Claiming Raven

I checked myself. I tried to remember what I said; in a real conversation you don't have a transcript and you must remember the words that cascade over your teeth. No, no command, no order for her to do something...it must have been my tone. I still had my hand extended over the table like I was blessing the salt shaker, not the pepper though that'd make me sneeze...shoot, is that racist? No, no black people do not make me sneeze so fuck off with your racist bullshit. I was married to a Chinese chick and in that context I was the minority so fuck off. She broke my heart by the way, but I broke hers too so we were even when she went off and got pregnant before the divorce was final.

Where was I?

Oh, right.

"Your hand, please." That was a command, in case you missed it. Her hand rose from under the table, extended out to me and fit into mine, like she was docking with the mothership...fuck, that's all wrong. I can't be the mothership...I can't be a mother at all!

My mind stopped. The feel of her hand in mine, the compliant sizzle that came with commanding her to do something and this first time when I got to feel it. She'd been telling me "that's ds" short for dominant/submissive, which is short for a dominant, submissive relationship, which is short for you vanilla people just don't understand so I'd be thankful if you'd just treat this like a religion and play like you have no right to bitch...where was I? Oh, right, Raven had been telling me things and then pointing at them and saying "that's ds" to one degree or another for months.

It honestly hadn't occurred to me that her trip here was to get out from under that. To see if she could stop, if I could...no, not make her kneel, to see if she could kneel to me. Kneeling is symbolic, a thing you only do as a submissive to someone you are about to let fuck you, that's the vanilla understanding but for a ds person...it's taking a place below that person and that person can command you, then, for a while, or for all time, that's the spectrum. You'll accept his commands and do as you are told, show deference and respect explicit and obvious to the observer but the part that lures people that the tricky part, to take pleasure from it. Doing what she's told makes Raven wet, you know, between the legs, her pussy, her cunt...that's why we were there, in that place, together...it was to see if her cunt would become my cunt, the arousing and erotic symbol of submission and then the obedience that follows. It's the religious experience without any of the bullshit metaphysics where Zeus goes out and fucks mortal women and pisses Hera off and things go downhill from there.

Focus. I thought that. I still held Raven's hand high over the table. I lowered it.

"You said we weren't going to do this." She said.

My heart was hammering in my head like it was a percussion instrument, and if you know your anatomy you know that's not where your heart is supposed to be. I couldn't fucking breathe. Submissives have it easy, none of that macho shit to confuse them. They can sigh and moan and get wet and everything but we doms must be all implacable and imperturbable and other words that start with I and M, and not show any emotion and keep focused on the safety and pleasure of our submissive...not that Raven was mine...that's sort of what this was about...would she become mine to that extent. Could I claim her, own her in real life like this? Would she actually kneel for me? Would I want that? The kiss, that's what would matter. The kiss, but holding hands was a start...shoot, we were being normal.

See, the whole ds thing is as confused as a polygamous colony that doesn't allow incest...after a while nobody can fuck anybody so they have to go recruit and that means ignorance comes into the mix, which is not bliss in the ds world, it's dangerous. And that is why they don't invite vanilla wafers to their orgies or whatever you call it when doms get together to fingerfuck each other's submissives or whip them or whatever...see, they aren't going to like me much because I don't do religion any more and as a writer, I avoid jargon like the plague, because it is infectious human waste so you have to pay attention and listen to everything I say or you might think I don't know what I'm talking about...which is also a possibility but Raven has said "you get it" enough I'm pretty confident I do. She's really, really smart!

Writers are a notoriously insecure bunch and it's not a character flaw, its like saying that a grease monkey should apologize for the grease under his fingernails at his daughter's wedding, I mean insecurity is how we get the words right, always thinking that we can do better, say it different in a way that makes the heart soar and the mind blink with Platonic recognition, and then fearing that we absolutely screwed the pooch in the last sentence. Anyone can see that if you keep rewriting the same sentence over and over again, you get nothing done and I mean no work accomplished but also you never finish the story, like I'm not finishing this one right now. If Raven ever reads it, she'll have skipped to the fucking parts and if I fuck up the next few minutes there won't be any so she'll run out the back of the story like a car through the back of a garage. And she'll hate it and I'll be sad and humiliated and all un-dom-like but that's a risk we writers live with all the time.

