Pass

The jar was Lena’s idea, which is what Owen will say later, when they’re telling it in the dark.

It’s a Mason jar from the back of the kitchen cupboard, and on Sunday afternoon, with the rain coming down so hard the windows have gone grey, she sets it on the coffee table between them along with two pens and a stack of index cards cut in half.

“Truth or dare,” she says. “Grown-up version.”

Owen looks up from his book. Five years married, and he still looks at her like that when she surprises him: eyebrows up, mouth tucked into the start of a smile.

“Grown-up how?”

“We each write ten dares. They go in the jar folded, so we don’t know whose is whose. Truths you make up on the spot. You get two passes each for the whole game.” She holds up two red poker chips from the junk drawer. “Use them, and the round’s over, no questions. Run out, and you do whatever comes out of the jar.”

“And if one of us says stop?”

“Then we stop. That’s not a pass. That’s just stop.” She taps the cards. “Rule two. They have to get worse. Write them so the first ones are easy and the last ones scare you a little.”

He closes the book.

They write in silence on opposite ends of the sofa, shielding the cards with their hands like card players. Lena’s face is hot by her fourth dare. By her eighth, she has to stop and drink some water. She sees Owen pause over one card for a long time, pen hovering, and then write something quickly and fold it twice, very small.

The jar fills. She shakes it.

“You first,” Owen says. “Truth or dare?”

“Truth.”

He thinks. “When was the last time you touched yourself, and what were you thinking about?”

She’d expected something gentler. “Wednesday,” she says. “In the shower, after you left for work.” She makes herself hold his eyes. “I was thinking about you pinning my wrists over my head and not letting me move.”

Something shifts in his face. “You’ve never asked for that.”

“I’m asking now. Sort of. Your turn.”

---

The first dares are easy, just as she wanted. Owen has to kiss her neck for a full minute without touching her anywhere else, and by thirty seconds she’s arching toward him, and he makes her sit still. She has to take off her shirt and bra and play the next three rounds topless, the cool air of the living room drawing her nipples tight. Owen has to answer a truth while she sits in his lap — what’s the dirtiest thing you’ve never told me you wanted? — and he turns red and says, “Watching you get yourself off. Just watching. Not touching. Making you show me.” Lena feels it hit her low in the belly, and feels him hard under her through his jeans.

“That’s on a card,” she says. “Somewhere in there. I wrote it.”

“Then I hope I draw it.”

She draws next. She unfolds it and reads it in Owen’s blocky capitals:

GO GET MY BLACK TIE. GIVE IT TO ME. PUT YOUR WRISTS TOGETHER.

Her pulse jumps. She looks at the red chips on the table. She doesn’t touch them.

When she comes back from the bedroom with the tie, he’s standing. He takes it from her without a word and binds her wrists in front of her, firm, two loops and a knot, then slides two fingers under the silk to check it isn’t too tight. That small, careful thing undoes her more than the knot does.

“Color?” he says, and she realizes he must have looked it up, sometime, privately, and never said.

“Green,” she says, voice unsteady. “So green.”

“Then sit down. You’ll draw with your hands tied.”

---

From there, the dares stop being easy.

She draws one of her own: Bend over the arm of the sofa. Five spanks, counted. The other person decides how hard. She’d written it at two in the morning on a dare to herself and never expected to see it again. She bends over the arm of the sofa in her jeans, bound wrists stretched out across the cushion, and Owen unbuttons her jeans and tugs them and her underwear down to her thighs, and she hears him exhale.

The first spank is cautious. “Harder,” she says, into the cushion. “That’s not the dare.”

The second one cracks across the room. She gasps. “One. Two.” Heat blooms across her skin and spreads inward, down, pooling between her legs. By five she’s squirming, and he lays his palm flat on the burning skin and leaves it there, and she can feel how wet she is, and so can he, because his hand slides lower and stays there for one long, unbearable second before he takes it away.

“That wasn’t on the card,” she manages.

“It’s my turn to draw,” he says, and she can hear him smiling.

He draws one of hers: Strip. Sit in the armchair. Do whatever the other person says, for five minutes, without touching them.

He undresses slowly, which isn’t fair. She kneels up on the sofa with her jeans still around her thighs and her wrists still tied, and watches him settle naked into the armchair, already hard, flushed, his hand resting on his thigh.

“Touch yourself,” she says. “Slowly. Don’t you dare speed up.”

He does. She’s never watched him like this before, from the outside, in daylight, with the rain on the windows. His hand moves slowly up and down, and his breathing changes, and his eyes never leave her body.

“Stop,” she says at two minutes.

He stops. His jaw clenches.

“Again. Slower.”

She takes him up three times in five minutes and makes him stop each time, his hand gripping the arm of the chair, his chest heaving, a bead of wetness glistening at his tip. The third time, he groans her name like a curse, and she feels it between her own legs like a touch.

“Time,” she says, and her voice isn’t steady either.

---

Five dares left in the jar. Then four.

She draws: Kneel. Hands behind your back. Blindfolded. The other person may touch you anywhere, any way, for three minutes. You may not come. Owen ties his scarf over her eyes, and the world goes dark and full of sound: rain, his breath, the creak of the floorboard as he circles her. Then fingertips at her collarbone. A mouth on her nipple, sucking hard enough to make her cry out. A hand sliding between her parted thighs, finding her slick and swollen. He circles her clit with two fingers, slowly at first, then faster, until her thighs shake and she’s leaning into his hand, hips rolling.

“Close?” he murmurs at her ear.

“Yes. Yes.”

He takes his hand away. She sobs into the dark.

“Ninety seconds left,” he says, and puts it back.

He does it four more times. By the end she’s begging, please, please, Owen, wrists straining against the tie, so close she can feel the first flutters gathering deep inside. Each time he waits until she’s right at the edge, then lifts his hand and lets her hang there, shuddering. When the three minutes end, he pulls the scarf off and she blinks up at him, wrecked, her whole body throbbing.

“You wrote that one,” she says.

“I did.”

“I hate you.”

“Your turn,” he says gently, and holds out the jar.

---

Two cards left.

She draws the small one, folded twice, the one he’d hesitated over. She has to unfold it with her wrists tied, and her fingers are clumsy.

TELL ME YOUR REAL FANTASY. THE ONE YOU’VE NEVER SAID. THEN I’LL DO IT, IF I CAN.

She sits back on her heels. The red chips are still on the table, both of them. She could pass. He’d let her.

“I want you to use me,” she says. “Not ask. Not check every thirty seconds if it’s okay. I want to tell you yes once, at the start, and then I want you to just take me, however you want, for as long as you want. Bent over something, tied up, whatever. And I want you to make me wait to come until you’ve finished.” She’s shaking. “I want to belong to you for an hour and not have to decide anything.”

The rain is very loud.

“Okay,” Owen says quietly. “Say yes.”

“Yes.”

“And stop is still stop.”

“Stop is still stop.”

He pulls her up off the sofa by the knot of the tie and walks her to the dining table and bends her over it, cheek to the cool wood, wrists stretched out in front of her. He kicks her feet apart. She hears him behind her, feels the blunt heat of him nudging against her, and then he pushes inside her in one long slow stroke, and she cries out at the stretch of it, at the fullness, at how much she’s needed it after all that waiting.

He doesn’t ask. He holds her hips and takes her, deep and steady and then harder, the table creaking under them. Every time she gets close he slows, or stops, or pulls out completely and leaves her empty and clenching while he runs his hand down her spine and says not yet. She has no idea how long it goes on. She stops counting. She stops thinking. She is only her body, held down and used and wanted, the edge drawn out so long it’s become its own kind of pleasure.

When he finally comes, with his hand fisted in her hair and his voice breaking on her name, he stays buried inside her and reaches around and touches her, and says, “Now,” and she comes so hard her knees give out and he has to hold her up.

---

Later, on the sofa, under the blanket, with the tie in a heap on the floor and the rain finally easing, Lena reaches over and picks up the jar.

There’s one card left.

“Leave it,” Owen says, his mouth in her hair. “Next Sunday.”

She turns it over in her fingers without unfolding it. Then she reaches for the pen, and a fresh card, and starts writing.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Next Sunday’s,” she says, and covers it with her hand.