We have bound thee, we guide thee;
Down, down!
With the bright form beside thee;
Resist not the weakness,
Such strength is in meekness
That the Eternal, the Immortal,
Must unloose through life's portal
The snake-like Doom coiled underneath his throne
By that alone.
Neither Sa’afia nor I could have wanted to punch the other, even as mock-violence, even as an affectionate “joke”.
In sex, Sa’afia wanted to give her surrender and to have her surrender taken. She wanted to be given orders and to feel herself obeying them. She wanted me to find reasons to punish her, so that she could feel that she had no choice when she obeyed and served me. It wasn’t enough to surrender: she wanted to feel it. She wanted her surrender to be palpable, something she could wrap around herself like a cloak.
Dominance and submission is about tightly focussed attention.
I wasn’t very experienced in bdsm. I had a lot to learn. But at least I knew ways to let her feel her surrender, and intensify her experience. While we were exploring those feelings together she didn’t want to be anything as trivial as “feisty”. She was strong and courageous. Even waiting for me, naked in her kitchen simply because I’d told her to over the phone, was extremely brave.
She could have ignored that instruction and our evening would still have been good. We’d still have found our way to bed, and I probably would have smacked her bottom lightly. I’d have done it after her first orgasm, when we were building to her second, and I thought it’d be a safe experiment: she’d like pretty much anything I did.
So we’d still have explored some very light surrender, but it would have been a much safer and flatter night.
She chose the riskier option, a definite, explicit act of obedience. It could have gone wrong. She must have worried that I might laugh at her, or that I’d take her surrender and do something stupid and cruel that genuinely hurt. She put her dignity and her safety on the line for what she wanted. That pushed us past various polite pretences and it pushed me up to match her courage. I had to take back the lead, take her surrender, and make her feel it.
What a submissive does when they kneel to serve their dominant, or they present themselves to be fucked or hurt, may not look like any traditional picture of courage. But it’s honest, assertive and brave.
At other times, Sa’afia and I would be shopping together, and she might laugh at the clothes I wanted to buy, or my taste in music. Then she might be playful, and do “feisty” like a fucking Disney fucking princess, as she’d have said. But in sex she preferred something stronger than feist.
Sa’afia wasn’t just a dolly who’d do whatever she’s told. She was a submissive woman. She did things that she liked, that turned her on.
She stood up for herself, even when she knelt. Or bent over to be spanked or fucked, knowing that she wouldn’t choose which happened. But that was something she wanted. I provided it for her.
When it’s moving right, bdsm connects the people involved with incredible intensity and intimacy.
It’s a sententious thing to say, but bdsm is the opposite of violence.
It’s always nice to talk about nipples, isn’t it? For example, the German word for “nipple” isn’t really “Brustwart”, or “breast wart”: it’s “Nippel”. Now, here’s the thing about Sa’afia’s nipples. They’d be purple-black and flat when she was resting, but when I kissed and squeezed them and they woke up, they’d perk up, all erect and yearning to be kissed and bitten. And they’d turn from purple-black to purple-pink.
I loved making that happen. Now, she wouldn’t have had nipples like that if she wasn’t Samoan, or didn’t have Polynesian ancestry. But were they Samoan nipples? Nah, they were just Sa’afia’s.
Her mouth was wide and her lips sweetly full. And there were freckles, for heaven’s sake, on her forehead and cheeks and nose, under the brown. She owed those things to her Polynesian ancestry too, and I thought they were wonderful.
I liked things about her that were Samoan culturally, though not genetic. Her body was slightly shiny when she was naked because she rubbed herself with cocoanut oil. When I licked her she smelled of cunt and cocoanut.
I liked the tapa cloth on her wall, depicting her parents’ village. I liked the little carved canoe with sea-shell eyes, on her bedside table. Even the care she took not to make her mother have to admit she was having sex appealed to me. For no reason except that it was different. Those things were hers because she was Samoan, too. But I liked them because I liked her. Not the other way around.
Sa’afia’s other fear was that I was with her only because I really wanted Ana, and I couldn’t have Ana. That I was fucking her because she resembled her cousin. That was the nerve I’d touched when I’d asked her about Ana’s father.
When I said Sa’afia hit me, I was trying to make two points. Both of which were true. The first was that Sa’afia was hurt when I asked her a question about Ana, while we two were in the middle of doing something very intense and sexually powerful. I’d re-awoken her worry that I was with her for reasons that weren’t about her.
I’d got her to suspend disbelief on one of her worries, which was that I might be interested in her because she was Samoan. There were white boys who went after Samoan girls, because they thought they were easy, or they had a fetish-y thing for them, or whatever. She wanted always to be certain that I liked and desired the individual she was: Sa’afia.
She was right to give me the benefit of the doubt on that one. I do and think lots of dodgy things, but I’ve never found that I get turned on, or turned off, a woman because of her race. Once we were lovers, then I liked the brown of her skin and the shape of her nose, slightly broad and slightly snub, and I loved the firmness of her flesh and the strength of her body. I loved a lot of things, some of which were Samoan things.
Actually, there was something I really liked about her nipples, but I’ll save that for tomorrow.
