Good SM, like all good sex, involves a transition from our everyday mundane grocery-list state of consciousness to another state – the state of excitement. Someday the scientists will be able to tell us what interactions of neurotransmitters, what parts of the brain light up, which dim down, what shifts in brain waves are required for the trip to turn-on. What we know about starting the journey to transcendent eros is gathered from a lot of sources, much of it our own years of practice in SM, and explorations of other spiritual practices rooted in the body: yoga, prana, ritual dance, drumming, western-style tantra – and, let’s not forget, sex.
What they all have in common is following a path in the body to transform what is going on in the mind. We will describe for you techniques of shifting consciousness that have worked for us and people we know. We want you to know that it’s fine to experiment with these scripts. You can change anything and try it a different way, and the order in which we describe various techniques and sensations may be different from the order that works for you. There are no hard-and-fast scripts, no “right” ways – there are only the ways that work for you and your partners. Try things different ways, and if you light up with pleasure and joy and arousal, then you’re doing it right.
The first task in setting off on the road to ecstasy is to clear away the obstacles. Release mundane worries, forget about the bills, free yourself of any of the daily trash that you trip over in ordinary consciousness.
Dossie likes to do a lot of preparation in order to cast off all her cares and woes. She prepares food and drink as for a long journey, cleans the house, changes the sheets, puts out the toys, cleans herself (squeaky inside and out), dresses in costume, sews on the buttons. She takes care of all the details that she can think of, and the process both satisfies her anxiety and starts getting her excited as she fantasizes about where on the soft freshly vacuumed rug she intends to get ravished. She likes to wash away worries and cares as she bathes and shaves, imagining all the distractions whooshing down the drain, transformed into compost.
Janet uses a different sort of checklist to take care of her preparation process:
To have the kind of experiences we talk about in this book, the first thing I have to do is want them.
Sounds obvious and simple, no? Well, not really. These experiences aren’t always easy to have: occasionally they’re scary, often they’re deeply moving, once in a while they alter your life. And that’s not something I always want, or should want.
To travel in the realm of radical ecstasy, I have to let go of many of the things that keep me safe in the rest of my life — my identity, my coolness, my worries about how I look or what people think of me. While these are important things to have — they help me do my work, maintain my relationships, find my place in my world — they are all mediators of my experience, filters that alter the way I see and the ways I’m seen.
Irony, that ever-useful Swiss Army knife of 21st-century culture, is a very good way to appear hip and knowing, and a very bad way to travel through inner and outer space. Irony is a way of holding the world at arm’s length, of saying to the universe, “Oh, did I say that? — well, surely you know I was just kidding.” Which means it’s also a way of holding myself at arm’s length, of building a wall between what I’m really feeling and what I think I ought to feel. Out it goes.
Self-consciousness: very important. If I don’t know how I appear to others, I will say and do inappropriate things; I’ll dress funny and walk weird and make the wrong facial expression. Self-consciousness is an inevitable outgrowth of self-awareness, I guess. But it’s also a way of creating a second self, the “me” that I see as other people see me. And only one of me gets to journey in these lands: the self that’s as close to my core as I can get, my undecorated soul.
Fear — now there’s a two-edged sword. Without it, I’d walk into danger every day. Fear is the parent that keeps me from running into the street, the cop that keeps me from slapping the obnoxious sales clerk, the vertigo that sends me staggering back from the edge of the abyss. But sometimes the abyss is exactly where I want to be... so I must give up my fear to you and to the scene we do together: trust you not to laugh at me, not to betray me, to cherish the naked pink vulnerable self I’m giving up to you.
Distraction, one of my favorite addictions. How can any one problem become too important when I have so many to keep my mind whirling? Did I feed the dog? Will today be the day I overdraw my checking account? That cute woman I met at the last munch, did she like me? What’s for dinner? — a soothingly familiar agitation, meaningless and omnipresent as Muzak. But how can I be there for you, totally focused on you and on whatever we’re building between us, when my brain is skipping like a pollen-seeking bee? So out with distraction, perhaps the hardest of all to relinquish.
So: here I am, just me, as pure as I can become. I am touching you, hoping that you are as naked as I, no walls between us, all the filters gone. Let’s play.
For most people, what works for releasing whatever needs to be let go is just that: release. If you find yourself holding onto thoughts or patterns or emotions that are getting in your way, just notice them, unclench your psychological hand, and let them float away. You don’t need to push or shove, or beat yourself up for having the thoughts or feelings – just let them go.
Think for yourself of all the ways you can do the equivalent of taking a psychic shower. Imagine washing off your bad body image stuff. Imagine a box in which you could put your resume, your job search, your boss, your taxes; close the lid and lock those things away until you are ready to deal with them. Put the key somewhere comfy and give it a rest. Imagine yourself in a beautiful environment, dancing with nymphs and satyrs. Imagine whatever you like to imagine while you’re getting to sleep or masturbating. Your imagination is a powerful tool: imagine a movie in which you are the gorgeous, confident, powerful star – rehearsing for a great performance.
Because when you get ready to do a scene, that’s what you are doing – getting ready to be a star. A very bright shining one.
So you think you already know how to breathe? Chances are you do, if you’re reading this. But there is an amazing amount to know about breathing – another never-ending exploration. We have borrowed wisdom about breathing from yoga practice and from bodywork therapies, starting with Wilhelm Reich, who indeed borrowed his ideas from yoga. Here are some new and interesting ways you can play with your breath.
Put your hand on your belly and take a deep breath and hold it. Pay attention to how your belly feels, your shoulders, your face, your sense of yourself. Now release the breath thoroughly – let this take a few seconds – and register how different you feel in your body and in your mind. First principle of breathing: holding the breath adds to tension, physical and mental. Releasing the breath promotes relaxation.
Take a few slow breaths and let yourself relax a little. Let the air flow without halting it or holding between the ins and the outs. Now imagine that the air you are breathing in is cool and fresh and blue, and that the air you breathe out is orange and hot. Imagine that the more of that hot orange air you breathe out, and the more cool fresh blue air you breathe in, the more comfortable you become. Imagine breathing out all your tensions into the hot orange air, releasing any charge, any burden.
There, you’ve done your first breathing exercise. Now you know how to increase and release tension – very useful in sex and play. Just about everybody builds up a lot of muscle tension as they approach orgasm, so if you want to last longer and not come yet, you can learn how by physically relaxing your body and slowing your breathing. And if you feel that a whip or a clothespin is getting challenging, you can relax your body and let the pain flow through you with the breath. And when you do that you will feel more. Take more, too. And have more to give.
