Sometimes I wonder if he purposely provokes me. Most of the time I think not because the beast in me really scares him. It makes him glow like nothing else when he knows he is the reason for my greatest pleasure.
Part One: Chasing Opulence
The warmth of your hand
And the cold, gray sky
It fades to the distance
He looks at me sometimes with this smug expression.
I guess it is because he knows just how good he is. He likes to feel irreplaceable. In submission, I think, he enjoys the attention. He enjoys that my focus is so wrapped up in him that nothing else exists for me.
Even if that means enduring acts he finds extremely unpleasant.
It pleases him, on some level, just to know that I can’t take my eyes off of him.
And quite often, I can’t.
**
At the worst possible times.
The best man speech at his friend’s wedding. And he wasn’t even the one giving the speech, he was just listening.
All eyes, all attention was on the best man and his words. But I could not take my eyes off of the one sitting across from me. His tie was half undone, he was totally oblivious to my stare. I was looking at his mouth.
At times like that, I can get myself worked up into a frenzy in a matter of a few minutes, just watching, thinking, observing and planning.
He catches me staring and he does a double-take. He gives me that look.
I give him my own look back.
We never speak a word of it.
**
Those nights are the best.
I have a gun in the drawer.
It’s a weapon, and it scares me. He’s talking to me, in the bathroom, half undressing, half reflecting on the wedding.
I have a gun trained on the spot where he will exit the bathroom and both my hands are shaking. Even though the bullets are locked in a box on the other side of the apartment, and we both know that.
It still feels heavy in my hands. It still feels too big for a small woman in a light blue dress to be holding. It feels too heavy for a woman in thigh-high stockings and lacey things to be holding.
My thoughts are bigger than it is, though.
And when he comes out, he sees it, stops in his tracks, two hands up at his collar to start removing the tie. He says nothing, just looks at me, and his words just sort of halt.
I want to say something simple, say “It’s not loaded, it’s…it’s just me…do as I say,” but no words come out.
He knows, though. He’s seen this gig before. Just never with an unloaded pistol.
“Take off all of your clothes,” I say.
And I enjoy watching him strip for me. My hands are shaking more than his, and he moves with a slow, deliberate manner. Eyes on me the entire time. His shoulders alone seem to slowly slide out of the shirt, letting it drop to the floor. He wets his lips in perfect time, he breathes just the way I like it.
“Put your hands on your head,” I say when he is completely naked across the room. He does so slowly, with more deliberate ease, the tension in his arms making me ache.
I describe to him how he will make love to me. He listens with a nod, his bottom lip slightly sucked in like a cornered schoolboy.
And when we fuck, it lasts all night long.
**
There are times when you’d never guess there was a submissive bone in his body (I sometimes wonder if there really is), when he makes love to me from above with both of my wrists pinned above my head with one of his hands.
Strong, musician’s fingers that fit with ease around my small wrists, and I can’t do anything but enjoy the comfort of his strong frame. He holds me against him possessively enough to make me feel soft and feminine, he says weird, romantic things into my ear that I don’t even understand because his artistic words are beyond me.
I don’t tell him that at times like these I just imagine the next time he will be helpless for me, and how much I’ll enjoy seeing his eyes turn glassy.
This man that holds me down. I can make him cry.
**
And then there are mornings when I hide my head under the pillow because I can’t escape the noise that at other times I call music. Shutting doors, latching windows, sometimes even turning on the television to drown it out.
I understand the muse, and how an artist must succumb to it. That’s why I never stop him when he creeps out of our warm bed before the sun is even up, and I hear his bare feet creaking on the hardwood floors until he reaches the studio. I just hide under the down pillows and wish the muse would pass quickly.
When he returns to me, hours later, sitting on the edge of the bed to see if I am awake yet, I can’t help but want to torture him.
The lack of sleep, the time to mull over my fantasies, it always builds. Sometimes we wordlessly end up on the floor next to the bed because I like the way it feels on my naked back.
