Of course, those physiological rationales didn’t explain the side of the coin that John was on, but he didn’t feel the need to justify anything. He didn’t seem afraid of his sexuality, as I was. Science babble did not interest him. He focused on a different detail of the physical response.
“The harder I spank you, the wetter you get,” John told me once, when I was inelegantly draped over his knee.
I pushed my torso up and twisted around to look at him.
“Gross!” I declared, indignant. “I don’t want to hear that!”
“It’s not gross, it’s great,” he replied. “But do you want to argue with me while I’m in this position and you’re in that position?”
I had never felt so good.
“Wisely and slow,” cautioned Friar Lawrence, who advises Romeo and Juliet throughout the play. “They stumble that run fast.”
I longed to understand him. John, I discovered, was a kindergarten-through-high-school-product of the Catholic school system.
“Ah,” I joked. “That explains it.”
“What?” he replied.
“Nothing,” I said, smiling. “Are you still Catholic?”
John frowned.
“I think everyone has a God-shaped hole inside his chest,” he finally said. That didn’t answer my question.
Another time, I asked him why he was named John. “It’s such a clean name for a messy guy,” I said.
“My mother chose it because she had never met a John she didn’t like,” he explained. “Until me, I guess.” He smirked.
We found lines the wrong way: by crossing them. Once, after a spanking, John tossed his belt on the bed. Against the brown leather, I could see dark smudges of something wet. I reached out to touch it, and my finger came away red. It was blood. I showed him.
“Wow,” John said.
“Really?” I asked. “We broke the skin? Are you sure?”
He ran his hand over my butt, surveying the damage.
“It’s not bad,” he said. “It just looks like pinpricks. Like red sweat.”
That intrigued me. I wanted to find a mirror and see for myself.
Then I imagined us from the outside and was dismayed by the sight. My boyfriend had just spanked me bloody. And I was thrilled.
DUKE
So then it seems your most offenseful act
Was mutually committed?
JULIET
Mutually.
DUKE
Then was your sin of heavier kind than his.
—Measure for Measure, 2.3
“Does this stuff worry you, John?” I asked, still bent over the bed. “Are we—?” I broke off. I couldn’t finish the thought.
“You worry too much,” he replied.
From then on, those extremes were not rare. People don’t realize how often (or how easily) spanking can cross into blood play, or strip away patches of skin.
But it was impossible to shake the fear that our “brawling love” was sick. After all, that was the official psychiatric consensus. At that point, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders still listed sadism and masochism as serious mental illnesses. (The psychiatric establishment has a shameful history with sexuality. Homosexuality was once classified as a mental illness; so was masturbation. Even today, the most recent DSM still lists sadism and masochism as mental illnesses if they cause distress to the individual—just as it once did for “ego-dystonic homosexuality.”)
I didn’t have any old friends in Spain. I longed to call Peng and tell her everything. But how do you start that conversation?
As private as my personal life had become, the political borders of my worldview expanded like never before. Shortly after I moved to Seville, a series of simultaneous, coordinated bombings terrorized the Madrid commuter train system, killing 191 people and wounding thousands more. Three days later, the Spanish people went to the polls for their 2004 presidential elections. International politics seemed more urgent and relevant than ever. I couldn’t read enough. The following month, 60 Minutes broadcast a story about American soldiers torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
“See, that is sick,” John told me, pointing to a news photo on a computer screen. “That’s what is deranged. Can’t you see the difference between that and what we do?”
“Don’t joke, John,” I said.
“I’m not joking,” he replied.
When I wasn’t reading about international politics, terrorism, and the wars in the Middle East, I read books. I was thrilled to have been admitted to Stanford, but I was also terrified. My admission felt like a fluke. I wouldn’t fit in at a fancy college. My only hope, I decided, was to get a head start: I’d read the classics. So I raided the English-language section of the nearby bookstore and filled my room with giants: Orwell, Joyce, Faulkner, Plath, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Salinger, Plato, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Bradbury. And Freud, who made me mad. And Cervantes, who made me laugh.
Oh, and Dostoevsky.
“Promise me you’ll start with The Brothers Karamazov,” John told me. “You’ll love it.”
And I did love it. Masochists love Russian novelists.
“If we ever do something that you can’t take, you can say ‘red’ and I’ll stop,” John told me one night over dinner, as I squirmed on a hard chair. “You know that, right?”
I did not know that, actually.
“Like red light, yellow light, green light?” I asked.
John nodded.
“Exactly,” he said.
“In that case,” I replied, “red light.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I have to take that seriously, Jillian,” he said. “Was that a joke?”
I pushed my food around my plate with my fork.
“It was a joke,” I admitted.
“Okay,” John replied. “If you say that again, make sure you mean it.”
