the contract

I agreed several months ago that I would work on a contract for me and Jos. Specifically, he was hoping for three things: a bill of rights, a list of my promises to him, and a statement of the attitude I wished him to have in serving me.

I wrote the promises a while back, although I was reluctant to show them to him, and only did so tonight. And, also as of tonight, I have requested that he write the bill of rights.

(A short aside about the bill of rights. It is not that Jos wishes to demand rights from me, or generally fears that I won’t respect his rights. But sometimes he needs to ask me to respect some kind of limit or boundary or legitimate request, and becomes mixed up internally over doing this. The bill of rights is there to remind him that it’s really something he can and should do without worrying that it’s wrong. It includes things like the right to appeal my decisions.)

This is what I wrote for the promises:

As long as you wear my collar, I will…

demand your service by…

• asking for what I want from you
• being clear in my directions
• giving you honest feedback about whether you met my expectations
• correcting you as needed, including (at my discretion) with punishment

respect your service by…

• taking your difficulties seriously
• listening to your concerns
• answering your questions honestly
• taking responsibility for my mistakes
• paying attention

guard your health and safety by…

• respecting your limits and safewords
• discussing new activities with you before trying them
• listening to your concerns
• playing within my own limits
• taking appropriate precautions
• informing you of any risks I’m aware of that you might not be
• telling you if I am having serious difficulties during a scene
• reviewing what went wrong, if something goes wrong, in detail
• respecting your responsibility to keep yourself safe

That part was actually pretty easy for me to write. What has been giving me fits is writing the part about the attitude I want from him. Because, honestly, I am not always sure what I want. And what Joscelin wants is in some ways so clear to me, and he wants it so strongly, that I have a hard time seeing around it to the possibilities our relationship really presents.

So tonight, I sat down for about an hour and just wrote freely in Google Docs, not for his eyes at all, about what I want. Some of it was silly, and some of it gave me pain because there are things I can’t have (like having him never be angry), and some of it…started to form a pattern. It was a pattern that is slightly, though not entirely, foreign to how our d/s relationship has typically been construed.

At the end, I wrote a draft of what this part of the contract might say. This is that draft:

Please be ready, but relaxed. Always remember that you are my slave, and that I can call you into service. But when I have not given you an instruction, then be my lover and my friend, collegial, kind, playful, and affectionate.

You may sometimes fear that you don’t know how to serve me. It is my wish that you be calm and relaxed and trust that if I am not pleased, or if I have a desire, I will express it. If you are not pleasing me I will correct you. If I want your service I will demand it. And please trust that I will often want and demand your service.

I want you to strive. I want you to hold yourself to high standards. But I also want you to accept my love, kindness, and mercy. I want you to view yourself with love and forgiveness. I want you to understand that I see you as a beautiful person deserving of love.

When I am using you as my slave, for pleasure or for pain, I want you to give me what I ask for, while holding yourself in a state of calm acceptance. I want your mind as clear as you can make it. I want you to give yourself over to me without thought of what I wish to accomplish or what techniques I am or should be using. I recognize that as a person with a mind, you will often analyze and have feedback about scenes or sex, but I want that process to come after and not during. Ideally, in a scene you would be limp-willed, trusting, and accepting of whatever comes. I would love it if your mind were wordless and you existed only in the moment.

I want you to accept being treated with kind strictness, and hope for the same. I want you to be content when I treat you as a pet, knowing that I can also invoke your fiery qualities with pain and fear.

I also need your own strictness, your passion and burning desire for justice. I love them for themselves but also appreciate the way that they keep us both safe. By policing your boundaries, you make it safe for me to explore near them, at some cost to yourself. I need you to maintain that vigil. I need you to help me keep from harming you, and to stop me when I’m enraging you.

But, within that stricture, what I most want from you is your trust, your calm, your readiness, and your acceptance.

Well it’s just a draft. I can already see parts I want to change.

