Читать книгу Out of the Shadows - Senta Holland - Страница 5

My private monsoon

I sat on my side of the taxi and held his hand.

I sat very still.

My dream might be over.

No, all that would be left would be my dream.

Nothing else.

I tried to look at him as much as I could.

To remember him if necessary.

He was very remote.

I don’t know why, or what he was feeling.

He’s not the kind of man who’d tell anyone.

I know what I thought: I thought, he’s withdrawing. He’s preparing himself for going back to his life in Bangkok.

And, depending on what he feels when he is alone enough to feel it, he will be gone. Or not. Or be there again. Oh, I don’t know.

As I looked, something was blurring my vision.

I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. It was a very private monsoon.

I gripped his hand more strongly and pressed it like a child.

He returned my grip but didn’t look at me.

I remembered when I was very young and had to have really painful surgery done on my foot. It was awful, like being butchered. And there was no one who even showed me any sympathy.

Cold-hearted old men in white coats. Did they know what they were doing to me?

I felt so alone.

I held somebody’s hand.

I don’t remember whose.

Only that it was the only hand that was there. Somebody human. Something other than fear and desolation and pain. Even if it was an old cold-hearted man.

I gripped it with the same desperate and trustful grip that I’m holding his with right now.

But I know I will have to let it go when the pain grows worst.

At the airport, the same place where we met all these many hours ago, and every one of these hours is embedded deeply into the ridges of my core memory, I followed him from station to check-in station, all disguised as palm trees.

He put his bags on the cart, and he had to pay the airport tax, and then finally it was time and he had to go.

I followed him around with tears glistening in the tropical midday sun.

He didn’t say much and I found that I was making little remarks in a small voice.

At the end, I trotted along beside him and cried.

So much to lose.

So much just found.

So much life just opened up.

So much to develop, and maybe cut off.

Now I wasn’t sure why he had given me the pictures, though I was glad I had them.

‘I’ll call you,’ I said again.

‘Yes, on Saturday,’ he replied, again not looking at me.

We stood in the sun, beside the too cute little hut that was really the boarding gate.

The lady in the shadows nodded to him.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

Would he have just turned?

I didn’t give him the chance.

With all my strength I threw my arms around his neck and hugged him with my whole body.

He gave an embarrassed little laugh and then he hugged me back.

This may be our first fully clothed hug I thought.

How strange to hug him when I’m not naked.

I kissed him. He didn’t really kiss much, but this time I just drank and drank and drank his mouth dry.

I remembered the sea mussels, all soft inside. I was one of them. If I could have changed myself into liquid, I would have soaked him through his clothes and seeped in through his pores, so that I could travel inside him. Wherever he went. Losing cohesion would be a small price to pay.

Then I let go.

I was never one to fight to the last.

Always hoped they would stay of their own accord.

He said ‘goodbye’ and went.

I saw him give the attendant his ticket, I saw him walk past the barrier.

He turned round and waved. I waved too. The waving cut through my breath. It seemed final.

Something in me pushed and pushed.

He turned again.

I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t hold it back. I hadn’t held anything back for the last three days and five hours.

It came up in an awkward shape, unformed, unfiltered, unheard of, unthinkable.

‘Don’t go!’ I blurted out.

He stopped and blurted back.

Just as awkward and unfiltered.

‘I have to.’

Yes.

Then he was gone.

I saw him drive past, sitting on the little wagon where I had spotted him when he arrived.

I waved again, but it was too late.

Then he was gone.

The sun was very hot and bright as I walked back from the airport to the main tuk tuk ring road. It was a long way, particularly carrying my computer in my backpack. I cried and cried and cried.

My feet rubbed raw against the cheap new flip-flop shoes. I didn’t care. I was accosted by motorcycle drivers and then insulted and cursed when I didn’t want to ride with them. I didn’t care. I cried so much water I could have passed out from the dehydration. I grew a monumental headache, so that I nearly didn’t see the tuk tuk when I finally reached the main road.

I didn’t care.

In the main fishing town I found an email place, inside an electrical repair shop.

I knew he couldn’t have written, he was on the plane. I needed to read what other men had written to me, so that I wouldn’t drown.

I found many letters from men on the alternative lifestyle website: they gave me brutal commands without knowing me, they just wanted a fuck for the night, they felt all women were whores and they needed me to do all sorts of things for them while they themselves weren’t going to do anything for me. They weren’t really quite sure what they wanted. I wasn’t good enough for them anyway.

I sat between the cut-off cable rolls and the conversion plugs and thought of my Nai without panic. Even if I never saw him again, my Nai had given me an experience that was in a different world from men like that. He had been himself. I had had a chance to become myself. More of myself than I ever dreamed of. I would probably never have a relationship again, considering what was usually on offer and expected, but I had been with him. For a whole three precious days. And five hours.

I stopped the internet connection but bought the conversion plug.

It would be nice to put on the fan AND the laptop at the same time when I returned to my hut on the other island.

I remember waiting for a long time on the pier, under a thatch and between sweets stands, never quite sure when the ferry went and if I would be called for the right one and in time, surrounded by blood red dragon boats, and just looking out on the sea.

It was completely calm.

The other island

I had always planned to go to the island, sit in a hut, and write.

And that was what I did.

