Sunday, September 30, 2012

Back to Black

She slides her arm around my waist and pulls me in to whisper into my ear. "Come home with me." I vaguely register this thought. There's something about the darkness of the bar and the shadows of candles glancing off the bricks that has enamored me. I swirl the ice cubes through the whiskey in my glass instead of responding. I'm not in a hurry to go anywhere. We have the rest of the night to fuck, and there's no doubt in my mind that it will happen. I've been planning that part for a few days; at this point I'm just letting it unfold. Letting myself enjoy seducing her. Learning things I didn't know about her. Testing her boundaries. The chase is always half of the fun.

The pianoman wraps up one song and launches right into another through the applause. I recognize the tune on the first notes, and I turn my back partially to her to sing with the strangers crowded around the piano. Otis Redding always reminds me of life in Mississippi; specifically, this song takes me back to running on the banks of Deer Creek during the Christmas festival as a child. But by the second verse my mind has wandered to you. I remembered a moment, recently, when I was texting you about the music I was listening to at work. We discussed Redding. I don't know if I could love a girl who didn't love him. For a moment, I wish it was you with me, because you would know the words. You would look so incredibly beautiful in the candlelight. You would wrap your arms around my waist, and I would lose myself in you. Forget the bar, forget the world, forget my intentions or my past or... I do when I kiss you. I get lost. I sink in you.

But it's not you here with me. I know wherever you are, whatever you are doing at the moment, that you are surrounded by the people you love. I'm sure you're having a fabulous time. I'm being incredibly selfish, wanting you at this moment, when you'll be home and in my arms before I can blink. 

The song ends, and I return my focus to her, checking back into the moment. Again and again, I repeat the mantra: stay present. Be here. I promised myself that I would before I picked her up, even before I called to ask her to come out with me. If I'm going to sleep with her, I'm not going to spend the whole night thinking about where else I could be. It's not fair to either of us. 

------------

I lift off my side just enough to run my hands across her hip, down her thighs, across the small of her back. I don't remember how the conversation has started, or what words brought us here -- the whiskey still seeps around my brain. 

"I don't like to talk about my feelings. I don't like to talk about myself, honestly, but there are moments when I let loose. I'm the most honest during sex, for some reason. People ask me the craziest things during sex."

"What's the weirdest thing anyone has asked you during sex?" 

I don't even hesitate to answer this. "If I believed in God." She laughs, the sounds bouncing off the tile and columns of her room. "I was so shocked by the question that it took me a minute to even answer. And then we had a super intense metaphysical conversation in bed." 

"I want to ask you something." 

"Anything," I tell her. "Here's your one chance. You can ask me anything in the world you want to know." I grant this of anyone I sleep with. It's a bizarre gift, I suppose. I never think much of it until the moment it happens. Sex puts me in a mood to expose anything and everything. 

Her thoughts race through the silence. I wish I could get in her head. "I don't know what to ask." 

I lean in, pulling myself up so I can look down at her. My teeth find her collarbone, and her body moves with me as I bite her. "What do you want?" The question comes low and soft, and I realize it's my favorite to ask. 

Instead of responding, she pulls me in to kiss her, and I reach my hand between her thighs. She bends with me, flows with me, so easily. I tease her, threatening to touch her labia, but never quite getting close enough. She bucks against me, begging with her body, trying to force my hand, but I'm too fast. 

"You like to be teased don't you?" She murmurs her agreement. I've been in top space for hours, and her response is intensifying the desire. "You like to be pushed, you like to be topped. I bet you even like to be spanked, too." She nods against me, and I kiss her one last time. "Flip over." 

Her ass is so perfectly smooth. She's got the kind of skin that any woman would kill for, and the kind of curve to her ass that makes me swoon. I lick my finger and slide it over her labia, checking to see how wet she is. I warm her up with a few light spanks, then lean forward over her. "Do you know what a safeword is?" 

"Yes." 

"Good. Do I have to make you use it to know that you will, or do you know your limits well enough to use it when you need it?"

"I'll be ok." 

"Don't feel like you have something to prove to me. You don't." I still hesitate because I haven't fucked her before. Because we've never discussed this. I sense she has little experience with d/s, and I don't want to test that theory."

"What's the safeword?" 

"Red," I respond without thinking. 

I spank her, hard, rotating from left to right, beating a rhythm then stopping just long enough to make her question my next move. She takes it without kicking back, and I'm impressed. If we were at my house, I'd probably tie her up and pull out a flogger on her, just to see if she likes it. I wonder for a second about what is in the room, but there's nothing I could beat her with. Plus there's something deeply personal about being spanked. I like the sting of the palm of my hand, the intimacy of skin hitting skin. 

When she's red and a little raw, I shove two fingers in her cunt and fuck her, hard, opening her up. I slide two more fingers into her ass, and don't let up until she can't handle it anymore. She comes once, almost twice, before she pulls away from me. It's fast and dirty, but by this point, we're almost three hours in, and I'm starting to feel the pull of my bed. I'm not sure her body could take it much longer, and something tells me she isn't the type to keep lube handy. 

I pull myself up next to her, but this time she turns toward me. "I know what I want to ask." 

I can't see much of her in the dark, but I'm not sure I'd want to see the intensity of her eyes right now.

"How did you know I like to be spanked?" 

