16. Finding the Balance

Had a comment on my last post. The post sort of jumped the track of my wandering narrative. The question was, how do Maymay and I strike a healthy balance in our relationship? 

We pay attention, and we talk a lot. We identify issues and do the work we think is best to solve them. And really, I think that’s it.

There is an idea that having a healthy relationship depends, in some way, upon finding the “right person,” but I’m not sure that’s true. I have had many healthy relationships in the past, and have many at the moment. I have even had relationships end in healthy ways. In every case, they were the right person for me at that time, for whatever it was we were doing.

And then, every relationship I’ve ever been in that was hurtful or unhealthy had issues stemming from problems in communication. Perhaps that’s why I’m so obsessed. And, perhaps that’s why I’m so neurotic, and why the self-awareness tag in this blog keeps growing.

And as for whether Maymay is the “right” person for me, right now, he is. And he continues to be, in a way I’ve never seen before. We are suited to each other in the long term, which is why we’re pushing four years together and we’re still talking, every single day.

15. Time Apart

Before I moved in with Maymay I had never shared a room with another person. I had never had a roommate, or split an apartment that wasn’t housing under the jurisdiction of an educational institution. And considering that I moved in about five weeks after I met him, it still surprises me to this day that our living situation has never gone horribly wrong.

One of our recent challenges has been working from home together. The biggest hurdle at the moment is that our sleep schedules are absolutely fucked. It has been rare for me in the past few weeks to hit my pillow before 4am. Maymay does the same. That means we miss a lot of mornings. 

I sleep less than he does. And I wake up more quickly. Truth be told, had my lifestyle not unfolded in such a way that being a night owl is intrinsic to my interests and company, I would be a morning person. I like mornings. I wake up quickly. I write better in the morning. (But I write sexier in the night. Go figure.)

It’s hard for me to work and spend the day with May at the same time. And I have been feeling on the antsy side. There are many reasons we might spend time together or apart. But with living together, working together, being attached to each other, it gets a little much. 

We have been scheduling time apart from one another our entire relationship. That that works well. It means that we’re assured of our own spaces. We have been doing that, of late. It works well. It keeps me balanced. It makes me hungry for him when I come back home.

He is still asleep as I write this. I am going to the beach today. (Even though it looks like it might rain.) I am tempted not to wake him up before I go; he looks so lovely in his sleep. The thing is, it’s good to go my own way for a while. But in truth, I miss him. I miss him even when he’s right next to me. I miss his skin on mine.

10. Chains

Hmm. Missed a day or two in there somewhere. But that’s all right. Good things are afoot outside the computer screen, and if I could only manage to work as hard as I play everything would be golden.

Yesterday morning I woke May up very slowly. He wakes up one slitted eye at a time, very sleek and small. “C’we try the three corners chains on’a'bed?” he mumbled. 

We have a few lengths of chain lying about. Advantages: cheap, incredibly adjustable. Disadvantages: Very loud on the bedframe. Also, dealing with padlocks. The real advantage: He loves them, I love him in them.

I found padlocks and unearthed keys from our keysafe and my jewelry box, and chained him down in a spreadeagle. He had barely opened his eyes, and was smiling and moving against them like a lazy sloth. I put a blanket over him, another over me, and crawled on top of him. I curled up on his chest, put my face in the hollow of his shoulder, and we fell asleep that way. Both of us blissed out, him drifting, me cozy. Perfect.

4. The Way of Small Things

I have a touch of claustrophobia, at times. I will not be bound. I will bite if I cannot move, and when I take up space I stretch so far my joints make popcorn noises. 

Maymay, on the other hand, blisses out in tiny spaces. One night I folded his arms over his chest in a cross and tied them down that way. I’ve never seen him smile so wide. In bed, he wraps the blankets ’round himself like a burrito, or wedges his ass into my belly and folds his body into every nook and cranny of my own. Even day to day, in the way he sits and stands and walks, there is restraint. He holds his lips in, sometimes, and it makes me a little bit regretful because he has such lovely lips.

I joke that he is pocket sized. I want to create some sort of sac that I could fold him into, like fetal mummification. We play sometimes that he is verysmall and I am verylarge.

It is only when he sleeps that his restraint truly relaxes. When I wake up in the morning and shut off my alarm before he can roll over, he will be tumbled out along the sheets all fingers, legs, loose and parted lips. Then he is slinky long, and looks like a grown up, or a statue in white stone.

