by Ben Boswell
She continued, “It was like a see-saw or something. You know, I’d be little Miss Normal, doing the usual college thing. I’d be hanging out with kids from my dorm, or class, or orchestra, or whatever. And then, you know, I’d be closer to a guy, and we’d sort of pair off. No one at Brandeis really dated. It was much more fluid. Increasing closeness, intimacy, then, you know, boredom, whatever.
“I had a couple of boyfriends, I guess. Just close enough to bother mentioning to the ‘rents, invite them home for Thanksgiving, make summer plans. Jason, sophomore year. Brian, for the first half of senior year. He and I had been in Brussels together for a summer program, but we only started dating when we got back.”
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“Oh, I think Jason went to law school. Pretty sure Brian was going to be a dentist.”
“No, Rach, I mean between you and them?”
“Oh, right. With Jas, we were just too young. And we both knew it, so I don’t know, we just pulled back. Brian, though, I ran into him in a bar sucking face with a bleached-blond tramp.”
“What did you do?”
She smirked at me. “What do you think? I found myself the first tattooed-up biker and threw myself at him.”
“Really?”
She shrugged. “No, first I threw a drink at Brian. Then I cried. Then I got drunk. Then I passed out. Then, after my hangover faded, my next boyfriend,” she made air-quotes for my benefit, “was, yeah, inappropriate.
“But that was always the pattern, nice guy, bad guy. I never really cheated,” she hesitated, “not until Jack.”
Ouch! Knowing I was the first man she’d actually cheated on was rough.
She read my reaction. “Oh, Jeez, Max, no that didn’t come out right. With the others, the relationships were more fluid. No clear beginning and end point. No real expectation of exclusivity. Believe me, there was ugliness, but just the usual, kids-will-be-kids drama.”
“Do you think some of those relationships faded because you were thinking of other men?”
“No...” she paused. “I dunno. Max, this is hard. I like to think of myself as a nice person.”
“You are a nice person. You just happen to be a nice person who gets turned on by rough trade.”
She laughed. “God, I am never going to live that phrase down, am I?”
“Probably not,” I acknowledged. “But you’re deflecting.”
She didn’t respond.
“Come on Rach, this is about the past. But I want to understand.”
She continued to hesitate, so I pushed harder.
“Rachel, how many of those relationships faded out because instead of thinking of the man next to you in bed, you were thinking about some brutish stranger?”
She took a deep breath. “What do you want me to say, Max? That while I was having sex with my nice, appropriate boyfriends, I was secretly fantasizing about being taken by a muscular thug?”
“If that’s the truth.”
She sighed. “Okay, yes, sometimes. After the initial bloom of new love,” she rolled her eyes, “wore off, then yes, sometimes. And yeah, I am sure it affected the relationships. There are so many ways to sabotage things. You don’t even realize it until later.”
“Yeah?”
“I was seeing this guy, David, I think. Yeah, David. David Brill. He... well, it was never really great. You know, he’s one of those self-described nice guys, but not really nice. More than a little a passive-aggressive, I guess. Needy. But whatever… he was sweet in his own way. We sort of ended up in bed together almost by accident. We were at a house party with some friends, and they were all sort of pairing off, and I dunno, it just happened.
“I’d have been just as happy to let it go at that. But he guilted me into more. You know, ‘Oh Rachel, you’re so special. I’ve always had a crush on you. You’re not like the other girls.’ He threw me up on a pedestal. But it was sort of oppressive in a way.”
“I’m guessing the sex wasn’t so hot?”
She laughed. “No, it was pretty good. He was very attentive. Very. He was constantly going down on me. And I’m pretty such my tits were pruned up by all the attention he paid them.”
I felt myself blushing, and looked up to see Rachel watching me with an amused grin.
“Was that the reaction you were looking for?” I asked.
“This is your line of questioning,” she replied, but still with that grin.