My head swirls for a minute. I've been dominant my whole life. It's such a sixth sense at this point, I have trouble explaining it in terms of her actions. "It's something about the way you respond to my ordering you around. The way you don't resist anything I ask of you, the way your body responds. It's my job to read you, to test what your body wants, to push you a little. Maybe it's because I practice BDSM. Maybe because it's pretty obvious you like to be topped." It feels uncomfortable to describe her actions to her, so I hesitate. I barely know her. I'm brilliantly failing at putting this into words. 

I can't read her response in the dark, and she hasn't moved or spoken.

"What do you think? What do you like? I want to know." 

She laughs, but there's something biting in her tone. "I'm just a submissive. I don't have options, right?" 

My response is firm, "No, I didn't say that at all. I have so much respect for people who submit. Many of the submissives I know are some of the strongest, smartest people I know. You can submit and still crave something, still want or not want something." 

You come to mind first, and the thought of you makes me smile. But I know many submissives who fit this description, and my response is defensive and protective. I hear it too often -- this idea that submission is weak, it's feminine, it's about not wanting control or not having the capability to have control. I think my response surprised her, because something in the air has changed. 

I leave the conversation there and pull her into a kiss. I'm not up for educating someone about BDSM at three in the morning, and there's a lot in that conversation that probably shouldn't take place when we're drunk and naked. "Can I fuck you again?" she asks when she pulls away. 

"No, it's time for me to go home." Puck's fairies have begun to lull me toward sleep. I have no desire to pass out here; I much prefer to be in my own bed. 

I don't know how to process my feelings yet. Fucking her has been fantastic, but I find that I don't want her to touch me. I don't want anyone else but you, and everything else feels like a waste of my time, bordering on uncomfortable and unwanted. I wonder if it's just a side effect of top space, but it feels different than that. I want to discuss it with someone, but I'm not sure who. I'm not sure what to say. 

I come back to reality, pulling my clothes and my jewelry back on long enough to kiss her goodnight and stumble across the yard to my car. These are questions for another day, a conversation for later. For now, I file away my feelings and my thoughts, and I focus on the drive home. 

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Hallelujah

Somehow this blog keeps getting read and read and read, even when I am so painfully absent, even when I am basically non-existent. I can't explain it. I can't begin to understand it.

But thank you.

The words haunt, and I am awake long past when I should be. That is what words do. Isaac has passed and left me, thankfully, safe. I fear what it has done to so many others, and I cannot express my deepest sorrow and anguish to see my city and my region once again maligned in the national press. I am so fucking sick of people who say we should not live here. WE DO LIVE HERE. We are you. We are the people who came back after Chicago burned to the ground, after earthquakes leveled much of California, after terrorism shook New York, after hurricanes hit Galveston and Miami and Charleston.

We are people with families and homes and jobs and favorite restaurants. We feed the ducks in the park and we try to survive the violence and we try to contend with the politics and poverty that Louisiana breeds so familiarly. We harvest your seafood and your oil, we ship your imports, we dream your jazz, and we welcome you with open arms to visit us. And yet, you still go home and rant and rave, anonymously and online and in public and over radios that those damn people in Louisiana, in New Orleans, they live in a bowl. They live where no one should. They deserve to flood and to die and to watch their every possession become water-logged and molded.

Must be nice to sit atop the mountain and claim such loftiness. I hope you NEVER see the day when you face the loss of your home, your family and friends, the fear of a disaster -- man-made or "natural." I hope you never have to call for help. I hope you never spend your whole life paying taxes to a government, to a country, that doesn't see you as important enough to save.

Anyway. I could go on for hours. This is my city, and if you don't like it, then stay the fuck out. Thank you very much.

It's not assholes who keep me awake. It's not even the strep or the seven medications. It's a girl. Of course it is, you say, because what the fuck else keeps people up at night? Well, a lot of things.



You cannot destroy me and you will not hurt me, but you can keep me at arm's length. You can keep me in a place where I never get to know you. You can keep your thoughts locked inside your head, and you can fit me into a box that is convenient.

But I'm not sure if that's good enough for me.

I want a fighting chance. I don't want a leash, and I will give you a long enough rope to hang yourself if you choose. I will give you a long enough rope to run the world, twice, and I will give you the scissors to cut it any time you please, as long as you give me the same. I will give you space to run, and I will not follow. I don't want anyone to ever feel the need or the pressure to stay. I've been there, and I'm over it. It's fucking miserable. I want you to choose to open up to me, to choose what secrets you hold, to choose to come home with me. I don't care whom you fancy and whom you fuck. But when you are present, be there. Demand the same of me. Demand more of me. Demand something. Want something. Need something. You might not get it the way you want it. You might not get it when you want it. But ask.

I don't need a girlfriend or a wife. I don't need a bedmate or a roommate; I don't need a friend. I have the life I want, and I'm not looking for someone to complete it or change it or make sense of it. What I want is you. I keep coming back to that. I came back because I wanted a chance to get to know you. I wanted to know what made you tick, where you go when you are angry. What makes you wake up in the morning, and if you are happy when you do. Where you want to go tomorrow. What you dream about. I'm not asking to change you; I'm not asking to make sense of you. I'm asking for a moment when I get to listen. I'm asking for a peek over the wall.

And if that's too much to ask, I understand. You can say no, you can draw the boundaries. You can play elsewhere, and I won't come looking. But I will never know if I don't ask.

Just like you'll never know if I will wrap around you in the dark, if you don't pull my hand and see.