A Penitent Season: Day 1

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

....

Day 1.

I stayed awake a great deal of the night. He fell asleep moments after we got in bed. I could still feel him dripping out of my cunt when he started to snore. My jaw was still throbbing, my arms still so incredibly sore from the punching and my insides still raw from the assault of his fingers and his cock. When he got in bed beside me, I was still cowering, hiding my body inside the curvature of my shoulders to thwart any more attacks; when he reached over to move my hair aside and kiss me, I flinched and squealed. Sometimes, I am unsure as to how to explain to people that trauma responses are the most romantic thing your partner can give to you, they reach deeper than other responses. They reside in the same realm as evolutionary fears and heart rates that elevate in response to adrenaline, responses like that are meant to obey humanity, but instead, they obey him. When he gives me trauma, he brands my psyche. It's like a tattoo on my soul, an emotional memory so strong and significant I couldn't forget it if I tried.

"You poor girl," he told me before he turned around to sleep, "This fortnight is going to be so difficult for you."

I spent most of the night wondering if I was comforted by that declaration or confronted by it. Every couple of hours, I'd wish I could wake him up and offer more of my body up for hurt, then I'd shudder at my need and try to force myself back to sleep. When I woke up I hadn't been asleep for very long, I shook out of somnolence because he was stroking the hair off my face and just as he leaned in to tuck it behind my ear, I began to cry.

"I'm sorry, please," I muttered even before my eyes were completely open.

It took a few minutes for me to realise that dawn had just broken, he hadn't just been beating me, he wasn't about to hit me again, we had just woken up to a new day. He kissed me on my forehead and I placed my palm against his chest.

"I love you," he whispered into my head, stroking my hair and holding me against his chest.

"I love you as well," I sobbed into his fuzzy skin that tickles my nose as much as it provides the comfort of a terrible, ratty blanket of my youth.

"It's going to be okay," he said, as I pulled away and prepared to get out of bed.

"Is it, really?" I asked, grazing my jaw with the tips of his fingers.

"Well, for me, it will be okay for me," he said, shaking his fingers from the grips of mine and squeezing my face.

"And for me?" I asked, looking down at the sheets, unable to bear his gaze.

"A penitent season, my love," he said with the finality of a guillotine, "It's what you deserve."

...

There was a terrible poster on the mirror in my grandmother's dressing room. It was yellow and in a garish font it read, "Marriage is not a word, it is a sentence." They meant it to be funny in the way that that generation thinks it's funny to spend your life with someone you hate and casually reference that fact constantly. For the longest time, I didn't understand the poster and when I did, it made me angry. Then I fell in love and it took on a whole new meaning.

His love is a sentence.

And my imprisonment is my homecoming.

I think about that poster a lot.

...

He came to me an hour before lunch and dragged me from my desk to the edge of the bed. Normally, he wouldn't interrupt my work and as a matter of habit I would never be so accessible while I was working that I could be reached. There are aspects about my life about which I am completely private and that includes the people closest to me. I find it comforting to love a person who doesn't feel entitled to the entirety of me but especially to love a person who understands that the things I keep to myself aren't something I am doing to him. I find it liberating to love a man to whom I can declare that I am doing something about which I can tell him nothing, even if I leave town for several days to pursue it, and have him accept that answer as adequate information that requires no further explanation. I would do the same for him, in some ways, there are parts of him he doesn't want to experience in my presence. I relish this lack of pretence. We believe separateness to be a necessarily bad thing but it isn't, this lack of expectations around what a relationship should look like is why my marriage isn't a sentence, it's a constant delight.

