Janet wants me to write about how I make connection with other people, and the truth is, once again, I don’t know. I do make connection, I’ve got lots of evidence of that, and I know how to emake connection — that’s why I’m here writing this book sharing all the ways I know to make connection. But I don’t understand about the magic.
One minute I’m nervous and disconnected and stuck and feel like an idiot, and then there’s touch and breath and eyes and mirrors and eros rises and everything is magic.
Sometimes I don’t even feel the magic. I’ll be doing a scene or a ritual, playing my part, competent, I suppose, but maybe not seeing it as something that is getting very far off the ground, Then somebody tells me there are rainbows coming out of my fingers, or that they can feel the magic flowing everywhere, and I can’t feel it. Luckily that only happens occasionally.
More often I get a sense of rightness, like the power is upon me. High contrast to my more normal state of worrying about everything, in the constant conviction that I’m doing something wrong wrong wrong. You see, much of the time — it’s better now than it used to be — I’m a scaredy-cat, constantly checking myself out, worried that I’ll somehow explode or break something or otherwise fuck up. For me, some of the magic of sex and SM is that when I get into the flow I forget about all this. My self-consciousness disappears, I’m just there, with the other person, and we’re wonderful and beautiful and glowing.
Other people always appear amazing to me. They do things I’d be afraid to do. That sounds ridiculous — my life is terrifying to most people — SM, writing books, being a therapist. So I look brave on the outside, and I’m scared a lot on the inside.
My slut lifestyle is a great joy to me, and a creation of which I am very proud. I know I created it partly in response to my self-loathing. Despite the dirty roots, it has borne fabulous fruit. In radical ecstasy, in sex, in trance, all the uncertainty disappears.
All my relationships are colored by my pain. I grew up in a family that wanted me to be someone different from who I am, and believed it was their task to chisel me, sometimes violently, into a nice young lady. I am very proud of having fought back against this oppression, but still I grew up believing that I was the wrong one. I just made a huge mistake on this manuscript because, when I was missing some chapters which were precious to me, I assumed that Janet wanted to delete them. Being really good at believing that what I do has no value, I managed to operate for a month on that assumption. Which, it turned out, was incorrect. You have the chapters right here in your hands, and I’m not going to tell you which ones.
I approach relationships as if something is wrong with me. Perfectly nice people get interested in me, and I assume they can’t be turned on to me, that I’ve made a mistake. Lots of my lovers initially thought, when they were trying to connect to me, that I didn’t like them, so carefully did I protect them from contact with my wrongness. I have profoundly insulted people.
In partnered relationships, sadly, what quiets my anxiety is somebody who reiterates my oppression, somebody who wants me to be smaller and quieter, wants me to hide my light under a bushel. Somebody who doesn’t want me to shine as brightly as I can. I live in constant fear of being too much: too loud, too bright, too smart, too sexy. I have fallen in love and felt a mighty relief in believing that I have found someone who is bigger than me, who can release me from this constant struggle inside myself. The outcomes have been dreadful, as you might imagine. I write this with great shame — it seems to me I should have conquered this as I’ve conquered so many other fears in my life.
A man recently asked me if I wasn’t lonely living without a primary partner. He didn’t accept my usual offhand replies — I’ve been lonelier living with a partner, my loneliness is partly because I live in the country in breathing exile, doesn’t everybody get lonely sometimes? His worldview, narrower than mine, couldn’t imagine how life would be without a committed partner. I felt ashamed to say, “I’m just not that good at it.”
I do better as a slut, in friendships and loverships that are not about partnering. There are so many different kinds of intimacy. So many wonderful ways we fit together. I love my tribe. I love my friends. I love my lovers. I live in a sea of love.
Writing about connection, I feel sappy. Sentimental, foolish, ridiculous, as if I’ve fallen into the traps set for me by a culture I don’t believe in. And yet, the sentiment I find fellow-traveling in ecstasy is all about the wonder-fulness of connection. Not just about orgasms or other exciting adventures, it isn’t just about the excitement. It’s about love.
