The last gasp #2

“Tiana?” I didn’t remember a Tiana. “No.”

Svitlana frowned, puzzled. “You don’t know who I mean. That’s weird. She remembers you. Tiana Matatumua.”

“Ohh-wuh! Oh, you mean Ana. I haven’t seen her in ages. Why?”

“I met her … Well, her sister’s a dyke. Tiana isn’t, but she knows people in, oh, you know, circles. She’s political. Anyway, we got talking. You remember, I told you someone had given you a good review?”

“Yes?” I was too astonished to take this in.

“That was Tiana. I think she’d like to hear from you.”

“Why? I mean, why would she tell you about … About me?”

Black and blue

Black and blue

“Your friend Kerry. She was talking about why we shouldn’t work with men. It was like 1980s politics. Your name came up. She hates you, you know. Just a tiny bit. Tiana was sitting next to me, and when Kerry said you beat women black and blue, and why is Barbs still friends with you, Tiana laughed. And Kerry said there were some straight women we shouldn’t be working with. And then it got very intense.” 

“Fucking hell. So Ana – ok, Tiana, I guess – Tiana’s on the shit list too, now.”

“Oh yes. I don’t think she’s losing any sleep, though. Anyway, I talked to her afterwards. I knew Barbs and Mayne were going to dinner at your place in a couple of weeks, so I asked her why you were so funny.”

“I’ve always wanted to know why I’m so damn funny. So what did she say?”

“It was a conversation! I mean it was private, Jaime. Anyway, it meant I came along to your dinner. And it means she’d like to hear from you. I’m sure of it.”

Immigration Woman. And a Woody Allen joke: "The last time I was in a woman, it was the Statue of Liberty."

Immigration Woman. And a Woody Allen joke: “The last time I was in a woman, it was the Statue of Liberty.”

“That’d be great, I guess.” I shook my head. “But I haven’t got her number, for one thing. I have no idea where she lives.” 

“She’s working at Citizenship and Immigration. Department of.”

“Where? Which office?”

“I don’t know. But you’re an ingenious man. If you want to, you’ll find her.”  

Svitlana kissed me when she left, that night. The next time she visited, which was the last time ever, she didn’t kiss me. 

The last gasp #1

Svitlana and I didn’t talk about our relationship, nor its end. I just passed, by degrees, from being her lover and dom to being her life coach. There’s always some overlap between those roles, so that came easily enough.

In the next step I became her lesbian dating counsellor: “Call her! Of course she wants to hear from you!” She didn’t fuck her lesbian dating counsellor, because she was getting limited amounts of sex from the new girl, and was starting to fall in love.

In all good remainder shops!

In all good remainder shops!

I turned out to be reasonably good at giving lesbian dating advice. Women tell other women a lot of things that they don’t tell men. But they also tell men some things that they don’t tell to women. Mostly men aren’t listening, so this doesn’t influence the world as much as it should.

But it means that men, if they listen at least sometimes, know some things about women that other women mostly don’t know. Or acknowledge.

There’s probably a book in that. “Straight Men’s Sex and Dating Tips for Lesbians.” A short book, with tiny sales, but never mind.

Anyway, Svitlana got the girl, with a bit of help from me, and as a consequence I lost Svitlana. I wasn’t being noble. I’d always known that though Svitlana was absolutely a blessing in my life, she was going to be a temporary one. What I lost was never mine.

One evening, though, we were having what turned out to be our second-to-last one-to-one conversation. Svitlana knew that it was going to be one of our last meetings. I didn’t, of course. She said, “Have you ever been in touch with that girl you used to know? Tiana?” 

One swallow doesn’t mean a thing #37

Svitlana and I couldn’t last. She wasn’t willing to be seen in public with me. That was mostly because some of the local dykes wouldn’t like it, and they could make life difficult in a small circle that Svitlana didn’t actually want to leave.