However, for a short period, I've given myself permission to be distracted, to prioritise pleasure and relaxation over goals, schedules and routine. It's a celebration. I realise I have a problem and it has been more and more clear to me over the past year, I put off celebrating and push the goal each time I achieve one, it has led me to be terribly cruel to myself in terms of how much joy I am allowed to experience. It's about the award. I won one and I feel horrible about having won it. For months I couldn't tell anyone I was even nominated, I only told my husband I was on the shortlist a week after they told me and I cried from shame when I did win. For days I have been avoiding taking people's calls because I know why they are calling and I feel sick to my stomach. I couldn't even tell my stepson because I knew he would want to buy me a present or throw a party but I know something no one else knows, I know in my bones that I do not deserve this. I haven't done enough, I haven't worked hard enough, I haven't suffered enough. Life has been too easy for me, I shouldn't be rewarded.

I have a problem.

So, I have decided to address it by teaching myself to relax and to celebrate an achievement even if it feels fraudulent and makes me uncomfortable. In the interest of celebration, I have allowed myself to be swayed by my husband's vacation insofar as I will prioritise enjoyment over responsibility, goals and duty for two weeks. I will succumb to romance and whimsy. My mother said to me recently that she felt like she had made a mistake by raising me to be so career-focused because if she hadn't, at least I would have learnt to have fun and relax, and not have grey hair at 31. It is mostly the grey hair that bothers her, I think. She is worried I will look older than my husband who is a decade older than I am, in fact, she believes I already do, and if I don't immediately put a lot of aloevera on my face and take more vacations, all hell shall break loose because some people may think that I look old. God, I love that insane, strange woman, and she is right that her upbringing is part of why I cannot relax.

And so I have resolved to do it.

It makes sense to me that I want to indulge not in travel or sloth in pursuit of relaxation, but in lust. We should be allowed vacations of lust. It is easier for me to allow myself indulgence into this state where my sexuality gets to be primary, than anything else, and in this state, when he pulls me from my desk, I am able to follow. I was able to forget what I was doing, drop it without notice and worry that I would forget to take care of it when I went back to it, and follow him even though night hadn't fallen, I wasn't allowed yet by my own constraints of how life should function to be free, distracted by pleasure or allowed to shirk responsibility. It has to be a vacation of penance for me to take one, I suppose.

He sat me down on the edge of the bed and squeezed the swollen bits of both my arms. The skin was still warm from the previous night, the bruises hadn't even risen to the surface. He brought a spry little cane from the closet and began to run it over the swollen bits of my biceps.

"I'm sorry," I said as I felt him take aim on my left arm, "I deserve to be punished."

I don't. Maybe I do. Maybe there is no such thing. I don't know anymore. I just wanted to declare my state of repentance, I just wanted to reinforce this state of being a sorry creature who knows no pleasure but to suffer. It knows no ballads of lust but amends whispered shamefully into the silence. It knows nothing of what it ought to feel only that it feels sorry and it must. If I insist on finding meaning only in suffering, the least I can do is commit to a discipline of suffering.

"Good," he said, approvingly, "Hope is a fool's crutch, you are not a fool, are you?"

I am. By every definition of the word including the one about which you must write essays as a student of literature, I am a fool, but I am not deluded. Hope is for other people, hope is not for me. I don't think of my world, nor my future, in terms of better or worse, I have no need for hope. I wouldn't know what to hope for. He struck my arm with ferocity that may not have felt so harsh if I hadn't already been hurting, but I suppose I should get used to that. If you're going to go to the penitentiary of pain for fourteen days, you are going to run out of healed, unblemished flesh to assault. All these beatings and terrible things I assume will follow will have to be layered over the beatings and terrible things of yesterdays. Does it sound like I lament? It's a misdirect, I moan in lament.

The beating was short and harsh. I went back to my desk with a twitch in my left arm. It passed after a few minutes and a glass of water. He stared at me from across the room as I typed into my keyboard, I pretended I didn't know he was watching me, but I could feel his gaze touching me. Wrapping its tentacles around my throat to choke out the tears building inside my chest.

I pretended he couldn't see me.

...