Once I figure out that love is not about joint checking accounts, I become free to be a fool for love. To dance in lovelight, swim in warm moonlit pools, sing like a babbling brook. Writing this, I’m renewing the vow I made when I was twenty-five: I will be loving, affectionate and demonstrative with all my lovers.
When we were teaching in Detroit, we had a circle of sixty-three people lying on the floor, with their feet toward the center. With one hand on their crotch, and the other on the heart of the person next to them, we raised kundalini by breathing and visualizing the awakening of the chakras. Then we took that gorgeous energy and ran it out of our hearts and down our arms and into the person next to us, so that the beautiful energy ran round and round the room, like a fabulous running rainbow. Leading the group, we stood in the center of the circle, calling out the breaths and the images, and felt the room fill with love. Yes, love.
And in that moment, the energy was so powerful and so palpable that I didn’t need to think about what I was going to call it, and I didn’t feel sappy or silly. I just told them to feel how the room was filling with gorgeous glowing love, and I knew for sure they could feel it too. In that moment, love was what it truly should be, and in no way ridiculous.
When we call it love in a group, everybody pretty much understands that it’s a different kind of love from pair-bonding. And when we play with all the lovable others that we have described in this book, and every other lovable other we have been privileged to encounter, we want to acknowledge the love that rises in us, the golden glowing ineffable love.
Love at the moment of orgasm, love in the fumbling moments when we’re trying to figure out how to make something work, love in the phone call when somebody’s had bad news, love visiting in the hospital, love at the play party. Dear, sweet love.
Sometimes we call the divinity that flows through us energy, or source, or kundalini, or eros. Why are we so scared to take the risks of getting close, of dropping our shields, of connecting our skins (isn’t it interesting that we call them “hides”?). Why are we so scared to call it love?
One of the most extraordinary experiences that play or sex or intimacy can offer is the moment when we feel ourselves merging, accepting another’s essence and feeling ourselves accepted as two flames held close merge into one – a feeling that it is not too grandiose to call love.
We’ve heard curmudgeons ranting about the devaluation of the word “love, “ storming on about how we should keep it only for the people with whom we intend to have our children and our mortgages and, we suppose, our conjoined gravesites – that it’s practically criminal to talk about loving our friends or our fuck buddies or the other people with whom we connect. We’d argue that theirs is the devaluation of the word. We think that our hearts are capable of holding huge, stupendous amounts of love, of every variety and gradation; and to keep such a stunning word for only one of its infinite possible meanings is like chaining an anchor to a butterfly.
However, we both grew up in a culture that attaches a lot of baggage to the feeling we call love. During the era in which we grew up, and we suspect still in the present, if you started feeling tender and passionate and intimate about someone, it was expected that a certain sequence of events would inevitably click into place: a specific number of dates, with increasing levels of sexual activity... then an agreement, or more likely an assumption, about monogamy... moving in together... commitment, often signaled with a ring and a ceremony... purchasing of property, having kids... you don’t need us to tell you the drill. Both of us have seen it flash before our eyes, like an insane movie on fast-forward, every time a hot new potential sweetie comes into our lives – in spite of the fact that neither of us consciously wants ever to walk down that particular pathway again. This programming is strong, and it would take stronger women than us to erase it completely.
At some of the tantra events we’ve attended, an announcement is made in the beginning that goes like this: “During some of these practices, you may have feelings that will feel a lot like you’re falling in love with your partner. That’s because you are – you’re falling in love with the love in the universe, which you’re seeing manifested in your partner. When that happens, it’s absolutely wonderful. Just accept it for what it is, and don’t feel the need to attach anything more to it than what it is right here and now – nothing about the future, nothing about anything outside this room, just what it is. “ In SM, a similar truism holds that you always fall in love with your first top.
This is very good advice to keep in mind as you travel in the realms of radical ecstasy, where you may over and over again have experiences that feel like falling into the deepest and most passionate of love. Remember, we are your friendly neighborhood ethical sluts, and pluralists to boot, so our intention is to show you some ways to celebrate lots and lots of deep connections of sex and SM and spirit – including how to fall in love with the whole wide world, or at least as much of it as you can manage.