But it was also because of her own reservations: I was fine, but I was only a holiday. It was too easy to get classified as heterosexual if you get seen dating someone from the opposite sex. Svitlana wanted to get back to the local dyke community. It wasn’t really the kindest social circle I’d ever known, and she knew that. But it was hers, and it was where she was going to find her next serious love. 

dykesAfter a while she started seeing more of another new girl in the local scene. Svitlana and I still met, but I spent my time listening to angst about whether the other girl really liked her, and giving encouragement and advice. She stopped staying the night.

Eventually she moved in with the other girl and her visits stopped entirely. I think I was a bad secret now, a shameful one.

I didn’t mind being cast out. I liked Svitlana, and she had to be who she wanted to be, and the odds were against her. She had to write me out of her history. Later I’d sometimes meet the two of them at parties. I was friendly, an old friend, but I was discreet. I don’t think Svitlana ever talked about me. Eventually, even with mutual affection and respect, we really did become the strangers we pretended to be. 

But before that had happened, she had one more surprise for me.  

One swallow doesn’t mean a spring #36

So Svitlana and I were a couple. Of sorts. For a while. 

One of the sorts of couple we were was “secret”. Svitlana generally turned up after midnight, but only if I’d assured her there was no-one with me and no-one expected. 

Some of our time together was like the night I’ve just described. Svitlana would turn up, slightly anxious until she was safely in the door, and not really relaxed until she was bed, being admired.

Other times … I’m going to try to tell a story quickly. 

coupleSvitlana and I were out for dinner. We didn’t go out often, but I’d won a contract so I was in a spacious mood. She talked me down to something less grand, a cheap Thai restaurant that fed a lot of students. So I sat her down and ordered wine. We laughed, ate and talked, exactly as if we were a couple on a date. 

Svitlana’s chair faced the entrance, which I thought nothing of at the time. But it wasn’t an accident. Suddenly she said, “oh shit.” She got up and disappeared to the toilets. I had another prawn and a glass of wine, because I guessed that dinner was over. And, without looking around too obviously, I saw that Kerry had arrived, with friends.

Kerry was the woman who’d warned Svitlana against various male friends of Barbs, for various political and personal shortcomings. Jaime the dom pervert had, as I’ve mentioned, taken a prominent role in that list of male scum. Kerry had encountered so much bigotry for her own sexual choices that it could never occur to her that she too was a bigot. She was the reason Svitlana was hiding in the toilets.   

Kerry’s friends filed over to a reserved table, which fortunately was on the other side of the restaurant. I got a text from Svitlana asking me to wait for ten minutes and meet her in the car park outside. A moment later she made a break for the exit, her hair tucked under a sort of mob cap, her collar up and her head down. So I pretended not to know her, and ate as much of my meal as I could manage in five minutes. Then I paid and sauntered out, taking the wine bottle with me. 

Svitlana was by my car, freezing since she hadn’t asked me for my keys. I pushed her down over the hood and spanked her, since our relationship had progressed to the point where I could do that sort of thing without asking. I’d have liked to have fucked her, but she was obviously too nervous about discovery for that to be any fun. So I gave her the wine. And bought her a burger on the way home.

So we were always a secret couple. Spies on the porch of love.  

One swallow doesn’t make a spring #35

I said I had more. I hadn’t, though. I had enough energy left to roll over and fondle Svitlana’s mango-wet cunt. I thought about having an erection, and her skin was firm under my hand, but my mind kept slipping away. I could see the ghost of the tree in front of my window, shimmering out of the night, and there was a bird woken up and piping on a single note, answered by another bird with a call like a handful of pebbles tossed into a tin helmet. 

cuddleIn ten minutes I was mostly asleep. I was vaguely aware of Svitlana wrapping herself round me, one leg over mine, and that mango pressed against my thigh.

She was a quiet sleeper, and companionable. I woke up later and flipped the light out.

One swallow doesn’t make a spring #34

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.

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?”

One swallow doesn’t make a spring #33

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.

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. 

One swallow doesn’t make a spring #32

“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.

“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.”

One swallow doesn’t make a spring #31

chookI 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 really in bed. Probably not lesbian.

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.”

One swallow doesn’t make a spring #30

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!

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.