The hut I ended up in was right on top of a hill, overlooking the South China Sea. It had a view of green, still water in the day and of the same water, black, at night, with a string of huge lights reflected on it. The lights were spooky. They looked as if a big city had settled on the sea at nightfall, or the faraway coastline of the Gulf of Thailand had suddenly closed the gap, but they belonged to the bottom draggers who had already fished the region almost empty. All that was left when you went down to the little beach, dodging the water bottles and broken stones, was empty sand and empty salty sea. The bottom draggers themselves looked like huge spider crabs with bright white eyes at the end of their many feet. They were on the verge of replacing biology. The only animal inhabitants left here were vicious amphibians who could swim and dig through the sand with equal determination and who would cling to human toes and sting.

The only other animal inhabitants were youthful tourists who had been hoping for an authentic experience and ended up staring at the emptiness, consuming various legal and not-so-legal substances and nursing their bitten feet.

Up on the hill there were only a few of us, and our huts were far away from each other. I had a stylish veranda with artistically cut logs that still showed the stumps of their erstwhile branches under elegant veneer where I could sit and write. Thousands of ants used that log railing as a highway to circle the hut in endless ceremony. At night, dog sized lizards heaved themselves onto the veranda to survey and hiss at the scenery. Huge cockroaches and hand sized tiger-pattern spiders raced each other round my mosquito net.

We had electricity for a few hours at night, unless the owner decided to play his special moonlight collection. In that case I had more time to use my laptop but I also had to listen to his music.

I worked on my project, as I had intended, and with great dedication, considering that each night I had to choose between my laptop and the electric fan.

Every few days I climbed onto the owner’s four wheel drive truck and went on the hour-long journey on deep red tracks hacked into the virgin jungle and desperately trying to heal themselves with long green creepers, into the island’s only larger village. There the owner went off to look for visitors coming off the ferry, while other hut inhabitants went for a much needed dose of cheese in the Western café.

I walked down the dusty street and looked for a phone.

There were no internet terminals in the jungle huts, but the dusty boom town street had them.

The first time I came down with the jeep I almost didn’t dare to enter. My Nai hadn’t contacted me, not at all, since I had left on the train, but then there were many possibilities or reasons. One of them was of course that he didn’t want to contact me.

Still, I had proved to myself that I was strong. I had found him. I had realised that he was what I wanted, and more. I had given it my best, I had made it clear to him and to myself. But I had not raised my hopes, and consequently I had not had them dashed.

So I was telling myself when I went into Mr Hong’s world-wide connection shop and sat down at the ancient computer with the encrusted keyboard that did its best to crank itself up to the speeds required by global communication. The lights on its old curvy screen flickered dangerously.

I had many other people to look up of course. I decided to start with those others first, and end with them. Looking for a mail from my Nai would have to be sandwiched in between. Safety insulation.

So many mails never come.

In my journey on that round-the-world trip, the most common mail I got from a Dom was the first.

And still I looked out for my Nai’s mail from the corner of my eye.

What does it matter, the project, the island, the fear, the hope, the lizards on the veranda.

The only thing that counts is his skin touching mine. And knowing that he is, so finally, so simply, so improbably the one who understands me.

He was there.

His mail was already a few days old.

He had tried several times, he said, but there was no getting through on the phone number I had given him. But he had set up a special account, just for us, just for him and me, if I wanted to write to him. Ever. Or now. Or ever.

I ran out into the hot street, startling the dying dogs and Mr Hong who had never seen a tourist leave the shop with minutes of airtime still unpaid. The next time I went there he was cautious, as if he suspected me of not really being a tourist. Or carrying some other dark secret.

He had a good instinct.

I knew I didn’t have a lot of time left. I had to catch the truck before it went back through the wounded jungle.

Of course there were no phones. All I could find was a lady in a travel agency who let me use her mobile, at an exorbitant fee.

It rang. It was the wrong number, no it was the right number.

He answered.

I stood in the relentless sun, getting my skull burned.

My ear filled with sweat.

He answered.

What matter the details?

He answered and his voice was small. He didn’t recognise the number, he said. Of course not! It came from jungle island.

‘You are calling,’ he said. Twice. Then he said it again.

‘I tried to ring but they said you weren’t there.’

‘So I went away. Right now I’m – being blessed. At a temple.’

He made a little embarrassed laugh.

‘And now you are calling.’

Of course he could not come to the jungle hut. My lizard would never have allowed him in.

For weeks I stood there in the dusty sun, talking to him on the phone. Yes, there was one. The locals used it and they had made it look as if it was broken. They needed the income from the mobiles.

But I was such a frequent user, I was given access to the proper phone.

Then I went back on the truck, squeezed between water bottles.

‘I’m going to come and meet you,’ he said. ‘On the other island.’

He gave me a time.

I would have gone there straight away. If I ran I could have jumped on the ferry. I could see it from where I stood.

But it seemed he had a schedule that we both had to follow. It would mean a complicated journey and a tremulous wait on the other island where they had an airport.

Just like my life.

I told everyone.

Well, not about the BDSM, but about the meeting.

I told the owner, I told my fellow hut residents, I told the ants and the lizard. When the cockroaches raced across my bed before the swift claws and poison of the tiger spider I smiled benevolently.

I counted the hours, I counted the days.

I drank coconuts at the airport.

I never thought he would really come.

But I saw him, riding on the last cart, wearing an island hat.

Intimate studies

‘Now you want to come,’ he said.

‘No. Well, OK, yes.’

I snuggled into the crook of his arm.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘When you’ve been spanked you want to come.’

I had never thought of it like that. I had thought of spanking, of course! And had been spanked. And I love sex. But never like that, a connection that describes my sexuality.

‘Yes,’ I said, surprised, ‘that’s true.’

‘I’m beginning to know you.’ He was so pleased.

I was pleased too. No, I was thrilled. To be known, so intimately. To be so intimately studied. To lie here, skin to skin, touch to touch, under the pink duvet, with my Nai.