We were locked in a bizarre contest of wills. I couldn’t quite explain it. I wanted her to unlock her past. She seemed determined to control the pace of her disclosures. I wasn’t sure what my motivation was, but I knew that the more she dragged it out, the more she deflected, the more she sought to embarrass me into backing down, the more I wanted, needed to know.
“So while nice guy David Brill was eating you out, you were thinking of, what, some guy in combat boots bending you over a dirty sink in some trashy bar, plowing you from behind?”
“Sometimes,” she admitted.
“And what did you do about it?”
She snorted. “I accused him of cheating on me. I said I knew he was fooling around with another one of our friends, Ellen. He denied it. I made myself insufferable. He finally snapped, called me paranoid. We had a fight. I walked out.”
“Then what?”
She laughed. “He hooked up with Ellen. They got married. It was the best thing I could have done for him.”
“And you?”
She smirked.
“I dragged a girlfriend to the Cellars. Told her there was a cool band I wanted to hear.”
“Was there?”
She laughed. “No. Anyway, the acoustics were awful. Just white noise, well, more like a jet engine noise. But no one went to the Cellars for witty repartee. The entire atmosphere was predatory. The girls checking each other out, squinty-eyed, ‘who’s the competition?’ the guys looking for weakness, ‘which one of these whores is gonna give it up with the least work?’
“I was definitely an easy mark. I was wearing a tank top over a lace bra. I’ve never had the boobs to flash cleavage, so that was the next best thing. I was wearing skinny, low-rider jeans. Before we walked in, I pulled up my thong so it was on display.”
“You must have been fighting them off with a stick.”
She laughed. “I wasn’t fighting them off at all. I spotted this guy, by the bar, real tall. Six-three, six-four, square-faced, shadowed with stubble, he was wearing a Metallica concert tee shirt. Just what I was looking for. I made sure he’d seen me, and then looked away, slowly made my way through the crowd toward the bar.
“By the time I got there he was waiting for me with six shots of tequila lined up. He handed me one and we clinked glasses. Salt, shot, lime. Then a second. Then a third.”
“Real subtle.”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t looking for subtle.”
“So did he bang you in the bar?”
“No. After the third shot, he took my hand and led me outside. We got on his motorcycle. It was chilly. I wrapped my arms around him. He didn’t live far. And well, you can guess what happened next.”
“You cuddled by the fire and he read you poetry?”
“Sure. If by cuddled by the fire, you mean he threw me on his messy futon on the floor. And by reading poetry, you mean he hammered me like a rusty nail.”
“Does one hammer a rusty nail differently than one hammers a pristine nail?”
“You have to hit them harder.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I asked for that, didn’t I?”
“That you did.”
“Okay, so then what happened between you and our motorcycle-riding carpenter? What was his name, by the way?”
“I, um, never found out. We practiced several different techniques of nail hammering. Then he passed out, or pretended to, and I took a cab of shame home around sunrise.”
“And that was it? Were they all one-night stands?”
“No, not all of them. But they we
re all pretty quick. I mean, the point wasn’t a relationship. It was, I dunno, refreshing the thrill.”
She suddenly blushed a deeper red than before. She was thinking of something. Something even more embarrassing than she’d admitted so far.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she lied.
“You still fantasize about him, about them, don’t you?” I guessed.
She leaned her head to the side, half-nodding, half-shaking her head.
“No. I mean, well, yes, you know sometimes. It’s not a regular thing. But it isn’t that. It’s... oh god, this is so creepy.”
“Come on Rach, out with it.”
She sighed. “Jeez, it makes me feel like such a serial killer. But I’d take a, um, trophy. Just a little thing. A bandana, a tee shirt, a shot glass, something. And then I’d, well, you know, keep it with me, fondle it, play with myself and relive it. It was so fucking embarrassing. And then I’d meet a nice guy, and I’d promise myself I was through with the assholes, and I’d throw away the trinket. But then, you know, I’d get bored and start having those fantasies again. And before I’d know it I’d be sabotaging the relationship, looking for an excuse to act out.”
