“That was easy to quit, dominance wasn’t. It catches up with you when you least expect it. This time I went at it more carefully, slowly building on ideas I’d developed over the years.”
He stopped, rubbed the back of his neck and tried to smile at me. There was something impenetrable in his eyes and I looked away when it made me shiver.
“Anyway. I’m rambling, aren’t I? What it’s like for me is… intense. I’ve learned that while it may look like I have the power, that’s not really the truth. Or more accurately, it’s half true. Both open each other more deeply, right to that place that contains who you truly are. Showing that to someone makes you vulnerable—sub or dom, doesn’t matter. You know, when you kneel in front of me, there’s that tinge of humiliation, the knowledge that in any other situation it would be degrading or laughable. And you trust me not to laugh or to degrade you. But it’s the same for the dominant. It’s all over if you laugh at his attempts to lead you.”
He reached over and tapped his finger against my nose. My eyes fell closed and I angled my face up to kiss his palm.
“Both have power, we just exercise it in different ways. You are powerful in the way you let me see you vulnerable, in living out a sense of weakness that couldn’t be further from most definitions of that word. Without your permission, I couldn’t do a thing of what I love to do. My power is in guiding you, both of us, in planning and watching and steering. But it’s too deeply entwined, you know? Once I started to see it that way, I didn’t know how to have regular sex anymore... it just felt like mutual masturbation without that sense of giving everything inside of you to the other’s needs.”
My tongue sneaked out to moisten my bottom lip. I hung at his words, letting them roll around my head, slowly testing and probing their worth. I wanted to think about them, wanted time and a piece of paper to write but I also wanted him to go on explaining.
Over his lap and in the bathroom, I had learned that indulging these fantasies did not have to feel degrading at all, didn’t have to feel like I was betraying my gender and the rights we fought for. Here at this table, I was learning about him and how he was dealing with those questions. His eyes, his mouth, his neck—my glance brushed over them all, their reactions, tension, release. He wasn’t nervous, but neither did it seem altogether easy to bare his mind like this. And I wanted to kiss him for it, for being who he was, for sharing it with me the way he did.
“When I spanked you, I did it because that’s what you wanted, craved. And because you did, your reactions coursed through me like wild fire. When you hurt, I hurt —and we both loved it. That’s why I went on and did it harder. Everything is shared this way, every sensation, every orgasm...”
“Yeah...” I whispered quickly, interrupting him when he inhaled.
He smiled at me and raised his brows. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Whatever had been closed behind his smile seemed to dissolve. Our hands found each other, and like the moon never turns her face away from the earth, our eyes were locked together, spiraling through space. It was the moment that decided so many future decisions but in that point in time, I was transfixed and dazed. We smiled at each other and for that fleeting moment, nothing else existed—not my job, not the interview, not his past or the pain he masked with layers of kindness and thoughtful words.
It couldn’t last. Moments like this, moments of softness and beauty are so much more volatile than any others. A robin on the windowsill, fluttering away before you can reach for a camera as a way to hold onto it, give it substance by recording it.
X
Paul looked away first. His chair screeched when he pushed it away and got to his feet. I closed my eyes, breathed shallow breath after breath. His naked feet smacked softly against the wooden floorboards; something jangled, like glass on glass: a bottle of Pinot Noir and two high-stemmed glasses. I crossed my naked legs when he returned to the table, piled his plate onto mine, the cutlery on top, ignored his gently reproachful glare while I cleared the space between us and distracted myself from watching the strength in his hands as he plucked the cork from the bottle with a soft
plop
and a sigh.
“Could you mix it with water for me?” I asked quietly. Paul looked up and nodded without judgment. He took the empty plates to the sink and poured tap water into the bulbous bottom of the glass. It still swished in a circular motion when he sat it in front of me and filled the remaining space with red liquid. It looked nothing like his drink: mine crystalline red, catching the light like a gemstone, his like viscous dark blood.
“Thank you,” I said, but he waved it away and raised his glass. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.