Kissing Gravity

We wake up in the late morning as the Saturday sun starts to make a nuisance of itself. I find the time on the clock by my bed, then I look at him, and lose it. He is folded like a bud and pressed against my side. I pull him over and he blossoms lazily. 
We kiss. It is a good kiss.
We kiss for an hour. It doesn’t get too hot, we don’t become sticky as the room heats and the sun gleams through the shade. Our skin stays dry and we alternately lock together and slip apart and lock again. He lays on his side and I tuck my feet around his ankles, my leg around his ass, my arm around his shoulder and our fingers interlaced.
He turns and presses his belly and lips into mine, and for a moment he is like a baby monkey clinging to my body. Then I pull him up on top of me and bring his face in close. I find and lose track of the time again. We kiss like the weekend lasts forever and the afternoon hasn’t come. We kiss as though the sun is frozen.
We spend another hour playing games. I roll on top of him and hold his body to the thin mattress with my thighs, like I’m the weight that stops him from floating sheer away.
Then he rolls back, and curls along the line of me, runs his face into my cheekbone and his beard into the softness of my neck. 
At one point, as we kiss, I take his arm from where it rests by his ear and stretch it up, pin it to the pillow with a crushing grip. He gasps for the first time, gives me that parted-lip smile that makes his eyes roll back in his head. He moves his body under me and flutters the fingers of his other hand. Soon I have him pinned from his fingers to his knees. He opens his mouth as we kiss again, hungry. 
When he kisses me I think we are planets falling into one another’s gravity; some spinning force has got us in a death grip. The world stops beyond the bed. We exist to kiss, and nothing else. 
The light is fading when he slides his fingers down, and we kiss again, and I come. I scream a little. He comes. He screams more that I do, his eyes screwed closed. 
We break apart and lay on our backs, and look at the ceiling, and laugh. Then we leave the bed and go out into the afternoon. We hunt for breakfast as we watch the sun come down.

Sex and Nachos

One night a few weeks ago I’m sitting on our thin foam mattress bed trying to catch up with my email. When May pushes the front door open he makes all the familiar sounds: his keys clink-clank, his shoes thud on the carpet, he puts his iPod on the front table with a click and hangs his underwear over the arm of the couch. Every night, the same little clatter.

He comes to the bedroom naked and curls up on the matress like a June bug. He starts banging his forehead into my thigh.

“Yes, may I help you?” I say, petting his hair.

“Can we have sex?” he says, all hopeful.

I pet his hair. “No thank you, dear.”

He goes and gets his iPod from the table and wedges his ass tight against my knee as he checks his Twitter feeds. A minute passes.

“Now can we have sex?” he says, in his best little-boy voice, like I have cinnamon rolls hiding under the blankets. Pretty pretty please with a cherry on top?

I finish my email, put my computer on the floor and roll him over, rubbing my face and hair into his. I pitch my voice high and smile while I make fun of him. “ Can we now, can we now, huh? No? Hoooow ‘bout now? No? Now? Now?” And he laughs and hides his face in the pillow. I throw the sheets on the floor, lace my hand through his hair and drag him downward with one hand. With the other hand I awkwardly pull down on the elastic of my cotton boy-cut briefs. They are one of my oddest pairs of underwear; they have bananas printed on them.

He goes in soft with his long tongue, and has just made contact when I start screeching. The long wiry hairs of his beard are brushing in little circles over the sweet-spot skin of my ass. “Augh! It tickles, stop, it tickles!” I writhe back and forth and try not to laugh so hard. “Get off!” I plant a hand on his forehead and he goes back in a jumble on the edge of the bed while I try to start breathing again. When I stop laughing I crook my finger at him.

He comes back firm this time, and that goes well until his beard starts to brush my bum again and I squeeze my eyes shut trying not to laugh. For a little while it works, but soon I can feel the tiny bits of laughing tears start to gather. I’m trying frantically to swat them down with the incoming buzz of juices.

I give up. I pull him up, reach over to the desk drawer, and toss a condom in his face. It hits him on the nose, and that’s too much. I laugh hysterically while he rolls it on. He drizzles lube over his penis with a wrist flick like a dessert chef, and once he’s inside me I stop laughing.

It’s sweet, slow. I have a hand on the small of his back and I can feel the sharp line where his skinny hipbones dig into my inner thighs. My feet flop a little in the air, and then I pull them up to my chest. I push him out so that he has to hold himself up with his arms like a seal, and as I look at the gap between our bodies inspiration strikes.

I scoop the Hitachi from the side of the bed and wriggle it down into that little rounded space. He grins at me. I flip the switch.

