“All you want is to run into the woods & beg

the wolf to fuck you up.”

– Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds

My therapist once told me that she believed one of the biggest misconceptions about kink was that people turning their fears and past traumas into sexual fantasies were somehow weak or still broken.

“I think what you do is incredible,” she’d said, “because you are taking back that narrative. You’re making it your own. You are asserting control over it and making it operate on your terms, in the service of you.”

But it is still bewildering to dig beneath some fantasy I have and find at its root something that utterly terrifies me.

Handoff, Part Two

(Part one can be found here.)

Before we got too deep into anything, @doctortease (I will, for the sake of convenience, refer to him herein as ’D’) had me sit down in the armchair in his hotel room so that we could go over limits and, to an extent, expectations. He was across from me on the ottoman, so close our knees were touching. Despite the tightness in my chest that I couldn’t quite attribute to solely nerves or arousal, something about D’s presence set me at ease. At the museum, he was congenial and easy to be around. His voice was gentle. He had kind eyes.

Even so, I could barely meet them. I always withdraw when it comes to saying what I want, and to have someone speaking so casually about tying me up and playing with me – in the sort of nonchalant way one would order a sandwich – had rendered me taciturn. “I’m really turned on right now,” I admitted, allowing it to serve as a means of voicing my consent. Here and there, I’d chimed in things that had appealed to me, had seconded some of his own preferences. But I’d hoped being this forthcoming would negate, or at least justify, my shyness.

“Good,” D replied, tracing the tips of his fingers over my thigh. His touch was so light it felt like breath on my skin.

I’d expected him to undress when I did. But he didn’t when I rose, unzipped my skirt and let it fall around my ankles. And he didn’t when I removed my t-shirt and tossed it aside. Nor when I unhooked my bra. Nor when I stepped out of my wedges. Instead, he’d advanced towards me until I felt my back press against the wall. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to fuck you.”

I looked up at him. “You can fuck me if you want to.”

He laughed. I felt my ears redden, felt the heat rise on the back of my neck and in my cheeks.

I want to talk for a moment here about power. I think a lot of people conflate power with force because those are the manifestations of power we’re most used to: closed fists, raised voices. To hold power seems to imply being the agent of something. The instigator. The one enacting the violence, the one calling the shots, the one explaining the rules. And I think that’s a valid idea to a point. But I think there’s a greater power in doing nothing. In leading the other person to show their cards while you withhold yours. So, D had gotten me naked without lifting a finger, while he stood there with his clothes on. He’d had me offer myself to him and not even given me the dignity of an acceptance or refusal. I realized what this afternoon was going to look like. And in the face of it, I was fucking dizzy with want.

Soon enough, my wrists were tied in front of me with a length of soft rope, a yard or so of excess trailing down to the floor in front of me. D seized it up and led me over to the foot of the bed, turning me with his hands on my shoulders so I faced it with my back to the duffel bag he’d withdrawn the rope from.

“I’d like to blindfold you, Ivy. Is that all right?” D asked. I appreciated his willingness to obtain my consent, but I was mildly amused by how perfunctory his tone was about the whole thing. As if he’d just checked in with me about turning on the fan or making some other mundane adjustment. Regardless, I nodded.

I didn’t recognize the black elastic bandage right away when I saw the roll out of the corner of my eyes. D wrapped it around my head in three swift, deliberate turns before I felt his fingers against his temple, pressing the loose end flat. The blindfold was snug, the material pressing firmly, though not uncomfortably, into my eyelids. A few attempts to open my eyes proved futile. It felt redundant when he asked if I could see, more like a reinforcement of my status than a request for an update on it.

“It’s fine,” I answered, taken aback by how breathy my voice had become. Were it possible, I felt even more naked than before.

More so, even, when D pulled up on the rope, guiding my bound hands to rest on the back of my neck. My arms were forced up, bent at the elbow and out of the way of my body. He allowed the excess rope to trail down my back before tugging it up between my legs. Even though he hadn’t pulled it very tightly, my breath still hitched. It was enough to remind me of how vulnerable I was. To confirm how much I’d given him.

For a few honey-slow moments, we stayed like that. His breath warmed my neck, his fingers trailing idly over my skin. I tried to imagine what I must have looked like in that moment: bound, nude, blindfolded, forced to stand with my chest pushed out. I was a little light-headed. I could feel myself soaking into the rope between my legs.

“I want to hear you breathe,” D said, his voice giving me something to steady myself against in the darkness as his hands left my body. I heard his footsteps on the rug, the sound of him rummaging through the bag.

Something freezing cold made contact with my back, just between my shoulder blades. I gasped, lurched forward. At first, I thought it was ice. But after a few moments, there were no telltale water droplets running down the slope of my back.

Hear you breathe.

