Best Sex Writing 2008

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

  And spelling out what I was looking for wound up handing me an extremely pleasant surprise. I knew I shouldn’t expect sex from a professional submissive; and sure enough, Rachel had “no sex” clearly stated on her website. But since every person on the planet seems to define “sex” differently, I thought I should check with her about what, exactly, she meant by this.

  “I understand and respect the ‘no sex’ rule,” I said in my email, “and would absolutely stay within your limits. But…” and I proceeded to ask about a few specifics, which she might or might not consider sex. Ordering her to masturbate. Caressing or squeezing her bottom while I spanked her. Caressing or squeezing her breasts before putting clamps on them. Masturbating while I looked at her. Masturbating while I spanked her, or while I fondled her ass. I put this list in my email, fully expecting her to say “No” to most or all of it, and half-afraid that even asking would make her blow me off as a clueless oaf who didn’t get that pro submission isn’t prostitution. I waited fretfully, obsessively checking my email, increasingly certain with each passing hour that I’d blown it and would have to start from scratch with someone else.

  But Rachel finally replied… and I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only was everything I wanted okay with her, but a number of things I wouldn’t have asked for in a bezillion years turned out to be okay as well. I could fondle and even chew on her breasts; I could rub my cunt against her ass; I could spank her pussy with my bare (gloved) hand. I could even “masturbate” her if I wanted to. That one really took me by surprise. In Lesbian-land where I come from, we call that “fingering,” and it’s without question considered sex. But I wasn’t about to argue. The only things that were off-limits were body-fluid-exchange stuff like fucking and sucking, and I could happily live without those for an hour.

  So the moral of the story is, ask your sex professional for what you want. But even if it had turned out the other way—if all the extras I’d wanted had been off-limits—I still would have been glad I’d asked. As much as I’d have hated to miss a pleasure because I didn’t know it was permitted, I’d have hated even more to try something and have it turn out to be verboten. And if I hadn’t asked ahead of time about this “borderline” stuff, I doubt I’d have had the nerve to try any of it.

  Of course, now that Rachel and I had discussed details and scheduled a date, both my fantasies and my fretfulness were in sharp, vivid focus. I spent the days before the session veering between high anxiety and near-blinding horniness; between insistent, poorly timed fantasies about the session, and a displaced fretfulness over details: what to wear, what to bring, how to get there, what if I missed my train, what if the dungeon caught fire. An hour before the session, all my planning and fantasizing and blocking out the broad strokes of the session had gone completely blank, replaced by teeth-grinding obsession over minutiae and a loud buzzing in my head. I kept chanting to myself, “This is for me, this is for my pleasure, I’m doing this for myself ”…a mantra that utterly failed to sink in. And fifteen minutes before the session, everything in my brain had been obliterated by the blank, terrified hyperawareness that I was trying to find my way through a strange, slightly dicey neighborhood with three hundred dollars cash in my wallet.

  Also, did my hair look okay?

  Part Three: Doing It

  Did I mention the fretfulness, the anxiety, the blank terror? All of it focused into a laser beam of panic when I rang the doorbell and walked through the dungeon door. I’m tempted to say that it felt like crossing a line, like stepping across a border into unknown and forbidden territory that I could never return from unchanged. All of which is true, it did feel like that, except I was also aware of what a dorky, overdramatic metaphor that was. Mostly, I just had no fucking idea what to do next.

  But Rachel, of course, was a professional. She knew how to put nervous horny people at ease, and she knew what to do next. She graciously took my money, and she sat me on the sofa and chatted a bit about what we’d be doing, and she walked me around the dungeon showing me her toys… and while part of me was watching the clock tick and wondering, “Am I paying for this?”, a much larger part was relieved to have the chance to get my bearings. I was getting a sense of the physical space, which was helping me relax and settle in… and which was giving me ideas.

  And of course, now I knew what Rachel looked like. Yes, I’d seen photos on her website, but we all know about photos. They can lie in so many ways, not least of which are the lies you tell yourself when you look at them. But while Rachel didn’t look exactly the way I’d imagined—she was taller, and dressed more conventionally—I certainly wasn’t disappointed. If anything, her photos didn’t do her justice. So by the time the tour was over, I was… not relaxed exactly, but no longer paralyzed. And while I was still deeply weirded out, I was also getting a little turned on.

  So we started. Slowly at first. I sat in a wooden chair, crossed my legs, and told her to stand in front of me while I looked at her. Then to turn around while I looked at her. Then to bend at the waist, pull up her skirt, and slowly pull down her panties while I looked at her. All of this was familiar territory, and for the first time that day, I began to feel like I actually was in control.

  So I was watching this pretty, sexy, obedient woman bend over with her skirt hiked up and her panties pulled down, when it occurred to me that it might be fun to go squeeze her butt. Immediately I thought, “No. Not yet. You were going to wait for that.” (I wasn’t kidding about blocking out the session beforehand. In my hyperanxious state, I’d been worried that if I didn’t, I’d get lost in the preliminaries and wouldn’t have time for the main events.)

