And in the bright light of the morning…

…I don’t want to be punched in the face quite so much.

It’s truly weird how that need hits you in the empty prison cells of the late evening. You, alone with your thoughts and your obsessions and your physical need, and you keep spiraling around that need until it starts feeding off of your horniness, and before you know it the need for a little discipline and pain and domination becomes this leviathan, this titanic thing swallowing you up, and all you can think about is letting your mistress beat the living shit out of you until you’re bruised and bloody.

It used to get bad when we lived apart. I used to get crazy needy. But it hasn’t happened so much lately, partly because things are so uncertain — living apart, we knew when our next rendezvous would be. Now? It’s stolen moments. Borrowed time. Furtive bits of pain and domination snuck into boring average vanilla lives.

She’s so good with me. When I let her know I’m feeling like this, she usually tries to satiate me somehow — even if it’s just to get the kink equivalent of licking a little icing off of the beaters, if you know what I mean. But even that little bit reassures me — it comforts me — that I’m owned.

That I’m property.

I need some kind of daycollar or permanent tattoo, I tell you. If I could touch her mark, or the symbol of her ownership, this would all be easier. Or would it turn me on more? Would that constant reminder keep me in a semi-constant state of arousal? Does anybody out there have daycollars or permanent marks from their masters/mistresses? I know This Girl just wrote about a marvelous permanent collar, but unfortunately, I think it would look odd on one of my suits…

Any suggestions, folks?

I am so in her thrall right now…

I want her so badly right now. Please, allow me to vent a bit.

I’m alone and I’m so horny. I’m aware of everything — the feel of clothes on my body, the temperature, every inch of my skin.

I want to be punched in the goddamn face. There’s no other way to put it. I want to be tied to a chair and beaten with rope and punched in the face at least once and I want clamps on my nipples, clamps connected by chains, and I want her to pull on those chains until tears run out of my eyes.

That is how badly I want her.

I reread some of my older entries last night, and I remember asking myself: where are our limits? Because the limits we set in the beginning, about ballgags and physical abuse, they were illusory. And we cruised past those limits like they weren’t even there. And then we set new limits — no knives, no fists, no pony-ish play. And we cruised past those limits.

Now she cuts me up whenever she wants. She burns me. She reins me in like a horse while she pegs me. The closest thing we had to a hard limit the last four months or so was choking, and we breezed past that finally a couple of months ago. She puts those hands on either side of my throat and just….squeezes.

And I want more. There is a part of me that wants to be…just really fucked up by her. I want to be a pulpy mess when she’s done. And the worst part isn’t that this part of me exists, the worst part is that I will, no lie, get off on the trip to Bloody-Mess-ville. Thinking about it makes me drippy wet and iron-hard. There is a part of me that looks back on those scenes where she beat the hell out of me, because she was angry or because she was really feeling her power, and I just…wonder why we can’t have that all of the time.

It’s our wedding anniversary in three weeks, and not-coincidentally the first anniversary of our first successful scene around the same time. And we’ll be out of town at some really religious friend of my wife’s wedding. And we’ll have no daughter with us, and a hotel room to ourselves, just like the good old days in Miami. And I want it all — I want to be fucking wrecked when we’re finished. I want to be beat and cut and burned and disrespected and bound until she’s bored.

I want her to make me cry. I’m not a guy who cries a lot because of pain. I’ve gotten injured so many times over the years, and dislocations and the destruction of cartilage and broken bones have not made me cry. But I want her to take me there. I want tears. I want to fucking sob because of how badly she’s hurt me. I want to cease to exist except as a focus of her energy and anger and violence.

And to be dominated while it happens — to have her make me beg for each blow, the way she does. To have her make me thank her. To have me worship her while she becomes some beautiful avatar of some weird Eastern goddess of pain. Kali, the Soccer Mom. No boots, no corsetry, just her, naked, and those eyes — that stare — that grin. Those good girl looks doing such bad things, that church-girl mouth whispering those sweet, sweet curses.

There’s even a part of me that wants to sport a black eye at the wedding. I can tell everyone I fell. And I will thank her for the bruise.

I am so sick. I have no idea why I’m like this. But I really cannot sleep because of how horny these thoughts make me. I suspect it has a lot to do with how (relatively) active we’ve been the last week or so, it’s awakened that part of me that’s starving for real, long-scene, private, achey-pain and submission.