What is the “self”? While most of us put some effort into making sure our externals are attractive – that we look good, that we can tempt the kind of partners we want – we also yearn to be seen as more than the packaging. Large-breasted women resent being looked at as a pair of boobs with a woman inconveniently attached. Successful men fear being viewed as walking wallets. “I want to be loved for myself, “ we wail.
And what if you feel like you’re loved because you’re highly intelligent, or extremely kind, or – in the BDSM world – a natural, brilliant dominant or submissive? Or because you write books? Does that feel like being loved for yourself? And if your intelligence or your generosity or your personality isn’t your “self,” what is your “self?
Excellent question! We wish we knew the answer. We suspect that the “self” is less a thing than a process, or a dynamic, or a permanently flowing sense of awareness. We sometimes wonder if the self lies one layer down under whatever layer it is that’s being seen at the time – that it exists mostly as a hunger to be revealed, to be known. Like all hungers, this one can be satiated only temporarily... but how wonderful it feels when it happens!
The moment when we feel like we’re being seen for our selves, when the barricades are down and the armor is off, is, of course, the moment of transcendence, the moment we have attempted to describe in this book. When it happens between two people, it feels a lot like love. In fact, we would argue, it is love, as Janet describes here:
We’d known each other for a while, enjoyed one another’s company. He’s smart and funny and so am I; he’s tall and broad, the way I like, with the softest blue eyes you ever saw. I’d been flirting with him for ages — well, I guess you’d call it flirting; I don’t do subtlety very well, so I guess what I mean by flirting is “So, hey, when are we gonna play?”
And then one day I got an e-mail: he wanted to, at the party coming up Saturday night. Yay! My gut started telling me right away that this playdate was more than just a playdate. The negotiations certainly didn’t predict anything special — the usual I like this; well, I don’t, much; OK, then, we won’t do it; oh, well, if you really want to we can. Our desires and fantasies overlapped to a reasonable degree, enough to fashion a pretty decent scene, but certainly not a perfect match.
We went to dinner, fine-tuned the negotiations, chatted. He’d worn a special outfit: leather cap and jacket, jeans that fit just the way they should, boots that added another two inches to his height, a cologne I actually liked (and as a rule I hate men’s scents). He looked big and tough, and yet there were still those eyes gazing out from under the leather brim of the cap...
I had actually bought an outfit — for some reason my usual butchish attire wasn’t right for this date. I bought heels, goddammit. I put on makeup. What was going on?
We got to the dungeon, grabbed my favorite cable-spool table with the padding and the eyebolts, started setting up the scene. He likes bondage, I don’t, so we compromised — my feet fastened firmly in place but my arms left free so I could stand or bend over. He asked if I liked blindfolds, I said I did; he slipped one on and I started to float. He pulled my tight spandex outfit down from the top and up from the bottom, turning it into a very tight wide stretchy belt. And then he held me from behind, letting me feel the thick leather of his jacket against my awakening skin, allowing me to trust his strength. My core started to soften, melting outward, bones blurring, blood warming.
He began to flog me, softly at first, building quickly — I’d told him I didn’t need too much warmup. Caress, caress, thwack, caress, thwack thwack. I began to make sounds, grunts and small moans. A heavier flogger now, more thud, more bite on the edges, hit me harder dammit I’m right on the edge... yes, like that, let me feel how hard you can hit, how much you’ve got in you, knock me over, let me catch myself so you can knock me over again, — or better yet you catch me.
And then suddenly a fit of giggles, contagious — what started it? Hell if I know, but I probably laughed first, you’re too polite to laugh when I’m working this hard, but you’re happy to let me take you flying with me in a gigglestorm, and I twist my neck back to look in your face and your eyes are crinkled up with pleasure and laughter; I can feel your chest shaking against me. And then the arms and chest are gone and thwack, and I pull myself back together and straighten up and brace myself for more, and the laughter’s made you even stronger, and you’re hitting me as hard as you can, and screams are pouring through the space the laughter opened up. And I start to bend over to hold the table for strength and you bark “Stand up straight!” and whatever last little bit of resistance I might have felt is gone, and I stand up straight, and my arms fly out to my sides, and no part of me is touching the earth any more: I’m airborne.