[The project is done and the cheque’s in the ether. I hope. So I can get back to the Probation Officer story. In the last episode, we got as far as this:]
Sa’afia froze. Immobility is not affectionate. Then she hit my shoulder, hard, with her fist. She said, “you’re with me. Can’t you forget about fucking Ana for a fucking second?”
Update: This is a true story. So far I’ve only changed details to make sure my client Ana and her cousin Sa’afia can’t be identified, even by someone who managed to work out where it was that I worked as a probation officer. It’d be pretty hard to identify Svitlana, too.
But in that post, the one I quoted above, I’ve told a lie. I think it’s the first genuinely and gratuitously untrue thing I’ve said. I was trying to improve the story: Conflict! And look, she’s not just submissive; she’s feisty! Hey! But the truth is that Sa’afia never hit me and she would never have wanted to. Even if she was angry.
Neither Sa’afia nor I knew much about dominance or submission, really, though I’d had more experience than her. She knew what she wanted, and I knew enough to be able to guess roughly what she wanted and provide her with it. She could be a wonderful version of herself in that place I’d provided. She’d been incredibly happy, when her ass burned from the rod and she knelt to suck my cock. She’d wanted to know what that was like, and she’d known she’d like it. She also knew that I would treasure her, when she served me, and she wanted to feel treasured.
In that place and in that mood she couldn’t feel anger. She could only be angry if I behaved so badly that I shocked her out of submission and back to normal time, to everyday life.
So no, she didn’t hit me.
Sa’afia froze. Immobility is not affectionate. Then she hit my shoulder, hard, with her fist. She said, “you’re with me. Can’t you forget about fucking Ana for a fucking second?”
There’ll be more later today. But I’m out of time. Sorry.
Update: I’m still out of time. For now. Here’s a pic.
We lay together in Sa’afia’s bed. Sa’afia lay mostly on top of me, her legs straddling my right thigh. I’d rested my hand, in affection and something like ownership, on her bottom, cupping her and savouring the residual warmth and two hotter welts raised by the rod.
She’d stood, taken my hand and led me here and complained gravely that I was overdressed. I’d taken my clothes off, lain down and pulled her on top of me. For a while we were equals, in an affectionate fog.
`The rod was at the foot of the bed. Sa’afia had carried it with us, not because I’d told her to – I hadn’t – and she’d placed it within reach. It exuded promise and power. But for now we wanted to cuddle.
Sa’afia was telling me about her childhood, some of it spent in Los Angeles and some spent in Samoa. She’d been born in American Samoa, but her family home had been in the State of Samoa, in a village near Taga on Samoa’s second main island, Savai’i. This didn’t mean much to me at the time. I’d never been to any of the Polynesian islands. I took her word for it that it was a beautiful place.
Stupidly, I imagined some Gauguin-flavoured fantasy with a river pool and lots of girls naked as Sa’afia, washing their hair in the water and singing traditional songs. I had no idea what traditional songs would sound like. I imagined something wild and fluid, like a mermaid might sing in a movie. I hoped they’d sing to me.
But talk about family reminded me me of a duty. I said, “So Ana’s father. Does he live in Samoa, or does he live here? In LA?”
Sa’afia stayed on her knees, still working my cock when there was no more come, cleaning me and keeping my cock as firm as I could be, after coming into that comfortable, clinging place.
Sa’afia sucked and licked for about twenty minutes, while I slowly, pleasurably softened. Finally, though my cock was still a little fat and complacent, it lolled out of her mouth.
I leaned down and, my hands still in her hair, tilted her face up so she looked at me. Sa’afia wanted to please me, and she’d wanted to see if she could drive me, for a while, out of my own control.
She was smiling, and there was no doubt or need for reassurance in her face.
I kissed her forehead and the broad tip of her nose. I said, “I think – ” Then I said, “I don’t think anyone has ever – ” Then I kissed her again, and said “I’m keeping you.”
I didn’t really make any decisions. I’d assumed that I was going to break off and do other things before I came. I’d thought that while I striped her ass with that rod I’d stand where she could turn her head and watch my erection, and then feel it inside her, when her skin was still hot and hurting and I fucked her.
But then I felt the urgency of that sensation at the base of my spine, or somewhere deeper, made up of sugar and need. I dropped the rod and put both hands on Sa’afia’s head. The rod bounced and rebounded on the hard floor, but I’d forgotten it while it was still making its racket. I was supposed to growl something at her, threatening to punish her if she didn’t swallow every drop. But that had never been something that I really cared about, and anyway I didn’t have time.
Instead, looking down on the black shine of Sa’afia’s hair and the warm brown of her shoulders, my eyes wide as a cat’s at twilight, I made incoherent noises, gutteral at first but higher pitched with the rush into Sa’afia’s mouth.
Sa’afia coughed once, and then swallowed and kept swallowing.
I said, “good girl good girl good girl good girl,” over and over, while my body took over. I came in my Sa’afia. My? Well, perhaps she was.
I was laughing, towards the end, because of happiness, pleasure and awareness of how ridiculous we were, but mainly me. I mostly enjoy being ridiculous.