13. Fruit, Wine, and Tantalization

     Yeah, so that thing about maybe never bothering to alert you to my presence? Scratch that. (Hi reddit.) Right when I thought I was getting used to the idea of all this being out there in the world… Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s fine. It actually happened before the Best Compliment Ever, but it brought on a new bout of anxiety and I didn’t want to write about it. But probably it doesn’t matter. Why wouldn’t it be totally fine? I keep thinking about the difference between all those fancy sex blogs and this. It was easier not to care when it was just me and few people I knew, reading over my shoulder. Now I actually do have You to worry about. Does this random rambling bother you? Should I have to wonder? Is it rude not to give a fuck, now that I know you’re there? What about the format? My husband thought I should probably post the back story as static pages instead of individual posts, to encourage people not to read it backwards, but I didn’t want the subsequent posts – the rambling parts -  to start feeling like Facebook comments instead of parts of each episode. Because even when they are unrelated, they are describing a period of time, be it a three month phase or a night at a hotel. Pobble Thoughts is completely random and still manages to be awesome. Pobble is actually an old friend of mine. She’s the High Priestess of truth, inspiration, righteous indignation, and, well, anything shiny that happens to catch her eye. But she’s also a published author with a standing writing gig, an established fan base, and a blog network that’s close to a decade in the making. I can’t even think about comparing my shit to that without getting queasy. Though maybe I can borrow some of her iron clad orneriness: This is how I’m doing it because this is how I want it. You are welcome to come in and poke around. If you don’t like the way it’s done, I trust you can find your own way out. If you like it, pull up a cushy chair and make yourself comfortable. If there’s none left in the fridge, here’s my recipe for ghetto sangria – stir some up and I’ll try to have something written about sex for you to read, by the time you get back. (And pour me a glass, would you?)

L&BJ’s Ghetto Sangria

This is the big recipe. It’s easy enough to halve it, but the longer it sits around, the more the fruit and liquor soak together, the better it is, so it’s beneficial to make more than you can drink in one sitting, anyway.
And you won’t be left with half an orange.

1.  Take off your shirt; you’re going to get sticky.

2.  Music. You need music. (There are some good suggestions on here, if you scroll.)

3.  Pour half a cup of sugar into the bottom of a large pitcher.

4. Add two shots of Cointreau – don’t measure too hard, let them overflow, you’re going to get sticky anyway, remember?

5. Add one of those pre-cut, grocery store pint containers of fruit. I always use the one that’s a combination of pineapple, blueberries, strawberries and blackberries. (You may have to cut the strawberries smaller – they usually leave those fairly whole for the people who like to take them into the bedroom. I don’t like food with my sex, personally, but I’m not about to judge those of you who do.)

6. Slice an unpeeled orange as thinly as you can (do it on a plate, so you can save the juice), and tumble it all into the mix. Go ahead, try to do that without getting any on your skin. 

7. Dump in one large (like the 1.5 liter size) or two regular sized bottles of shitty, sweet wine. I recommend a late harvest riesling (Hogue is good & cheap) or moscato (Barefoot is good and cheap).

8. Stir and stab violently with a wooden spoon, to crush the fruit a bit.

9. Pour in a few glugs of something bubbly. I use lime flavored sparkling water, but 7-Up or any light to clear carbonated beverage will do.

10. Stir more reasonably.

11. Have someone lick the sticky off your boobs and fingers.

12. Garnish with sex or internet erotica.

Glass full? Feet up? Comfy? Okay, let me tell you a story from last week.

