Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  Affection! thy intention stabs the centre.

  Thou dost make possible things not so held,

  Communicat’st with dreams—how can this be?

  Like Hermione, it was time for me to unfreeze.

  Being honest with John about my disease was the responsible choice, but for days I worried that I had derailed whatever relationship we’d started to build. We still hadn’t even kissed, although, for weeks, we’d been flirting and going on chaste “dates.” As days passed, I began to suspect that I had knocked myself into the friend zone. Maybe he would never make a move.

  Then one night, as I sat in my bedroom reading, there was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” I called. It was John. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. My hand immediately went to my hair and smoothed it into place.

  “Kylie and Ana left a note,” he said. “They took the bus to Cádiz. They’re gone.”

  “Oh,” I replied. “We’re alone tonight?”

  “We’re alone all weekend,” John said.

  “So this is our chance to burn the place down,” I joked.

  I expected John to leave, but he didn’t. He paused. Then he took another step into the room and picked up my stuffed monkey from a shelf on the bookcase. He fiddled with the monkey’s red bow tie.

  “Do you know how frustrating you are?” he finally said, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. I stayed on my bed and looked at him. An uncharacteristic calm washed over me.

  “I am not frustra-ting,” I replied, in a soft voice. “You are frustra-ted.”

  John leaned against the wall opposite my bed. I leaned against the wall behind me. We faced off, looking at each other, for seconds. He looked more nervous than I felt.

  “Do you want water?” John asked, abruptly. “I want some water.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I want some water.”

  He pushed himself off the wall and left the room. A second later, I heard a sink turn on.

  I pulled my feet up onto the bed and rested my chin on my knees. The position made me nervously aware that I was wearing a skirt. I almost never wore skirts. My legs felt exposed and vulnerable. I fiddled with the hem, pulling it toward my knees.

  In the kitchen, I heard the sink turn off for a minute, and then turn on again.

  My eyes fell on a pile of folded clothes stacked on my desk. I had left my flat, wooden hairbrush on top of them. It felt like Chekhov’s gun: a weapon that, once introduced into a scene, must fire. I jumped off the bed, picked it up, and shoved it into my sock drawer, out of sight. As I slid the drawer closed, John walked back into my room. I turned around.

  “Here,” he said, handing me a glass.

  I took a sip.

  John closed my door.

  I turned away and put the water glass on top of my cupboard. I stood there, looking at the clear liquid inside. My senses felt heightened. I heard the soft hum of the air conditioner. I heard my skirt brush against my legs. I heard my breath.

  Behind me, I heard the door lock.

  “You’re sure no one is here?” I asked. My chest felt tight.

  John’s hand appeared on top of my own. He detached my fingers from the water glass. I turned around to face him.

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  I swallowed.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Are you nervous?” he asked.

  I nodded again. He put his right hand on my waist.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked.

  I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe.

  He stepped closer to me, and put his right hand on my chin. Then he tilted it up, toward his face, and kissed me. His mouth was warm and wet.

  It was my first kiss. My fingers trembled.

  John stepped away from me and sat on the edge of my bed. He reached out for my hand and pulled me, gently, toward his knees.

  “Come here, Jillian,” he said.

  His voice was thick and rough with emotion.

  That night, for the first time in my life, I left my head and fell into my body.

  2.3 Romeo and Juliet:

  These Violent Delights

  Shakespeare is physical. He has to be. His words can’t survive imprisoned on the page. They belong inside our bodies. To savor Shakespeare, read him aloud. Otherwise, how could we appreciate the pulsing s sounds, rising momentum, and climactic release of Sonnet 129? It’s not a poem, it’s an orgasm:

  Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame

  Is lust in action, and till action, lust

  Is perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,

  Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

  Enjoy’d no sooner but despiséd straight,

  Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,

  Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

  On purpose laid to make the taker mad:

  Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

  Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme,

  A bliss in proof, and prov’d, a very woe;

  Before, a joy propos’d, behind, a dream.

