Wetting the Bed for Mommy

I locked the door of my own car before I crossed her driveway, like that would keep any of this from being real.

The house was warm in a way mine never managed. Lamps, not the overhead. Something baking that I could not name. Sloane opened the door before I knocked, and she looked at me the way you look at a coat you already own, fond and a little proprietary, no question in it at all.

“There you are,” she said. Not a greeting. A confirmation.

I am thirty-one. I run a team of nine people. That morning I had stood at the front of a room and told grown men with twenty years on me exactly where their budget had gone wrong, and not one of them argued. I held that fact in my mouth like a stone the whole way up her stairs, because I could already feel it slipping, and I wanted to remember holding it.

The room at the top had a bed bigger than the situation called for. White rails I did not let my eyes stay on. A folded stack of something thick and pale on the dresser, and my stomach dropped at the sight of it before my brain had even finished the word.

“Arms up,” Sloane said.

“I can undress myself.”

She had already started on the buttons of my blouse. Her hands were unhurried. That was the thing that did it, every time, the unhurry, the way she moved like the outcome was decided and we were both just walking toward it. My blouse came open. Her knuckle brushed the bare skin under my collarbone and my breath caught and I hated that it caught.

This is a transaction, I told myself. You answered an ad. You can stand up and put your shirt back on and she would let you, she said she would let you. The thought arrived clear and sharp and then it just sat there, useless, while I lifted my arms so she could pull the blouse off my shoulders.

“Good,” she said.

One word. My face went hot. I have never in my life cared whether a stranger thought I was good, and my body lit up over it like a struck match, low and fast, between my legs, before I had given it any permission at all. I pressed my thighs together. She saw me do it. She did not say anything, which was worse.

She undressed me down to nothing the way you’d peel fruit, attention on the task and not on me being a person about it. The air in the room found every part of me. I stood there with my arms crossed over my chest and she took my wrists and moved them down to my sides, gentle, final, like I’d been told once already.

“You don’t hide from me,” Sloane said. “We’re past that.”

We were not past anything. I had been in her house for nine minutes.

“Lie down.”

The mattress took my weight. She lifted my hips with one forearm under the small of my back, easy, like I weighed what she decided I weighed, and slid the thick folded thing under me. Cool. Quilted. My whole face was burning now and I stared at the ceiling and tried to make my breathing normal and could not.

“Knees apart.”

“Sloane.”

“Mommy,” she corrected, and waited.

The word would not come out of me. I have a master’s degree. I have fired people. The single syllable sat behind my teeth like something shameful, and the not-saying-it stretched until my eyes were stinging, and she just waited with her hand warm on my knee, patient as weather.

“Mommy,” I said.

It came out small. It came out wrecked. And the second it left me something unclenched in my chest that I did not know had been clenched my whole adult life, and my eyes spilled over, and I was wet between my legs at the exact same time, the two things tangled so tight I could not have pulled them apart with a knife.

“There she is,” Sloane murmured. “Knees apart, baby.”

My knees fell open. I told them not to and they did it anyway.

The wipe was cold. She drew it down slow, deliberate, from my hip across the crease of me and lower, and I made a sound I had never made before, thin and high, and clapped a hand over my own mouth. She took my wrist again and set it back on the bed.

“You don’t cover that either,” she said. “I want to hear you.”

The powder came next, a soft hiss of it, her palm spreading it warm and smooth over me, over the inside of my thighs, one finger trailing close to where I was aching and then deliberately not, going around it, and my hips lifted off the bed chasing her hand without my say-so. She pressed them back down.

“Patience,” she said, and there was the faintest curl of a smile in it, the first one all night, and I wanted to die and I wanted her to do it again.

You are turned on by baby powder, said the cold clear voice in the back of my skull, the one that had run every meeting I had ever won. Powder and a stranger’s voice and a folded white thing. Look at what you are. The voice meant it to land like a slap. Instead it ran down my spine and pooled hot and low and made me clench around nothing, and the shame of that, the shame of being so easy to read, that was the part that soaked me through.

Sloane noticed. Of course she noticed.

“Oh,” she said softly, looking down between my legs, and her voice had gone rich and pleased. “Look how wet you are already. We haven’t even started.”

I shut my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” She did not stop powdering. Her hand was so calm. “This is just your body telling me the truth your mouth won’t. It’s much more honest than you are.”

She drew the thick padding up between my thighs, snug, and the give of it pressed against me right where I needed weight, firm and constant, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek so I would not buck against it. She taped one side. Then the other, her thumb smoothing each tape flat across my hip, sealing me into it, and with every press the padding pushed up tighter against my cunt and my breath kept hitching and hitching.

“There,” she said. “Snug.” She tapped the front of it once, a light pat, and the small shock of it went straight through me and I gasped out loud.

“Mommy,” I said again, and this time I did not even fight it, it just fell out of me, begging without a single thing asked for yet.

“I know,” she said. She sat on the edge of the bed beside me, hip against my ribs, and looked down at me with that fond ownership, smoothing my hair off my forehead. “Here are the rules, and you’re going to listen, because I’ll only say them once.”

I nodded. The padding pulsed against me every time my heart beat.

“You sleep here. You don’t get up in the night. Not for anything.” Her thumb traced my cheekbone. “If you need to go, you go right where you are. That’s what it’s for. That’s what you’re for, tonight.”

The cold voice tried one more time. You will not. You are a continent adult woman and you will lie here all night and hold it out of pure spite and prove you are still yourself. It was the bravest thing I had thought all evening and it lasted about half a second, because she chose that moment to slide her hand down over the front of the padding and press, slow, the heel of her palm grinding it up into me, and the words dissolved into a moan I could not catch in time.

“You won’t last,” she said, reading the thought right off my face, not unkind. “They never do. You’ll fight it because some part of you still thinks fighting me is who you are. And then somewhere around two in the morning you’ll let go, and you’ll cry, and you’ll feel more like yourself than you have in years. I’ve seen it a hundred times.” Her hand kept up that slow press. “But that’s later. That’s for the dark.”

My hips were rolling against her palm now in tiny circles, shameless, the proud stone in my mouth long gone to grit, and I could hear how wet I was through the padding, a soft slick give every time she pressed, and she could hear it too.

“Right now,” Sloane said, leaning down so her mouth was at my ear, her hand never stopping, “I’m going to take care of the other thing first. The thing you’re squeezing your legs around. We can’t have you all worked up at bedtime, can we.”

“Please,” I said. I did not know what I was asking for. I had stopped knowing my own name.

She straightened up. She reached past me to the dresser drawer, and there was a click, a low electric hum starting up in her hand, and she let me lie there and listen to it build while she undid the tapes she had just done, one, then the other, peeling the front of the padding back, baring me to the warm lamplit air all swollen and slick and clenching.

“Look at me,” she said.

I looked at her. The hum was right there now, hovering an inch from where I was throbbing, close enough that the air off it moved against me, and she held it there, watching my face, in no hurry at all.

“Tell me what you are,” Sloane said.

And God help me, I opened my mouth to say it.