22. In Wild

Once upon a time on a summer afternoon, the very first week May and I moved in together, he decided to try and teach me to rollerblade. Between the bumps and the concrete and the massive, amazing bruise the size and shape of a cantaloupe, I did, in fact, learn to do so. But curiously, what I remember about that day is not so much the speed and the bruising, but the distinct absence of D/s. We’d been together what? Three weeks? And yet we were already so far into D/s roles that the absence of them was noticeable, like a change in the air. It wasn’t bad, no. Just different.

Today we rode a winding train out into the Blue Mountains, hiked along the edge of a yellow-gold cliff dropping off into a massive valley, and then took a pitched-steep staircase down and down and down again to the floor of the cool, dark rainforest. Then we caught a cable car back up into the skyline, and, wandering back into the little town, ended up in an amazing cafe, with dark wood walls and no right angles. And as we walked, climbed, and ran, May was small. He was precious, he was my own. Sometimes I can’t figure out if I’m an outdoor-loving-dominant-girlfriend trying to drag my boything along with my adventures, or an out-of-breath adult trying to keep up with an exuberant six-year-old romp.

Interlude

On the platform of the Inner West line at Central station a few nights ago, May grabbed my hand and pointed. “Look!” he said excitedly.

A few yards ahead of us, a tall, skinny boy dressed in black was walking slowly. He had long arms, long legs, broad shoulders, and his face, turned briefly, was pale-skinned and pretty. These things, however, I noticed only in retrospect.

He had thick hair the brilliant color of red gold. It cascaded off his shoulders and trailed down his back in wavy sheets, thick, curly pools of hair that ended just below the small of his back. It was the most beautiful hair I’d ever seen.

I stared, open-mouthed. My body tingled in simple lust.

May started off, deliberately tracking the boy down the platform. I hissed at him to stop, but followed. The boy paused by some benches, and May and I took up places a little ways away.

May was watching me, grinning. “Why don’t you go talk to him?” he said.

I shook my head. “I’m not going to go up to some totally random stranger.”

“Come on,” he urged. “Just say hello.”

I stood awkwardly, watching as the beautiful boy took his headphones from his bag and began to fiddle with an iPod. Behind me, our train started pulling into the station. My stomach felt tight, knotted up like wet rope. I dipped a hand into my bag and pulled a card from my wallet.

Almost collapsing from the sudden stage fright, I crossed the platform and edged into the boy’s vision. I flashed him a smile, and he returned it as he took his headphones from his ears.

“Hi,” I said. “I know you must hear this a lot, but your hair is really remarkable. I think it’s gorgeous.”

“I do hear that a lot. Thanks.” His voice was light. My eyes edged the clear lines of his cheekbones. His beard precisely matched the red-gold of his hair. “I hope I brightened your evening,” he said.

“You definitely did.” I held out the card. Behind me my train’s doors were opening. I could see May watching me, smiling. “Give me a call sometime if you’d like to get coffee or something.” I held out the card, and as he took it skipped back across the platform and nipped through the closing doors of the train.

I followed May to a pair of seats and collapsed, suddenly shaking. “Oh God,” I groaned, “I can’t believe I just did that. I’ve never done that before.”

“What’d he say?” May asked eagerly. I focused on relaxing the pit in my stomach as I told him. Suddenly I started laughing.

May was startled. “What’s funny?”

I wrapped my arms around my middle as I laughed. “Is that what meeting people is usually like?” I turned to him and made a face. “God, that sucks.

Postmodern? Part 1

This weekend May and I went to a play party. It took us three weeks in the country to find a place to play. It does, of course, help to know people.

The party invitation called for “Fetish formal.” Facing our new built-in closet, May wrinkled his nose in frustration. “I hate dress codes,” he repeated, pulling on a transluscent grey tank top that matched his pants. He posed in front of the full length mirror. “Is this okay? It’s not even black.”

“You look great, love,” I said. I enjoyed the way the shirt framed his shoulder muscles.

A party with a fetish formal dress code makes both of us wary. I wondered if there would be play, at what level, if we’d be interested, interesting. What was the age group, what was the space like, what was the ratio? Should we bring our whips, the rope, the knives?