My Nai always travelled with his pink duvet.

And he always turned the aircon to zero.

This was one of the many ways in which he acted like an upper class Thai. Although he was American, he had lived here in Thailand longer than anywhere else. He had grown up in a garden in Bangkok with mango trees and spoke Thai with his nannies while his mother spoke English with princesses.

When I first got to know them I didn’t realise how important names are, to Doms. Every Dom has a very specific desire, and he wants to be called by a specific name.

To me, that was quite alien. My desire to submit didn’t focus on magical names (well, that’s not entirely true, it didn’t focus on magical names for Doms, but there was some word magic elsewhere). But when I understood, I started to find this quite endearing. Adult men with identities had the chance of re-naming themselves, and of naming their passion.

Of course there were quite a few whose imagination wasn’t so original, or who had been powerfully attracted by tradition. They did want me call them ‘master’ or ‘sir’ and at first I just did it to please them, it held no special meaning for me.

Later I met those who had other ideas. Some names emerged from amorous nicknames, some were cryptic and clearly carried a lifelong significance that would or would not be revealed but would resonate with my lover every time I said his name, some were unashamedly the names of impossible daydreams, and some the names encountered in the shadow lands.

And now my lover and Dom had a completely new, unheard-of name.

My Nai.

The two go together.

My Nai.

Like my Lord.

So new then, the word Nai, and what it means to him. Actually, I am still not sure. What it means to him. I know it is a Thai word that means something like ‘lord’ or ‘head of the family’ or ‘someone of high rank’. But to him, I think, it means a lot more.

It means being accepted and recognised in the culture he lives in and grew up in. That may never happen in Thailand, since he is after all a foreigner, tall and pale. The certainty of never belonging.

His servants call him Nai. Oh yes, he has servants. He has a driver, and a cook, and several maids. He has a wing of the house where he lives. And another wing for his estranged wife, when she visits. And a guest wing for parents and American relatives.

I had never been intimate with someone who had servants.

I had never been asked to call anyone Nai.

I didn’t. I called him my Nai.

He smiled.

‘I am the Nai,’ he said. ‘My household knows that. If I change, they have to change with me.’ And he held himself up more proudly and smiled again.

At moments like that he looked so fragile. I could have held him in my palm and broken his wings with a snap of my finger. At moments like that I opened my heart to him. Of course, moments like this would also turn against me. Right now, I was the personification of his freedom. Later on, in his mind, I would join the ones who didn’t let him be, didn’t let him be the Nai.

But at that time, all I could see was a boy who would be Nai. Just as I was a woman who lived her dreams.

I shivered with secret delight, I was me and not me, I was becoming the other person, the person who lived in my dreams. Because I didn’t know her, at least not very well, in many ways I didn’t know how she would react.

In the morning I took my shirts out and we saw a huge spider, more like a scorpion or a tarantula, running with hairy bended knees out of my armhole. All my life I would have been struck with dread and screamed and run, out of the door. But because I was the new person, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how she would react to a monstrous spider creeping out of her armhole. So I stood and looked and said, very calmly, ‘I am afraid of spiders.’

He stood very calm too and said, ‘Yes they are everywhere.’

‘Even in such a nice hotel?’

‘Yes, even in such a nice hotel.’ He laughed very quietly.

‘They live here!’

Maybe he was used to them. Probably. Or maybe he was a new person, too. Maybe he, too, no longer knew if he was afraid of spiders.

Another interesting effect of becoming a new person is that your lover gets to know you better than you know yourself, in certain ways.

So that he can say: you want to come when you’ve been spanked.

And he loved that. He adored the fact that he knew me so intimately. I’m not sure if he realised that I didn’t know myself so well. I’m not sure if he realised that I was becoming a new person.

How could he know? He never met the old one.

Humiliation in the jungle bed

The hotel room was like a little house, with a tiny garden and white bricks and carved monkeys on the table.

We had no neighbours except the sea, just a few metres from our heads when we slept.

He had his backpack with him.

‘How did you get that through airport security? With all those weapons?’

I still don’t know but he did.

Again he began the unpacking of the treasure. He had a lot more rope with him, blue like the sky it was designed to make you fly in.

He unpacked the well-used belt, the collar, and a pretty new leash from the weekend market, the puppy section.

We were lying close on the jungle bed, after a long wonderful session trying out so many things, for the first time together, and maybe even for the first time ever. Then we whispered, only a little louder than the sea, but so close that our skins could lip-read, and he came up with the next one I delighted in.

Now I think he must have made a list, from all the things I wrote to him on Mr Hong’s ancient world access machine, or told him on the phone, in the hot midday sun in the dusty main street on the other island’s shanty town. All those days, he was working on the list.

So he whispered to me, after a long exciting session of breast bondage, all done by the book, but not quite by the book, in his own, Nai style of doing things.

With intense concentration he worked on my nipples. He made my breasts swell so that they overspilled their D cups, and had to be bound, securely he said, to be tormented in the proper way. And when he was done he tormented my nipples, so shy, so quick to retreat at any hint of danger, they grew hard and long and red, and ached from the air that touched them.

I still have a photograph of those tormented, huge, wildly excited nipples standing out from my aching breasts.

He had asked me, respectfully, if he could take pictures of me.

‘Of your body, only, in play,’ he said earnestly. ‘I’ll make sure no one can identify you, not that I want to show them to anybody.’

And when I looked a little hurt he said: ‘Of your face at breakfast.’

