I am crying when I open my front door to you. Without a word I put my arms around you as you stand on the doorstep and embrace you for a long time.
"Thank you for coming," I say after a while. "I really needed a friend." I release you. "Come in. I'll get us both a drink. I think we need one."
I lead you up the stairs of my flat to the sitting room. This, I tell you as you sit next to me on my sofa, is where I have been hiding since my fiancΓ© called off our wedding.
This comes as news to you. Everyone at the ceremony was given the impression that my would-be husband had missed his flight, but the truth is more complicated.
He missed it on purpose because he couldn't bear to go through with the wedding I had arranged for us.
You listen dutifully as I tell you how it had all been going so well. I cup my face in my hands and compose myself. I take your hand. "You've always been such a good listener," I say. "I will tell you everything."
I had been encouraging my fiancΓ© to wear my clothes, just privately at first. I explained to him how women are objectified when men give them sexy clothes, which he understood straight away, and he could see why I wanted him to know how that felt.
"It started with a pair of knickers," I say. "Nothing fancy. Just some old black satin ones of mine with a bit of lace round the top. I told him I wanted him to wear them during sex."
I stop crying as I recall how easy it had been. I used them to caress his cheeks and nipples, laid them out over his pelvis, gave him a squeeze and he was ready for me to help him put them on.
"I kept him hard in them for about an hour before I made him come. I told him not to clean himself up. He wore them while he went down on me and kept them on all night.
"From then on he always wore my clothes during sex. I think it was a camisole next, or a slip. I would order him the girliest things I could find on eBay and have them sent to his office, so he would have to bring them home.
"If he wore them home I would ravish him the moment he got in," I say, and I smile for a moment. "Although he would only do that with the underwear. The blouses and skirts only went on when he got home, and that could be a struggle until he accepted that wearing them was a condition for anything more than kissing.
"He kicked up a fuss when I ordered him his first dress. I thought I'd gone too far. It was a French maid outfit, all in pink satin with ridiculous frills and bows everywhere and he couldn't handle it. I got really upset too and as he walked out I threw the dress into the street and told him not to come back without it on.
"But you know what he's like: he can't bear confrontation. He rang the doorbell and I found him in tears, holding the dress. We got him dressed and I decided to go all out."
I'm looking into your eyes as I tell you this. You try to look comfortable. I put a reassuring hand on your knee.
"I had been teasing him about his anal virginity for a while, making him take a finger as he came, but I hadn't told him that I wanted to take him properly. The maid's outfit made him totally meek so I told him to get on his hands and knees and close his eyes, and he did it, bottom in the air. When I eased in the strap-on he whimpered and he moaned but there was no fight in him, even when I got carried away. He asked me to stop. He begged me, actually, and he might have tried to use our safe word but I told him that he had to learn what it's really like to be vulnerable.
"I turned him over and took him in my hand and he came like I'd never seen him do before.
"He never resisted me again after that. That was when I started planning our wedding."
My lip starts to quiver as talk about my preparations for the ceremony. I describe how I measured him for a wedding gown and planned every detail of our day, then my face crumples with sorrow. "It was going to be perfect. He was going to look so gorgeous. It was all set up and then, with a few hours to go, he just goes and bottles it."
Tears fall down my cheeks and my voice cracks. "I spent I don't know how much money on that dress and it's just hanging in the bedroom, never to be used."
I collapse into your arms and hold you tightly. Between sobs I tell you how beautiful the dress is. "That's what gets me the most. It's just such a fucking waste. I've wasted everything."