Negotiation or Seduction? #BDSM #negotiation #nostalgia

By Lisabet Sarai

I wish now that I’d kept his letters—the ones in which he detailed his fantasies about spanking me, tying me to his bed, dripping hot wax over my breasts, then asked for my reactions. We hadn’t touched each other at that point, just flirted over a chess board (he almost always won). I’d never thought about the activities he described in his multi-page messages, at least not consciously, though I’d had kidnap fantasies since before puberty.

Somehow he sensed that I was susceptible, before I knew this myself. With old-fashioned, pen-on-paper epistles, then later through lengthy, expensive phone calls, he revealed his kinky nature and explored mine. When we finally met again in person, more than six months after he’d left grad school and moved to the West Coast, we were in essence already lovers, though we’d never even kissed. With his arrogance, eloquence, and calculated crudeness, he’d captured my erotic imagination and won my consent. We both knew we’d have sex, and not vanilla sex, either. (Hard to believe, but I didn’t even know the term “vanilla” at that point!) I was ready to yield, eager, despite the fact that I had no idea what to expect.

But actually, that’s not true—I had learned about his desires as he interrogated me about mine. Face to face, we didn’t need to negotiate anything. I trusted him, somehow, with my body and my spirit. I think he was surprised by how easy it was.

I was too overwhelmed by emotion and sensation to even consider the question.

That was almost exactly forty years ago. I’ve wondered, since then, whether he and I would have come together if he’d stayed on to get his PhD instead of putting 2500 miles between us. Geeky and awkward as he was, would he have had the courage to offer himself as my master? Struggling to deal with my own raging hormones, would I have paid enough attention to him that I would have seen who he really was?

Believe—believe in me, and in your own dreams.

For I will make them real.

I am the one, the Master.

Give me your nakedness, your naked heart.

As you open yourself to me, so I will satisfy your lust.

I don’t have those letters anymore. One day, years ago, I destroyed all the correspondence I’d saved. I decided it was unhealthy to hold onto them. Rereading them over and over them was too guilty a pleasure. I worried that my obsession with our past love might be damaging my marriage. But a few of his words and phrases live on, quoted verbatim in my novels—like the snippet above from RawSilk.

Lisabet Sarai probably would not exist if not for that long-ago, long-distance negotiation. I’d always written stories, but without my memories of that incandescent passion, would I have been so moved to write erotica, especially erotica featuring power exchange? I doubt it.

I really wish I had those letters. Would I still react the same way? Or would his words sound cheesy and silly? I am no longer the innocent I was. We were both so young. Still, even at twenty four, he had the true instincts of a dominant. In those letters, he both guided and tempted me. I fell for his lines. I answered his embarrassing questions. I gave myself wholeheartedly into his hands.

I’ve never for an instant regretted it.

For an earlier post about negotiation, go here:

http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/2010/06/delicate-art-of-negotiation.html

For a fantasy about those letters:

http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/2016/02/stash.html

Lilith

By Lisabet Sarai

He’s searching for God. She’s just looking for a fuck. But that’s not quite right. She knows, somehow, that you don’t have to seek God. God’s already there, inside. You just need to figure out how to open yourself and let divinity out.

For her, sex is the way, the consummate opening. When she’s writhing in a lover’s arms, the barriers crumble. For a few glorious moments, she can experience first hand the communion she normally has to take on faith. The bliss and the certainty are as brief and fragile as they are transcendent, She’s left with mere memories that fade the more she tries to clutch at them—scraps of joy, glimmers of magic. She’s learned over the years to let them go, the same way she releases her lovers when it’s time for them to move on. There are always new bodies, new hearts—new truths.

He doesn’t understand, thinks she’s been put there to tempt him him from his path of purity and righteousness. He’s not pure, though. He knows very well he’s not. If he were, he wouldn’t want her so badly.

She loves his youth, his shyness, his awkward innocence, his cleverness with words and with his hands. His intuition astounds her; the depth of his feelings humble her. When they meet for coffee and intricate conversations, she aches to touch him, but he’s armored in self-denial. The most casual brush of her hand makes him flinch away.

A veteran of many couplings, she can read his desire like the books he cherishes. It’s in his darting eyes, his flushed cheeks, the sweat she can smell, even across the cafe table. It’s more than lust. It’s like a prayer.

He stares into his coffee cup to escape her bold stare, even as he speaks of Japanese folk tales or dissects King Lear. In the fragrant and bitter dregs he reads his fate—an instant of forbidden indulgence then a long, hard fall. He vows to be strong, but her magnetism draws his traitor body. His stubborn cock is a pillar of iron between his tensed thighs.