"We've been talking for eight months, Raven," I said sounding all reasonable even to myself. "You say that no one has expended so many words in emails and other stuff as I have...what is there that we haven't talked about? I'll tell you, this, now, here, you and me, physically together. We never talked about what happens next."

Her eyes widened, I could see that she knew what I'd stumbled upon wholly inadvertently was not only true but important. The nexus of the moment had been reached.

"Oh." That simple syllable acknowledged something important. I'd shifted her, touched that submissive part of her, opened the door to that quiet sanctuary and let her settle onto her knees in a sort of reverence. That simple syllable said I'd let her go there, led her there and held her hand while she slipped away, almost out of sight.

See? That was complicated. Raven is married. She has a family. Her husband is her best friend; they've been to war together and been on the outs and on the in and out and they have a life and me, I'm not even up to the level of an interloper. I'm like what? The funny papers in the newspapers compared to the front page or the editorial page...and yes, I'm showing my age because I know how you read a newspaper, funnies first before you face the headlines, that's basic to mental health, which the internet has deleted and so we're all going crazy. Knowing about newspapers makes me seem old. I'm proud that I got wiser with time and not just older like so many of my compatriots who didn't die young and leave a beautiful corpse.

Where is there to go from this moment for us, for Raven and me? That, that we never once talked about. I claim it is me being all Zen and shit, which was news to Raven, I had to explain what a koan was, which made me feel all dom and shit...missing the whole point though, vanilla wafer that I am. Which begs another discussion or question if you want to be the soul of wit, what is she doing with me anyway? We did talk about that, how I was a number of things that simply didn't fit.

"Clark?" There was no pull in her hand, but it pulled at her. There's a thing here, a ds thing that is worth explaining to you vanilla wafers reading this...part of the ds thing is push and pull. The dom pushes the submissive to do something and she pushes back, refuses, resists and she does so specifically to be overcome to have that expression of her will to be replaced by the doms. Don't ask me any more than that, I don't fucking get it. I'm a dom. That makes Raven Amazon wet and I don't mean Jeff Bezos's Amazon, the other one with the river and piranha and mosquitoes the size of birds. Having me push her makes her wet, arouses her, thrills her, makes her...feel.

But that doesn't always work so then I must pull. That was the feel of my hand in hers. I have strong hands, and this was the first time she could test that so when she tried to take her hand back, I held on, not gripping it too tightly but firmly enough to let her know that if I wanted, I could hold her hand and she could not get it back without spilling more water. But the pull is something else, more than just brute force. In fact, it's never brute force and if that's your game, that means yes, you're just a brute. A submissive submits...because they want to, because it's what they want. The pull is when I remind her of that, so it's not the strength of my hand holding hers, it is the sensual thrill she gets from my skin on hers and the tantalizing taste of that pleasure that pulls her back and makes her relax her hand and leave it in my possession, just as she finally leaves her will in my possession to use as I wish. Her hand, her will, both mine.

"Raven. You came all this way, it seems silly not to at least hold my hand. This isn't really a first date, is it? I know you're shaved and I know you're wet. How many men know that about you on a first date?" It was a rhetorical question but subs don't do rhetorical, not once you activate their desire to please you and I could see that the combination of my skin on hers and my calm, reasoned explanation of why she should do what I wanted had activated her. I mean, her submission was activated and she wanted, wanted, wanted to submit. So she answered my rhetorical question.

"None. Never." She said. The second word was a little push back but so feeble I could ignore it. The ds thing, at least in my interpretation is to wrap her up so thoroughly in her own passions that she is utterly helpless to resist me and will refuse me nothing. The whole thing about pissing on someone, maybe there are people who do like it, but for Raven that idea is having empirical evidence that her will has been turned over completely to me. No, fuck off. I'd never piss on her, but she might want it, because the truth is, no one ever can surrender that personal will. Never. It's like imagining that you can hold your breath to kill yourself. Good luck with that.