Sometimes I wonder if I really am just screwed up in the head. But there are other times where I just don’t care…

Ugh. What is wrong with me?

The Addiction

There are times when I look at my wife, or we’re flirting and building up to a spontaneous scene, or when we’re in the middle of a scene and she’s taking me some place new, and I get swept away by this feeling that, in the heat of it all, I will let her take me any place.

Any place she can imagine, I’ll go.

I have no interest in sissymaid play. (I don’t have a problem with it, mind — but I think you have to be wired a certain way to get it, just like you have to be wired a certain way to dig knifeplay.) But I was reading a fellow’s blog, and he’s into it, and I thought to myself, “If she wanted to make me dress up like a woman, I’d do it.”

Why? I have no interest in it, right? It doesn’t do anything for me. Dressing femme — even very femme — isn’t real taboo for me. I’m not transvestic at all, but I’ve done drag so many times, publicly even, on dares or bets or just because I was bored that there’s nothing to it for me. (I also have beautiful eyelashes and eyes. Every time I dragged, women would want to punch me for having such pretty eyes, and now I realize all of the opportunities I missed to get hit.) And when I fantasize about sex with my wife, even when she takes the “male” role, I’m a guy, being overpowered by a woman, not a guy dressed as a woman, not a woman, etc.

But it has nothing to do with me. It has to do with her. Her, with big capital letters. When she gets that look in her eyes, when she holds out her hand to me to kiss, when she stretches out that foot for me to lick it — I’m hers. I’m Hers. And it doesn’t matter what I want anymore.

There are times where I really want her to surprise me — to take me someplace I’ve never imagined. I remember one night, I was tied up and she was jerking me off forcefully, just tearing at my dick. And with her other hand, she just SMACKED my balls. Open hand, caught the whole sack. It hurt like…like hell. (Or I suppose a masochist should say ‘heaven?’)

She’s made those open slaps a part of our routine now, but I remember that first time because I hadn’t asked for it — hadn’t suspected she would like it — hadn’t known she was capable of it. And the fact that she’d done it, she’d surprised me…it was wonderful. It reminded me that no matter how much we may be on the same page, it’s her leading the way. Her controlling things. Even when I top from the bottom, she’s the one in charge.

And I’m addicted to that. Addicted to her, her control, her power, her whimsy. The idea that I’m at her mercy, subject to her moods and urges and spontaneous choices to hurt here, to make me do this, to talk to me like so. To be reminded that I’m property.

If there’s one reason why I want to eventually join the larger BDSM scene, is because of a cheesy submissive fantasy I had: a collaring ceremony. To have people watch her mark me permanently, or collar me in a way that really hammers home her ownership and my submission and the essential inequality of it all. And be surrounded by people who understand what that means, who get the significance. Who see what’s going on. Shit, I don’t even know if those things really exist, but when I think about them, I’m like a 12-year old girl looking at bridal magazines. I mean, there’s nobody in our day time life who gets it. Nobody understands how far I’m willing to go, how strong she is, how deeply in her thrall I am.

Yes, I want affirmation and validation from my peers. But I don’t have any peers yet. (In real life. In the blogosphere, I have tons.) That’s not so bad, is it?

The Closer We Get…

The closer we get to getting our own house, the more we steal away for S&M. We’re building up to a crescendo, a climax that will hopefully take place in a home of our own.

We’re looking for places now, and I’ve made no bones about wanting a finished basement. My wife’s priority is that she wants a nice kitchen, because she loves to cook, and hasn’t had a space of her own in years. Me, I want a finished basement for us to turn into a rec room/dungeon. I want a place where we can start really fucking around with suspension and bondage. Someplace where we can anchor ropes and chains. Someplace where we can lay down some plastic sheets for watersports and to catch blood. Someplace where I can start building sawhorses and chests to bend me over. And hopefully someplace painted fairly brightly — like with my wife, the contrast of happy colors and dark doings is unspeakably hot.

I was nakedly and unashamedly open about this with her — that my desire is that we have a space to figure out and act on our darkest desires. And my wife is just as open about wanting the same thing. We’re committing to BDSM to such an extent that we’re shaping our house-shopping around it.

I think that’s cool. August 17 marks our 1-year anniversary, a year since we had our first successful D/s scene. It’s only right we mark that occasion by just admitting that BDSM is here to stay, no matter how painful our recent and enforced abstinence has been.