He’d been away on business for days. I am pathetic, when he’s away. I am a kite with no string. All things normal and routine become unfamiliar and strange. I become a bundle of hesitation and vague, featureless fear. So when I woke to find him there where he was supposed to be, warm and delicious and sprawled across the pillows like someone had thrown him there, ah, all was right with the world again. I curled up against him with my head in that little dip between his shoulder and his chest, and he put his arms around me and pulled me against him. I can’t usually get away with this. Usually his brain is already at work. Usually this kind of lying together requires post coitus level relaxation that doesn’t exist in the morning, but he let me. This is my favorite way to sleep – no nagging or ugly thoughts can get past him, to my mind. It’s the half sleep in which the lines blur between reality and dream, whale sleep. Whales sleep with only one lobe of their brains at a time; part has to stay awake so they’ll remember to breathe. I can sleep like that forever. But this was morning, so it couldn’t last. Eventually we got up and began to slowly move toward the obligations of the day. I was working on letting go of all the goodness that made me want to pull him back into the bed (surely it was still warm), and then he came up and groped me from behind while I was brushing my teeth. I looked up in the mirror, expecting to meet his eyes and share a wicked little moment, but I found instead that he was looking at my ass. I have these soft, tiny little pajama shorts that he is helpless to resist. In a second, his hands were inside them, grabbing me, fingers in my pussy, manhandling and starting that slow shudder traveling from his hands, up through my flesh to my breasts and my neck, and me, holding onto the counter to steady myself, eyes closed… And then he just walked away. Jesusmarymotherofgod I love it when he fucks with my head.

I was on my way back from the kitchen a little while later, having been discussing the kid’s plans for the evening – halle-fucking-lujah, he’s staying out late, at a friend’s house (apparently we’re doing Christian based cursing on L&BJ today). I was still feeling the soft and smooshy and warm of a comfortable waking, and the relief of finding him back in our bed and his hands back on my body. My hair was disheveled, my eyes half-lidded, and then there he was, just standing there, bag on his shoulder, ready to go, and not moving. Looking at me. I went to him, summoned without communication of any sort, and he pulled me to him, kissed me like he meant it, his face in my hair, his hand in the crack of my ass, fingers pressing into my quim, and he whispered in my ear “Cum twice before noon, and then not again.” As he walked to the door he added without looking back, “Until tonight.”

This is how awesome my life is, now.

I told you I was inviting you to live vicariously through my unemployment, didn’t I? This time I’m going to let you share the anticipation of that moment, because of course there’s more to the story. There’s the afternoon I spent alone, and the night that followed it. But I’m also trying to break the self-imposed routine of the Monday morning blog post. Every time I try to force myself into a writing regimen, the very next thing I do is fuck it up. So now that I’m not just posting epochs that have been previously written (you’re still not quite caught up to reality, because I’m writing this from what’s a couple of pages back in my journal), I’m going to stop pretending I have any sort of real routine, at all. I’ve already started, if you haven’t noticed, but only because I’ve been fucking up the Monday post by not getting to it until Tuesday. Now I’m going to embrace the randomness that I’ve been worrying about. I’ll come back tomorrow or the next day and tell you about the afternoon of self-pleasuring, and then maybe I’ll make you wait another day for the graphics of nightfall, as I had to wait for them, when it happened. Maybe you’ll stick around to find out how it went. Maybe you’ll get bored and go away. I’m trying not to worry about you. I hope that you’ll at least get housed on fruit and wine and think dirty thoughts, wherever you end up.

( It's a good kind of sticky.)

12. Saturday Saturnalia and the Best Compliment Ever

       We’d had this day in the backs of our minds all week. The kid was heading to the renaissance faire with his friends. Historically, they geek out, dress up, spend all day there, and come home sunburned. I’m jealous here, not judging – now that he’s old enough to do it with his friends, there’s nobody left to do it with me! The upside though, is the empty Saturday. I love afternoon sex. Three o’clock in the afternoon is my favorite time of day to get laid. The light is right, and it comes from the sun, so there’s no turning it off. The heat of the day is in the room with you, contained in just the slightest sheen of damp on your skin. If you open the window, there’s the breeze against it too, and the sounds of innocent, afternoon life outside your world. Most of all, 3pm is a time when you should almost certainly be doing something else. It’s decadent. I was tight in the grip of anticipation.

The kid left later than planned, but whatever, the day would still be long enough for the slow, heady rise to late afternoon, and finally he was out of the house. We got comfortable, we sampled new porn, we talked sex, we groped and fondled, tested, tasted and played… We spent fourish hours on casual foreplay. No penetr – no wait, that’s not true – no intercourse, I guess is accurate. Then as the heavy tension built toward a true, inhibition-free bacchanal, we got a text saying the boy was already on his way home. Pardon? By which I mean WHAT?!