I nodded, but didn’t speak. It was creepy. She was right. But then I remembered Tina. I was between jobs, and had taken a trip down to the Bahamas. It wasn’t Spring Break or anything, but it is always a party. I met this girl in a bar, well, a woman, whatever. Early twenties, maybe older. I was shit-faced already. We drank margaritas, walked on the beach. She blew me sitting up against a palm tree.
We went back to my room and had a couple of hours of very passable, essentially anonymous sex. When we were done, she went to the bathroom. There was no real question of her staying over. It’s not what either of us wanted. While she was gone, I stole her thong and hid it. She looked for it for a while. Badgered me a little. She knew I had it, I guess. But anyway, after a while she left.
So I understood Rachel’s impulse. The excitement of sex with a stranger. The desire to keep a trophy. Thing is, for me that was something that had just happened, a momentary impulse. I don’t even think I took her underwear home after the trip. I certainly never jerked off with it later.
-----
Rachel’s revelations had me reexamining all of my own experiences. Tina wasn’t my only one-night stand. There was this fellow intern at one of my summer jobs. After a company happy hour, we hooked up, and then immediately agreed not to admit it to anyone. She didn’t want the reputation and I didn’t want the commitment.
I realized the big difference between Rachel and me. We’d both had some tawdry little flings. The difference was, for me they just happened, were almost immediately regretted. For Rachel they were sought after, plotted, cherished for a period of time until the excitement faded and the embarrassment became overwhelming.
Then she’d force herself into a “normal” relationship. But that was never enough. Sooner or later, she’d get that itch for the inappropriate... That was the word she used most often. But that wasn’t quite right.
They were humiliating. Tony on the pool deck, jamming his hand into her bikini bottom and then using her for his own pleasure. The man in the bar, approaching with three shots and an attitude that said, “Here slut, drink so we can get to fucking.” Jack, treating her like an incompetent child, valuing her only as a sexual plaything.
That feeling of being used, of being reduced to nothing more than a sex toy, for some reason she found it intoxicating. And like an alcoholic, she’d come to regret her binge, will herself onto the wagon. Until...
This last time, with me, she’d lasted ten years. A commendable dry streak for anyone. And yet, I didn’t think I could exist that way. It would be living perpetually beneath a Sword of Damocles, knowing that at any moment I could be blindsided by the discovery that she had again succumbed to her obsession.
Worse, though, in some ways was the idea that she wouldn’t. That instead, she’d just dream of the idea, reflecting daily on my inability to give her that charge. It was a terrible dilemma. I could live either with the fear that she would one day cheat on me or the nagging suspicion that she forced herself to tolerate me.
The way out was, again, obvious. I needed to become the man who could both be her loving husband, a partner in raising children and building a home, and a a sexual partner who met her deep, dark desires to be dominated.
Squaring that circle was no easy task, as my previous effort at it suggested. It had worked out okay. She’d apparently appreciated the effort, if not the execution. And we’d recovered some lost intimacy in the process. But I was not fooled into thinking that an effort that ended in giggles was likely to meet her needs for long.
CHAPTER NINE
It occurred to me that the big problem I’d have with meeting that goal was simple familiarity. Having me bark out a command to suck my cock struck her as ridiculous. As it should. It was so out of character as to be instantly absurd.
So the key was to shift expectations, to establish a new context, a new set of rules. I dimly remembered that movie from my youth, thought of the woman being led into a dungeon of sorts, sending a signal that things were about to change. I considered ways to do that, and inevitably ended up exploring the whole BDSM culture on the Internet.
It’s funny. I was familiar with each of the words that composed the acronym: bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism. But the words themselves don’t really describe the scene any more than the word cuckold, which just refers to a wronged husband by itself, can prepare one for the ritualization associated with that scene.
