21. The Way of the Moment

     I could have said “I’ll be right back, I have to pee,” but I didn’t. I said “I have to pee,” and then I waited for permission. That was my choice. He could have responded with “Okay,” but he didn’t. Instead, he took me up on the opportunity I’d made available. That was his choice. This is one, small example of how it works with us. Little signals get passed between us, that determine the nature of every encounter. We pick and choose as we go. There is almost always at least a wash of the Dominant/submissive in our liaisons, but the spectrum is wide (though not nearly as wide as a lot of truly hard core scene builders’), and of course there are infinite points on every line. We have some rules – some constant and some specific to certain activities or phases we go through – none are reproductions of anything anybody else has designated as “right.” We do not follow other people’s rules; we make our own. On a given night, I might choose not to speak unless spoken to. There is no standing rule that tells me not to. If I have chosen thus, I will likely be punished if I speak out of turn. That’s not to say that I won’t be punished for speaking out if I haven’t sent that signal, at which point I would know that he had chosen to put such a rule in play. Sometimes I might be told exactly the words I am to say on command, during the rest of the evening. (I’ve recently also been made to guess what they are, first: mytightlittlepinkasshole.) The choices are both of ours to make as we please.
     One night last week I made a very poor showing and cried out shamelessly and unrestrainedly, while he took the riding crop to me. Though it is often implied, there’s no hard written rule that says I can’t. Unless he tells me that I can’t (or punishes me when I do). Then there’s a rule. He didn’t do either, last Saturday. Then, for one particular bout, my conscience gave me that you know better than this look, and I conceded (a little ashamed of myself), and tried to stay quiet. As I think I’ve mentioned, I do not consider myself a true masochist. It’s one of the assumptions people make about me, if they’ve recognized my collar for what it is. Some of them argue it with me, but I don’t define myself by the imprecise characterizations of others any more than I cede to their doctrines of kink. I do not enjoy pain. I enjoy what bearing it does to my head (and to my cunt). It’s a hard bargain for me, and I struggle with it. So I set my mind (not my jaw – always be mindful of the position of your teeth and tongue, so you don’t bite yourself when the blow lands), and I tried to actually bear it, tried to shut the fuck up. I was praised for my effort – a signal passing back and forth, a rule developing. Then he turned it on its head, in that low, casual tone that’s a perfect combination of amusement and threat: “I thought I was going to have to put you in a ball-gag.” Instantaneously, this opened up a whole other question in my head, another choice he’d have to respond to with choices of his own… Which way do I let it play out? See it? Now that the rule was in play, I could follow it, be good, receive praise, feel proud, or I could break it, be gagged, be punished. It took the thinnest of seconds for all the intricacies of that question to flood my brain in swirling possibilities. It took half that time for my husband to spot it in me (or maybe he knew it would happen before he’d opened his mouth, maybe he did it to me on purpose), and I was immediately made to understand that such a choice was not mine to make. He called me out on it (which never fails to get a physical response from me, it stops my breath and sends an electric shudder through my body), and he striped the shit out of my ass, my thighs, my back and shoulders, the bottoms of my feet, for it.
     The bright flashes of pain that deepen instead of fade in the moment after the crack of leather on flesh, they are like switches thrown one at a time, the mechanism that drops me stage by stage through the seemingly undeniable compulsion to escape, the refusal to do so, the anxiety of doubt in my desire to and then in my capacity to maintain, and finally to the secret underground chamber of absolute certainty. This is the dwelling place of an alternate consciousness that exists only to know without question that this is the very least of what I would do, what I could stand, what I would gratefully endure. It is the embodiment, the active experience of a love that could lay waste to nations.
     (What’s better after that, the orgasm or the denial of it? You tell me.)
     Sometimes he makes conditions. Sometimes he makes conditions and then makes it impossible for me to meet them. Sometimes he makes no conditions at all. Sometimes I make them. (Sometimes I make conditions that I hate, because I hate them. Does that make me a masochist? I still say not truly.) Remember Pavlov and his dogs? It turns out, with further research and experimentation, that training for a desired reaction with reinforcement (positive or negative? In this case those lines are obviously less than clear), is far more effective when the reinforcement is inconsistent. The bell rings and the dog food comes sometimes, but not always. The chicken receives its corn kernel at random, but only after the peck of the button. The monkey gets the biscuit at the whim of the lab tech. The conditions we set are never impervious to variation, and they are never set because they are the way others do it, or expect it to be done. Assumptions about the way we navigate these corners of intimacy are misplaced. There is no right way. Not for us. There is only the way of the moment.
