A Penitent Season: Day 14

Note: This is a series of 14-days of erotic penance written in real-time available exclusively to my patrons. It's our observation of a real fucked up version of Lent. You can access the entire series at this tag.

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Day 14 

Very little pain lingers in my body. You could cane me today and my thighs may appear swollen and purple, but it is unlikely that I will be able to feel it the next morning . You could punch my arms for hours, and I will cry as it happens, but two hours later, it will be as if it didn't. Of course, this will change somewhat as I get older, part of it is merely an accident of relative youth. I'm not *young* by any measure, but I can still get away with not washing the make-up off my face before I go to bed. I can still push a little harder than I should and trust there won't be any immediate consequences. Eventually, pain will linger in situations where it doesn't right now. The callousness with which I forget there are welts on my legs or a bruise on my cheek because I cannot feel them will be taken away from me. Right now, pain lingers in specific situations.

I can access it if he makes direct contact with the area that is hurt, which is a fetish I contracted from him and it has become almost vital to my pleasure. The first beating just feels like the dress rehearsal and each subsequent interaction with the wounds feels like the real show. In that way, my pleasure can no longer be found in the moment, it is always in the future. The pain in my jaw tends to linger too, but I don't feel it at all for the first thirty-six hours after the beating, I don't understand why that is, but that appears to be my body's response time. The pain, always lingers in my cunt, and ever since I've been with him, it feels like it has only gotten more and more consistent and constant. I will never figure out his fixation on torturing cunts, it's not just me, he does it to everyone (with whom he is interacting sexually).

And pain lingers with whips.

My midriff still feels like it's on fucking fire. It burns to touch my skin, it still feels so warm, like it's preparing to bloom. I'm not particularly sentimental about cuts and bruises, my joy resides firmly in the experience when it comes to everything in the world, but there is something about the marks of a whip that makes me go back to the mirror, sporadically, lift my shirt up and admire.

Maybe it's because the pain lingers.

...

He keeps threatening me. There is no specificity to his threats, he just keeps telling me that I will wish for death this evening. He hasn't touched me all day. Well, aside from the fact that he fucked me in the morning, it's how he woke me up. I haven't been sleeping well. There were a few nights when I just crashed from exhaustion, but I was up by five most mornings. Alternately, I tossed and turned, unable to fall asleep most other nights, waking up to write and occasionally cry, at the oddest hours, only falling back asleep minutes before I was supposed to be up. Sleep has lost a lot of its allure even while retaining its role as the only space that feels safe from him.

And this morning, it felt like he was infiltrating that space.

The idea of being woken up with sex is such a popular fantasy, it seems like such a pleasurable way to start your day, but his cock pressing up against my ass this morning did not signal any pleasure at all. It was like being woken up with a death knell. His hand reached over my body and grabbed my sore abdomen, as he squeezed my swollen flesh, I pushed back against him in a trained response to please the cock. He leaned over to me and bit my earlobe.

"Good morning, slave," he whispered into my ear, "It's time to take your fucking."

I know what it means when he phrases it like that. It means that I should bend over immediately, put my hands behind my back and act like the receptacle he prefers his women to be during penetrative intercourse. The fear he has instilled in me for this act has grown exponentially and I am worried that it will never stop being as terrifying as it has become. My former partner instilled a similar fear of anal sex in me, I still cannot get through it without having a complete crisis of self and body. As he fucked me, I watched my hand, curled up on the side of my face, I watched it while he slapped my head and humiliated me for being a useless, disappointing cunt.

"Useless fucking whore," he growled as he shot his load into me.

It felt like a bullet right into my deepest wounds.

"I'm sorry master," I whispered into the sheets, it's all I know to say anymore, except the words he insists that he must hear and so I continued, "Thank you for punishing me."

...

He keeps asking me questions. The questions seem rhetorical, but in actuality, they aren't questions at all. They're statements structured into questions designed to offer information that is intended to terrify me.

*If I sew your hands together in prayer, do you think you'll finally be able to earn your absolution?*

I don't want absolution. That was never the point. The point was to titrate the effects of my own guilt-based neuroses so I could swim in the sentiment of repentance without being bogged down by the unnecessary shackles of self-loathing. The point was to allow myself to be sorry without the moral condemnation of needing to make amends. I don't care to be forgiven, he doesn't care to forgive me, really, neither one of us knows what it is I have done wrong. His question has nothing to do with absolution, he just wants me to know he has enough sutures to stitch my hands together in prayer. I'll pray, my love, but there is still no God for me. I'd be begging forgiveness from the void and I still have a better chance of being forgiven by the abyss than I have from you.