When we met Ms160 and Sol on the corner, we had no large toys with us. I’d stuck my villainelles, tiny hand-made steel points that Switch and Boy so beautifully created, in my purse. We piled into the backseat of their car and drove the few minutes to the party through dark, small streets. We all laughed at Sol’s brilliant parking job in front of a high wooden fence.

Ms 160 led us to a row of nondescript doors. “Damn, I don’t remember which it is.” We stood awkwardly between two buildings, debating the decency or indecency of knocking on some stranger’s door at 10pm in full fetish gear.

Across the street some guys and girls were hanging off a porch, drinking from green bottles. I peered up the stairs behind a screen door that was propped open. A girl, one of their friends I thought, with more green bottles, saw me peeking in. “You’re the next one over,” she smiled, coming down the stairs. “You can knock. They’ve got a doorman.”

“The outfits gave it away, right?” I thanked her.

The doorman, in a tuxedo, ushered us up the stairs into a beautifully done up apartment, decked with candles, pottery, plants, dramatic lighting. I felt distinctly as though I should avoid moving quickly for fear of breaking the place, or burning it down. We dropped our coats, retrieved drinks from the elegantly laid table, and circulated through the building. Ms 160 introduced me and May right and left. Characteristically, names dropped from my head as fast as they entered. I complimented our hostess on her veil, made cleverly of metal wire and rhinestones and glittering like a Mardi Gras mask.

Eventually May, Ms160, Sol and I found ourselves in the dungeon, testing out the frames of the equipment and picking up toys from the rack to slap them against our arms. “They run this as a B&B,” Ms160 said, “So you can rent the whole thing out for a night, close it off and have your own private dungeon.” She pointed out the TV stand with a built in cage. There was another cage under the bed. The floors were hard tile, which I regretted, thinking of the possibility of flinging May against the ground.

At one point my boy ran up to me excitedly. “They have tie points in the shower!

At another, I chatted in the hallway with a young blonde woman, laughing and enjoying a respite from feeling socially awkward. “I’m assigned to the door,” she said, “so I just try and snag people as they go by and get them to entertain me!” May joined us a moment later.

“This place is really nice,” he said, gesturing toward the dungeon. “It’s very schmantz” -our private word for fancy- “and postmodern.”

“You just called the dungeon postmodern,” I glanced at him.

He wriggled a little. “Yes, so?”

I raised an eyebrow. “You just called the dungeon postmodern.” Our new blonde friend dissolved in laugher.

After a little while we grew to miss our singletails. The boys were sent into the night to fetch them. Ms 160 and I climbed the stairs to the upstairs living room, settled on a couch and watched as a woman in a zippered black latex dress was tied to a beautiful wooden x-cross lacquered in red and hung with silk. In the meantime, Ms160 told me the amusing story of the male dom who had started a fashion trend of wearing leather chaps, thus confusing all of the dominant women at the party, who suddenly found themselves surrounded by dominant men with their bums hanging out.

A lovely boy in just such chaps passed by us occasionally, offering tidbits of food on a tray and occasionally stopping to say hello. Watching him leave, I decided I might very well be warming to the aesthetics of ass-less trousers.

Eventually our boys came back. The whips came with them.

Heads up, the second half of this story will be passworded.

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Two And A Half

Today May and I are celebrating our 2 1/2 year anniversary. I wouldn’t usually be one for half-year celebrations, but if the truth be told, we never actually got around to celebrating our 2 year anniversary, six months ago.

I’m home sick with uterine cramps (which yes, can be excruciating), my computer is on the fritz and has been missing for two weeks whilst I tap my thoughts out on a painfully bad keyboard, and it’s raining.

May is here with me, working from home, fiddling away with code. He made breakfast. We took a walk in the rain. Tonight I will make him dress up in a nice shirt. We’ll go out to dinner, we’ll be cute and fluffy and drink margaritas. We’ll come home and watch a movie. I’ll carve my name into his flesh and leave bruises on his skin like perfect painted fingerprints.

It is really just a good, sweet, ordinary day.