Real Sadism

The other night, while being forced to sit through “Mamma Mia,” I turned to my wife and said, “Five hours ago, you were slapping me in the balls and trying to choke my cock as hard as you could. That was so much nicer than this.”

“I’m cruel,” she admitted later.

I should have safeworded.

Dominant Head

I’ve always associated oral sex with submission. I mean, there you are, with your head in someone’s lap, while they thrust into your mouth or push on your head or grope your hair. The same general area that gets used for urination is pretty much right there in your mouth, and all too often you’re on your knees while all this goes on.

I love giving head. I mean, I used to collect terms for going down on a girl — eating pussy, of course, but there was also chomping box and all sorts of other juvenilia. My first serious girlfriend, when I was 12, was about two years older than me and I went down on her every day, rain or shine, even on her period. (I had no idea that was a taboo, because she didn’t break it down, and Lord knows 12-year old guys I knew weren’t quite so outre as to know that you could actually give oral during that time of the month.) Giving head is awesome, and one of the reasons why it’s awesome is because it’s fundamentally submissive.

Even when I’m subbing to my wife, if she starts giving me head, I start getting switchy. I talk shit. I spank her ass. A lot of times, she’ll scoot her body up so her ass is somewhere close to my chest and her head is pointed down at my crotch, and she’ll let me finger her and plumb her ass at the same time, which is a wonderful feeling. But because head is submissive, I feel dominant while this is going on.

Until today. We had some time, and so we ran into the room and I went down on her. It was early enough in the day that she hadn’t used the bathroom yet, and so she was what I like to call “fresh from the shower,” which meant everything was on the table — eating her out, rimming her, just diving down and doing it all. When she came I looked up, grinning, my face soaked with her fluids.

Then, she decided to return the favor. And of course, I started feeling dominant, no matter how submissive I was a few moments ago, because she’s giving me head. So I started paddling her ass, talking smack, asking her if she liked my cock in her mouth, etc.

So my wife decided to cure me of the illusion that just because she was sucking my dick, I was anything but a slave.

With my cock in her mouth, she raised her hand and swung it in a wide arc, smacking the inside of my thigh while her fore-arm simultaneously connected with my balls in what had to be the most painful recreational smack I’ve ever received on my scrotum. It was that kind of blow to the balls that didn’t hurt at first, until the pain blossomed up like a deep ache and came to rest over my gut and crotch. She didn’t miss a beat.

After a minute she took my cock in her hand and loomed up over me. She looked at me with her domme-eyes, and said, “Shut the fuck up.” She started squeezing my cock, hard, then tearing at my nipples with her other hand. “You are not in charge.”

She started giving me head again, and I cannot explain how aroused I was with her dominating me. And so I began to thrust into her mouth. She pulled back and shot me a glare.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“No, you’re doing something.” She smacked my balls again. “What?”

“…thrusting. Into your mouth.” I said at last.

She got up and grabbed the Bag o’ Toys, and pulled out the crop. Then, she started giving head again, but every time I moved my hips or grabbed her ass, the crop came down. On my balls, and then the tops of my feet. I shouted, but eventually stopped moving.

She glanced up again and pulled her head away. “Come for me.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, Mistress…”

She started going down again, and as she did I slipped into euphoria. I remember babbling about how she was my goddess, my master, how I was a slave and a whore. I remember coming, hard, spilling seed into her mouth. She brought her face up to me and looked down, and spit my come into my mouth. I opened my mouth and swallowed what I could. I felt my cock throb in response to this and she saw the dribble of post-come semen spill out and lunged for it like an animal. She spit this at me too, but it hit the side of my face and dripped down it.

“I didn’t know you could give head and dominate at the same time…” I said wearily.

“Well, now you do.” She then began hitting me and playing with me while I floated in my headspace, raising welts with her crop as she brought it down on my arms and legs and ass. “Now you do.”

Scene Report: Stinky Feet and Aching Meat

I am, at heart, a very sick person. Or something. Dirty scene descriptions after the link.

I Once Loved a Girl

I once loved a girl who was weird and unfashionable, in a time a couple years before that in itself became fashionable.

We had met when a friend of mine dumped a girl named Shelly (pseudonym) — rather rudely, and coldly — and then, after asking her if they could still be friends, was surprised to have her try and hook him up with a friend of hers from across town. This is in Southern California, and it was the first year of high school, in ‘89 or so, and we didn’t have cars, none of us. So across town might as well have meant in Michigan, for all we were likely to actually meet this girl.