Further breathing tricks we learned from tantra are about raising eros in whatever form you like by breathing like a pump. First, you need to know how to squeeze your PC muscles. These are the pubeococcygeal muscles which stretch like a sling between your tail-bone and your pubic bone. Animals who stand on four legs don’t need as strong PCs as we do, because their internal organs hang down tidily from their spines, swinging freely. But we stood up, and developed strong PCs to keep our internal organs from falling out the bottom. And, lucky creatures that we are, lots of our sexual nerves travel with the PCs.
To find the PC squeeze, move the muscles you use to open and shut off the stream of urine when you pee. Those are the front PCs. Then squeeze and release the muscles you use to control taking a bowel movement. These are the rear PCs. Doing PC squeezes will also get you a little turned on (goody!). This is a fun way to find or increase your turn-on during sex or play. You can practice anywhere – in line at the bank, for instance. When you get good at it, you can amaze anybody who has some part of themselves inside you.
The breath used in tantra as a pump for eros is an undulating breath. Sit on the floor with your tail on the edge of a cushion, or on a chair with just enough of your butt on the chair to be comfortable. Take a breath in, and simultaneously rock your pelvis so that your pubic area pushes downward toward the chair. This will arch your back, bring your chest forward and up and, if you let the movement follow up your body, bring your head up. Try that a few times. That’s the in-breath.
Now, while breathing out, rocky our pelvis forward, which will bring your pubic bone up, make your belly and chest curl up and your head go down. That’s the out breath. Try it a few times to get the hang of it.
Now we put them together, sensibly enough, inhaling while rocking the pelvis back and arching, exhaling while rocking the pelvis forward and curling. Arch and curl, that’s the motion. Like your pelvis is a hinge, opening and closing, and the rest of your body follows like a wave. The tantrikas call it undulating.
You can also do this breath lying on your back on a firm surface with your knees, pushing a little with your legs, that same rocking undulation.
When you get good at undulating, you can add the PC squeeze. Most folks start by squeezing on the in-breath, and releasing on the out-breath, as if your body was a big pump that could draw up eros from the earth like hot red water to fill up your body with excitement and turn-on. (Other folks prefer to release on the in-breath and squeeze on the out-breath. One of us does it one way, the other does it the other. We don’t care which way you do it, as long as you’re pumping up plenty of hot energy for yourself.)
As this breath starts to work for you, pay attention to how you feel, physically and emotionally, and what you are imagining. It’s lots of fun to practice this and fantasize at the same time. That’s a good way to get familiar with the process of your own turn-on.
As the energy gets stronger, practitioners often speed up the breath, maybe with a loud noise on exhaling, like “Hah!Hah!Hah!Hah!” or any other noise that works for you. This will feel silly at first, but if you give it enough time it will make you very happy. As you get more excited and move faster, you may find yourself doing it differently, curling on the in-breath and squeezing on the out – that’s fine, whatever works. If you lose the thread, go back to how you learned to do it first and carry on from there.
Breathing like this is intoxicating: it will get you high. If you feel dizzy or uncomfortable or further out than you want to travel today, slow the breath down and make the exhalation longer than the inhalation.
When your authors do this breath together we get really loud.
Here is a story of a scene Dossie played that started out with the easiest breath.
Slow Hand Trance Dance
It’s not easy to find language to write about a person as gender-queer as the one I’m flirting with. Only two pronouns to choose from to describe this friendly, sexy person — not enough. Crewcut, slight beard, abundant tits, that sexy testosterone-rasped voice that promises all the horny surging hormones of a fifteen-year-old boy in a substantial warm body, and the connected sensibilities of a thoughtful woman — mmmmm. Best of both worlds — I love people who defy categorization.
“Do you prefer he or she?” I ask politely. “He, and thank you for asking,” he responds, settling visibly. Which is fine by me.
He explains to me that he has a hard time with stingy sensations. Later, when I told my buddy Fang about this, she collapsed laughing. “Oh, the poor innocent had no idea who he had run into.” Fang knows about me and sting, she has felt my cane before.
Well, it is sort of like telling Dracula that you’re a little phobic about blood. So I let the cute boy know that I think I could help him with that, put my wicked grin on hold and we talk a little about limits. Poly agreements, his partner is at this party; pants on (his); wants it on his back; no ropes, claustrophobic. So he takes off his shirt and it’s pants and boots and a broad strong back, complete with freckles. Very nice.
I’m wearing my front, a studded leather garment I devised that looks like a superhero with cleavage from the front, and utterly nothing on the back but a few crisscrossed bootlaces that hold it on. Lots of skin — whenever I wear it I get petted a lot. Yum. Stockings and heels, of course; black, of course, with a loose mostly unbuttoned black chiffon dress over it all that keeps me a little warm and you can still see through it, if you like. We look good.
The party is in a set of crowded hotel rooms cleverly organized at the end of a corridor. A portable screen bars the gaze of the uninvited, and relays of volunteers make sure that entry is forbidden to the uninitiated. Hotel beds are stripped and re-sheeted to accommodate softer landings, and a bondage table and portable sling have been set up in the “living room.” We find a spot on a couch, where he kneels on the cushions and rests his elbows over the sofa back; this lands him at a good height for me to work on. Two other women are sitting on the couch — fine, there’s plenty of room if we’re friendly. They will duck when I swing.
I am teaching a technique here, as well as playing a scene. It’s been said that the last stage of learning is teaching, and so as we go along into the play, the connection, the turn-on, a part of my mind is registering what I do and why, how does it all work, so I can relay all that later. Right now, what I want is to get him entranced and deeply relaxed.
First I show him the breath. “Put your hand on your belly. Breathe in deep and hold it — pay attention to how you feel. Now breathe out even and all the way. Keep breathing, keep breathing. Feel your torso relax? Keep breathing. If you tense up, you won’t be able to let the sensation in. And I want you to feel a whole lot. So I want you to remember to breathe. I’ll help you.”
I’m touching his back, his shoulders, his head, crewcut silky on my fingers — firm strokes down his spine, smooth, soothing, nothing tickly or sharp. Arousal will come later, this is about going down, down, down. I kneel behind him, my thighs holding him, and press myself against his back, my arm around his chest, and breathe with him. I can feel the energy in his spine rising, his heat rushing up to meet me.
I first learned about the breath when I was about thirteen, from a Readers’ Digest article written by Wilhelm Reich, believe it or not. This would be about 1957. He pointed out that we don’t exhale enough. I tried breathing per his instruction, and it helped with my asthma. Later I learned a lot more about how breathing relates to feeling, through yoga and meditation and childbirth.
One useful fact I learned: our bodies are hardwired to perceive the excess of carbon dioxide, not the absence of oxygen, as the signal that we are in danger of suffocating. In the presence of too much carbon dioxide — perhaps you have felt this in a crowded room — our bodies get defensive, we are struggling to breathe. So there are concrete physiological reasons why holding the breath can lead to tension and panic, and releasing the breath leads to relaxation and feeling safe.