More, please, more. Three floggers held together at the handle and swung like a baseball bat, knocking me off balance, making me grab the table and brace myself because god knows I don’t want you to stop, this is too wonderful, you’re snapping yourself right down those big arms and those big floggers and pouring yourself right into my hot welted skin, into my simmering core, and the heat of the skin and the heat of the core meet up so I’m lava through and through, and the joy is just overpowering.
And just as you’ve landed the hardest blow and I’m teetering against the table you grab me, pull me upright, hold me so I don’t have to hold myself up any more, and I’m yours, completely yours, for just that moment — and I know that moment is permanent, that I’ll have it forever and just because of that I’ll have a little bit of you, forever.
… and after that same scene:
“Shhh... it’s all over now... it’s OK... it’s all over.”
That’s what he said to me after the scene, softly into my ear as he held me, after he’d reduced me to a screaming sobbing begging lump. And when I think back on the scene, that’s the moment I remember best, and with the greatest longing. Something in me has been waiting all my life to hear those words.
How often in life do we really get to know that the hard part is over? When we have a baby, one hard part is over when we push the new life out into the world — but there’s a couple of decades of even harder stuff lying ahead. Completing a task at work usually simply means clearing it off the desk to make room for the next one. Solving a problem generally creates a dozen more.
So for that one moment I get to be soothed, to be reminded that I’ve survived an impossible ordeal, and that I’m being rewarded with petting and affection and reassurance because I did it well, and it is all over. I can feel proud of myself and know that he recognizes how hard it was to do what I did.
And I also get to learn that bruised, beaten, snotty and hiccuping, all pretense gone and all defenses dropped, I’m still lovable: without any of the shows I put on to make myself attractive, someone still wants to comfort me and make me feel cared for and nurtured.
That moment, those words murmured into my ear so softly that I can barely hear them over my own sobs, feels a lot like love to me.
When we first started work on this book, we were both fairly recently out of relationships that neither of us would hesitate to call “failed” – both feeling raw, bitter and very uncertain about our possibilities for ever getting involved again. Although things have improved quite a bit since then, those dark days did lead to some interesting – if uncheerful – thoughts about the nature of loneliness, especially for those of us who like our sex and play very, very intimate. It was during such a period that Janet wrote:
Is a sadomasochist who hasn’t gotten to play for a while “impervious”?
Sure, I can make puns about it, but it really isn’t funny. I’ve been snappish for days. Everything I think of annoys me; there’s no calm place for my mind to rest. I miss people who are gone and resent people who are here. I can’t think of what I want to eat or what I feel like doing. My reflection in the mirror looks ugly.
Nobody can tell there’s anything wrong: I’m socializing as merrily as ever — but by the time I get back to my car I feel frantic, sorry to have left but desperate to get away, utterly unable to conceive how to stand going home by myself but unable to tolerate anyone else’s company for another minute.
I run through my mental checklist of what could be eating me. No, I’m not premenstrual. Hmm. I’ve gotten plenty of exercise in the last couple of days, and I’ve been eating OK if not with wild enthusiasm. No changes in medication, no broken sleep, no fights with friends or business troubles.
Well, that’s not it — so what the hell do I want?
A thought comes to me suddenly and forcefully, and I begin to cry, alone in my car. I want to be touched. Not just with physical touch, I get plenty of that. I want someone inside my skin, or I want to get inside someone else’s skin. I want to feel that sensation of wanting to devour someone entirely, to erase the air between us so there’s a perfect synergy of minds, hearts, bodies. I want to connect. And the best way I know to do that is with SM.