And then under the bed, I see it. A single tennis ball, hidden away next to a Sharper Image catalog. I squeal with delight as I take it into possession, and mid-thrust he sees it and groans, turning his head the other way.
Nothing else matters anymore. Not the smell of his skin, not the feel of his hair between my fingers, not the faint trace of coffee on his lips.
Just this single ball, such fascination, and the shaking of his head as he says, “No. No. No.”
**
The word “no.” is common for him. Most people think a submissive wouldn’t say no or isn’t allowed to. This is a very sad myth I think.
A child who is given everything she wants from the day she is born may be spoiled, but she loses any sense of value in her prize. Submission is devalued when it is so unconditional that the sense of giving cannot even be measured anymore.
He measures what he tolerates, I think, or more honestly he measures what he can handle.
When he says “No,” to the tennis ball, I may hold him by the chin and wrestle him until he accepts it.
When I lead him into the bedroom, taking him delicately by one finger (like a schoolgirl, as if to make him feel at ease thanks to my sweet innocence) and he sees an ominous array before him, his “no” may carry more weight.
I’m not saying we don’t fight about it.
“I can’t.”
“You will.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I need you to.”
“Don’t make me do this.”
“It’s important that you do this for me.”
“It’s important that you don’t make me do this for you.”
Stalemate. We stare at each other. He offers me ice cream.
Curled up in a ball next to him on the couch, I cry like a spoiled child denied. He strokes my hair and watches the nightly news. He knows it will pass.
He knows, also, that it will be worse the next time.
We compromise. Constantly.
**
I watch him do pushups from the side of the bed. Just ten of them, but they are ten for me. Propped up on two elbows, chin in my hands, I help him count them, and I tell him how I am going to masturbate later thinking about it.
Not missing a beat, he continues. He has heard this all before. He’s heard it on the phone, he’s watched it in the shower. He’s received notes scribbled on napkins at dinner parties, he’s received polaroids at work.
Sexually, nothing shocks him anymore from me.
“I masturbated with your rubber duck today when you were at work.”
He collapses on the floor midway, unable to stop from laughing.
But I am very serious. Offended, almost, like a toddler who told a story only to have grownups see it as a joke. “If you don’t believe me, go check!”
**
In reality, he is a snob.
He’s arrogant because he knows he has talent. He knows he can get any number of reactions from me at any time, he knows he can tame the beast unless really cornered and stripped down.
The respect we have for each other comes from realizing the power.
He realizes I enjoy – and am capable – of taking that away from him.
I realize that he has the power to take.
This is why it works for us.
Part Two: Chasing Arrogance
Resist, resist.
It’s from yourself
That you have to hide
His self-confidence is the reason I never tire of the domination game with him. Many men in my past had become less challenging, less engaging. Because with time they became less resistant, the submission was easy to pluck from them.
But it never is that way with him.
Sometimes I wonder if he purposely provokes me. Most of the time I think not because the beast in me really scares him. It makes him glow like nothing else when he knows he is the reason for my greatest pleasure.
When I find him alone in his study, flipping through a manual, his pencil between his teeth, I wonder if he can hear me, my footsteps creaking on the hardwood floor. No thigh-high boots, no black stiletto pumps. Just small bare feet and a soft nightgown. A victim of insomnia.
The sight of him, hair slightly disheveled, open text illuminated only by a small lamp next to the chair, somehow seems to purposely engage me.
My two hands slip over his eyes from behind, fingers interlocked, a familiar game of peek-a-boo so many couples play.
But with us, it is different.
He closes the manual without a word. He removes the pencil from between his teeth. He says, simply, “You’re up late.”
My hands remain there, covering his eyes. I just enjoy the sight of him that way as I look from behind him, catching a bit of his reflection on the computer monitor. “I can’t sleep. I need to have you.”
And that word — the word “have” – to us – is not the playful expression of couples preparing to frolic naked on the hardwood floor (although there are times for that, too). It is a word with a loaded meaning for us. A meaning he knows all too well.