In a massage workshop I learned to deepen a person’s breath by placing a hand on the belly, lifting it slightly on the inhale so the stomach will reach for the warmth and take in more air; and pressing down lightly on the exhale to encourage further release. This is a good way to take control of someone’s breathing. And their psyche.
Here on this couch at this party, I’m using another trick. Surrounding my bottom with my body is at once comfort and intrusion. My face close to his, my belly on his back, I follow his breathing for a bit, until we are easily breathing in tandem, and then I slow my breath down, just a little, and he slows down with me. Got that trick from Neurolinguistic Programming.
So we breathe till I get him real slowed down. My goal is to top my bottom’s relaxation, to carry him into a trance state. So I continue till I feel his energy deepen, as if I could collect him under me, and then I get up, careful to keep my hands on him not to break the connection, and start shaking his shoulders, loosening his back. By moving his body with my hands and without asking, I am taking more control.
He is deeply entranced now, and responding to me very nicely, so I start punching his back with the soft outside of my fists, introducing a new level of intensity. I like this, feel my energy rising up to charge through my arm with a full-body smash, as if I could punch my energy into him.
I start to alternate the punching with a knee in the crotch — it would be too early, a distraction to go for erogenous zones, but some generally wide-spread attention to the crotch is nice for waking up the first chakra. I can feel red heat running up his spine, and my hands are attracted to the nexuses of power — the chi, the heart, the throat. I grab his head to my chest and hold my hand over his third eye. It pulses. He sees me.
He’s ready for some challenge, I judge, so I pick up a thick heavy flogger and set the energy flying through the air — softly at first, while I get my aim and he adjusts to the new sensation. One of the onlookers pushes the crowd back to make room as I step back for a bigger swing. When we have sunk into the rhythm of the flogger, I up the intensity, striking the broad muscles of the back with all my strength as if I could pour my power into him. I’m talking to him now like a labor coach — “Keep breathing, yeah, that’s good, I like that, yes!” And if I am the labor coach, I wonder what he will give birth to. I especially want to honor the magical creativity of the bottom.
I work the flogger up to a string of truly brutal blows, hard as I can put out, loud, yelling at him to breathe, to take it in, and he stays with me till I throw down the flogger and throw myself over his back again. We catch our breaths as I reach for the cane.
The cane is my favorite implement for a pain-trance scene. I have two with me that I varnished myself — about half an inch thick, sanded and burnished with layers of marine varnish to glow like lacquer. I had soaked them in the bathtub of my hotel room last night, so they are supple and weighty — a dry cane is too light to carry the sensation deep into the body, and can be very stingy without much reward. It’s also my experience that rattan canes give a little as they land, some very strict version of sponginess, so I prefer them to canes of less resilient materials.
I start tapping his back with the cane, and he tenses, scared. “Keep breathing, you’re all right, you’re just fine, I want you to stay down for me, honey, that’s sweet, yes.” I tap around lightly till he relaxes again, gets into the sensation, forgets about what might happen next, he’s in the present moment, which is exactly where I want him.
I hold the cane across his back and instruct him to take a deep breath, breathe it out, again in — I’m taking more intimate control of his breath and the flow of his energy. At the end of an exhalation, at his most relaxed, I slash down with the cane and immediately, with my other hand, rub hard across his back to wipe out the sting.
This is a technique I was taught years ago — if you wipe out the sting from a cane before the muscles have time to tense up, then a lot of amazing sensation gets into the body and kind of reverberates, which is so fascinating and compelling that one forgets about the sting. It is important to leave time after each stroke so the bottom can fully process the sensations before you strike again — too many strokes too close together too soon can lead to involuntary and uncontrollable tension and resistance. It’s also a good idea not to hit the same spot over and over again — the skin, I think, gets raw, and then the cane can feel too sharp, not the right sensation.
So I massage his back while he feels the cane’s blessing rolling around inside him (at least, that’s how it feels to me!), and wait till his breathing slows before again telling him to take a deep breath, let it out to my pace, I slow him down till he feels ready and slash and rub again. We find a deep slow rhythm, one strike then another, each time a complete experience. I explore different spots on his back — limited a little by needing to have both hands in position, one to strike and one to rub, but his back is broad, his shoulders are strong, and I’m not going to run out of skin soon. He is breathing with me beautifully — at first he had gasped for breath, and I would wait until his breathing slowed down again, blowing on his back to remind him to breathe. But now he is taking the cane in without tensing at all, just blowing out his breath through the intense part, and taking in a smooth long drink of air as the sensations do their thing inside him.
So now he’s got it, he knows how to do his part in taking in the cane, and I can up the ante. I start hitting sooner, on the edge of what he can process, and harder, now that I’ve got my aim down. He’s breathing with me and it feels like we are one thing, two people doing their parts in riding one energy as the cane flies faster. Soon we are whirling in the center of a hurricane — me shouting, “Keep breathing that’s great excellent I love it you’re so good yes!” and his body clear and flowing under my cane. Wow.
We do this for a while — I’m entranced too, and who knows how much time is passing — later, I think this whole scene took about two and a half hours. While I was in it, there was no time but the next breath, the next stroke: when we are so connected, the top gets pulled into the present too.
Now he has entered what I call the Forever Place, and we could, indeed, do this forever, except that we are, indeed, mortals, and my arm will wear out eventually. So we dance in the storm for a while, and then I get close to his face and hold him and whisper, “You could do this forever, couldn’t you.” He grins, it’s true, I tell him that we will have to find a way to get to closure, and ask him to pick a number from one to seventeen. “Seventeen,” he replies instantly, not a moment’s thought, just wants more. Yummy. So I beat his back with all the force I can muster, and am gratified to see welts starting to come up — this from the boy who couldn’t take sting! And we are still one being, riding a tidal wave of sensation.
So who can count? Eventually I figure we should stop, so with a few last seriously vicious strokes, I take him in my arms and just tell him we need to end. I sit on the arm of the couch, and he throws himself into my arms and shakes for a while — I hold him tight, the connection is bliss, there is no reason to go anywhere, we are perfect right where we are. We take plenty of time to return to a more ordinary state of consciousness, enjoy our blissed out wildness while it lasts.
When we finally get up, and pee, and eat something, and land back on the planet, he makes love to me very sweetly — another long slow scene, very sensual, very hot. He gets me all slowed down with infinite patience so I get to go on another trip. And we get high again, and he turns into a cougar and bites me all over, and I turn into a snake and writhe a lot and it’s all sweetness.
And light.
