35. Groceries (and Tangents)

     It had been a long time since I’d had an out-of-the-house task to complete. I was terribly excited about it, but my excitement quickly gave way to trepidation. Of course, trepidation is part of what makes public tasks arousing, so basically I was spinning myself up into a tizzy. Snapshot memories of similar situations paraded through me, as I was forced to get out of my car much more slowly and carefully than I usually do. More sense-memories than the actual events surrounding my past experiences with this – physical reminders of how hard it is to be in a fitful tizzy when your own personal conditions demand that you proceed with motions that are slow and controlled. Carefully, carefully now… I entered the market with what I hoped was a subtle shift of my ass, and then, breaking out in the slightest of sweats, I remembered the fear. Fucking hell. Tell me again why this hard, glass impediment is my favorite toy?! Then I remembered that that right there is the reason it is. Breathe. There is no rush. No one is staring at you. Take your time.

     He’d come home the night before, too tired and stressed to do much beyond groping me, after talking the trip out of his system. He fell asleep with his hand in my crotch, which I always feel is sweet because I’m sentimental like that. This morning I’d woken up to the same sensation, only with a little more violence in his grip. We’d only have a couple of nights together, before more trips would separate us all over again (I was even going away this time, to visit Harpo in New Orleans), and we were both aware that tonight was going to have to be a main event. We’d spent the early part of the morning torqueing each other up, but we didn’t fuck. I may have mentioned before that I’m near impossible to get off that early. It’s not a need to be more awake, because if you let me sleep really late you can make me come before I’ve cracked an eyelid; it’s more like my vagina simply doesn’t deign to recognize the outside world before ten o-clock. So we’d made out and rolled around and fondled and frolicked, and then he’d given me my assignments and gone off to work.

     I had already had one really phenomenal, vaginal orgasm today. It’s rare that I get myself off without any clitoral stimulation, even with the use of a vibrator, but I‘d recently bought an interesting new one, and met that challenge. We’d lately been on this run of fun and games – a new sort of epoch. Laughter and beatings were interspersed one with another in a way they hadn’t been, before. The formality of all submission and a little masochism had been elbowed out by all masochism and a little submission. It was weird. Good and weird. He’d taken to using his regular old belt on me, and that had a few times led to beatings with no accompanying sex. It was like the atmosphere around that division of our sex life got sort of casual for awhile… Oh and by the way THWACK! Weird. Good and weird. Anyway, I’d made a couple of new purchases during that time. One of them I was so horribly ashamed of that I didn’t tell him about it when I ordered it, and then couldn’t bear to open the box when it finally arrived. By then he knew what the box contained, and he let me stew over it, silently watched me struggle with wanting what was inside and being unable to face breaching the packing tape. When I finally got up the nerve and brought the thing out, I didn’t even use it. I just held it in my hands. I sat there on the bed for over an hour, just holding and touching it, in all its embarrassing glory. That’s not the one I’d gotten off with earlier today, though. 

     Today’s orgasm had been brought to me by* the other thing I’d purchased during this sexually matter-of-fact period. We’d been pretty deep into fooling around a few days before, when something reminded me of a new toy I’d seen in the adult store. Before, I never would have stopped in the middle of sex to say Hey, guess what I saw yesterday, it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to do so, but the atmosphere had changed. Plus, it was something I’d never seen before, and that never happens! We rarely even go into adult stores anymore, because invariably there’s nothing there that we’d want, that we don’t already have. That kind of shopping is supposed to be fun, and it just ends up disappointing. This time though, I’d been surprised. It was a vibrator with three bendy arms. They are all identical, kind of paddle-shaped, and made of what I can only describe as something similar to Stretch Armstrong. If that reference is too old and obscure for you, try to imagine what rubber would feel like, coated over an extremely thick syrup or putty. In this case, if you bend an arm, it stays bent in whatever position you’ve chosen for it, completely independent of whatever the other two are doing. And they all have separate vibrators in them, with multiple settings, and separate controls. You can set each one to do something different, and in a different place or position, or from a different angle. Kinda cool. I hadn’t bought it, because I couldn’t tell if it was more than the novelty of finding something new that made it interesting. Also, it weighed a thousand pounds and was Bright Pink. So mid-sex, we’d stopped to look it up online, and in doing so we’d discovered that it also came in dark purple(!!), and we ordered it on the spot before falling back into the main activities of the evening. 

     So it was that toy that I’d been experimenting with, earlier. I’d tried it with all three arms together, and I’d tried it with each of them spread into various directions, outside, inside, over, under, around and through.** It took only a micro-second however, to determine that if one of them was settled on my clit, the deal was going to be over and done. What with my unfortunate clitoral refractory period – and I think my assignment may also have been restricted to a single orgasm anyway – that wasn’t going to do at all. I once returned a vibrator to a store with an expansive refund policy, because it made me come too quickly. (Okay, credit where it’s due, I chickened out and made my husband return it for me.) Regardless, I wasn’t about to waste all the potential this toy had for three and a half seconds of orgasm. So I’d left my clit completely alone, and played with everything else. Despite all the different combinations of position and vibration (all of which were fun and effective), the one that finally tipped me over the edge was just all three arms in my pussy, at the same time. What I did was bend them out until they were way too wide, and then push them in anyway. In reality, all that happened was that my pussy forced the arms to bend back in, to squeeze together so they’d fit, but in the imagination, it cleverly lined up with images of virgins being deflowered… I came all over it.

