Kitten Versus Ropes: Part Three

 

We had a very important development around here last week! I had to crate the kitten during a work meeting, and she didn't even peep! She just curled up all nice with her crate-specific alien catnip toy. I rewarded her with gross wet food after, so happiness all around. One more step towards getting to practice my ropes more often, huzzah! 

(A few weeks ago, I went over to the Water Ceremony at my neighborhood Unitarian church. The theme of the day was "Love is a River" and the pastor encouraged us to take down dams where we could and let the river do its thing. Maybe this is that.)

Anyway, back to mid-August and Reluctant Kisser. He was very un-reluctant otherwise! When he told me to turn over, I worried aloud about my newly-arthritic knee (I'm currently and always a symphony of bodily entropy),but he said that's okay, just lie flat.

"Ooh! I love being flat!" I lay on my belly and happily smushed my face into the pillow. This position always reminds me of Steampunk Guy, but whereas he was feral and rough, Reluctant Kisser was kind, deliberate, thorough.

His long dick went in far, even with all the padding. Though I felt a little abstracted from the proceedings, I reveled in scream-moaning into the pillow, yelping joyfully when he got brazen enough to land a few hard spanks. I loved it when he said:

"You're gonna make me come..."

and I huff-sighed "Yes, come on, come on, I need it, I need it."

The glow didn't last long afterward, he said he had a late-night shift, which felt like an excuse to me. He asked how often I'd like to see him, which was nice, and we talked a little bit more about herpes versus kissing. (Not quite as chummy as Godzilla versus Kong!) (That wasn't part of the convo.)

I have NEVER been so surprised when someone texted me the next day! But as we kept chatting on and off, I could feel him disengage. Or maybe it was me that was disengaging. I think I'll sometimes project a fear or a not-wanting-to onto somebody else because I still,
after all these years and ALL these paragraphs, feel obligated to accept any and all attention that comes my way, whether someone is right for me or not. Sometimes I allow myself the not-wanting-to by projecting it onto the guy. Or maybe we both just didn't want to.

After a week or so, I texted kindly that I didn't think we were the right match. It's hard to keep the faith when I'm drowning in a sea of app-people who are beautiful but not the right ones.

My quest for a hot love story with someone other than myself feels futile almost all the time. But there's always a new glimmer, and as long as people keep being cute, there's hope that I'll eventually figure it out.

Kitten Versus Ropes, Part Two

 

I have a problem I don’t know how to solve: I’m desperate to be kissed. I’m SO scared I’ve lost kisses forever, that gentle little Herpes 1 has doomed me to a lifetime of cheek kisses, of soft mouth-deflections, of down-the-neck avoidance. I LOVE a good kiss down the neck, but since the diagnosis it’s been a pathway to shame, just like, oh no, this again. In Codependents Anonymous speak, kissing and maybe all of dating has become unmanageable.

I even Googled “Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous,” but there’s no meetings near me and I don’t think my schedule can handle another regular thing. Plus, it’s not ALL of it that I’m freaking about, literally just the kissing.

I’ve had one really emphatic kisser since the not-a-big-deal-but-apparently-it-is diagnosis. He was rough, too suctiony, but absolutely ravenous. I’m so grateful for the hope and chafing he gave me. There was a sweet-but-not-a-match kiss outside of a perfect-in-every-way lunch date. (Oh, this whole kissing embargo thing might be just in my head. I mean, duh.) Then there was Heart Emoji Guy, the connection that ended with a very scary “I know where you live.”

Which brings us to mid-August, and the Reluctant Kisser. After I finished my pretty harness despite the kitten’s best efforts, RK climbed into bed with me, still shy but a little less so. He wrapped me up in his long arms big spoon style, and I wiggled my butt cozily against him with a happy sigh. One of my favorite parts of any first date, the venture, the pull-and-tingle of a man’s hands inside my bra. He was gentle and playful, and I let out a bigger moan than I meant to.

I turned over toward him and went for a kiss, and he did the glancing-off thing—cheek, chin, neck, cleavage. I was so hungry for a mouth on mine that it was hard to enjoy those sensations, but I was determined not to let the fear get the best of me. I wanted to just let myself have nice things, just be in the moment and reward this guy for all his very sweet kitten-distracting.

