#mark asprey

(This scene was less than 30 seconds so I bring gifs of what I could get)

I have been a dom for most of my adult life. This is not something I put in the little biographical notes that accompany my novels. People want to know what it's like to be Mark Asprey, the man who writes sentences that are a form of dominion. They do not want to know about the dominion that happens in bedrooms. The red leather. The restraints. The particular satisfaction of reducing a woman to a state where she is capable only of saying please. More. Master. I know what I'm doing. I have been doing it since I was old enough to understand that control is what makes the world bearable. I was a dom so long I forgot there was another version of me. The lesser-known, less popular version. The one that wanted relief from being in charge. Some comfort in being ordered around. In being good at it. And then I met Xin Yue. The first time I took her to my bedroom, I dressed in red leather. I chose it carefully. The red leather was a statement: this is who I am. This is what I do. This is what I'm giving you. I had the restraints ready. The cuffs. The silk. The particular implements collected over years of being the man who knows what he's doing. I had the script. The choreography of control that had never failed to produce the desired result. A woman on her knees. Begging. A woman who would look at me afterward with pure worship. I cuffed her hands behind her back. Leather against her wrists. She tested them. Just once. To see if she could. She couldn't. That was the point. I whipped her. Not too hard. First time, you don't go too hard. You let them feel it. Let them understand what it is. The sting. The heat. The way it spreads across skin and stays. She didn't make a sound. Just breathed differently. That was enough. I fingered her. She was a good girl. Took it. Took my fingers. Three. Four. Almost my whole hand. She was so wet I could hear it. She was looking at me the whole time. Those eyes. Very old. Very young. Watching me watch her. I put clamps on her tits. Pretty tits. The clamps had a chain. I pulled. She arched her back. Made a sound then. Small. I pulled again. Harder. She made the sound again. I kept pulling until she was breathing in gasps, until her wrists were pulling against the cuffs, until she was mine. I did things to her. Things I've done to women before. Things that made my reputation. Not once. More than once. Until she couldn't speak. Until she couldn't think. Until she was just body. Just nerve endings. Just the places where I touched her and the places where I didn't. She couldn't stop coming. Overstimulated and still begging for more. Saying the things women say when they've been taken care of by a man who knows exactly what he's doing. I was in control. And then she took the strap.

The credits roll.

His last novel came out six months before I arrived in London. I’d read it in New York, in the weeks before the swap was finalized. I’d read it the way I read all Mark’s books: with admiration so acute it had crossed, somewhere around page fifty, into a species of pain. The prose was his usual—lucid, grave—but something was different. Something was wrong. The book was called The Fire Eater. I had assumed, when I bought it, that the title referred to the novel’s nominal subject: a woman, unnamed throughout, who performs in a travelling carnival somewhere in Indochina in the 1930s. She is, the novel tells us, half-Chinese, half-Vietnamese, though neither identity seems to claim her. She eats fire for crowds of French colonials and their bored wives. She is described as beautiful, but the description is withheld—we are told the effect of her beauty rather than its particulars. This was the thing I noticed, even on first reading: she is the centre of the novel, and she has no inner life. She is all surface and effect. The novel’s plot, such as it is, concerns a French plantation owner named Delage who becomes obsessed with her. He pursues her. He purchases her contract from the carnival. He installs her in a house outside Saigon and attempts, over the course of two hundred pages, to possess her. She resists in many, many intricate ways that drive Delage mad with grief and hubris. She eats fire for him in the garden at dusk. She lets him photograph her. She lets him touch her, sometimes, in ways that seem to promise more. But she never gives him what he wants, and what he wants, it becomes increasingly clear, is not her body but her surrender, her self, the thing inside her that makes the fire harmless when it passes her lips. He does not get it. The novel ends with Delage alone in the house, the woman gone (where? we never learn), the garden overgrown, the photographs faded. The final pages are a meditation on absence so acute, so lacerating, that I remember closing the book and sitting for a long time in my kitchen, the light gone bad outside, thinking: Mark Asprey has been broken by something. At the time I assumed it was just craft. I assumed he had achieved, through sheer writerly will, a tone of genuine anguish. Now I understood: the anguish was the point. The woman in the novel was real. She was not Nicola—Nicola was too present, too there to be the fire eater, who exists only as a negative space. This woman was someone else. Someone Mark had loved, or wanted to love, or tried to love, and failed. Someone who had passed through him and left behind only this: a novel about a woman who is not a woman but a wound.