Dangerously Happy (25 page)

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It was . . . really weird. Intense. Awesome.”

He laughed. Kissed my neck. “Anything more specific?”

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It was like my body went away. Like I went away, and all that was left was my cock, and whatever part of me you were touching, except superconcentrated, amplified like ten times, like all the bandwidth of my brain and nervous system were diverted just to those places. How’d you know about that?”

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I didn’t. You were my guinea pig. I’d just been thinking about how being bound kind of does that. If you’re really immobilized, especially if you’re also gagged and have the sensory deprivation of a blindfold and maybe the headphones, you’re forced to be passive, and so all your attention turns to the sensations of your body, because you’re not thinking about how to touch and please the other person, or what to do with your hands or your legs or your cock or whatever. So it ratchets up the intensity of whatever sensations your lover is provoking. Having you stay still and passive, it’s basically mental bondage, I guess.”

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What was it like for you?” I asked him.

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Weird.” He laughed. “Especially when I kissed your mouth. That felt absolutely bizarre. But the rest of the time, it’s just strange getting zero feedback. Except your glorious erection. That helped. But when someone’s bound—as you know—you still get lots of feedback. You know what each touch, each slap, each kiss, each thrust is doing to him. Or her.”

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Dario?”

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Hmmm?”

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Can I ask you something?”

The laughter went out of his smile and it turned earnest. “Yes, love.”

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Sorry, maybe it’s a hard question.”

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Let’s see.”

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I just keep wondering, how, why did you get into bondage? How can you enjoy that kind of play? After what happened to you?”

He kissed me. “It’s not a hard question. But it’s a complicated question. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Something I still think about sometimes. Especially lately. But I’m not sure I have a good answer.

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I guess the easy part is how I got into it. When I was twenty, I started seeing someone. Or, I started wanting to see someone. Paul. He was a few years older than me, but he was a friend of a friend, so we were often at the same parties, and he was one of those people who just exudes sexuality. I wanted to fuck him the first time I laid eyes on him. And back then, well, I guess I was making up for lost time or something, I wasn’t very subtle about it when I wanted someone. One night, he kissed me. One, deep, hot, please-fuck-me kiss. And then he looked at me with this grin, like he was going to give me a dare he knew I’d be too chicken to take, and he said, ’Do you want to fuck me?’ I’d never had such a . . . forthright offer before and it embarrassed the hell out of me, and also totally turned me on. And when I said yes, he said, ’Good. But if you fuck me, you have to top. And you have to tie me.’ Obviously, if he’d said the reverse, I would have backed out. But the idea of tying him up didn’t scare me. Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what I was getting myself into. I just pictured it like . . . a position, or, I don’t know, like men who like to fuck women while they’re still wearing their stilettos. I didn’t get that he was into the power aspect of it. Until I had him tied. Basic. Wrists to the headboard. By now he knew I’d never done that before. So he coached me. Told me he wanted me to pin him with my body. To fuck him like I’d forgotten he was a person. To use his body, his hole as if he were an inanimate object. At that point I started to freak out. Those things he said immediately brought up my memories of what had happened in the woods, and I started to panic. But weirdly, at the same time, it aroused me, I guess because it was like I would be on the other side. I still wasn’t sure I could do it. I was surprised I was even still hard, but I was. Perfectly.

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When we started, I barely even did what he was telling me. He kept having to tell me to fight him, you know, he’d sort of struggle as if he were trying to evade my kiss, my cock, and he’d tell me to grab his hair and hold him still, to be rougher, to just take him like I owned him. After a while there was this feedback loop. The better I carried out his instruction, the more aggressively I held him down—for example, putting my forearm across his chest and putting a lot of my weight on him—the more excited, the harder he got. When I got into it a little more and was really fucking him, stroking him, he told me to put my hand over his mouth. Hard. I did it. He started making this sound that was somewhere between a groan of pleasure and a cry. A scream. I almost lost it. My hard-on, my cool. I really thought I was going to have a meltdown if I didn’t get off him and get out of there. But he was so fucking hard, writhing for it, I felt his thighs quivering in that almost-there way, felt how high and tight his balls were, and suddenly I was there. I was in it, my hand clamped down hard over his screams, his cries of pleasure, basically fucking him like I was stabbing him, and he started coming and I felt . . . fuck, just so powerful. Fucking omnipotent. And I came like . . . I don’t know, it was so adrenaline-fueled, like punching someone. I’d never felt anything like it.

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After, he told me that was the only way he could come. He didn’t know why. He hadn’t been molested or abused or raped, couldn’t think of any formative experience that had made him that way. But that was it. While he was tied down and being fucked, he liked to imagine the man on top of him was his high school math teacher, or that he was in the army, being raped by a superior officer or an enemy soldier, or a priest who’d punish him later for being such a dirty boy who came while his ass was getting drilled by a big cock. I didn’t tell him anything about what had happened to me.

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We started fucking regularly. We were never a couple. We never dated. But we fucked three or four times a week, because I realized after that first time that somehow dominating him like that diminished the weight of the pain I’d been carrying since the assault. I think part of it was the role reversal. Feeling in control. Feeling powerful. But there was also something comforting about it. Going through something so intense—frankly, brutal—and discovering that after, over and over, every time, he was okay. I mean, utterly content, sated, grateful, at peace. Somehow that was healing, for me.

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I never thought I’d want to switch roles, for obvious reasons. I couldn’t have even imagined letting a lover tie my hands, even as a concession to a desperate wish. But then I met Jared.”