The desire to gulp it all down like the first sip of water after hours of heat rose in my throat. My fingers played with the glass stem, I watched the wine color his lips and then I brought my glass to mine. The taste, diluted and softened, did not make my face twist into the displeasure alcohol could easily effect. I was distracted, nervous again after all these minutes of calm, of a center unlike any I’d found in my life before.
My sips grew larger, more frenzied and I only truly realized it when I let the empty glass sink back to the table. My head swam just a little and I didn’t check whether Paul thought me strange for it.
“Are you okay?” he asked. Predictably.
Not quite knowing what to say, I turned my eyes back to the glass. Down at the bottom rested a final drop of clear, pink liquid. I picked it up again, gently tilted the glass until the drop painted a thin, transparent line along its round walls. I wondered if I would always drink wine like this—not like a woman but like Italian children at dinner. I wondered what other sensations I routinely diluted—for safety or comfort or fear. Now, I could hardly see any red in that drop anymore. Unlike Paul’s pure color, this watered-down version did not have the power to stain anything. That felt important somehow.
“Iris?”
Finally, I looked up and nodded.
I was fine. His chair screeched across the floor again, but this time he dragged it closer to me until his knee touched mine. He didn’t have to pull me towards him when he put his arm around my shoulder—I leaned against him all by myself. Like gravity.
“A sudden sadness is not unusual,” he said so quietly, his breath stirring the little hairs in my ear. “It’s like coming down from a high, like after you take drugs.”
“I’ve never... done drugs,” I whispered with a little smile and he broke into a warm chuckle. It was a beautiful, rich sound—not loud but it seemed to fill the room into the last crevasse between the wood planks on the floor.
“Of course you haven’t,” he replied. His smile was still crinkling his face. “You’re a good girl, a very good girl.”
And apparently, an easy one. I exhaled a shallow breath at that simple pronouncement, angled my face up to look at him and my eyes couldn’t have left much to the imagination. I moistened my lips and left my mouth open just a fraction of an inch. We were so close, I could feel his warm breath on my face, but every minute that passed without him kissing me seemed to deflate me, my chest, and my stomach. I gulped and reached for his glass, but he stopped me with a warm hand on my wrist. His head moved from side to side once and that was all it took.
His eyes didn’t leave mine as he dipped his finger into the wine. Then he brought it to my face, gently brushed the liquid over my lips. I whimpered with the sensation that fell like a drop on a dry patch of earth, greedily soaking up every hint of what he gave me.
It was only after the first impression that a little of the taste leaked onto my tongue. This was not the diluted, softened version. It stung, harsh in taste and smell. With every second that it remained on my lips, I could feel the alcohol burning into my skin and finally, I sucked my lips into my mouth and licked it off. I felt heady and light as I watched him take a sip of his own. His hand cupped my cheek, held me there, suspended by his grasp—and finally his face came closer and closer, blocking out the light from the softly whirring bulb over our heads.
Even before his lips touched mine, our noses met and something inside of me melted, broke from its egg a fresh and tender hatchling.
He tasted like wine but on his lips the burning sensation seemed at home, a perfect complement, a natural pair: snow on a Douglas fir, edge on a razor. I almost choked when his lips opened to mine and he let wine trickle into my mouth. My eyes flew open but he held me steady.
Drink.
Drink.
Our wine-soaked tongues moved against each other as I gulped the liquid down, down where it burned my body and set it on fire again. When we broke apart, he took another sip and this time, I knew what to expect—how his kisses came flavored in burning liquid and dizzying heights, pushed further with each sip we shared.
I hardly noticed when he reached into his pocket and pulled out an object—metallic and familiar in the corner of my eyes. Click. Silence. And suddenly I heard someone gasp and moan, a high-pitched fragile sound, birdlike, yet earthbound. They were my moans, crackling ever so slightly on the old tape recorder. While I listened, Paul filled up his glass again and I didn’t know if my head was pulsing and red-hot from the wine or from listening to the sounds of my own pleasure. Eventually, I grew louder; the sharp cracks of his large palm meeting my flesh made me jump even now, in their ghostly recorded image as wine ran down my chin and stained his white shirt red.
