Little Girls Like To Play Games.

I was playing the fool. As we snuggled together in our bed, I was gently poking his nipples with my nails just to hear him protest and squeal through my giggles. I'm deeply ashamed of my playfulness, and the alacrity with which I reveal it to him, but I think I'll keep it because I love the way he laughs when I am being silly. It's the kind of laugh that makes you feel cherished and under normal circumstances I would be furtive in my desire to be cherished. Who wouldn't, right? It's easy to want to be hurt, demeaned and destroyed, but wanting affection is revelatory in a way that feels like sporting an exposed, unsightly wound. It's easy to demonstrate my desire to be worthless, it's much harder to admit it feels good to matter to him. To be adored and cherished by him. In my warped perception of being human, it feels like weakness. 

In response to my persistence with his nipples, he reached out to tickle me. There aren't enough angry words in the English-language for me to adequately convey just how averse I am to being tickled. I would sooner stick thousands of barbed fishhooks into my skin than be tickled. 

"Arr..." I started to say, jumping up and glaring at him, before taking note of my broken word and falling silent. 

He looked at me, squinting and waiting, for an explanation. 

"I cannot believe I almost said your name!" I declared. 

It's not so weird to call a person by their name, but it's weird for us. I never say his name, really only when I am talking about him with other people, and even then it feels odd on my tongue. Like a grain of salt that refuses to dissolve. There are many methods of address I use to refer to him, ranging from sweet to silly to ritualistic, but never his name. Even in moments of seriousness, or conflict, I use his last name and I often precede it with *mister*. I know that's weird but it's not because I am an overly formal person, it's much sicker than that. There was a man my mother used to date, well, is it called dating if you're both married, but not to one another? He taught me to only refer to him as *Mister Kamal*, chiding and making me repeat myself anytime I deviated from the convention, and insisting I refer to all men in the same configuration of terms. *Honorific + last name.* It was sinister and pedantic, but I thought nothing of it back then, I just did it. Now, I don't actually do that to *all* men, but I do it to all the men who attract me. I've done it to all the men I've loved. Perhaps I just prefer my love to carry an air of formality, and fetid nostalgia. 

"Well, you didn't say it," he responded, "You're a good girl." 

Again, language is not adequately capacious to contain my disdain for being called a *good girl*. It's not that I want to be bad, either. Well, maybe sometimes. 

"What if I did, though?" I asked, grinning through my teeth at the prospect. 

"Little girls don't refer to their daddies by name," he announced. 

The words hit me like a bullet between my legs. It was a neologism, in that I had never considered being turned on by this aspect of name-restraint before and I imagine it felt exactly as language would feel, if it could feel, when it is stretched apart at the seams to accommodate new words. 

"But daddy, I want to!" I put on a marvellous act of innocence, it's pellucid, but it's effective, "Come on! I want to call you by your name." 

"Your funeral," he said with infuriating nonchalance, ever the prognosticator. 

For a moment I really did consider not doing it. I really did, and then I figured it was already late, we had to be up early in the morning, what was the worst thing he could do when he had already gotten to lassitude for the day? So, I said it. And then I leapt out of bed and ran around the room. It's never a good sign when they don't chase you. I was running in circles, but I am certain that in my head, I was running away. He just sat and watched me, for a bit, with no trace of his earlier smiles and giggles on his face. He switched on the big, bright light and I stopped in my tracks; nothing good ever happens under fluorescence. I stood in place, eyeing the door with longing and the past with an urgent desire to engage an *undo* button, as he got on his feet and made his way to me. 

"Daddy I'm sorry, it was a joke..." I spoke in the panicked tone of the spineless and pathetic. 

"Oh, no, no," he said, getting to me and pushing me into the big armchair until I was seated, "You call me by my name now, sweetheart, that's the bed you wanted to lay in." 

I shook my head as he held on to me by my neck, smacking my mouth with the back of his hand. 

"Please, I'm sorry," I mustered between blows, "I won't say your name again, Mister M."

He paused at my choice of address, looked into my eyes, cocked his head, narrowed his eyes and smirked, just a little. I'm a little girl, I like to play games, I just prefer to play them with live toys. Well, it is me, I'm the live-toy. 

"Toying with me?" He asked, making his way to the closet and returning with an armful of tawdry playthings.  

He dug his fingers into my jaw, prying my mouth open with sheer force. He grabbed onto my tongue with his fingers and pulled at it. As it hung out of my mouth, he began to attach a series of clothespins to it. I would have screamed, but I couldn't get my tongue back inside my head. As the pain seared through my mouth, the bravado and the playfulness all disappeared into the indentations being formed on my tongue. 

