Dropping the Ball

I’m now at the house with my wife after several days of driving and various tourist-style misadventures up the East Coast.

I could talk about ball-slapping, which she decided she enjoyed; or the full-fledged interrogation scene we roleplayed out, with me as the spy working for an agency trying to shut down my wife’s criminal empire. We could talk about all sorts of things that happened, including the power of simply being blindfolded, which we’ve found marvelously powerful.

But what I really want to talk about is the other night, before the interrogation scene, when we were just fooling around. I was laying on my chest on the bed, and my wife was lying next to me, her leg over mine. She was almost reclining on her side, and my head was turned away from her. She would lazily reach over and scratch me, or pull my hair, or dig her fingernails into my buttocks and pull and pinch until I was screaming a bit. She whacked me on the balls. And she’d spank me, hard swats to each cheek, alternating with carresses, so I never knew what to expect.

It sounds like foreplay. It sounds like a game we’ve played any number of times. But for some reason — and I can’t explain it — something was off. Really off. And every time she touched me, I jumped. Not in the normal, hot, “Ohmigod, what will happen next?” way, but in a pure kind of panicky fear. I started throwing my arms back to catch her hand as she moved it, trying to redirect her, trying to keep her from hitting me. I started getting really fearful, felt my chest tighten, and it wasn’t working at all.

I probably could have told her, but our daughter was off in another hotel room with her grandparents, and this was stolen time. I didn’t want to ruin it. But it just got worse, and my fear started rising, and I’d jump and get nervous every time she moved. The pain — for the first time since we’d started playing with it in seven or so months — was hurting in a way that wasn’t arousing. I wasn’t hard. I was nervous and in the buildup to what felt like a full-fledged anxiety attack.

But I didn’t want to ruin it. I didn’t want to be the one to mess it up. And I don’t know if — at the time — I could articulate why this particular light play was causing me to be anxious and fearful rather than hot and bothered.

I hoped — really, really hoped — that I could work through it. And eventually, I did. We moved on from the informal “just fooling around phase” and she took a leather cord, noosed me with it, bound my balls and cock with the other end, and started choking me and hurting my genitals simultaneously. And oddly enough, as I felt my breath get harder to draw and my cock and balls ache and throb, the anxiety went away and — this is hard to explain — she became more prominent. My fear receded as her control became more pronounced.

She leaned into my ear and said, “I hear you’ve been keeping secrets…” and the interrogation began. I was still jumpy, still nervous, but by the time she threw me against the wall and began beating me — very, very hard — with the flogger, the nervousness was completely gone. By the end of the scene, it was forgotten.

But still, it’s the first time it’s happened, and it’s like freezing up during a speech or under fire — it doesn’t matter that it was a one time thing, you start wondering if it will happen again. Something that was easy — automatic — dare I say it, autonomous, is suddenly revealed as something that can go wrong.

The closest I can describe it as is the time I sprained my leg. I had a very bad fall on an icy surface and tore tendons all up and down my leg between my ankle and knee. And after that, I found myself very aware of where — and how — I stepped. Walking had been something automatic, reflexive, that required no extra thought — just like getting off on pain. But all that changed. And now I find myself wondering if my next step when it comes to BDSM will experience the same problems…