Pegged, Diapered, and Trained by Four Lesbian Roommates

The lease had my name on it, fourth bedroom, six hundred a month, and I had read every line except the one that mattered.

Mara found it for me. She pointed to a clause near the bottom, the one I had skimmed because it was the day I was carrying boxes and my arms ached and I wanted the keys. House rules to be agreed upon move-in. I had signed. Three weeks later I sat on the long couch with the four of them around me and learned what the rule was.

“You’ve been late twice this week,” Mara said. She wasn’t loud. She never had to be. “And you wet the bed Tuesday. Joss did the laundry. She found the sheet.”

My face went hot. I opened my mouth to say it was a spilled glass, water, anything, and nothing came out, because the truth was I had woken at three with the sheet warm under me and I had balled it up and hidden it and told no one. The lie died before it reached air. They already knew. That was the thing about this house. They always already knew.

“I can buy a mattress protector,” I said. My voice came out small and I hated it.

Devon laughed once through her nose. She was the youngest of them, twenty-six, with a buzzed head and a way of looking at you like she was reading the back of a cereal box. “She thinks a protector fixes it.”

“It doesn’t fix anything,” Petra said. Petra was the quiet one. She sat in the armchair with her legs folded under her and a paperback closed over one finger, and she had not raised her voice once in three weeks, and somehow she was the one I was most afraid of. “It treats the sheet. The sheet isn’t the problem.”

Mara crouched in front of me. Up close she smelled like clean cotton and something sharper under it. She put two fingers under my chin and tipped my face up so I had to look at her, and my pulse jumped in a way that had nothing to do with being scared, and that was the first betrayal of the night, the one I couldn’t take back.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “We’re going to take care of it for you. Since you can’t.”

I should have stood up. The door was right there. My coat was on the hook by it. I had a job, a car, a savings account with four figures in it, I had given a presentation to thirty people on Monday and not one of them would believe what was happening to me on this couch. The part of my brain that ran all of that was screaming at me to get the coat and go. And underneath it, lower, in a place I didn’t have words for, something had already gone soft and warm and willing, and it scared me worse than Mara did, because it wasn’t listening to the screaming at all.

“Joss,” Mara said, not looking away from me. “Get the bag from the hall closet.”

Joss got up. She was tall, freckled, with paint on her knuckles, and she moved like she did everything in this house, easy and sure. I heard the closet door. I heard a zipper. The sound of plastic, the particular crinkle of it, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

“No,” I said. “Mara. I’m not. I’m a grown woman, I’m not doing that.”

“You said no,” Mara agreed. She still hadn’t let go of my chin. “Did you hear a question?”

I hadn’t. She hadn’t asked me anything. The realization landed in my gut like a stone going down a well, and I waited to be furious about it, and the fury didn’t come. What came instead pooled between my legs, slow and shameful, and I pressed my thighs together on the couch and prayed none of them could tell.

Petra could tell. Petra always could. She watched me shift and a corner of her mouth moved, just barely, and she turned a page in a book she wasn’t reading.

Joss came back with the bag and set it on the coffee table. She drew the things out one at a time and lined them up, and the four of them watched me watch the table fill, and that was its own kind of stripping, slower than hands. A folded white thing, thick, that crinkled when she set it down. A bottle. A wide flat brush with soft bristles. And last, from the bottom of the bag, a harness of black straps and a curved length of silicone, blunt and patient, which she laid across the end of the table like a place setting for later.

My eyes went to it and stuck. I couldn’t breathe right.

“Not yet,” Mara said, following my look. “First things first. A baby doesn’t get that. A baby has to earn that, and you haven’t earned anything yet. You’ve just made a mess and hidden it.”

Baby. The word hit me low and I made a sound I didn’t mean to make, a small broken catch in my throat, and Devon heard it and grinned wide.

“Oh,” Devon said. “She likes it.”

“I don’t,” I said. My voice cracked in the middle of the lie. “I don’t, I don’t like it, I want my coat.”

“Then stand up and get it,” Mara said.

She let go of my chin. She sat back on her heels and she gave me the whole room, the clear path to the door, the coat on the hook, my keys in the pocket. She gave me everything I had been screaming for. Nobody held me down. Nobody touched me. The couch was soft under me and the front door was eleven steps away and all I had to do was take them.

I didn’t move.

I sat there with my hands flat on my own thighs and I felt the wet ache between them get worse the longer I stayed, and the staying was the worst thing I had ever done to myself, worse than the sheet, worse than the lie. Because the sheet I could blame on sleep. This I was doing awake. This I was choosing, eleven steps from the door, with four women watching me choose it.

“That’s what I thought,” Mara said softly.

Petra closed her book. The small click of it was the loudest thing in the room.

“Up,” Mara said. “On the blanket. You know how.”

I didn’t know how. I knew exactly how. Those were the same thing now and that was the whole horror of it. I slid off the couch onto the folded blanket Joss had spread on the floor, and my legs would not work like adult legs, they folded wrong, they put me down on my back with my knees coming up, and some animal part of me arranged my own body into the shape they wanted before my mind could refuse on my behalf.

Mara knelt over me. Devon and Joss came down on either side. Petra stayed in the chair, above us all, watching, and I understood without being told that she was the one this was really for, that I was being made into something for her to look at.

“Hips up,” Mara said.

I lifted my hips. The button of my jeans gave under her fingers. She drew the zipper down one tooth at a time, slow, and the cool air of the room reached the wet patch on my underwear, and she paused there with her hand resting flat and warm over the front of me, not moving, just there, holding the proof of me under her palm.

“Oh,” she said, very quietly, just for me. “Look how much you don’t like it.”

The shame went through me like heat off a stove and my hips pushed up into her hand before I could stop them, asking, and I heard Devon breathe out a laugh and Joss say something low I didn’t catch, and Petra in the chair turned one more page she would never read.

“Please,” I said. I didn’t know what I was asking for. That was the most frightening word I had ever said because it came out of the part of me that had stopped screaming, the soft warm part that had been waiting under everything, and it had wanted this since the day I carried the boxes in and signed without reading.

“Please what,” Mara said. She slid my jeans down off my hips, slow, peeling them, and the soft brush sat waiting on the table, and the white thing waited folded, and the black straps waited at the end for whenever I earned them or failed to. “Say it properly. Tell the room what you are.”

She hooked one finger in the wet cotton at my hip and started to draw it down.