Claiming Raven

"Are you going to say something?" Raven asked.

Raven. She was reminding me her name wasn't Patience. No matter how you spun it, she had years of BDSM experience, dating men who knew she was submissive and panted to experience that in her, to see her tears while they fucked her face...or feel her satisfaction when they laid a whip across her back. The vanilla wafer in me cringed. My father, for all his faults, raised good men, men who'd no more hit a woman than we'd hit ourselves in the balls with a framing hammer. Hitting a woman was for cowards and fools and assholes...the list goes on and on because there is such a wide variety of men who hit women and should be buttfucked with a hat rack until they get it that it isn't a good thing to do...my vanilla is showing.

"I'm thinking. No. My mind is blank. So I'm sharing what is on my mind...nothing." I spoke and my voice felt alien. I was possessed. I was channeling some spirit from a former life when hitting a woman was just part of the gender profile for a man and for the woman, expected and endured like voiding one's bowels...and people say humanity hasn't changed. We have, just some people haven't gotten the memo yet.

She smiled then. It was a real smile, like what I'd imagined when sending her some ripe line that she said made her laugh. Raven sent back in words her reactions and in doing so, exposed herself to me. I drank it like an alcoholic drinks whiskey. Despite the long months of discussing everything that trundled into our minds, I still had this dichotomy of my vanilla past and this dominant submissive context I was swimming in. Yes, swimming and I swim like a brick. The idea of ever laying a whip to Raven's back or ass or legs...stop it...it floated out there like someone else's god, nothing to do with me.

Striking a woman has always been anathema to me, verboten, bad form, go sit in the corner, Charlie. But here, sitting across the table from me, was a woman who had been beaten, whipped and spanked, who had wept, and cringed and suffered the pain and endured the humiliation and degradation, because she wanted it. If you're vanilla reading this...you may not know it but if this all makes you queasy, you're vanilla. If the idea of water sports makes you nauseous, you're vanilla and I'm not talking about riding dolphins. There may be people out there who love drinking piss but that's not me and it's not Raven, but she thinks about it, writes about it and now, so do I. Why?

The moment you asked that in earnest, you get some sprinkles on your vanilla. And you'll never be vanilla again. Why, though? Why do you ask that and why do you take off your bra and twist your nipple until your eyes tear up and streak your cheeks? The answer is painfully present and embarrassingly obvious. You do it to feel something.

"Clark?" Her voice sliced through the cloud of thoughts in my mind. "Where are you?" She'd been talking, something about the airplane and airplane food and the guy from Singapore who sat next to her and sleeping and dreaming she was being fucked and waking horny and thinking about me and wondering if...she stopped there and swerved into something about if she was wearing the right clothes and she'd thought about not wearing panties but decided on a first date, that wouldn't do. Then the stop, the focus, "Clark?" Her voice using my name like that ran ghost fingers up my spine. "Where are you?"

I can hear the chiding tone in her voice and for a moment I resent it, the paradox of the submissive teacher, taking me by the hand and saying "This is how you hit me." Just doesn't compute and when I think about it my dick melts. So I don't think about it much.

I smiled at her. I reached for my water glass and didn't knock it over. The cold water made my fillings throb.

"I can't believe you're here." I said honestly. Vanilla man meets crazy wild woman...I pushed that thought aside along with the intimidating bondage that threatened to tie me up in knots.

"I am." She said with a smile. She drank some water without spilling any. I was proud of her.

"I know." I said and the flood of chagrin filled me for I hate, hate, hate inane blather. Yet here I was, stuck in this loop of vanilla banter that I hated. So I exited, stage right.

"You said you were mine. Are you?" I asked. I could see the question caught her off guard.

"You warned me about this a long time ago." She said. "Do I have to answer?"

"Did I ask you a question?"

"Oh." She said softly and when she smiled at me, my heart melted. I wanted to do her on the table from the front and the back at the same time, which is clearly impossible but I'd love to fly too and the fact I can't doesn't stop me from thinking about it.

