Boris called me this morning.

"Why didn’t you call me before?" I said. It rushed out before I could stuff the words back in my mouth.

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you say that,” he replied. “Maybe I should have made the boundaries a little clearer. Or maybe you’re simply a slow learner. Is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it,” I stutter. “Of course.”

“I will call you when I want to call you. And one day I will no longer call you. And you will accept it. Do you want to accept these conditions? Because we can forget it right now. You do know you are totally disposable?”

“I know I'm disposable. I am worse than nothing. Can I meet you today?” I cringe. The way I was going, I'm surprised he didn’t put the phone down on me.

“If you’re sure you wouldn’t prefer a spot of shop lifting?” Boris says, giving a dry laugh.

No I most certainly did not. Instead, I went to his hotel in Covent Garden.

I was so pleased to see him, I almost cried. The whole room felt brimming with light. Flowers everywhere. The beautiful big bed, the sheets so clean and soft.

He tied me to the bed and put a thick vibrator up inside my arse. He kept pushing it in and out, stopping and starting, stopping and starting. It was so frustrating and yet insanely pleasurable at the same time. I teetered on the edge of orgasm for what seemed like hours, until I was reduced to just a hole, brimful of sensation. I was getting there, slowly, approaching orgasm like a parched traveller who sees a river on the horizon. Then, abruptly, he went out of the room and made himself a cup of tea. A fucking cup of tea. He brought the tea back in and made me drink it and while I held the hot tea in my mouth he wanted me to give him a blow job. The warm liquid does something for him, don’t ask me what. I was glad to do it.

After he came, he got out a cane and said I would have to punished. For the way I had spoken to him on the phone.

He untied me and had me kneel at the side of the bed. I trembled, hardly daring to show him how much I longed for his ministrations. First he slipped his fingers into me, and rubbed and rubbed at my G-spot until I came all over his hand, and then, while I was still shuddering beside the bed, the lashings of the cane rained down and down, until all I could see was just a red firey glow, and his eyes, pinholes of darkness, burning through the blaze.

"Are you sorry now?" he said, twisting my hair in his fingers and yanking it back.

"Yes,” I whimpered. “I’m sorry."

"For what are you sorry?"

Pleasure and pain were blurred together inside my tired aching brain and I could no longer remember what I was meant to be sorry about. But the cane came down, harder and faster now. It really seared me, like a hot iron pressed into flesh.

"I am sorry for the way I talked to you on the phone," I managed to spit out eventually.

And after I thought I could take no more, he hit me once again, and this time the skin was lacerated, and blood flowed.

It was almost over. Then he slicked the cane slicked between my legs and an orgasm shuddered through me, like an earthquake.

Now there were fireflies inside the pale empty cavern of my head. The room was flooded with blackness.

He lay beside me on the bed and we cuddled.

I felt my heart rip open and felt Boris drip in. Oh no. Not that. I don’t want to get involved. Not with him.

And yet, a little voice says, too late. You are.

It is too easy to get involved with Boris. Boris makes no demands on me. None. Whereas Dan at least requires me to wash his clothes, to occasionally cook meals, to listen to new ideas for documentaries he wants to develop, which are sometimes staggeringly dull, while Boris just watches me, intently, like a cat watches a mouse, before it pounces. It’s a predatory expression, but it also, in some bizarre way, makes me feel loved.

Because, of course, everything I have told myself about Boris is false. I’ve told myself not to get involved, because it makes no sense to get involved. And yet, my heart says, of could I want to get involved with him, because just being with him gives me such a charge.

I remember that time we went shopping together. Just walking around the streets and looking in shop windows and laughing together, like you do when you first know someone and are just so blown away with being with them that you can hardly believe your luck, that this person is as fascinated by you as you are by them. And it all comes back. How could you have forgotten how it felt to be this alive? You knew it once, that time before, when you fell in love, before it all crumpled to dust under your fingertips.

Boris and I have it. We have that connection.

That is what I miss with Dan. That sense of connection. That is what is missing, although it seemed to be there more at the beginning. When you think about all the love affairs you have ever had, it is at the beginning, when there is that strangeness, that fascination with another person, that there is a sense of closeness. And sometimes I think this perception is an illusion, for doesn’t it always break down at some point, and all that is left is this human stripped down to the bone, and now you know the person, you really know them, and once you know them, the closeness and intimacy is gone. That is what I have noticed. And it would be the same with anyone else. At the beginning, that ache, that longing, to know that other person. How addictive, how almost impossible to withstand it all is, and how repetitive is the cycle, and so full of disappointment, because the human is so limited, and the ability to love is so limited, and yet some of us keep going, forever searching for that elusive person who will make life easier. If only such a person existed!

And so I think, maybe with Boris it can always be like this. Because we will always be stuck at the beginning.

Because he has shut me out. Because I will never know him.

Maybe it can stay this way forever.

I wonder with who else he has this kind of anonymous relationship with. Instead of feeling jealous, the thought of him being with other women arouses me.

I leave the room in disarray. The sheets smeared with my blood.

This evening I made love with Dan, and think about Boris. That hasn’t happened before.

I am sunk.