But when he took out his gorgeous cock—so long, hard, and perfectly cylindrical, so very very cozy to hold, to squeeze, to run my thumb over the tip and feel the happy warmth of pre-cum—I just couldn’t make myself get past the kissing thing.

“I can’t fuck without kissing,” I admitted, and we talked for a little bit about the herpes situation. I’d disclosed before we met in person—after Heart Emoji Guy I was scared to have anyone in my space without telling them first. Here in bed, I tried to be factual, honest, and open to his boundaries. I hope I did a good job, I’m so extra scared lately about not being a good citizen of sex!

He did kiss me, and it was a good one. His tongue was kind and expert, and I liked the way his beard enveloped my lips. But I still felt like I was harming him, so I didn’t press for more kisses, just relaxed into the next stages of a gorgeous fuck.

Yesterday it occurred to me while I was washing my hands—the fear of disease, of infecting someone, of accidentally being some kind of germ predator, is a pretty understandable reaction in the wake of not just my Nineties coming of age, but of the bad Covid years. My body and heart went through so much then and is still living in that time a little bit, the death, the isolation, the heartlessness of some, the general eugenics vibe I was getting from my brother, mom, and aunts—that’s so much for a body and mind and soul to take in.

Plus I lost almost my entire sense of smell! Of all the senses to lose, that’s the best choice, but it’s still a pretty painful change to go through. I haven’t caught Covid since last December, but long Covid still seems like a force of entropy living in my bones.

I’m still broken from all of it and I’m sure so is everyone I might hope to kiss.

Unmanageable.

So I guess before part three wherein I tell you about the good fucking, I just want to stop and say, oh bodies. How do we get through any of this. How do we touch and kiss and risk and trust in the midst and the wake of so much terror, so much needless destruction.

Thank you, bodies, you are miracles of generosity and strength and tenacity and pleasure and beauty. I love you so, so much.

 

 

 

A Happy Time at the STI Screening, Who’d’ve Thought?

It occurs to me that because of Planned Parenthood’s low income plan thingie, my hoo-ha’s health is much more up-to-date than the other parts of me. Back in February, I had an incidence of HPV and today I went back for a routine screening and to make sure the HPV symptoms are still gone—hooray, they are! The doctor said that a healthy immune system could get rid of the virus, so I can go ahead and worry about it a little less.

I have a deep fear about being diseased because I went through a lot in that department when I was in high school. Everything was cured, but the experience was tied to a sexual assault and so there was a deep shame about being infected and treated.

Today my doctor, God bless her, said something that seems like it should be obvious but hit me right in the soul:

“It seems like your life is really different now than it was in 1992.”

Yes, and thank you, thank you, thank you. Even if my sex-positive life sometimes feels unmanageable, I am very, very happy and grateful for the way things are turning out to be in 2012.

Triggers and My Voice: The Story of a Hard Limit

Note: If you’re someone who gets triggered by mentions of non-consensual sexual violence, you’ll want to skip this one.

Last week I talked a lot about being protective of my voice and being subject to panics. I’m unsure if these facts about myself disqualify me from experiencing BDSM in the ways I want to. I guess I thought there would be failsafes or at least compassion in case someone’s triggered, but that doesn’t seem to be the case so far. I’m trying to not judge the whole “lifestyle” based on one group of people.

A lot of things contributed to me being an anxious girl with shaky self-worth. I had both a happy childhood and a terribly abusive one. Both my mother and father were physically and verbally abusive to myself, my siblings, and each other. They often fought loudly about sex. One night, I’m pretty sure I heard my dad rape my mom. I got it to stop, in fact, by crying loudly. “Now you made (me) cry.” she said as the action simmered down in there.

But the biggest factor in me being protective of my voice was something that happened when I was seventeen. I’ve been telling the story in the same stupid way for twenty years: I was promiscuous in high school and it lead to an inevitable conclusion of rape and assault. That is a bullshit way to tell the story—it’s sad that I only realized recently that there was no cause-effect relationship. It was a terrible, evil crime, not a path I put myself on.

