Truth AND Consequences

[Note 1: The man in this story -- Stewart -- was inspired by a dear friend. I thought it would be disrespectful to make the character too much like my friend, however, so I've intentionally made Stewart deviate somewhat from my friend's true personality. Anyone who should happen to know both of us should not assume that anything Stewart says, does, thinks, or feels applies in any way to his real-life counterpart.]

[Note 2: My characters always do more talking than fucking, so if you need a higher action-to-word ratio, feel free to move on. :-)]

Part One: Joining

I'm a switch. I like pain/sensation play, as either a top or a bottom, and I like dominance. What I love best as a domme is opening people up emotionally -- pushing them to reveal more and more of themselves, to dig so deeply that they're discovering the things they show me right in that moment. I love knowing friends and lovers more deeply and thoroughly than they've ever been known before. I also like to play with the combination of fear and arousal -- having someone be simultaneously terrified and so aroused they can barely stand it is incredibly hot.

Though I've played with dominance, I haven't done much in the way of submission, because I grew up with very authoritarian parents who dominated me so completely that I had essentially no thoughts, feelings, or personality of my own while I was a child. Didn't want to sign up for THAT again! But somewhere in my heart of hearts, I knew that I needed to go there, to conquer my fear of giving up any of my hard-won independence. Being unable to bend even a little was getting in my way. Yet even just thinking that scared me.

My life changed when I met Stewart, a dominant who had some of the same tastes as I. He also liked to push people to do things that scared them, though unlike me, he didn't "do" pain. He told me this many times. He told me this so many times that I pointed out that he was protesting a little much for someone who actually had no interest. He confessed that he had played with pain in the past and didn't like how much he enjoyed it and wasn't planning to go there again. My eyes lit up -- ah, a thing he was afraid of yet drawn to -- something he was conflicted about, something that was inside him that he had trouble facing. Fertile ground!

As we were getting to know each other, I mentioned my childhood history and my fear of ever being submissive, along with my tentative notion that it might actually be good for me to go there. I said that if I ever wanted to explore submission, I'd want to explore it with someone considerably stronger than I, so that if being dominated turned me into Rage Woman, my dom could keep me from hurting him. His eyes lit up -- ah, a thing I was afraid of yet drawn to -- something I was conflicted about, something inside me that I had trouble facing. Fertile ground! He mentioned that he was 6' 3" and an avid cyclist, and thus strong enough to contain me. Um, this is all theoretical, right? I mean, we're just talking because we like to talk with each other, right?

So here we are -- I want to seduce him into facing his interest in pain in spite of his fear of what that will mean about who he is. (Who he is, is a fabulous man -- intelligent, thoughtful, humane -- accepting his sadistic streak will not change that. But at this point, only I believe that.) He wants to order/coerce/force me into facing my fear of submission; the fact that it scares me and fascinates me at the same time is a big turn-on for him.

So, we negotiate. We live far apart, so we can get together rarely, which means that we must make the most of any time we have together. It also means that our relationship will grow rapidly, in rather a hothouse environment, on those occasions when we get together, while moving along rather lazily while we're apart. We agree that I will fly to where he is, and for the week that I am there, I will be his. Within a few agreed-upon limits (no verbal abuse, no breath control, no forced ingestion of anything I wouldn't willingly consume, no playing with bodily excretions), I am his to do with as he wishes, with one requirement: he must hurt me. He must hurt me enough that he is seriously scared, that he is facing the thing that he doesn't want to accept in himself. He must push himself as hard as he wants to push me.

The thing is, I'm a mild to moderate masochist. I like some pain with my sex or even just some pain all by itself, but not a LOT. And I am asking him to give me a lot, not because I'm enough of a masochist to need it, but because I'm enough of a domme to want to force him to go there. I did mention that I was a switch, didn't I? But how the heck did I end up arranging to top somebody by being hurt a lot? Isn't that usually the bottom's job? :-)

Officially, he is my dom, and indeed, he will be doing all of any explicit dominating that is done. But he will also be facing his fear, at my insistence. He will be in charge of when and how -- he's the dom for the week -- but he is also ever-so-slightly my submissive. I tend to like complicated people and complicated situations.