This restless flame inside me seeks to join with someone else’s flame, to leap toward the sky together. It’s happened in various ways throughout my life. Sometimes during long intense intellectual conversations, the ones where it feels like our minds are two horses yoked to the same chariot, pulling together to go someplace neither could go alone. In tantra practice, when I gaze into someone’s eyes and feel myself falling into her pupils, plummeting inward, a tiny me reflected in her eyes, a tiny her reflected in mine. Occasionally during bouts of uncontrollable laughter, where your face hurts and your stomach aches and it doesn’t feel like you’ll ever stop, because as soon as you slow down, you look at the other person and it all starts again.
But mostly, I go there in scene. And I haven’t played in a long time, and I haven’t gone there in even longer, and it hurts.
And I drive on, and I wonder if these tough boundaries I’ve built with such effort and pain have finally fenced me off completely from everyone I love and everything I enjoy, and I cry.
Scientists describe a basic animal need called “touch-hunger” : babies who aren’t given plenty of physical touch wither away, just as they would if they weren’t given enough food. We think there is a subtler but just as real need to be touched at an energetic or spiritual level. Clearly, this spiritual touch-starvation feels very awful indeed – so bad that we may wind up opting for self-destructive behaviors (bad drugs, bad partners, bad behavior of various kinds) rather than feeling it a moment longer. One of the reasons we wanted to research and write this book is to help make sure that nobody has to feel this awful feeling any more than absolutely necessary – that everybody has as many tools as possible to make connections with the universe and the people around them when they need to.
There is another way in which love seems to manifest, a way that has drawn each of us in on more than one occasion. That naked raw hungry self, the one that yearns to be seen – what’s the easiest pathway to it? Through the weak spots, of course – through our frayed places, our places of vulnerability, our wounds. So when an attractive stranger comes along and puts his or her mouth right up to one of those wounds and speaks into it the way an announcer speaks into a microphone, it can feel a whole lot like being truly seen, like a promise of real satisfaction for the hunger that’s gone unfulfilled for what seems like forever. Unfortunately, what’s being seen isn’t the whole us; it’s our weakest, neediest selves, the least acknowledged parts of ourselves, that are on display. But since those aren’t the parts of ourselves that we normally spend much time with, we can easily mistake them for the whole thing – not noticing the mistake until there are two names on top of the joint checking account or the birth certificate.
Janet writes:
Crazy In Love
I’ve only been searingly, impossibly in love twice in my adult life — once with someone who loved me back, the other with someone who didn’t. The second one did me the bigger favor.
This kind of love is a kind of craziness, a delusional state with obsessive-compulsive overtones. It bypasses rational thought and self-preservation. The only experience I’ve had that came close to it was the feeling I had about my kids when they were tiny infants — completely occupied with them, endlessly fascinated by them, not sure where they ended and I began, wanting nothing more than to curl up around them and shelter them forever and ever.
For me, crazy-in-love manifests as mad protectiveness, the complete conviction that I and I alone can see this person’s inner beauty, and the certainty that I’m strong enough and good enough to make them happy. Believing I can do that, that I’m that strong and competent and empathetic and intuitive, makes me feel immensely powerful. This is, of course, megalomaniacal and delusional, but just try telling me that when I’m tossing and turning because my skin won’t be calm unless it’s touching that person.
Why is it that the people who activate my worst instincts — egoism, martyrdom, manipulativeness — are the ones I fall in love with? Not coincidence, surely. There must be a part of me that longs to feel those things and leaps at the opportunity to inflict them on someone else. And the worst part is this: even as I work to build boundaries, to leave those behaviors behind, I know that if another one came along — someone who’s tough yet needy, unpredictable, irascible, very smart but a little bit nuts — I’d do it all over again.
No, wait, that isn’t the worst part. The worst part is that I want to.
This is scary truth: that we can’t depend on our lovers to prove to us that we’re not broken because actually, in some ways, we are. Wounded, anyway.
And if you’re feeling scared, or upset, or worried about this, or about anything we’ve presented here: back to the breath. Remember about self-acceptance and being kind to yourself. Take another breath. Always return to the breath.