When we left for the tropical airport he gave me the pictures on a data stick. True to his word, there was not one that combined my face and my body.

My body was sensationally beautiful. He had chosen the most sexually outrageous moments and the closest close-ups of my most intimate places.

My face at breakfast looked confused and insecure.

There was not one picture that showed both of us, my Nai and me, together.

‘So,’ he whispered into my hair, after he had released my breasts into his long, bony hands, and kissed them long and wetly, ‘what is it that you want, in humiliation?’

I couldn’t say it, straight away.

‘Come on, you’ve mentioned it, now you’ve got to say it.’

‘Oh. Yes.’ I had mentioned it, when he asked me what I wanted. As usual, I had just said the truth. Never thinking he would listen.

So I closed my eyes, really fast, and snuggled up to him, stomach to hip, skin to skin, and all I could do was whisper: ‘I want to be made to say things. Embarrassing things. Humiliating things. About me.’

He gave me a hug.

‘Now, make yourself come.’

‘I don’t know if I can, my Nai.’

I started to try. But it didn’t work. Partly because I’m not very good at making myself come when there’s somebody else there, it’s too private! Almost like cheating on my most trusted and most vulnerable lover, me. And partly because I didn’t really want to. After all, I can make love with myself whenever I am in a romantic mood, but I can’t make love with him if he’s not there. I suddenly felt very sad, not knowing if, after these few days, I would ever see him again. So for those precious moments, those few precious moments, he is here, and I’m supposed to make myself come all by myself!!

I looked at him, sort of forlorn.

He said: ‘Think of being spanked.’

In spite of myself, I felt my pelvic muscles go soft and finally a few drops of moisture coated the lower end of my vulva, just outside the entrance. What I think of as rolling out the red carpet for my lover.

It was just so overwhelming, so recent, the hot hard fast, never-ending spanking, so hard and fast and hot and sharp and close, so close his arms his legs, all hot and the spanking, the spanking so furious time looped on itself and there really was no end.

My body was still there, still glowing and swollen, my brain hadn’t had the time to lay down memory coils, so it was all fresh, all still there – I grew more liquid under my fingers, and slowly I could feel the big inside muscles relax and shiver playfully.

I could hear my Nai giggle. A giggling Nai! He only giggled if he told me stories about silly people. Or dogs who peed into flower pots.

‘You do so love to be spanked,’ he giggled.

‘I do,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do.’

How wonderful to say it, like that. So directly. So clearly. No smuttiness, no twisted ‘I am doing this but really it is dirty and so are you,’ no adolescent forty-year-old swagger.

Just real.

I feel as if I am being seen without mirrors. Without filters and mirrors, without distortions. It feels as if it is me who is being seen. Not like so many times, a man looks at me, and all he sees is just himself in drag. Like my first lover on alt: thinking about where he should have been, rather than be with me. Looking at me, making me into the symbol of his sexuality, the part he craved and despised, the part he rejected, the part he looked down on.

That was one of the best things about my Nai: he looked at me and he saw me.

Sometimes. When we were having sex. When we, and more importantly when he was engaged in a scene. It was as if being my Nai in a scene gave him the ability to see me. To see. A transformation that brought him into his full power, and beauty, and brought all his talents into balance. Passion woke his hidden powers. Passion made all the parts of his body and mind more clearly defined. Passion was the catalyst that blew him into another dimension. A higher frequency of himself.

When he was out of it, he was just as blind as other men. Sometimes blinder. Often, because, as a traditional, unquestioning conservative, he was not a member of the reality-based community. Outside passion, he could only see the world as handed down to him.

But not now. Now he had eyes like an eagle satellite. That could spot a Russian submarine from twenty miles up in space. That could see everything for what it was. He had eyes like an eagle and moved like a tiger. The tiger that was already there of course. He lives here. On this island. In this jungle. Maybe he’s lived in this hotel room all the time. Waiting for my Nai to show up. Waiting to be him.

Waiting to see me.

What could be difficult, after this?

I get closer. My Nai can sense it. Whenever I lose the way, I concentrate on the burning sparkles from the spanking in my ass.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘say: “I am such a slut.”’

Interesting. This isn’t even a very powerful word for me. The world of sluts and, what would be the other side? Good girls? Moral women? Whatever it is, it doesn’t carry much of an erotic charge.

But when he tells me to say it, out loud, I feel its connections to other, wilder, more humiliating words.

I have to say, out loud, in front of another person, who I am, deep inside, in the dreams that nobody knows. I have to bring my darkest identity out and show it. Show it to him.

Something that I have been hiding. From the outside world, from the accusations of evil, from the insinuations of deviance, from the suspicions and the attempts to change me, or cure me, or push me out of society. From myself, even, for a long time. If he only knew, my Nai would tell me to say some other words, words that are far more loaded for me, loaded so deeply that, for a long time, I couldn’t say them, not even to myself, not even to my therapist. And that was when I finally decided to talk to a therapist just about that, my sexuality. I couldn’t say the words any more. It was as if a big iron door, too long unused, had rusted and settled into its closed and shuttered state, so that the only way to open it would be to push it until it collapsed. Or to explode it or melt it down. Or to laser it away with the newest technology. Or for the earth to open up and eat it all.

If he knew he would tell me to say: ‘I want to be spanked. I deserve to be beaten. I need the belt. Please, Nai, I need the belt.’

These would be the words of power.

For a long time, I would never say them. For a long time before that, I wouldn’t even write them, form them in my mind. When somebody else said them, with apparent ease, either because they said them so often they had become desensitised or because the mere saying of words didn’t have, for them, the same power, I got a charge from them, like an electrical shock. I thought it must have been visible to the speakers of the words, but maybe not. Maybe not if they don’t feel it themselves. Maybe not if they didn’t watch me closely enough. Like my Nai.

