The Mud Weight or A little restraint is good for the girl who has none.

It was not her fault just as it was never her fault and, even looking back on it later, there was no other course she could have chosen.

It was the lake, all the lake’s fault and the moon, of course, one should never forget the moon.

They had moored an hour before sundown in a little spot just off an island. They did not quite have the lake to themselves; there was another couple in an expensive looking wooden boat far off on the other side of the lake. ‘Boaters do their best to respect privacy’ she thought as she watched her boyfriend walk around the boat to drop in the delightfully termed mud weight that would anchor them.

Mud weights are funny things. They have an ignoble name that does no justice to their jobs. They sit, a sullen lump of metal on the front of the boat, only when you move them do you see the stain their dark metal rusts behind on the pristine deck. They are lowered (or dropped) into the water and down they go.

They go where no other living thing is. Past ducks and their legs, past the little fishes, past algae and big fishes and past whatever lurks so deep in a lake that no one knows and so they find the mud. They loiter there. Being such a little weight they cannot keep the whole boat still, they merely tether the boat to an area as the boat gently swings around the weight, like a ballerina holding onto the fingertips of her partner’s. But sometimes, most unlike a ballerina, the boat feels some deep pull in the water, some ancient remembrance of a tide, a gathering to the moon and the boat drifts taking the mud weight with it.

He told her, over a splendid Rioja just why the lake was one of his favourites, how often he had visited as a boy. He told her over strawberries how the lake was full and deep and dangerous to swim in. He told her over clean, white sheets how he had loved her from before he met her and how the rest of their time together had just been allowing his mind to catch up with what his heart already knew, one tethered to the other, unseen but linked his understanding had circled around his love until it had felt able to accept it.

She woke up just before two in the morning. Unsure what it was that had woken her she looked around. He lay there asleep, his pillowed scrunched around his head, one leg bent towards her and the other stretched out to the front of the boat.

She could see him so clearly it was as thought the sun were up.

That is when she saw it.

The moon was so plump and bright it sang out to her. It bathed the inside of the boat with a silver, dangerous light. Warm under the duvet she looked up at it. She would stay in bed with her lover, where it was safe. She would stay cosy and still with him. The mood danced across her window and she strained her head to follow it, the boat turned its back and the moon was gone.

She had no choice but to follow it. Lightly she left their bed and crept along the boat. They had left it open all along to the back where only a tarpaulin kept the night out. She undid the sheet and let the moon in to the back on the boat. It was quick and light, covering her toes and legs immediately. ‘It must be warm,’ she thought, ‘like the sun. It is so bright and it calls to me like the morning.’

The lake was silent, black but bright, forbidding but tempting and all the time the moon would not let her go, around it she went on the silent boat, tied to the moon in a daze.

She did not even make a choice, already naked, her limbs at home in the pale moonlight she slipped off the boat into the water that welcomed her.

It was almost silent, a tiny shiver from her at the cold water, a tiny fear at the dark depths below her and the gentle splash as she made her way across the silky water to where the moon lay in wait for her.

“Come back.”

She thought at first it might be the sun or the day light or the boat that called her and she ignored the sound.

“Come back right this minute.”

It did not sound like the sun or the daylight or the boat. It sounded like a man, an angry man.

And so she did. His words as a demand, a threat tied her to him more closely than his suggestions of danger over dinner and so, despite knowing what lay ahead she swam slowly back to the boat, there was a curve to her swim; there are no straight lines in nature.

His arm pulled her into the boat. It occurred to her as she was wrapped in a towel that one very rarely sees how strong a man is. ‘Our lives,’ she pondered as he rubbed her hard all over to dry her and warm her now almost blue skin, ‘prevent us from seeing ourselves as we really are sometimes.’

She did not argue as he took her back to bed, even though she knew what was coming. His lap under her tummy and thighs was shockingly warm; the residual heat on the bed from where he had been sleeping warmed her face.

His hand, though, warmed her bottom.

He spanked her from the outset with a force that drove her breath from her as no cold water shock could have done. He spanked her from still silence to kicking fear and back to compliance. He spanked her thighs and her bottom until they were swollen and stained dark in the moon light.

Hard strikes on cold cheeks, no words as they were superfluous, his hands spoke for him of his fear, his displeasure and his insistence than his tie to her was stronger than the moon, than the water and than anything else of the earth.