I can sense his reaction in his body, even though I can’t see much of anything. But I feel his muscles tense a little, sense the change in his breathing. “Can I finish this chapter?” he asks. Quietly, politely. Not submissive, by any means. Just level.
When I lean down to kiss him, hands finally slipping away from his eyes and into his hair, I know he can tell from my mouth how serious it is. I kiss him deeply, possessively, and my hands clench tight enough in his hair to make him sit up straight, gasp halfway through the kiss and make a soft sound.
“Don’t be long,” I say.
**
We go to a lot of parties.
We go to parties for his job; we go to parties for my job. We split our time between high society functions where he fits in more than I do and the occasional dive party of a friend of a friend of a friend.
Sometimes, incredulously, we realize a few hours into it that neither of us knows anyone who is there.
Loud music. Breaking glass from the kitchen. A crowd just slightly younger than us. I watch him sitting on the edge of the couch drinking a beer from the bottle. A girl, probably no more than 20, is flirting with him.
I watch these things, amused as usual. Amused that he attracts them even though he looks so much more sophisticated than they do. They don’t mind that his clothes are nicer than theirs and they don’t mind his intellectual look. I tilt my head, just gazing, as I watch him push those glasses up a little because he’s looking slightly down a little bit.
That’s not to say I don’t do my share of flirting. He catches me spying a young college boy time and time again, he sees me use one hand to push them up against the wall possessively just to see them react. Sometimes I see him shake his head at me, wave a hand, and go into another room to find someone to play cards with.
He fears no one when it comes to losing me. Because there is not an ounce of fear left in him for that.
**
Sometimes, he even picks out the boys for me. That party, on his third beer, because there was nothing else to drink, he leaned against the wall and motioned, with an elbow of all things, toward a beautiful creature at the other side of the room.
“I saw you looking at him awhile ago.”
“I think he’s gay,” I say sadly, looking up at him, watching him take a long, deliberate swig from the beer. Slightly out of character for the man I know, he uses his sleeve briefly to wipe his chin. And he says, simply, “We’ll see about that.”
**
I suppose it’s just those things he does. The things that surprise me so much. The things that surprise me more than he is probably surprised when I jump him, shove a rag into his mouth and force him over the kitchen table without warning.
It surprises me when he brings over a 22-year-old and says, “This is Christopher,” and I can tell he was flirting with him.
It surprises me when I find myself sitting there, watching them converse, watching him flirt with the boy, watching him stand closer. I barely hear what he is saying, but it is making the younger boy blush. But I see the boy stare at him, and I know the attraction is there.
It should be no surprise to me when the moment comes that he hands me his beer so I can hold it, takes the boy by both arms and leans down to kiss him. He kisses him, without hesitation and without fear, full on the mouth. He takes his time, and the boy seems to wilt in his grasp.
And I just sit there, the stunned bystander. I should have expected it, I know. Because even though he has no attraction to men in that way, he certainly knows how to get me hot.
**
In the stranger’s bathroom, that night, I find myself sitting on the sink to regain my composure. He slips in behind me and closes the door, locking it, and I hear him say, “You liked that, didn’t you?”
The words still aren’t quite there for me so I sit, legs open slightly, reflecting. Reflecting as my hands wander. Reflecting as I feel warm fingertips press softly into my panties under my skirt.
He smiles at me, knowingly, presses his back to the opposite wall and slides down in one smooth motion, sipping from the beer bottle, ending up sitting on the floor in front of me, gazing up. He’s just watching. A little drunk, I can tell. Quite pleased with himself.
And I feel the cool mirror behind me as I lean back, legs open, watching him drink his beer and observe me masturbate like a patron at a peep show. We don’t even say anything to each other. The situation doesn’t phase either of us.
He drinks his beer and gazes appropriately, I thrust my hips and cum as quietly as I can, three fingers lost inside of me, my mind still fixed on the image of that kiss.
**
When I have to attend celebrity events he escorts me, ordering bottles of wine efficiently and making the most appropriate conversation.