"Oh?" I echoed, teasing her.

"Oh, yes."

"So that works here?" I asked, a relative pronoun with no antecedent but which we both understood.

Raven nodded slightly, like some part of her was answering surreptitiously before the official line was toed.

See, Raven is a submissive. Now that doesn't mean that she's a wet noodle or a milk sop. She's not that. An engineer, trained but not good at it she says, but really I suspect she was good at it and hated it, which is two different things. An accountant, so a woman who does numbers, if it can be said that an accountant does numbers...rather like suggesting that a lawyer deals with truth. But still, the capacity is present in both cases even if the opportunity is never seized. In some ways, her submissiveness can be understood as sexual, being given a simple command by me makes her cunt wet. (She's British so "cunt" isn't the automatic pejorative it is in the United States, and yes, I know I said she flew in from Melbourne, which isn't the United Kingdom but people can migrate away from the UK too and do. There's Brits turning their noses up at people all over the world.)

That's a vanilla understanding of the ds thing. With BDSM it's related to getting wet if someone smacks you, spanks you or calls you a cumslut or fuck tramp. It inverts the pleasure-pain vector and dares you to say boo! about it. The vanilla version of pain is that it's bad even though life is full of pain and the lessons that pain teaches us can be hugely profound and life changing, yet we vanilla wafers persist in mocking someone who becomes aroused when they experience a good whipping. A man who shrugs when his wife fucks a baseball team seems pitiable and broken and, and, and...we wafers pant over such things but never stop to ask why we can't breathe around just the thought of being fucked in the ass or having two women fucking us at the same time. (If I need to explain how that works, you're just too vanilla for words...okay, I will explain it just this once; one sits on your face and the other sits on your cock and you don't know whether to dance or shiver.)

For Raven and I think for me too, the difference is just a matter of details, the core issue is the same. The urge that moved her into the dominant/submissive context or the BDSM is the same, it is the need to feel something. For Raven being submissive, the view back into the vanilla world is the choice between feeling something and numbness.

Generally though, this world implies a mindfulness of the relationship, a focus on the interaction and attaining something that fits for both the dominant and the submissive. The submissive gets the sense of...I don't know, maybe fitting into the world in a way general society simply doesn't offer. It's the right to be insignificant in a specific way at a specific time and still feel full. It's the loss of individual identity without experience any destruction. If I understand correctly, it's the feeling that comes from pleasing someone, satisfying them, in really small things so not only sexually, though that can really be fun to. Obedience expressed as a fully sensual experience.

The dominant has this thrill of controlling someone, of directing them but also the noble, perhaps ennobling experience of having the submissive's will completely in hand so you cannot hurt her or damage her, but you can move her and even twist her this way or that, like a potter modeling clay, molding her into something you want and she lets you do that. But more the allowing it, she wants it, that feeling of being converted into something new entirely into accordance with someone else's will. It's a feeling of connection that has no real corollary in the rest of society, which is why this whole thing is so seductive and, and addictive even.

The vanilla world seems to view the kinkster world as feeling the wrong things but the difference may be akin to a thirst for knowledge. Once you gain that thirst for knowledge, it doesn't get satiated by learning one new thing. There is no "perfect knowledge" that you learn and then the thirst goes away. It's permanently inside you, the gnawing need to understand, to go where the darkness shines, to add something to what you know now. Get a little, want a lot!

Pleasure is like that. You don't get enough but the pleasure you enjoyed yesterday, after so many repetitions, begins to fade and for some, perhaps many people, the end result is that the feeling simply vanishes. What is left when you stop feeling? We call it numbness but it feels like emptiness, like a hunger that tears at you from the inside and turns everything around you to dripping dross that can become icky and horrendous to the senses, like the idea of a puddle of cum on your belly or someone pissing on you if you are still vanilla in your sexuality.