That autonomic thing that makes suicidal depression irrational and unnatural is the same thing that prevents the submissive from completely surrendering her will to her dom. His to her is out there but I'm male and so the gender thing is set for me, immutable. I can't not be dom...Raven taught me that by letting me make a legion of mistakes with her but never flinching, even when it hurt her, and keeping her submission before me. I love her for that. God, you have no idea what it is like to fuck up with your submissive once she's said "I'm yours."

It must be something like what parents feel...the only experience I had with parenting wasn't that, my step-son spent more time in prison than he did in home room, so I'm a parenting voyeur but I voyeur pretty good I think. I always know things about people I shouldn't know...and that's because I have empathy. Hurting a submissive must be like hurting your progeny, seeing that they learned one of your bad habits just from being around you and you're helpless to stop them from hurting themselves because you couldn't stop yourself. It's like that maybe, hurting, damaging your submissive...makes your gut feel like someone kicked you there but from inside you. So you, you did it. You have to feel what she feels as acutely as if it was you doing the feeling.

Raven told me that. Without empathy, ds is just abuse, just the way it looks to all the wafers who peer through the shades of the neighbor's house while the dom is whipping the sub. You can't see empathy and you cannot feel it unless and until it is directed at you. So the peanut gallery just gasps and points, condemns and snuffles like an asthmatic fat woman in a really tight dress in a dusty church with no air conditioning. When ds works, when that bond is real and vital and flowing back and forth between the dom and the sub, the empathy is there. The submissive wants to feel the surge of satisfaction from the dom, the validation of her actions or words or even just her presence or in our case at this moment, her hand in mine and our skin touching for the first time, ever. The dominant wants to feel the submissive's pleasure for it is his pleasure and only empathy lets that happen. When she wants pleasure only from his pleasure, then it begins to get confusing, because to only get that pleasure from him, she can't have any pleasure in any sensual way present in her body, so she wants to submit, to obey even when the thing you require of her is something she doesn't want to do. If a wafer would see a man piss on his sub, they'd see something disgusting but the sub might accept it and feel pride, perhaps even pleasure from enduring and accepting it from her dominant. The point is not what disgusting thing you do to her, it's how much does she allow you to do, how much will she endure? That's the point. When you piss on her or hurt her with a whip or a sharp word or just disapproval in the tightening of your eyes, she feels only the need to please you and the pleasure from doing so with no other pleasure in her body.

And it is strong, once it is developed and there's trust that keeping her safe it's the ultimate thing to you, the utmost thought in your mind. The push and pull, the resistance and compliance, not the same thing so I am listing them separately, (Raven might rush to judgment and call me redundant but you wafers might miss that they're different entirely), they develop over time with attention and experience until the submissive knows she is safe and secure. Then she can surrender her will completely and, for a few moments or days or always, give into that urge and the cascading pleasure of having her will supplanted utterly by someone else's can be surrendered to and for that moment at least, the hunger can be satisfied and the void in her chest can be filled...because she feels.

"Clark." Raven, not Patience, said.

I jerked then and she felt it, a little jolt of the tension in me. We hadn't discussed it but there it was, naked between us. What happens if she does find she will kneel? What if she does that, completely naked, me still dressed in my casual white man khakis and white oxford button-down shirt, underdressed compared to her, and she kneels down, getting not to one knee like some knight errant but to both knees, sitting on her bare heels, feet completely bent onto the floor...then what? What is next?

I can't bundle her off to my condo and store her there. I'm Peter Pumpkineater. You know, had a wife and couldn't keep her...his heart shattered and now living alone is a right relief...adding someone into my space would be like adding a needle to my spinach salad. You might not suffer right away but it would happen if you cleaned your plate and mother always insisted I clean my plate, because that's what my father required.

