A Penitent Season: Day 6

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 6

He said he had to punish me for begging him to touch my cunt. I did do that. I am ashamed that I did. It was two nights ago, I was completely beside myself in need, I cannot even bring myself to repeat the things I said in the heat of the moment before devolving into an emotional mess of a human being. Yesterday, he was kinder to me, as a result of the breaking I am sure, he only beat me once, he only fucked me once and he didn't shove anything inside my cunt at all. That's the nicest he has been in days.

But, today is a different day.

He came up behind me as I lounged around the bed enjoying my Saturday morning. Saturdays make me want to go to a farmer's market, buy fresh flowers and bake a cake. I'm willing to settle for a juice shop, flowers I pick from the gardens of others and potatoes au gratin. Saturday made him lift me up by the hair, force my clothes off my body and shove his fingers back inside me. It will be something about this systematic raping that takes me down. I know it. Years ago, a decade ago, my former partner and I devised a sexual experiment in which he locked me in the basement of my grandparents old home (they were not there at the time) in the mountains for a week without my phone, clothes or really, anything. I am not even sure I could survive that now. I have no idea how I did. I read the things I wrote about it, in the aftermath, and then again, a while later, and I am horrified. Still, you'd think it would have been the controlled water supply, the strange toileting conditions, the lack of sunlight, the complete confiscation of recreation that broke me, but it was the systematic raping. I left some of my sanity in that basement. In that case it was my ass he was raping, but a hole with a history, is a hole with a history, right? I wonder if I'm on the precipice of losing some of my sanity now.

He kept pulling my hair, shaking my head from side-to-side as he fucked me with his fingers. It's so awful, even the areas outside my cunt, the parts of my ass against which his knuckles punch when he fingers it, are swollen and hurting. The more I scream and cry, the more firmly he holds me down. The more I cry, the more determined he sees to me. Even in our permanent agreement of "*I'll say stop if I need to, but you do you boo*," I rarely ever say *stop* very often. Now, I feel like I am saying it ten times a day. I wonder if I am unlearning some of the composure and silence he taught me over the past eight years, I cannot last the brutality without crumbling. (Eight years? That's almost as many years as the last one. I don't know why I would say that.) He didn't fuck me for very long, but before he left, he did shove a dildo inside me, telling me to keep it there until he returned.

He had to see a patient and take a puppy to the vet.

I know.

He is alarmingly human for a monster. He takes stray puppies to the vet, he has long conversations with our cats, he makes declarations of his love for Sirius at random and ad nauseum, he contrives with the child to design pranks to play on me, he cooks me an elaborate meal to celebrate a victory, he gets sleepy in under three-seconds when his head hits the pillow, he likes when I scratch his bald head, he scolds children in the street for not wearing helmets while riding their bikes, he gets senitmental about his youth when he listens to classic rock, he giggles like a goofy teenager when he is high. He is so human, but in my words, maybe that is less visible than it ought to be. His cruelty features in my writing, his tenderness does as well, but his humanity is perhaps most absent. His dichotomy is like a potent elixir, I cannot figure out how these extremes reside inside him, and how all of these hues feel completely like him.

He left for a couple of hours and I kept wondering why it felt weird to exist with a cunt filled with vitrified pain.

...

He beat me and then he told me it was going to rain. He was disappointed I wasn't more grateful for the fact that he only caned my thighs once yesterday, so he caned them again, even before the stripes from yesterday could turn into the bruises of today. I'm uncomfortable with how determined he is to not feel sorry for me. In some parts of the beating, I could see him swing the cane with such force he had to have known I couldn't just lie there and be quiet. Still, he was so irascible about the noise coming from my mouth. I was barely making any noise.

I'm stuck.

I am really stuck in a place where I can do no right, and I imagine, the inevitable next step would be to divorce my gratification from right or wrong, and place it firmly in just *being* but there is still hope, or something, that shows up when he is explicitly being so harsh that it would be reasonable to expect a reaction from the recipient, and a small amount of disappointment, in response to the complete lack of leniency in face of extenuating circumstances. He's like the parent who makes you do arithmetic the day after your last exam and beats you because you put the date down wrong on the page of perfect answers. He's being my mom. I'm not touching that with a ten-foot pole, which I am sure he would try to fuck me with if he could have access to one.