     And there I was, some hour or two later, trying to remember how to buy groceries with a glass plug in my ass. Breathe. There is no rush. No one is staring at you. Take your time. I made my way down the aisles as tense as a bowstring, gathering items. Every gesture and reach intended to look graceful from the outside, trying to cover the tight grip of every muscle in my body. My pussy was wet, and making the tops of my inner thighs slippery. As delicious as that was, it was also extremely dangerous, in that particular scenario. Too slippery could be disastrous just then, when the floor is tiled and the plug is glass. I tried hard not to bail, after getting just the items that were necessities for that night. He’d be fine with that – my task would be technically complete – but I wouldn’t. I had to do the thing all the way. I was grocery shopping, not dinner shopping, damn it. Oh hell, did it shift, or was I just afraid it would shift? I had forgotten about that particular threat of panic. I tried to casually lean against the edge of a refrigerated section, pretending to check my list, to reassure myself that the toy was still planted firmly in my ass, give it a little extra shove, maybe. I tried to think about those people who can willfully bring down their own heart rates – how hard could it be? I paced myself around the store trying to deep breathe.

     Seriously? How could there be NO green peppers?! Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I couldn’t make the same dinner, without them. I was going to have to go back through the store and change ingredients. Already I knew I still had to stop at the drug store before I could go home. It would take a million years, I knew it would. I kept reminding myself that I could do this – I had done this. I had succeeded at this very task! But when have there EVER been no green peppers?! Slowly… carefully… I just had to do it until it was done, that’s all. I stopped and backed up next to a display, to pretend to check my list again. I knew there was little chance that a security camera couldn’t see me, but all the actual humans I could see we facing other directions. Plus, hadn’t I once taken a picture of myself with my hand in my pussy, right underneath the eye in the sky at Target? I tried to give an actual, full-on readjustment, but manually maneuvering a butt plug in my ass, in the midst of all my public fear, only made my pussy wetter and my fear of slippage worse. I had to set the rational side of my brain to actively remind me that the toy was secure – I’d felt it, I knew it was secure – over and over again, as I went on.

     Really I could get away with not going to the deli. It was an after-thought at the bottom of my list. But there was no line, so I couldn’t bring myself to skip it. They made me wait to be waited on, anyway. Then a friendly young woman took my order, but decided she’d better clean the slicer before she filled it. I watched her do her job while I slow danced under my skirt. I made myself hold, made myself breathe, made myself pause, made myself chat, rolled my hips ever so slowly around the article impaling my ass, feeling three times its actual size. Shit. I realized that now that I was getting deli stuff, I’d have to go back to the vegetable aisle and get lettuce. I made myself smile. Did I usually fuck up this many things in one trip to the market? Did it just feel like everything was fucked because I was being anally penetrated while I tried to do it, or was the anal penetration actually making me fuck up everything? It didn’t matter, I was going to the vegetable aisle fucked and fucking.

     I tried to think about something else. Tried to think about later, because I still had another orgasm to accomplish, after this. That wouldn’t be hard, I could still feel slippery, melted, liquid between my legs. And what about after that? There’s no way he’d set me this task if his mind wasn’t already set on fucking my ass tonight. I had clothing choices to make, before then. I had to choose a corset, had to choose shoes. I had to set up the bed with the crispest sheets, lay out the switch and the floggers, Oh shit, I still had to send him a picture to document the orgasm I’d had before I left! I was at the checkout now, trying to function and make small-talk with Lars at the register (that’s right, his name was Lars), while trying not to forget all my jobs, while the majority of my brain still couldn’t pull away from the fact that I was standing there being silently drilled, invisibly probed. I still needed to take a bath – maybe I would make myself come in the tub, before I shaved my legs. I’d done all my girl-grooming the day before, so any prickles left from that would have softened by now… 

     Lars the cashier was smiling at my request for cash back in singles. Really it was for New Orleans buskers, on my trip to visit Harpo, but since I couldn’t tell him the more interesting thing he should have been smirking at, I let him believe. He went so far as to ask where I’d be spending them, and I smiled and said I’d let him use his imagination on that one. Slowly, finally, I managed to navigate my cart out of the store and over the speed bumps (careful, careful) in the parking lot, thinking He has no idea that the reality is even better than what he imagines.


*Yep, that was a Sesame Street reference; you didn’t imagine it.
** So was that.

(Nope, still not telling you what the other toy is.)