Opening yourself up to connection is not a skill that most of us have automatically. Babies and very small children have it, but it gets schooled out of most of us early on, when we’re taught to restrain our emotions and behave ourselves. These are important skills in terms of learning to get on with others, but they require closing yourself off, putting up filters between yourself and the world. Later, when you want to learn to make intimate connection, you have to learn all over again how to drop those filters – and it’s not always easy.
Hardly anybody gets relationships right the first time, or the second, or the nineteenth – in fact, we have a big question about whether it’s possible to get relationships “right” at all, or whether we just do the best we can with the cards we’re dealt at the time. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to grow together and take care of each other as well as we can – to see each other and touch each other and try not to harm what we see and touch. Perhaps that’s not such a small thing – perhaps that’s one of the biggest tasks we face on this earth.
Here’s a relevant exercise we learned in tantra. If an exercise seems weird in the midst of all this cogitation, that’s really what this book is about: to show you a lot of the ways that have worked for us to open a path to connection.
Sit across from a friend or a lover, and gaze into his or her eyes. Breathe together for a moment. Imagine that you can see so deeply that you can see your beloved before they were ever wounded. Innocent, clean, unafraid, sacred. And remember, your beloved is seeing you the same way.
Imagine you could make love from this place. Any kind of love that fits. Maybe gazing like this is making love.
The reality is that there are as many ways to touch, as many ways to love, as there are combinations of people and circumstances – which is to say, an infinite number. The trick, we find, is to remain open to the moments and the dear people in them when they present themselves — there’s presence and acceptance again – to welcome the moments in which all the love in the world presents itself to us with a human face for a little while. When we treasure each connection for what it is... not what it might become, or what we might make of it... when we simply cherish that dear person in front of us, perhaps we might still be cherishing tomorrow.
To close this chapter, we’d like to recount in both of our voices an evening that we spent combining what we know of tantra and SM to achieve mutual ecstasy. Dossie is in the plain text and Janet in the italics:
We are having a date at my house in the country. We’ve spent the afternoon with the outline of this book you are reading. Janet has brilliantly organized all the scattered bits and pieces, and the evening is set aside for play by the fireplace. The feeling is good and easy and connected, and the dog is happy.
We negotiate the scene before dinner, which is a little complicated —Janet has a couple of clear fantasies, and I’d like to be able to fit into them. She’s hungry for spanking and viciousness, imagines a teenage boy who comes home to find the babysitter smoking weed and blackmails her into sex. I had been wanting to do a scene starting out with tantric breathing and raising the energy, making the energetic connection. Last time we did this I was the top, and tonight I have eyes to bottom for it. I had just topped the scene in this book about trance dancing with the cane, and I really wanted that for myself. There’s a little fumbling around — can we script a scene that includes both of our desires?
I’ve been carrying around a lot of stress and frustration, and I haven’t had the chance to do much intense play in quite a while. Typically for me, this situation has built up into some very nasty fantasies. There’s a playstyle that I love topping and often enjoy bottoming to, but not too many bottoms meet me with it — a no-holds-barred, harsh, punitive kind of play. Of course, it has connection built into it, but not overtly, and it looks pretty scary from the outside. I’d been hoping for such a scene that night. Dossie can sometimes go there with me, but not always; I have my fingers crossed...
We can’t figure out how our nasty horny hostile teenage boy could top a good trance induction, so Janet offers to change the cast of characters to a corrupt guru with a naive disciple. We both like this — trance induction for betrayal, sounds like a hot scene to me.
We actually discussed quite a few options before we came up with this one. Later on, as you’ll see, the discussion paid off — it turned out that what we were doing was defining a circle of possibilities. I enjoy playing the wicked betrayer, too... and once Dossie gets tranced out and warmed up, she can usually follow me almost anywhere I want to go.
So Janet sets out the toys she wants while I get dressed in a chiffon sarong and velvet cleavage top with dragons — girly tantra wear. We put five hours of Hildegard von Bingen on the stereo — 12th-century intense monastic music is all about flagellation. The titles include “Canticles of Ecstasy” and “Canticles of the Blood. “So imagine this long slow exquisite singing throughout the scene.