Sometimes I don’t listen to him or listen to anyone. I just look at him and imagine his body stretched out over a rack, the way his fingers curl up into tight little fists when he starts to beg me. I imagine the sweat, how it makes his hair look sheer black and sometimes drips down onto his barely parted lips.
I imagine that one day he may get his tongue pierced for me, even though it terrifies him. Holding so tightly onto the arms of the chair, grasping for anything. These thoughts come over me and I feel such an aching between my legs that I want to escape to the ladies room and strip out of my panties, masturbate, then return to place two wet fingers on his lips as if hushing, but really wanting him just to know what I did.
I half-listen to him chatting with movie producers and recording artists, I wonder if I look like a teen zombie or something, eyes fixed on him, mind totally pre-occupied with thoughts of him on his knees in front of me, arms wrapped around my ankles.
He pours me a glass of wine. Leans over, and places one courtesy kiss on my cheek. Plays the dutiful suitor. Our momentary glance communicates it all to him and he clears his throat, I see his left hand on his lap, holding onto the napkin now.
Like a child reaching for a security blanket, his fingers rub the material reassuringly.
Or maybe it is all in my head.
When a teenager approaches him for an autograph, he looks at me and we both snicker. It is not the first time he’s been mistaken for someone famous because of our company.
There is just something about him that looks important in a celebrity kind of way.
Maybe that’s why I enjoy torturing him so much.
**
That night, after he finishes reading his chapter, he joins me in the bedroom and finds me waiting in bed. The lights are all off, and I wonder if he thinks I might be asleep. I listen to him get undressed, I feel his weight on the bed.
His body is warm next to me. He slides close so that I know he is there, but he doesn’t ask about the domination, about what I want to do. He doesn’t ask if he should kneel down, or crawl, or go find a gag to put in his mouth.
He kisses my neck, breathes into my ear. When I reach around to put my fingers on his lips he can smell my scent, but he doesn’t know just how long I have been there waiting for him. Really, truly waiting for him.
There are no toys this time. There are no instruments of pain. There are no rituals, or commands, or titles.
I tell him to take the pillowcase off the pillow.
I hear him say, in a voice of persecution, “No,” but it is more a plea, a sentence hissed with urgency for me to reconsider.
Soon it will be over his head, making it difficult for him to breathe. We both know this. We know that I will then do what I want with him, sexually or not, and I will get off intensely at this simple removal of his being.
Maybe I will just make slow, delicate love to him from above. Maybe I will order him on top of me and tell him to fuck me, gripping him around the neck just to show him that he is mine.
Maybe I will tie it off at the bottom, snugly around his neck, leave him in the bed while I move to the chair and use my vibrator, making him listen to me cum while he just suffers in darkness, removed, knowing what is pushing me over the edge is the sound of his breathing and the fact that he doesn’t pull it off his face, even though his hands are free.
Perhaps I will order him to masturbate, watching as I recline over his legs, telling him how fast to go, how long to make it last, and how hard to squeeze.
He is beautiful to me, even when I can see none of him. I can cum on top of him just from pressing against his body, feeling his breath against my hand, through the fabric, as I clasp it over his nose and mouth just to see him struggle.
And neither of us knows how long it will last this time. An hour, or until dawn.
He waits it out and rides the storm.
As do I.
Part Three: Chasing Decadence
I can hear you
By my side, but
Tell me please
Where are you tonight?
The fall.
He is there in the dimly lit room, straining to free himself from the ropes that bind him to my chair. He does not even know I am watching this time; He’s blindfolded, and he thinks I left to go fetch a few things.
And that is how I love to watch him. So lost, concentrating so hard, desperate. The way he bites at knots when he has to, the noises he makes that are a cross between a grunt and a whisper.
Walking across the floor, bare feet barely touching hardwood, he hears nothing over the creaking of the big wooden chair.
Until my mouth is at his ear, lips just brushing his skin. “Not quite yet.”
Startled, he looks up, calls my name, then I am gone.
**
I love watching him sleep.
When he is peaceful, and not chased by me in his dreams. Sometimes, though, I see that furrow in his brow, and I know what images must be in his mind.