Monday evening May and I presented our sexual teasing and denial class for Conversio Virium. In doing this we have come remarkably full circle, as prettily as though Fate had planned it so.

I like telling stories, if you hadn’t guessed. So all right. Here’s the story of how two kinky people meet each other, the story we don’t tell when we’re asked, “So how did you two meet?” We have a prefabricated version for such situations, a bland dry tale about a party and a movie date, crumbs of the truth scattered through it.

In comparing notes, it seems that the two years before May and I actually met each other are a series of near misses. May went to CV regularly, every Monday night, about five years ago, until the tiny size of the group and his increasing indifference to the social scene made him give it up. Three weeks later I came to my first meeting.

A year after that, May was called back for one meeting, to bottom for a singletail demo. I was busy that night, maybe out of town. I missed CV for the first time in months.

I was invited to several scene parties. May was apparently a regular guest at these gatherings. I went to one party, but knew no one and soon moved on to other social groups. May missed that party; one of the only ones he ever missed.

And throughout this time, all over my conversations with people who knew us both, was the question, “Haven’t you met Maymay yet? You’d like him.”

“So I’m told,” I would answer.

Finally success, practically accidental in nature. I was asked, with another member of CV, to present on teasing and denial. This happened through no expertise of my own, nothing more than my obvious enthusiasm when the topic came up in conversation. I knew literally almost nothing. I knew that when I held my lips a fraction of an inch away from a man’s mouth and kept them there, eventually he would moan, beg, strain desperately to close that gap, to make the kiss connect. I knew it made me melt to do this.

A scheduling mistake. Sunday night, three weeks before the presentation, an email to the group. Apparently, teasing and denial was on the docket for the very next day. In a panic and a flurry of email exchanges late into the night, we get it sorted. However, there is no time to send a new email.

The next night I showed up to CV exhausted, caught in thesis frenzy. I had come straight from my studio, and had paint on my hands, my clothes, my body. We apologized to the group. A few faces fell. Maymay’s was among them.

He had come back to Conversio Virium after seeing an email that the group was presenting on this topic, something that he was passionately interested in and had never seen a presentation on. After the meeting he flagged me down and told me how excited he was to see me present in three weeks time. “Oh, you’re Maymay!” I remember saying.

Apparently, we had a long conversation. I say “apparently” because, I shit you not, I don’t remember a word of it. Apparently it was nice. Apparently we hit it off. Apparently Maymay thought I was dandy.

Sometimes I make him tell me all the nice things he thought about me that night, all over again.

Maymay liked me. He decided we should get to know each other. So what did he do?

He seduced me.

That’s right. He seduced me.

The seduction went down, so to speak, at a play party that weekend. Finally, we were at the same party. I watched as in the corner Maymay was kissed and handled by a boy who looked like Peter Pan. I got involved in a hair pulling scene with two friends of mine. I and another girl sandwiched a proper British boy between us on the couch and pulled his hair until his gasps could be heard even over the music. Maymay and the Peter Pan boy found this fascinating, and came to watch.

“What are they doing?” Peter Pan asked our British Boy.

“It’s hard to explain,” he answered.

Maymay sat down next to me, quietly. He leaned in, said hello.

“Hello,” I said. “You have amazing hair.” He did have amazing hair, long, fiery curls to his shoulders. He leaned in farther.

“Can I pull it?” I asked. He nodded. I ran my fingers through it, tracing the back of his scalp.

In the most forward gesture he had ever made, May leaned over and snuggled his head into my lap. He closed his eyes and let out little cries of pleasure as I pulled his beautiful hair.

I left the party at 5am. Before I climbed into bed that night, I checked my blogs. May already had an entry up, and a little stab of disappointment went through me to see that I was not in it. Oh well, I thought. At least I met him.

Silly me.

The new date for the teasing and denial class came rushing toward us. My presentation partner and I were struggling over how to create a demonstration. I mean, really, how do you demonstrate sexual teasing and denial in a space that prohibits not only sexual contact, but the display of genitalia? Eventually an idea was formed. We emailed Maymay, and asked him if he would consider being a demo bottom for the class. I knew from our previous conversation that he owned a CB-3000. (Why I retained that piece of knowledge and none of the rest of the conversation, I do not know.) Would he be willing, we asked, lock himself in his chastity belt for a week and give me the key?