We still weren’t having sex, but every moment was sexual. To his credit, John almost never pressured or rushed me, despite the fact that our atypical relationship dynamic and the age difference between us empowered him to do so. He controlled when and how we played with pain; I controlled, for the most part, when and how we experimented with pleasure. And along the way, sex did happen: first, I gave him my anal virginity at a Hotel California during a weekend trip to Málaga. We didn’t have lube, so John made do with spit and sunscreen, and that was my first time.
“You do realize that didn’t count as my virginity-virginity, right?” I announced after. But then John took my “virginity-virginity” on a red tile apartment floor in Barcelona a few months later, so those semantic calisthenics were ultimately pointless.
“Oh, my God,” John said once, a few weeks after we’d started having sex, as we lay on the bed in his apartment in Seville. “Yesterday, we had anal sex in the morning, and you gave me a blow job that night. And I didn’t take a shower in between.”
I sat up straight. He was right.
“Oh, my God,” I repeated.
I leapt off the bed and sprinted to the bathroom.
“I’m going to die!” I yelled, scrambling to put paste on my toothbrush. “Go get me some antibiotics!”
John was laughing.
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “Did it taste . . . weird?”
I poked my head out of the bathroom. My cheeks were puffed out like a chipmunk’s to contain the unreasonable amount of frothy toothpaste I had just inhaled.
“Are you asking me,” I said around the toothbrush, as foam threatened to spill past the edges of my mouth, “if your penis tasted like my poop?”
John shrugged.
“I guess,” he said.
I disappeared back into the bathroom and spat the toothpaste into the sink. If it is possible to spit emphatically, that is how I expelled the paste from my mouth.
“No!” I screeched. “Why the hell would you ask me that?”
“Don’t cuss at me, bird,” John replied coolly. “Y
ou know better than that.”
I stuck my head back into the bedroom and pointed a bottle of Listerine at him.
“Don’t start,” I threatened. “Don’t you dare.”
John’s eyebrow flickered.
“Well, if there was ever a moment to wash your mouth out with soap . . .” he said with a grin.
I locked the bathroom door.
If accidental ass-to-mouth play seems like an inappropriate topic to mention in a chapter about Shakespeare’s most “romantic” play, by the way, don’t blame me. Blame Mercutio, Romeo’s best friend. He’s the one who first raises the subject of anal sex, when he teases Romeo about what kind of woman he should find:
If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree,
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.
O, Romeo, that she were, O that she were
An open-arse, and thou a pop’rin pear!
Mercutio’s joke is a double entendre, of course. (And not a very subtle one, at that.) Open arse is self-explanatory. But during Shakespeare’s life, it was also bawdy slang for a medlar fruit. That joke appeared as early as the fourteenth century, when Chaucer used open arse to describe the fruit in “The Reeve’s Tale.” And when we consider that Shakespeare’s words were meant to be heard, not seen, the term pop’rin pear quickly becomes a phallic play on pop ’er in.
In other words, Mercutio encourages Romeo to look for a girl who will, let’s say, slide into “literature” through unexpected doors.
The heady euphorias of every spanking were followed by intense, inexplicable lows. Without fail, twelve to sixteen hours after intense play, I’d crash into tears, self-doubt, and depression. I wanted to cry, fight, or curl up and hide—and, more often than I’m proud to admit, that’s exactly what I did. Years later, I’d learn that this phenomenon is called “sub drop.” The physical pain of BDSM play causes endorphins and adrenaline to spike, and when those hormones subside, the return to normalcy often feels sad and confusing. (“Dom drop” can happen to tops, too.) But since John and I didn’t yet speak the language of our world, we didn’t understand my depressive moments. Sometimes John dealt with my moods by spanking me, and suddenly, almost like magic, endorphins flooded back into my bloodstream and I felt better. More often, though, I looked for reasons to pick fights and John shut down.
“i wonder if you even care about me, john [sic],” I emailed him once, in the throes of sub drop, for no apparent reason.
“Sooner or later, every girlfriend writes me an email in all lowercase letters,” John said, sighing, later that night. (I winced at the realization that I had become a cliché and redoubled my commitment to grammar.)
And there was still the risk that my disease might, at any second, ruin everything.
I was spending the night at John’s apartment and had just finished brushing my teeth. I put my toothbrush in the coffee mug John used as a holder and looked up at the mirror above the sink. Juliet’s face, instead of my own, gazed back at me from the glass. But something was wrong. She looked gray, stiff, and cold, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb.
I could feel it coming before it happened. At first, it was just an energy in my fingers and hands that ran down the map of my skeleton. Then a wave of paralysis hit, and my body folded up into itself, out of my control, like an old, crumpled grocery list. A second later, I was on the floor of the bathroom. My body curled over my arms. I couldn’t stand; I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even cry. It hurt. Nothing had ever hurt so much.
The bathroom door opened.
“Jillian, what the hell?” I heard John say.
I couldn’t speak, so I kept my eyes closed.