When you set out to play with another person, first you need to make connection. This is the beginning of warmup, foreplay, trance induction, whatever you want to call it. The breath is a powerful way to make connection. Some people like to lie like spoons and relax as their breathing synchronizes – it will fall into rhythm even if you don’t try. Spoons is nice, lots of skin, sensual touch, warmth, cuddly feelings. You can also sit tantra-style (the tantra folks call it yab yum), facing each other with your legs wrapped around each other, and share the breath while gazing into each other’s eyes. Some say the eyes are windows into the soul, but we also note that sustained direct eye contact is rare in normal social interactions, and tends to generate, after perhaps a little embarrassment, a sense of deeper intimacy.
If you sit yab yum, you can undulate together, which is very sexy. You will very soon discover that the out-breath can be a form of dry humping, with your crotch banging against your partner’s. If this isn’tworking right, you can adjust your pillows to bring you to the right heights. And since you are going to practice your breath for a while to get to a truly trancy state, the dry humping needs to be entered into without being in a hurry – so what if you’re turned on, you’ve just begun, and it’s not time to get off yet. We want to do this for a long time. Think of when you were a teenager and you could kiss for hours. Try alternating breaths, breathing in and out of your partner’s mouth – more connection.
Other ways of connecting are also about aligning the energies of our bodies. Dossie recalls a top who, after securing her in standing bondage, just stood close behind her for a while, where she couldn’t see, not touching, just there. The connection built palpably while they were doing utterly nothing.
Touching skin is another happy way to make connection. Start touching shoulders, necks, arms – warm touch, light touch, sensual touch, delicious touch. Focus on what you are touching. Move your hands very slowly. If you are the dominant this time, you can imagine that you are collecting everywhere you touch, making it your own. If you are the submissive, you can imagine that you are worshipping everything you touch, making it sacred. Imagine your own fantasy. Take your time, touch for the sake of the delight it brings, stay in the present, the future will get here soon enough. Dossie finds being touched feels to her like little swarms of snakes traveling inside her body to meet where her friend’s fingers are trailing – she feels the flow of energy opening up as her friend wakes up her skin, and all the nerves become roads from the surface to somewhere deeper inside.
Touch may or may not lead to immediate sexual arousal or desire for orgasm. That may happen later, or not at all. Stay in the moment and stay with the touch, and enjoy it for what it is, and let whatever happens go ahead and happen.
Another path to trance and turn-on operates by playing with the senses, putting them to unusual uses, giving our senses something else to do, breaking our minds out of their habitual algorithms. The blindfold is the simplest form of sensory deprivation, and has the effect, for many people, of shutting up the verbal thought train and the nagging voices of self-doubt along with vision. Oddly, wearing a blindfold may make a bottom feel safer, less exposed – even though they are more dependent on, and thus more connected to, their top. Helping someone walk around the room while they are blindfolded will probably get you very connected.
Music and rhythm are tremendous stimuli for trance and turn-on. Choose your music carefully. You might want a slow rhythm, or a faster sexy rhythm. Consider avoiding songs with words in any language you understand, as we’re really trying to get away from the language centers and into less commonly traveled parts of our brains.
Silence is powerfully sexy. Your authors once played a kidnapped-pleasure-slave-training scene in which they pretended that they had no language in common. Communication was entirely through touch and body movements, and it worked. We both got very into it and flew out of reality for a while.
Rhythm, especially anything polyrhythmic (that means more than one rhythm at a time, most highly developed in wonderful African ritual music), sends most of us into trance; and dancing to polyrhythmic music, as we have described elsewhere, can be a journey in and of itself. It can be very trancy to be a drum, getting beaten with two hands or canes by a ritual drummer, and to feel the rhythms take you over as you fly away into drum-ness.
The chakras are junctures, spots where many people perceive intense energy: seven points along the spine, sometimes represented as a caduceus with coiling snakes, or glowing spots along an inner flute, or disturbances in a waterfall. Here is a list of them, with their traditional colors and locations. There are many individual differences in where we feel them in the body and what colors we might see, so please understand this list as places to start looking.
First Chakra: Root. Red, base of the spine, genitals or anus, connection to the earth.
Second Chakra: Sex. Orange, where your womb is or would be, sexual turn-on.
Third Chakra: Power. Yellow, solar plexus, center of gravity, chi.
Fourth Chakra: Heart. Green, middle of the chest, emotions.
Fifth Chakra: Throat. Sky Blue, center of the neck, speech and peace.
Sixth Chakra: Third Eye. Midnight Blue, between your brows, vision.
Seventh Chakra: Crown. Violet or white, slightly above your head, connection to the universe.
Following is an example of a chakra visualization taken from Dossie’s meditations. She likes to work with the snake image of kundalini. You will find out what you like.
The root chakra at the base of my spine starts out with connecting to the earth. I feel it at the base of the spine, as a sexy red swelling, especially at my asshole. Here we can let go of anything that no longer nourishes us — compost all our cares and woes, grow roses from shit. The root is also a gate of entry, where we can welcome into our bodies intense sensation, sexual penetration, and the red hot energy from the core of the earth. What I imagine at the root is a small snake that forges a path into my body through my anal sphincter, which feels both scary and sexy to me, and then climbs up my spine, pausing at each chakra for more focus. I got to know this snake through a garter snake who lived under my house, and came out and draped herself across our doorstep whenever we did ritual with drums.
She climbs to my second chakra and fattens in the womb, coiling thickly, glowing orange in the crucible. Her skin gets tight and she needs to crawl out of it, like getting born.
Thicker and more invasive, me breathing harder, she progresses up my spine to the third chakra at the solar plexus, where I see a yellow sun whirling into spirals, sometimes shooting out swarms of tiny snakes, and the feeling is of strength, central heating, source of tremendous energy and personal power.
From here Snake crawls up my spine to wrap herself around my heart, constricting rhythmically to massage that muscle and soften up my emotional center. Now I feel harmony and sweet unconditional love. If sadness or fear shows up, my snake comforts me. Bright green ivy sprouts out around the snake and spurts all through my body, tendrils up my arms and out my fingers, branches down to my feet with roots digging into the dear sweet earth. And I get happy. A big foolish grin on my face, yelling with the breath, I am a child without a care in the world, giggling with delight.
Flowing up from my heart to the fifth chakra in my throat, Snake grows huge, charging up to fill my whole body like the trunk of a tree, I am stretched around her. In my throat, she opens her jaws very wide and I yell, I bellow, I scream, I whisper syllables in no particular language, I hiss contentedly. When my throat opens, I feel a tremendous love of my truth, my feelings are clear and real and important. I might cry. Sorrow, grief, anger, joy — the entire range of feelings, shouted out in enthusiasm.