But the vanilla idea focuses on the cum or the piss, the ds and BDSM approach, in some higher sense (which I admit might be all bullshit but this is what I have today) is that pushing at these boundaries to find new pleasure is what matters. Each time you take a step away from the sameness and the numbness of your life, by locking handcuffs on your wrists, or bending over a table while someone marks your ass with a cane leaving strips you'll feel all week long and savor because the ecstasy that followed lingers with you too...you add a little feeling to your life you didn't have before. And that can become addictive.

That void, that emptiness suddenly has a spot of something that isn't numbness, isn't darkness, isn't void and the entire focus of your entire being latches onto that little bit of something...and you want more. Much, much more.

That is what Raven represented. I, however, I fancied that I was something different. I wasn't arriving in her world without this desperate hunger, this numbed need to be filled with sensation...I was different and that difference, that was what got her and ultimately brought her to this moment, staring across the table at me waiting for me to get all dom with her, daring me to try and waiting with bated breath to see if I'd fuck it up. I felt that pressure but in that silence, just not talking, I felt my power, my superpower reappear and I felt my shoulders relax.

"Raven, was it all a lie? When you said you were mine, was that just play acting or were you saying something true?" I'd already silenced her by saying she was mine, that shifted her, activated that urge to submit, which for you vanilla twats, is where her mind empties of all the normal life bullshit and she focuses on what I want, what I command, waiting for me to direct her. It's Zen meditation with outside direction, with sex interwoven into it. Her mind becomes empty and she can relax because all the stress of normal life, it just vanishes. She feels an altered state that is a controlled, steady, even sense of harmony, but it takes time and practice and mindfulness, leading and following, commanding and obeying and there comes a moment when you realize that she's there with you and you have her and she's yours. Then it can happen, a sudden recognition that the connection has become solid and it appears as an erotic poof of sexual arousal...and you wonder why she is here with me, submitted and willing to discover if I can claim her or now, if I can have her in this way?

"Are you really mine, still mine, now that I can touch you?" I asked the question knowing that it would still her. I was right.

That got her. I saw the thought touch her. At least that's what I thought I saw, we were strangers with intimate knowledge, like an interviewer meeting an applicant for a scholarship, all knowledge was academic, none of it was physical and empirical. This moment, it was empirical, sensual, sensitizing and real. Yet those dozens of conversations in the online echoes were just as real. If something makes no sound, that doesn't mean it isn't real. If it makes a sound but you can't see it, like thunder, that doesn't mean it isn't real, either.

"Clark, don't." She pushes back. She'd said we should just have a date, just meet and see what that was like. She'd done this many times before.

Raven was married. She was different in a very interesting way. She refused to go numb and stay there. She refused to go through the motions of her life and not feel the ecstasy of this moment, every moment as it happened. Her husband, Banbridge McGinnis was, by her estimation, brilliant, more brilliant than she and so more brilliant than most anyone you'll meet because Raven is incandescently smart, which is why I like her. I'm no black hole myself but my love is for the brilliant woman but more than that, the woman who is smart and never bows her head because of it and more, is proud of it and pushes those limits every chance she gets. She says parenting is the hardest thing she's ever done, bar none, though.

Being a parent does that for you if you take the trouble to notice. Most people focus on what they should teach their kids, not what their kids are teaching them...a bad expression, the kids force parents to learn even while they push the kids to learn...which sounds like Raven, and I mean that reflexive dynamic, teaching and learning, learning and teaching.

She married Ban and discovered they were mismatched sexually, her sexuality exceeded his the way a violinist exceeds a man riding a lawn mower. His interest was in other things, vanilla things, numbing things or more fairly, absorbing things that didn't include anyone else and that included her, er excluded her...included her in his exclusion of everyone else. He pursued the insular lure of his professional life that she could never share in, not because of incapacity but because such things cannot be shared. It is like fame. Marry a movie star and you don't get to share her fame. Marrying a genius will not make you a genius. Proximity is not acquisition.

So Raven languished, seeking sexual congress and being rejected. Her stoutness of will became her character, rejecting the options others took when faced with her situation...she didn't divorce him, she didn't betray him and use that as a reason to divorce him, but nor did he. In this sense, she may have mimicked the ways of women in the past, unhappy, unfulfilled, unfeeling and finally numb. Unlike the women of eons past, she had several options that she tried.