Most contracts you find online are from One True Way boneheads, or are nothing more than hot wank material (at best). I bet most sane d/s couples don’t have contracts at all. If you were going to write a contract, you’d have to find your own style, because I doubt this one would be right for most people. But I’m excited for us to be finding our way to something that works for us - both in terms of a contract, and in terms of the relationship in general.

I’ve been feeling a certain loosening lately. Perhaps because Jos thinks I am a great mistress to him, and so clearly loves and accepts me, and perhaps because I’ve just had more time and experiences to help me think this stuff through, I’m finding myself becoming less fearful, less eager to please, less empathetic-to-the-exclusion-of-other-things, and more prone to seeking my own way. And as you can probably tell from what I’ve written above, “my own way” is not about being more strict and demanding (which Jos would certainly accept and enjoy), but about getting what I really want.

a mistake

As my regular readers know, I have a long-standing habit of describing, often in excruciating detail, failures, mistakes, and instances of things going horribly awry in my often wonderful d/s relationship. This is one of those times, and to some extent I don’t want to write about it, because it’s embarrassing, but writing about things is therapeutic for me, and it’s good to talk about how things like this can be handled when they do happen.

A little over a week ago, I was at Joscelin’s house, and he was desperate for an orgasm. I was trying to figure out how to decide whether he could have one or not, and I wanted to do something chance-based, but also devious and interesting. Then I got my idea.

“OK,” I said. “I want to try this, but it’s going to be horribly psychologically damaging. You ready?” (I was not serious about the damaging, but I did feel that it was akin to edgeplay for us - dangerous, perhaps not quite right.)

He assented, so I had him fetch a piece of paper and a pen, and I asked him to write down some tasks that he was willing to complete for me by the next Sunday (tomorrow). “Make sure you’ll have time to do them,” I said.

My idea was that I was going to let him roll as many D10’s (10-sided dice) as he wrote items, and if he had three come up as 8, 9, or 0’s, he could have an orgasm. But when I saw the list, he had written only four items, which wasn’t enough dice, but they were fairly substantial. So I counted up the hours the tasks would take (~ 7 by my reckoning) and used that number instead. He lost the dice roll and got no orgasm that night.

Fast forward to Thursday night. We were at a restaurant discussing how he was going to get the tasks done.

“I have to confess something,” he said. “If you asked me to do that again I would not write down any tasks.”

“OK,” I said. I felt crushed and a little bit angry, but I didn’t want to say anything, because I knew I would cry if I did. I kept the food I was eating in front of my mouth so that he wouldn’t notice, but he didn’t look up anyway, for long enough that was able to get over it.

Later, in bed, I got my feelings hurt over something silly (I forget what), and it dragged on a bit, and I said, “You hurt my feelings earlier.” (I really wanted to say “You slaughtered my feelings earlier” but I controlled myself.)

When I told him about it, he apologized, but said it had been important for him to say.

I asked him to roll over and face away from me. I wanted to hold him from behind and feel, at least for a few minutes, that I was holding and comforting him rather than needing comfort from him. I stayed that way for a couple of minutes and then said, “I guess I need to know how you felt about that.”

He was quite a minute, but finally said, “I felt like you took advantage of my weakened state to get me to agree to things that weren’t good for me, for my schedule. I felt tricked. And I was angry about it.”

Of course, this was my worst fear, and I said so. He told me he hadn’t needed to tell me that - that what he told me at dinner was enough - but I disagreed. I thanked him for telling me. I was glad that I had asked. And I apologized to him, and explained that I knew it was edgy at the time, but hadn’t meant to hurt him.

And, of course, I fell apart crying and needed to be held for a long time. And eventually I apologized for responding so poorly to his anger, and he said, “I forgive you,” and I was crushed. And he felt terrible for hurting me, and I felt terrible for being so hurt over such a small thing (really).

