Private Entries: The Secret Diary of Vanessa Hale

I’ve deleted this four times because every version makes it sound like Nathan did something to me, and that would be the first lie. I invited him upstairs, kissed him first, and when he told me what to do, I obeyed him. Sophie thinks her brother drove me home and left me at the door. She doesn’t know I took hold of his shirt in the lift because I couldn’t stand waiting another floor.

I’m sitting in my kitchen wearing his shirt, drinking coffee that tastes like burnt dirt while my phone lights up with Sophie’s sixth attempt to find out whether I survived last night. My dress is beside the front door and my underwear is under the kitchen table, which should probably embarrass me more than it does. Apparently there is a version of Vanessa Hale who leaves a trail of clothing through her apartment for her best friend’s brother to follow, and she is considerably less innocent than everyone believes.

I have encouraged that belief, if I’m being honest. Sophie sees me as the sensible friend who pays bills early, avoids men with obvious warning signs and never creates messes she can’t clean up. Nathan has spent nine years existing at the edge of our friendship. Birthdays, Christmas drinks and lunches at their parents’ house, while I politely pretended I hadn’t wondered what his hands would feel like on me. I wasn’t innocent. I was just very good at keeping the filthy parts quiet.

Sophie once caught me watching him and joked that Nathan was the only man she would never forgive me for sleeping with. She said he couldn’t keep anything simple and she wasn’t losing her best friend because her brother couldn’t keep his dick out of trouble. I laughed, agreed that he wasn’t my type and then spent the rest of lunch imagining exactly the kind of trouble his dick might cause. That probably should have told me something.

Last night was Sophie’s birthday. She had chosen a crowded bar with sticky tables, expensive drinks and music loud enough to make everybody lean close. Nathan arrived after nine wearing a black shirt with the sleeves pushed up his forearms, and I noticed his hands before I properly looked at his face. One rested around a glass of soda water while his thumb moved through the condensation, and I caught myself wondering how firmly that hand could hold my wrist.

When I looked up, he was watching me. He didn’t smile or politely look away; he held my gaze until heat spread beneath my dress, then returned to his conversation as if he hadn’t just caught me mentally undressing at his sister’s birthday. A decent person would have been mortified. I crossed my legs and wondered how much he had understood.

The chair beside me became his sometime later. His knee rested against mine beneath the table while we spoke about work, the terrible music and the drink I claimed to hate despite ordering it three times. Nothing he said was openly suggestive, but neither of us moved our legs apart. When he finally leaned closer and told me I wasn’t being subtle, I should have denied everything. Instead, I told him that perhaps I wasn’t trying to be.

That was when his expression changed. He still didn’t touch me or reward me with something filthy whispered into my ear. He simply watched while I spent the next hour making myself increasingly obvious, leaning across him for drinks, resting my hand on his shoulder and looking at his mouth whenever he spoke. I told myself I was teasing him, but the truth is that I was offering myself in small, deniable pieces and becoming wetter every time he noticed.

By midnight, Sophie wanted to move everyone to another bar. I had reached the point where another drink would make me either sick or honest, so I said I was going home. She accepted Nathan’s offer to drive me, hugged me and told him to make sure I got inside safely. The guilt should have stopped me then. Instead, I followed him to his car thinking about how much I wanted him to do the exact opposite of behaving himself.

The drive was quiet enough to make every breath feel obvious. Nathan eventually told me that if I kept looking at him that way, he was going to stop pretending he hadn’t noticed. I asked what would happen if he stopped, and he said that depended on what I chose when we reached my apartment. He put the decision entirely in my hands, leaving me no room to pretend later that alcohol, loneliness or his attention had made it for me.

The haze from my drinks had already begun to lift, and I was relieved. I wanted to be clear when I chose him. I wanted to know I was fully responsible for the mess I was making, because underneath the guilt was a much uglier truth: I had wanted Nathan for years, and the possibility that he might finally give me everything I’d privately imagined was turning me on more than the risk was frightening me.

