Tangled Passions Pt. 02 Ch. 29-31

XXIX.

The morning following a peaceful sleep is a good time to think. Sitting with a mug of hot coffee, Jenn consciously chose to remain alone for a while. The urgent messages from Lisa could wait; now was the perfect time to re-evaluate her life, her direction, her performance. And it was an especially interesting collage when viewed objectively. How many people had she – Jenn Anderson, former monogamist and one-man girl – actually had sex with? The number was astounding – and all within a year. Was it all just substitute love for missing Matt? Or, she thought for not the first time, had she become a nymphomaniac? She knew that it wasn't nearly as simple as either of those alternatives. While not actually in love with any of her multitude of lovers, Jenn knew she was hopelessly in lust – helplessly in heat for any and all of them. Was being obsessed with carnal pleasures, single-mindedly seeking out self-gratification, were those the hallmarks of nymphomania? She thought it was more like extreme, fanatical hedonism. It wasn't like she was trying to prove anything. She had just pulled out all the stops, and now she was riding a runaway; she couldn't complain. She was still having the time of her life. Did any of it make sense? Maybe not, but as they used to say, 'If it feels good, do it!'

She thought about her chosen role – how well she played the part for Lisa; her performance at Celebration; how versatile she was – as evidenced by yesterday's more egalitarian affair. She thought about the road that had brought her here. The cliché usually refers to that trip as the descent into sexual-servitude – slavery. For Jenn it was much less a descent than a transition. It was a lateral move between universes, diversion not corruption. It became just the next place to go; the next life to lead – or be led; the next stage to fret upon. Sipping her coffee, the picture started to become clear, or if not clear, then at least discernible. There were no details yet, for how could there be? It was like religion – explaining the incomprehensible with something equally incomprehensible. There was simply a thrill in humiliation that Jenn didn't understand. She enjoyed it; she accepted it; but she couldn't explain it. As simple as it was, it was complex beyond her grasp. "I'm not God," she often thought by way of rationalization, "I can't understand every little thing." Initially the humiliation was just fun; she enjoyed the thrill because it was fun. Even when it went beyond mere humiliation, even when it became degradation, she still enjoyed it in some perverse way. She enjoyed the flush of mortification. She enjoyed the feeling of the raw wind against her dignity, stripped bare. The deeper she got into the world of submission, the more complicated her responses seemed.

But sitting alone with her coffee, mulling the ideas around in her head as her drink got cold, she thought that maybe she could see a suggestion of order and reason. No, nothing was clear, yet she could make out shapes. And in those shapes she thought she could maybe understand how Matt's submission was of an entirely different character to her own. As much as she was in transition, Matt was apparently in descent – a descent into his own welcome hell. Jenn's disposition to slavery was so very different from Matt's. His was all tied up in his omnipresent guilt, which had become more evident since the death of the girls, but had been latent long before then. Jenn knew that hers was all to do with thrill, the illicit thrill of activities that were, to most right-thinking people, intolerable. To Jenn, tolerating the intolerable generated a thrill to which she was becoming addicted. She craved sex – craved satisfaction. She was a slave to her obsession, and in her carnality, she no longer had any recognizable morals. Right or wrong had lost its definition; her sense of discrimination was paralyzed. Satisfaction was everything.

Yet, in finally seeing that, even admitting it, she pondered, still holding the cold coffee mug, had anything changed?

Jenn's life continued much the same way: visits to Celebration, evenings at Lisa's, invitations to orgies, attendance at private functions. Every few weeks Jenn would connect with Matt. They would spend the occasional night together at the condo with only each other for company. Their sexual contact was perfunctory; their energies spent rather on talk. Sometimes they would talk of philosophy, sometimes they would recount experiences, yet, sometimes they would still search for the 'old magic'.

On one of those nights, Jenn had Matt tie her spread-eagle to the bed and tease her to climax after climax – her climaxes became increasingly intense – increasingly enervating. While she was almost completely exhausted, he hadn't actually come yet. When she swooned in a post-climatic trance, he slipped off the bed and rummaged quietly in the bedside drawers for a moment. Jenn pretended not to notice as he inserted a large butt-plug into his own rear before climbing back onto the bed. Matt rammed his pecker, infused with life again, into Jenn's slit again and again. Eventually he threw his head back and moaned at the arrival of the hard-won orgasm. His climax nudged Jenn to yet another.

On a different night – a different chase, looking for the same magic, though – Jenn tied Matt face down on the bed. After kissing and caressing his entire body, she carefully lubricated and inserted a huge double-ended dildo. Like a thick black flagpole, it rose majestically from his ass. Gingerly, Jenn straddled his buttocks and lowered herself onto the awesome tool. As she began to ride it, bouncing at first carefully then, as her pulse increased and her control dissipated, wildly, she felt the onset of her first peak. Sinking her weight onto the pole, into Matt's rectum, she heard him gasp as her spend dripped down the shaft. She rolled from crest to crest in a sea of sensation. Matt didn't climax until she had attached nipple-clamps, and leaving the dildo in, reached beneath to give him a hand job. It didn't achieve the intensity either of them were now used to, nor did it even remotely resemble the 'old magic', but, on those odd evenings, it satisfied them nostalgically if not otherwise.