It worked out all right, I suppose. We were able to talk through it completely, which is important. I am proud of myself for asking the question. I’m not so proud of myself for (predictably) falling apart. Meanwhile, for the record, Jos has completed all but one of the tasks.

beautiful night

Saturday night, Joscelin and I went to the club.  He wasn’t feeling great when I picked him up, something both physical and probably psychological.  He mentioned that he was still feeling stressed from our scene the previous night, when I’d bitten and pinched the crap out of him in a way that was pretty casual for me, but intense for him.  (This is a bad combination.)

At the club, we watched an interrogation scene demo.  As the interrogator motivated his subject by cutting her hair, Jos gasped repeatedly such that one guy sitting in front of us turned around.  Hair-cutting: unexpectedly intense.

The demo was fine, but Jos continued to be stressed.  He was having difficult headspace issues (stuff like not knowing where to stand or how to be) and we sat in the coat room to be alone, and he told me he felt like he did when we went to Thunder last year.

“I broke you again,” I said.

“I guess so.”

By “broke” I mean that I put him in a sort of traumatized place.  If I’d tried to have a scene with him, he would have screamed at my first touch.  Yet he really couldn’t handle the idea that he needed me to take care of him, or that he needed to ask anything of me.  We talked about how we solved this last time by having a couple of easy, nice scenes.  He couldn’t stand the idea of me giving him that kind of scene as a gift (his word, not mine).  I reassured him as best I could.  (The idea of him feeling bad about something like this is completely at odds with my reality.)

So we had a mild scene.  I laid him down on a padded table, which I’d covered with a sheet.  He was wearing shackles and I managed to chain him with his hands on the table above his head, which I’ve never done before but which is super sexy, and I chained his feet down with his legs spread.  I rendered him reasonably helpless.

In truth, I’d only brought a few toys - a quirt (totally inappropriate for the circumstances), a soft flogger (possible, but difficult to use in that position), and vampire gloves.

Vampire gloves, for those not familiar, are leather gloves with pointy metal sticking out all over the fronts of the fingers and thumb.  You can hurt someone with them pretty easily, but if you use them without much force, they feel amazing - either a really delicious prickle all over if you just touch with them, or a delightful scratching sensation if you move your hands with very light pressure.

I started just with bare hands, touching him all over, and then I got the gloves.  I touched every exposed part of his body, except that I left his cock alone (because there is no way to do that softly enough with the gloves).  I worked methodically down one side and up the other.  And all the while, I watched his face closely, watching for the transitions from pleasure to pain, and backing off if I saw a lip curl.  Sometimes I pressed the gloves against him enough to hurt a little, but never much.

When I cupped my vampire hand against his cheek, he said, “You’ve really got me headspacy.”  Sweet.

I took the gloves off and I started biting him gently.  And smelling him.  And kissing him.  He was beautiful.  I didn’t realize what a deep headspace I was in until I needed to cross the dungeon to get him another blanket - suddenly I was aware of being dizzy and goofy.  And, unexpectedly, wet.

The scene went on for a while - I flipped him onto his stomach and did more gloving and some very light flogging - but that was the best part for me, the earlier part, where I could watch his face.

Afterwards, we spent a long time in the common room with him wrapped in a sheet, very spacy, drinking some Coke and eating some tortilla chips and m&m’s.  (Yes, this is what our club is like - homey.  No alcohol.  A fridge full of sodas and a table full of snack foods.)  Then we went to dinner - a long odyssey as it turned out, in which we ended up at a late-night diner full of drunk club-goers: mean-eyed guys, girls in short shorts - and then home.

I knew he wanted to spend the night at his own place, but asked if he would consider sleeping in my bed instead.  He readily agreed, which made my night.  I was feeling intensely in love with him.  I started thinking about the smell of his underarms (he makes very little odor, in truth, but you can get a little bit if you stick your nose right in there) and it was making me feel loopy and like I just wanted to rub myself all over him.

We got to my place, got naked, got under the covers, and I tried to absorb his body.  I smelled him and he was delicious.  I had an orgasm with his help.  And then I made him come with my hand.  It took a surprisingly long time and I felt like I was in a trance, just gently stroking him over and over, going to teasing strokes sometimes, feeling his cock all softly-textured in my hand, listening to his small sounds.  My eyes were mostly closed.  It was really like a meditation or something.  He came in the end.

