. “You can’t. It’s almost chucking out time in the pubs, so you’d be out on the streets with a load of drunks just spoiling for a fight.”
He grimaced. “I’m gonna have to risk it. I don’t want to get beaten up, but I’d rather that than potentially end up hurting you.”
Should she just come right out and say, “I want you to shag me senseless, so quit worrying about consent when it’s not an issue.” Probably not: he’d got himself so worked up that the very mention of sex might make him do something stupid like try jumping through the window.
He peered around her at the door. “Can you get out of the way, please?”
Just relax, you stupid… Inspiration struck. “Pete… Peter, you say you’re afraid of losing control, right?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“I know a technique that can help you with that. Will you let me help you? Please?”
Uncertain, but wanting to believe, he answered, “Okay.”
“All right, take a deep breath, and hold it. And out. And in. And hold. And out…”
Once his breathing had settled into a suitable rhythm, she moved on. “Now you need to focus on something… Can you see the mark on the ceiling, near the window?”
Peter’s eyes sought and found the stain caused by a leaky seal in the bathroom upstairs.
“That’s right. Just keep looking at that and breathing slowly as you listen to my voice. Keep looking at the mark and listening to my words, and if any other thoughts come into your head, just let them pass through and carry on concentrating on the mark and my words.”
Peter’s hunched-up shoulders began to drop as the tension ebbed from his body. He continued to stare at the stain, and started to blink.
“It’s okay to blink, Peter. That just shows that the technique is working. Keep concentrating on the mark, and breathing slowly, and listening to my voice, and blink as much as you need to. Staring like that can be tiring for the eyes, but that’s all right. Just keep looking for as long as you can, and breathing in and out like I told you, and listening to my words, and if you ever feel you just can’t keep your eyes open any longer, that’s fine too, and you can just let them shut and go in with the breathing and listening to me…”
Gradually she lulled him into a trance. Once she was confident that he was properly under, Barbara decided to take a chance. “Okay, Peter, this is how you can stop yourself losing control. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” he answered, his voice flat.
“You can’t lose what you don’t have. So if you give control over to me, you won’t be able to lose it. That makes sense, right?”
“Yes.” His shoulders sagged further.
“So I want you to give control to me. Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of it. Can you do that for me? Just sat that you’re giving me control, and then I can take it and you won’t have to be afraid of losing it any more.”
“I… give you… control.”
For a moment she was tempted to try testing that control with one of the staples of a stage hypnotist’s act, like making his arms float up or getting him to impersonate an animal of some kind, but then something more serious occurred to her.
“Tell me, Peter, have you ever lost control with a woman?”
“No.”
“Then why are you so afraid of it happening?”
“Andrea said…”
“Andrea on our course?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to listen to her. She’s a miserable bitch who hates men and sex and tries to justify that by calling it feminism.”
Reassured that Peter’s fears didn’t indicate that he could be a danger to her, Barbara tried to figure out how best to continue with her hypnotic seduction of him. Just telling him to ignore Andrea’s rhetoric might not be enough to override the hang-ups he’d had instilled into him. Still, there were other ways of getting around the problem.
“You said that you don’t want to hurt me, right?”
“Yes,” he agreed, his tone a little more emphatic.
“You know that it’s possible to hurt people emotionally as well as physically, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t want to hurt me either of those ways, do you?”
“No.”
“Do you like me, Peter?”
“Yes.” He smiled.
“Do you find me attractive?”
He answered more quietly, “Yes.”
“Do you think I’m sexy?”
Barely audibly, he said, “Yes,” again.
“Good. Because I like you. And I want you. It would hurt me if you left me here on my own tonight. So will you spend the night with me?”
He could only answer, “Yes.”
“One more thing. You have to be honest with me. About the things that matter. So if I ever tell you to do something that you really, absolutely do not want to do, you need to let me know why it’s a no-no, and we can work things out. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. In a moment I’m going to count to three, and when I do, you’ll come out of this trance, but I will still have control. You’ll be able to think and talk and act like your normal self, but you will do as I say unless I try to push you too far. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“One, starting to come back to yourself. Two, feeling so good and happy and relaxed. And three, fully alert, eyes open, back with me.”
Peter snapped into wakefulness and gaped at Barbara, struggling to mentally process what had just happened to him.
“Oh, quit the goldfish act and come over here and kiss me.”
He had no problem with obeying that instruction, and when Barbara pushed her tongue between his lips and into his mouth, he didn’t hesitate to do the same to her. Their hands explored each other’s bodies, and Barbara soon felt his growing arousal as well as her own.
Before the need to feel him inside her became too much to bear, she pulled away from his hot mouth and agile tongue (which she fully intended to put to good use lower down) and panted, “Let’s get to bed.”
As she led Peter up the stairs to her room, she checked that she had the pack of condoms she’d got just in case he’d come unprepared, and added, “Don’t worry—it’ll be safe sex.”