Then Big Snaky pokes her head up into my skull and peers around. She sticks her tongue out through my forehead, as snakes do, testing the air for smell and taste and warmth. A big red eye opens up on the top of Snake’s head, above the two eyes with their vertical pupils: her Eye is mine.
The night sky arches over us full of stars, mystery of darkness, gateway to dreaming, so we play in visions for a while, till Snake gets impatient.
The crown chakra, at or slightly above the top of the skull, is the seventh and final nexus. My skull resists this final opening, like a shell resisting a hatchling, and Big Snaky pokes her head against the roof and pecks and butts until the bone splits and she leaps up to the stars, her mouth gaping open to suck down sheer white light into me. The feeling is brilliant, shining, I know for sure that the cosmos is full of love, that I am loved, everything in the universe is love, love is the real cosmic principle, the initial force from which everything else flows.
And I am strung on Snake like a bead on a string, on kundalini’s journey from the earth to the stars. She flows, and I get to ride.
That’s how I do it. You, of course, will do it your way, which will also be wonderful and amazing. And different. And yours.
When we talk about ritual, many people assume that we’re talking about something formal, with candles and incantations. That kind of ritual works for some people and not for others, but it’s not necessarily what we mean when we talk about ritual: part of your morning ritual is probably brushing your teeth; your scene ritual may have to do with turning down the lights, setting out the toys, connecting beforehand with a hug or a collar.
Ritual has two uses (among many) that are important to how we get into states of ecstasy, how we travel safely, and how we get back out again. For our purposes, ritual can be like a container that defines the mental space we are operating in, and that protects that space, keeping it, and us, safe and inviolate. We have spoken already about how so much of what we do is about letting down boundaries to find new paths, and to enter into more unbounded states of consciousness. So when we let down our everyday boundaries, what will keep us safe? We can use rituals to set and define sacred space. Many players borrow ritual from pagan practices, and might make a circle around the space we intend to play in with sage, or water, or herbs, and a prayer to banish everything that doesn’t belong in the space – anything intrusive or inharmonious from outside, and any distractions or anxieties that might rise up from inside ourselves. For example, we might decide to leave agonizing about the size of our bodies outside of this circle. Some rituals make a place for that – a glass of ice water, or a trash can. When you put parts of yourself outside the circle, you need to promise them that you will come back and reconnect with them when you leave the circle. Our cares and woes won’t accept permanent banishment – wouldn’t life be easy if they did? But they can learn to delay gratification. You might even provide them with a comfy place, like a baby blanket, to rest while you travel elsewhere.
The goal of setting a circle is to be in a safe and contained space, with its own particular rules, and where we intend to behave with particularly high consciousness. So we are protected, and reminded that we are sacred.
Dossie likes to walk a symbol path through the four elements when she sets up sacred space – air, fire, earth and water each contributing their own special wisdom to the endeavor at hand. However you make the space, and however you enclose it with your imaginary circle, when you are through, you will exit by reversing your steps: walking the circle in the other direction, blowing out the candles you have lit, with perhaps a few words of thanks for whatever wonderful journey you got to go on. Closure is important, and can be as simple as a warm cuddle until you are both ready to get up and go about life in whatever extraordinary way comes next.
When you pick your cares and woes back up, you may find yourself able to welcome them home with more insight and compassion than you had before you dropped them off.
The second use of ritual, for our purposes, is to create a symbol path that gets us to the state of consciousness we are looking for: the role we will play, the acts that will open us wider than we thought we could. Roles are in and of themselves the ritual, the story of the scene the myth we are exploring. Costumes can be symbols of shifting consciousness, and nakedness a further, sometimes scarier opening.
Breathing exercises, songs or chants, visualizations, and stimulations – stroking, beating, cutting, piercing – are all rituals we engage in to open ourselves to our own and each other’s gorgeous flowing life force, to connect to ourselves and to each other in a particularly profound way.
The roles we play, the costumes we wear, our collars and cuffs, the candles we light, how we turn bedrooms into dungeons by hanging up some chains, all this is setting up ritual as well. We are making a space and time in our lives that is set aside to be different. Dungeon or temple, this is sacred space, and we do well to come into it with good intentions.
We may play a character different from our everyday selves, or express a minority part of ourselves who doesn’t get to be up front very often – we will discuss this at much greater length in the “Mind Journeys” chapter. We may be polarizing our roles, top or bottom, becoming intensely more dominant or more submissive; and in harmony or maybe in friction, perhaps pushing against each other, we push each other higher, further out.
Foreplay, bondage, rope, all the ways we set up scenes, these are our pathways as well. And while ecstasy can be reached along an infinity of paths, including the short steep ones, we’ve found that the most certain paths are the slow and gradual ones. We like short fast intense thrash-and-scream scenes sometimes too. But we suggest that once in a while at least, you might be pleasantly surprised if you enter into setting up a scene with the idea in mind of taking a long time warming up, setting up, breathing together, sharing massage, slow dancing, chanting or undulating. If you invest some time at the beginning, there will almost certainly be more rewards at the end.
You are, after all, not really in a hurry. You do intend to enjoy this for a while. If you start a scene or a ritual slowly, and take plenty of time at each step, you will move more smoothly into the flow, travel further, and perhaps surprise yourself. Try something, oh, doesn’t work, okay, let’s try something else, and how about we rub a little skin in between to quiet down again: when you make friends with time, you can also afford to make mistakes.
Out in vanilla-land, orgasms are considered a pretty straightforward phenomenon. There’s one kind: you have it from genital stimulation; it goes on for a few seconds or maybe a minute if you’re lucky; some women can have a few of them; most men only get one at a time.
That wasn’t our experience even before we started working on this book. We were pretty sure we’d had the kind that everybody else described, the nice clear-cut binary now-I’ve-had-an-orgasm kind – but we’d also had ones that felt like we were skimming along the surface of orgasm without really dipping beneath it, and ones that felt like a huge wave that consumed our whole bodies without ever really especially involving our cunts, and a lot of different things that felt sort of like orgasms and sort of not. In fact, it seemed that there were almost as many kinds of orgasmic experiences as there were kinds of sexual experiences. Janet writes about this:
When I first learned to come, I learned to squinch up my genitals, my face, my legs, pulling everything inward toward the center of myself, tightening every sphincter I have in my body plus a few that probably exist only in the noncorporeal plane. With exactly the right kind of stimulation to my erogenous zones, the proper tape running in my head, and a goodly dose of luck, all that tension struck a spark that flared up into — voilà — an orgasm!
Much much later, I learned to ejaculate — and all those skills were exactly wrong. I had to push where I used to pull, and open up what I used to close, and let go of what I used to hoard so jealously. And it was still an orgasm, but it was different — a pushy-outy orgasm instead of a pully-inny orgasm. I started wanting both kinds, not always both on the same day, but at least some of each some of the time.