His email response was long and excited. Its basic contents: “Hell yes!”

We tossed emails back and forth with the rapidity of similar minds. The meeting, Monday April 11th, came and went. I strung the key on a chain around my neck. The next day he emailed me again. A movie? Sin City was playing. Maybe we could . . . ?

Hell yes.

Thursday night we met for dinner and a movie. I remember recognizing the halo of May’s hair in the neon glow of 41st street.

We started talking and didn’t stop. After the movie we talked so far into the night I offered him my bed to avoid a 4am subway ride. The next morning we had breakfast. We talked. We took a stroll. We talked. The stroll turned longer; eventually we had walked eight miles in a vast loop around the city. We could not stop talking. Friday night I had an 8pm show to attend. He walked me to the theatre. At 7:55, seeing him go was almost painful. In the past 24 hours we had only stopped talking for the brief time the movie was playing, to sleep a few hours, and for a bright stretch of time in the night, before bed. I thought on those bright moments as I watched him walk away.

That night I had seduced him.

Exhibit A

In some ways I am a very bad New Yorker. I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty. I’ve never set foot in Rockerfeller Center. I’ve never visited half of the places I’d like to, half the places I’m supposed to. I am holding on to my New Yorker title by tenuous threads.

Saturday afternoon I finally, after six years in this city, made my way to The Museum of Sex.

Currently the Museum of Sex is running an exhibit entitled “Kink.” Supposedly, it is about BDSM. In reality, it is about fetish. I would guess that the curator would not know why I make that distinction. I would in fact guess that the curator is not kinky. But that is all right. It was enjoyable. May and I read about mud and macro fetishes, about how domination and submission are expressed in wolves, and peered curiously into the yiff tubes of plush stuffed animals. I applauded the way the exhibit handled their section on rape play. I was pissed that their leather sample was made from fake leather.

We followed the dark back staircase up and around, and wound our way through the history of pornography in film. I got a crash course in sexploitation films, and kept having to pull May away from screens of cute boys having sex, often pictured with demin around their knees and surrounded by the remnants of tight white tshirts. On the top floor we wandered through a sampling of the permanent collection, stopping on a bench to watch a film on a man who creates brilliant animated robot sex.

“I would have that in my house,” May said, indicating a series of graphic sex acts done in holograms, so that the images appeared only from specific angles. I was amused watching people walk by them and jump in surprise.

“No,” I answered.

“Why not?”

“I hate holographic art,” I answered. Although really, the content would be okay, maybe for a bedroom, I thought.

On the other side of the wall I pushed a red button and grinned in glee when a fucking machine next to me rumbled in to life. “Hee! Awesome.” The security guard chuckled with me.

The museum itself was enjoyable, small, and worth a second visit after new exhibits come through. Far more entertaining were the people, a constantly flowing crowd, mostly my age, maybe a little younger here, a little older there. It seems that in my age group the common reaction to sex is still to point and laugh. I almost don’t know why I was surprised.

I watched the people migrate, yelping and jumping, pointing and calling to their friends. Come look at this, look at that guy, what’s that a picture of, how does this work, are those really robots?” And even That’s disgusting!

And most often of all: Eewwww. Gross.

Oh, right, I thought to myself. Outlaw culture.

As May and I were walking down 6th avenue after we’d been kicked back out into the night, I mused. “Places like that make me remember how strange we really are,” I said to him finally.

“Mmmhmm,” he answered.

The curious thing about being an adult is that I finally understand the subtleties of how the world sees children. I see how we’ve linked maturity and age, though I don’t always see why. And yet, where are the lines being drawn between sexual maturity and emotional maturity? What do we say to the people who’re fully capable of fucking all the live-long day, and probably do, but who still need to snigger and point at genitalia?

The people for whom sex is still a dirty, weird, amazing mystery.

In some ways I grew up so, so fast. Sometimes I don’t know if that’s a good thing.

Standing on the third floor of that museum, Saturday night in New York City, I was unable to shake the idea that I was surrounded by children. I haven’t felt so old in years.

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