I came closer to coming, opening up from a lot deeper inside now.

‘Say it, say it now. I am such a slut.’

I opened my mouth. I ran my fingers over my clitoris. I formed the words in my mind, but they didn’t come out.

Say it.

‘I … I … I …’

‘Say it, slut.’

So I have to say it. Now. I dive deep down.

My Nai holds my hand. Literally. He holds my hand away from my clitoris. He holds it hard. No way to wiggle. No way to escape. No danger of escape.

‘Say it, slut, now.’

I open my mouth again but nothing comes out, not even a sigh or a syllable.

My Nai gives me a sensuous soft stroke, with his hand and with my own hand. My arms and shoulders and neck melt away with softness. He touches my breasts very tenderly with his other hand, almost flying over them, lingering over the bruises, making them feel hot and releasing more memories.

‘Now,’ he says. ‘Don’t stop. In a moment I’ll let you come. Are you ready to come?’

‘Yes, yes. Yes, my Nai.’

My Nai reaches into the slim triangle that I have opened up at the top of my vulva. His fingers join my fingers.

‘Hmm, nice. Nice and wet,’ he says.

It’s taken me a lifetime to understand what a man means when he says that something is ‘nice’. I would probably translate it into ‘wild’, ‘exciting’, ‘makes me go crazy’. But for a man, it’s ‘nice’. So, now, here, in the presence of the tiger who is dragging open the long-closed doors of my heart with its bare teeth, I, the sexual being, am ‘nice’.

His fingers push much harder than mine, and, at this stage in our relationship, a little too hard for me, and a bit too fast. No inkling of the clit fests to come. When I was contorted on the floor with continuous orgasms, one pushing the other, pushing the other, until my stomach muscles cramped, until I felt I was going to throw up.

‘Now,’ says my Nai, his mouth very close to my ear so that I could feel his breath, ‘open your eyes.’

I open my eyes and I can see his face so close to me. He looks into my eyes, and he whispers: ‘Say it. Say it. Say it to me.’

‘I don’t know,’ I say, my body shivering because in all this time he hadn’t stopped rubbing my clit and I hadn’t stopped running my fingers around my labia either.

‘I don’t know if – if I can. I’ve never said this. I’ve always kept my eyes shut.’

‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Yes, if you keep your eyes shut you can always pretend it isn’t you. Look at me.’

Actually, I think, it’s not so much that it isn’t me when I keep my eyes shut. It’s more me, even. It’s that I don’t have to bring it out to you. Show my insides, my deepest secret insides, to you.

‘Yes, Nai,’ I say, and I do.

I look at him. He looks back into me.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Now say it.’

I want to have some peace, to collect myself. I want to meditate on it, make the private, secret core of me rise from the depths, slowly, as slow as it needs to be, and then I want to take a good long time to think about it, and hold it in my heart, and head, and then, maybe then – maybe –

Maybe then the doors will still be rusted. Rusted shut from all that time in the rain.

Maybe then it will be perfect. Maybe then it will come out in a full, mature, perfect shape. Completing the circle.

But that’s not how it is. That’s not how it’s going to be. No peaceful retreat. No thoughts. No maybe tomorrows.

My body trembles with different rhythms. I’m already catapulted into speaking. I feel my Nai’s body along mine, all along the length of it, the silky skin touch, the muscles that held me down, with such determination, the bones underneath.

I look into him, I go cold with fear, I feel faint, I feel disoriented, I don’t know any more what is up and what is down, the room is slanted, it stands on its side, pierced on fear.

I want to run away and hide, outside with the spiders and snakes. I want to stay here, close to my Nai, and just give up and crumble into a ball and cry and be held by him.

I want to jump and rush and slide down the stream while I scream, loudly, the words, so that they can be part of the wind.

I look into my Nai’s eyes and I can feel the shame creeping up my neck and cheeks, and for the first time I see in his eyes the satisfaction he feels at calling up the shame, and making me show it to him, to him alone, the owner. I feel his body press hard and his penis grow harder.

Tears streaming out of my eyes, I never look away. I say the words.

‘I am such a slut.’

A strange jungle sound follows them. It must be that all the animals, crowding the darkness beyond the hut, stopped for a moment in their business of killing and eating and fucking and running and fighting. The sound comes from my throat. Something ripped out of me. Something is pushing through the rusted doors.

‘I am such a slut,’ I say again. It’s a little easier now but my burning cheeks are only beginning to bloom. I can see how it pleases my Nai.

‘I am such a slut, I am such a slut.’

He rubs and clamps and tears at my clit.

‘I am such a slut, I am such a slut.’

The words are just sounds now, they mean nothing in themselves, they mean I am yours Nai, you are my Nai, I am showing myself, you tore this out of me, and you receive it. You receive the full power of my anguished soul and the full triumph of me going up in flames. I shout at you, I hack at you, I overwhelm you with the force of my finally freed being.

You take it and you better be strong.

You take it and you better be able to take it in, and hold it, and make it part of yourself, because it is no longer just part of me.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, I come.

Yes, I come with you.

And see such a smile on the face of my Nai.

In the sea

Over lunch, I talked to him about having sex in the sea.

It is strange, now, looking back, that all this time he hadn’t even had a full orgasm yet inside me. He had given me some great orgasms that morning, and he was happy about that and he was proud.

Proudly playing with me in the sea, showing off his catch.