Okay so we had two options: Start the serious action for real and make it quick (not likely – cheap-out after four hours of build up? I don’t think so.) We could wait, and wait, and wait some more, and hope the mood sustained until after dinner (which meant we’d suddenly have to plan and execute an actual dinner). Our two possible plans were equally unappealing. And then my genius husband came up with Plan the Third: “Here’s $20 for a pizza; we’re going out, and we’re going to be late.”

Because sometimes you just have to go to a hotel that’s two miles away from your house, and pay for a night you know you’ll only stay for half of. Sometimes you have to pack a hotel bag arsenal of kinky lingerie, sex toys, embellishments and accoutrement that you know you’ll maybe use a quarter of. Sometimes you have to demand a hotel room with a balcony, so that you can do things on it that leave a wet spot and will get you kicked out, if your neighbors on either side happen to look out their windows. Sometimes you have to go to a hotel and test the height of the wet bar against the height of your husband’s pelvis. Sometimes you have to go to a hotel and have marathon blow job sessions on your knees, in front of a couch you don’t want to see under a black light. (Sometimes you need to hear someone you want to spend your whole life fucking say something as awesome to you as “That is Jedi-level cock sucking.”) Sometimes you have to overindulge. Sometimes you have to shed your everyday life and dip your naked core in saturnalia. Sometimes you have to go to a hotel and realize three hours in that you haven’t fucked on the bed yet… And then correct that oversight with impressive, eyebrow-raising flourish.

Sometimes you have to be the reason that germaphobes have anxiety attacks in hotel rooms.

(Not sure this one goes with the spirit of the post musically, but I just couldn't pull the trigger on  Hotel California...)

11. A uterus and an asshole walk into a blog…

        Okay, so it’s a blog. Crazy. (But points for unprecedented follow-through!) I’ve been having fun reading other people’s, but I’m not sure they really informed my decision about what to do with mine the way I thought they would. Dick n Jane are a ton of fun. It’s like peeking through an intentionally unmonitored keyhole or eavesdropping on a really dirty conversation with a wineglass held to the outside of a bedroom door. They are a lot more complex and organized than I will ever be, though. Dangerous Lilly is hilarious, informative, sexy, creative, smart and all kinds of fucked up. (Jesus, is she the perfect chick?) She makes me want to date her – take her out for decadent desserts and drinking and beg her to take me home with her and show me things… but her blog is more purposeful than I aspire to be. What use really, is somebody else’s journal? Anal Amy is more like a personal story teller – an x-rated Scheherazade lying naked next to you in the dark, whispering her exploits into your ear until you can’t wait to hear the next. Still, her tales are pretty single-minded erotica. I guess there are a lot of blogs out there full of random ramblings, and I guess that’s what I’m doing here, I just can’t exactly pinpoint whatever this is that I’m up to. This thing started as a way to sort into epochs these various stages of unemployment I had been living, but right from the very first paragraph I was writing in the second person. “You ask yourself this question, don’t you?” Who was “You,” before I put this thing online? I don’t know. It’s probably really bad practice, blog-wise, but for the moment I’ve decided not to care. I’ve decided to just go ahead with exploring what it’s like to release all these thoughts onto the electric wind of the internet, and let that be enough, for now. It’s out there. Nobody has seen it, but it’s there. Like some chick coming to orgasm in that little mini cooper you parked next to, but didn’t think to look inside. Whoever You are, I have not yet alerted you to my presence (I suppose it’s possible I never will), but if you get that feeling like you’re not alone, it might be me, telling you mildly interesting things there’s no practical reason you should know.