  All this the world well knows, yet none knows well

  To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

  —SONNET 129

  Cerebral doesn’t work for sex, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for Shakespeare. The Bard too often seems distant and unapproachable, but that’s all wrong. He doesn’t live inside an ivory tower. He lives behind your rib cage, and in my pelvis, and all the parts of our bodies where the blood flows. Shakespeare is raw. Shakespeare is bloody. Shakespeare is physical.

  Romeo and Juliet is physical, too.

  JOHN AND I did not have sex that night in my bedroom, by the way. Sex didn’t even cross my mind. We both gave into impulses that run deeper than that.

  Over John’s knee, my hair spilled past my shoulders and into my face.

  “Are you comfortable there?” John asked, in a low voice. He reached down with his left hand to gather my hair on one side of my neck.

  It was hard to answer questions with my stomach in my throat.

  “Am I supposed to be comfortable?” I murmured.

  John chuckled.

  “I guess not,” he replied. He reached back to grab the edge of my skirt, and pulled it up to my waist.

  I winced. I was not wearing sexy underwear. Come to think of it, I didn’t even own sexy lingerie. My underwear that night had polka dots.

  John pulled those down, too. I heard him inhale.

  “Your ass is amazing,” he said.

  I blushed with pleasure. I wasn’t going to argue. I’ll always be grateful that my fetish fixates on a body part I happen to love.

  “It was convenient of you to wear a skirt on the same night that we have the apartment to ourselves,” John teased, stroking my butt. I wriggled to adjust my position, but only managed to disrupt my balance. I grabbed John’s ankle to steady myself.

  “That’s just a coincidence,” I insisted.

  “Is it?” John asked. “We’ve been dancing around this for a while now.”

  I swallowed. The truth was, I had known that Kylie and Ana would be out of town before John told me. So why had I worn that skirt?

  I turned my head to the left, to look up, over my shoulder, at him.

  “Are you still frustrated, John?” I murmured.

  Around me, John’s body changed. His leg muscles tightened, the pressure of his left hand on my lower back increased, and his torso shifted forward. The gentle things he had been doing to my butt with his right hand stopped. The next time he spoke, it was in a rough voice I had not heard before.

  “Jillian,” he said. “You have no idea.”

  If I’m honest, that first spanking, as cathartic as it was, was also a mild disappointment. It just didn’t quite match my fantasies. (Fetishes are nothing if not detailed to the point of absurdity.) It didn’t hurt as much as I wanted it to, for one. John, to his credit, had proceeded with caution—it was our
first time, and it’s far better to hurt someone too little than to hurt her too much. I was also disappointed that I didn’t cry that night. Years later, I would learn that many spanking fetishists regard tears as comparable to orgasms—desirable, but elusive. Like anyone else, I shouldn’t have been surprised to not “climax” my first time.

  The biggest disappointment, though, was that I didn’t bruise. Bruises are to kinky people—or, at least, bruises are to me—what I imagine hickeys are to vanilla teenagers. I wanted to bruise because I wanted physical proof that it had happened; I wanted confirmation that my deepest fantasy had come true. I wanted my body to display a record of touch.

  “Now you have something to think about the next time you’re tempted to use drugs,” John said afterward, with a wink, as we sat on my bed in a tangled web of limbs and emotions.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “You’re the most hypocritical dealer ever,” I said. “I want a refund.” I stuck out my hand.

  John frowned.

  “But I gave you those lines for free,” he replied. “I didn’t make you pay.”

  I giggled.

  “Actually, I think you just did.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, I discovered that what I lacked in bruises I made up for in embarrassment. I woke up alone in my bed, thirsty and needing to pee, and couldn’t bring myself to leave the room. I had never been so mortified. John’s room was just down the hall.

  I couldn’t bear to see him.

  I peeled myself out of bed and cracked open the door. I tilted my head toward the hallway, straining to hear a sound. The apartment was quiet. Where was John? He never worked on Sunday, when the entire city of Seville shut down, but it also didn’t sound like he was in the apartment. Maybe he had woken up early and fled. I hoped he had.