But still, I was a little worried for him. For me. I was worried that if he didn’t have a full orgasm inside me soon he would give up on the whole affair.

He sat there, not eating much, telling me a story. We had just tried again and when he didn’t stay erect he had turned it into some other play.

I looked around for inspiration. I told him that I’d never had sex in the sea, and that was true. He told me about his diving life. I could see he was feeling a little more relaxed.

He seemed so laid back, almost fatalistic, that it was hard to judge how much he was affected by his impotence.

I had loved sleeping in the same bed with him. My skin brushed by his skin. My scent wrapped up in his. I could have lain there forever. Sleeping with him for a night, a whole night, the first whole night! I never wanted it to be morning.

In the morning he had smiled and counted my orgasms, and made me say (with much blushing) ‘Spank me, my Nai’. He was proud of my orgasms like a boy of treasures he found on the beach. He wasn’t hard to read then, he was very happy.

And I was a little less anxious, since I had managed to become his proud possession.

But still – he didn’t mention his own missing orgasm, and he didn’t really attempt it any more.

Except to say, occasionally, that he was growing old and that I should have known him ten years ago.

So I sat under the thatched roof of the seaside restaurant with him, having lunch by ourselves at I don’t know what time, except that it was not lunchtime for anyone else, and talked to him about having sex in the sea.

We didn’t look into each other’s eyes.

We looked at the table and the water and we talked, very indirectly. Diving in the big waterholes when he was a dive master. Feeling the water around you. How people had looked at my breasts, this morning, when he ripped my top off in the water. How my breasts were developing sunburn. How I’d never had sunburn on my breasts.

For me, with my strong feelings and my aroused body, it was difficult to extract from his nonchalant stories how important it was for him to manage to fuck me.

But I did find out when he suddenly stood up, took my hand, pushed my head down just enough so that I couldn’t see where we were going, only the ground and his feet, and led me to the quiet cove, next to ours, where the water was deeper and the hotel was hidden by a big flank of a hill, populated only by the jungle.

I let myself be led, it was such a heady delight to be led, not knowing where we were going, not having to know, not having to find out. I was no longer the navigator.

It was just a walk by the beach, but for me it was a walk into the unknown realm of submitting to him, of following the creature that had risen from the sea.

This cove was much deeper, and there weren’t so many corals to cut your knees on. He started to run, to draw me in, and we put our flippers on and swam properly. He showed me how to spiral round and round and I lost my goggles and we had to look for them under the sea, and then, suddenly, he found them on some rocks, high enough for us to stand on without drowning, between the hill and a small dragonback island and faraway from the beach. He kissed my shoulders and rubbed my newly sunburnt breasts in the salt water and then, suddenly and very roughly, he pulled my swimsuit down all the way. I tried to hold on and I tried to let go and then he dived down and grabbed me and pulled it off my legs. He squeezed it under his armband, very professionally, and pulled his own swim pants off. He took his time with the preparations and held me in an unforgiving grip. I realised that it was going to happen now, I was going to be fucked in the sea, and it was going to happen whether I liked it or not. He slapped me a few times in the face and ordered me to grab him round the waist.

‘I’m going to take you, slut,’ he said and his face was flushing dark red.

I felt his penis. It was there, it was hard and, maybe one reason that explained his problems, apart from the long solo tours, it was very large. I couldn’t see it in the bottle-green water, he wouldn’t let me look down, only into his face, into his eyes, that had a savage look in them that I had not seen before. I felt a matching savage lust.

His penis rubbed against me under the water, and I tried to catch it with my thighs, and squeeze myself onto it.

He slapped me again and again, not cruelly, but hard and well practised (he knew how to slap with authority but also without causing injury) and his breathing changed.

I just wanted to be taken by the monster from the sea. Legend had it that such monsters lived under the rocks that rose ragged and spiky out of the island waters. One day they would rise up and pierce us with their dragon claws.

I was looking into his eyes and smarting from my last slap when he suddenly rammed himself into me. All the way.

I could see his fierceness and his delight when I screamed. His penis rubbed salt into my vagina, and I could feel my secret skin inside rise up with thousands of tiny scratches. It made me feel his whole length, and alerted me to every nuance of his movements.

I was being subjected, mastered, used and hurt for his pleasure. It made me crazy with lust, and with submission. And I still had to look into his eyes, open and naked and no defence and no retreat.

He thrust in deeper, and I felt him open me up.

I just wanted to throw myself back and splash my arms and legs and I didn’t care who saw me and heard me and if my head went under the water and I joined the fish.

His penis slipped out.

I looked at him, I wriggled close, still aroused, but now I was also anxious.

I didn’t want to lose my lust, but even more I wanted him to come, to come inside me, take me with his penis, now. Now or never.

He pushed it back in, and I screamed again, new salt water biting the old marks.

‘Push yourself against me.’

I held and I pushed and I squeezed and I shouted and felt and felt him, and his body was so hot, the hottest spot in the entire South China Sea, visible from space, there must be alerts on the satellites.

He held me up in the water and his face and neck and chest were dark red, suffused with hot, purple blood, just under his skin, a scratch away, and he breathed and breathed and breathed, and I moved against him and with him as much as I could, without anything to hold onto but his body.

All the time I was crazy with arousal, and dizzy from the sun and being taken, naked, in the sea, the way he liked it and the way he wanted it. I was delighted that he could take me the way he wanted it and I was feverish with hoping that he would, the whole way.