  But then it dawned on me: “Screw that. This is for you. The whole idea is that this is for you. She’s a submissive: she’s here to do what you want, when you want it. So to hell with your stupid timeline. If your clit wants you to squeeze her ass, then go squeeze her ass.” (I guess my “This is for you” mantra had sunk in after all.) I walked over behind her, let my hand hover above her bare ass for a moment, and touched her.

  And that, more than walking through the dungeon door, is what made me feel like I’d crossed a line. Touching the naked skin of someone whom I’d paid for the pleasure, squeezing her flesh while my clit throbbed and then squeezing it harder to make my clit throb again… that is what made me feel like I’d done something I couldn’t take back, become somebody I couldn’t change. It was unnerving—but it was also exciting, in the way that adventure is always exciting. And now that I’d unequivocally stepped into this strange place, now that I wasn’t just freaking out trying to imagine what it might be like, it began to feel less strange, and my confidence grew with every squeeze of my hand and twitch of my clit.

  I began to take things a little further. I made Rachel show me her breasts, and then groped them. I made her crawl on the floor, and then followed her around groping her ass while she crawled. I switched back and forth between touching her and watching her: between using her for the pleasure of my hands and using her for the pleasure of my eyes, between treating her like a sex toy and treating her like a piece of pornography.

  Now normally, if I were feeling like this in an S/M scene, I’d start telling my partner about it, so she could get off on her objectification as much as I was. I was about to do that with Rachel. But then I thought: “No. I want to be lazy. I know that I’m thinking of her as a sex toy, and I’m getting off on it. I don’t need her to know it, too. I just need her to keep doing it.” I was starting to get into this whole selfish “you are here solely to serve my needs” thing, and I wanted to go with it.

  But being sexually selfish turned out to be much harder than I’d anticipated. I hadn’t quite realized this before, but apparently a lot of what I get off on as a top is feedback: the admiration of my wonderful skill and sensitivity and general toppy hotness. It was extremely difficult to not care about whether Rachel thought I was hot. And even though I was playing the whole “distant and cool” thing as a sexual game, I think I
was also doing it as a defense. I knew that no matter how Rachel was responding to me, I’d be wondering if it was real or an act she was getting paid to put on. Playing the “this is all about me” game meant I didn’t have to think about that question.

  It was still hard, though. And it got harder as the scene got more physical. When I took Rachel over my knee and started spanking her, I had to remind myself of our email negotiations, and the fact that she’d made a point of telling me, several times, that I should feel free to spank her. I knew in my head that she was okay with being spanked. She’d shown me a whole cabinet of paddles and crops and floggers I could use on her, of course she was okay with being spanked. In fact, it sounded from her emails like she was a lot more than okay with being spanked. But paying somebody to let me physically hurt them still took some adjustment.

  And even when I was getting into the selfishness game, part of what I selfishly wanted was a certain kind of response. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that I could ask for that as well. I could order her to wriggle or be still when I spanked her, to moan or be quiet, to beg me to stop or to beg for more. But once I let go of my worry over whether she was faking, I realized how much pleasure I found in telling her how to react. It was an unsettling pleasure, but an intense one: the power I felt in controlling, not just her behavior, but her response to mine.

  I’ll say this for damn sure: It was wonderful to be able to spank her as hard as I wanted. I’m not sure I’ve ever spanked anyone as hard as I wanted. Rachel liked being spanked, and she liked it hard, and I could spank her as hard as I could, for as long as I liked. I could spank her until my hand hurt, and then spank her more when my hand recovered. I could squeeze or tickle her ass after a good hard series of whacks… and when I got bored doing that, I could start spanking her again, as soon as I felt like it. Or I could grope her breast with one hand while I spanked her with the other, getting off on the feel of her tits without worrying about whether I was doing it exactly right. Of all the things we did in the session, bending Rachel over my knee and spanking her was the closest I came to really experiencing the fantasy: the closest I came to really feeling like I was being serviced by an obedient submissive whose only purpose was to comply with my orders and get me off.

  As the scene became more intense, the whole “it’s all about me” game got easier. Yet at the same time, it got more perplexing. When I was doing something that required care and delicacy, like spanking Rachel between her legs, I’d be intently focused on not harming her or pushing too hard—while at the same time, I’d be cruelly trying to maximize her pain and frustration, making her play with her clit to get it excited and swollen before I started hitting it again. When I was doing things that to me felt blatantly sexual, like rubbing my cunt against her ass while I groped her tits and masturbated with a vibrator, I’d be paying strict attention to the details of her “no sex” limits—while at the same time, I’d be luxuriating in how dirty and fucked-up it felt to selfishly use this woman’s body to get myself off. My top persona became colder, my orders coming in an increasingly chilly voice, accompanied by snapped fingers and an impatient bark when they weren’t immediately followed. I got more comfortable with it, and more deeply into it, with each passing minute.

  But it was still hard. Which is probably why I did what I did at the end of the session. I was pretty much done—to be crude about it, I’d finished coming—and I said to Rachel, “You’ve been very good. I’ve enjoyed this very much, and I want to give you a reward. Is there something you want before we finish? Something you want to do, or want me to do?”

  “Honestly?” she asked. Her voice wasn’t submissive or meek this time: it was straightforward and firm, and she didn’t pause for even a second before asking.