34. Alright, where the hell was I?

     Ah yes, the Harlequin was still new. I still bore the marks from the first night we’d had it. They were still fresh enough to be red and purple… I didn’t think it was a go, this night. Usually there’s a build-up, a consensus, whether it’s spoken or not. Usually there’s an atmosphere about the house and an undercurrent to our interactions. On this night there were no outward signs at all. Just out of nowhere, there was music playing and our ever-growing slide show collection of erotic stills on the TV. He told me to get out the new flogger, and I brought it to him, handed it over while trying to arrange my expression to contain and suppress the seventy-five different emotions that were suddenly drag racing through my bloodstream. He gave me several preliminary cracks against my legs with it, and said “Mercy, right?” My new safe word ... I went off to do my preparations like a roller coaster virgin packing for Six Flags.
     I came back from my initial groundwork (I didn’t want to stay away for long, as I wasn’t sure how much slack was in the proverbial leash, tonight), to find that he had the ropes out. Sweet mother of fuck, it was a rope night. I really hate surprises, except when I really don’t. In fact, now that I think about it, that edge of uncertainty that I can’t tolerate in the rest of my life is precisely what spins me up and makes my breath flutter, in the internal ritual that begins the releasing of my will. Turning my volition over to him, begins with not knowing. With loving not knowing.
     He chose the dark red ropes, and began with a beautiful breast wrap. The basic function of it was standard, but he made up the design of it as he went along. I love it when he experiments like this, appraising and adjusting for aesthetics on the fly. There’s a casual concentration on his face that has everything and nothing to do with me, at the same time. It’s sexy as hell, and rope work is the only thing that brings it out. The breast-bind was absolutely lovely. I wanted to dress to go with it, to set it off (and to officially make myself complicit in the turn this night had taken), but I didn’t want enough clothing to inhibit whatever other ropish inspiration might come to him. Panties can be enhanced by ropes, or they can be completely in the way. High heels can anchor a tie really effectively, but they also rule out the feeling of a tight wrap around the arch of the foot or a single cord pulled between the toes… I decided that my good, black-on-black corset was minimal enough to not get in the way, and nice enough to make me feel dressed up for the evening all on its own, so I went with that and nothing else. It was the last decision I made that night.
     I went to get us drinks, and stopped at the mirror in the hallway to admire the rope work and the effect of black against wine red. When I returned, he put one finger on the bedspread and said “Put your face here.” I still don’t know if it was punishment for tardiness or for pride or simply for his pleasure, but the result was the same. He’d been maintaining that detached air of suavity and nonchalance, like he had one foot on either side of the line, up until that moment. He stepped into the night for real then. With my face down, my ass up, and my arms over my head, he stood behind me and almost in a frenzy, he flogged my back, my ass, my underarms, and my pussy. When I couldn’t keep from squirming, he tied my feet together and flogged me harder.
     He put me on my back then, leaning slightly against the headrest, and tied my legs together. He takes his time with this kind of thing, for the sake of pleasing lines and symmetry, intricacy and function. And then he lifted my legs high and straight, and secured the live ends of the rope to the binding at my chest. I was piked, and I was bound. My pussy and my ass were exposed and vulnerable, and he made a point of noting this for me with a slow dose of hot spit dropped from above, that landed on one and slid down into the other. He moved out of my sight for a moment, letting me feel the sensation and the totality of my restraint, the tactile indulgence of rope sunk into flesh, then he picked up the Harlequin again, and let me feel that rope in my flesh as well.
     He had access to the underside of my ass from above in that position, and he took full advantage of it. Saved his upswings for the backs of my legs, and swung down on my wet pussy and my ass and the soles of my feet, as punctuation between them. One crack on my underside landed with such force and precision that it was a line of fresh pain all night, never seeming to dull or fade out. When he put down the flogger, he did it to pick up my pink glass plug, and told me in accurate, murmuring detail what I was feeling as he worked it slowly into my ass. He lifted me to sitting then, so I could feel it under my own weight, and detached my legs from my chest so that he could reach his fingers into my crotch, spreading his spit and my own wetness over the bright spots of pain he’d left there, and squeezed my breasts until runners and droplets of milk seeped into the ropes that bound them. He bent me at the knees to gain access to the toy in my ass, manipulating it (and me) from underneath, while he watched my face for every trace of arousal and fear.
     He did not let me come. As soon as he had me close, he untied my legs and sent me for fresh drinks. I asked if I could stop for eyeliner, after I got them. There is no armor in the world like black eyeliner, and I knew if I could have that, I could let go of everything else. When I came back, a little less trembly and sliding around the plug still in my ass, he had out the “switch” (which thankfully isn’t really a switch – I can’t bear that level of sting), the riding crop, and one of his long, bamboo poles. He put me on my knees first, arms over my head, and lay stripes across my shoulders, front and back. My stomach and lower back were still corseted, but he left marks I wouldn’t be able to hide everywhere between its top and my neck. The riding crop was small and precise enough to work around and in between the ropes forcing my breasts out between them, and he paid special attention there, and to the top of my back and shoulders. When he was satisfied, he lay the bamboo sideways across the bed, and put me down onto my back, above it – on top of all the stinging red lines he’d just placed so carefully. He placed my feet on it, wide apart, and with multiple, heavy wraps around my ankles and then under and around the pole on both sides of each, he lashed me to it like it was a spreader bar. My knees were bent, so that the pole was just lower than my ass, and he took my wrists next, and lashed them to it on the outside of my feet. Squirm at all then, and the pole pressed against the flange of the toy in my ass, forcing it further into me.
