Beyond Limits

"God! Oh my God!" she chanted. She must have been terrified by the look on my face, strained and furious. My orgasms in BDSM are intense, shattering, terribly emotional. I often end up crying and weak from rage and I don't know why. The sheer catharsis, the pain of releasing all that feeling, as if it can't squeeze through the opening in my soul.

"Russell! Russell? Are you all right?" Our limbs collapsed like bomb-damaged metal. I almost felt like our bodies were smoking, smoldering from our explosions.

"Yes, yes! Oh Christ, yes!" We looked at each other through the wreckage of our emotions. I was still coming, my body clenching like a fist with each ejaculatory spasm, shoving my hips against her, a puppet in the throes of sexual ecstasy.

"Oh, fuck! Lexi!" What can I say? My soul's laid bare, the naked need, naked sensation— It's all there on my face, the sweat running down my chest.

"Oh, baby...!" she says, and gives a nervous laugh.

I pull the ottoman over with my foot so it makes the chair into a kind of sofa and fall down on it next to her, take her in my arms. My heart is racing—our hearts are racing. Her tits feel so good as they flatten against my chest and she melts against me like liquid woman, like salve. I hold her ass in my hands and press her against me. She's so soft and warm I want to crawl inside her. I want to fuck her again forever. I want to wear her like a bandage.

"Where did all that come from?" she asks.

I laugh weakly. "You shouldn't be surprised. We've talked about it."

"I know, honey, but I didn't know those fantasies were still active. That was weird, Russell. Hot, but weird."

"Weird? Why?"

She snuggles into my arms and laughs again. "Well, maybe I should slap your dick with a rolled upNew Yorker and then we can compare notes. What do you think?"

She doesn't know what this means to me, to control her like that, to punish her in the throes of love, the ferocious bite of tenderness. At that level a transformation happens and sheis me. She's my hunger and my desire—a perfectly imperfect mirror, a terrible beauty I have to set up and destroy and catch as she falls.

"Never mind," she says, kissing my chest. "It was incredible and I love you like that. I love you when you lose yourself in me like that. There's nothing better in the world."

I smile. I'm still shaking and strange thrills are echoing in my prostate, in the big muscles in my thighs, down my spine and my scalp and even the backs of my arms. It was total orgasm, total release and the energy is sloshing in my body trying to redistribute itself.

"I'm just surprised you're into it so much," she says.

"You think I am?"

"Don't you think?"

I suddenly don't want to talk, but I see we're going to have to talk.

"Yes," I say. "I guess I am. In some ways. And I think you are too."

"You do?" she asks. "Why would you think that? But tell me about it. I want to know about it now. Now that I've done it—at least tried it—I want to hear about it and what it means to you."

I sigh, It looks like we're going to have to talk. I stand up and try my legs. I can walk. "Let's go in the bedroom." I start blowing out candles. "We might be talking for a while."

But when we get in the bedroom, words desert me. She comes into my arms and presses herself against me and my cock bends against her belly that's filled with my cum and there's nothing I can think of to say that makes any sense or communicates what I feel, this total completeness and satisfaction.

"Tell me," she says as we slide into bed and she slips into my embrace like a knife into a sheath. "Tell me all about it."

"You know I can't. I can't. It's just that when I have you like that, when I take control of you, I feel like I have you so much, like I own you. I'm controlling your feelings and sensations, your world."

"Baby," she says. "You are anyhow. You always are. You're my world when I'm here with you and when we're apart. That's what it means when I say I love you."

She doesn't understand. Or rather, she understands, but in her own way, in a way that misses the hysterical desperation of my way. There's something essentially healthy and wholesome about her way of understanding; mine is sick and diseased. Mine has that feeling of corruption at the center, and that's why it obsesses me. She just doesn't understand. She's missing the organ you need to understand, that diseased part, so what can I do? I hold her and let it go, and soon she's asleep.

Soon she's asleep and I'm watching her face, lax and beautiful as she drifts in unconsciousness, satisfied to be lying in my embrace, content in her nakedness and innocence, unaware of my flailing sperm held inside her and my eyes trying to unpeel her beauty and find what it is I desire from her so much.