  This was the kind of situation in which I would’ve liked to scream “Demetrius!”

  I stepped into the hallway, as quietly as possible, and tiptoed into the kitchen. I filled a teakettle with water and put it on the stove.

  I watched the pot, waiting for it to boil. John walked into the kitchen.

  “Shit,” I said, when I saw him.

  “Good morning to you, too,” he replied, sticking his hands in his pockets. “How are you feeling?” His lips twitched as he fought to suppress a laugh.

  “Go away,” I said. “I’m making tea.”

  He sat at the cheap plastic table we’d put in the middle of the kitchen.

  “I like tea,” he ventured.

  “Go away,” I said again.

  “Where do you want me to go?” he asked. “I live here.”

  “I want you to go away,” I repeated. “I’m processing. And making tea.”

  “What are you processing?”

  “I’m processing you, I guess,” I replied, with a shrug.

  For a moment, John paused.

  “You’re something,” he finally said.

  I looked over my shoulder.

  “I’m someone,” I corrected. Then I turned off the burner on the stovetop, poured boiling water into my mug, and sat down at the table next to him. John didn’t say anything. I took a sip. We sat there for a few minutes, quietly.

  I finally broke the silence.

  “So,” I said. “You’re pretty fucked up, huh?”

  John burst out laughing. I laughed, too. We both laughed so long and hard that it was unreasonable; we laughed until the tension dissipated; we laughed until I had tears in my eyes. Eventually, we caught our breath.

  “I want to be your boyfriend, Jillian,” John said.

  Something inside me fluttered.

  “Um, yeah,” I replied, rolling my eyes to hide my nerves. “After that mess last night, you had better want to be my boyfriend.” He laughed again.

  I liked him so much. John made me nervous in the best ways; at the same time, he made me unselfconscious in the best ways. Our relationship felt as natural and necessary as water.

  He called me “little bird.”

  We didn’t talk about our kink even as we explored it. John had first raised the topic, not me, so for months I reassured myself that I was merely satisfying his interest, not my own. I wasn’t one of those weird masochists, I insisted. I was just a girl who loved a sadist. I couldn’t acknowledge my complicity in my own fantasies even as they came true. We had to navigate BDSM ourselves, and it was tricky. There were no guidebooks—or, if there were, they weren’t available in the tiny English-language section of our neighborhood bookstore. Neither of us had a laptop, and I wasn’t yet desperate enough to conduct that particular research from a public Internet café. We were so young: I was still seventeen, and John was twenty-four. As worldly and experienced as I thought he was, we were both kids, playing with a potent drug.

  Romeo and Juliet also play with dangerous sexual drugs. Shakespeare’s story about two star-crossed lovers from feuding families is one of my favorite plays, and Juliet is one of my favorite characters. But, despite what we’ve been told a million times, Romeo and Juliet is not a love story—it’s a lust story. Even Juliet, magnificent and perceptive as she is, almost recognizes this; early on, she describes her relationship with Romeo as “too rash, too unadvis’d, too sudden.” Romeo and Juliet isn’t a story about young people in love. It’s a story about two young people who desperately hope for love, with tragic results.

  Their lust never becomes something better.

  It’s all about physical and sexual attraction. Romeo makes that clear the first time he sees Juliet, when he says that Juliet has “beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.” A few lines later, he says, “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.” If Romeo sees Juliet’s beauty as “too dear” to exist on earth, how can we expect them to handle the day-to-day realities of love, like aging and paying the cable bill? Who is going to clean the litter box?

  Other than John’s first question, when he asked me if I had “ever received a severe spanking,” and our subsequent chat, when I couldn’t bring myself to even say the word, John and I talked about our kink only a few times.