     I assume that it was the shaft of the crop that he used to put lines down across the fronts and inners of my thighs; I couldn’t look, at the time. The pain was immense. The marks were tight and deep and they lasted many, many days. He also took the switch, which is stingier, to my pussy, and repeated the gravity propelled drop of spit-from-above, so the slaps were wet and splashy. He beat the ever-loving fuck out of me, and every writhing motion I couldn’t control affirmed the rope and the pole and the plug that occupied me. Then he produced the Hitachi Magic Wand. We rarely bust that thing out. I hate it every bit as much as much as I like it, so just when I’d given in to the beating, he’d managed to reanimate my fear and I had to give in to that, too. It’s a near impossible thing that happens to your head, when you have to resolve yourself to being afraid. Fear is a thing that, by its very nature, should prevent you from coming to grips with it. Under regular circumstances, getting used to a situation in which you are afraid, generally lessens the fear. If you accept the fear, you undermine it in doing so. You can abide it though, consent to it, without losing it. The crossover is just sort of in another place. If you can let go of where you usually live in your head, you can take up residence at the intersection.
     For a long time, he alternated beatings with near-coming and that low murmur of profane suggestion and narration that does to my head exactly what his hands do to my body. It purrs around the edges of my brain, flicking switches as it goes, and he was keeping it up until the internal chaos that was pleasure was just topping the internal chaos that was distress, and then he’d trade the horrible, buzzing weapon of undeniable orgasm for the crop or the switch or the flogger and I’d fall down another rabbit hole. It sounds like I’m over-describing it, but it was just like that, and it was endless.
     Then he let me come, and it wasn’t endless after all.
     He untied me from everything but the breast binding and put me back on my knees. He flogged my breasts and my shoulders again, not hard enough to make me fight escape but just to reignite the fires he’d put into them before, and took the riding crop to my underarms (fucking hell, that’s another kind of pain). When he stopped, I couldn’t keep myself from kissing him – I didn’t try; there was no time or thought, I just fell into him. He let me kiss him, he seemed amused by it, and didn’t stop me from moving straight to cock sucking from there. That didn’t last long, though. Pretty quickly he demanded my pussy on his cock, and when he got it, he began fucking my ass with the toy while I was fucking him. I got three vaginal orgasms, one on top of another, out of that. The second and third were both super-twos, and the last one went on for so long that it was like losing consciousness. Right on the heels of the clitoral orgasm he’d pulled from me with the evil/not at all evil Hitachi wand, the first one was like coming home. Like a conclusion. The second one surprised me – sneak attack before I’d come all the way down off the first – and then surprised me again when it went over the top and exploded through my whole body. The third, well, like I said, it was very like blacking out, only if the blackness was a sea of pleasure. It was like drowning in orgasm.
     It’s at this point that I reached that stage where I would do anything at all. This is an interesting point to reach. It always leaves me a little embarrassed afterward, but it’s always worth it. Anything. He could whip out Japanese tentacle porn and start giving directions when I’m like this, and I would throw myself into it like I’d been waiting my whole life. My skills would be lacking though – not only for obvious reasons but also because I am fully out of control at this stage. I am a creature of emotion. I have blown the fuse on the frontal lobe of my brain. I am a mess. A flailing, devoted, probably crying, enthusiastic, madly in love, oversexed mess. Fortunately, he didn’t whip out any Japanese tentacle porn.
     What he did was slow fuck me. At the same time, he was maneuvering the toy in my ass – not for my benefit, but for the sensation it was giving him, with his cock in my pussy. It did benefit me though, of course, and the doubly penetrative stroking kept me right on that brink of control that I was struggling so hard to maintain. When he ordered me to suck my come off of him, I still wasn’t right in the head. I was incapable of precision and intricacy, so it was a long, happy, non-technique-specific cock sucking, with lots of deep throating and drenching volumes of spit. I used various exit strategies from a wide mouthed withdrawal, one finger pressing his cock against the full length of my tongue, to tight suction right up over the tip. I used a pulse from the back of my throat while I had him at depth, pulled out through a suicide squeeze. I played with the good gag and pushed through to various feats of past-gag heroics. (That game is particularly fun when I have crested the peak of anything at all. Then it’s not just that I would do anything, it’s that suddenly I can do anything. Does miracles for the ego.) I got both of his balls in my mouth and slid my tongue up behind them as far as it would reach. I played spiderwebs with the spit between my fingers and the head of his cock. He was still playing with the toy in my ass, and at least twice as I pulled his cock out of my throat in one way or another, he slid his fingers into me to my g-spot, and made me girl-come all over his hand and wrist.

