Two Cities, Chapter 1: The Link

Two Cities · chapter 1 · fiction

The first night after she moved to Toronto, Léa didn’t unpack. She sat on the floor with her back against the bed, phone on her knees, and waited for Sam, still in Montreal, to finish his shift.

The bed was a bare mattress. The sheets were somewhere in a box marked BEDROOM in Sam’s capital letters, under three others marked KITCHEN. The radiator ticked without giving off any heat, and a streetcar ground past on the street below every few minutes, so close the window hummed.

“Where are you?” he wrote at 10:40 p.m.

“In a room that smells of paint. You?”

“In our bed. Which is way too big.”

They had promised not to be dramatic. Eight months, one contract, then she’d be back. But eight months is long when you’re used to sleeping with your hand on the other one’s hip.

Usually it was his hand. Warm, heavy, his thumb moving a little in his sleep, as if he were checking she was still there. Last night was the first time in four years she had gone to bed without it, and she had lain awake with her own hand on her hip, feeling stupid.

The night before she left, Sam had handed her a small box. Inside, a tiny pink egg with a soft antenna. “So I can still find you,” he had said, blushing like he was sixteen.

She had laughed at him. Then she had put the box in her carry-on, between her chargers and her toothbrush, and thought about it for the whole drive.

Tonight she took it out of the box. She read the instructions twice, cross-legged on the floor, in the light of the phone. Then she stood up. She pulled her sweater over her head and dropped it on a paint can. She unhooked her bra, pushed her jeans and her underwear down together and stepped out of them, and stood for a second in the middle of the empty room, naked, goosebumps rising along her arms, with nobody in the whole city who knew where she was. It felt less lonely than she’d expected. It felt like a secret.

She put it on. It was cool for a moment, smooth, and then it was simply part of her, a small weight she could feel when she shifted her hips. She lay down on the bare mattress, the ticking rough under her shoulder blades, and held the phone above her face. Then she opened the app and pressed a button she had never touched: Send control link.

Three dots appeared, vanished, came back.

“Are you serious?”

“Try.”

The first vibration came so softly she thought she’d imagined it. The second, she didn’t. She burst out laughing, alone in her empty room, and wrote: “Slower. I want this to last until midnight.”

It was 10:52.

In Montreal, Sam laid the phone on the pillow next to him, as if it were her.

Her side of the pillow still smelled of her shampoo, something with almonds. He had kicked the duvet onto the floor. He lay on his back in the dark, wearing nothing but the blue light of the screen, and typed with one thumb: “Tell me where you are. Exactly.”

“On the mattress. No sheets. No clothes.” A pause. “Your grey T-shirt is in a box somewhere. I didn’t look for it.”

He read it three times. His body answered before he had finished reading it the first time, and he let it, one hand flat on his stomach, the other on the screen.

He drew a wave. Then another, higher. He couldn’t see her, but he knew exactly when she was holding her breath: the messages stopped.

In Toronto, Léa had let the phone fall onto her chest. The hum started low and deep inside her and spread outward, to the tops of her thighs, to the soft skin under her navel, until she could feel it in the backs of her knees. She pressed her knees together and that made it worse, and better. Her free hand wandered without asking her: her stomach, the curve of one breast, her collarbone, her hip, the exact spot where his hand should have been. She left it there and held on.

When he let the wave fall, she grabbed the phone again. Her messages got shorter. “There.” “Like that.” “Dont stop,” with no apostrophe, from a woman who corrected his grammar in texts. He stopped. He waited a whole minute, counting her silence, and then came back so low it was barely there, and at the other end of the 401, she turned onto her side and bit the edge of the mattress.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” she wrote.

“You said midnight.”

At 11:41 a voice message arrived. Six seconds. He put in an earbud before he played it, as if someone in the empty apartment might hear. No words. Just her breathing, close to the microphone, uneven, and right at the end a small sound in her throat she had never made in front of him with the lights on. He played it again. Then a third time, with his eyes closed, and moved the slider without looking.

At 11:58 she wrote one word. He didn’t answer right away. He slid the control all the way up and counted to midnight.

He had reached forty-one when the earbud clicked: another voice message. He pressed play. Her breath, caught high and held, held, and then his name, broken in two in the middle, the second half much louder than the first—

At 12:04 his phone rang. Video. He picked up so fast he nearly dropped it on his face.

The screen was almost black: a corner of her ceiling, a bare bulb, a mess of dark hair on the striped mattress. She didn’t turn the camera toward her face. She didn’t turn it off either. The video was half a second behind the sound, so her laugh reached him before he saw her shoulders shake.

“Hi,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “My legs are still shaking. I can’t find the button to turn it off. I think I’m lying on it.”

“Your neighbours.”

“I don’t have neighbours yet. I have paint.” She breathed out, long, and he heard her breathing come down slowly, step by step, like someone walking downstairs in the dark. “I said your name. Didn’t I. On the message.”

“In two pieces.”

“Oh God.” She pulled something over herself; by the sound of it, her sweater. “Sam. Don’t hang up yet.”

He didn’t. He lay in the dark with the phone on her pillow and listened to her fall asleep five hundred kilometres away, and now he knew something about her he had not known in four years: that she said his name in two pieces, and that she didn’t turn the camera off. At 3:10 his battery died.

The next morning an email from Sam was waiting in her inbox, sent at 6:52, as soon as his phone had charged: “Tomorrow night, I’m sending you a link.” She read it twice before she understood that this time the link would be his.

To be continued… Chapter 2: Léa takes control. Next Sunday.

The toy in this chapter

Overview based on manufacturer info, not a hands-on test · partner links

Léa wears a Lovense Lush 4: a quiet wearable egg the other person controls up close or over any distance through a control link. The same link works with the smaller Lush Mini.