What happened was, my friend Sheri and I lied and said we were going to each others’ houses so that we could hang out with her boyfriend and his friend and get laid. That didn’t take very long, so after the guys were done with us, they dropped us off in the park three doors down from my house. We were considering sleeping in the park when a pickup truck full of hooting and hollering people we vaguely knew pulled up and asked if we wanted to go to a party and we said sure—I thought of how mortified my mom would be if she knew I was riding in the back of a pickup truck.

They either put something in my drink or I drank way too fast. I don’t remember drinking very much at all, but we were playing Quarters around the time that the guys started asking, “So which one of us are you gonna fuck?” I was woozy and tired and I didn’t want to fuck anyone, no matter how known for it I was. But I knew I didn’t really have a choice—I wasn’t in any condition to stop anybody, and this was kind of who I was now. So I chose Willie, the cutest guy at the party. He was a tall, skinny African American guy, cute but with kind of a dismissive face. I chose him partly because he was there with his girlfriend, I think her name was Lisa, a blond in acid-washed jeans. I thought he couldn’t do anything with her there, but he sent her home.

Willie took me to the party host’s bedroom and told me to get undressed. “All the way,” he said, and I did. He got on top of me and put it in, humped quickly and mechanically. I opened my mouth to cry out, not for help, but to moan so I’d be doing a good job. He put his hand over my mouth and I shut up. When he was done, he left the door open so that the whole party could see me scrambling around for my shirt.  

That’s when I started to get sick, just throwing up copious amounts everywhere, so, so much. I must have passed out then and when I came to, I couldn’t see, and they were hitting me with something hard. (I found out later it was tennis rackets) and yelling at me for throwing up. They were screaming all kinds of names at me, but I just remember them saying I was bad. I’m not sure how many people were doing the hitting, but Willie and Lisa were two of them.

I screamed and screamed and screamed and some angel neighbor called the cops. When they got there, Lisa or some other blond girl took me into the bathroom to try and clean up the blood that had spattered all down my shirt. I remember she was talking to me so sweetly.

So far we have three reasons why my voice (which includes these paragraphs) feels like a lifeline that could get taken away: “saving” my mom by crying, Willie’s hand over my mouth, and the screams that maybe actually did save my life. But the fourth reason is much guiltier: I didn’t tell the police the sex part of the crime. They couldn’t get it out of me. Everyone knew, but I refused to say it on the deposition. I’d been drinking, I was a slut, I didn’t know how to prove I didn’t deserve what happened.

I didn’t know how to prove I didn’t deserve what happened. I’ve told this story so many times, but never understood it quite that way.

I felt like I couldn’t really say it was rape because I’d chosen him, I didn’t try to stop him. The Accused had somehow become embedded in my consciousness, having the opposite (?) of its intended effect. I knew the danger of being “put on trial” for it and I wanted no part of that. So I lied my face off and told the police the assault story without the first part. A few of them, including Willie, did some jail time for the assault, but the fact that I didn’t tell the truth about the rest of the crime makes me feel like a co-conspirator, like I didn’t do enough to protect myself or my fellow women.

The crying, the hand over my mouth, the screams that saved my life, the guilt over not telling, they’ll always be in my body. Sometimes they make me very hard to be close to, but they also make me brave, protective, and they make me try to be transparent.

I guess what I want people to get out of this is that you never know what stories can be inside someone’s body. Every single person you touch, even in the most casual way, sitting next to her on the bus, tying him up at a play party, or hugging them on a first date, has a body full of stories. Give up the idea that enough negotiation can make those complications got away. The stories inside us, even the screams, are beautiful and deserve to be treated with care.

Please, Sir, Part Four: I Burn Pretty

As I was turning over (I think, sometimes I’m not sure of the sequence of things) he took me by the shoulders and laid me down decisively. It was nice, like falling.  I like the part of fire where I’m on my back because I can see what’s going on and watch the pretty flames. He said it hurts more if you watch, but it really doesn’t hurt much. He said the flames burn prettier on some bodies than on others. How it looks is: he has two wands, one with the fire and one soaked in alcohol. He runs the alcohol over me in whatever design he wants and lights it—the flame only burns for a second but it is bright blue and so pretty. There’s something about it that makes me feel like a princess. This time, he took off his shirt and held my hand to his heart.