  One conversation, if I can even call it that, happened a few weeks after John told me he wanted to be my boyfriend. He had moved out of the group apartment we shared and into a studio in Triana, on the other side of the river. (I was glad when John moved out. I wanted to look nice around him, so it was a relief to be able to wander the apartment in sweatpants again after he left. More to the point, John and I were also glad to have a place to “play” without having to worry about Kylie, Ana, or, God forbid, Carlos hearing something untoward.)

  One afternoon, we made scrambled eggs in his new apartment. We cooked eggs all the time. Eggs were cheap.

  “Did you do this stuff with your other girlfriends?” I asked, stirring.

  “Make scrambled eggs? Sometimes,” John joked.

  I shot him a glare.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said.

  He sighed.

  “With Luce, yes,” he said. He had mentioned Luce to me before. She had been one of his college girlfriends. “But I think it—well, I think it got a little out of hand with her.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  John winked.

  “Would you like to find out, m’dear?” he joked. He could drop in and out of his drawl at will. It was cute. He used it against me.

  “No, I’d rather not,” I replied. And then, after a pause: “You didn’t, like, actually hurt her, did you?”

  John leaned against the doorframe and squinted.

  “I don’t actually hurt you, do I?” he asked.

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  The eggs were done, as was the discussion. That was our big conversation about consent, boundaries, and the role of kink in our past and current relationships. (To be clear: This is not a healthy model. This is an example of what not to do.)

  But his last question was reasonable. Was he hurting me? Technically, he was. I was shocked by how much
it could hurt. Every time, I thought the pain was more than I could take—and yet, somehow, I did take it, and always came back for more. By that point, we had graduated from using his hand to using wood and leather, and our play style had evolved from the tentative, improvisational tone of our first time to something much more intense and disciplinary. (Throughout that conversation, I had purple welts on my butt and thighs from the night before.) We played rough. We weren’t having sex yet—for months into our relationship, I remained a virgin—but the kink was satisfying on its own. Intercourse was almost irrelevant.

  That’s one of the biggest misconceptions about kink. The notion that BDSM (or, in my case, spanking) is just a form of foreplay to sex couldn’t be more wrong. Spanking is like a dance or a massage: it can be erotic, but it doesn’t have to be. (Years later, my friend Abby put it this way: For us, spanking isn’t exclusively sexual—it’s inclusively sexual. We can sexualize it when, and if, we choose.) This paradox is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that our spanking “pornography,” in my experience, often doesn’t include sex. It really is just spanking. A person can be kinky and asexual at the same time, and many are. Even for those of us who are kinky and sexual, kink often stands alone. Spanking was dinner. Sex was dessert: I didn’t need it, or even want it, after every meal.

  “Is love a tender thing?” Romeo asks his best friend, Mercutio. “It is too rough, too rude, too boist’rous, and it pricks like thorn.”

  Mercutio shrugs.

  “If love be rough with you,” he advises, “be rough with love.”

  I adored it. The pain and ritual were a drug. Besides Shakespeare, kink was the only thing that could free me from the confines of my neurotic, self-conscious, insecure mind and release me into my body. Other details from the BDSM spectrum made guest appearances, but spanking was the fetish. It was the focus. And it was fun.

  Spanking has some themes. Submission and dominance are two of them, of course, but there are others. Obedience. Discipline. Authority. Accountability. Respect. Punishment.

  Those are good words. Someone out there, I promise you, is masturbating to that list of words right now. Wordplay is sex play. This is a verbal fetish.

  As John and I continued to play, I tried to justify our lifestyle with science. Pain releases endorphins, which can cause a euphoric high, similar to the high that long-distance runners describe. There is an artery in the pelvic region called the common iliac artery, which supplies blood to both the genitals and the butt; when blood rushes down that artery to one of the two regions, it also rushes to the other region and can cause a kind of blood engorgement. Fear and lust have a similar effect on the brain, and provoke a symmetrical list of symptoms: sweaty palms, racing heart, churning stomach. Maybe my fetish, I decided, was just a reasonable conclusion to that tangled web of nerve endings and blood vessels.