We start out sitting on pillows in front of the fireplace, me on Janet’s lap with my legs wrapped around her, and we go into the breath. Kundalini rises very quickly, and I can feel the intense connection between us as Janet gazes into my eyes. It feels like she’s raping my soul, or maybe that my soul is a butterfly mounted for display. We undulate with the breath and get very turned on, until Janet is lifting me and slamming our crotches together, still with the breath coming faster and faster, and both of us are shouting — it sounds like Janet has an orgasm in there. Feels like I’m sitting on her dick, a strong illusion even though she hasn’t put hers on yet.
I often grow a dick when I do undulations, and if Dossie’s sitting on my lap it’s pretty much a sure thing. And with me running that hot frustrated energy, let me tell you, it’s a BIG dick.
For a while she controls my breath, first by putting her hand over my mouth to tell me when I can breathe and when I shouldn’t — I get quite dizzy in the process. She initiates some mouth-to-mouth breathing, back and forth between her life and mine, careful to breathe in some extra air so we don’t deplete the breath we are sharing. This feels intimate, and I get an image that she is taking me over by breathing herself into me. I’m definitely trancing now, and she’s holding me up and pushing me at the heart, back and forth to the breath, as though I’m on a swing that she controls.
The “guru” fantasy becomes very strong for me here. I’m teaching her the breathing by doing the breathing for both of us — this in spite of the fact that in real life she is far more experienced with these breathing techniques than I. And then an idea comes to me — a way to build a bridge to bondage by integrating rope as part of the breathing practice...
She takes some silky thick black rope and winds it around my chest and arms, tightening to constrict the breath, my arms bound to my sides, my chest wound around tightly. As we continue the breath I get dizzier and higher and more distant from myself, as if Janet is operating my body. She uses the rope on my chest as a handle to throw me far back and then pull me back up before my head hits the floor — I trust her with this. She is growling now, and I can see her evil man top is in control. This is a little scary, which is exciting.
The “evil man top” is a familiar character to both of us; he shows up in various ways when I play with Dossie — all very vicious, all very precious to both of us. This betraying guru-fellow is a new incarnation of an old friend. I am punching her hard in the chest to throw her backward, grabbing the knot of ropes at her heart chakra just before she hits the floor, yanking her back toward me in an embrace, meeting her mouth with mine... then doing it again... and again...
Then she wraps a long satiny rope around each of my wrists, leaving a length of rope hanging like a leash, on each one. She pulls my hands around her back, holding the ropes in front of her, and we breathe with me attached to her like a monkey baby. Kundalini comes up and up, and out the top of my head. I can feel our inner snakes twining together above us, my snake reaching out to hers when she puts her forehead against mine and stares into me, my snake licks her third eye, she is staring from her soul, and the arousal has us shouting and thrusting. I am sitting on her dick in a violent and out-of-control upheaving — out of my control, anyway. We are happily gasping and bellowing, me hissing and spitting.
All of this takes much longer to do than to describe. With each change in position, each new bit of bondage, we bring the breath back up, raise the snake, and explore each new form, physically, emotionally, spiritually, as far as we can go with it.
In the last position, she pushes my arms behind my back and ties the leashes around in front of me, so as we breathe and rock, I am completely dependent on her to keep from falling over. I can feel the heat rising in my cunt right now while I’m writing about this.
I am panting, out of breath, and my arms are tiring... and I’m still itching to make her scream and cry. It’s just the kind of girl I am, I guess.
When we have exhausted all the possibilities of this configuration, Janet helps me move to the couch and places me over her lap for the spanking, pillows arranged to protect each of our rather fragile necks. She starts with a sensual spanking, while I get comfortable in the position and sink into the sexiness of it. Then she tells me she wants to hear me scream. That scares me a little — I know she knows how — and I know that means she will push me beyond what I can channel with the breath.
I believe in asking for what I want. If I want to hear someone scream, I tell them I want to hear them scream. It sets the direction for the scene, it gives them permission to open their mouth and throat and let the screams come out.