She'd told me all this in the first week or so of our acquaintance. Her startling frankness glossed over the incredible pain of being sexually frustrated and refusing to go numb to end that frustration. She kept the senses alive, the sensual nerves that made her feel alive remained active, doing their due diligence. They made her hunger. Not hungry, that's a vanilla thing...this alternative to numbness and the existential terror waiting after midnight, that's hunger and it only goes away when the senses are filled up. It makes you look like a hedonist or a sensualist or a hippy, humanity keeps changing the names but they are all the same, people who have rejected numbness, tradition and going through the motions generally with no joie de vivre, joy of and for life, for you Francophilaics, no Francophobes I meant...they choose to fill up their senses like night in the forest...which tells you that John Denver was one of us really but he was like me, using words to stave off that darkness, but loving the darkness. If everything is maximum light, color disappears...

"Clark? Are you going to talk to me? I fly half way around the world and what? You stare at your water glass?" I looked up and her eyes, blue pools of color glittering and...present. I gathered up my mind, a splash awareness and put it back together. I nodded. I'm here. I thought, you're here. I spoke out of that place, aware suddenly that Raven had arrived and feeling it in a new, different way.

"You said we should be convivial and...fuck, I forgot the other word you used."

"They were your words, your suggestions." She said.

"Oh, that makes me feel better, I can't even remember my own words." Now that needs some explanation...that's because I am the master of rationalization and not of Raven...another story but I have to tell this one first so I can get back to the other one...this Raven and I never met a non sequitur we didn't love and chase it off the subject and down some rabbit hole where we cornered it, skinned it, cooked it, ate it and picked it from between our teeth only go to back to the dinner table and find we were too full to eat...and that metaphor got plumb away from me. What was I saying?

Oh right, can't remember my own words. That sounds bad...if I say it, I should remember it right? Saying it happens to be right, but I'm talking about what I write and unless someone mentions it or I tell someone about it, I don't remember a thing. I just write it down and poof! It's gone, out of my head forever, staked to the paper with little nails like someone's savior nailed to a cross waiting to die and be resurrected when someone reads them and finds them worthy of a comment. Fuck that metaphor got away from me too. It's a trend.

"Clark?" She smiled tentatively then cocked her head, inquiring.

I lifted my eyes from the table beading with water from my spilling...catching the light and glittering like crushed diamonds...so, diamond dust.

"You're here, Raven." I whispered and my gut wrenches and I feel about as dom as a caboose on a train. I rally. "Give me your hand."

"We said we weren't going to do this. We were going to be normal, have a normal date, be normal with each other."

I extended my hand. The student no longer because I knew and understood she was pushing.

"Give me your hand." I said. See? For you vanilla peeping Toms reading this, the dominant submissive thing is about interaction, not piss and shit and whippings. All that is like thinking that when Jesus returns he'll be dressed like the Pope and show up at the Vatican for a sit down before destroying evil once and for all. If that happened, Jesus would go out on a bender first...and then destroy evil starting with the pedophile priests. Digression, crap. I like digressions though, it's like getting lost in a new city...when you're done you can give directions, which is why men never ask for directions, we're not lost, we're just learning how to get some place we've never been so shut up about it.

Where was I?

Raven... I met her on Lit Chat and I saw she wrote stories and thought "Oh, a writer! She'll be too self-absorbed to talk to me" but I PM'd her anyway (private message for those readers who, like me never thought to venture into the Lit Chat room and talk about sex with real people, wow, what a concept!). And here we are sitting across from each other and I have my hand out like I'm swatting a fly really, really slowly.

"Raven." I say. Her eyes leave my hand.

"You said..."

"I know what you said, I didn't say it though. Normal, right. Who comes half way around the world to have lunch with someone they've sucked and fucked in their mind for eight months...does that sound normal to you?"

"No sir." She said.