*If the skin on your breasts is abraded, do you think you will be able to put on a bra for the gym?*

He doesn't actually care if I am able to do so or not. The last time he took a stuff wire brush to my back, I texted him from the gym when I lay down on my back to do crunches to tell him that I was suppressing screams. He sent me a voice-note that contained nothing but the sounds of him laughing at me. These glib questions that roll off his tongue aren't designed to express any concern, he just wants me to know that he wants to peel the skin off my breasts and arrogate even more of my skin than he already has. You can peel the skin off my breasts, my love, I'll still put on a shirt that hurts and sweat into the wounds without complaint. If it hurts more to live my life because of him, then I'll take the pain, even in inconvenience. I'll call him and tell him when it hurts most, so he can laugh at me. It's the least I can do.

*If I beat you with my belt over your whip marks, will that make new bruises or deepen the ones that already exist?*

That question may seem like a scientific curiosity but it's one he has asked, answered and conducted several replication studies to confirm. He will always beat my bruises, in this realm his turpitude is nonpareil. When he sees me in tears, it will always spur him to more cruelty. If he sees me in pain, he will always desecrate that which is already broken. If he sees a massacre on my skin, he will pour kerosene on it and set me on fire. You can hurt my pain, my love, that's why it exists. I don't need him to bear witness to my suffering, I am build myself a soapbox to make an exhibition of my pain, I don't need him to pretend this state of brokenness compels him to care. With me, he can deracinate compassion from his soul, I will always take it. It doesn't matter if the bruises are new or just deeper, so long as he will always be there to make a bad situation worse.

*If you start crying three hours before I am done with you, how much water would you need me to force you to drink to ensure you won't pass out from the dehydration?*

I suspect he does care if I pass out. Despite his enthusiastic display of moral ambiguity, he does possess the capacity for sagacity. He just wants me to know he will make me cry a lot. I don't doubt that he will, it won't be because of the pain he causes my body, I know that too, it will be the heart-wrenching manner in which he stomps out any hope I dare display. I will display it too, if I have learnt anything it's that my resolve is mercurial, it is subject to the slightest changes in my emotional experience of him. I may decide to be perfect, but it doesn't matter what I decide, my illusion of will is ephemeral. But you go right ahead and make me cry as much as I can bear, my love. I need his facilitation of my tears like an addict needs their next fix. I will pour my life onto his floors, I will show myself in the weakest and most exposed state that I can embody. I want him to see me like that. There is a beautiful song in which the singer, addressing a former lover says: *Bichadte waqt un aankon me thi humari ghazal, ghazal bhi aisi jo kisi aur ko sunayi na thi*, a literary translation of which would be — *In the moment of separation, the eyes of my lover read back my own poetry to me, and it was poetry I never revealed to anyone but him, poetry he inadvertently came to own*'. My tears are the poetry I never reveal to anyone else, they're his. I want him to have them until I run out and then I will make more just to satiate his hunger for my suffering.

I will build myself in structures of pain, my love, to give to you.

...

*Why do you keep beating me?*

He brought his belt down against my back and it felt worse than anything in the world. My barometer for the measure of pain is completely warped. Yesterday, as he whipped me with a bullwhip, I didn't make a sound, it didn't feel excruciating even though my skin was changing colours right before my eyes, it felt beautiful. In comparison with the whip, the belt should have felt like nothing, right?

But it's not that.

I hate the climax of everything. I hate grand finales. I hate the pressure of the end of storytelling. The reason why I dislike films and thrillers or mystery novels is that there is so much riding on the exposition that it's impossible to do right. You know that show — I May Destroy You — I liked part of the conceptual direction they took in the finale. They did three possible endings, and I would have loved it if they had left it at that, but so harsh is the expectation of a perfect ending, that they hedged and included the *real* ending as part of the finale as well. I wish they hadn't done that. Often, when I watch or read endings, I can see the hand of the writer being forced to create something explosive. To end with a big bang.

