By this time, I can tell that the sensation isn’t just sexual; I’ve tenderized the little nubs — he’s beginning to sob. Oh, boy, dessert! But I don’t want to wear him out too soon, so I reach down to his genitals to balance the pain with some pleasure. He’s not hard, but there’s a nice gooey blurb of pre-cum at the end of his dick. I massage it and he moans, but I don’t let up on his tits, except to take a break to probe his mouth deeply with my tongue...
I press my fist deeply up into his perineum, giving him pressure up against his prostate; and his sobs grow deeper, part pleasure, part pain; and god, if I could get him hard enough I’d mount him right here and now because I am so horny I am just about to keel over and die...
...but he’s just not quite hard enough for that, although I set a condom close at hand just in case, and go back to work on the nearest nipple; and now there are tears on his face. God, if I have a fetish, it’s tears. Nothing makes me hotter than to see a bottom crying because of the pain I’ve given him. This is too much, it’s unbelievable, I could devour this man like a dog eats a steak...
...and I’ve totally lost track of the time. Has it been an hour? two? three? I haven’t even taken any toys out of the bag, I feel like I’ve hardly gotten started. I take out two little toys, a horse’s currycomb with brush bristles on one side, and a soft scrap of chinchilla fur, just a couple of new sensations, really, and he stirs, and says, “I think I need a change in the bondage now, sir.” The energy shifts, and I give him his arms back and lie down beside him, and it’s over, and it turns out we’ve been playing for almost three hours, and all I’ve really done is play with his tits and genitals with my hands and mouth, and, oh yeah, fall in love a tiny little bit.
And we lie and cuddle and drink some water, and eventually I figure out how to untie everything I tied and undo all the straps and stuff and get everything more or less back into the bags and us more or less back into our clothes. Everyone else went home hours ago and we never noticed. We walk back to our car through the deserted streets as the last bar closes, and a drunk sings a Christmas carol even though it’s mid-January, and the magic doesn’t start to wear off until a day and a half later, and hasn’t all the way worn off two weeks later as I write this, and maybe with luck never will.
So there you have it – hearts and spirits connect with each other and with the universe, minds and bodies really are one, time and space drift out of the picture, bodies are happy to carry the sensations (and the toybags), and what you get is ecstasy. No wonder it feels like love – it is love.
Something Told Us To
Write This Chapter
Your authors decided to write this book after a remarkable scene we played together. It might seem like one of our simpler scenes: not much in the way of role-playing, lots of physicality. Bondage, whips and canes, what some people might be shocked to hear described as “the usual sort of thing.” But, as Dossie recounts...
I have this story fantasy that I have put myself to sleep with for decades. Still the same story, although it constantly changes, gets embroidered, new details are added, old pictures drop out. The kind of story you can always match to your masturbation, because you know it so well you can rewind when you need to spend some more time getting turned on and then zip! Fast forward to the orgasm part. Lots of you reading this have stories of your own.
Now Janet and I have been playing together for umpteen years, and she certainly knows what I like, but she doesn’t know this story. Not in all its details, not in its particular sequence, not perfectly. So when she tied me up and started doing all the wonderful things in my story in exact detail and in perfect sequence, I was quite, quite startled. Well, not startled enough to stop her, let me reassure you, gentle reader. I thought about that for a moment, interrupting the scene to inquire into what in heaven’s name is going on here, but I know what side my ass is buttered on, and I figured out right away that I’d rather do the scene than talk about it.
And the scene felt beautifully connected — of course it was a perfect fit from my point of view. And am I going to tell you all the details? Oh, no, gentle reader, even I have limits. And an occasional sense of privacy.
After we were through, while we were cuddling, I asked Janet if she knew what she had just done. “What?” she inquired. I told her she had just completed a perfectly psychic scene, and she said, “Oh, yeah, a lot of people tell me I do psychic things when I play.”
!!! This from Janet, the left-brained empiricist, who doesn’t like all that woo-woo stuff, and has to be patient with my metaphysical bent. And so we decided to write a book about it.
And this chapter is about that woo-woo psychic stuff. Pardon us, intuition. Let’s say you’re in the moment, you’re completely in connection with your partner, and all of a sudden... something just comes to you, a piece of information about what needs to happen next, what your partner needs to hear or what their body needs to feel, that you have no rational way of knowing. What’s going on?
What’s going on, most likely, is that your intuition, that lovely bit of your consciousness that gathers up information that your busy cerebral cortex has overlooked, is kicking in and feeding you the good stuff that you need to send you both rocketing into the cosmos.
The best definition we’ve heard of intuition is “knowing what you know without knowing how you know it.” Everybody has intuition, although some people are in much better touch with theirs than others. And we can’t really teach you how to have intuition – but we can suggest ways to listen to what you’ve already got.