I kept resolving not to beg him to stop and I kept begging him to stop. Are penitents allowed to feel like they're being tortured more for their venial sins than they deserve or is feeling that a sin in itself? I guess I will find out. The changed nature of his sadism in this period is forcing a change in my behaviour, it's forcing me to fall victim to reflex again and again. I wonder what is the real difference, it's not just the lack of consideration or adherence to established process, the fact that every caning feels like a cold-caning is secondary to..something. I guess, maybe, it's possible he is not acting purely out of sadism but a need to destroy something about me. He not even trying to make me last longer during beatings and I am not even trying to compose myself for them. Well, I am trying, I am just failing constantly.

I definitely failed this afternoon.

He told me he would do if again before we went to bed because I hadn't lasted until the cane broke. I wonder if I should just grab it and break it myself, I had that thought while he was hitting me, and then I felt a wave of shame wash over my body and leak out of my cunt.

"Every single day you disappoint me," he told me before he flung the cane beside me.

"I'm sorry," I told him, "Thank you for punishing me."

"It's about to rain, by the way," he said.

I sprang from the bed and ran to the window. I forgot my tears and my pain completely, within seconds, I was smiling so broadly, my jaw hurt from the joy. He laughed at me, but it was amicable laughter. He understands. It hasn't rained in months! I wake up wishing for rain every single day. I associate trite, over-the-top meaning to rain, I base my decision to move to entire cities on whether it rained the day I first visited. I feel welcomed when it rains for my arrival. The month we moved here? Rained all month. Record-breaking rain for the area. The year I moved to the desert, it *rained so much the streets flooded*. Rained the day I was born, it rained the day I was raped, it rained the day I met my husband, it rained that entire month. I will always, irrationally and against all admissible reason, believe that it rains for me, but I don't get to choose when that happens. It is mine to wish every single day, it is its to decide when I deserve it.  It knows best. The rain knew, even, not to come down at my wedding, because I didn't care for it. I don't want to associate meaning to a party celebrating my parents' need to feed a bunch of people too much food, nor really a document I signed in the presence of a judge.

I recently found out that people in liberal communities, especially kinky and polyamorous communities, will deliberately hide that they are married. No, not in the usual way, not so that they can individually date and lie to their spouse. Collectively, couples or individuals who are married will mask the fact that they are married and say they are living together or nesting partners. I don't understand why, but the person who told me explained that in certain liberal dating circles being married if frowned-upon as being less woke or cool. This world sounds insane to me. People marry, even liberal woke people, because societal and legal systems incentivise marriage and penalise legal singlehood. Do you need to marry to procreate? No. Does it make your life easier? Yeah, sadly, it does. From inheritance to guardianship rights to school admissions, everything is easier if you are parenting in society as a married couple. It's that way about so much — health, money, taxes, income — being married, at some point, becomes a loophole you're trapped into whether you like it or not, at some unfair penalty, but doing it and pretending not to have done it doesn't fix anything at all?

I frequently talk about the fact that I got married because of my husband's job, not only because I couldn't live with him in conflict zones unless I was his wife, but also because I cannot access his healthcare unless I am a wife and while I can make the decision to pay for my own healthcare, and sometimes do, that was a good incentive for me. Do I wish for systems to be less marriage-obligate? Absolutely, but hiding that I am married won't make it so, talking about *how* my decision to marry was influenced by systemic bias is a much better place to start, in my opinion.

...

We were sitting together, across from each other, at the dining table. There was a man repairing the air-conditioning inside our bedroom. I was in the middle of discussing how the evolving social mores and laws about marijuana and psychedelics meant there would eventually be an overall overhaul on the generally-accepted version of the drug talk that parents gave to their children, or so I hope anyway. Instead of listening to me, he was looking at me. He was looking at my neck, and I could feel his hands around it, even though the image was being conjured in his head. He was threatening me with his eyes and it addled me. I stopped talking mid-sentence and forgot what I was saying. My mouth went dry. A little moan escaped my throat. My entire body started to tingle and melt into the chair. I feel like this a lot these days. Yesterday I told him I feel like I am constantly on the verge of tears, or greatness. Today, I feel like at any given time I want to curl up on the floor and hug my knees. I could feel his cock pulsate inside his pants, under the table when I said that sentence. I never thought I would ever meet a person who was as turned on by my misery as I am.