Because underneath my delight and my animal lust and my special submissive arousal at being taken while my vagina burned, and slapped in the face and made to move the way he told me, I was dancing a delicate dance, trying to encourage his penis to stay hard and stay in, squeezing my vagina muscles enough but not too much, finding the right angle to push, not to be persuaded away by the slow current of the tide, coaxing this hard, big, exquisite, unexpected huge penis to stay in the dance and feel me and push me and pierce me and not fall back, shrink, slip out, but stay and grow and be as wild as its master. And my master.

I felt how my Nai worked, his legs trembled where he stood, his whole slim body generating desperate energy, wanting to let go, just like me, wanting to dissolve into the sea, but not too soon, wanting to feel his erection and enjoy it and be proud, and feel me around it and hammer me and fuck me and blast me and master me and subject me in penetration as he was subjecting my mind and body in so many other ways.

He wanted to, so much, and yet he was wary of just giving himself to it, let it flow, in case it stopped again, in case his body let him down as he had felt it had let him down before.

I remembered how quickly he had pulled out and given up, that night in Ayuthaya, not given himself a chance to start up again, and I was glad I hadn’t tried to, either, just lain there with him, resting my head on his chest, caressing and licking his body, not his penis, softly, tenderly, talking.

Only now, exploding with heat in the sun, fucking hard in the sea, yes, yes, because that’s what we were, fucking hard in the sea, I realised how much he had wanted this, and how fragile everything still was, in spite of the wild movements, in spite of his reassuring continued size, in spite of the dominant thrusting and ramming himself into me.

I felt the wave of my own orgasm building up. Every movement of his penis made me contract, and the point behind my cervix where the tension collects before it opens out and swallows sea water until it drowns, happily, was gaping its hungry mouth.

I wanted so much to come, my body wanted to come, but, more than all that, I wanted him to come, to grow as hard and full as he could, and then come to orgasm, inside me.

I wasn’t sure.

I felt his heart beat, fast, so fast, I felt his breath, I looked into his eyes, I gave him my lust and my submission. I felt his penis but I didn’t know for sure, I couldn’t tell, and I tried to hold my own orgasm back, so that I wouldn’t squeeze too hard, didn’t disturb his rhythm, didn’t spoil it for him, he was so close, so close this time, to coming inside a woman, after seven years.

Finally, he threw his head back and held me so tight I sputtered for air.

Then he relaxed.

I had to look at him, I didn’t know. I saw it in his face, yes, he had come.

The peak for my own orgasm was past, but seeing him so happy made me dance with joy and I coaxed some of the contractions back, and he held me, tenderly, joyfully, trying to make sure I got my fill, and I came, a few times, as his penis sunk back, out of joy and release, and knowing that in the future, if there was a future, I would come and come and come, with that huge penis, and being fucked and opened up like that, my vagina still wasn’t closing herself again, as if in shock, or, maybe, gaping for more, until I, too, dropped back into the sea, and we both floated, hair and arms and legs drifting over the coral reefs, a pair of still hot satiated choice morsels for any passing shark, for the sun to shine onto, for the angry little fish to snip at, and for the locals to point to and photograph.

Until that moment I think I never fully realised how vital being able to fuck a woman with his penis and come inside her is for a man. I had had some limited experience of impotent men before but they always played it down, so I did too. I had heard advice on the radio and I had seen training videos for counsellors which all seemed to say that it wasn’t such a big deal.

I never really understood men until this moment in the sea with my Nai.

Until that moment with my Nai I didn’t know, not really, not intimately, not from my lover while he fucked, how much a man’s whole being is affected by the performance of his penis.

Only now the circle had closed for him, and only now was he really free to give himself to our play.

Because of this moment the relationship took on a whole different dynamic. He was wilder in his play, and I had found a very deep, intimate place in his affections. Because I was the woman who had been with him in this moment. Who had been with him through this moment. I was the manifestation of his rebirth as a sexual being.

While for me, he simply transformed my entire life.

So that was fair.

I could have reflected on all this that same evening, in our bed, when he was taking me into the deepest and most intimate humiliation I had ever known and always desired.

But by then I was again flying without a pilot, and so much immersed in the present that I didn’t even notice it.

The match

So what is it that I want so much?

So much that I travelled round the whole world and spent so many years looking?

I want to fulfil my deepest needs. And I want to find someone who has and knows his own deepest needs.

I want someone who matches my desires, so that I fulfil his and he fulfils mine, just and exactly by being who we are.

It sounds impossibly ambitious, and it is very simple.

On the most primal, biological level, it is not at all too much to ask.

On the contrary, it is the most common relationship dynamic in the world.

Animals have it, plants have it.

They have it with other animals, other plants who are genetically developed to match them. They also have it far beyond that – with the environment they live in, with the temperature, the moisture in the air, the chemical composition of the soil and the water. With their choice of planet. I don’t know if they feel fulfilled, but they are. They each have what they need and they give to their partners what those partners need.

On some level I claim the same rights as a duckweed or a one-cell amoeba swimming in a slimy pond. I want to be matched. And I can provide the right match.

But of course it’s not always so easy.

Particularly for humans whose needs appear to be so much more complex, although I don’t actually think mine are.

Still, the matching process doesn’t always work.

A dog in a city apartment, a flower on a windowsill, or a worm eating earth of the wrong kind of acidity will not find it.

I don’t know how much they suffer. I don’t know if they even know the cause of pain.

BDSM as I practise it is a very sophisticated concept, evolved and refined over thousands of years of human culture. It involves biological, mental and psychological aspects. As do romantic love, team sports and international politics.

But BDSM is also a primal need. For us, the BDSM people. It’s not something that we choose, it chooses us. It is who I am, just like the grass, just like the cricket that sings in it.