I have to admit, I didn’t completely get it. There were specialized clothes, equipment, instruments. But this wasn’t really my fantasy. It was Rachel’s, and while I was struggling to understand it, there was this whole community living it that I could try to tap into. And in a strange way, what I found the most appealing was specifically the artificiality. I thought that was the key, putting Rachel in the mindset not of being my friend, my wife, the mother of my children, but rather being my sex toy.
I’ve never really had domination fantasies. But watching those videos definitely sparked my interest. Those women, so meekly obeying their masters, dog collared, often bound, sucking cock while getting their tits lashed with a cat o’ nine tails. It was surreal, and yet, exciting.
There was one video that I couldn’t get out of my mind. She was a young woman, a spitting image of Britney Spears at the peak of her fame. She was barely dressed, just a short, pink skirt and a matching belly shirt.
The video began with her already bound and a facing door, her hands above her head. She turned to look at the camera. She had a red ball gag in her mouth, secured by a leather strap. There was something insanely erotic about that image, her pink lips stretched around that bright red orb, the straps digging into her cheek, pinning her hair to her neck.
The camera lingered on her body, then panned down to show her toned legs held apart by a steel bar attached to her ankles. As the image moved back up, it gave a little peek under her skirt, exposing a perfect little ass, giving a quick glimpse of her bare, shaved pussy.
The video again focused on her face. Porn stars are not usually known for their acting chops, but this one managed to convey a credible mix of wide-eyed innocence and looming apprehension. Or maybe it was real. She was a small, skinny little thing, probably not much older than twenty, bound, in a room with, probably, several men on the production crew. Did she have any idea what was going to happen to her? Surely, but gagged and bound, she wouldn’t have much opportunity to protest if things went too far.
The camera panned to a man entering the scene. He was a good-looking guy. Tall and well-built, with three days of stubble and bulging muscles. He wore faded jeans and nothing else, a heavy wallet chain dangling from his pocket. He grinned at his captive as he approached her.
Her spanked her left cheek, hard enough that her firm ass jiggled and immediately reddened. She let out a muffled whine. He
spanked her right cheek, then alternated back and forth until her entire bottom was scarlet. He stepped away and the camera again focused on her face. Her mascara had begun to run, strands of hair were plastered to her forehead with sweat, and spit ran down from both sides of her mouth with the streams meeting at her chin. Her eyes widened again.
The camera swung back to the man. He was now holding a black riding crop. He approached the girl again and ran the flattened tip of the whip over her body, up and down her legs, between her ass cheeks, against her pussy. He yanked up her belly shirt to expose her cute little tits, and circled her nipples with the hard leather. He used to crop the caress her face, almost tenderly.
Then suddenly he stepped back and snapped his wrist, bringing the switch down against the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. She whined through her gag and pulled at the restraints. He whipped her again, this time across her ass. And again, this time across the belly.
The video returned to her reddened face. Her eyes had a wild look. She was slobbering around the gag. Then suddenly her pupils seemed to roll back into her head.
The camera zoomed out. He was fingering her roughly, two fingers jamming into her shaved pussy. With his other hand he yanked off his pants and stroked his big cock. He withdrew and grabbed her by the throat. With a hard thrust he entered her completely, immediately fucking her hard enough to lift her off her feet.
It seemed like the sort of thing Rachel might like. And it was definitely something that got me going. I decided to try to reenact the scene with my wife.
-----
Though I had a script, I didn’t have the necessary toys. There is a shop near our house, Night Dreams, sandwiched between a bar and grill and a cell phone store in a local strip mall. I’ve walked past the place a million times, always glancing, with forced casualness, at the trampy lingerie and costumes in the display window.
It’s weird, but I’ve always been too shy or embarrassed to go inside, even though I’ve always been curious.
Rachel had taken the kids overnight to visit a college friend who’d moved out West. It was a perfect time to go shopping, and would also give me an opportunity to bring my purchases into the house without anyone seeing. So it was a Saturday evening when I finally got a chance to go inside. I grabbed a burger next door, fortified my courage with a few beers, and then headed in.