Did I mention that we've never met face to face? Ah, an important detail, yes. We met online, though not on a BDSM site, or through personals. No, we met through a gaming site. If we'd met through personals, we would at least have remembered to specify an interest in someone who lived on the same continent, after all. We've exchanged an enormous quantity of e-mail -- I feel that I know him, I trust him, and I've become very fond of him. But never having actually laid eyes on him will add considerably to the trepidation with which I give myself to him. I wonder if he'll be scared, too? Probably, he's a sensitive soul; that's one of the reasons why I like him so much. Still, it has to be a lot scarier to give control to someone you've never actually met than to take control from someone you've never actually met.

All of that is dry and dispassionate, isn't it? Almost a psychological analysis. And that's because the pilot has just announced that we're beginning our descent into Glasgow. These are my last few minutes of being in charge of my own self until I board the plane again a week from now, and I need to hang on to my ability to analyze and be dispassionate. Throwing up would be bad, and screaming would be worse. I can fall apart in private if I have to -- Stewart might even enjoy it if I were truly that scared -- but airline personnel are touchy these days, and screaming on the plane would be a really bad idea. Breathe. Breathe. Go analyze something; you're good at that.

I get off of the plane, worried that he'll be turned off by my appearance, even though I've warned him that I'm fat. *I* know that I'm sexy, but the rest of the world does not always agree. He's assured me that the most important sexual organ is the one between your ears, and I know that he's right -- what's between HIS ears has made me fly 3000 miles, after all -- but I'm more than a little fat, and I hope that actually seeing me won't make him reconsider. Sure, Kate, that's a good idea -- worry about your body; then you might not have to spend so much time worrying about what's happening in your head.

Just then I catch sight of a group of people holding signs with the names of the people they are there to meet. Usually these signs are carried by limousine drivers or potential employers meeting job candidates; friends meeting in airports generally don't need signs to identify one another. God, the Internet has changed everything, hasn't it?

Suddenly I spy my name. I'm nervous about lifting my eyes from the sign to the face of the man holding it, and I realize that although I now know it's him, he doesn't yet know it's me, and I can study him a bit before he realizes that I'm heading towards him. He's tall and painfully thin, with longish fuzzy hair and a beard, and there's something arresting about his face, for all that it's a perfectly ordinary face. So this is Stewart. I'm half in love with him, and I've only just now laid eyes on him for the first time. Life can be strange.

I run up to him and hug him, burying my head against his chest so that if there's disappointment in his eyes at the sight of me, I won't have to see it. After hugging for a minute or two, though, he holds me at arm's length: "Let me look at you." I look at his face, trying to memorize the look of the person I know so well yet have never seen.

"You don't LOOK dangerous," he says.

I'm flabbergasted. "Dangerous? Me?"

He smiles. "You have no idea, do you? Mike said you didn't, but I didn't believe him."

"Mike's word is good," I reply automatically, "But I still don't know what you're talking about."

"You like to shake people up, ever so nicely, for their own good, just by being yourself, until their entire world turns upside down."

"Oh, Mike says stuff like that, but you have to discount for his being a Southern Gentleman -- hyperbole is their native tongue."

We laugh together, and I reflect that this is the first time that we have laughed together. It feels strange to know so much about someone yet not know what their laugh sounds like or how their face looks when they're thinking.

We go to his flat, still a bit awkward with each other, yet excited to be together, too. We talk all the way there, mostly about the computer game that brought us together, the forum devoted to that game, and the people in it. I ask for his thoughts on a topic that came up recently on the forum, and as always, he puts forth a thoughtful, interesting, and erudite discussion of the most important issues. Half of me admires his mind yet again while half of me wonders if I'm worthy of him. I'm no dummy, myself, and I've been called thoughtful and interesting more than once, but I can't pass for erudite on the best day I ever had. I'm not used to feeling outclassed intellectually, and the feeling is not at all a welcome one; then I reflect wryly that it may well be very useful in achieving the mindset we're out to evoke.

