“Ssh, ssh. Breathe, honey. Good. Now, we need to get it the rest of the way through.” A sharp tug as she aims the needle, already inside me, and a fierce sting through the skin as it comes back out.
“Hmmm, not quite right.” She backs the needle out — I am stunned, are we going to do this again? I struggle to catch my breath, to relax, to refrain from fighting her, to release my body to the ropes. “It’s okay, you can struggle, you aren’t going anywhere. And if you fuck up my aim, I can just set it again. So you figure out how you want it. Oh, yeah. Scream if you like.”
She grabs her pinch of skin again. “Ready?” “Yessir!” I lie.
Again, three times the breath, and I am floating under the surface while the needle slides in slow and excruciating. I hold the float while bright pain lights up in my breast and travels around inside my body. Every muscle is clamped tight and the needle is still cutting its path through me and just when I’m sure I can’t take any more and every muscle I used to own is clenched in terror, the spike heats up another notch coming back into the air. She burns, she burns.
“There, baby, you got that one good. I’m proud of you.” I gasp for breath, stretching to open a channel through me for all this acute burning brilliance, and she is soothing me, smoothing my skin, rocking me gently. I fall back in her arms, somehow she surrounds me with warmth and love and warm flowing turn-on. The juice stirs at the root and runs up my spine like sap in a tree to meet her. I get all sleepy and warm in her arms till she says: “Okay. Time to bury the point on this one.”
Shit! I am riding the rising tide of her wickedness, she is riding my pain, she likes hurting me. I can hear her breathing hard, a little ragged, and she gets up, shifts her body and sits on me, pinning me to the bed with my legs and cunt behind her hung out to dry. Her knees clasp my arms tight to my flanks, she digs in her heels while my heart runs in place.
She reaches up and twists the two needles like reins to guide me, but the only things that runs is my blood. I can hardly feel the stream over my skin, so perfectly matched to my temperature. I only feel her gloved finger, touching and painting, and then her finger is in my mouth, the taste is strange and familiar, I am drinking my own heart.
“God, I wish I could taste that, it’s so beautiful, it smells like lust. Taste it for me, baby.”
She pulls on the ropes under her crotch and through mine so we rock in unison, predator and prey, one beast. Again I feel the pressure building, a shuddering starts in my womb and spreads through my body, my back arches, and she stops. “Now we get to the part I really like,” she croons. “Now we put new needles under the old ones.”
Again the process is fussy, picky, shrill. My pain, each bit, prepared and executed with exquisite attention, savored over and over until two needles become four. In exactly the right place. After several trials. The points keep coming out and each one has to be reburied several times till she is satisfied. I am sunk so deep in the fire that there is no longer any question of self-control: I buck and scream, writhe and moan — at her command.
She shifts, reaches for something — which pulls the ropes over my cunt. I jerk, mindless. She keeps her seat, enjoying herself. She passes something warm and smooth over my skin, it takes me a minute to remember the candle. She gentles me down till my breath is soothed, and when I am rising and falling happily to her rhythm she pours liquid heat over the needles in a scalding stream.
I almost buck her off.
“Ssh, now, ssh baby. You are so beautiful, I love watching you like this, and I got a whole lot of wax melted here, and we have plenty of time, so ssh, baby, ssh.”
Like molten steel from a crucible, the wax pours here and there, rivers on my chest, my breasts, flowing over my shoulders, a blaze that lights up the dark behind the blindfold. Hot and nasty, she is riding again, rocking the ropes, her fingers tugging on the reins till the blood flows with the wax in one burning scarlet river. On fire, I am cast into my own desire, rushing heat, blazing pain.
She slides down me, down between my thighs, I feel her hot at my cunt, nailing me with the smooth warmth of her dick. Piercing me to the root, she reaches my boiling womb and fucks me furiously, just short of explosion, building the heat and the pressure, surely the bed will catch fire. The ropes holding my cunt are all wet and slippery now, they slick off to the sides while she holds me open from the inside.