When we turned off the light to sleep, despite the crazy loving energy between us, I had my customary crash.  I buried my head in his chest and cried - actual tears! - while he said amazing things to me until I was ok again.  I don’t know why that happens, but it’s wonderful to be taken care of so easily.

“I’m putting in earplugs now,” he said after.  “But if you have any aftershocks, just let me know, and I’ll take these out and hold you some more.  It’s no problem at all.”

We both slept well - practically a miracle itself - and woke happy, playful, sweet, unstressed, connected, and in love.

What a beautiful night.

honesty is humbling

Recently I needed to be open and honest with Joscelin and discuss something that wasn’t easy for me, and it was a humbling experience.

It was a discussion about a problem we had talking about feminism.  Jos described his view of events here.  He had me read it when he showed up to hang out with me, and then we lay in bed and talked.  I had him remind me of enough events that I could remember exactly what I was feeling when we argued, and why I might have behaved how I did.

It’s not that I did anything egregious.  Nor did he.  But somehow expressing the fear, anger, doubt, and distrust that I’d felt required me being open to him in a way that made me feel exposed.  I had to trust him not to use my admissions to hurt me.  And he didn’t.

I feel this post is vague to the point of being completely boring, but I don’t have the energy to fill in the details.

sadism is close to anger

Last night, I spent some time with Joscelin.  We talked about the difficulties he wrote about here.  And I was not too freaked out or anything, yet twice, when I began hurting him, I felt anger come to the surface, and blend with the desire to hurt, and I had to stop.

The sort of hot-blooded sadistic feeling of wanting to hurt him is awfully close to anger, I realized.  It’s close enough that, if anger crosses my mind, I can’t distinguish between them.  And I’m not OK with hurting him out of anger, so it makes me stop what I’m doing.

I’m not angry at him for having problems.  But part of me is angry that he resists so hard - angry that he can’t just let go, relax, be OK, enjoy what is.  It’s a part I don’t claim, because that anger is both unkind and useless.  And very probably unfair.

But it was just an interesting thing to notice about hurting - that if there is any anger under the surface, I can’t safely play with pain.

my sadism

Sex Geek has a post on the ethics of sadism. (Can I just say how much I love her blog? I want to respond to every single entry with something of equal length, except I’m never quite sure what I want to say, exactly.) Anyway, in the post she talks about if and to what extent sexual sadism (the kind we have in bdsm) is related to what ordinary people mean when they say “sadist” - i.e., just enjoying hurting people with or without consent. I’d quote her, but I really don’t mean to respond to her post so much as to discuss what it made me think about.

An email correspondent once ventured to guess that I was one of those kids who secretly identified with the wicked witch in kids’ movies, and enjoyed watching the prince get captured or tortured. And, oddly, that is not true at all. As a kid I was darkly fascinated by torture, but mostly from the perspective of, “Oh god, will that ever happen to me?” And not in a happy fun way, though I think my general SM orientation had something to do with it.

Even now, I can’t really enjoy torture scenes. I saw one in Heroes one time - the TV show - and I was thinking, “Ooh, hot butch guy being beaten up, Bitchy and Eileen will love this,” but I didn’t love it. I didn’t like it at all. I leave the room during that scene in Reservoir Dogs. I won’t watch a movie where someone gets shot in the kneecaps or the like, if I can help it. I will never watch The Passion of the Christ.

But I don’t hurt Jos because he likes it. Sometimes he hates it. I mean, he craves to be subjected to my cruel passions, and that allows me to do it, but it’s not what makes me want to do it. Once I start hurting him, sometimes it’s like a rush or a wave of sadism comes over me and I want to go extreme - pinch his nipple right off with my fingernails, bite him way too hard, beat him at a faster and faster pace. Other times I just do something slow and excruciating and watch his face contort until he starts to beg me to stop, to let up. And then I keep going.