We eat lunch at his flat, and I'm touched that he's made vegetarian food for me, even though he thinks that my reasons for being vegetarian are invalid. He's warned me that our relationship is just friendship, with nothing romantic involved, and I've agreed to that. I reflect that a friendship good enough to stock up on vegetarian food for my visit is plenty good enough; kindness and consideration trump roses and poetry any day.

After lunch, he turns to me and says, "I thought we could spend our first few hours together putting the face and the voice together with the person we know." I nod vigorously, and he smiles. "I thought we could have more of our patented long-winded discussions about every subject under the sun, and I thought we could have vanilla sex, to get acquainted with each other's physical selves in a somewhat lower-pressure environment than a BDSM scene."

"Sex?" I'm surprised, since the last I'd heard, sex between us was off limits. "I thought you said you wanted to keep this relationship strictly platonic, out of deference to your girlfriend."

"Ah, yes, I should have mentioned that. My girlfriend gave me carte blanche with respect to you. She doesn't want me to have any other Scots women, but she doesn't feel threatened by an American I can only see a few times a year, and she thought that if I did the more, er, extreme things with you, then I wouldn't demand them of her."

"'Extreme.' I feel like I should deny that or something, but you know, I think maybe we're extreme people, you and I."

"We've been in the tails of the distribution all of our lives; it's home now, isn't it?"

I laugh. "Yes. Home. Okay."

"As I was saying, I thought we could have more of our patented long-winded discussions about every subject under the sun, then I thought we could have vanilla sex, to get acquainted with each other's physical selves in a somewhat lower-pressure environment than a BDSM scene."

Again, I agree, though I'm amused at the idea that sex between people who've never met before is the easy part. Sometimes BDSM makes the rest of life seem as if it's seen in a distorting mirror.

We talk and talk, and although we're still slightly awkward with each other, I can never get enough of this man's mind, and soon eagerness to hear his thoughts and to share mine with him overcomes the lingering strangeness of our situation.

Now that we're comfortable, of course it's time to get awkward again. :-) As Stewart begins yet another topic, I lean forward and cover his mouth with my own. Though he's caught by surprise, it doesn't take long for him to get with the program, and soon he's kissing me back as passionately as I could want. I really, really, really, REALLY like to kiss, to the extent that I have to be careful who I do it with, because my brain tends to fall out onto the floor and roll under the sofa. Stewart seems less carried away than I am but still very into the process, and he seems fascinated by all the moaning and shuddering I'm doing. "You told me that you lost your mind when kissed properly, but I didn't realize quite how literally you meant it."

People never seem to realize that I almost always tell the truth. If what I say sounds weird, well then, weird things have happened, that's all.

I nuzzle against Stewart's neck and ask if I can bite him, and he says, "No, I don't like being bitten, but I hear that you do," and he proceeds to bite me in exactly the right way. Most people don't bite very well -- they don't know that you want to be biting muscle, not skin, and a fairly large chunk of muscle, at that. They don't realize that a sucking bite is usually more pleasurable than just a bite. They don't realize that the juncture between neck and shoulder has a lovely little bundle of nerves that are very nice when stimulated; they don't realize that starting lightly then building up works just as well for biting as it does for other sorts of activities. Stewart, who seems to know everything about everything, also knows these things, and before my brain trips out completely, I make a mental note to thank whichever ex-girlfriend taught him to bite so well.

When he pauses for breath, I decide that I need to give as good as I've gotten, before my brain shuts off again. I unbutton his shirt and begin licking his nipples, licking circles around his tiny areolas and flicking the even tinier nipple back and forth. Some men don't like having their nipples played with, but most do, a much larger percentage than most people believe. Stewart doesn't disappoint me, making purring sounds while I play with his nipples, so I begin sucking his nipple, gently at first, then harder, while rolling the other nipple between my fingers. I suck his nipple fairly hard while flicking it with my tongue, and he suddenly starts to laugh.

"What are you laughing at?"

"I just suddenly remembered that one of the first things you ever sent me was a story you'd written about going down on a woman and how much you liked it. You're treating my nipple like a clit, aren't you?"

I laugh. "It's not MY fault you're clit-challenged, and I have to make do with what's available."