     The threshold move, the brink before deep throat, was getting notable response from him, so I started alternating between that and some tip tricks, now that my head was starting to come around enough to accomplish them. I did a little exploring of that older sister move I’d been working on and made up another thing with more hand and just a tease of lips and tongue, between sinking him back to pop against that ridge at the top of the throat. Then, on a whim, I picked up the Hitachi wand and stroked it just from the tip of his cock to back along the frenulum. He let me get away with it, so I added my mouth to his cock, at the same time. You have to be ready for it, if you’re going to take a vibrator of that strength basically to your face, but it was fun and effective. I used generally the same motions I usually do, just substituting the wand for one of my hands, or using my tongue as I would have used my hand and placing the wand where my tongue would have been.
     I’ve been over-stimulated by that wand before and I didn’t want to do it to him, so I backed off into the good old blow job while he found the toy in my ass again, and then my g-spot again, and again. And as I finished him off between the ripe peach, the dragonfly, and something I’m afraid I’m simply going to have to call bubbles, I began to wonder again if I should actually start compiling all these little techniques and ideas onto a page. The whole room was a steamy mess and smelled of hot sex, and I lay back into it, against the stinging welts on my shoulders, thinking Would anyone buy it? Would You? Should I do it?

(“Mercy, right?”)

33. Consistently Inconsistent, and the Harlequin

     So I’ve been staring at the next several pages of my journal for days and days. Here I’ve made this proclamation about getting this thing a step or two back toward what it used to be, but the next few entries are written very much in the style of what it has become (cue the funk soundtrack). So what’s a girl to do? I tried reading back over the early posts to confirm that they are more entertaining (they are), but wasn’t able to figure out how to morph the upcoming episodes into the view-from-just-a-little-further-away that I want. I don’t want to just bail on the idea; that would be too similar to the way I make grand statements about writing schedules and then immediately fuck them up. (It’s so consistent that some part of me has to be doing it on purpose. Self-sabotage or belligerence? Hard to say, maybe both.) But I really like the old style, even if I’m not going all the way back into it. Seriously, there’s funny shit in there! Look at this: “I got mine in pink, because I hate pink – I’m blonde and blue and so pink makes me feel like Barbie, which is only anything but heinous when it’s Barbie getting railed in the ass. Then it’s awesome.” That’s fucking hilarious! I don’t care if I’m the only one laughing, I crack myself right the fuck up! But this thing is one hundred single-spaced, typewritten pages long, and the best line in it is in the second post? There’s something wrong with that. So I asked myself what it was that made the early stuff come out so differently. I think it’s because those posts each had some kind of a point. They were all going somewhere. I had something to say besides “Yep, had sex.” So I tried to look at the new, as yet un-transcribed pages and figure out what the point was there… There wasn’t one. Not really. But as I was going back & reminiscing over the old stuff, I came upon The Way of the Moment. The point of that one is pretty cliché – we play by our own rules, I don’t give a fuck how anybody else defines this shit, blah, blah, blah. You’ve heard it before. However, that doesn’t make it meritless, and the idea translates. So I’m going to listen to my own advice and ignore any fabricated rules I feel like, even if I’m the one who fabricated them. (See my rambling and inconsistent defense of come versus cum.) If I have a point to make, I’ll make it. Maybe I’ll keep a better eye out for them, even. If I don’t, I’ll give you whatever graphic porn I’ve got in the bank. (Speaking of rambling and irrational declarations like the come/cum thing, have you noticed my refusal to call this erotica? I don’t want to derail this train what has to be a fourth time in one paragraph, but it’s intentional.) Anyway, somewhere in the mix, maybe a point or a shiny new thesis statement will pop up somewhere that I didn’t see cumming. (Hahahaha!) 

     Or it won’t, and that will be okay, too.