Even fucking, she stops now and then, a meditative moment when a point breaks free, to sink the dangerous little sharpness back under my skin. Pain spikes through to my cunt, completing the connection from her dick to the needles, and she jumps, electrified.
“All right, little bitch, here we go.” And away we fly, beyond the rising tide, we are fucking a hurricane, we are riding a wild flowing wind punctuated by the stabbing needles until she stops
dead
dug in deep:
“Hold still, little bitch, it’s time.” And I feel my cunt struggling on the brink while she grabs two needles and
yanks
and I nearly knock her off. Anguish rolls up and down inside me like thunder reverberating in a huge canyon while my cunt clutches her dick and before this all quiets down she
gets a grip on the last two needles and
rips...
I scream. Not so much in pain as in desperate need to release, no longer able to contain anything. I scream long and deep and loud, a wailing siren emerging, I flow all over her, and she fucks me.
Hard and reckless, out of control, her breath scrapes her throat as she groans, and that other noise is me bellowing over and over till the dam breaks, the flood cuts loose, and we flow out and into each other like crashing breakers until we are reduced to puddles.
Laughing puddles.
I shield my eyes as she opens the blindfold, the light is too much and I have to cry. She holds me while I weep from the brightness of everything — her tender eyelids, the curl of her ear, her mouth kissing my cheeks, baby kisses. I weep for joy. She looks at me, her eyes — how can brown eyes burns so bright? And I fall onto her, giggling, happy.
After a quiet while she sits up — “Hush now, baby, there’s more” — and puts the needles away, strips her hands and snaps on new gloves. Eyes still on fire, she slips out her blade with a pointed “click!” that sets off more sparks, I feel them burn from her eyes right to my cunt.
Carefully, she scrapes up the wax, pulling and picking, sparks on my skin, I am beyond holding still. She squeezes and pinches where the needles were till the blood runs from the wax, purple and red reflected in the hot glare of her pupils, so close to my face.
She plays in the mess she’s made while I rest in the afterglow. She cleans, meticulous, only to make another mess with the flaking violet wax. More blood. I am loose and sleepy, her picking over my skin feels like luxury, I am cared for. When the alcohol comes, I welcome the sting, wishing there were more holes. I try to figure out how many — four needles, in, out and in again, three holes each, but multiplication is beyond me. Then she is stinging me again, mad wasp with the blade, the alcohol.
I bask, hissing softly, while she cleans me up. The wax, the blood, then the slow sliding ropes, the focus on lengthiness, the slither across the body, the odd freedom of foot or hand as if it were unnatural of them to be operated by me. Freedom, one limb at a time. She turns each one, stretching, as if there were some rite of passage, a dance to return control of my muscles to me.
The knees released, the legs stretched out, she rubs my knees, my hamstrings — she knows they get sore — and the blood flows in, following her hands as she massages and calls the blood back to the thighs, the calves, the feet. I am bathing in the warm blood she evokes, like warm sun. Turn and sigh, lazy, arms over my head reaching, until a wicked tug wakes me sharply. I open my eyes, catch the nasty grin on her face, and I recall — the ropes in my crotch.
This is intense — the soreness, my swollen lips, the once soft ropes unbearably scratchy, tighter even as she turns me this way and that to release each
winding, from the front, from the back, ends trailing over my sensitivities, me hissing and writhing. She keeps me soothed down, stroking my skin — “Still now, snake girl, you let yourself be still.”
As the ropes unwind I fall quietly deeper into her, until the last rope is gone, the sheet is gone, and she is holding me, pulling a blanket over us, she says:
“Sleep now, baby. Time to sleep.” And she curls me up like a fairy in a ladyslipper, and carts me off to dreamland.
Touching Worlds
Janet wants me to write about how I make connection with other people, and the truth is, once again, I don’t know. I do make connection, I’ve got lots of evidence of that, and I know how to emake connection — that’s why I’m here writing this book sharing all the ways I know to make connection. But I don’t understand about the magic.