Nothing happens. “Shit,” I say. I realize I unplugged the damn thing the night before to charge my cell phone. I pull it out of the way. “Plug that back in?”

He reaches over me, his penis still inside me at an awkward angle that makes me want to giggle again, and feels along the crack of the bed.

“What am I doing?” he says, bewildered.

I try to explain. I paint little pictures with my hands. “Take the thing that is plugged in, unplug it, then take the other thing that is unplugged and plug it in.” It’s perfectly clear in my mind.

He tries again. “Yeeeeaaa,” he says eventually, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I push him off and weave my hand through the bed frame to the plug, make all the right connections and pull him back inside me as I’m turning. I slap his ass and smirk as I flip the switch again. “Let’s get up to speed here, boything!”

The wand comes on. In a few minutes, while he watches and thrusts and sighs, I start screaming low in my throat, because my clit feels like it is under attack from an invading army and has chosen to run in six different directions. I grab the sheet and twist with my free hand, and come in waves that, amazingly, don’t stop. Between our legs things get wetter, and warmer.

The final spasms push his penis backward, and as I lay and quiver-twitch he runs a finger up my side. “Can I go back in?” he says. That same voice from before, a boy begging for sweets.

I put my fist in his hair and tuck him tight into the bend of my shoulder. When he comes he tries to get away, for air. I press his face further into my skin.

Afterward we lay gasping together for a little while. I sit up before I fall asleep, feeling the heat seep out of my body and into the room that is getting colder every second. I poke him; he’s dozing with his mouth open in a little half-moon smile.

“I like having sex with you,” he says.

“I like having sex with you too,” I answer.

“Damn,” he says as he sits up. “I’m starving. How long did that sex take us?” I pull my cell phone from the dresser and flash him the screen. Two hours. “Damn,” he says again.

He goes to the kitchen and makes a plate of nachos. When he comes back I’m writing.

“What’re you writing about?” he says with his mouth full.

“Sex,” I say. I steal one of his nachos.

“Are you writing about the sex we just had?”

“Yes. Damn.” The residual nacho grease makes my fingers slip on the keyboard.

“That’s very meta of you,” he smiles. We are very meta people. He gets out his iPod again and rechecks his Twitter feeds. After a little while he turns back to me.

“I like having sex with you.”

I smile. “You mentioned that, my love.”

He pokes at my arm with his finger. “Also,” he says, and his voice goes round and little again. “Also, I like the cryptography script I made today.” He looks at me like a puppy, so I reach over and pet him. His eyes sink gently closed and his eyelashes flutter as he smiles. I lean toward him.

“Silly sexy boything,” I say softly, just before we kiss.

37. Chibi Emo Indignation!

One of the characteristics of my relationship with Maymay that does not generally make the blogging consciousness is that we are adorable. Seriously, we are cuter together than two sugar-crazed five-year-olds on a cotton candy bender. Although in many ways our interactions mimic the kink of age play, our “small spaces” are primarily non-sexual. Instead, they are a sort of relaxation time in our relationships. A resting rate.

But not only are these moments cute, they are a little bit ridiculous. They make us sound insane. We have actually had people cross the street when they hear us coming.

As an example, today Maymay accidently dressed entirely in black, with black Converse sneakers. When he bounded up the stairs to the bar where we met for dinner, I laughed out loud. “Hello, emo boy,” I said when I caught my breath. He stuck out his lip and narrowed his eyes.

Later, as we walked home, he clasped both hands around my arm and tucked his head down on my collarbone as we walked. I nuzzled his hair with my cheekbone. “You are a wiggler,” I said.

“I protest that you are the one who wiggles!” he declared, his voice high pitched and muffled in my shoulder.

I started laughing. That’s the thing about small spaces. They are silly, and odd, but mostly they are gleeful.

“You’re like a tiny chibi emo,” I said to him.

“Chibi emo!’ he chirruped back.

“If you’re a chibi emo, shouldn’t you be crying tiny, adorable tears?”

He shook his head and said forcefully, “Just because I’m a chibi emo doesn’t mean I have to cry all the time!”

I grinned at him. “Oh my! Chibi emo rage!”

He pulled away from me and crossed his arms in a small, exaggerated huff. “You’re mocking my chibiness! How could you do such a thing?”

I started laughing harder. “Chibi emo indignation!”