She proceeds to cook my ass with the back of a wooden hairbrush — a stinging, relentless implement. For a while I work on surfing the pain, keeping my breathing relaxed, staying with the ecstatic current, but Janet knows how to push me over my own edges, and she strikes without mercy till I cry and thrash, telling me all along about how Daddy likes to hear his girl scream...
Daddy? Where on earth did he come from? Hell if I know. Something about seeing her over my knees just tells me that I’m Daddy now.
By this point in the scene I am morphing roles in my own head with manic speed – daddy guru, rapist, Big Bad Wolf, torturer, gangbanger — but it doesn’t really matter, since they all seem to have essentially the same purpose: to beat and then fuck Dossie.
With tremendous skill, she rides me back and forth, easing up till I can catch the wave and then pounding down beyond my ability to process with serenity. We go back and forth for a while from floating to bucking, with her occasionally grabbing my crotch and making me writhe in a different way, shaming me with my wetness.
I know that if I give her a completely ecstatic ride, I’ll be frustrated and unhappy... and that if I take her into a place of pure miserable punished-girl pain, she’ll safe-word and we’ll both feel awful. So my job is to walk her right along the edge — we’ve been playing together so long that I can read her signals well enough to know what both states look like for her.
When her arm gets tired and I get to where she can’t throw me off my stride from this position, she gets up and has me kneel over the couch — another adjustment of pillows for the neck — and cuts into me with a cane with blistering ferocity. I can feel her now, feral and hungry, ripping me open to taste the emotional equivalent of blood, and I fall into the sweetness of victimhood, wriggling and crying and screaming and thrashing, miserable and ultimately delighted at the same time. This is one fine ride.
When she is ready, she tells me that she is going to put her dick on and then give me twelve more strokes of the cane, at maximum impact, and then fuck me till I scream. The intermission while she gets into the harness resets everything, and strips me of the dissociative cloud that had been making me immune to the stinging anguish of the cane at full force.
Hmmph. I’d like you to believe I’m doing it this way on purpose, but the fact is that the O-ring in Dossie’s harness is about an eighth of an inch smaller than her biggest dick, the one I need to be wearing right now, and it’s sort of like trying to load a cannonball into a rifle barrel. I’m gritting my teeth and swearing softly under my breath. But then when I start up again, it’s like the interlude never happened – I am sadistic again, my ears hungry for the whistle of the cane and for Dossie’s cries....
When she comes back, each strike of the cane feels like a fire blazing across my ass. When she attacks in threes and fours I lose my place entirely, unable to hold still or silent, falling into involuntary convulsion. We lose count — twelve or twenty or who knows — it’s all out of control; and then she fucks me.
Long and deep and hard, yelling nastiness in my ear, I am hers, she can do whatever she wants with me, she’s going to fuck me till I can’t take it and then fuck me some more, and I’m so far out I believe her, and it’s all heat. She has two or three of what she calls top-gasms, and I have the equivalent, until we are both exhausted and it’s time to give it up. She gets up and reaches for the knots that tie my hands behind my back — and I beg. Please, please, can I have the vibrator before I’m untied?
It takes a minute to get it clear — it’s not like I’m exactly coherent right now, mind you — that I actively want to be on my back on the floor with my hands tied behind me. And when we get there almost instantaneously I come. Hugely.
This is when I can really tell I’m in male headspace — there’s a part of me that is just a tiny bit peeved that I haven’t been able to make her come by fucking her. And she’s right, I was all set to untie her — with my bum shoulders I’d have been in agony if my hands had been tied behind my back a fraction as long as hers have been; I’ve forgotten that, with her much greater flexibility, she can handle this much and more. But when I see how fast and hard she comes with the vibrator, all that is forgotten. What a glorious sight, her flushed and straining and shouting and streaming radiance in the bondage as the orgasm possesses her; and what a wonderful feeling to let her float back down to earth in my arms, the glow ever so slowly abating and settling down over both of us. The fireplace crackles and the dog comes over to be petted and reassured. We come quietly, gradually, giggling back into ourselves. What a joy. What a friendship. What a love.