People say it is naïve to look for a perfect match in those complex mental and psychological constructions we carry in our evolved little heads, but I don’t think I am. I am quite happy to accept a rough match that leaves many areas of my life open to other relationships. But I do need someone who matches the core.

People shake their wise human heads and predict self-inflicted failure.

But I don’t accept that.

After all I only want what every plant and dog has.

If they are allowed to go out and find it.

If they are allowed to evolve in the environment they need.

If they can develop into their true nature.

That is all I ask.

I stayed

I didn’t realise until much later why he took the photographs.

He thought he would never see me again.

He wanted to be able to prove to himself, old and alone and masturbating to the internet again, that this had really happened.

So I stayed.

I left the jungle island and the dusty boom town, I left the lizard behind who guarded my door. I abandoned all other plans.

Our phone talks had changed.

Calmer, more matter-of-fact, discussing details of my coming to Bangkok.

Underneath, my body was expanding into the heat. My heart gave a steady joyous beat. Sometimes we stopped talking and just said are you there? Yes I am there for a few minutes.

Then he would say something outrageous and I felt very lonely with my unspanked bottom. So I had to tell him that. So then he came up with something even more outrageous until my skin tingled in the dusty heat.

I didn’t tell him I was going to stay for a long time. I only said I would come up to Bangkok. He made plans.

‘We need a place where we can make noise,’ he said eagerly. ‘An old building, with thick walls and large rooms and no neighbours.’ It seemed that he was on a mission to look into such places, and he had found one. He was excited. He was rediscovering his own city. A different layer of the city opened up to a different man. The hotel was just round the corner from where he lived. He’d never been there.

‘It looks like a palace,’ he said, wondrously. ‘And you are going to have two empty floors around you.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘I said it’s a guest who makes a lot of noise,’ he said proudly, ‘and they said it was no problem. They’re probably used to strange requests.’

He made me sound like a rock star.

He was looking forward to making me make the lots of noise.

Of course my Nai was not single

My Nai was not a very young man, and like me he had had lovers before. He was married to one of them. He had been married to her for a very long time.

His marriage was a strange affair, at least to me.

He didn’t actually live with his wife, but he also didn’t live as a single man. His wife lived in another town, an elegant place by the seaside, and she visited his house, where she had her own wing.

My Nai had his own wing too and there was a shared central part of the house for entertaining guests and official activities. Yes, he was that kind of rich.

When she was in Bangkok, she attended various social functions, and took part in a lot of events. To some of these occasions she was accompanied by my Nai. I believe a lot of the money was hers.

They had not had sex for seven years but they were economically and socially interwoven.

Many men in my Nai’s position here in Thailand, with a formal marriage that they honoured in public and a wife who was an integral part of their official life and their own social position, would at some point enter into a second relationship.

In Europe we would have called such a woman a mistress (I remember that the French president was accompanied at his funeral by both his wife and his mistress who had been with him for over thirty years).

In Thailand they were called ‘second wives’ and until recently they had had a clear position in society.

Nothing in my European upbringing had prepared me for the eventuality of becoming a ‘second wife’. I had never even seriously thought of being a first one!

I had never wanted to marry, and had never been married. Relationships had been on a voluntary basis, agreements between free and independent parties. When love changed, relationships changed too.

I had never even considered taking a married man for a lover. I felt we wouldn’t have a lot in common.

When I decided to come and stay in Bangkok I knew about the local customs, in the abstract. I didn’t really think that they might apply to me.

I was sad that my Nai was not single.

I was happy that he was my Nai.

The fact that he was not single had so far been a concept. It had not had a lot of consequences in reality for me.

And in fact, as our relationship developed, he was rarely unavailable because he was married. He was sometimes unavailable for other reasons, because he withdrew, because he shut himself away from everyone except his broadband, because he suddenly went away with his diving friends and equally suddenly returned.

The fact that he was there, that he had appeared in my life, was real.

As far as my life so far had taught me, he was the best available match. And I was his.

I did say it was an unconventional story, didn’t I?

The dream

If you have had a dream forever – forever so you can’t even tell its origins in time.

If this dream had come to you, fervently, night after night, day after day.

If this dream had been hidden from everyone.

If you had heard many times, during your youth, that such a dream is a sign of a diseased mind, of a deterioration of morals.

If you had heard such a dream be laughed about, with dirty heaving mouths.

If you had seen how such a dream was dragged down and made shameful.

If then, after many years, you had been able to realise that none of this was true.

If then, after many years, you were able to see it again as you had seen it at first: a manifestation of your true self.

If then you had been able to say to yourself, not to others: yes, this is my dream.

And your dream had risen up again, fresh and new, like a swan through the mud.

If then, even, you had found the strength (and it is an incredible strength) to follow the map of your true sexuality and embark on the long hard journey of finding others who could be companions.

If then, even, you had the unlikely and almost unbelievable luck to find them, some of them, not for long, not always the best match, but searchers, like yourself, bruised, battered, scarred, like yourself, from the long struggle both inside and outside, but, like yourself, never giving up, not surrendering to despair (except sometimes when the dream is so strong, and when the pain of not living it is sitting on your chest like an unbearable shadow – but you are strong, and you recover), keeping hope alive, as long as there is life.

If then, you had found a partner who slowly, cautiously stepped into some of your other dreams with you, and you into his, you all the while kept holding your breath for fear it would all disappear, and you would be there again, alone, sitting there with nothing, soothing the broken dream, no, no, darling, don’t cry, I will go on trying to find you a way to come out into the world, you are my dream, my beautiful dream –