"Do you want to say my name now?" He asked, moving on from my tongue to place the wooden clothespins on my lips.  

I shook my head. He pulled at the pins and laughed. It was a very different laugh from the one that makes me feel loved and cherished. It was a laugh that made me feel terrified, regretful and small. I tried to mumble an apology through the mire of pain, but no real words emerged, only the sorrowful dripping of a little girl in trouble. 

"Stay right there," he remarked as he retreated to the closet again, "Let's really teach you to be mindful of the way you address your..elders." 

He laughed because he knows how much I hate the cultural implications of respecting ones elders simply because they were born sooner than you were. I resent that. I respect everyone, until they give me a reason not to, and that respect is not conveyed by socially-mandated systems of address. I would have made that argument and perhaps even have successfully proselytized his ideas, if my mouth hadn't been occupied by the punitive state of being in which I had put myself. He returned with a pair of forceps and a single needle. As he busied himself with cleaning, sterilizing and preparing, I hoped to the lord he meant to put that needle through my lips. 

He didn't. 

He held the tip of my tongue in the forceps as I grabbed the arms of the chair, wanting more than anything to scream in protest and flee, but that's not how my body responds to terror. It just..freezes. It feels like being paused mid-scream, like being paralysed, but hyper-aware of your body at the moment of paralysis. It felt like madness in my chest and nausea in my eyes. I am sure I screamed when he put the needle through my tongue, I am sure of it, though I am also sure that there is no way I really could have screamed, but I heard it. I swear, I heard it. Spontaneous tears began to flow out of my eyes, and maybe even my nose, as he stood there, admiring his work and pitying mine. I wished I could load myself up on nepenthes, just banish the terror and grief of the moment from my head, forever, but he seemed determined to make sure I remembered. 

"Do you feel like saying my name now, you stupid brazen fucking cunt?" He asked, pushing my knees up to my chest, "Do you feel like testing my boundaries with your juvenile little games?" 

I did not. I really, truly did not. I felt silly in a very different way. He forced my legs onto the arm-rests and pushed his fingers inside me. When he's fucking me things he usually lets me scream, it cannot be helped, I will never not dissolve into mindless panic when there's something invading my insides, but I couldn't. The state of my mouth ensured that I couldn't scream, I couldn't thrash around, I couldn't run away and I couldn't even beg him to stop. I pleaded by folding my hands together, and he responded by tearing them apart and slamming them back onto the wood. You can really only cry when you've lost the battle, so I did. There may be no use crying over spilt milk, but when there's no recourse either, you may as well feel your feelings. By the time he stopped, it was impossible to tell my tears from the sweat, and the sweat from the drool. My face was as wet as his offending fingers. He held them up against my face. 

"What is it that you like about this?" He asked, "Have you no fucking shame, you worthless little girl?" 

I don't know the answer to that. I don't like it at all? I like all of it a bit too much? I want to feel this way all the time? I want to tell everyone but I want no one to know? As he began to pull the clothespins off my tongue and lips, it felt like relief was gushing out of me like acid, burning my mouth on the way out. As soon as he pulled out the needle, I collapsed into mindless gibberish even I cannot decipher. He held me up by the throat, letting my head hit the wall behind me in metered callousness. 

"Tell me, what have we learnt?" He asked, in the strident tone of revelry in cruelty. 

It was hard to speak, my mouth felt like or belonged to another, and all my words seemed to have dissolved and swirled down the gutter of my throat.  

"Tell me or I'll do it all over again," he asked, swatting my mouth. 

"Little girls don't call their daddies by name," I mustered, at last, staring down at my own lap, like a cornered insect. 

"Good girl," he said, pulling me up to my feet by my wrist. 

He held my face and kissed me on the forehead, a storm raged in the pit of my stomach. Pullulated with adrenaline and madness, I reached into his shorts and pulled him towards me by the evidence of his desire. 

"I'm sorry, Mister M," I begged as he pushed me into the mattress, "Won't you let me show you how sorry I am?"

I heard him snigger as he pushed my face into the bed. As I felt him inside me, I offered my wrists behind my back. It feels better than way, to be helpless against the assault you begged to experience. I guess, somewhere deep inside, there is a desire to apologise to the past. 

"Please punish me, Mister M," I begged as he fucked me, smiling into my tears with gleeful disturbia. 

What can I say, I'm a little girl and little girls like to play games.