He fucked me with the glass dildo in the strange hour of the early evening after I finish my work and before the kid comes back from school.  This act he performs, it is so specific in its purpose and compulsive in its execution, that it always feels dirtier than it should. In the grand scheme of things fucking my cunt with an object that actually belongs in there is so tame in comparison with everything else he does to me, but it's the worst. No one knows, or maybe I just feel like no one understands, exactly how terrible it is. He doesn't fuck me with things to turn me on, he does it to keep me in a state of soreness and pain. He fucks me his fingers like an assault and before it heals he fucks me with something else so that by the time he tells me to bend over so he can fuck me with his cock, I am already so used-up and afraid, it takes merely the gentle threat of a thrust to render me incoherent. The way he fucks me is how he, over the years, broke me down to his specific set of sexual functions for me.

It's appalling.

I cannot live without it.

...

He wouldn't move the hair off my face. It tickled my nose  and he could see me trying to use my shoulder to move it off my face but he wouldn't help me. I find that is more cruel than the beating he was delivering to my breasts at the time, it was the breakdown of the social contract of sadomasochism, he is supposed to move the hair off my face when my hands are too tied up to do it myself. I did not complain, though.  Mostly because I think there was a marginal kindness in the way he tied my hands to the pull-up bar in the doorway. He cuffed them together but to secure them to the bar he used a somewhat elastic section of chord, it allowed me to relax my shoulders from time-to-time. It made me less afraid of losing my footing and later, when my feet started to go numb from standing there for so long, it allowed me to stoop lower without hurting myself.

But that was the extent of the kindness.

He beat my breasts with a shoe-horn and I wailed out loud twice during the hour. Both times he hit me harder and chided me for misbehaving. Both times I resolved not to do it again and soon enough, I wasn't really able to do it again. I was so exhausted, my head started to stoop and rest on my shoulder. My eyes started to close and the atmosphere got so languorous, I worried I would doze off between blows and be woken up with the most jarring cracking sound against my skin. I would have begged for mercy, not that it's a guarantee of getting it, but begging usually gets me to mercy faster, but I am fairly certain I am not allowed to beg for mercy. You cannot be repentant and still beg for mercy, right? It did end eventually, he untied my arms and pointed me to the bed.

"On your back," he said to me, "Spread your legs."

I am scared that he is going to put his fingers inside me every single night. I could still feel their impact from the previous night, still lingering inside me. I fear nothing like I fear his fingers inside me. As he moved between my legs, he stroked the inside of my thigh and perhaps as an unfortunate force of habit I tightened the muscles in my hips to keep my legs from opening up further, he pushed against the tension in my hip and maybe, just maybe, I pushed back, but more likely I just stayed in place.

"Are you resisting me?" He asked, leaping towards my face and squishing it inside his palm.

I panic. I apologise in a panic. I wasn't, I really wasn't resisting him but I know not to explain myself, he doesn't care for explanation, even if I have the best one, it will only get me beaten harder so I just apologise and spread my legs. He pushes his fingers inside me, their insidious path leads to the same places as always, but I never get used to it. I will never get used to it. I am a stupid, useless girl. As he fucked me with his fingers, I got to the place where all of it started to make sense again, as the senseless suffering of my insides took over everything, I found the desire to remain there.

"Thank you for punishing me," I said to him.

I always know that's what he wants to hear, but I can never say it until it wants to be said.

...

He held me close and kissed me a lot before we went to bed. He touched my body, perhaps even as an act of desire and not in a manner so punitive as the rest of the day, but I could not adjust to the comfort of his kindness. It felt like a threat. A lie. A shelter erected only to lure weary travelers and rob them. He assured me he would only hurt me again the next day, that I didn't have to worry about the intervening night, I could bury myself in his warmth.

"Am I a bad slave?" I asked him.

I never ask such questions, they mean nothing to me, but vulnerability and exhaustion will turn you into a different person, one that seeks comforts it didn't even know it wanted. 

"Yes, you are," he said, not even appearing to think about it.

I would bury myself in his warmth, but I suspect it's a grave.

...