Dario sighed. Then he looked at me and laughed. “Oh, the things we do for love, eh?” He kissed me, warmly, deeply. “Does it bother you? Me talking about Jared?”

I smiled. “I know I’m not as zen as you about the jealousy thing, but I don’t need to deprive you of your memories of Jared. Say anything. It won’t hurt my feelings.”

Another kiss. A happy smile. “I’m glad. With Christopher, eventually I kind of pretended Jared had never existed because he always seemed hurt whenever I mentioned him. I didn’t mean to let it happen, but after a while I started resenting Christopher for that. We would have ended, anyway, but that resentment definitely fueled our demise.”

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Was Jared your first love?”

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Until now, my only real love. Yes. When he died, I really never thought I’d feel like this again. How egocentric is it that I think we’re happier than everyone else? That our love is bigger than everyone else’s?” Another deep, yearning kiss. I felt the same way. Maybe because even though I’d been happily in love twice before, it had never come close to what I felt with Dario. So now I had the notion that those past loves were what everyone else had, and somehow Dario and I had levitated to another plane. For a little while we got lost in our love and our happiness and we almost forgot what we’d been talking about, but then Dario remembered and told me.

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Jared wasn’t like Paul, he didn’t need bondage to get off. But it was something that fascinated him, something he’d explored fleetingly and superficially with another lover, someone he’d never gotten serious with and with whom he’d never gotten to a point of trust sufficient for him to go as far as he wanted to go. All it had done was given him the taste for it, and after that it was almost an obsession. When he first brought it up with me, I was absolutely turned on by the idea of dominating him, of having him under me, bound and helpless, and a little terrified because my encounters with Paul had been so extreme. And it scared me, the idea of letting Jared see even a shadow of that darkness, and I wasn’t absolutely sure how I’d keep it in check, once we got started, because with Paul I’d never had to reign it in. Nothing I did to him was ever too much, and he told me right out many times I never went far enough for him. But really I knew that I’d never hurt Jared, and finally I told him that if he wanted to be tied up and dominated, we could try it. But he wanted to try the other, too. Putting me in bondage, having me helpless, in his control. When I told him no, I could tell right away that he was upset. He wasn’t a jerk about it, I could just see that he was disappointed. And this whole disagreement took us back to the only real hurdle we’d had in our relationship before then, which was that when we were first together I wouldn’t let him fuck me. I’d never let anyone fuck me. Before Jared, it had been easy—I kept the lovers who were okay with it, and let the others go. But I couldn’t bear to let Jared go.

Obviously everything would have been easier, simpler, if I’d just told him what had happened to me. I still feel really ashamed and guilty that I never told him. He deserved that trust. He deserved to know about it, because it had a real impact on our relationship. But I wasn’t brave enough, so he died after two years of us loving each other, thinking it was just some macho hangup of mine. I let him feel almost like he was the jerk, the one with the problem, just because he wanted things to be equal between us. But finally I decided that I loved him too much to risk losing him, or to risk hurting our relationship by not giving him that. So . . .”

Dario took a deep breath and blew it out as if he were reliving the fear of giving himself to his lover for the first time.

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Finally I said yes, he could top me. And it went amazingly well, I mean, I was terrified I would have a meltdown the second we started, but he could see how nervous I was, and he was perfect. He took perfect care of me through it, and after that we were great. Until this thing about bondage came up, and all those old frustrations and misunderstandings came back. And once again, after a few weeks of feeling like me denying him this thing that was important to him was really hurting our relationship—he’d really come to feel like he wouldn’t ever feel whole, sexually, without it—I decided to take the chance. For him. For us.

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And again, he was perfect. So careful and kind. But the second I was tied and I realized I couldn’t get my wrists free of the headboard, I started to lose my shit. It didn’t matter that it was Jared on top of me, Jared touching me, Jared unbuckling his belt, undoing his fly, I felt as vulnerable and scared to death as I did in those woods. Like a full-blown posttraumatic flashback. I’m still amazed I didn’t make him stop. Even when he realized I was freaking out and he asked me if he should stop I said no. Maybe because I was scared of losing him. Or maybe I was trying to prove something to myself. That those three men weren’t still fucking up my life. Hurting me.

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And then something happened. I didn’t stop being scared, but I stopped thinking about the woods. Just, I became incredibly present, there with Jared and my terror, and I don’t know why, but I got aroused. Got hard. It was that way through the whole session—me perfectly hard, turned on as hell, but without the terror going away. I remember I had a phenomenal orgasm, a weird, fraught, weepy but incredible orgasm. And after, kind of like what had happened when I’d dominated Paul, I felt like the rage and the hurt I’d been carrying all those years was suddenly lighter. Like Jared and I had just hacked a heavy limb off a dead tree and thrown it into a ravine. And it was always like that, every time he tied me down, every time we pushed it a little further, the blindfold, the headphones, and—God—finally the gag, I suffered, I cried, I got hard, I came. And after, I always felt a little better than I had before. Not just for an hour or a day. It was really like we were hacking that fucking dead tree to pieces branch by branch and I was watching the pieces decompose. I’m still grateful to Jared for that.” Dario laughed. “Poor baby, he got a lot more than he was bargaining for. He’d thought it would be fun, a little rough, a chance to tap into that primal shadow self that’s lurking somewhere in all of us, not that his rather stoic, dominant boyfriend would turn into a quivering, weeping victim when he tied me down. But, worried and wary as he was the first few times, when I told him it felt good for me, he went there with me. Although, over time, as we whittled that dead tree down to a stump, I stopped getting as scared. I stopped falli
ng apart and weeping, though I suppose there were always a few tears.