Some people believe that intuition comes from subconscious observation of phenomena that are too subtle for the conscious mind to observe, like very small shifts in body language, pupil size, odor, things like that. Other people believe in genuine paranormal phenomena, psychic links, and so on. What do we believe? Please refer back to earlier chapters: we believe both of these things and neither of them – does this surprise you? Actually, we feel no need to believe either of them – we just do what works for us, which is what this chapter is about.
We do think, however, that the processes we’re teaching in this book, the breathing and connection and all the rest of it, make intuitive leaps far more likely. When you open yourself up to energy flow, you’re connecting yourself to new sources of power and creativity – if you’ll pardon a rather geeky metaphor, it’s like you’re adding more processing power to your CPU. That means you’ll be able to take in and process more information, right?
The most important step in grasping your intuition is to open yourself up to it. Because we live in a culture that loves to be rational, people learn to ignore their intuition the way they learn to screen out other “distractions” like buzzing flies and minor aches. So when the time comes that they want to be intuitive, they don’t know how – they’ve spent so much effort tuning out that channel that it’s difficult to tune it back in.
Tuning in is often a particularly difficult task for people who place a high value on rationality, because when they get “messages” that they can’t account for, they discount or ignore them. Sometimes, they may even be frightened by their intuitions, which can be accompanied by strong and inexplicable emotions. Well, if this is you, please stop that immediately – you’ve got a good brain, and if it’s telling you something there’s a reason, even if you don’t know what that reason is. Trust your brain; it wants you to have fun.
How do intuitions come to us? In day-to-day life, sometimes in dreams, in “irrational impulses,” in daydreams. We may find our attention lingering on an object or thought for no good reason, or find ourselves drawn over and over again to a particular color or shape. We might feel an itch or a thrumming somewhere on our skin, or our body might want to change position, or our hand might open or make a fist. A smell might call to us. We may hear a song lyric playing itself out manically like a stuck record in our head – what is it saying to us? Janet had an amazing discovery about one of her intuitions:
This is a littl
e bit embarrassing to talk about. But I’ve had this fantasy for decades, since earliest childhood, although it’s had different casts and settings through the years.
Here’s the broad outline: Person A is a Bad Guy of some sort, a criminal or maybe just a pain in the ass. Person B takes him in hand, becomes a sort of parental figure, reforming and redeeming him (and, of course, spanking him a lot). I never thought much about it; it was just My Fantasy, as much a part of me as my face in the mirror.
A couple of years ago I was working on a presentation called “Intuition and Reading Your Bottom.” I was doing a lot of thinking and meditation about my own intuitive process, trying to understand it in a linear enough way that I could present it to an audience. During one of these meditations, my mind drifted, as it tends to do, to My Fantasy.
I noticed that Person B in this particular fantasy (well, it was Jean-Luc Picard, if you must know) was taking his shirt off. Hmmm, I thought. That’s odd. He’s never done that before. And then it hit me: one of the ways I get my intuitions is through skin-to-skin contact; that’s why I almost always take my shirt off when I top. The fantasy was telling me something.
Oh God — the tops in my fantasies were my intuition, speaking to me in their stern parental voices, telling me what I needed to know. Can’t I even have a fucking sex fantasy without it turning into some sort of lesson?
The good news is that this knowledge didn’t destroy the fantasy, as I’d feared it might; it still soothes me to sleep at night (and when I’m not sleeping it makes the night a lot more interesting). And sometimes, really, it is just a fantasy, nothing more. But now, when one of my fantasy tops speaks, I listen very, very carefully.
When intuitions come to us during play or sex, it’s usually in the form of impulse – something telling us which toy to pick up next, or what words to say, or where to place the next clamp. (A black-belt friend of Janet’s once observed, “If you look at a body, it will tell you where to hit it.” Janet agreed, “Yes, I know,” and got a very startled look in return.)
This can get a little tricky, though. If you’re playing and connected and high and turned on, how can you tell the difference between an intuition and your own desires? Well, truthfully, you can’t – even professional psychics will tell you that they can’t work with clients that they know personally, because they can’t tell the difference between their own emotions and desires, and the information that comes to them psychically.
So, say you’ve got your bottom all trussed up beautifully, and the flogging has progressed from the light flogger to the medium flogger to the Flogger Of Death, and your bottom has flown along the top of everything you’ve fed them, laughing joyously, and something is telling you that the next thing that bottom needs is a heavy caning – even though you haven’t really talked with them about canes before.
Well, that could be your intuition talking... or it could be your dick or your clit talking. And you don’t know which, and neither do we, and we don’t suggest that you gamble your reputation and your relationship with that bottom (and your karma, if you believe in such things) on the outcome. So what you could do, for example, is pick up a cane and try a couple of light taps on that bottom’s ass to see how they respond, and if they flinch and tighten up, you have your answer – that was your gonads, not your intuition, talking. But if, on the other hand, they begin to breathe heavily and their pelvis begins to undulate and they stick their ass out for more, you might try a couple of slightly heavier taps; and if you get more of the same reaction, then you have reason to suppose that Lady Intuition was whispering in your ear. You can confirm her presence, if you like, with some verbal affirmation such as “So, you like that, do you?” (The appropriate response, for all you bottoms reading this, is “Ohmygodyyesssss...”)