And all along, I’d been having these other experiences during peak BDSM play — convulsions that felt like being grabbed in Something’s teeth and whipped back and forth like a rag doll, huge waves that started at the site of the sensation and slammed outward toward my fingers and toes, whole-body quakes ranging from subtle tremors to somewhere off the Richter scale (I never fell off the table, but almost). During these, I wasn’t pulling in or pushing out — I was beyond volition, helpless in the power of whatever it was that was shaking me.
I started to be able to feel them approaching, and to make preparations to welcome them. Sometimes I’d find myself bouncing or dancing, building rhythm, letting the inside of my head turn snowy white. Sometimes I’d feel myself inflating, my fingers and toes extending and quivering, my skin thin and tense as the skin of a balloon, impossibly full and getting fuller, waiting for the explosion. Sometimes I’d have visions, flames leaping, fireworks bursting, and I’d open up to their heat and feel it light the fuse that runs right up my center. I’d let go of my face and feel it contort, let go of my voice and hear myself making sounds I never dreamed I knew how to make.
Now, I go to classes and workshops about sex, I read books about sex. And they talk about learning how not to squinch the way I used to, how to rreeeeelllaaaaaxxx. Well, OK. I think not-squinching is maybe a good thing, although an orgasm that you get by squinching is certainly better than no orgasm at all. But really, I think that the whole discussion of how to have orgasms is sort of beside the point.
I don’t want to have orgasms, I want orgasms to have me. When an orgasm has me, I don’t get to decide whether to squinch or relax, whether it’s pully-inny or pushy-outy; it makes that decision for me. It makes all decisions for me.
But it won’t take me unless I ask it to. So I dance, I inflate, I burn, I scream. My friends come and help. We do anything we can to get that bitch my brain to let go of me for just a little while, and then the orgasm, the energy, the universe comes and takes me, takes me, takes me.
A lot of what we’ve done in classic SM, though, is still aimed at the traditional genital orgasm. And in an SM scene, all too often, when one or both partners have an orgasm it means the scene is over. Orgasm works great for closure: everybody feels good, gets a release, and returns more or less naturally to a more ordinary state of consciousness. The transition is built into the physiology.
Yet so often, after playing with intense sensation or energy or roleplay or even sexual stimulation in the lengthy explorative manner that we think is typical of ecstatic SM, when the top goes for the genitals, or the vibrator, or whatever might take either or both of us over the edge to orgasm, we might feel a faint disappointment. We know we will be moved out of the transcendent state we are now inhabiting. It’s almost over. The end is near. We have to come down. Dossie remembers:
I had a tantra date with a woman who was concerned that it wouldn’t be possible for us to get close to each other without going for the genital, which was out of bounds for her. We had made an agreement about boundaries, that whatever we did in our energized state, it wasn’t going to be genital sex. We went into altered space with massage, with some top/bottom energy, with holding and breathing and raising kundalini. And kundalini went up and up, way out the top, till we were breathing and laughing and shouting and sighing and breathing some more, playing with the third eye as if there were an electric conduit between hers and mine. Whenever either one of us moved a hand over the other’s body, even at the back of the head (especially at the back of the head), the response was orgasmic: flowing and laughing and shuddering and gasping for breath and totally ecstatic. Going out, but never getting off.
We played in that space for more than an hour, all delicious and delirious, me sitting on her lap with my legs wrapped around her, total body contact, coming out of one paroxysm to catch our breath, only to dive back into the flow and rush onward to the next. We were ecstatic.
Ending wasn’t easy. We had mentioned finishing a couple of times, only to find another fabulous way to rise up again to play with the life force. Finally, with the wisdom of SM, I said “I don’t think this is going to come to an end. We’re in the Forever Place. I think we’re going to have to decide when to stop and actually work at it.”
After a few more rounds of ecstasy, we went to work on it. We kept getting caught up in the rush of it all — we would calm our breathing, only to touch another fabulously alive bit of flesh and start yelling again, then come down again. Finally we managed to move our bodies a little bit apart — I slid down so I was lying on her, my face on her chest. Our chakras no longer lined up right against each other, so the energy quieted more readily. We cuddled there for a while, trancing in little seismic aftershocks, until we were able to bear the notion of moving yet a little further apart.
Eventually we stood up — vertigo! Hugging and kissing, still connected in the energy, but somewhat less intensely. Getting clothes back on was funny — I was clumsy, couldn’t figure out a bra, finally gave up and didn’t wear it — I kept thinking, “Our left brains will cut back in eventually, right?” She thought we should go outside and get something to eat, so we went to a cafe (I drove: we were at my house, and I could drive the back roads on automatic). We radiated all over the restaurant. Food got us further and more firmly planted in our bodies, and also gave us a chance to talk about our experience.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I like orgasms just fine. But sometimes, as I found that day, I can go out a little further if I don’t finish us off.
So you can even take your time and the orgasm doesn’t end, it just flows through you and keeps on flowing for as long as you can stand it; and sometimes it never ends, you just have to give up.
Time is your friend even when it becomes time to go fast and furious. Try staying with that longer than you usually would. Try elongating the gasping and heaving, the storms. Keep going when you think you can’t thrust one more time, and then go on some more. Slow down, catch your breath, speed up again... wear yourself out, then take yourself back to the breath, relax, and jack yourself up again. Each time you go further. And the endless beauty of ecstasy is that, miraculously and tantalizingly, there is always further to go.
Here is a scene that Dossie played with a friend of hers:
Ropes and Points
Rope. A meditation on rope. I’m wearing fishnet, black of course: stockings and long sleeves and seriously inadequate panties, all made of skinny woven cord. The rope is industrial cotton, unbleached, softened with many washings, tumbled smooth in the dryer for hours. It is straightforward, radiates a practical elegance. She pulls a whole lot of it out of her bag.
She has worn a dress shirt for this date, with a black satin vest that outlines a lean elegance, very hot to watch her moving around, gleam of cufflinks, studs. The tie makes her look Victorian, strict, unbending.
She starts by weaving a corset around my waist, an intimate endeavor. Her arms reach around me again and again, wrapping and looping, tightening — and tightening again. While my legs and arms are still free, I am cornered, constricted at the core: organs pushed out of the way, breathing circumscribed to her limits. My reality defined by her, not me.
When the corset is tight and my breath high and nervous, she pins me down with her body and closes her mouth over mine, breathing into my lungs, sucking the breath out of me. When I figure out how to follow her lead, she pinches my nose shut, her fingers across my face, and I almost panic, dependent on her for my breath. Her eyes stare into mine, pupils like black knives. It takes all my attention to keep the air moving between us, all of my will to allow this dreadful intrusion into the pulse of my life. With tremendous effort, I give in.