That being said…

It’s not usually just ass fucking. Before it got so happily out of control, when ass fucking wasn’t even all that frequent, there was an unspoken rule that it couldn’t be first. You had to put something in my pussy before you could put anything in my ass. Actually, it might even have been a spoken rule, eventually. Talking about sex is part of the foreplay in this marriage, so communication is never an issue – even when it is an issue, because one of us has something to say that’s hard to say out loud. (Is it obvious that that would be a moment I always adore? To make myself say a thing to him that I can barely put into words in the privacy of my own mind? Fuck, I love that shit.) But when the ass fucking started to really go off the rails (in the good way), that rule was one of the first ones to go out the window. Soon enough it was sometimes the very first thing of all. Often even without lube. Is it silly that I’m kind of proud of being able to do that? Part of wearing the collar is about being prepared for anything, at all times. I like living up to that. But still, it’s very rare that ass fucking is the only fucking. The first time it was, happened when the anal sex snowball had only just begun to roll. We had been in a state of mental and verbal foreplay all day long, building to a night without the kid in the house and therefore no need for caution or concern. Then the moon and tides came early, and intervened.

Now, I am in no way grossed out by my period. That kind of blood doesn’t freak me out (the other sort kind of does). However, as horny as it makes me, it does not turn me on. Does that make any sense? The hormones and what have you get me all spun up, but the period itself is not at all sexy. It might be weird to call it spiritual, but I can’t be the only one who thinks of it that way. It’s the physical evidence of a femininity that possesses me – I do not control it, I am it, it is me. That’s not about sex. It’s filed in a different folder of my brain. So period sex has historically been about external, vulvular fun stuff, blow jobs, and a tampon. Only that wasn’t going to be enough, on this particular night. So I cleaned up particularly well (by which I mean I prepared my ass to take a cock with no chance of unpleasant repercussions), completed the deep tampon ritual (I cannot understand how some women can own a vagina and not be able to reach around inside it – who can “lose” things like condoms in there as though it’s a fucking underground cave system, who don’t know what their cervix feels like, or can’t use a tampon without an applicator or a dangling string – seriously, it’s not the fucking mystery your pancreas might be, if you saw it for yourself! Are you afraid to look in the back of your throat, too? “Uvula?! Ewww!”), and I told my husband the night was still on. 

Oh, that night went incomparably well. I don’t know if it was in spite of it being ass-only fucking or because of it. Knowing myself, I expect it was the latter. It was one of those sexual engulfings where the inside of your mind splits open like an egg with a whole other universe inside it. Another life that you recognize as your own, but without the cold, darkness and confinement of the everyday. Where you exist in light and wind and know yourself to be the topmost point on the surface of your very own planet. There was no pain, no concern, no anxiety, only wave after wave of that True Love-True Fuck (still looking for a better word than Valentine), where orgasm seeps from every pore of your being and carries you out to sea.

Hard to top that.

So the other night when the moon and tides were hanging around longer than usual, as opposed to arriving early, I was conflicted. Dear gods did I want to try for that pinnacle again, but of course if you want to be disappointed, just go ahead and try to recreate something that fabulous. I couldn’t stop thinking about that other time, and I was definitely feeling the pressure of trying to live up to it. It was a creeping fear of knowing it was going to be nothing but my ass… Well okay and my mouth, because you know I can’t pass up the opportunity for an extended blow job. And that’s when, unbelievably, this ridiculous blog actually reached out and leisurely plucked me out of the tangled whirrings of the front of my brain, and pulled me to the very back, where I belonged. I’d been sucking that magnificent cock for over an hour, plying all my wiles, and in doing so, while lost in that solitary place my brain becomes, I began to consider it as I had written it here. And from considering all the angles and nuances of the sucking of cock as I had explained them and was, at that moment experiencing them, my mind began to travel to the other explanations I had written. And I found myself mentally rereading all the things I’ve more recently written about fear, and recognizing their immediate applicability. The near ninety minute blow job hadn’t eased my creeping fear, and because of the examination intrinsic to the writing of it, because of the journal-turned-blog, I knew how grateful I was that it hadn’t. I  lifted my ass onto his cock acutely conscious of the fear breaking in my chest, watching it, clinging to it, I slid him into me, pushed back until there was no further to go, and I drove. It was a joyride. Orgasm on top of orgasm took over the motion for me, claimed the fucking. I don’t know how long they went on, I only know that I was verbally pleading for this to never, never stop, until they became one, long drenching thing and with the most beautiful timing, my husband came like a dam breaking in my ass.

