A Penitent Season: Day 13

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.

....

Day 13

"It sounded like you were having nightmares all night," he said to me, a few minutes after we woke up.

"I don't really remember," I said, stretching in the bed as the chain rattled against the headboard, "I don't recall having any dreams. Really, I don't even remember when I fell asleep."

"Yeah you were out like a light," he responded, "I don't think you've ever fallen asleep hours before I did, but it has already happened twice this week."

It has happened twice this week, because I have been exhausted, but also, for the past two nights, I've tried to fall asleep the second my head hits the pillow because I'm afraid of being in bed with him. I am as afraid of his intentions as I am of how easy it is for him to inveigle me into championing my own destruction. In that regard, I am the perfidious one, he is always very honest about his intention to violate me. It is I who pretends that I am looking out for myself.

"I was really tired, master," I told him, "And I suppose, when I am asleep and you are, I feel safest."

"You think I won't wake you up to beat you?" He asked, "You think I won't wake you up to fuck you?"

I was concerned that saying yes or no would make him do it so I chose not to respond at all. He is not easily goaded but I worry nonetheless. Most days he wouldn't care if I believe he would do something or not, he knows it doesn't matter because I will likely not make the correct assessment anyway. That is true. When it comes to him, my judgement is genuinely unsound and often inaccurate. He is the person who knows me best, but there are alarming moments in which I realise that I don't know him nearly as well. I know who he is, I know about his life, I know his ATM pin, but there is another thing that is important to know about a person with whom you share an entire life. It's important to know what they are capable of, and with him, I don't.

Years ago he told me that before he first met me he thought I was a lot of bullshit and bravado. He's not the first person to think that about me and he won't be the last. My persona seems designed and curated to titivate, it is over-the-top in its intensity and people often assume or suspect there is something else, something less confronting and more human, underneath. As much as I would love to deny my humanness, it does exist, it's just on the surface. In many ways, I am not a deep person, because there is nothing on the inside that I don't wear on my skin. You don't have to dig deep to find me, that is not the challenge of me; i am not a hidden treasure nor an acquired taste, just a specific taste, that appeals to people who as kids used to eat chalk, pick their scabs and deliberately bruise their knees on asphalt. My outsides just seem hard to believe because most people keep most of themselves on the inside, but I keep everything of value to me in the garden and there is no gate. It's how I am with everything.

I reveal my own secrets out loud and not the salacious secrets of a sordid sexuality, those don't even feel like secrets to me, I reveal my struggles and fears. I reveal my ugliness. I reveal my intention. I don't make a display of revelation though, I just adorn myself in it. I reveal everything. I can see how it feels like too much. I can see why he thought it was a farce. I am used to being underestimated, or at least, suspect of performing an elaborate act of sophistry to finagle the world. I told him, back then, that it delights me to be underestimated.

But I was the one who underestimated him.

At least, there was on my part, a miscalculation in terms of his capability. It's been almost eight years since we have been together and even today I cannot tell what he is capable of. I cannot tell if he will actually do what he is threatening to do. In my head, he wasn't capable of the cruelty of the last two weeks, not to the extent that it has gone. Last evening, we were sitting at my desk and I was telling him exactly how much fear I have been carrying around, in talking about it I choked up with so much emotion, I cried.

"Don't you feel sorry for me?" I asked him, "Has nothing stirred your compassion?"

"I don't feel sorry for you," he said, his tone was acerbic but not unkind, "I love you, but my love doesn't guarantee compassion."

"Even now?" I asked, still crying and as I blew smoke out of my mouth.

"Even now," he said.

I didn't know he was capable of that. In actuality, he doesn't need to pick up a whip or a belt anymore, he is hurting me, merely by existing, just by keeping me in this state of capture and reinforcing it with intermittent bouts of pain and emotional disregard. I am a minefield and he keeps throwing my own belongings onto me to test it. Sleep is the only respite.

"I'm sorry if I kept you up with my noises," I told him, preparing to get out of bed.

"No, I liked you having nightmares beside me," he said, unleashing me from his chains, "I'm pretty sure I gave them to you."

"Oh," I responded because there isn't much one can say to that.

"But I think I'll have to work harder, since you don't even remember them," he said.

The man I love is a stranger.

How is he capable of this?

I went to this church for absolution, I wandered around in the grounds and followed the sound of the bells, instead of a priest I made my confession to the sexton and now I'm buried alive in my own grave.

...

"Are you really that scared of me fucking you?" He asked me, moments after he had beaten and fucked me.

His question wasn't based on anything I did during the process, I am too broken to fight back, and the retinue of voices in my head that get me through life have all gone silent; so little of me has survived his expedition that I have gone quiet, which for my unrelenting garrulity is a departure from normalcy so severe, it's how you'd know I am not being myself.

His question is based on what happened last night.

Earlier, he was talking to me about how much he enjoyed my conflict from last night. I could sense it even then, as I stroked his cock and told him that I needed to feel him inside me, while simultaneously breaking into tears each time he made the slightest gesture that he may take me. I really did want him inside me, but I wouldn't have been able to bear it. My body would have survived, but my heart would not have returned from this journey. I told him that.

"You wouldn't have survived the lovemaking you think you want either," he had told me in response.