And he stopped there on the sidewalk, threw back his head, and wrapped his arms around his stomach as he laughed. “That’s it,” he declared. “Chibi-emo-indignation: the cuteness quota has been reached. Officially, if we get any cuter, the world is going to explode.”

I wrapped my palm around his soft, dry fingertips and started walking again. He bumped his shoulder into my side. “I love you,” I said.

“Yay!” he said back. “I love you too.”

11. Precious

Saturday night I pulled May up from the beige carpeted floor of our living room and onto our rough blue couch. He was wearing thin satin panties. A garter, a slippery nightgown. Pretty things. Pretty boy.

I held my lips over the skin of his throat and growled, feeling my lips peel back from my teeth. I climbed on top of him and ran my fingers through the air around his skin. He writhed upward, trying to make contact somewhere. Anywhere. I hid my laughter in his curls. He moaned. The bright pink tip of his cock slipped out the waist of the satin, and waved back and forth in the air.

After a little while I caught him up in a little ball, his legs folded close to his chest and my arms around his entire body. He tucked his chin down to his collar bone and looked up at me. Red eyelashes. He has red eyelashes. His mouth was trembling open, his eyes enormous.

“I love that look,” I murmured to him, just to watch him being sweet and coy. He flutters those eyelashes sometimes, when he’s pretty, when I compliment him. It goes right through my chest like a dart when he does that. I pressed my lips to his cheekbone, right at the corner of his eye. I smiled in his ear.

“You are so beautiful, precious, precious boy.”

When Does It Get Better?

Last night I drove up the West Side Highway with Rona. Technically she drove, I fluttered from a late night adrenaline attack, and we talked, loud and long. I said something then that stuck with me:

How can my life be simultaneously so fucking easy and so fucking hard?

I have a family I love, who loves me. I am overwhelmingly grateful. And yet, thinking of my travel plans for the holiday makes me feel ill.

My discussion with my family member broached a topic that I have not yet touched upon. A large, I might even say central topic. A topic with soft skin and red hair.

Yes, of course. Mixed up in this whole damn mess is the boy I love.

There was a question broached, some months ago, about whether May would accompany me to my family’s for a portion of this holiday season. I broached this question, I believe, in early September. I understand now why I never got a straight answer.

I was told at the time to make my own decision. This infuriated me; I felt it entirely unfair to be asked to make decisions about other people’s homes and lives, in a potentially explosive situation, with absolutely no input from the people involved.

Last Sunday, in the afternoon before May and I talked, I called my family member’s home. After some brief, friendly conversation I asked the question.

“Should he come up with me? It’s okay if he shouldn’t,” I added quickly. “I just want to know what you think, and if he shouldn’t then I’ll just go home to New York a little earlier, so I can spend the holidays with both of you.”

I felt as though my heart was choking me, asking this question. I thought of the email, that stupid joke that made me laugh. I thought Maybe it’s really all right.

“I know you said it’s my decision, but I really think it’s unfair to ask me to make that decision. I would appreciate some guidance.” I closed my eyes.

They paused on the other end of the line. “I guess you should go back to New York, then.”

“Okay,” I said. “I will. Thank you. That helps. That’s all I wanted to know.”

When I hung up the phone I pressed my hand to my forehead for a second. Silly girl, you knew better. Nothing has actually changed.

It didn’t actually hit me until I was sitting on the subway platform. Suddenly I curled up in a ball and started crying, leaning over the hard bench. May made a distressed noise and rubbed my back.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. He walked to the booth a few feet down the platform, bought something, and came back. It was a fashion magazine; one of my silly guilty pleasures. He smiled as he handed it to me.

“Here,” he said. “A distraction.”

I smiled, then laughed slowly. I thanked him, kissed him.

You stupid shit, I thought to myself as I flipped through the pages. It was far too soon to ask that question.

Graduate Level

So. I had been presented with two problems which, although intimately linked, I chose to deal with separately. These problems mirror consistent, resonant issues in alternative sexual communities of all kinds.

The first problem: Someone I love thought (thinks?) I’m immoral and sick, based upon what they’ve read and seen here in this blog.

The second problem: There is a possibility that my public words and actions will negatively affect my life, career, or personal safety.

Well, first things first.

I want to talk about why people attack us.

One of the comments on my previous post cited a religious irony. True, religious groups often attack alternative sexualities.

However, in my case this is not relevant. We are not a religious family. Perhaps because of this, perhaps because of other influences, my family member and I actually have similar attitudes on sex. The crux of our issues, it seems, focused specifically around the themes of pain, violence, and consent.

