Svitlana looked at the ceiling like a pale, naked chef at a tasting. She put a delicate fingertip to the corner of her mouth – I was sure, again, that there was nothing there – and popped the fingertip between her lips. For some reason I became aware of my cock, resting wet and soft, still on my thigh. Life was far off, but signalling a return.

Seussy and the Bamshees.

She still stared, blankly considering, at the ceiling. Life in our bedroom stopped in suspense. It was a small world, but all of it was waiting for her judgment. “Well?” I said.

Svitlana laughed suddenly. “This is like that book! I read it when I was learning English. Green eggs and ham?”  

“Well?” 

She kissed me, mouth to mouth. “Got any more? Jaime-I-am?”

Svitlana looked at her knees, something wistful in her expression. “You like the idea of making me swallow. There’s lots of stuff about power, in this, that you aren’t talking about.”

“Yeah, that’s true. It feels like you’re submitting, when you swallow what I give you. It makes me feel triumphant. But that’s because I’m a dom; I tend to think that way. But the power works both ways. Some of me gets absorbed. It becomes part of you.”

Umami in preparation, in a Japanese porno kitchen. Steamy, as ever, is best.

“Mine.” She smiled and touched my cock, still asleep, spent, limp on my thigh.. “It’s … umami.”

“It’s what the hell?”

“Umami is a flavour. In Japanese cooking. It’s a kind of tasty savoury bland. Like a miso soup. Maybe mushroom. Your come is umami, but it’s like it started out too bland, and it’s been salted to make up for it.”

I considered that. “You’ve had it on your tongue quite a while now. You could have got rid of it by swallowing, ages ago. So you can’t pretend you mind it all that much. “

Svitlana grinned, revealing that she still had my come in her mouth. I’d started to wonder. “No, it’s not horrible.”

“Then swallow it because I bloody said so.”

“Just a moment.” Svitlana closed her eyes and screwed up her face, like a child pretending her rice pudding is frogs’ eggs. She swallowed dramatically, twice, then gasped for air. I was sure that wasn’t necessary. 

“I just don’t want you to think I’ll, I don’t know, convert to men, just because I’m enjoying being with you. I don’t like women because men are horrid. You aren’t, mostly. Women are just better.”

I shrugged. “I’ve never understood why women fuck men at all, really. I mean, I’m pleased, obviously. But – “

“You really are a silly man. You don’t know anything. Men are better than you think, and it’s weird that I should have to tell you that.”

“Okay.”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“And for your information, I’ve sucked cocks before, before I knew that girls were for me. But I never swallowed male, um, fluids. Sperm. I never would. I thought it was gross and anyway, who did those boys think they were? It’s a point for you that I’m even considering it.”

“It’s an honour. I really like it when a lover takes something of mine into herself.”

Svitlana smirked at that, nudging my thigh with her knee. “I already took something of yours into me.”

“I mean permanently into herself.”

I supposed that Svitlana might have reason not to want too much intimacy with my come. She’d made choices that had meant that for the last few years she hadn’t had much to do with cocks. So she might have reservations about some of the penile by-products. I just didn’t know. 

But she’d said, “Why?” As in, “why should I swallow your come?”

She might have been bratting, but then again she might not. I took the boring approach, and treated the question seriously. 

“Okay. One thing is that if you spit it out, it looks like rejection. That’s why there’s so much emotion invested in it. Well, male emotion anyway. Even I might think it was faintly, only a bit, hurtful if you spit that mouthful you have, right now. I’d only feel it for a second or two, but there it is. If you really don’t want to swallow, that’s more important. You shouldn’t do anything you don’t want, but that’s why we think it matters. Also, we like it when -“

Svitlana said, “We? Who’s ‘we’?” She said this carefully, her mouthful still in an indeterminate state, neither swallowed nor spat. Like Shroedinger’s cat’s come.

Glamorous redhead. Not Svitlana, though.. 

“Well, men. Or doms. Or maybe I just mean me. I like it when you – meaning women, especially glamorous semi-dyke redheads in my bed -“

“Okay, that’s nice. But don’t think I’m a semi-dyke, darling. I’m a dyke. You’re a fling.”

“Glamorous redhead dykes gone a-slumming. Then.” 

I’d spoken lightly and meant it lightly but I’d dismayed her. She put her hand on my arm, her face very earnest. “Oh no, Jaime! I’m not slumming. Really.”

I said, “Kiss.” I kissed her cheek. Yes, I was dodging her mouthful of my come, hypocrite that I am.

But we rubbed our faces together and that felt fine. “Bless. It’s all right.”

I’d never discussed the question of whether a woman should swallow my come before. In my experience till then most women had simply swallowed. 

Women who aren’t submissive, or weren’t being submissive in bed with me, had generally swallowed. If they didn’t like having come in their mouths, they generally hadn’t sucked my cock. It had happened a couple of times that a woman had spat out my come, but they’d done it into tissues, and neither she nor I had made any fuss about it. If they weren’t submitting then it was up to them. 

I’ve been good!

A submissive girl I’d known a while ago had been coy about swallowing, but it had been clear that she was only playing. She’d wanted to pretend to be virginal and to be smacked across the arse and told what to do.

So I’d spanked her bottom and then held her nose pinched closed until she swallowed and showed me a clean tongue. And we’d moved on to all the things that flowed from that.

In bdsm we’re all supposed to have talked about our limits beforehand, listing all the things we don’t want to do. A submissive who has a physical or psychological barrier about swallowing come is supposed to tell the dom in advance. Then he can check whether he should avoid coming in her mouth, or if he just needs to make sure he has tissues and a glass of water handy.

There are also some people in bdsm who feel that if a submissive doesn’t mention a limit beforehand then it’s not a limit. I’ve never felt things are that simple. No-one’s perfect, not even submissives, and they can forget important things that they really ought to have told a dom before playing. 

The girl I’d smacked had said something like, “you don’t seriously think I’m going to swallow your silly old come, do you?” She tended to talk like that once she’d dropped a couple of levels into submission. So it hadn’t been hard to tell that she was just bratting, and that she expected me to subdue her. 

With Svitlana I had no idea if she had a serious issue about swallowing. We hadn’t discussed anything beforehand. That kept coming up as a problem.