I don't like bangs.

As he beat me, having laid out a dozen things with which to hurt me, it felt like a bang. I could not bear it. I started to cry five minutes into his belt being administered onto my back. As I cried, I expected him to be more compassionate than he has the past two weeks, I realise that I refuse to learn, I refuse to abandon irrational and naive hope, but that is who I am. Every day, I wake up and I try to fix things in the world, I know it's distasteful to say that about one's own self but I don't know how to describe my job without saying that, if I let myself abandon hope and optimism, I would never be able to do my job again. I have spent the past year being more perturbed and hopeless than ever before, you get knocked down and sometimes it compels you to stay down, and I figured it was time. It was my time to learn that you cannot trust anyone, the world is a horrible place, you will never get what you think you deserve and there is no joy but moments stolen from the unforgiving grips of life.

But I was wrong to think I could be that person.

The fact that I refuse to abandon hope for his tenderness is not a tragedy, it's a triumph. Hopelessness is not a lesson I want to learn again. In the past year, I  have clutched to my routines and my schedules more than I ever have before, I explained to myself that it was because I had more work than ever and organisation always helps to manage time better. It's not entirely untrue, I am genuinely fond of efficiency to the point that nothing turns me on more than an efficiently-managed situation, but my growing obsession with it was not about my fondness. It was about the fact that I was disillusioned with everything I have been doing in life. All of it — the inability to feel accomplished, the reluctance to celebrate anything, the constantly diminishing of everything I did — was stemming from the fact that I had started to lose hope. I had lost hope in the people in my life. I had lost hope in my ability to affect any real change. I had lost hope in the world. I was drowning in the noise and clutter of mindlessness that litters the world under the garb of decor. I had to clutch to routine because it created the illusion of belief.

I don't want to clutch anymore.

I want to believe in things, against all odds. I wanted to believe that he would stop hurting me. I didn't scream or should as he beat me, I didn't fight him or attempt to establish a circumstance where he didn't use every single one of those items he had placed on the bed. The belt, the knife, the needles, the scalpel, the oven brush. I had accepted the condition that he would use each one on my body until it was even more desecrated than before. I didn't want to stop it, I just wanted to cry because his relentless pursuit of me was weighing so heavily on my body, I had to release some of the pressure lest I collapsed under my own weight. I wanted to cry because despite all acceptance, you can still hope for a better tomorrow. Hope is free. Hope is cheap. Hope is abundant. Hope of a difficult choice.

I chose hope.

I cried as he stuck a needle in my back and howled even more when he wouldn't stop telling me that I was still being a useless, disappointment. I cried as he swung the belt against my back with vehement force to punish me for my tears. I cried until I wet the bed, until my nose was completely blocked, until all of the accumulated angst inside my soul was pouring out through my eyes.

**Why do you keep beating me?*" I asked, intermittently, but it wasn't meant for his ears as much as it was for mine.

I didn't need to know why. He did not need to tell me, but the helplessness made me question the circumstances of my plight.

*Why do you keep beating me?*

"Do you want me to stop beating you?" He asked me, pulling me up by the hair and looking into my eyes.

I could not say anything. I could not say no because it wasn't the truth, I did want him to stop. I could not yes because it wasn't coming from an honest place, I wanted him to stop, but more than that, I wanted it to not matter what I want. I wanted to have hope, not choice.

"I don't want it to be my choice," I finally mustered through my sobs.

"Good," he said, patting my head roughly, "You don't choose, you don't ask, I told you, you just take what I give you."

"Thank you master," I told him, and for once, those words of gratitude may have been more a function of meaning than habit.

"Get on the floor, on your knees," he said, pulling me off the bed and onto the floor.

He sat on the edge of the bed and I kneeled between his legs. My hands folded themselves before him and he put down the belt and held both of them in one hand.

"I won't beat you anymore," he said, and I started to wonder if he had anticipated any of this.

"Thank you master," I said, before launching into a tirade of tears so strong, they could have uprooted our house.

He pulled my head to his knees and let me cry until my legs went numb. He didn't reassure me. He didn't tell me it was okay. He didn't express any approval nor disappointment in me. He just let me cry. It had none of the flavour of a finale, but in my head the perfect ending isn't a bang, it's silence.

At the end, there was silence.

...