All the while I was giggling, smiling, having a great time. “What is this sub-space you speak of?” he laughed.

“What, you can’t giggle in sub-space?”

“Huh. I’m learning things from you already. Okay, you can giggle in sub-space.”

I’m really disturbed by the idea that a submissive would always have to have a serious/ecstatic/pained expression. What does that say about my role in the proceedings? Shouldn’t I be here to have fun? Anyway, anyone looking for all-serious-expression-all-the-time would be severely disappointed with me.

He put my foot on his shoulder and made the flames climb up my leg, trying for different swirls and patterns. (“See, this is why I shaved.” he said.) After that, he made plumes. That’s when he mists the alcohol and lights it, about eight inches above my skin. I guess people don’t usually look during this part, but I did. He was delighted by the giggly/scared expressions I made, by the way my body contorted when I startles and half-shielded my eyes.

He warmed his hand and placed it at the bottom of my neck-the fire-kiss. He lit and snuffed the flame again and laid it on the mound of my vagina, and that felt very soothing. “You can do that for at least twelve more hours.” I said.

“But then I wouldn’t have time for anything else…”

He growled and attacked my boobs, sucking hard on the right nipple and playing with the left one. That was the first time I really groaned for him, I couldn’t help it, yelping cries, I thought about Wonder Woman overhearing them and wondered how soundproof this basement is—my guess is, a lot to very.

I sat up on the table and kissed him—he was hard underneath his jeans and I wanted him between my legs. We kissed gently and sweetly and then it was time to get spanked some more. He told me to lean over the table on my elbows and I gladly did. He said:

“Here’s what you have to do for me. If you’re going to come, you have to say, please, Sir, may I come. The sentence has to have “please” and “Sir” and “come” in it.”

“Okay.” I said. This information seemed a bit premature, but I filed it away just in case.

He got a nice spanking rhythm going. To avoid the possibility of me getting distracted by the music, he’d chosen unobtrusive massage music, and he spanked to the rhythm of that. It was pretty funny. I laughed for most of the time but got serious-happy whenever he told me to spread my legs a little wider. My feet kept sliding along the carpeted floor; it was hard to stay upright. That was making me a little shaky. I guess It was a good workout.

He asked if he could leave a handprint on each cheek and I said of course he could. He told me to inhale deeply and when I exhaled, there came the pain. The really hurty parts aren’t my favorite, but I don’t mind them.

There was part where he was sort of ramming his clothed self into the back of me. It was a little embarrassing, kind of reminded me of the bathroom scene in secretary—okay, humiliating.

Once I was standing again, the hardest part of the scene happened. He said, “I have job for you.”

“Okay, what can I do?”

Get that bowl of condoms over there and set it on the table. Oh-kaaaay…

“Now I want you to put the condoms on these.” and presented me with a Ziploc freezer baggie full of sex toys.

I wanted to cry. I think maybe I should have stopped the scene right there. Because, dude! You think I’m too dirty to put my sex toys in!? I looked it up and it’s a pretty common safer-sex practice, but it still seemed creepy as fuck. Maybe the fact that a Ziploc of machinery was coming at me an hour into a first date exacerbated the situation.

The other reason I wanted to cry is that I felt small and overwhelmed and inexperienced—I hadn’t put a condom on ANYTHING since the early Nineties. MKT and I always use them, but he always puts them on. I’ll have to remember to have him show me how next time, assuming my sex drive comes back at some point.

I didn’t say any of that; I just said I wasn’t ready. “Not even for this little one?” he asked, brandishing a little silver bullet like the one Sweetie and I have at home.

I don’t know if he could tell how scared I was or how hurt I was determined to be brave and have fun, and there was SO MUCH MORE fun to be had.

Next: “Wash Your Hands,” Pretty Blue Ropes.