He is being chased by me. Chased through dark alleys and dimly lit streets, chased through his own house where the locks don’t work on the doors and the closets won’t open. Chased through the corners of his own mind, chased and then caught.
Caught, restrained, and tormented. Used in a variety of ways, mostly taunting his undaunted nature and the way his eyes get so big when he realizes he can’t get away.
I watch him having these dreams, and I stroke his hair. Placing little locks of it behind his ear, wishing I could see into his mind. His lips pursed, sweat dampening his bangs, he dreams of a world where he cannot escape me.
He runs, but he always keeps coming back to me.
**
Sometimes I make him put on a tuxedo just so I can look at him. Other times, I make him wear a wetsuit. I dunk him in the bathtub and hold him down, straddling his chest and holding him by the hair with both hands, threatening to push him under if he does not look me in the eyes and say special words that will get me hot.
“Strawberry,” he says, “Eloquent sea creatures,”
I giggle, and push down, and tell him he needs to find better words.
He gasps now, trying to scramble before finding himself submerged. “Oxymoron, is that a good word?”
I shake my head no. There are no good words this time, I just want to see the water splatter everywhere.
And besides, I like how the bow tie looks when it’s wet.
**
I don’t have to chase him every time. Sometimes we go to candlelight dinners that require we take a plane, and we never know if we are going to stay overnight or not.
I wear sensual lingerie underneath my conservative clothes, and he slicks his hair back and reads magazines with his glasses on, pretending to ignore me on the plane.
I make sure the seatbelt is locked low and tight across his hips as the stewardesses require, and he looks down at me through the glasses that he doesn’t need and tells me to stop acting silly.
Then I whisper things to him, and older couples smile at us as if thinking, “What a nice young couple, flirting like that.”
“I want to fuck you until you can’t breathe anymore,” I flirt nicely with him, listening to him clear his throat and turn the page of the magazine. “Then I want to put you in the bathtub -“
“-not that again,” he chimes in, deadpan, on cue.
“-And cover myself entirely with body oil.”
He scratches his chin and turns the page again. I can see he is reading nothing. I grab the magazine but he holds tightly onto it, we wrestle for it, and pages rip out and fly everywhere.
We get looks from the stewardesses (who are lacking patience now) and I demand peanuts, but when I open the bag and turn to him he puts his hand over mine and looks at me. “Not now,” he stops me.
And I adore him for that.
**
I argue with room service about the availability of baby oil in the hotel’s general store and request that they send a bellman out to buy it at the store down the street.
He watches me, unpacking three days’ worth of clothes for a one-night stay. After all, it is only dinner. But he knows about me and costume changes, and he knows from experience that sometimes we just don’t leave.
We stop unpacking to make love, simply, testing out the comfort of the bed. Our dinner reservations are at 9 because we love eating late, and we have several hours to kill.
At least, until the baby oil arrives.
**
You see, I’m not always cruelly dominating him. Actually, I rarely am cruel to him at all. I just sometimes have the need to completely possess him and see how far he will go to adore me, to make me wet.
This time, I just want to revel in the way he squirms, to see how much I can make him sweat without leaving the confines of the coolly air-conditioned hotel room.
I tie him up but playfully, I blindfold him simply because I love the way it looks on him. We sit, naked, kissing and feeling each other until I have coated both of our bodies entirely and want to press him down on his back and have him.
But only after taunting him ruthlessly with my body, the feel of my slick thighs around his waist, the feel of my hard nipples, glistening although he cannot even see them, pressed into his chest.
“You’re merciless,” he says to me, he says it half mockingly but with real anguish in his voice.
And we continue to slip and slide until one of us either cums or the other collapses in giggles, but I keep him bound and blindfolded the entire time.
And he kisses like a prince.
**
Sometimes we take those trips and never even go to dinner, and the entire thing ends up being a farce. An excuse to go on a plane, leave the city and our lives behind, to go to a hotel where we can smear oil all over the bedsheets and squeal all hours of the night, drinking champagne and eating fresh fruit.