But my friend fell deeply in love with this new girl, who he knew only from phone calls and a picture she sent in one of their frequent letters. And this girl lived not with her parents, but with a friend and her parents — whom I shall call K. My friend’s new penpal couldn’t go on a date without arranging for a date with her friend, whose parents were nice enough to put her up. And my friend couldn’t go on a date until he got a ride across town. The solution to both issues was me — both as a hookup for the friend and as somebody whose parent would give us a ride.

And so it was that K and began talking, and she was unapologetic about who she was. She liked Star Trek, and at an age where I had mercilessly closeted myself about my geekiness in a quest for sex, it was frightening and cool to be able to talk about Star Trek with a girl. She also said she had a lazy eye (which made the upcoming blind date a pretty miserable prospect for me,) and had never had a serious boyfriend, and from her description of herself, she was painfully uncool.

But I had my boy’s back, and we went on the blind date, and it turned out his date had lied about just about everything — she’d sent a photo of her cousin, she was massively overweight, had bad hair, bad skin, and was a much better conversationalist on the phone than in person (which is the lesson for here, and an obvious one at that — never trust an ex-girlfriend you hurt badly to set you up with your rebound girl.) Whereas my girl was still a bit uncool and into Trek — but didn’t have a lazy eye, a story she made up just to freak me out.

That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but her attitude was so alien to anybody I knew in high school - she didn’t give a shit. When everybody else was putting their best foot forward, she acted like hers was a wooden leg. When everybody else would have lied about their idiosyncracies, she came forward honestly — I’m a geek. I like Trek. I play accordion. I love my family. Take it or leave it.

There is a kind of insane power about that. Self-knowledge and self-assuredness is worth its weight in gold in high school, and even if she was uncool, there was a kind of iron in her. And me, sexually submissive, so ashamed of being a geek that I was as closeted as the gay kids in school, she was this white hot candle, to which I simultaneously was drawn and repulsed.

It took us two years to have a second date, because of the distances involved, and also — to be frank — because I found the idea of wanting her so scary. Could I take her out without admitting my own geekiness? Could I give up on the front I was living and just say, “Yeah, she doesn’t dress like a surfer, she doesn’t spend hours on her hair, but she’s cute and smart and awesome?”

When we did meet again, she came over to my place. And we made small talk and we chatted about this and that, and after a while she looked me dead in the eye and said, “So, am I going to get a hug?”

And within instants, we were up against each other in the kind of feverish and rough foreplay you only see in movies. It was, until I met my wife, the hottest moment I ever had with a girl. Foreplay with this girl was better than sex with all of the repressed little surfers I was dating, and better than most hookups I had in college.

And I remember, there was one moment, where I dropped to my knees, and started to go down on her. And she grabbed me by the face and said, “Get up.” And there was no high school girl doubt in her voice. No, “I’m not ready” quavering. And I started to explain to her that she’d like it — because even at 16 I was ferociously good at oral sex, because it allowed me to scratch that submissive itch, and because my first girlfriend had trained me for weeks back when I was 12. But she looked me dead in the eye and simply said, “I don’t find it pleasurable.”

It was like being kicked in the head. Here was a girl — no, a woman — who knew what she wanted, and wouldn’t let you wheedle anything out of her. It was her game. And her attention was on me, the entire time, letting me go where she wanted, steering me away from places she didn’t. She was in control, at the age of 16, like no woman I’d ever met or ever would meet for a good decade.

She was dominant. I mean, I knew it at the time but couldn’t put words to it. She was comfortable in her own skin and strong and powerful, and I had never imagined a girl at that age could be like that.

So of course, after that session I was deeply in love with her, but wouldn’t allow myself to see her again. Because she made me feel submissive, and it wasn’t something I was ready to be, even though sex dreams — when I had them — were all submissive fantasies, about being overpowered and controlled and forced to do things. About being a slave. And because I was a nasty little dork full of self-loathing and repression and it wasn’t the right time to be out and kinky or geeky.