Satisfied, she lifts her head, and I gasp in the cool air while her fingers explore my throat, isolate the pulse in the jugular. She watches my blood moving from the brain. She plays with the puluse for a while. She wants my blood.
My eyes cloud a bit and I feel slightly faint before she releases my circulation, turns the business of staying alive back over to me. “Keep breathing,” she says. I feel relieved, now I know what she wants.
More rope. From the corset through my crotch, knots carefully placed to press here and there, the incidental stimulus of rope drawn across my clit before it is cinched down. Rope inside my labia, pulling them apart, cinched down wide open. She regards her handiwork while I feel the unaccustomed coolness of air between my lips, those lips, my cunt in a cage, clit exposed.
I can feel her breath on me, warm and purposeful, an exquisite sensitivity. She draws the tiny patch of fishnet back over my clit, protecting it from too much too soon, and laughs at me as I shudder.
More rope. Windings around my calves, my thighs, caught behind the knees, legs bent, fixed open, in the proper position for getting fucked.
More rope. Wrists are connected to ankles, then strapped to my knees — if I struggle, I will pull my knees further apart.
And I will struggle.
She will ensure that.
She stands by the bed, looks me over and nods in confirmation: everything is as it should be. She undoes her tie, places it on the dresser, unhooks the collar stud on her shirt, and then removes her cufflinks. Gold gleams in the candle as she places it neatly on the dresser. Thoughtfully, getting each fold just even, just right, she rolls up her sleeves.
She pulls a blindfold over my eyes, carefully rearranging my hair. I fall into soft fur, soft darkness — without my sight, my only focus is the sensation she offers me.
I hear her moving, organizing some things, clicks and rustles, then she moves close again, lying on me between my spread thighs, her hands on my breasts. Her knee, accidentally or deliberately, disturbs the ropes on my cunt. Fear shoots through me, I feel so fragile, so easy to hurt. Her hands on my skin, she carefully turns me on — stroking here, pinching there, bit by bit, all of my skin comes to full alert. She slips some fingers inside my stocking, feeling around to the inside of my thigh to get to more skin, more sensitivity — her other hand holds my face.
From the darkness I imagine her staring at me the way she looks when her lust rises, brown eyes burning in her relentless glare. I feel her digging into me. Letting her touch in beneath my skin, past my bones, into the vital vulnerabilities in my gut. Catching my breath, I lift myself toward her touch.
She laughs. “Right,” she says, “Are you ready to fly?”
Earlier we had met for a hike on the beach, combing the tide for agates and sea-smoothed glass, fossil rocks and petrified whale bones. We had talked about dreams and limits, boundaries and the wild red yonder.
She said she wanted blood. I saw the hunger glowing in her eyes, watched her swallow as she salivated. I felt a flicker of her in my cunt, a release of wetness as secret sap started to flow.
Back home, we covered the bed with an old sheet and set up the needles, alcohol, towels, surgical gloves, preparing a table like a scrub nurse before surgery. Hunting for the right scalpel, I noticed an old toy — a gift from someone — gathering dust on my dresser.
“Look,” I said, “Somebody made these.” A candle in a small thick glass pitcher, purple wax, ripe for melting. She lit the wick, set it aside aside to melt for later. So there would be plenty.
Now, pulsing in the blindfold dark, I listen to the small sounds, the rip of sterile packets opening, the click of metal on the tray, the snap of rubber gloves, while my imagination wanders in the warm grip of the ropes.
She climbs back onto the bed, settles between my legs. She plays a bit with the ropes on my cunt: is she adjusting something, or just trying me make me thrash? I lie entranced, nothing is real except the reality she creates, I am nothing but a creature that responds, canvas to her brush.
She drops her weight on my torso, a pleasant constriction. I can breathe easily until she catches my throat, pressing on the pulse to play with the channel that feeds life into my lungs. Pressing and releasing, compressing and lifting up, she dances over me till I fall into her rhythm. She lifts up, breathing out loud so I can keep following, deep inhale, full breath out. She picks up a pinch of flesh on my chest — one breath, two — “Now!” she says, and a sharp pain pierces my consciousness, too bright, lasting a little too long as the needle finds its way in, leisurely, and then carefully out again. My body is still arched, my hands clenched, when I realize that she has finished and it doesn’t hurt any more.
“Relax,” she says, and she breathes on the needle. I breathe out, almost relaxed but her fingers are on the needle, twisting and pulling, stretching my skin — and me.
Something in me always has to fight the needles. She lets me, holds me down till the thrashing subsides.
“Now we need to bury the point.” Her progress through her desire is deliberate, meticulous, painstaking — she has a design in mind, and intends to see it perfectly etched into my skin.
She collects my breath again. I follow the sound, the hiss of the in-breath, the aah of exhalation. Somewhere in here I remember that the blindfold allows her to turn the lights up so she can see, but right then her knee hits my crotch at the same instant that the point pierces my skin and her other hand holds me down at the heart. Again I fight as the point goes in.
“Hold still, little girl, don’t mess up my design.”
Her design. I wonder what she sees? Me blind and bleeding. She amuses herself with my clit, but when I start rocking and reaching, she puts on the brakes.
“Oh, no, I am nowhere near finished. You gonna be a good girl and wait for me?”
Crushed in the silence, I can’t think of what I’m supposed to say. Is there an alternative? She climbs up on me again, carelessly tugging on the ropes, my crotch leaps, she hisses into my ear: “Yes. You say yes now.”
“Yes.” I whisper. “Yes, what?” “Yes I’ll wait.” “Yes, who?” “Yessir.”
She pinches my breast hard and vicious and before I can pull away another needle spikes into me. I bite back a scream.
“Ssh, ssh. Breathe, honey. Good. Now, we need to get it the rest of the way through.” A sharp tug as she aims the needle, already inside me, and a fierce sting through the skin as it comes back out.
“Hmmm, not quite right.” She backs the needle out — I am stunned, are we going to do this again? I struggle to catch my breath, to relax, to refrain from fighting her, to release my body to the ropes. “It’s okay, you can struggle, you aren’t going anywhere. And if you fuck up my aim, I can just set it again. So you figure out how you want it. Oh, yeah. Scream if you like.”
She grabs her pinch of skin again. “Ready?” “Yessir!” I lie.
Again, three times the breath, and I am floating under the surface while the needle slides in slow and excruciating. I hold the float while bright pain lights up in my breast and travels around inside my body. Every muscle is clamped tight and the needle is still cutting its path through me and just when I’m sure I can’t take any more and every muscle I used to own is clenched in terror, the spike heats up another notch coming back into the air. She burns, she burns.