Outside my building, I asked whether he wanted to come upstairs for a drink. Nathan asked whether I actually wanted a drink, and I told him no. He followed me through the foyer and into the lift without touching me, letting the anticipation stretch until I was almost shaking. I made it halfway to my floor before I grabbed his shirt and kissed him.

Nathan let me control the kiss until we reached my door. Once we were inside, his hand closed around my wrist and he turned me against it with enough confidence to strip every clever thought from my head. He watched my face carefully and told me that if I wanted him to leave, I only had to say it once. I told him not to leave, then felt something inside me loosen when his grip tightened and the playful version of him disappeared.

The first time he told me to look at him, I obeyed before deciding whether I should. That frightened me more than anything else because it felt less like losing control than being relieved of it. I spend my life making decisions, anticipating what people need and maintaining the respectable version of myself. With Nathan holding me still and calmly telling me what he wanted, all that noise vanished, and fuck, I liked the silence.

He made me admit why I had invited him upstairs. I tried to give him a clever answer, but he waited until I confessed that I’d wanted him for years, had spent the entire night trying to tempt him and had imagined his hands on me during the drive home. Nathan already knew; he just wanted to hear how filthy the truth sounded in my own voice.

There is no point writing this if I’m going to soften it now. I liked being watched while I undressed. I liked being told where to put my hands and made to wait when I was already desperate. I liked having to ask for what I wanted, then having to ask again because the first time wasn’t honest enough. Every time Nathan gave me the opportunity to slow down, I moved closer and offered him more.

The worst part is how badly I wanted his approval. He called me a good girl once, quietly against my ear, and the needy sound that came out of me should have been humiliating. Instead, I pressed closer because I wanted him to say it again. I wanted him to see that beneath the competent woman Sophie trusts was someone shameless enough to beg her brother for exactly what she wanted.

I had never considered myself submissive, and even now the word makes me want to argue. Nathan didn’t make me weak or steal anything from me. I handed him control because it turned me on, then kept giving him more when he proved he knew what to do with it. When he finally took me to bed, I didn’t want romance or another opportunity to reconsider. I wanted him to fuck every respectable thought out of my head, and he did.

I remember the rest in pieces: his hand stopping me when I tried to hide my face, the way he made me meet his eyes and the patience with which he waited for me to choose him again. I remember thinking I should be ashamed of how readily I obeyed, then realising the shame was making everything hotter. I wanted to be filthy for him. There it is. That is the sentence I kept deleting.

Afterward, Nathan brought me water, pulled me against him and asked whether I was all right in the same calm voice that had undone me. We slept for less than two hours. When I woke, he looked entirely comfortable in my bed while I felt as if my carefully managed identity had been dragged into daylight and left there naked.

I mentioned Sophie before saying good morning. Nathan asked whether she was really the reason I looked frightened, and I couldn’t answer because she wasn’t. Sophie finding out would be awful, but what terrified me was that Nathan had seen how quickly I melted when he became firm with me. He knew I had begged, enjoyed being told what to do and wanted to be praised for obeying. There was no way to take that knowledge back from him.

Before leaving, he kissed me at the front door with one hand against the side of my neck. My body reacted immediately, and his slight smile told me he had felt it. Three minutes after the lift doors closed, Sophie asked whether Nathan had behaved himself. I put my phone facedown and stood under a cold shower, but I couldn’t wash away the awareness that something filthy had been uncovered inside me and had no intention of becoming quiet again.

I’ve spent all day claiming that sleeping with Nathan was the mistake. It wasn’t. Sleeping with him was reckless, disloyal and guaranteed to become complicated, but I started writing because I liked who I became when he stopped letting me pretend. That woman was greedy, shameless and embarrassingly eager to surrender control to someone who could handle it. I don’t know what to do now that I know she is me.

Nathan messaged me at four o’clock this afternoon. You can ignore me, but don’t insult both of us by calling last night an accident. I read it until the words stopped looking real, then deleted the notification. This cannot happen again. Sophie can never know, and I am not blowing up our friendship because her brother discovered how much of a filthy liar I’ve been about what I want.

That was what I had decided when I closed this entry.

11:42 p.m.

I answered him.