But this is the place I want to be.

It's about incident versus reality. Incident-based pain, like a beating and a fucking, delivered over the course of an evening is great, but suffering as a lifestyle hits different. It's world-building, much like you do when you are writing, and be best world-building takes places when you expose all of yourself. All of your shameful inner workings around arousal, the little things, like the sick pleasure of having your panties pulled down to your ankles and left there, like the particular poison of shifting around just a little bit until you're told to stay in place. The whole world lies in the little things. In the look with which he demonstrates my entire situation to me without raising a finger or an eyebrow and how it leaves me debilitated. I wonder how much we contribute to creating our monsters. He wouldn't be the same, if he hadn't been haunting me for the past eight years, if the structure he was haunting was different, he would be different.

How much of this monster did I build?

...

I fell asleep with my head against his chest on the couch in the late afternoon. I was leaning against him with my back and he was holding me, it was cool because of the rain and I was warm inside the blanket, and I just fell asleep. It's not customary for me to sleep without a two hour ritual of convincing myself to sleep and trying to distract myself through any means necessary. I'm like a toddler when it comes to sleep. I had a dirty dream while I was asleep on him. Well, is it a dream if its just a recaptulation of what has happened earlier in the day? He was fucking me with the glass dildo and I was begging him to stop. He kept telling me he would stop as soon as I stopped getting wet so I started pleading with my cunt to not be wet anyway.

I woke up moaning.

He was watching me. When I tilted my head my back slightly, I could see the bottom half of his face, but I didn't need to see any of it to know of the disapproval. His hands moved to my breasts and he started to squeeze them just a little. I really, really do not know what has happened to my body to make my breasts act erogenous but I am actively fantasising about the way he has been touching them. Gentle and tantalizing. Soft. Like he is touching my clit. I am sure my cunt has referred itself to my breasts because it is trying to accept that it will not be touched. Yet, now, when he touches my breasts a dread starts to dawn on me, I start to cry out like a pathetic creature willing its own body to have mercy.

Still I lifted my shirt so I could feel his hands on my skin. He touched them. He held him in his hands and squeezed, repeatedly. I started to moan so loudly. I started to spread my legs and buck against the air.

"Oh no," he said, with ersatz woe and genuine pity in his tone, "It's happening again, isn't it?"

I hate when he uses this tone. I cannot describe it. It is the kind of tones villains use in movies when they tell the protagonist they are going to murder their family and make them watch. It's the tone of evil and it makes me so wet. I started to apologise, but my body was bucking and thrashing around wildly, invalidating every word of apology.

"You're getting horny again," he said, "How can you never learn? How many times will I have to teach the same lesson?"

I appreciate that he keeps up the casuistry. It's colourful and entertaining, but we all know, I am never going to learn.

I can't.

Why cant I stop?

...

Did you know that love could feel bleak?

Whatever it was, the place where I was trying to get tonight, I couldn't get there. It felt like being on a train that is stalled indefinitely just two minutes away from its destination.

Two minutes from enjoying the pain.
Two minutes from hating it.
Two minutes from being able to accept it.
Two minutes from arousal.
Two minutes from peace.

I was stuck, two minutes away, from myself.

I seen unable to do anything right and I am sure, now, that it is by design. The point of Lent isn't to be perfect right? It's to try to circumvent your pleasure, correct your flaws and to fail so you can keep swimming in the guilt. I feel like I am failing constantly. Earlier tonight he called me a terrible slave. I *know* he doesn't *really* mean that, but I also know, that he does. In whatever reality he does say it, he means it. He wants me to know I cannot do anything right and I cannot. I cannot be beaten right. I cannot be fucked right. I cannot be tortured right. I cannot even cry right. I want to slap myself, I felt the overwhelming urge to do it as I lay in bed beside him, after he finished demonstrating to me, yet again, that I will get aroused and show it, no matter how much he punishes my cunt. I know this test is rigged, I know, but I can't help but find the inadequacy in myself. I know this game favours the house but I can't help but hope that I will have a win. If I erase everything human about me, will I finally stop being bad?

Will I finally be fixed?

Probably not.

I can't do anything right.

...