     Alright, so when last we left our fair heroine, she’d been assigned the task of finding a flogger suitable to the new era. I cannot adequately express to you how well I succeeded. Having exhausted the mediocre selections at the local adult stores, I went online. Dangerous, since you can’t try it out on your arm or your leg before you buy it. Also, I trust you have some inkling of just how much BDSM equipment is available online? Daunting as fuck. I perused noncommittally through those huge warehouse places, but as soon as I found Leatherbeaten, I knew that was where I was going to stop. The flogger descriptions were all written in a familiar vernacular that told me exactly what I needed to know, and there was a sense of humor inherent to the whole site. And then there it was. The Harlequin. I think my nipples got hard as soon as I saw what it was made out of. You can guess, can’t you? Rope. It was made out of rope. (Clouds part, ray of sunlight, and the choir goes “Aaaaaahhhh…”) I emailed back and forth with Billy (super nice, probably a ton of fun to get boozy with), and talked about options. He was out of purple, but was happy to make one especially for me, in… Red. See how poetically it comes back to the previous flogger discussion? If there are gods, at least one of them’s a kinkster for sure.
     The day it arrived, I went back and forth between feeling like I shouldn’t touch it and not being able to leave it alone. It wasn’t really mine to handle, it was only mine to receive. I swung it against my leg once but immediately felt guilty, so I settled for abstaining from holding the grip, and just indulged in feeling the rope ends against my palms and fingers. Eventually I hung it over the bedroom doorknob and waited for my husband to come home from work. I did all the prep and bath and shaving and lotion and crap to keep myself from going insane, and to make sure my skin was smooth and supple enough to sustain the night ahead. I let my husband know the package had arrived, so he wouldn’t be ambushed by a naked girl throwing herself at him in a puff of honey dust, the minute he walked in the door. (Actually, I went without honey dust, if you care. Just the good lotion. It makes for grabbier flesh and just slightly more palpable contact.) I tried to girl it up in skimpy little white things with tiny flowers, going for contrast with the thrashing that was surely coming, but (beside the fact that I can never take that shit seriously, anyway), I didn’t last an hour before I had to tear it all off and be nakednakednaked.
     He put on a Sex & Submission porn, and left the sound on. We never leave the sound on, so that was an interesting little embellishment. Something about the sound of the lash falling, as an accessory to the percussive soundtrack of the room. He started off testing the Harlequin on my ass and thighs. Love at first strike. All the fire and burn of the other floggers, but with the heavy smack I was missing in them. A bruisey thwack of seven looped tails, and the sensation of rope wrapping around me as it came down. No question it was going to leave deep purple marks. What is it about the marks? In the very first post here, I made reference to sex that you can see the evidence of on your body the next day, but it’s not just a reminder of the sex itself. It’s more than that, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Sure, there’s an element of exhibitionism to it when they’re somewhere you can’t hide, or when you’re changing in the locker room at the gym with an undeniably purple ass, but that doesn’t cover it either. It’s like carrying something with you, something less fleeting than the moments in which you got the welts and bruises. It’s something you gained from the experience, something created by it, and it’s a part of you, so that you’ve somehow become more than you were before.
     I was given instruction to lie back and play with myself while he watched. But of course he didn’t just watch. He had me grab and pull at my pussy and my clit, and the ropes would come down on me whether my hand was in the way or not. At the same time he talked to me about where this evolution was going, the admission of pain as one of my primary sources of pleasure, made me say it out loud, confirmed that he’d known before I’d admitted it to myself, and he flogged my snatch and the insides of my thighs while he did it. He went down on me then, with that languid, sucking, hedonistic mouth ravishing that’s very like being slowly devoured. When I started to climb the near side of the orgasm, he pulled away and went back to flogging me. Know what’s better than rope landing hard on flesh? Rope landing hard on wet flesh. He flogged me until I couldn’t keep still or quiet, then instead of punishing me for it, he took me in his mouth again. As a woman sleeping with a man, there’s something thrilling about the thought, when it’s had at that particular moment, of part of your body being inside of him, instead of part of his being inside of you. It never fails to escalate my arousal. The punishment came when I was denied again, at the rise of climax. And the rope tails came down between my legs and on my clit, made so extra sensitive by the near-orgasms and their contrast to the spikes of pain, and it wasn’t as long as the last time until I was squirming and crying out. Then again his mouth was on me, and I could think only of the wet, tactile kinship, the sameness of pussy and mouth, mouth and pussy, tongue and clit and labia, and warm, wet, pink flesh that parallels both chambers. That’s another thought that does it to me every time, but again I was denied.
     He lifted my knees, and pinned them back against my sides. With the language of a glance, that comes from being together for a very long time, he told me to hold my feet up, hands to the arches, keeping them wide over my head. It tipped my ass so that he had access to the underside, which he flogged with side swings and lifting strokes that came up from below. It gave him access to the backs of my thighs, which he flogged with hard down-strokes and across. He went on until I wasn’t sure I could. I have never safeworded with him. It’s not that he doesn’t push my boundaries – in fact it’s a particular pleasure of his to do so – but he can always see it on my face, and backs off right before I have to vocalize it. He told me later this night that he thought I was going to safeword then, and it made me wonder. There has to be an arousal in a dominant to bring a sub to the point of safeword. To hear it. I’m sure there are plenty who go there intentionally (though hopefully very carefully), and routinely. I wonder if he thinks about it. As I mentioned, I changed mine recently, and for the first time in my life. I did it to acknowledge the stripping away of that last pretense (by last I mean most recent – who knows if there are more), to let go of the word along with the time when I wasn’t admitting I might actually need it. It was never said aloud, except to confirm it, and I think it’s kind of fitting to cut it loose unspoken like that. I don’t know if I’ll ever use the new one. Maybe, maybe not, but I like it, I like having it. It has a potential that the other one lost under its pile of dust. It’s the potential that I like, I think. The not knowing. And I wonder if it made him think about it. I don’t know if bringing me to it would turn him on or horrify him. (Which is weird, because I feel like I should know that. How have we never had that conversation?) I think I’ll wait until he’s read this, and then ask him. On the night in question though, I did not. I was however, so overcome by being delivered from the flogging, when he stopped and went down on me again, that I got sloppy and let go of my feet. Try to guess what happened next.