     Do you want to hear the rest of that first example? It’s the part that I skipped, way back in The Night That Followed. I don’t mind telling it, but I get the impression that many people are put off by discussions of things like pee. I get that. I totally get that. Tell you what, if that’s you, skip the rest of this paragraph and I won’t mention it again, after. Where shall I pick it up? Let’s see, I’d stated simply that I had to go, and was standing there waiting to see what he would do with the information. He didn’t deny me completely, though I know he’s sometimes tempted to do so, to tie me up and just wait until it’s simply no longer in my control (or maybe not just wait). He put his hand out, palm up on the bed, and told me to sit, hairpin style. I sat. My task was to let go just barely, enough only for him to feel the first traces moisture on his palm, and then stop. If I could do that, then I was free to get up and go relieve myself of the rest. Easy. I should have known better than to think so. He gave me about two seconds to settle into misguided confidence, and then he slipped two fingers into my quim. I don’t know about other women, but for me peeing and coming are mutually exclusive. I can be mentally aroused and pee, but the physical conditions work like a toggle switch: It’s one or the other, it cannot be both. The resulting episode on that Night That Followed, was a war in which he’d let me get just to the threshold of completing the task he’d set for me, and then he’d hit my g-spot until I was just to the threshold of orgasm, preventing me from meeting his conditions, and then abruptly aborting the rising orgasm he’d done it with and making me start over. He set me up for failure on both sides of the toggle switch, and he did it over and over again until I dissolved in tears. (Then he laughed and kissed me and let me have both.)
     I have no idea if this is the sort of game people in other relationships with a similar dynamic play. I don’t really care. I don’t mean that in a judgmental or self-righteous kind of way. I’m a subjectivist. No two people anywhere, are the same. People are who they are, they like what they like, and no values system of any kind is universal. Other people with differing tastes are not failed attempts at being me (or you). I’m sure I’m not the only sub who falls face down, ass up at just a certain look, an eyebrow, a slight cock to the head. The plug in my ass during or after some torture, be it negligible or serious, is probably common as teaspoons. It can’t be only a few of us who know the maneuvering power of the very lightest touch of the switch, lifting the pelvis with the barest of suggestions before the real stroke, turning us this way or that with hardly a flick. The positions into which I am placed, bound or (more trying still), unbound and expected to maintain, arms behind the back, bent at the waist, arms raised, fingers laced at the back of the neck, tipped over backwards, thighs spread open, thrown onto the front, soles of the feet raised… No matter the combination, I cannot imagine we’ve stumbled onto anything groundbreaking and new. My point is that it doesn’t matter. I have no more need for our practice to be unique than I have for it to be prescribed or customarily sanctioned. I have no need to be any way but that which is required of me at the moment, by one man.
     It was a joyful cock sucking we ended on, after the physical and emotional rending, last Saturday. It was the amusement park of blow jobs. I would have put any amount of money on getting religiously ass fucked before the night was out, but it just didn’t go that way. The way of the moment is unpredictable. I think he could see how happy I was, with my ass in the air, still plugged with pink glass, and his cock the object of my considerable affection. I think my joy was obvious and arousing to him. I wasn’t even sticking to my usual tricks, I was playing at invention, making up things I had no name for. I think he must have enjoyed how much fun I was having, because he let me finish him off, like that. I’d say “What he didn’t know was…” but I know better. (Just because I didn’t tell him, didn’t say it, doesn’t mean he didn’t read it in me.) That joy – the letting go and the freedom of that particular Coney Island picnic of a blow job, came directly from that moment under the riding crop. That moment when the elevator, the trap door, the false floor deposited me into solace. The drop through frenzy to stillness, when the scattering cards of my mind – like Alice in the court of the red queen – suddenly shuffled themselves into neat and perfect order, a magician’s trick, and the measly, squeezing tears of pain turned to the unbound spilling tears of Love, Love, Love.

(So potentially complicated that it's absolutely simple.)

[Yes, I changed it. Assume nothing - that's the whole point!]