The after-glow has lasted for two days now. I don’t know who You are, shadowy, maybe imaginary blog-follower, but thank you. 

(What other song could I put with this, really?)

10. Something about ropes

      It’s not too often that the ropes come out. When they do, the evening’s adventures tend to revolve entirely around them, and there’s so much else we like to do! So for the most part, ropes are a special occasion. There are a lot of other methods of bondage in our arsenal that are less all-consuming while still providing the restraint that I often crave. I am good with this, because the ropes are so special to me that I like ceremony of it. The infrequency that’s almost denial but not quite, keeps my longing for them alive, so that when he brings them out, like he did last night, the experience is more like sex worship than anything else.

The very first time he ever pulled them tight, equalizing, duplicating the pressure and confinement of my right side with my left, something shifted at the core of me. Something that had been there always, something that I’d been holding but never looking at, never examining, suddenly demanded my attention… Forced me to notice it, in that moment of complete symmetry, to see what it really was and always had been. The involuntary gasp that escaped me at that moment, I will never forget. It reached from the beginning of me to my very end.

Historically, I had always loved restraint. We had any number of leather straps and buckles and bindings, and my husband had learned early on that I had to be truly bound, it had to be real, because if I could get out, I would. Still it wasn’t anything near fetishistic, and he periodically worried that all the true kinks in our sex life belonged to him. He worried that while I was always more than happy to try out any of his whims, and enjoyed them along with him, he was the only freak between us. So when I first got a load of kinbaku, my reaction was as exciting to him, as it was to me. He was compiling a slide show of erotic stills, that we could watch when we wanted something more artistic than overt pornography. He knew I’d like it given my proclivities, but whatever response I gave to that first image made him immediately go back and get many, many more. After that it was straight to the selection of beautiful ropes of varying colors and widths and materials, learning our preferences with research and trial and error and intricate shibari knots. Eventually our catalogue of erotic stills came to include photos of me, bound and writhing under labyrinthine patterns, in complex arrangements. It was years and years ago, but still I’m not sure there is any sight sexier to me than my husband, with his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, in total concentration on the complicated binding of my body, almost to the disregard of myself.

That’s what did it, I think. That’s what brought to light what should have been obvious. My fascination with restraint wasn’t about the restraint itself, it was about submission. It was, and is still, about the giving over of my will. It’s about surrendering, becoming an entity created at the whims of this man, to whom I am devoted utterly, from the presentation and actions of my body, to the inner responses and pathways of my psyche. Bondage is only one of the ways that I reach it now – pain, fear, task setting, exhibitionism and any number of other exercises are all further means to the same end – but those ropes were the first, and they will always be my favorite.  

Last night he chose the dark red ones. He knows me so completely that I can hide nothing from him, even that which I’m not consciously aware of myself, so of course his choice fit my mood precisely. (There are two different shades of pink, for the inclusion of certain elements of shame and debasement I’ve touched briefly on before, in reference to the awful/fabulous Barbie effect. There is a light blue for nights when the beauty of our delirious, complicated sex life manifests in appreciation of that beauty itself. The red is for the darker, lurking facets of fucking and being fucked. There are also black ropes and white ropes for the stark, naked mind-frames, when everything is stripped away but the fundamental truths of sex.) I think I went silent as soon as he reached for the soft bag that holds them all.

First he lay me on my back and spread my knees. He tied my ankles to the highest point of my thighs in thick, multiple wraps that cinched tight, between. Often he binds my breasts and ties my arms and hands behind me, so that I cannot touch myself. Last night he took my wrists to the same cinch at my thighs, instead. Tied my hands flat against the ropes, so that I couldn’t reach my pussy that was maybe two inches from any of my outstretched fingers. I could feel the ropes though, and after he played with my pussy, mercilessly pinching my clit but offering no release, he left me there, watching me squirm and grope at them, from a distance, smiling at me. It was ecstasy, and I lost myself in it for I don’t know how long, just reveling in the sensation and the feeling of the fibers biting into my flesh, leaving their marks on my skin. Finally he knelt over my face and put his cock in my mouth, amusing himself, alternating between forcing me to reach and try to catch the tip in my lips, stretching as best I could, helplessly, to suck more of him into myself, and thrusting it deep, pushing that head against the back of my throat, cutting off my breath.