     When he tired of punishing me, or maybe (hopefully), when he reached the point of being unable to continue not fucking me, he turned me onto my side and took me from behind. He did his progression and repetition thing where he starts super slow and goes on fucking me like that until my pussy melts onto his cock. Then he increases everything until he’s railing me fast and hard, and it’s like the orgasm is going to start at the very core of me, travel out from under my ribcage and my diaphragm and engulf the entire lower half of my body. After that point he was so deep inside me that he was just crushing himself into me and I was squirming back on him and squeezing his cock with my cunt.* And then, just when I’m going to die of pleasure, he stops, pulls almost all the way out of me, teases me with just the head of his cock nudging barely into my wet snatch, and he starts the whole thing over again. He still didn’t let me come. He pulled me up and put me forward over a wedge pillow. You know the stiff, triangle-shaped ones? High side under my hips, apex under my boobs, face in the mattress. He kicked my knees out wide, picked up the Harlequin and went to town on everything from my shoulder blades to my calves, including this upswing that would hit my whole pussy at once. I was beside myself. Went to another place, for awhile. In fact, I don’t know how that particular portion of the evening ended. He might have let me have a #3. I’m honestly not sure.
     The next thing I was aware of, was kneeling to face him. My front and my breasts were disproportionately pain-free, compared with the rest of me which was lit up like a string of Christmas tree lights – a hot, blinking fire hazard. I took my breasts and nipples in my hands, squeezing until my fingers were wet and slippery, holding them towards him for approval. He flogged them, of course. Again, wet skin under seven falling loops of rope. I think he was swinging more lightly than before, or my front bruises less easily than my back, because the stripes he raised there were gone by morning. He bent me forward again then, this time fucking instead of flogging, while he held my upper body flat. I remember the weight with which he held me down; I was restrained as surely as I would have been, had he strapped me to a table. (Which we don’t do anymore. I very nearly lost consciousness once, years ago, in Vegas. Good times.) He started to do what I thought was the same slow to fast, tip to depth maneuver he’d worked me over with earlier, but then one hand came off my back and I heard the flogger just the moment before it came down. He was definitely working more carefully now, because he was flogging and fucking me at the same time. Not even sparing my ass and unders, while he was inside me. Brave man. (Or a switch in disguise!)
     He left off then and motioned for me to suck his cock. It was hard to concentrate at first, because the flogging didn’t cease, and the angle (from over my head to come down on my ass), whipped the ends of the Harlequin’s tails right into my pussy. Finally I got my head around it though, and worked out that what was working for him was the deep stuff. So I went deep. I used the suicide squeeze with a slow withdrawal, straight deep throat with a swallow, deep throat with a tongue swirl, deep throat with an under-lick, deep throat with a pulse… Basically I got to work. Then, like he’d done to me, I backed out almost altogether and played with the tip. Tongue trap, ripe peach, I had to modify the Vegas trick because I was coming from straight in front of him, but it worked well enough to slow the attention of the flogger that was still messing with my control. I took the opportunity and lifted off him so he could see the volume of spit still left from all the deep throating, and I swirled it around the head of his cock, while he watched. That did it. A moment later he was pulling me up onto him.
     First there were a couple of deliciously smooth g-spot orgasms that oozed slowly, instead of gushing. Then he started talking me through my own rising climax. I was trying to recreate the awesomeness he’d given me with the slow to fast maneuver of hours earlier, but he was sitting up in a position that is one of my very favorites and instructing me on how to fuck him until I came, in this low, ongoing murmur, and squeezing my breasts until his fingers were wet, and I was closer and closer to just losing control in my typical cock riding frenzy. Then he said “Poor little clit, beaten and hasn’t come – rub it in your cum that’s all over my stomach…” And that was it, for me. Remember the vaginal orgasms I dubbed “Super Twos?” That sent me into the huge, ongoing, explosion of one of those, followed in short order by a second, of the same magnitude. Slightly ironic that he’d been addressing my clit, when he triggered that, and I didn’t have a clitoral orgasm all night.
     There was more cock sucking after that. I can’t resist his cock when it’s covered in my come. I brought him to the edge and backed off a couple of times, and was practicing the good gag (because it’s not enough to know how to keep from gagging, sooner or later you’re going to fuck that up, you also have to learn how to let yourself gag, and still stay in control). (Okay, plus, I think he gets a charge out of watching me gag on his cock.) I could have let him come then, but the fact was that I wanted him in my ass. He was still sitting as he had been when I climbed off of him, and I was tucked in between his spread knees, so all I had to do was turn around. I mean, I could have climbed back up where I’d come from and ridden myself to an anal orgasm like that, but my husband’s a visual guy; I wanted him to be able to see. Also, I can’t fuck him like that without losing control, and I wanted to make it slow for him. So I turned around and slid my feet and calves under his spread thighs, putting us ass to cock. I started with just the tip, working a little deeper then withdrawing, then the tip again and working a little deeper still, then withdrawing, then deeper still and withdrawing, while he watched. By the time I had him at full depth in my ass, I knew I was going to lose control like this, too. I was alternating between straight-up fucking him, and burying him in a backward grind and squeeze, when it happened. I’d wanted him to come in my ass, but I started getting hit with more of those long, low, slow-ooze g-spot orgasms I’d had earlier, and I got lost in my own pleasure. He probably would have come for me there, but I fucked it up in the throes of climaxing and blew the rhythm completely. I decided to make it up to him by blowing something else.
     He was all about the tip now, super sensitive to every move. I know what that’s like because he does it to my clit all the time, so I went kitten mouth on him. I teased him back from that with more of the ripe peach (which is exceedingly wet), and the tongue trap (which is exactly what it sounds like), and then I drew him onto a newer thing I’m trying to work the kinks out of. (I’m thinking of calling it the older sister, because when I fuck it up I end up punching myself in the mouth.) Anyway, it’s a variation on the half hand job, half blow job theme, so when he did come, it was one of those spilling, splashing, dripping-over carnivals of wetness that drenched me before I even got to swallow it.
     Cum stings a little, on fresh welts.