She turns so she's facing away from me, sailing on dream-tossed seas. The leaves rattle on the trees and skitter in the streets below. Fall comes early up here and it's thorough, and the mists dig deep off the big lake like early snows, and only now can I tell her. I tell her now over the looming foghorns, now when I'm certain she won't hear me.

"I have to control you, Lexi, I have to rule you because I know that in reality you rule me. You don't mean to but your love controls me and is stronger than I am. You're all that stands between me and that abyss, between me and the shadow of my own death. You're my bridge over oblivion, and I don't dare tell you that because what will you think of me then? A man so pitiably weak. You think I don't have to control you? I do, baby. I do. And yet, how can I? How can I when I love you so much?"

*****

Why would I think she was into that? What gave me that idea? Call it a sixth sense or an instinct, or maybe it was something I just believed about everyone who fell in love with that intensity, that at the bottom of the relationship there had to be a willingness to surrender oneself totally to the beloved, that that's what love this strong meant, and the way you showed that was by surrendering the body. Or maybe it was a certain tentativeness in Lexi, a certain need to be in control that made me think that what she really wanted was to have that control taken from her and used against her. In her acting she found a certainty she couldn't find in her regular life and watching her I could see how she ceded control to her characters with a kind of desperate abandon. She threw herself into her roles. But despite what happened that day she wouldn't cede that control to me. No matter how deeply we fell in love or how intimate we got in our other lovemaking, she wouldn't give herself as I wanted, as I needed.

And we did get intimate. We frightened each other with our intimacy so that with our love was mixed a few drops of terror, a whiff even of fear of the power the other one held. She made me weak with desire. I made her tremble with fright at the thought of what I might force her to do. The fear bound us together like glue, as if we held razors at each other's throats. We broke taboo after taboo, our bodies doing what our minds were afraid to admit. I never had a woman like this, laid out for me body and soul, and she gave me so much I hardly noticed the piece she held back.

I would find a way into her life, though. I started writing a play for her that I meant at first for her to star in. But I was smart. Lexi wasn't the star at school, and so I wrote a second part for her that she could play as well. The play was calledThe Given and it was about a girl named Jessica who saves this artist Max from himself by posing for a fantastic picture. But Jessica is turning invisible as Max paints her, only Max doesn't know this. She's turning invisible because she's turning into a spirit, because he's stealing her soul as he paints her, and so she sends her friend Allison to pose instead, and Allison seduces Max and makes him change the painting into something earthier and more sexual. It sounds silly, but it was amazingly powerful. Jessica's becoming an angel and Allison's jealousy and sexuality play off her so well. The play's done in magical realism with minimal stagecraft and it becomes an allegory. Jessica was a good part, but Allison was custom made for Lexi, with her facile intelligence and smoky sexuality and murky motivations, and we were both excited about it. Working on the play became an erotic adventure, and I could get Lexi aroused by musing on Jessica or Allison's next move or emotional reversal and having Lexi role-play the part. I wasn't exactly controlling her, but it was close, and she allowed that and I loved having her that way. We did parts that would never be in the play.

"In this part Max has decided he never wants to see Allison again. He's figured out what she's doing, how she's trying to seduce him and take him from Jessica, and he's furious with her and he throws her clothes out into the hallway and tells her to get out and never come back. But she seduces him. She seduces him by giving herself totally to him, by telling him she'll do whatever he wants. But at this point she knows that he needs her, that Jessica has become too spiritual for him to love and so he needs her flesh and blood, and so she gives herself but she already has him, do you understand? She's his slave and his mistress."

"No. Explain it a little more."

"Okay. Imagine you know me so well you know everything about me, everything I want and love. And now you have to pretend to beg for my love and debase yourself when actually you already know how to make me drool. That's where Allison's at."

"Yes. I understand. Okay. Give me a minute."