Sex Geek wrote, about someone having a scene with her true sadist side,

In every case the trust required is enormous - they need to know that there’s a Beast feeding on their pain, but that I’m still there too right beside that Beast, and that I’m stronger than it is, and that I won’t let any true harm come to them.

I have to remind myself continually not to actually go too far. I don’t want to actually remove his nipple. Putting bolts through his skull to attach him to the wall (which I sometimes talk about in a scene) would be gory and disgusting and way too horrible. Beating him dozens of times is enough - I don’t need to ramp it up endlessly. (One way I control this is to notice when diminishing returns start to kick in, and stop at that point. I wonder if that will feel familiar to other sadists?)

He’s a person and I love him. I have to remind myself.

The idea of torturing someone without consent doesn’t excite me. I know it does excite a lot of perfectly ethical sexual sadists as a fantasy. I actually feel like kind of a poser because it doesn’t work for me. Am I really just getting off on submission, not pain? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)

But I’ve said to Jos before that I can’t imagine that anyone isn’t a sadist. And my guess is that, if I were in a position where torturing someone without consent seemed like the right thing to do*, and I did it, I would get into it. I bet I’d find it plenty hot and enjoyable if I were actually doing it. I think becoming a monster in that way would be really easy.

I don’t want to go there, which is why, as Sex Geek wrote in a different post, mere consent on the part of my partner is not enough. I trust Joscelin’s reasons for letting me go there with him. I trust him to take care of himself if he needs to, and tell me to stop if I’ve gone over the line (which has happened - a fact I’m not proud of, but we play so fucking close to that line, and neither of us wants to stop).

Mmm.

(*Since it is, shamefully, a current political issue, let me state for the record that I unequivocally oppose the U.S. government’s use of torture against detainees and terror suspects.)

“please don’t let me”

Jos and I were lying in his small bed last night, face to face.  He was rubbing my pussy in a delicious, teasing way, and I was rubbing his cock in a horrible, vicious, teasing way.  He was whimpering and I was listening, eating it up, and wondering if I could have an orgasm from what he was doing.

“Beg me not to let you come,” I said, partly inspired by clever Bitchy.

He looked at me.  “Please don’t let me come tonight, Mistress,” he said, with apparent sincerity.  “Please, let me feel it tonight.  Let me suffer for you.”

He was so convincing and it was too hot.  I grabbed him and kissed him, hard.  “You have to fuck me right now,” I said.

While he fucked me, straining against his desire to come, he kept it up.  “Please, Mistress, let me go to bed tonight, remembering this, trying to ignore my hard-on and get some sleep.  Let me wake up in the morning with only one thought - to get online and IM you and beg you to let me have an orgasm.”

“I would never want you to beg me for this if I didn’t make you,” I said.  It was true and I wanted him to know it.

“Okay,” he said.

I feel stupid just typing over and over again that it was hot.  It’ll either sound hot to you or it won’t. But it killed me.

“I want to tear your arms off,” I said.

“Please, please, don’t let me come tonight,” he said again after a bit, eyes full of pain.

“I’m not,” I said.  “I’m not going to.”  I said it half-reassuringly, half-cruelly.

He wailed softly, sobbing almost, and kept fucking me.

HNT: mirror image

During our last scene, I walked into the room and found Joscelin kneeling in front of the mirror just like this. The beauty of the positioning of his hands inspired the picture-taking.

magical realism

Joscelin sometimes asks me if he is “really” my slave. And while I usually answer with some variant of “yes”, part of me is usually saying “hmm, not really really.” Because, you know, slavery is illegal and I wouldn’t want to practice it anyway. There are limits, both small ones like respecting safewords, and large ones like not interfering with his work. And, of course, he can leave anytime. These are limits I wouldn’t have with a full chattel slave.

So, it’s real in that, what we do is real, but I question whether it’s real slavery, if you know what I mean.