Next, he untied me from the first position and rebound my thighs – in fewer wraps, so that I could feel the individual lengths of rope – passing the ropes up around my ass and then down between my legs. A harness. He ended with a fat knot right in my pussy, forcing it out to either side and preventing any actual access. He got the switch out then, and went to work hard on everything that was bound, flipping me ass up, face down and back again. He swung harder than he usually dares at those sensitive areas, because they were largely protected by the ropes, but it only made those strikes more biting, more concentrated on the in between places left bare, my exposed outer labia and that lovely indentation at the very top of the innermost thigh, that so loves to be punished. He had me writhing and riding the edge of orgasm for so long that when he finally knelt between my legs and lifted my hips onto his lap, pulled the ropes to the sides and pushed his cock into my ass, I was unable to muffle my cries; on the brink of soul shaking orgasm, I called him by name. I called my husband’s name from the throes of passion for so many years, that sometimes it just happens out of deep, ingrained habit. Sometimes, since fully embracing my submissive nature, I fail to call him Sir on purpose, because I am relentlessly and instantaneously punished for it, every single time. Sometimes he takes my by the throat when he’s doing so, and forces me to admit that. (The first time he did that, when he showed me how he knew it wasn’t an accident, ah, that’s another mentally core-rending, earth-shattering moment that will live with me, forever.)

I don’t know if I did it on purpose or not, last night. Honestly. I didn’t know at the time and I still don’t. I was so completely swept up in physical and emotional sensation that there was no rational, linear thought with which to examine it. It was all one, breaking wave of love and desire and fulfillment that I only know the tears, the sobbing release that came of it all. It’s the feeling I get to relive the next day, when I carefully straighten and  loop the freshly washed ropes into neat, knotted cords, and reverently tuck them away again, until next time.

 (And the song of the post is...)

9. Conversation Hearts & Crotchless Panties

(This is the one where you find out how far behind reality you are... You're catching up really fast though, I promise!)

So here we are: Put up or shut up time. It’s a landmark chapter here, you see; I’ve actually caught up to the present. I’ve been writing this for – actually I don’t know how many months, a few to several – and I’ve been unemployed for over a year, and the writing has caught up to the life. When I started Laundry and Blow Jobs I did it because I was still having trouble embracing this life sans career, and it has actually worked. It fixed me. I feel good now. I guess this is no big surprise, since writing has always been how I sort things out. Get them out of my head and onto the paper where I can look at them and make some sense of things. It’s not even like it took the place of my former job; I’ve been writing for months and this is what, the tenth epoch on the page? But even going about it so lazily, it got me here. Contentment. So I guess I owe it at least the decency to do what, when I started, I said I would do if I ever caught up to the present (even though I think I said it believing that it would never happen). I said I would turn it into a blog.

I know nothing about blogs. Seriously, nothing at all. The only one I ever became totally addicted to was that one written by the chick who worked in the adult video store, remember that one? It was a long time ago. So I guess I’d better start reading some blogs to try to figure out what this one is going to be like, and meanwhile focus on the date and the fact that I have not had a job for about fourteen months now. Maybe it’s justification for not quite going through with the blog part yet – I’m really pretty good at procrastination – but I think it’s fairly significant in itself, so I’m going to go with it anyway (see?).