And Lexi would take off her shirt and her jeans and strip off her underwear, then put her clothes back on over her naked body. She'd open her shirt and get into character, take her hair down and spread it over her face like a dissolute woman and start breathing fast, come to me and put my hand on her breast, spread her legs and put my other hand between her legs. She'd give herself to me, forcing her femaleness on me until I took her, until she lit a flame in me and I took her wrists and backed her against the wall and went mad on her, my mouth at her lips, her throat, her tits, ripping her pants down, turning her around and fucking her like a bitch against the wall, pulling her hair and making her hiss like a cat, taking her. She did like to be taken. She was terribly female in that she loved making me lose control, whether it was a game or not, and she loved feeling the feverish hot clutch of my hands on her body and my teeth on her flesh. She loved making me growl and shudder as I touched her.

#####

Because she was older than the other students, her status was somewhat different than theirs, and there were some in the humanities department who knew about us and looked the other way or even sympathized, among them Steven O'Shaunessy thesculptor from the art department. He let us use his cabin down outside of Douglass on Lake Superior on the Shipwreck Coast for a weekend in Late October . That's what they call the patch of Superior shoreline east of here, and not without reason. The wind comes out of the west up here, blowing over the Canadian wilderness, and the Upper Peninsula juts out for 200 miles in an east-northeasterly direction like a great anvil the wind hammers against, and between the hammer and the anvil are the ore ships from the mines of Minnesota that are blown onto the shoals and wrecked, broken in half or left to founder on the underwater sand dunes stacked up by the autumn currents, hard as concrete. Hundreds of ships lay scattered on the bottom here, and thousands of lives have been lost in the autumn gales. Superior is cold and cruel, a true inland sea, and the waves come up suddenly and unexpected. A string of lighthouses and rescue stations were established on the Shipwreck Coast at the turn of the century and manned up into the fifties, and the story of their heroism is legend.

Lexi and I drove out there to O'Shaunessy's wind battered-house behind the lake dune and alternately froze and sweltered as the fireplace roared and the wood stoves glowed cherry red and the waves crashed booming on the rocky shore not a hundred yards away and the wind howled through the dead and bent beach grass.

The house was new and very well insulated, the windows triple thermopane and everything weather-stripped and tight as a drum but sure enough a gale came up and the wind was a thief and the huge vast lake was a monster in the dark, the only place to be warm was in Steven's great bed with the quilts piled on.

At night we saw the lights of a boat in the gale and then they disappeared and we looked at each other in horror. Douglass Light was two miles away and we saw its beam lighting up the howling sleet and rain and we figured the men at the light would handle it. They'd have seen it and they'd know what to do and I thought of trying to phone them but I didn't want to look foolish. Maybe there was some simple explanation—a harbor nearby or some sort of optical illusion everyone knew about. We gazed out the window but saw no more lights.

We ate a bubbling hot stew Lexi had made in front of the blazing fire with warm French bread and drank coffee laced with Irish whiskey, and I was never so glad to be inside and with someone in my life. We read Yeats and Shelley and kept on glancing at the window and then I read to her from theZohar, because I was reading a lot of Kabbalah then, but the Kabbalah creeped me out with its talk of mystical lights and emanations of God and the light binding and striking the light and shattering the vessels and the wind was howling around the cottage and I gave it up.

The truth of the matter was, I'd always been terrified of death by drowning, of being thrown from a boat in the immensity of open water and watching the lights of a ship fade into the distance, knowing that death was inevitable but not to come for hours or maybe days, and the lights had spooked me. It wasn't just the drowning but the loneliness and futility of struggle and sense of abandonment, the hopelessness of trying to survive; the final grimness of wet and freezing suffocation that haunted me. We'd seen the lights of the boat in the darkness and then nothing. Men might be struggling to keep their heads above water even as we sat there with our hot fire and soothing whiskey, being pulled down by the weight of their own innocent clothing, down into the numbing cold of howling, black-sleeted Superior. The universe was numb and cruel; death and oblivion was our fate.

I pulled Lexi close, wrapped the blanket around us, slid my hand under her sweater and several layers of shirt to find her breast, soft and warm and reassuring. I held her close against me, tighter than I meant to and pressed my head against her.

She hardly moved. She seemed to know what I wanted and she put her arms around me and gathered me in to herself and just let herself be held, just put herself there for me. I pressed my face against her neck as the wind howled outside and the sleet drove against the window, and she felt so good I wanted to cry. I don't know what happened, but I was afraid and I felt so safe with her and so protected. I felt lust for her and a kind of urgent, simmering desire, delicious life and beauty and it overwhelmed me. I wanted to cry.

