In one year…

 

I have grown so much. I’ve pushed myself beyond the bounds of what I thought I needed to find joy, what I thought I found desirable, what I thought was possible.

 

It was a year ago today I shook hands with a man who, I would very soon learn, was to become central to my life.

 

Last weekend I found myself on the floor in a play-space that had been made sacred by the labor and intentions of a close-knit group of people. There isn’t anything particularly special about a hotel ballroom. And there sure as hell isn’t anything special about the hideous carpeting in said ballroom.

 

But there is a magic when you realize that you are being pushed into the aforementioned hideous carpet and you feel every inch of skin being abraded against it as you writhe on the floor, trying to breathe.

 

I was past coherency. I didn’t think about anything clearly except how it was becoming more and more difficult to breathe. I was surprised to learn that my previous issues with breath-play had been neatly circumvented. I’ve had breath-play on my limit list since the first time someone had put their hands around my throat and I immediately experienced a stabbing headache. I though this was probably a bad idea.*

 

The Ongoing Epic Battle Royale about breath-play aside? I’m an advocate of only doing shit the outcome of which you’re prepared to handle. That stabbing headache occurred even with mild pressure restricting the flow of oxygen to my brain or air to my lungs, so it was right out.

The Dominant Guy happens to enjoy this type of play, and he has partners with whom he can explore that, so I did not think I’d be the recipient of such an event as a full blown breathplay scene.

And it didn’t start out that way. it started out with one of my favorite toys, a flexible handled cat o’ nine tails. Love them…a thuddy whip will get my attention every time. And we’d started out with a silly opening to our scene, a playful teasing series of orders to strip, which I obeyed with a faux reluctance, a wink and a smile. The long crimson and saffron scarf that floated about my shoulders wound up wound around my throat as I found the other end of it wound around his hand, but of course he wouldn’t strangle me with it…that was off the table.

 

Warm up consisted of the whip finding its flickertongued way across the back of my thighs eliciting sighs and squeals alike from me. But there was an odd impermanence to the rhythym and before long he had put down the whip in favor of availing himself of my pain with his hands. I laughed once about how few toys he used when we played, and he smiled and said he prefers a more personal touch to administering pain. It is more satisfying, more intimate, he explained, when he knows it is HIM causing the pain, not him via another instrument.

 

“Fair enough,”  I thought, “since his hands are fairly fucking formidable…”  and this  thought was followed by my wailing scream as he dug his fingers deep into the big muscles of my thighs, fingers pushing with insane force into the crease where my hip socket hid within muscle and tendons pushing me to the place where speech becomes an eel in my mouth and I can’t quite manage words, stuttering spitting syllables to beg for…what? Mercy? That is a fucking laugh because when I start to feel that real pain? when I can see him observing the edges of my composure fraying? it is just getting good and mercy simply isn’t in the cards.

 

I was hiccuping and writhing away from him, trying to escape the thrumming pain in my muscles as he squeezed, compressed and pulled them to places where my wordless verbalizing became a stream of shouts and moans and I think if you’d closed your eyes you might think you were front row in the Amen Corner of your friendly neighborhood Pentecostal church. Except I wasn’t even trying to pretend the ecstasy and the surreal glossolalia were due to anything but unrelenting pain and protracted torment at the hands of someone I trusted completely. And as the pain became more intense, my body’s energy and charge around pain focused it to a shaking and a climax that wracked, again and again, my whole body as I felt myself smashed against myself break apart and resolve into a heaving panting orgasmic response.

 

And then my hiccupy breath escaped me.

 

And failed to return.

 

I tried again to inhale and  found myself strangely desperate for breath. Not in a wheezy asthmatic way. Not in that stabbing pressure to my head strangulation way. I just…couldn’t inhale. And I couldn’t figure out why. I blinked and connected solidly with him as he observed my face, looking into my eyes and no doubt seeing my confusion. He leaned in closer to me and I realized then I couldn’t breathe properly because his arm was between us, aligned underneath my breasts, compressing my ribcage evenly. No pain, no muss no fuss but I couldn’t. Fucking. Breathe.

 

I put my hand against his chest, at first with a sort of pleading flutter rather than roughly, pushing him away. And he backed off.

 

For a moment.

 

I caught my breath and took in as much air as I could only to feel him leaning in again, face inches away from mine and I could feel my heart squirming in my chest. My lungs shuddering, diaphragm confounded in its standard action. My body had been doing this job for just over 42 years and hadn’t previously encountered an external force that bothered to interfere with it in this way. But here it was, and there he went, pressing again with a force that was almost gentle and didn’t hurt, not really, but terrified me all the more because I felt my vision narrowing and a small white hot panic blossom behind my eyes. I’ve only felt this type of diminishing of my faculties once before, and that was a very bad moment. I had feared then that I might be dying and that genie erupted from that bottle and the thought occurred to my confused mind that the logical result of him continuing on the path we were currently exploring was my suffocation.

 

I shoved him as hard as I could, gaining another lung full of air and another opportunity to vent my slipstream of unsense as I watched him watching me and he permitted me this struggle, my twisting away and dragging myself a few feet before he brought me back and pulled me over and under him and pushed down on me again and I sobbed. Shaking, I felt my chest relax, strangely, as he leaned in again and pushed.

 

And again.

And again.

 

The cycle of resistance was winding down…I was drained.

 

Drained and trapped in his eyes as I watched him watch me fading saw his eyes dilate even as my eyes drifted shut and I moaned, my hand no longer pushing him away fingers instead resting on his arm and I let go. I did not hurt and my panic had died into a sweet terror…not of him, though.

 

Even as I wondered what it might be like to have the last thing I saw be his eyes on mine, that barely visible smile, lips parted to inhale the last wisps of breath that escaped mine. I lost my desire to fight. In that moment I remember one thought, swimming upward from the murky depths of my consciousness…the thought that I did not need to fight him. Fighting him was not what I wanted, never what I wanted. What I wanted was…to graciously, gratefully endure whatever he gave me. And as I gave him that, my wordless pleas becoming again manifestations of the slippery, beautiful terror, I was so totally his I let go of myself and gave myself to him. And there was nothing, nothing at all, in those moments that would have driven me to assert my will against his.

 

Not even the will to breathe.

 

Then I was breathing again. Then I was in his arms, safe from him. Safe with him. Then there were tears, and then there was more. Then I lacked words and took his hand in my hands and pressed his hand to my lips, Over and over again.

 

Everything I could say about those moments, that conversation we had without words, all of it sounds like hyperbolic histrionics. There are ways and there are Ways that power exchange manifests. Manifesting power to give control of my autonomous functions to another human being…and to do so voluntarily, to look into the eyes of another person and give them everything is a sweet emotional narcotic.

 

And I am fully addicted.

 

Thank you, sir, for this first year. You have captured my heart, taken my breath away, and given me so much in our journey together thus far. I hope I do you proud, and bring you joy, and help you on your path of learning and growth as well.

 

Yours.

 

Truly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*PLEASE NOTE: I’m an advocate of RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink). DO not take my sharing of this scene, inclusive of the application of manually inflicted chest compression, as my endorsement of it as something you should jump in and do. This shit has risks. @TheDominantGuy is a medical professional. Because of his background, I am prepared to accept that degree of Risk. With the Awareness of the dangers.

Don’t be stupid.