One minute I’m nervous and disconnected and stuck and feel like an idiot, and then there’s touch and breath and eyes and mirrors and eros rises and everything is magic.
Sometimes I don’t even feel the magic. I’ll be doing a scene or a ritual, playing my part, competent, I suppose, but maybe not seeing it as something that is getting very far off the ground, Then somebody tells me there are rainbows coming out of my fingers, or that they can feel the magic flowing everywhere, and I can’t feel it. Luckily that only happens occasionally.
More often I get a sense of rightness, like the power is upon me. High contrast to my more normal state of worrying about everything, in the constant conviction that I’m doing something wrong wrong wrong. You see, much of the time — it’s better now than it used to be — I’m a scaredy-cat, constantly checking myself out, worried that I’ll somehow explode or break something or otherwise fuck up. For me, some of the magic of sex and SM is that when I get into the flow I forget about all this. My self-consciousness disappears, I’m just there, with the other person, and we’re wonderful and beautiful and glowing.
Other people always appear amazing to me. They do things I’d be afraid to do. That sounds ridiculous — my life is terrifying to most people — SM, writing books, being a therapist. So I look brave on the outside, and I’m scared a lot on the inside.
My slut lifestyle is a great joy to me, and a creation of which I am very proud. I know I created it partly in response to my self-loathing. Despite the dirty roots, it has borne fabulous fruit. In radical ecstasy, in sex, in trance, all the uncertainty disappears.
All my relationships are colored by my pain. I grew up in a family that wanted me to be someone different from who I am, and believed it was their task to chisel me, sometimes violently, into a nice young lady. I am very proud of having fought back against this oppression, but still I grew up believing that I was the wrong one. I just made a huge mistake on this manuscript because, when I was missing some chapters which were precious to me, I assumed that Janet wanted to delete them. Being really good at believing that what I do has no value, I managed to operate for a month on that assumption. Which, it turned out, was incorrect. You have the chapters right here in your hands, and I’m not going to tell you which ones.
I approach relationships as if something is wrong with me. Perfectly nice people get interested in me, and I assume they can’t be turned on to me, that I’ve made a mistake. Lots of my lovers initially thought, when they were trying to connect to me, that I didn’t like them, so carefully did I protect them from contact with my wrongness. I have profoundly insulted people.
In partnered relationships, sadly, what quiets my anxiety is somebody who reiterates my oppression, somebody who wants me to be smaller and quieter, wants me to hide my light under a bushel. Somebody who doesn’t want me to shine as brightly as I can. I live in constant fear of being too much: too loud, too bright, too smart, too sexy. I have fallen in love and felt a mighty relief in believing that I have found someone who is bigger than me, who can release me from this constant struggle inside myself. The outcomes have been dreadful, as you might imagine. I write this with great shame — it seems to me I should have conquered this as I’ve conquered so many other fears in my life.
A man recently asked me if I wasn’t lonely living without a primary partner. He didn’t accept my usual offhand replies — I’ve been lonelier living with a partner, my loneliness is partly because I live in the country in breathing exile, doesn’t everybody get lonely sometimes? His worldview, narrower than mine, couldn’t imagine how life would be without a committed partner. I felt ashamed to say, “I’m just not that good at it.”
I do better as a slut, in friendships and loverships that are not about partnering. There are so many different kinds of intimacy. So many wonderful ways we fit together. I love my tribe. I love my friends. I love my lovers. I live in a sea of love.
Writing about connection, I feel sappy. Sentimental, foolish, ridiculous, as if I’ve fallen into the traps set for me by a culture I don’t believe in. And yet, the sentiment I find fellow-traveling in ecstasy is all about the wonder-fulness of connection. Not just about orgasms or other exciting adventures, it isn’t just about the excitement. It’s about love.
Once I figure out that love is not about joint checking accounts, I become free to be a fool for love. To dance in lovelight, swim in warm moonlit pools, sing like a babbling brook. Writing this, I’m renewing the vow I made when I was twenty-five: I will be loving, affectionate and demonstrative with all my lovers.