February dawns. The month almost nobody pronounces correctly. Of course it won’t be February when this chapter goes online. (Look how I actually have started to think about the blog part!) I know enough about what I want to know that I’m not going to dump all of this on there at once. I’ll put up an epoch at a time, until I get used to the idea. Maybe it will be less terrifying that way. But here in the present, all the public spaces of the world have begun to appear done up in red satin and pink hearts. Mylar balloons abound and people seem to think teddy bears are better messengers of human emotion than the humans themselves. People get so caught up in it all, like there’s something actually important about the fourteenth. I have trouble with holidays; I’m conflicted. I always get jealous of those people who have their special holiday – you know how so many people have a favorite? The Christmas people light up their houses and put bells on the door, the Thanksgiving people get out their leaf-themed sweater-vests and begin baking like three weeks in advance, the Halloween people spend a month planning the most brilliant, detail-specific costume to try to top whatever genius they put together the year before… It’s like all the joy they experience during the rest of the year is minor league foreplay for the season that culminates in the apex of their happiness. I can’t get myself to feel like that, over a holiday. I’ve tried to get on board with some of the less popular ones, just to try it out, but the closest I came was throwing a gathering – cupcakes and cocktails, drinking and dessert – to celebrate Dr. Seuss’ birthday. It was fun, but it didn’t stick. I just can’t get that excited about a line of text on a calendar.

Valentine’s Day is, objectively, an interesting one. Most people who have an opinion seem to choose to actively hate it, but insist on acknowledging it anyway. It’s insidious, really. Supposedly designed to celebrate love, and in doing so, effectively ostracizing anybody who isn’t in it. It seems to make those people feel horrible about themselves (causing the hatred), but it does it by being the thing they suddenly feel like they should want, even if they were content to be single, before. How do you want to participate so badly in something that you hate? Maybe I’m wrong about the way they feel. Maybe I’m basing these thoughts on TV versions of life, because I don’t understand the need to feel one way or another about it. It’s a Hallmark holiday. Like Mother’s Day, it’s a universally accepted command to display an appreciation for someone when, if you have an appreciation for them, you don’t need a command to display it. If you need a specific day on which to buy me flowers, I don’t want them. Really. Bring me flowers on the second of June, when it means you were thinking about me because I’m always on your mind.

Still, Valentine’s Day has one thing going for it: It’s the only day when everybody puts love and sex in the same basket, like I do all year long. Most of the rest of the time people insist on separating the two. “A good relationship is about love; sex is not the important thing.” Or even “Sex is so much better when you are in love.” Even that one demands that the two are distinct from each other. “Unless of course, like me, your idea of romance begins on your knees with your face in a pillow.” That’s Toni Bentley, gods bless her; I am not alone. (And that's not the only awesome line in Surrender, if you're looking for an interesting read about ass fucking.) Some of us do not distinguish between the overwhelming emotion of wanting to absorb the very soul of another human being into our own, and the dizzying rapture of fucking that human until the two bodies are one thing, bound, locked, twisted into every orifice and pore of each other. Though there have been many, one of the most palpable moments of love and devotion that I have experienced, happened just last week. I had been full-body bound, the strap marks still evident on my flesh, my arms still tied behind my back, welts from the riding crop hot and itchy on the underside of my ass, the high inners of my thighs… I was between body-wracking orgasms first from the monster cock in my ass and then in my pussy, and my husband put his hand against my face, in among the tears I’d long since lost control of, held me there looking unblinking into each other’s eyes, and proceeded to bring me to relentless, merciless, pouring, bone-dissolving orgasm, all over his naked stomach and thighs. It was ecstasy. Was it true love? Yes. Hell yes, like in a fucking fairy tale. Was it great sex? Don’t be stupid. Was the one somehow increased by the other? You could argue that each was better because of the other, but I would not. I would argue that sometimes they are simply the same thing. You can have a love that isn’t sexual, and you can have sex without being in love, but you can also have a thing that is so composed of both, as to have become something else.

Maybe that’s how I’m going to start thinking about February 14th, when everything goes on sale at both the chocolate shop and the adult store – conversation hearts to crotchless panties, though I’m pretty sure the CVS doesn’t have a teddy bear ready to express it. It’s a day when love and sex are not only desegregated, not merely interchangeable or interwoven, but fused. We need a new word for it, I think. There are too many meanings to the word love. Maybe it’s Valentine.

(Communication is the key and everything, but I don’t actually have any interest in the candy.)