Iron, and salt, the destiny of sinners.

Every Monday they come together to pace out the same steps in this dance of frustration. What can she do? Perfume and decolletage don’t dent his desperate resolve. If only she dared make a first move—but she knows terror and need will send him skittering away. She cares too much to cause him that distress.

She dreams of him, imagines the magic they’d create in connecting. He might be the one to finally set her free. No virgin, still she succumbs to the seductive promise of a soul mate. And if that promise fails, the mystery of opening remains, illusion vanishing like fog in the white-hot flare of pleasure, incandescent truth shining forth for a few seconds before the curtain falls. That’s what he craves, too, or so she believes.

But how to reach him? She ponders the conundrum as she twists and tosses on ocean-scented sheets, her fingers an unsatisfactory substitute for his maleness. His aspirations to holiness make her feel like a whore, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except her need to wrap her legs around his waist and pull him inside her.

Finally, she writes him a story.

A Little of What You Fancy

by Jean Roberta

Here is a little snippet from my story, "A Dowager's Hump," which was published in Ripe Fruit: Well-Seasoned Erotica, an anthology featuring women aged 50 and over, edited by Marcy Sheiner (Cleis Press, 2002).

The narrator is a kind of Mary Sue character: a menopausal (or post-menopausal) woman who is not afraid of time because she doesn't believe in depriving herself of anything she really wants. She is bisexual, for lack of a clearer term. And in this case, she wants to show her distraught sister-in-law the pleasures of self-indulgence.

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I came home from work on a day cold enough to freeze a witch’s tits, to use a vulgar expression. As I walked into my welcoming house, its warmth hit me like a burst of hormones. The phone was ringing.

“Margaret?” begged the voice on the other end. “I kicked him out. I hope you can forgive me.”

This melodrama from my ex-sister-in-law seemed to match the extremes of temperature in a Canadian winter. “Pfft,” I told her. “It was overdue. You’d better come over. Otherwise you won’t eat -- or you’ll binge.”

Sarah was pitifully grateful, and she arrived at my door before I had had enough time to confer with myself. Emerging from her parka, she looked sodden. She shook her brown hair like a cocker spaniel.

“Have a drink to warm up,” I told her, “then we’ll go out for dinner.”

She seemed childlike as she sat on my sofa, sipping a scotch-and-seven as though it could restore lost hope. I had catered to her taste: old scotch ruined by the adolescent fizz of Seven-Up. A good hostess, like a cruel
ancient god, gives her supplicants what they think they want.

I noted that Sarah’s breasts were fuller than they had been; she must have gained weight. I knew that she must consider this a disaster. We both sighed.

“I mean,” she was complaining, “I can see why he fools around. Men have this biological need to find younger women as long as they can. It’s just in them, no matter what they promise. But what’s left for us?” I glanced ironically at the framed print hanging next to my bookcase. It is a sepia-toned photo of Emmaline Pankhurst giving a speech on women’s rights, watched admiringly by her grown daughters. Sarah missed the reference.

“I’m thirty-five,” she complained. “I have to face it.”

“So you do,” I agreed. She remembered that the digits in my age were hers in reverse. She was embarrassed.

“Not that we’re too old for some things,” she assured me, politely ignoring the near-generation gap between us, “but we can’t pick up guys the way we used to.”

I was wearing my favorite royal blue knit dress with the pantihose that are supposed to stimulate my legs. I considered whether most male patrons of meat-market bars would like the way the dress skimmed my breasts and hips.

I asked myself whether Sarah would sputter with envy if I explained that I stay slim enough by eating only when hungry and by traveling on foot whenever possible. I realized that better food for thought was on the table.

“Do you want another man so soon, girl?” I asked her. Better to wallow in scotch-and-seven, I thought.

Now she looked deeply distressed. “I don’t want to end up like –“ she blurted. “You haven’t been with a man since David died, have you?” Cancer, my only successful rival, had taken my husband ten years before.

“Not often,” I agreed. “The ones I meet usually lack depth, so I don’t keep them long. They’re appetizers. But I wouldn’t underestimate the value of a good fuck.” Sarah stared, obviously wondering whether the combination of
alcohol and gassy bubbles had affected her hearing. I smiled. “I don’t need their money any more,” I explained. “Sometimes they need mine. I believe in noblesse oblige, of course, and I don’t mind helping them, but when they
assume I’m a fool, the romance is over.”

I could see that my thinly-veiled advice was whizzing past Sarah’s ears like pub darts missing their target. I reached for her empty glass, took it to the kitchen and refilled it.

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