(Billie for Billy – Thanks darlin’! And hey, what else can you make out of rope...?)

*Yeah, I said it. Fuck off.

32. Evolution

     Things that change: Everything. Things that don’t: Everything.
     And at the same time, neither of those statements is exactly true. Things are fluxy. This is me writing my way through it, from the inside. If you’ve been around for awhile, you might have noticed a few things. You might have noticed that the posts come more infrequently. (Yes, I see it. Once again, the English teachers present can, with all my love, fuck off.) There are reasons for my hesitation. Make no mistake, the biggest reason is that I’m lazy as fuck, but there are others. The easiest one is that originally this was all written out ahead of time (well, through the first eight or ten posts, anyway), and posted weekly while I was trying to keep ahead of it. On the other hand, I’ve been back to being ahead of it for the last couple of months, there are two or three more installments on the page after this one even, but I’m still slow to post. So I have to ask myself why. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks, and I think it’s time to face the ugly truth of the situation. It’s another thing you might have noticed, if you’ve been around for awhile: It’s not as good as it used to be. It used to be about reflection and sexuality and sorting through my evolution from someone with a respectable career I was really pretty good at, to someone who is (instead) paying attention to all the other things I am. It has always been about sex, yes. But it used to be introspective and funny and maybe even a little philosophical, albeit inappropriately (which is the best way to be a little philosophical, if you ask me). Somewhere though, it has mutated. Mutated might be a little harsh. Let’s say it has metamorphosed into individual episodes of graphic pornography. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of graphic pornography, but what used to be an exploration, an investigation of my life and the sexuality inherent to it, has become more like a biweekly (if that) report. A play-by-play of my Saturday nights (and Wednesday nights, and Thursday nights, and the occasional Tuesday…), and while I sense that there’s a place for that, I think I’m better at something else. I think I need to shoot for something in between.
     I tried really hard not to become beholden to You, but the thing is, that was easier when there were four of You, than it is now that there have been fifty-five thousand. I think the motivation behind writing shifted from me sorting through my shit, to providing You with something to read, and much of the insight has been sucked out of it, in the process. One of the first four of You told me in the very beginning that she wished it was more narrative, sex stories if you will, and I think that’s sort of the same way I justified the diminishing art of the thing. It’s very possible that she’s in the majority, by the way, given the fifty-four thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six page view difference between then and now, but remember way back in Fruit, Wine and Tantalization, when I said “I’m trying not to worry about you”? Right. So maybe this is me sort of returning to the inception of it all, by writing my way out of the flux. I’m trying not to worry about You.
     It’s no coincidence that the blog is fluxy right now. It’s the literary incarnation of my sex life, after all, and that’s fluxy right now, too. I’m doing things I never used to do. I’m capable of things I never was before. As much as I’ve always loved the riding crop, a few scant years ago I would have called you crazy if you’d told me my husband was going to take it to my clit and that it wouldn’t make me safeword. Or you may recall occasions on which my husband has charged me with bringing myself to a g-spot orgasm, and then sat and watched me fail until I came to tears of frustration and abject begging instead, before he’d take pity on me and get me off himself (which he can usually do in five seconds or less – I remember he made me count it out loud one time; I almost made it to three). I always blamed it on a near-impossible angle and the fact that my fingers are shorter than his, but I recently discovered that I was full of shit. It happened while I was backed up against the cushion at the foot of the bed, spread eagled and masturbating under his supervision and scrutiny. What I was doing wasn’t anything new or revolutionary. You know that thing you see from solo-performance porn stars, where they basically just finger fuck themselves super fast, with the palms of their hands slapping against their pussies? It’s just straight, self-penetration, with little to no finesse or any of the subtlety of slow manipulation that I love so dearly. It’s not like I’d never done it before, the point is that I’d never liked it before. Evolution, see? I got myself so close like that that it only took two quick little tries off the end of it, and I was spilling girl-cum into the palm of my own hand. I can do that now.
     At the other end of the spectrum is the slow-fuck that he loves so well. It used to be a delicious tease to me, an anticipatory stasis he’d hold me in until I could stand it no longer, at which point he’d let me off the chain and we’d burst into the hard-fast-and-out-of-control that launched me into wild, flailing orgasm. These days, that long, intense slow-fuck reduces me to a puddle of quivering, girl-shaped goo. Sometimes he does one, sometimes the other, sometimes both. The other night he flipped me face down, ass-up (still one of his favorites), and pinned my knees together under me. He slow-fucked me from behind like that until I was incapable of human speech, and then slammed me hard and fast until I was incapable of human thought. Then he backed off and started over again … and again. By the time he was finished with that game, I was a thing of pleasure only, aware of nothing beyond the sensation of fucking, from the tender skin over the arches of my feet, to the goose bumps raised on my scalp under my hair. Fully on another level of consciousness. It was a lasting condition, too; I went on a blow job run after that like I’d sacrificed my first born child to the goddess of cock sucking. There have been more than a few nights like that.
     And then, and then, and then… there is the element of submission. As always, there is that. I was hashing this out with Harpo, the other day, and I think I’ve got the metaphors right, now. She is my sounding board, and knows (like a good therapist) how to respond just enough to let me figure out on my own, what the fuck I’m babbling on about or obsessing over. She gives me someone else to write even the craziest of my shit to, and it lets me see the forest, even from among the trees. There is no beginning to the submissive aspect of my nature. Even more than a decade ago (dare I say decades?), every new element of domination to which I yielded only served to shine a light on something that was already there. It has never been about discovering something new, it has always been about recognizing something old. Reflections or sensory memories sometimes even from my childhood that were always just there without seeming like they needed explanation, that suddenly fit into place and make sense in a way that leaves me wondering why I’ve never questioned them. So I think of my sexuality as a big, old house that I’ve been living in for my entire life. After I came of age, I became engaged in lifting the sheets off of lavish furniture, reclining on the upholstery I’d never actually looked at before, instead of perching on top of the dust covers. In recent years, I’ve been wandering around opening the doors of whole rooms I’ve been walking right past, for years. Only now, very, very lately, I’m beginning to realize that some of that upholstery is actually just more sheets, that some of those rooms turn out to have walk-in closets in them. Should I stop playing around in the figurative and get to a practical example? You probably already caught the one I’m going to give you, if this isn’t the first post you’re reading; it’s just taken me a couple of weeks to come to grips with it. (Another reason behind being slow to post.) It was the thing with the floggers that really made me have to face it – remember? They didn’t hurt. And there you have it. Maybe it was obvious all along. It’s not just about submission with me, it’s also more about masochism than I’ve admitted to myself, before.
     So if you were one of the people who called bullshit on my whole It’s not about the pain spiel, here you go: You were right and I was wrong. It’s kind of a little bit about the pain. I can’t describe to you the internal turmoil I went through, trying to say that out loud to my husband. If you think it took me a long time to get to the fucking point here, you should have heard that. It was a monologue that was more pregnant silence than actual words, because I couldn’t get them to come out of my mouth. But I did it. I said it. Okay, okay, he had to fill in some of the words for me, but however it happened, it got said. And then (predictably) he Han Solo’d the shit out of me and said “I know.” Fucker. I love him so much it’s sometimes hard to breathe.
     So everything changes, and everything stays the same. He sent me online, tasked me with researching and finding a flogger that feels good because it hurts, and as a kind of symbolic acknowledgement of this next epoch in our long and storied relationship, I have changed my safeword for the first time, ever. I have a feeling I might need it.
     As for the writing, I have no idea where the fuck this thing is going. I’m trying to sit back and watch it happen, instead of pushing it toward somewhere I might assume – likely wrongly – that it will end up. I will put the words on the page, and then read them to find out what the hell they say. And on the side, I’ve started writing down the bag of tricks and blow job savvy compiled in my brain and referenced here. I’m thinking a little bit about an e-book. I don’t know if I’ll go through with it or not – I have a suspicion that anybody who might pay to read it probably already has a bag of tricks all their own. Still, I’ll write it and decide the rest later. Like with everything else, I’m curious to see how it evolves.

(It occurs to me that if you're a huge fan of something like dubstep, you should probably never, ever click on any of the songs I post...)