And then I read something amazing in the comments on Sex Geek’s fantastic post on domestic discipline. First, here’s Jake (excerpted), arguing something I might:

…If you have a negotiated power differential with your bois, then that is real in that it is a fact that affects and informs how you live your daily lives. But I think there’s a meaningful way in which it is also not real…

If one of your bois were to realize that the relationship as it stands is not working out for them, they could ask to renegotiate and be taken seriously, or they could just walk away, without fear of either violent retribution from you or shunning and shaming from their communities…

There’s a definition of reality that I find quite useful: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.”

to which Sex Geek responded, in part,

…One could argue…that the power of the pen (or of consensual power dynamics) is not real power, and that the only real power exists when a sword is drawn (or domestic violence enacted). In a way it’s true; I can’t truly force my bois to do anything past their genuine lack of consent. This paradigm would be in keeping with the definition of reality that you mentioned.

One could also argue that a power that is contingent upon constant coercive enforcement is not real power either - because the second there’s an opportunity to resist, the oppressed party will likely do so, and the tables can quickly turn. Violence and force breed resistance, even if not in a visible way. But this resistance is how dictatorships are overthrown, rapists jailed, and bashers bashed back. And despite the power of the sword, we are still influenced by the pens of powerful people long after they’ve died at the hands of their oppressors - Oscar Wilde, John Lennon, Martin Luther King.

Of course both metaphorically and practically, I would rather hold the power of the pen than that of the sword. I don’t really care if pen power is real power in the eyes of a sword-wielder… it still gets my socks folded and my eggs cooked just right, and it still gives depth and incredible richness to the way my bois and I go about loving each other.

I just think that’s a fantastic way to turn the idea of “real” around to point in the other direction - the direction that says “what Jos and I do is more real than chattel slavery because it’s not held in place by artificial structures.”  I’m happy to have that idea in my brain.

not allowed to scream

So, last night. God. I don’t know where to start.

We ate Chinese food at a place a coworker recommended. It turns out to be excellent, plentiful, cheap, and quite near my apartment. It’s the kind of low-key restaurant that exists in a strip mall and always has a table available. This was a good beginning.

Of course, I wrote that depressed post yesterday. He’d read it, hence the occurrence of the date. But I’d had a 3 1/2 hour nap since. Still, he was in the mood for a heavy scene, and I was in the mood for some reconnection, which I felt might lead to a scene, but I definitely did not want to commit to anything.

At home, we sat in my living room for a couple of hours and just talked. We talked about Simone de Beauvoir and the sexuality of women. But mostly we just talked.

Then, bed.

Then, chains.

I chained him face up, spread-eagled, locked in. I had him put on the bit gag himself first. He wanted it tighter than I let him keep it.

While he was face up, I fooled around with the pinwheel and the vampire gloves. I never broke his skin, but I gave him lots of trackmarks with the pinwheel, and some deep scratches. With the vampire gloves I terrorized him a bit. My favorite moment was lying next to him, carefully grasping his entire cock in my be-needled hand, and watching him look at me shaking his head back and forth desperately.

“Breathe,” I said. “Relax.”

He did.

This was all happy sadist stuff. He was in headspace, and I was in a very playful mode, just fucking with him. I remember smiling a lot. I was also wet, but it wasn’t a deep thing for me. And I was careful to remind/assure him that I owned him, that he was my slave - the types of things he typically asks me because he needs them to make it through.

After a long while of this type of play, I unchained him. I was going to change his position completely, so we took the opportunity for him to drink some more water (which I’d also given him while he was chained up) and go to the bathroom. I spent a little time organizing my thoughts about how to proceed.

I mention this time because we don’t usually have “breaks” during a scene. And it wasn’t like we went completely out of the scene or anything, but it still felt unusual. But good. It was a good plan. It was actually nice for me to have some time to think.

When I was ready to proceed, he knelt, and I asked him if he would go somewhere scary for me.

He assented. I had him put the bit gag back on, and lie face-down in the center of the bed. I let him find a comfortable position - head to one side, arms and torso a bit asymmetrical. Then I began reconnecting his shackles to the chains at each corner of the bed. He trembled and whimpered. He was very headspacy.