I felt John’s arms wrap around me, and he lifted me up off the cold blue tile of the floor. In the same moment, the transient paralysis began to fade away, like the moment a wave pulls back from the beach. I began to cry.
“Hey, now,” John said gently. “If you wanted me to carry you, you could’ve just asked.”
I tried to laugh, but the sound mixed with my tears and came out in a strangled choke.
John carried me into his bedroom and set me down on his bed. I could finally move my hands again, and I used them to cover my eyes while I cried. John sat next to me.
“I don’t know what that was,” I said. “But I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“You’re my gal,” John said. “I’m here.”
I pressed my face into his chest.
The next day, we decided to move to Barcelona. I was ready for a change of scenery. And John, to my surprise, had found a low-level job at a Spanish law firm there. He’d just turned twenty-five. It seemed as good a time as any to grow up.
“I can’t tell you to stay away from drugs when I’m selling them,” John explained with a wink.
Right away, Barcelona was wonderful. I rented a room near Hospital de Sant Pau; John, meanwhile, moved into his own apartment nearby. (My waitressing job didn’t follow me to Barcelona, so at this point I was mooching off John and occasional checks from my mother, who had no idea what was happening on our far side of the world.)
I HAD ENTERED Spain on a tourist visa, so I still had to leave the European Union every three months. John and I had satisfied this detail by taking the ferry to Morocco while we lived in Seville, so from Barcelona we decided to shake up the routine and buy cheap flights to Switzerland for the weekend instead. We landed in Geneva and immediately hopped on a train to the Alps. I’d heard good things about a small town in the Bernese Oberland called Gimmelwald, which I wanted to see.
We arrived in the Alps and spent the night at a cheap motel at the base of the mountains. It was May, only a month before my eighteenth birthday. There was a computer in the hotel lobby, so that morning I used it to check my email. I had some spam, which I deleted. My mother had forwarded me a chain email about toxins in lip balm, and I also deleted that. And there was an email from my high school class president. Apparently someone had forgotten to take me off the list when I dropped out. The subject line was: “BEST PROM EVERRRRRR!”
Was it prom already?
I deleted that email, too. I didn’t care about prom.
John and I walked from our hostel to a tram station and took the tram up into the Alps to Gimmelwald. It was a tiny town of less than two hundred people, perched on the side of the mountain at an elevation of more than four thousand feet. We wandered through Gimmelwald until we found a picturesque farm with a perfect view of the mountains.
We sat on the grass and gazed at the landscape around us. It was incredible. Huge mountains filled the sky—360 degrees of massive brown crags, like hunks of perfect Swiss chocolate topped with powdered sugar. Small villages were scattered among the bright green fields at the bases of the peaks.
“It’s amazing,” I said.
“I miss the ocean,” John replied. I turned to look at him. It wasn’t like John to be morose.
“Why do you love surfing?” I finally asked.
John moved to sit behind me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders so I could fall back into him, like a chair.
“It’s peaceful,” he said. “I only have to think about my breath, my board, and the water. Sometimes the wave curls around me and makes a crisp blue tube. It’s perfect in there. It’s the most perfect the world can be.”
“It sounds nice,” I said.
“I can teach you,” John replied, getting animated with excitement. “There’s a wave I dream about called Cloudbreak. It’s in Fiji. It’s an almost perfect left. If I could surf any wave on earth, that’s the one I’d pick. I want to take you there.”
I ran my hand up his pants to the long scar on his calf. It was from a surfing accident years before. John had been surfing the Banzai Pipeline, a wave in Hawaii that is notorious for its shallow water and sharp reefs, when he fell. The leash that tethered him to his surfboard wrapped around some coral, trapping h
im underwater. As he struggled to free himself, John’s leg ripped open against the reef. The resulting scar was thick and ugly, and the long seconds he’d spent underwater, out of control, had left him with a profound fear of being unable to breathe. I was never, ever allowed to touch John’s neck. That was a real rule, not like one of our fun rules I could break at will. Whenever anyone touched his neck, it reminded him of choking.
“I don’t have good balance,” I confessed.
John laughed.
“I’ll take you somewhere safe, bird,” he said, hugging me. “There are some good spots for beginners in Portugal. You can ride some little waves. We’ll hop across the border and I’ll show you the ropes. You’ll see: surfing is the best way to feel real.”
I relaxed into his hug. This felt like love. But I couldn’t say it.
Instead, I said, “I love it when you talk about surfing.”
“I belong in the water,” John replied with a nod.
Since we were outside, and therefore I was “safe,” I decided to mess with him. I opened my bottle and splashed some water in his face.
John recoiled from the spray, blinking with surprise as water dripped from his hair into his eyes.
I giggled.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he finally said, in a familiar tone of voice.
Startled at his reaction, I jumped to my feet and ran. John took off after me, and we raced across the field. He caught up with me—it didn’t take long, I’m slow—and tackled me to the ground. He wrestled me onto my back, sat on top of me, and put his hands on my shoulders.
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