A certain hazy slant captured my mind. Images and sensations flooded past in rapid succession. One moment, I was in that chair, the next his fingers had slipped under my arse and he was lifting me bodily onto the table in front of him, opening my legs like the covers of a book ready to be devoured. We didn’t speak this time but he laid me back across the table. Breadcrumbs tickled my shoulder blades until, for the life of me, I couldn’t feel them anymore, washed away by his tongue lapping at my shores.
I was moaning in unison with my recorded self: she was getting louder and more desperate with each slap but I was soon rivaling her in abandon. His fingers slipped inside of me again, smoothed by my slick juices but still they were so clearly a man’s hands. A man of olden times before men exfoliated. They were hands from an age where men worked with their hands, strong, calloused and driven. They moved in and out of me, two strokes for each recorded slap, as though they were full-note bass beats and Paul was creating a half-note rhythm fluttering over them in and out of my moaning melody.
Something toppled off onto the floor but I hardly noticed. I was grappling at the wooden surface, at my breasts, at the open air—anything that I might hold on to as my body started to billow like a sheet in the wind.
“Please!” I spluttered, whimpered, pleaded for nothing in particular except for him not to stop. His tongue moved around my clit, around and around until all the wine and all the pleasure made it almost impossible to accurately distinguish the source of the sensations and my entire body felt wrapped up in the moment.
“Paul... please... oh please!” I only noticed then, that I was echoing myself. This past self on the tape was begging for more pain and I, greedy present I, was pleading for pleasure but we sounded just the same. Except, when I came, I howled louder than she did.
I’d never been what anyone could call loud in bed before. And maybe it was the kitchen table or the encouraging companionship with my moaning self, but I was then. He didn’t stop as my cunt contracted around his fingers, and the sensations mounted again and again until every muscle in my body was hard and tense like receiving an electric shock and a keening wail announced my second? Third? I don’t know which.
When Paul finally pulled his fingers out of me, I lay across that table, limp and panting hard. He kissed my labia, then the inside of my thigh. Then he pulled me into a sitting position and gathered me up in his arms. For once, I didn’t worry whether I was too heavy.
XI
“Did you share in this one?” I asked, voice low and raspy once he’d laid me down on his bed, remembering what he’d said about becoming so entwined that he felt what I felt, pain, pleasure, orgasms. The bed was made of driftwood again, and starchy white cotton sheets that smelled of laundry detergent. I did wonder whether he always slept like this or had made the bed that morning, considering the possibility he might end up here with the visiting journalist.
He smiled in response, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking down at me. His fingers brushed over my breast and my nipples stood to immediate attention, as though they too wanted to prove their obedience to him.
“I did.” There was hesitation in his tone, if just to find the right words. In the end he didn’t say anything—words unfit to quite encompass what it had felt like. I could empathize. I wouldn’t have been able to say what exactly had happened inside of me when he spilled his seed onto my tongue.
The lighting was low. It was soothing to my eyes, light-sensitive after my orgasm. Night had fallen outside and he had only lit a candle on the nightstand. I don’t know how long we rested there, me lying down, not moving a muscle and he sitting beside me.
I found myself wondering how his tongue might taste now. Had my juices washed the wine away or was it still there, a base note to the new and salty flavor? But he did not kiss me again. He got to his feet after a while and opened his pants. Exhaustion couldn’t slow the rush of excitement that burned through me at the sight. He pulled them down and stepped out of them easily. He had to know that I was watching him, but he didn’t show any sign of discomfort. He just gave me a smile, another one of those thoughtfully nice ones that I was now coming to think of as detached. I knew the difference now, still gentle, still caring but there was an absence, unmistakable and dark.
“I still want to fuck you, puppy.”