So it isn't just that she's married more or less happily which term married people mostly recognize...relationships ebb and flow so it depends where you are in the cycle as to whether you are happily married or not. Those people who are giddy all the time just piss me off. I want to tie them both down and strap their asses until they cry some actual tears, the fuckers. No, no, I'm happy for them, they are just the happy few...the rest of us ebb and flow, enduring both pain and pleasure. I say enduring pleasure because one of the most painful things is pleasure you know will not and cannot last.

It is a spiritual thing to love when you can, celebrate when you can, feel what you feel and relax into the luxury of real, honest pleasure and not just focus on the pain all the time. That takes...something, I don't know what but it's something and ds is about that state, that moment, those few breaths when a body feels a connection to another, the partner in crime, dom or sub and you feel again...the pleasure or the pain, that doesn't matter when your hunger is strong and the fight against numbness has been especially tough, through funerals or hospital waiting rooms or fights or terrors, for the night is dark and full of terror. When the heart is battered and the mind is filled with defensive plans that will ward off those terrors, that moment of just pure pleasure is redeeming and full of grace.

"Clark, really, you're being rude."

I looked up. Raven is seeing me for the first time, feeling my presence. She's married, with a full life and a heartfelt commitment to her family and her life as a mother...parenting is the hardest job I've ever done...she told me that almost as soon as we met, early, soon. I believed her, it is. The only way to miss that fact is to not bother parenting, that makes it seem easy. There's a Zen lesson in there but that's a whole different story and this has been nothing but digression. You wafers and Raven want to know if we fuck or not. I get that. Raven will skip all this and go to the place where she's bent over something and I'm ramming two miles of cock into her six inches at a time.

I'm like average in the cock department. See? It is all about cock. Those who have huge cocks want to show off and those with lesser lights want to make sure you don't laugh when you see what we sport and puts us into therapy for a year or a decade. Another digression but not really since everything really is about cock. We're not wrong about that, just vanilla wafers have repressed that reality and that creates some real warps in reality. Blame Freud, he noticed first.

Raven is looking at me and she's fallen into my trap. She's fully submissive now, anxious, wondering if I am going to wobble now, here with her present. I started out clueless, well, not totally. With some minimal experience and a lifetime trying to fit my dominant impulses into the model of the "sensitive male", it didn't work. I arrived in those first moments with Raven confused, even rattled by finding there was this whole world of interaction I'd utterly missed out on, that fit me.

I was a writer with vanilla wafer credentials and all I had to recommend me was my words...but that was enough. I can say with some certainty that Raven was touched by a dominance in me it was my words. I lured her around her rules and specifications, to which I did not measure up, and got inside her walls and then played a jig on my banjo and taught her to dance. Again. She doesn't dance, but I do and I love the metaphor for it is rich and replete with potential. Well I did before I got old. She had to have compassion on me because I was a wreck when we began talking. I hid it well, that's what good empaths do, they let you bask in your own feelings and give little or no thought to theirs and that's often the way we want it. Don't make me feel, not me. Just let me be empty like this and feel you and your emotions; you do that for me and I'll fill up with your emotions and not need to deal with mine.

Good work if you can get it but Raven would have none of that. Her brilliant openness demanded openness from me, my competitive nature showing its snout, and I told her all my secrets, both of them...well, one she guessed and the other I had to gut up and tell her in plainsong words. No, that's private, fuck off.

What is the difference between acceptance and mercy? Mercy is needed when a crime has been committed and justice demands punishment or recompense. Mercy suspends that demand. Acceptance is needed when there is simply nothing to be done, no way to sooth or heal or fix what has happened, when bad luck devastates us and leaves us gasping for air even though there's plenty available. I needed something and Raven offered me what she had, and she had it aplenty, that simple quiet understanding that lets you be you without adjustment. Oh, I made her come, and come and come, so there was a trade there. But it wasn't apples and apples or even using the same currency. Yet we managed to blend, to talk for hours, laugh and weep together, consoling and connected as no one else in our world at the moment could be connected to us.