Other tops like to use other ways of getting a bottom’s assent to their intutions, like having the bottom kiss the whip or other toy. Which gives the bottom a moment to say “I tried that one before and I hated it, Sir or Ma’am as the case may be.” Whatever – the important thing is that you have some way of checking your intuition before you wade in there and start flailing away.
Some not-so-good signs include muscle tension (tight, bulging or quivering muscles), tight breathing (fast or high up in the chest), or a high-pitched voice. Some generally excellent signs include rhythmic vocalizations like “babbling,” humming or groaning; rhythmic body movements like bobbing or dancing; or pelvic undulation. Usually a bottom who’s vocalizing or moving in these ways is heading toward an ecstatic experience, and will take you with them.
What if it’s not so straightforward?
So far, we’ve talked about using your intuition in scenes where consent and pleasure are clear-cut, which is nice and easy and direct. But what about scenes that are darker and less certain – scenes that are about resistance and tension and struggle, where you’re playing with consent that looks like nonconsent? Can you still use your intuition there?
Yes, of course you can – in fact, in those scenes you need it more than ever. Intuition can help guide you along the razor’s edge between almost-too-much and over-the-line, the edge where such scenes are played. But we aren’t going to be able to give you as straightforward a set of rules about this kind of play, because the guideposts here are far more individual – which is why it’s essential that you know your partner very well before you try this kind of thing. Misreadings in resistance play can be disastrous.
Janet writes here about such a scene, played with a good friend:
“I don’t think I’m going to be up for playing tonight,” she said.
She’d been under an amount of stress that was unusual even for her — kids in trouble at school, arguments with her husband, car trouble, friendships at risk. She was on edge, angry, weepy, unsure where she’d go in scene or how she’d react to whatever stimulus I fed her. I understood, of course, having had way too many such weeks myself, but we both also knew that it might be months before we’d have another chance to play again. Finally, we decided to give it a try, but to go slowly and to back off if things seemed weird or out of control.
So she stripped down to her panties and stepped up to the St. Andrew’s cross. I slowly and sensually bound her to the wood, adding more bondage than usual, knowing how she enjoyed lots of rope. When she was firmly attached, I stripped to the waist and came up behind her, putting my arms around her, feeling the warmth and chamois softness of her sides and chest, nuzzling her precious neck.
I bit her softly on the big muscle that runs up the side of her neck.
I heard a soft choking sound and looked at her face. She was sobbing. A tear was running down her face.
I pulled her body closer to mine and held her harder, pulling her into me. I felt an orgasm start at the center of her torso and thrum outward, pulsing through her limbs, making her groan, spreading her fingers and toes. We were perhaps ninety seconds into the scene. I wondered whether we’d reached any definition of “weird or out of control” yet.
I decided we hadn’t, reached for my warmup flogger — a decade-old familiar of green suede that’s practically a limb of my body — and began to oh-so-gently caress her back with it, running the tips down her skin as though I were painting rice paper with watercolors. She sighed and arched herself backward against her ropes, asking for more. I gave her just enough more to remind her that what she was feeling was indeed a flogger. She began to giggle, and giggled harder as I flogged harder...
... until suddenly the giggles were tears again. And then, as I surprised her with a few hard flogger strokes upward between her legs, another orgasm.
At this point I saw that my job that night was to squeeze catharsis from her like squeezing juice from a lemon, and summoned all my strength — physical, emotional, intuitive — to pull every last drop of energy out of her. She needed it so much, and I knew how to get it out of her, better than anyone else, I thought; and I loved getting it from her.
I struck again — and again giggles, and
again tears, like a three-spoked wheel turning, as I flogged and flogged, as minutes stretched to what must have been an hour or more, using heavier implements, and later a strap, and a cane, until sweat was dripping from the ends of my bangs and she hung limp in her ropes, too exhausted even to tremble, purged for at least one evening of all the petty anger and worry and little fears that had bowed her shoulders and made lines around her mouth.
I am always amazed by how young someone looks right after bottoming — the innocent look of bliss that steals decades from cheek and forehead.
I untied her and supported her to a nearby table, where we curled together and purred like big spoiled cats, with nothing much to say and no reason to say it — until thirst and low blood sugar led us to pull ourselves together, put on some sort of clothes, put the toys away and wander out in search of cold water and chocolate.
How had I known to go on, after that first thunderstorm of tears? I can never really answer such questions. I could have stopped, untied her, taken her out for a burger and let her talk about her troubles, and that would probably have served her well too. But I’ve been where she is, with kids and PTA meetings and an unfulfilling marriage, and I didn’t have anyone to beat me and let me cry and come and cry again in their arms. Back then I would have given anything for that — so I kept on going. Instead of a few more grams of cholesterol, we savored a scene that both of us will remember for a long time and that brought us closer in a way that no burger ever could.
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