He tackles me suddenly, pushing me down on the sofa, slipping his hands under my shirt, and grasping a nipple between each thumb and forefinger. I gasp at the sudden switch from laughing to serious and from him to me, then gasp again as he rolls my nipples between his fingers. I reach out to grasp his, and he bats my hands away, then grabs a hank of hair at the back of my head, wraps it around his hand, and uses it to lift my head towards him.

He stares fiercely into my eyes and says, "I'm in charge now. If I want you to play with something, I'll tell you to or guide you to it. You will do your best with anything I give you, but you will neither begin nor end an activity -- I'll decide what we do and when we start and stop."

I'm astonished by the sudden change but also very turned on by it, far more than I'd expected. I'm not a submissive, right? I don't do that. I'm scared of it. I don't just melt when somebody stares at me and pulls my hair. Right? I don't just do what I'm told. Right?

Maybe I don't with anybody else, but I do with Stewart. Maybe it's because I honestly do admire this man. Maybe it's because he's so very far from the usual arrogant jerk who tries to be a dom. Maybe it's just because he's him. Whatever it is, I seem to have fewer bones than I used to have, and I want to give him whatever he wants.

He starts taking my clothes off, and as he removes my underwear, he notices how wet I am. He says, "You did say once that you could do foreplay all day, or it could be 'two kisses, then let's fuck,' and I didn't quite believe you. Though now that I've seen how you react to kisses, two seems like a perfectly reasonable number for getting you ready." He smiles down at me, and I squirm a bit, feeling embarrassed. He notices and says, "Oh, that was a compliment, by the way." I smile at him and wish that I might be allowed to take his clothes off but make no move to do so.

He removes them himself, but at least I get to watch, and when he sees me watching, he says wryly, "I hope you like bones."

"Are you kidding? When I met my husband, he was 6' 4" and so skinny that he looked like he'd just gotten out of a concentration camp. I seem to have a thing for guys who are all brains and bones. Besides" -- it was time for me to have my own moment of insecurity -- "I have enough padding for both of us."

He looks at me and smiles. "It's clear that I won't hurt myself on you, though I might hurt you. But then, you signed up for that, didn't you?" I smile at him and open my arms, then look slightly guilty, wondering if that's against the rules. "Hinting is okay," he says, "you just can't get grabby."

He grabs my hair again and uses it to raise my mouth to his. He kisses me while also pulling my hair and growling slightly into my mouth, and I go back into thoroughly melted mode.

"Bring your legs up and hold them," he says, and I comply. "There are other positions that I generally like better than missionary, but for our first time, I want us to see each other's faces." I agree and gaze at him, letting some of what's in my heart come out of my eyes, letting him see the admiration, the fondness, and also the lust. It's a combination that most men like to have directed at them, and since I can't act for shit, it's lucky that that's how I feel about this particular man.

He kneels above me, then gently eases himself into me. I gasp "Yes" as I feel him enter me, and we stay still for a moment, just enjoying the feeling of being joined, after such a long time of being thousands of miles apart.

"I've waited a long time for this, and I'm not in the mood to be gentle. Can you take hard and fast?" he asks.

"Hard and fast is what I'd ask for at the moment, if I were given a choice," I say, and that's all it takes. He grabs my hair again as he starts to pound himself into me. I try to thrust myself up to meet him but he growls at me to lie still and be fucked, and I comply. The combination of his eyes on mine, his hand in my hair, the wonderfully hard fucking, and the simple fact of being together at last are so overwhelming that I'm afraid I might start crying, even though sad is the last thing I am. I don't want to freak him out, though, so I manage to suppress it and concentrate less on the emotional and more on the physical.

And the physical is very good, indeed. A lot of women seem to need clit stimulation to come, but I, well, I really like being fucked, and a man who's in the mood to do it as hard as he can will generally send me over the top in a very short time. I haven't asked him how thin his walls are or how nosy his neighbors are, and this is a serious oversight, because I can't be anything close to quiet, and I'm moaning and screaming in time with the sound of flesh slapping on flesh. We're both too excited to do this for very long, but we're both too excited to need very long, and soon I'm convulsing and making a noise rather like a dog barking, and shortly thereafter, he is making that peculiar strangled scream that so many men make when they come.