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “I want to be spanked some more.”

  I smiled. “Do you like it hard?”

  “Yes,” she answered immediately, almost interrupting. “I like to be spanked hard.”

  I was so glad I’d asked. I had hoped that would be her answer. Her obvious enthusiasm relieved any residual guilt I had about the whole “selfishly hurting you and using you for my own erotic whims” thing. Besides, I really just wanted to spank her some more. I bent her over my lap again and started spanking, ordering her to beg me for it, to tell me how badly she wanted it. When I started worrying if I was doing it too hard, I reminded myself that this was what she’d specifically asked for, the thing she wanted more than anything, and I bucked up my courage and spanked her even harder. I kept it up, solid and relentless, until our time was almost up.

  Then I ordered her onto the floor, on her back with her legs apart and her fingers spreading her cunt. I watched her silently for a minute, trying to fix the image in my brain. And I said, “That’s it. We’re done.”

  And then—boom. As soon as I said, “We’re done,” all the anxiety and paralysis came rushing back home. I was at a total loss about what to do next, almost as much as I’d been before the session started. I felt overwhelmed with social awkwardness: I had no idea how to make a two-minute transition from dom/sub roles into regular people roles…not that I knew what our “regular people” relationship was anyway. Rachel got dressed, sat me down on the sofa with her to chat, and asked if it was okay to cuddle for a minute.

  Now, this is going to make me sound like a complete asshole, but an honest answer would have been “No.” I didn’t want to cuddle. I didn’t even want to chat. I was feeling anxious and freaked out, and what I wanted was to give her my tip, say “Thank you,” and get the hell out of there. But the scene was over: she wasn’t my submissive servant anymore, we were social equals again, and after everything we’d been doing, saying “No” seemed churlish and rude. So I said “Sure,” and put my arm around her stiffly while we chatted about the scene. I took off as soon as I gracefully could, and headed back to BART, thinking: Boy, sex work is weird.

  Part Four: Analyzing It to Death Afterward

  So here’s the big, meaningful conclusion I’ve come to:

  Boy, sex work is weird.

  I don’t mean that it’s bad. I don’t mean that it’s sinful or exploitative or un-feminist, or any of that. But it’s deeply, deeply weird. And being a customer felt much weirder than I’d ever felt as a provider. It was radically different from unpaid sex, much more so than I’d expected. It was as different from unpaid sex as S/M is from vanilla sex, as different as making love with a beloved partner is from fucking a stranger.

  Why was it so different? It wasn’t the “playing with a stranger” part so much: I’ve done that before, at sex parties and such. And it wasn’t the “planning and scheduling sex in advance” part, either: I’ve done that before as well, with both long-term lovers and casual personal-ad hookups. But the combination of the two—making a definite, fairly detailed plan to have sex with someone that I’d never even met before—was deeply surreal. Even with strangers at sex parties, I’d known them for at least thirty seconds, had a chance to see if there was immediate physical chemistry, before deciding to boink them. This blend of careful calculation and blind leaping-into-the-abyss adventure was very peculiar indeed.

  And of course, I was three hundred dollars poorer at the end of it, which isn’t an insignificant difference. The money made me feel entitled to ask for what I wanted and (within reason) to get it. But it also made me feel pressured, like I had to cram as much pleasure as I could into the session to make it worth what I’d spent. And inevitably, it made me compare the experience to other luxuries, trying to judge whether that one hour had really been as good as thirty expensive cocktails, or ten pairs of Merino wool tights, or three fancy dinners out with my lover.

  But the biggest difference between playing for money and playing for free turned out to be the clock. Rachel had informed me ahead of time that she rented the dungeon by the hour and we had to be out by 8:00 p.m. sharp. Even if she hadn’t, I didn’t have the money to extend the session past the hour
we’d scheduled. So I was constantly keeping an eye on the clock: winding up the spanking so we could get to the cunt torture, deciding not to use the flogger because we wouldn’t have time to do it right. Now, I’ve certainly had quickies with a casual eye on the clock, have begun play sessions that we had to either cut short or miss our dinner reservations. But I’d never before played with anyone who was going to kick me out after exactly one hour, no matter what was going on or how much fun either of us was having. And this, I think, more than anything else about the session, made it nearly impossible for me to relax and just experience the moment.

  I want to say something, though, and I want to say it very clearly: None of this weirdness or anxiety had anything to do with Rachel. Rachel was great. She knew her stuff, and she responded beautifully to my orders, and she was lovely to look at and luscious to fondle and spank. Any stress or distance I felt came from my own brainwaves and neuroses. Rachel did not make this a weird experience—I did.

  Would I do it again? Well, if money were no object… but that’s ridiculous. Of course money is an object. Money is the object, the whole point of the exercise, the thing that makes paying for it different from just surfing the personals for no-strings sex. So let me rephrase that. If I could afford it—if I weren’t working a low-paying hippie-anarchist day job, if I hadn’t recently paid for a big wedding and bought a house (and before you ask: yes, my wife knows about my adventure, and she’s fine with it)—is this a luxury I’d save up for again?