“There, baby, you got that one good. I’m proud of you.” I gasp for breath, stretching to open a channel through me for all this acute burning brilliance, and she is soothing me, smoothing my skin, rocking me gently. I fall back in her arms, somehow she surrounds me with warmth and love and warm flowing turn-on. The juice stirs at the root and runs up my spine like sap in a tree to meet her. I get all sleepy and warm in her arms till she says: “Okay. Time to bury the point on this one.”
Shit! I am riding the rising tide of her wickedness, she is riding my pain, she likes hurting me. I can hear her breathing hard, a little ragged, and she gets up, shifts her body and sits on me, pinning me to the bed with my legs and cunt behind her hung out to dry. Her knees clasp my arms tight to my flanks, she digs in her heels while my heart runs in place.
She reaches up and twists the two needles like reins to guide me, but the only things that runs is my blood. I can hardly feel the stream over my skin, so perfectly matched to my temperature. I only feel her gloved finger, touching and painting, and then her finger is in my mouth, the taste is strange and familiar, I am drinking my own heart.
“God, I wish I could taste that, it’s so beautiful, it smells like lust. Taste it for me, baby.”
She pulls on the ropes under her crotch and through mine so we rock in unison, predator and prey, one beast. Again I feel the pressure building, a shuddering starts in my womb and spreads through my body, my back arches, and she stops. “Now we get to the part I really like,” she croons. “Now we put new needles under the old ones.”
Again the process is fussy, picky, shrill. My pain, each bit, prepared and executed with exquisite attention, savored over and over until two needles become four. In exactly the right place. After several trials. The points keep coming out and each one has to be reburied several times till she is satisfied. I am sunk so deep in the fire that there is no longer any question of self-control: I buck and scream, writhe and moan — at her command.
She shifts, reaches for something — which pulls the ropes over my cunt. I jerk, mindless. She keeps her seat, enjoying herself. She passes something warm and smooth over my skin, it takes me a minute to remember the candle. She gentles me down till my breath is soothed, and when I am rising and falling happily to her rhythm she pours liquid heat over the needles in a scalding stream.
I almost buck her off.
“Ssh, now, ssh baby. You are so beautiful, I love watching you like this, and I got a whole lot of wax melted here, and we have plenty of time, so ssh, baby, ssh.”
Like molten steel from a crucible, the wax pours here and there, rivers on my chest, my breasts, flowing over my shoulders, a blaze that lights up the dark behind the blindfold. Hot and nasty, she is riding again, rocking the ropes, her fingers tugging on the reins till the blood flows with the wax in one burning scarlet river. On fire, I am cast into my own desire, rushing heat, blazing pain.
She slides down me, down between my thighs, I feel her hot at my cunt, nailing me with the smooth warmth of her dick. Piercing me to the root, she reaches my boiling womb and fucks me furiously, just short of explosion, building the heat and the pressure, surely the bed will catch fire. The ropes holding my cunt are all wet and slippery now, they slick off to the sides while she holds me open from the inside.
Even fucking, she stops now and then, a meditative moment when a point breaks free, to sink the dangerous little sharpness back under my skin. Pain spikes through to my cunt, completing the connection from her dick to the needles, and she jumps, electrified.
“All right, little bitch, here we go.” And away we fly, beyond the rising tide, we are fucking a hurricane, we are riding a wild flowing wind punctuated by the stabbing needles until she stops
dead
dug in deep:
“Hold still, little bitch, it’s time.” And I feel my cunt struggling on the brink while she grabs two needles and
yanks
and I nearly knock her off. Anguish rolls up and down inside me like thunder reverberating in a huge canyon while my cunt clutches her dick and before this all quiets down she
gets a grip on the last two needles and
rips...
I scream. Not so much in pain as in desperate need to release, no longer able to contain anything. I scream long and deep and loud, a wailing siren emerging, I flow all over her, and she fucks me.
Hard and reckless, out of control, her breath scrapes her throat as she groans, and that other noise is me bellowing over and over till the dam breaks, the flood cuts loose, and we flow out and into each other like crashing breakers until we are reduced to puddles.
Laughing puddles.
I shield my eyes as she opens the blindfold, the light is too much and I have to cry. She holds me while I weep from the brightness of everything — her tender eyelids, the curl of her ear, her mouth kissing my cheeks, baby kisses. I weep for joy. She looks at me, her eyes — how can brown eyes burns so bright? And I fall onto her, giggling, happy.
After a quiet while she sits up — “Hush now, baby, there’s more” — and puts the needles away, strips her hands and snaps on new gloves. Eyes still on fire, she slips out her blade with a pointed “click!” that sets off more sparks, I feel them burn from her eyes right to my cunt.
Carefully, she scrapes up the wax, pulling and picking, sparks on my skin, I am beyond holding still. She squeezes and pinches where the needles were till the blood runs from the wax, purple and red reflected in the hot glare of her pupils, so close to my face.
She plays in the mess she’s made while I rest in the afterglow. She cleans, meticulous, only to make another mess with the flaking violet wax. More blood. I am loose and sleepy, her picking over my skin feels like luxury, I am cared for. When the alcohol comes, I welcome the sting, wishing there were more holes. I try to figure out how many — four needles, in, out and in again, three holes each, but multiplication is beyond me. Then she is stinging me again, mad wasp with the blade, the alcohol.
I bask, hissing softly, while she cleans me up. The wax, the blood, then the slow sliding ropes, the focus on lengthiness, the slither across the body, the odd freedom of foot or hand as if it were unnatural of them to be operated by me. Freedom, one limb at a time. She turns each one, stretching, as if there were some rite of passage, a dance to return control of my muscles to me.
The knees released, the legs stretched out, she rubs my knees, my hamstrings — she knows they get sore — and the blood flows in, following her hands as she massages and calls the blood back to the thighs, the calves, the feet. I am bathing in the warm blood she evokes, like warm sun. Turn and sigh, lazy, arms over my head reaching, until a wicked tug wakes me sharply. I open my eyes, catch the nasty grin on her face, and I recall — the ropes in my crotch.
This is intense — the soreness, my swollen lips, the once soft ropes unbearably scratchy, tighter even as she turns me this way and that to release each winding, from the front, from the back, ends trailing over my sensitivities, me hissing and writhing. She keeps me soothed down, stroking my skin — “Still now, snake girl, you let yourself be still.”
As the ropes unwind I fall quietly deeper into her, until the last rope is gone, the sheet is gone, and she is holding me, pulling a blanket over us, she says:
“Sleep now, baby. Time to sleep.” And she curls me up like a fairy in a ladyslipper, and carts me off to dreamland.