She knew my moods and she knew these spells of hunger and anguish I felt when I needed her soul like a physical presence. "It's okay, baby," she said. "It's okay."

I heard her words, but I didn't know if it was okay. I didn't know if she understood. I didn't know myself why I felt like crying, so how could she understand?

"I don't know if it is," I said. "I just don't know if it is. The way I feel, Lexi. I just don't know if it's okay to love someone like this."

She pulled her head back and looked at me.

In the time I'd known her I'd laid myself out to her. She knew my strengths but she knew my weaknesses too. Tonight for some reason I had no reserves of strength left, no surprises, nothing hidden. She could crush me with her rejection.

"It is okay," she said. "It's okay if they love you back the same way."

I had to believe her. Even as I knew that what she was saying wasn't true, what other choice did I have? I figured, well, it's not true now, but I embarrassed her. I caught her off guard. She doesn't love me that much right now, but give her a moment to get her balance, regain her poise, and she'll love me that much again.

And sure enough, she tugged me to my feet and led me from the fire to the bedroom as the wind howled and the waves boomed outside. There was no question of me playing the dom now. How could I?

We got into bed and she was all over me, hot, on fire for me. My need for her had made me weak, made me helpless, and Lexi slipped down beneath the blankets as the sleet hit the windows of the darkened bedroom like handfuls of thrown buckshot and I felt her hot mouth at my cock, her hand wrapped around me, her tongue laving me and giving me strength, her lips pressed against my dick in lewd and obscene prayer, petitioning the gods of lust, whispering imprecations of a woman's desire. I was ashamed. My need for her had made me weak and I couldn't play the dom and that embarrassed me, but I was streaming with juice, searingly hot under the quilts, and there in the hellish heat beneath the blankets, Lexi was worshipping my cock, slurping and sucking at me in a feast of perversion.

I moaned. I thrust at her. I wanted to give her my come, my earthy seed, the ghost of my soul. I wanted her to suck and swallow the fruit of my balls and I seized her hair and held her head on me and fucked her mouth, her beautiful face, used it as a cunt. I ripped it from her, her need for me, felt her tongue and her teeth, good and sweet, her avid sucking. Oh Lexi, Lexi! Her desire echoed in me and drove me crazy. She possessed me.

Finally her head emerged and she gasped for air. I pushed the blankets away and pulled her up and she slid up over me, pinning my shoulders down and mounting me. I felt her hand grip my wet dick as her thighs opened against my hips and she fit the head of my cock to her swollen pussy, that slit that led to the inside of her very body, that beautiful opening. She overwhelmed me and I couldn't stop her and I didn't want to. I needed to be overwhelmed, needed to let her darkness take me and absorb me. A thrust, a gasp, a divine flutter of her lashes and an infernal flex of her hips and I felt my cock sink into the glory between her legs where she opened up for me, wet, viscid and tight, hot and insistent. The nipples on her breasts were as hard and pointed as pencil erasers and my cock slid into her in some wet, primeval biological motion, murky as life in the slimy ooze, the head of my dick scraping against the damp and silky flesh of her secret sheath.

"Oh fuck!" she moaned. "That's good!"

I hissed with pleasure like molten steel hitting cold water, my fingers digging into her thighs. "Lexi! Baby! Do it! Fuck me, baby!"

Her hips began to work with fluid ease on top of me, sucking me in and spitting me out with pure whorish grace, using me, devouring me and I knew what it looked like, all insect-like and puerile. She put her hands on my chest for balance and began to fuck me faster than I'd thought possible, hungry, greedy for dick—riding me like a cowgirl desperate for the wicked hump of the saddle against her cunt, trying to draw the come from me like some mad strangler, on fire for the stroke that would take her over the edge and into here own obscene release.

"Oh yes, baby! Yes, yes!" I cried

"Oh God! Come!Come!" she railed between clenched teeth. Her eyes were closed, her hair was hanging in her face, and her belly clenched and rolled as she threw her pussy at me. I could see she was close to losing it. Her clit was rubbing on my stalk like a rag on a washboard.