I knew I was not being attacked out of hatred. I knew, intellectually and viscerally, that I was embroiled in a troubled but loving relationship.

With the blog still down, I started pouring over the old entries. What does this look like to my family? I kept thinking. I started identifying problems.

My blog details my experiences with kink, and I’m aware that my experiences with kink are not par of the course for my age group. My blog relates episodes that evidence my preference to play hard and my skill in doing so.

I had a good conversation with Maja while I was going over these ideas. “I mean, yea,” she said, “Your blog’s pretty intense.”

“401 class?” I replied snarkily. “I have a graduate level kink blog?”

She laughed. “Right.”

When presented with the idea of abandoning kink, I said that it would never be an option. Why not? I literally dismissed the idea that I could give up being kinky without a second thought.

Would I have done that when I was just starting out? Where did that security come from?

An easy question. That security comes from six years of BDSM experience.

Six years of experience means that I’m writing from an assured, educated, well-rounded perspective. But it also means that I’m writing contextually from within that experience. This works perfectly if I assume that I have a sympathetic audience; the things I say are based within a common framework that kinky people share.

This means that the words I use have subtext. The events I write about have unseen protections. The ideas I present have history, and complex ramifications that I don’t always address.

As critical as I am of communicating without establishing appropriate subtexts, I have to admit I am a little ashamed of myself.

I know it would make a pretty story for me to come out and say I’ve risen above oppression by rejecting those who falsely accuse me, all in a blaze of righteousness and glory. But you know what? I won’t.

I do not think I was falsely accused. I think that if we’re going to go around assigning blame in this particular situation, some of it belongs to me.

We all use words without establishing their subtext, and it works for us because we’re familiar with the community that gives us cultural context. My blog exists within a vast network of other blogs and sites that speak on similar topics. My personal life plays out around hundreds of other people with similar ideas and interests.

Additionally, we assume that our blogs will be read by a self-selecting audience. Either this audience will have a genuine interest in our topics, or a genuine interest in us. Unfortunately, these two types of audience members don’t always intersect; our blogs are read by people who have no understanding of or sympathy with our topics, but who will continue reading (or censoring, or attacking) because they’ve taken an interest in us, personally. Family, friends, employers.

Most of us approach the process of information exchange from a modern, web-based perspective. Information is no longer presented to us in complete, self-sufficient volumes. Rather, we exchange information in small packets which link dynamically to other packets, creating the context upon which our ideas rest.

I hesitate to cite a generational influence here; I realize that I’m young within my own community. But it seems fair to say that where I see dynamic linking and packet exchange, my family member may see a single, isolated volume.

You, the people who read my blog, are under no obligation to read other blogs, nor to educate yourselves upon the history, issues, or best practices of BDSM. I think we have to acknowledge that dynamic, self-driven education will not always occur naturally, and is much less likely to occur when the reader is taking a personal interest in us, rather than in our topics.

This means that the people most in need of establishing a cultural context before judging us personally are, in fact, the people least likely to do so.

My family member read accounts of sadism and saw pictures of blood, and came to the same conclusions I might come to if presented with such things independently. Independently, some of the things we do and say are scary as hell.

It seemed, as I had suspected, that my initial impulse would become my plan of action.

Initially my instinct was that I would continue writing, do some hard thinking on what I say and how I say it, and in the meantime try to open a dialogue with my family member that might allow them to put my 401 graduate level blog within a framework of elementary knowledge.

I would prove myself sane, not by backing down or changing myself, but by changing the way I present myself.

This is an easy resolution to make, but hard to carry through. I couldn’t bring myself to make such an awkward phone call. I began writing a very long, very passionate letter. I asked people around me to recommend books and resources, and debated how to send them. With a little note? With my letter? Briefly I flirted with the idea of giving the books as Christmas gifts, but rejected that as cruel and melodramatic.

Why did I (do I) assume that my family member would want to be educated? Doesn’t that seem presumptuous?

When I started writing and exploring my sexuality, I did very little to hide my interests or activities from my family. I saw my actions, my development and beliefs, and took pride in them. I assumed that my family, similar in their basic principles and sharing my inquiring mind, would come to the same conclusions.

This assumption turned out to be wrong, with shattering results. I forgot that one crucial piece of the equation: that the assumption was based on information we didn’t share.

But the inquiring minds remain. I have faith in inquiring minds.

I had begun to examine the situation within the baseline of a loving, troubled relationship. Again, it came to my rescue.

They emailed me, a single line: “I love you.” The lines of communication were open.