But when he is pensive, and withdrawn, as artists tend to get, I sometimes have to lure him into it. I trick him or kidnap him. I’ve had him playfully tied up on airplanes, I’ve had him bound and gagged in the backseat of my car as I haul up the coast as far away as Santa Cruz.
He hates me when I do this. I see fury and anger in his eyes that scares me. I have to drag him into a rented room in the middle of nowhere, away from the house and the art and the computer, and I have to keep him tied up until he promises he is calm.
If I have to, I strip naked while he watches and explain to him, very logically, while the trip is a good idea for him. I do this while changing into stockings and garters, high heels, and putting on lace gloves. He starts to get the picture and forgets about almost everything.
When I sit on his lap, facing him, and put on his glasses to kiss him (which is the reverse of how it usually goes), I can feel the tension slipping away from him, even by the feel of his tongue.
“Maybe you were right,” he says to me after the kiss.
I know I’m right.
**
And then there are the darker times.
When I met him, it used to scare me. It scared me because I knew the darker side of me would sometimes come out, and I was terrified of hurting him. I was terrified of fucking with his self-respect, and I was terrified of fucking with my respect for him.
Sometimes I look at him and he can see it in my eyes. Staring at him, serious, shy, while he fumbles idly with an acoustic guitar on his lap, doing a double-take when he sees it.
“Uh oh,” he says.
Because he knows. He knows when I have that look in my eyes. And it does not happen very much anymore, because I am much happier playfully tying him up and teasing him, taking trips where we play silly slave games, or blindfolding him while he fucks me deeply.
But when it happens, he takes it seriously. He pampers me, almost, and treats me as if I am sick and need special care.
That is what makes it even more intense. Because here I am, looking at him and thinking thoughts so evil I can barely confess them to even myself, and he wants to carry me into bed, place me on the sheets, kneel down, stroking my hair, and ask, “What do you need?”
I often sit weakly, tears in my eyes, unable to choke out the words. He nods and shushes me, says “Ok, it’s fine,” and sometimes leaves the room. And I hear his footsteps, I hear every creak on the hardwood floor. I hear him in the closet. I hear things being moved around.
I curl up in the bedsheets, shivering, eyes shut tight, breathing hard. Animal. Instinct. I imagine the look in his eyes. I need it so bad. It hurts me to want to see him that way.
Then he returns, with a handful of things, and crouches down next to the bed. He is so used to having to mindread, or just come up with something on his own (because I can barely confess to myself, let alone him, that I long to hurt and dehumanize him so).
Sometimes he goes through the entire ordeal completely on his own, and I just lay there, shaking, watching, swallowing hard, wanting to rescue him and torture him at the same time.
I’ve watched him gag himself with items he finds demoralizing, I’ve watched him lock shackles onto his wrists and ankles and present the key to me between his teeth. I’ve watched him, in the cases where it was really bad, wrap a belt around his neck and threaten to choke himself to unconsciousness if I didn’t stand up and take him. He has pushed me, many times, to lash out at him because he knows that is what I need.
His hands shaking, I have seen him come up with items I never even bought, bringing me to tears with his willingness to endure for me.
“You need this,” he says to me. And all I can do is sit there in awe at what he is willing to not only endure — but to provoke — to make me content.
He looks at me and I see all of him. The passionate lover, the tortured artist, the hopeless romantic. I see decadence and the lust for life – and passion – no matter how much pain it brings.
He doesn’t only take it for me. He makes it worth my effort and makes sure his sacrifice is not in vain.
The times where he goes to those dark, scary places, he does so with purpose, and pride, and courage.
Yet he still trembles uncontrollably.
**
Yes, he is pure decadence. There is nothing I can do to escape him. Even when he is gone, he is still there with me. A part of me wants to lock him in a cage for eternity to harness that passion for myself; the rest of me just marvels at what he is and allows him to go on.
Maybe one day he will really be mine.
(c) 1997, 2021 Akasha
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