When we were teaching in Detroit, we had a circle of sixty-three people lying on the floor, with their feet toward the center. With one hand on their crotch, and the other on the heart of the person next to them, we raised kundalini by breathing and visualizing the awakening of the chakras. Then we took that gorgeous energy and ran it out of our hearts and down our arms and into the person next to us, so that the beautiful energy ran round and round the room, like a fabulous running rainbow. Leading the group, we stood in the center of the circle, calling out the breaths and the images, and felt the room fill with love. Yes, love.
And in that moment, the energy was so powerful and so palpable that I didn’t need to think about what I was going to call it, and I didn’t feel sappy or silly. I just told them to feel how the room was filling with gorgeous glowing love, and I knew for sure they could feel it too. In that moment, love was what it truly should be, and in no way ridiculous.
When we call it love in a group, everybody pretty much understands that it’s a different kind of love from pair-bonding. And when we play with all the lovable others that we have described in this book, and every other lovable other we have been privileged to encounter, we want to acknowledge the love that rises in us, the golden glowing ineffable love.
Love at the moment of orgasm, love in the fumbling moments when we’re trying to figure out how to make something work, love in the phone call when somebody’s had bad news, love visiting in the hospital, love at the play party. Dear, sweet love.
Sometimes we call the divinity that flows through us energy, or source, or kundalini, or eros. Why are we so scared to take the risks of getting close, of dropping our shields, of connecting our skins (isn’t it interesting that we call them “hides”?). Why are we so scared to call it love?
What is love?
One of the most extraordinary experiences that play or sex or intimacy can offer is the moment when we feel ourselves merging, accepting another’s essence and feeling ourselves accepted as two flames held close merge into one – a feeling that it is not too grandiose to call love.
We’ve heard curmudgeons ranting about the devaluation of the word “love, “ storming on about how we should keep it only for the people with whom we intend to have our children and our mortgages and, we suppose, our conjoined gravesites – that it’s practically criminal to talk about loving our friends or our fuck buddies or the other people with whom we connect. We’d argue that theirs is the devaluation of the word. We think that our hearts are capable of holding huge, stupendous amounts of love, of every variety and gradation; and to keep such a stunning word for only one of
its infinite possible meanings is like chaining an anchor to a butterfly.
However, we both grew up in a culture that attaches a lot of baggage to the feeling we call love. During the era in which we grew up, and we suspect still in the present, if you started feeling tender and passionate and intimate about someone, it was expected that a certain sequence of events would inevitably click into place: a specific number of dates, with increasing levels of sexual activity... then an agreement, or more likely an assumption, about monogamy... moving in together... commitment, often signaled with a ring and a ceremony... purchasing of property, having kids... you don’t need us to tell you the drill. Both of us have seen it flash before our eyes, like an insane movie on fast-forward, every time a hot new potential sweetie comes into our lives – in spite of the fact that neither of us consciously wants ever to walk down that particular pathway again. This programming is strong, and it would take stronger women than us to erase it completely.
At some of the tantra events we’ve attended, an announcement is made in the beginning that goes like this: “During some of these practices, you may have feelings that will feel a lot like you’re falling in love with your partner. That’s because you are – you’re falling in love with the love in the universe, which you’re seeing manifested in your partner. When that happens, it’s absolutely wonderful. Just accept it for what it is, and don’t feel the need to attach anything more to it than what it is right here and now – nothing about the future, nothing about anything outside this room, just what it is. “ In SM, a similar truism holds that you always fall in love with your first top.
This is very good advice to keep in mind as you travel in the realms of radical ecstasy, where you may over and over again have experiences that feel like falling into the deepest and most passionate of love. Remember, we are your friendly neighborhood ethical sluts, and pluralists to boot, so our intention is to show you some ways to celebrate lots and lots of deep connections of sex and SM and spirit – including how to fall in love with the whole wide world, or at least as much of it as you can manage.
Radical Ecstasy Page 10