And we talked via phone all the time, and this girl admitted she loved me. She loved me so much, wanted me so nakedly and unashamedly about her feelings, and I could never bring myself to commit. Why not? I don’t know. I was a big stupid dumbass. When I moved across country after I graduated, we talked all the time via phone, and I admitted I loved her, too, but I could never make that leap to getting back to her. I started wandering across country in my car, working odd jobs as I made my way back to So Cal, and in the back of my head I knew our old home town would be my end point, but she was in charge of her life and I guess she got tired of waiting, and joined the Navy while I was in Washington State. We kept up talking for a few more weeks, and then our talks got more infrequent. The last I heard, a year later, when we managed to catch each other on the phone — she was hinting that she’d discovered full-on kink — as a top or a bottom, I was never clear, but she openly admitted to hanging out with a kinky friend and in his room, finally holding a whip and getting dreamy-eyed. Once again, she was nakedly unashamed about being aroused, about what she wanted, what she was learning she liked.

And there I was, painfully aroused, and painfully closeted. Unable to say, “Holy shit, you are everything I’ve been looking for.”

And so she will always remain my archetypal dominant woman. Even at 16, 17, 18, she was so clear-eyed, so strong, so unapologetic. She knew what she wanted, out of life and herself and her man. And I just didn’t have the balls to reach out and give it to her. And that to me is what dominance is about — that sureness. That frank gaze that doesn’t flinch. That personality that is content with itself, warts and all. And that sexual knowledge of her own wants and needs. She’s the model for what I wanted in a dominant woman, and when I see women who have that look to them, I melt.

And it took me 18 years to find another. It was worth the wait, but I still wonder what happened to my first, the one that got away.

It’s Weird

It’s strange, but rereading my post about riding my wife like a dirty little pony had me saying to myself, “But you know, I’m still a sub. I still want to be collared and dominated and tortured.”

I like playing the dominant. I like playing the sadist. But I am a submissive. I am a masochist. Those other things are what I can do, but what I am — in my heart — is unmistakably a little worm waiting for some sexy boot to come down on me.

Why do I feel the need to clarify? Why do I feel the need to be enabled, to get affirmation? I don’t need it — I’m fairly confident in who I am and what I get up to. I’m not wracked with guilt after trying to dom my wife. But on some level, there’s this voice in my head that says, “You are a sub. A slave. You are not here to dominate or to hurt, you are here to be dominated, to be hurt, to be annihilated in your Mistress’ will.”

I think part of the reason for this is that I haven’t been dominated lately. I haven’t been hurt. My wife broadcasts these mixed signals on this big, huge frequency that she puts out. It’s why she’s so special, so her — normally the 10,000 watt station that is her personality is blowing out friendly, happy, joyful soccer-mom Sally Homemaker vibes, but when she narrowcasts her dominance, aims it at me, it hits me like a goddamned freight train.

But lately, the signals have been all over the place. Dominate. Be Dominated. The other night while I masturbated for her, she told me about how she wanted to be objectified and used, but she was squeezing my nuts painfully with one hand while torturing my nipple with the other, and the pain was this white hot song on one end of my body and dirge of ache on the other, and driving it all into me was her, with this big Eye of Sauron personality, focused on me, her presence riding in on the pain and the pleasure and impossible to ignore or resist or deny, and all I could do is assent.

And it’s a headfuck, because she’s saying, “Dominate me,” but her personality is overwhelming, crushing me. Like last night, I was the rider, but her demands that I hold the reins, the fundamental need of hers that I was answering, responding to, being driven by — I’m like a blade of grass in a whirlwind, and the whirlwind is telling me to master it.

But I’m just a blade of grass.

If that makes sense.

Not Hard Enough

Last night’s experiment with pony play was incredible fun, and afterwards my wife and I were both sweaty, sated and relaxed. However, it did reveal an essential part of our characters which explains our D/s dynamic pretty well.

Our daughter was in bed in the other room, and we put the TV on in there to drown out the noise of rough sex. We crept into our room, and my wife popped in a porno and started watching. Since I was taking the lead, I made her masturbate while she watched, with a largeish dildo we normally use on my ass. (With a condom, of course.)

My wife doesn’t like porno for any reason other than the fact that it flat-out objectifies women, and objectifies the sex act itself. The women getting pounded by cocks, fucked in their mouths, come on — I suspect my wife uses female objectification as a placeholder for male subjectification in the same way I use lesbian BDSM as a placeholder for my own, barring those rare moments when a guy I can identify with is being beaten.