"You think you know what I want better than I do?" I asked, almost challenging to his authority.

"Yes," he told me, "My cruelty is harsh, you're struggling, but my tenderness would destroy you."

I hate it when he is right.

...

It's the thirteenth day and I am irked by the fact that it's not Friday. For a whimsical soul, I can seem quite like a pedant, but I swear, I'm not being pedantic, it's worse, I'm being superstitious. It's not the kind of superstition that is purported by any belief, it's the kind that I allow myself to foster because of sentimentality and a literary sensibility with which I decorate my life. It's the emotional equivalent of a beautiful sculpture of a naked woman in a yoga pose. It has some meaning, a little edge and no cosmic significance whatsoever.

I was born on Friday the Thirteenth and several of my most significant rapes also took place, not just on Friday the Thirteenth, but also my birthday. I am sorry to have put it like that, I know it's jarring to read someone who discusses their sexual trauma in a flippant, eroticised or ambivalent manner. It's easier to gawk in wonder of the coincidence that I lose my virginity to rape on thirteenth birthday, which was a Friday, and the thirteenth day of the month. The numbers are easier to deal with than everything else so I allow myself a little symbolism and wonder, a little macabre thrill. Many years later, when I finally dumped my former partner, on my birthday, which was also a Friday, he raped me as well. The next morning, after I had finished vomiting for an hour, I couldn't stop laughing about the way the dates had lined up. It was sad.

But somehow, after that, I began celebrating every Friday the Thirteenth that passed me by. I didn't really do anything in way of celebration except declaring that it was the birthday of my soul, but they began to excite me and each one that passed felt more special, like a rainstorm.

And now it's the thirteenth day.

But it's not Friday.

That's probably a bad thing.

...

I asked him why.

When he asked me to spread my legs so he could fuck me with something, I asked him why. For a few hours now I've been wondering why I asked that question. It's not even about the audacity of questioning his lordship which I am sure was his problem with it, it's more the fact that the answer to my question was so obvious anyway. It was rather explicitly clear why he wanted to me to spread my legs.

And I asked, why?

I think I am losing my mind. He was indignant that I asked why, and expressed it in his classic manner of constantly looking like there's some garbage underneath his nose. How must it feel to be so disapproving all the time? I cannot relate, at all, to the thrill of controlling someone this way but I think I understand the exhilaration of being able to say certain kinds of things to another person. In polite society, you can't talk to people like he talks to me and for the sake of good, healthy relationships you have to communicate a certain way. You can't keep telling your wife she has a dirty pussy every time you touch her. You can't call her a disappointment ten times a day. You can't kick her to the floor and tell her she can't do anything right. You can't express these horrible, descriptive ditties of cruelty. Yet if you know you can create spaces where it's not only allowed, but relished, I can understand the allure of wielding that power.

I don't understand the motivation for the use of power in power exchange, but I understand the motivation of abuse of power. Everything he does to me is an abuse of power. I don't know mean it is outside the realm of what both of us in sound and analytical mind agree to do with another, I mean that in practise his exercise of power has no desire to do *good* at all. He doesn't want to teach, he wants to confuse. He doesn't want me to learn, he wants me to fail. And every once in a while if he does want to sculpt something out of me, he will never give me any approval for it, he doesn't care to offer any motivation to do things well. No matter what I do, he'll never let me be right or good.

I'm a bad slave.

Because he's a bad master.

But it's not a bad thing. What do we have to be good for? If fairness, kindness and compassion make one good, that's not what I'm looking for in my cunt nor my heart. I want a bad master, it's too late for me to be fixed with lessons, it's best just to punish me so I may atone for a fraction of my wretched soul.

...

I found out the origin of the term whipping boy recently. Evidently in certain monarchical kingdoms, it was not permitted to whip the royal children, so they were assigned a whipping boy instead, one who was raised alongside them so they could develop empathy and love for them. When the royal children misbehaved, their whipping boy was punished instead and the royal children were emotionally punished for causing such pain to their proxy-fraternal friends. That's gruesome. I wish I had never learnt that fact. Because it's the first time that occurred to me when he brought the whip to the bed.

My favourite thing about whips is that every single time one strikes my skin, I want to stop immediately, but exactly ten seconds later I want just one more and the cycle continues until I lose all track of self and time.

That's exactly what happened.

I didn't scream even once. I smiled several times. I didn't squeal or cry. I didn't clutch anyway. Really, I think it may be impossible to make me dislike whips. I realised while he was whipping me that I have never cried while being whipped. Maybe something about the whip makes me feel powerful. Maybe I just really like the sensation. It is the kind of pain that automatically suspends all the rest of my sexuality. I am no longer slave, submissive, horny or anything else, I am just masochist. That's why I cannot stop smiling. Each time the whip bites, I would close my eyes and a smile would just leak out onto my face.

He's been such a prominent part of everything I have been feeling, he has controlled everything I have felt ever moment of every day for the past thirteen days but while he whipped me he disappeared for a while. Everything did, except me and the pain. It's like having sex with an old lover, not the kind who left pain or angst, but the kind who left the achingly soft familiarity of a well-used set of cotton sheets. Everything disappeared. He cannot punish me with this. Pain is on my side.

It's the thirteenth day.

I cannot lose on thirteen.

It's mine.

...