I sat at his head and started to stroke him. I had brought over our bamboo cane, and it was lying near his head.

“Mistress, how loudly can I scream?” he asked, barely comprehensible past the gag.

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” I said. I had a whole sort of speech prepared, but wasn’t quite ready to deliver it. I continued to stroke him until I was, and then said, “I’m going to hit you with this. You’re not allowed to scream. No screaming. But you can fight if you want. I have you pretty well restrained. I don’t need you to hold still. But I want you to know, I will stop. You don’t have to stop me. OK?”

He asked me if I preferred for him to hold still or fight. I eventually told him it did not matter to me, but then changed my mind and recommended that he fight, if he felt the need, so that I’d know I was hurting him that badly.

He had to stop me, and tell me that no, the psychology isn’t like that. He recommended that he stay still as long as he was able, then if he started to struggle, he would try to get back to calm. I said that sounded fine. He thanked me.

This type of negotiation is important but difficult in scenes. If he pushes it too far, he can undermine my confidence. But if he has something important to say to me, and feels that he can’t say it, he tends to get a little panicky (especially in headspace). So he has some responsibility not to become nitpicky over every little thing, and I have a responsibility to be open to communication, and to handle it once I get it.

I partly reclined alongside him, facing (roughly) his feet, but lying on my side, and I began hitting his ass with the cane - straight across his ass. And here was the amazing part. He could take it. I was hitting him as hard as I ever have, and I paused to say, “I know this hurts,” and he said, “It doesn’t hurt as much as you think. You can go harder.”

The hotness was unbelievable. My head was swimming and I was just…utterly absorbed in how hot it was to hit him over and over, hard. I watched little bruises form. I moaned and grabbed at his skin where it had gone pink.

Eventually I had to change positions to get more leverage, which was unreal. Normally he can’t take anything like the maximum I can dish out. I paced some of the blows a bit, and others I just let rain down one after the other.

It was wrong. It was wrong and cruel and beautiful and hot. And he could take it. At some point I finally made him lose control a little bit, but he regained it quickly. He started crying, or laughing - neither of us was sure which.

It was not being allowed to scream that was the breakthrough. When he can scream (i.e., all the time) he worries about controlling me through his sounds. Yet he can’t just not scream, because then I won’t know how bad the pain is. There’s no way for him to just scream a natural amount because he’s never that unaware, and I’m never completely not responsive to his sounds (nor should I be).

By being disallowed to scream, it let him completely focus on…what? Relaxing? Taking it? His helplessness? I don’t really know. But between that and the headspace he was in from the bondage and the earlier part of the scene and all of my Mistressy words, he went really deep for me.

When I was finished, I told him I was going to unchain him.

“I don’t want to come down,” he said, laughing a bit. “I’m so far gone.”

“I know. You don’t have to. I’ll be here.”

I released him and we lounged on the bed. I was full of crazy intense love for him and he was just completely high, mind gone. After a while we fucked. When I let him come he didn’t want to - he just wanted to serve me forever - but he did anyway. And I had my own screaming orgasm. And all the while our eyes just gripped each other. (When he came, I wrapped my limbs around him desperately until he told me he couldn’t breathe.)

We ate, and watched some TV. He was really barely there, brains-wise. The call-in poll results on “Top Chef” confused him in an astounding way. We were in love. I was in love.

We finally went to bed, and I couldn’t turn off the light or let him go to sleep for a while. I had to look into his beautiful eyes and watch his beautiful smile and I was just utterly smitten with him. And then we did turn off the light, and I was suddenly stricken with doubt, insecurity. It was like a horrible yearning feeling all down my center.

“Jos?” I said, touching him.

He startled, then said, “Yes?”

“I’m having a little drop,” I said. “I know this is crazy.”

“It’s OK, Dev. It’s OK.” He held me.

“You love me back, right?” I asked.

He laughed and held me and said yes enough times and with enough conviction for me to feel easy with it again. And then we slept.