Three and a Half Weeks(183)
When I don’t respond, he wraps his hands around my throat and kisses me, squeezing slightly to assert his domination. Should I go for it or tell him no?
“Okay,” I finally croak out, “but no dragging by the hair.”
He stands straight. “Agreed. You know the drill once we’re inside.”
“Okay, but first I have to brush my teeth.”
As we walk to the room, I contemplate the dynamics of our relationship. When Ian is feeling the need to dominate me, he creates reasons to justify it. He’s not really angry with me. He may have been worried but he’s had far worse worries of late. It seems to me he’s manufactured issues so he could get me into this room and do things to me.
In a moment of penetrating insight, I realize that I too must need the justification. My sense of self requires that I pretend I’m doing it to satisfy Ian’s needs, not my own. For in admitting I like to be dominated sexually, I feel like I’m acknowledging an irrefutable weakness. And that is an admission I find nearly impossible to concede.
The room is early-morning dark and cool, and my skin shrinks in protest when I remove my clothes and kneel. My eyes are cast down so I’m unable to see what he’s doing, but my ears tell me that drawers are opening and closing, and his footfalls are heavy across the hardwood floor. After a few moments his shoes—beautiful Italian leather—come into my view. “Stand,” he says and helps me up by the arm.
I keep my head down, wondering what he’s planning. I don’t wonder long, though, for he immediately begins to buckle cuffs on my wrists and ankles. “Come,” he says when he’s done, and leads me over to a round cushioned piece of furniture. It looks like a hugely oversized ottoman and he tells me to climb onto it on my hands and knees.
Every time I obey a command, I can feel him watching me closely. Is he trying to unnerve me or appraise my mood and level of anxiety? He’s left me in this position for at least five minutes without saying or doing anything. At one point, he comes over and using the toe of his shoe pushes my legs open wider without saying a single syllable.
“We’ve explored this before: I’m going to render you helpless, take away your sight and sound. Any commands will be relayed by touch. It requires a high level of trust but I think we have it by now. Do you trust me completely, Ella?”
Without hesitation, I answer in the affirmative.
“Let’s give it a try. First, your sight.” He slips the black satin blindfold over my head and tightens it till it’s snug. “Now, your hearing,” and I feel the cushioned earpieces descend over my ears and the room falls deathly still for me except for the deafening sound of my own respiration. Taking my left wrist, he pulls it back and clips it to my left ankle. My balance is precarious at this point but he gently grasps my shoulders and lowers me to the ottoman thing. I rest my left cheek on the soft fabric as he tethers my right wrist to my other leg.
If losing your sight heightens your other senses, then losing both sight and hearing makes the sense of touch incredibly vital. I feel everything keenly: the warm slightly callused skin of his hands dancing on my backside, the ends of his fingernails, clipped short though they are, skating lightly up my thighs, his satiny lips brushing my skin—everything. I’m practically quivering in anticipation of the hard stuff. One piece of the hard stuff in particular.
From one moment to the next I cannot predict his position. Sometimes it seems he’s in front of me but a half-second later, he’s behind me. It’s as if there are three of him, coming at me from all angles. Though he hasn’t touched me in the places that count, I feel an inexorable shift toward an orgasm.
Suddenly, a hundred pings of sensation hit my shoulders, proceeding up my back, and down my rear, my thighs, calves, ankles. A flogger.
The pings get sharper, more painful but in such tiny gradations as to be almost imperceptible. I know it’s pain now but I can’t tell how we got there. This is the punishment part.
When it gets so sharp I’m about to tell him, it begins to wind down. His hands run over me again, soothing the bite of the flogger. Nice and easy, I drift toward a dreamy trance until his fingers find my nips and pinch—hard. I rear back but find I cannot move my body but for an inch or two. It’s still too much for him so he knees my legs out wider. Now I have no purchase to move at all.
Pain, pleasure. Pain, pleasure. It continues for a long time, until I’m panting. Tears are running down my face from the extremes and he pushes into me without any advance notice. Empty one second, full to bursting the next. The detail I notice most is his body heat: his body is on fire and it’s igniting mine. I come so fast that it takes me unaware.