As we’ve slid further and further down the rabbit hole, she has become obsessed with the idea of objectification, both literal — using me as a footstool — and figurative, i.e., the idea of someone as a purely sexual object for release. Most of the time, she likes objectifying me, but she’s talked often about how she has fantasies about being objectified, of being used, of being a sexual object and her freedom as a human limited or degenerated somehow. Pony play fills that need nicely.

(I’m calling it pony play, but as I talked about briefly yesterday, it’s not — it’s the trappings of pony play, but we’re clearly both people, not roleplaying as animal and rider. It’s reducing her to livestock, to literal chattel, and slaking myself on her.)

So, alone in the room, I hooked the leather head harness up to her. It’s a web of belts and buckles and rings with a bit. She puts her mouth over the bit and then I strap her in, with a strap going underneath her chin, two rising up the side of her face and meeting halfway around her head, and then a strap going from either side of the bit and snapping to the single buckle that goes from where the two face straps meet. I strapped her in securely, and she seemed quite happy. Then, I got the riding crop, and pulled back on the reins which went from two metal rings on either side of the bit.

When I slid into her, she was tight and wet. I grabbed the reins and pulled back, and in response her head rose up and her body was pulled back into me. I traded the reins from my right hand to my left and picked up the crop. “Giddy-up,” I said, and began slapping her flank.

She began thrusting herself against me. Her cunt tightened around my length and I thrusted back, beginning a game of give and take. I started using the crop to guide her — I tapped in rhythm with our thrusts, slowly speeding up as I went. If I tapped faster, she thrust faster — if I tapped harder, she thrust back with more force. Soon, I started smacking her thigh harder.

“Harder, pony. Getty-up.” I heard her grunt.

I got an idea. “A real slut would let me know what an animal she was — she’d make animal noises.”

She neighed. Her neck was long and beautiful, her head high due to the pressure I put on the reins, pulled back. She had risen up on her hands, her shoulders tall. I felt high. I started pushing into her harder even as she clenched against me.

But — she began pulling against the reins, hard, lowering her head, and worried that I was pulling back too hard, I let the reins go.

She screamed in frustration and managed to mouth, “What was that for?”

“I thought I was hurting you.”

“No, no…”

I grabbed the reins and started fucking her again, getting her up to speed with the crop. But then, she pulled against the reins and I let go again. “Are you okay?” I asked, even as she moaned in frustration.

This scenario repeated itself about five times, to her growing frustration. Once, I really was hurting her, because her lip had gotten caught in the bit, but the other four times it was just me, worried that I was being too rough. She was pulling to feel pressure, to test her strength against mine, to pull, and I was chickening out when I got worried, letting go.

It didn’t stop us. Once we got a solid rhythm going at the end, I started whipping her flanks with the crop and fucking against her thrusts. “Good pony, that’s a good pony, fuck, getty-up, getty-up…” Our bodies, where they met, were covered in her juices and my precome. Her pussy was tight, and there was a sloppy sound as we came together.

I started thrusting into her wildly as my orgasm approached, losing the beat as I lost control. When I came, it was hard and wet, a torrent flooding out to equal the wave I’d exploded out with the night before when we’d just talked about it. She slowed down as my cock began to slowly stop spasming. (She says she can feel me come, feel my cock jerk and pulse with come.)

We were both satiated and happy, thrilled. She felt objectified, I felt powerful, and we both were exhausted. It was pretty darn close to perfect.

But…

But, as I pointed out to her, I lack the killer-instinct a good dominant needs. I worry too much — I’m insecure in disciplining, in being rough, in causing pain. When my wife pegged me a while back, while I wore that bit and reins, she didn’t let the reins go every couple minutes for fear she’d hurt me — she knew I’d safeword. She fucked me hard and fast and long and even when I looked uncomfortable, she took her pleasure from me. I was a fucking beast, and it was rough and painful and pleasurable and I knew she was sure and confident and in-charge. She owned me. I was hers. Hers.

To paraphrase something I heard on another blog, “Moans of discomfort and pain are not a safeword.” But to me they are — I want to care, I want to take care and give comfort. But not her — she doesn’t care about my discomfort when she’s dominating unless the time is right. I don’t know whether it’s that she trusts me more, or trusts herself more, or some combination of both. But she’s far more at ease with roughness and pain and dominance than I am.

OTOH, if sex like last night is the result, I’m willing to fake it. God, I loved every fucking minute of that, outside of the brief flickers of shame when I dropped the reins.