My cheeks burned even more fiercely as I realized what it was. The stark cold of it had drawn a few quick, heaving breaths out of me, but D coaxed them into long, deep draws. He rewarded my even breaths with soft praise, even as I gasped and choked on the first few breaths each time he found another spot on my torso. I couldn’t help it. Aside from the inherent disorientation of having something make contact with your body when you can’t see it coming, it was still cold. Even as it warmed slightly with the heat coming off my skin.

“Are you scared?” D asked.

“You think I’m scared?” I tried to sound cavalier about it. I wanted to serve it up as a bluff. But the words caught in my throat.

His grin was apparent in his voice. “I can hear your heart.”

Sometimes I miss the days when you’d come over and we’d keep our clothes on. When you’d rub me through my shorts until I leaked right through them because within a few minutes we were helplessly skirting the boundaries we’d set.

Those were the days when you brought over a six pack to keep at my place because I didn’t have beer to offer you, when you left your hat behind so I hid it and wouldn’t give it back. It was a time when we were doing little things like that in an attempt to articulate power with each other, in an attempt to understand how intimate we were allowed to be.

We weren’t even sure who was making the rules at that point. But, usually, we broke them.

A woman I lift with a lot told me the other day that she encounters two kinds of people here. The first category is those who walk in and think they can just start heavy shit right away. The second category is made up people who underestimate their abilities and shoot lower than they actually can reach.

According to her, I fall into the second category. I’m the kind of person who hates being bad at things, who hates disappointing myself to such a degree that sometimes I go just under the bar of what I know I can do. And, even more likely, I just have no idea what I can do in the first place.

I think I’d like to start overestimating myself.

Sweetheart learns the tough lesson that asking to be on top doesn’t necessarily imply being in control.

Powerless

A little over a month ago, Craftsmate and I got into this really uncomfortable argument in a semi-public setting about what we were doing. Basically, he sort of just dropped the bomb out of nowhere about not wanting to do kinky stuff anymore and I was upset because he wouldn’t provide me with an explanation.

There were a few explanations. It was a little awkward that I had just returned from Penthouse Land. He wanted to see if we could actually just be normal friends. He wasn’t sure what to make of our dynamic. And, he topped it all off with a “you make me feel powerless”.

“Oh yeah?” I replied, taken aback, then added with more than a little bitterness. “I am so sorry that I make you feel powerless.”

Although I had never considered it in those terms, I felt the same way. He had seamlessly worked his way into my life. My friends like him a lot. My roommate adores him. And the whole shame episode still felt fresh to me and the fact that he was suddenly living in a world that I had tried to keep completely separated from my blog had made me feel entirely powerless.

So, I think, in an effort to try to retain some power in the midst of being too vulnerable, I put up a bunch of walls. I thought he had seen too much of me already and as a result I wasn’t really being open with him at all. Sometimes I even got a little mean. I realized, in feeling like I was the victim, I assumed I was blameless and that I would be justified in taking whatever moves necessary to protecting my vulnerability. Especially after the really awkward kissing debacle, I did not want to show any of my hand or let there be any way I was more invested in this than he was (or even at all invested).

After I had expressed this to him, he came over that night. I was stressed out about other things and we were going to attempt to talk further, but Sunshine was home and awake. At one point, I walked out to go move some laundry to the dryer and he came with me.

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” he said. “But it makes a lot of sense.” We hugged.

We wound up falling asleep on the couch together, my head on his chest, his hand on my hair. The next day, he tied me up while Sunshine was still asleep in the other room. With my arms pulled back stringently, I realized that kink was very much a controlled outlet for my vulnerability. I could shut it down at any point I wanted with a safeword. There was power in this sort of powerlessness.

Fear is an incredibly powerful aphrodisiac.

That means you don’t have to approach every encounter with genuine excitement and assuredness. Sometimes it’s good to be reticent, afraid. So long as you’ve consented and you trust anyone involved, being frightened of what is to come can be just fine. In fact, you might even enjoy it.

With a lot of the female libido being dependent on anticipation, build-up, words, foreplay, preludes to the main event than the actual finalized actions, naturally fear is a great tool when wielded correctly. It’s just another suspension of time, another little subplot on the way to the climax.

I’ll admit part of me swooned when you referenced Mauss. But part of me almost felt violated.

I sometimes feel too well-known when people read the same books as I. I feel like they have a part of me that way and I, by extension, have a part of them by knowing what they’ve read. I start to associate them with the work. They become part of it

It’s not the same with movies. There’s just something about books.

But that’s the very spirit of the gift, isn’t it? You give me part of yourself and I’m indebted. I give you some of me and you’re in my debt. And you know how I feel about power exchanges.

It’s funny to remember you as you were before you existed, subtle visitor. You know how I’ve suffered getting accustomed to you.

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic." —Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale.