Page 37 of Stella is Starting Over

‘I’ve got friends who are at the Astra, so we’re going to join.’

Dom looks shocked, then deeply amused. ‘Oh, right. I didn’t realise that was Stella’s kind of thing.’

‘You’re open-minded, right?’ Beau says, looking me up and down.

Not really, no. I mean, I’m not closed-minded but open-minded would be like, point thirty plus on a list of things you’d say if you were trying to describe me. ‘Yes,’ I say, smiling up at him. ‘I love an adventure.’

‘Okay,’ Dom says, with his eyebrows raised. ‘You realise that you’re going to a sex party, right?’ he says into my ear as I hug him goodbye.

‘Yes, obviously,’ I lie. ‘I’m not actually as boring as you think I am.’

We wave goodbye to Dom and walk along the street until we reach a run-down-looking pub, all the while I’m frantically trying to remember whether anything Beau said on his messages to me about this evening gave the impression that we’d be going to a sex party. I know I’m naïve about the dating scene but it feels like something you’re probably supposed to sense check with your date?

Beau pushes through the door, gives our names to a woman wearing a latex dress.

‘I’m sorry, doll, but you can’t wear streetwear,’ she tells me.

I look down at the dress I’m wearing – an Abercrombie sundress with cherries on it, and I can kind of see her point. ‘Oh,’ I say, looking at Beau. ‘I guess I can’t go in.’

Beau grins at me. ‘You could just take it off.’

I want to say that I tell Beau to suck it. But he runs his hand down my arm and moves my hair away from my neck, and I want to fuck him so badly that this does seem like a good idea. I’m a grown-up. I’m not a prude. Before I had Rose, Louella made me go to a club in Berlin where everyone was naked and whipping each other. Gav and I didn’t really do much by way of experimenting once we’d figured out what buttons worked consistently. Besides, the whole point of this dating thing is to have enough experiences that I don’t need to keep having new experiences. If I chicken out now, I’ll have to go home to my mother, she’ll know that my date was a disaster and when I eventually confess what happens she’ll inevitably tell me something horrifying about having been to ‘lots of sex parties, darling.’

‘There’s also the market upstairs,’ says the latex woman helpfully. ‘You could get something there.’

When I was pregnant, I got something called diastasis recti, where the muscles in your upper torso just sort of banana-split themselves apart to make way for the bump. It’s never quite gone back to normal, so my waist looks wider than it once did, and I’m pretty sure that my belly button is actually slightly off-centre from all the stretching it had to do, so this sounds like a better idea. Beau waits downstairs, chatting to the girl in the latex while I go to the upper floor. A man with a blue ponytail and a gold front tooth is selling things to hit people with. To the side of him there’s a rack of lingerie and outfits. I tell myself again that I’m not a prude, and that I’m having an adventure. This is a good thing. I’m experiencing everything that I didn’t experience in my twenties – these are the kinds of stories I’ll be telling when I’m old. Then I pay an eye-watering £65 for a pink mesh ‘dress’ that doesn’t cover my knickers and has a fluffy pink feather trim, which I’m unlikely to get much future wear out of.

As I pick my way down the stairs, I give myself a pep talk. Okay, this isn’t ideal. In fact, it’s embarrassing, and I sort of hate it, and this was really not the life I signed up for and I feel too old, too fat, too neurologically developed to have let any of this happen, but we are where we are and the purpose of this evening was to get laid so I’m going to wear this for an hour, then Beau and I are going to go back to his place, he’s going to blow my mind with the best sex I’ve ever had, and then I’m going to go home and put all of this behind me. Unless the sex is so great that I want to do it again, in which case Beau (who is going to decide that I’m amazing) will be willing to provide.

In news that didn’t surprise me at all at this point, downstairs is a dungeon. I look around and it’s exactly like every scene I’ve ever seen on TV where they’re trying to depict sexual degeneracy. There’s a balding man wearing rubber pants standing on a cross thing, being whipped by a heavyset woman with a sort of whip. In the corner there’s a cluster of more attractive, younger people, all watching everyone else watching them. It’s got the vibe of a secondary-school cafeteria, only everyone’s wearing fetish gear.

‘Do you want to try something?’ Beau asks me.

‘Um,’ I say, trying to sound keen. ‘Maybe later? Is there like, another area? Somewhere we can maybe be a bit more. . . private?’

‘Sure,’ he says. He guides me into a lounge where there’s music and proper lighting and, to my enormous relief, a bar. I pay for our drinks – and try not to mind that I pay for them – and then perch on the arm of a chair, my legs across Beau’s lap.

‘This is a pretty wild first date,’ I say, smiling.

‘Sure,’ Beau agrees. ‘But then it was all on my profile, so I guess you knew what I was planning, right?’

Beau’s profile was basically unreadable. It said he was a queer pansexual kinkster looking for GGG and then mentioned a load of clubs he wanted to go to, which I assumed would be music venues and I now realise were fetish venues. So I suppose he has a point. This one’s on me.

I pull my phone out to check whether I’ve got anything from Mum by way of an update on Rose. Nothing from Mum, but there’s a message from Dom, which I only see half of. If you’ve realised what that place is and you want me to fake an emergency to get you out. . .

‘Excuse me,’ says a man wearing a black leather harness. ‘No phones.’

‘I’m just really quickly checking—’

‘No phones,’ he repeats.

‘Sure, but my—’

‘No phones.’

Beau puts his hand on my leg. ‘The phone policy is for everyone’s safety and privacy,’ he says, like English is my second language. ‘I’m a member here, so I have to vouch for your behaviour – please adhere to the rules.’

I consider throwing my phone at him, but I take a breath and try to be reasonable. Obviously, you can’t have phones here.