Occasionally Matt arrived back at the condo to find Jenn and Lisa locked in some erotic tableau. He simply waited in another room, reading or padding about to kill time, until they were finished, whether it took minutes or hours. And he would exchange pleasantries with Lisa as she left, as if they had just finished a chat over coffee. Although she knew not to expect anything else, it still amazed Jenn that he was so accepting of the situation; that he had just caught his wife having kinky sex with another woman in their marital bed did not seem to concern him in the least. Jenn had never interrupted Matt with anyone else at the condo; she, in fact, was correct in her belief that he almost never took anyone there. Yet, they still basked in their time alone together. Often they would abstain from sex altogether, although their touching, hand holding, hugging and kissing would be almost without pause.

Jenn got dreamy and warm at times like that. She felt an almost indescribable love for Matt. Perhaps, Jenn thought, her love was as simple and as complex as the fact that, basically, she didn't like to sleep alone. "No," she argued with herself. "There's definitely more to it than that." She felt secure in his familiar warmth; his familiar smells; the familiar texture of his skin; the familiarity of his breathing patterns, with which she sometimes felt herself – themselves – become at one – lying in bed in spoon position, breathing as one; their hearts beating as one; their beings merging into an asexual oneness that was the manifestation of their love. There was security in those things, and in security there was peace, and, perhaps, in peace resided love.

One morning, as they drifted slowly into the wakedness, Jenn began to describe those feelings to Matt. "Don't you think it rather odd," she asked rhetorically, "that our love can continue to flourish while our mutual sex seems so stunted?" But, having finally said it out loud made something go cold inside her, as if having verbalized the thought finally sealed it; made their sexuality irretrievable. She shivered and pulled Matt's body closer, just to warm her chilled soul with his heat. For a long while they lay still, saying nothing.

"I don't know; though I've often had the same thought," Matt admitted. "Shit, I don't understand it either – but I sorta know what you mean."

And yet they didn't completely give up hope; but as they both moved deeper into their respective submissions, more and more they found that they were too alike. Like similar poles of magnets – like static charges, they were well aware of one another's attraction; they just couldn't come together. Try as they might, they could make magic only increasingly rarely.

Lying together in the calmness of another morning, some weeks later, Matt had gently raised Jenn's hand to his lips. He had a hazy recollection of Jenn – another Jenn, in another time – arousing him tremendously by lasciviously suckling – actually, felating his fingers. Slowly he began to caress each finger, sucking it in like a small semi-hard cock. The heat of his lips nudged Jenn towards wakedness, towards arousal. She could feel, through her fingertips, the sexual tension building. She remembered having performed the same ritual on Lisa. Tiny, tiny spasms began shimmering through her. He treated each finger separately, then changed hands and did it all over again. Slowly, slowly Jenn felt the stirrings of what might build to climax; an ignition of sorts, it was like the proverbial Boy Scout rubbing two sticks together. Still it glowed and grew. Matt could feel it too. Heat and tension rising from a body in stimulation; and in sowing her excitement, he felt a kindling of sexual energy within himself. He continued, moving down to her toes, trailing his lips back up her body, stopping briefly at her nipples, her ear lobes, before returning to her fingers again. It seemed like hours before the slow train of release finally cannonballed Jenn out of her complacency.

As they lay in panting, sweaty afterglow, Matt muttered dreamily, "That was great!"

"Yeah," Jenn concurred. She marveled at the intensity of the non-copulatory, almost non-sexual love they had just made. He hadn't even got hard, yet it was great – great to be loved, great to be with Matt.

The morning of her fingers notwithstanding, Jenn felt less and less sexual desire for Matt. Although she still loved him, he failed to stir any degree of lust in her. And it often appeared that sexual indifference was mutual. It had become obvious to them both that the sexual aspect of their relationship had long since withered and died. In retrospect, Jenn wondered if it had been doomed from the start, its roots neither strong enough nor deep enough to actually satisfy them both. It just them took all of those years to realize it. But by then, their love had blossomed in other, more transcendental, ways.

They continued, nonetheless, to experiment from time to time, for old time's sake, alone at home, in a sort of half-amused attempt to light a simultaneous sexual fire between them. Sometimes it almost worked.

XXX.

The dynamics of Celebration meant that there were, from time to time, new or novice members. Jenn was often used as an example of a well-trained submissive for the new initiates. Dressed only in her leather straps, Jenn would be whipped in front of and by the new members. She would be required to give them head or take them in the ass, to masturbate herself or a selected spectator.

During one particular display, Jenn was brought out in front of eight fellow members – new and old – who sat in a semicircle in a parlour of the facility. A heavy chain swinging from sturdy nipple-clamps, she was strapped and gagged – her hands fastened behind her – holding a dildo deep in her own rear. As a demonstration of vaginal muscle control – those old 'Pelvic Floor Exercises' once again – having already practised in private, Lisa began inserting glass eggs into Jenn's vagina. After eight had disappeared into her quim, Jenn was instructed to deliver one, and only one, to each of the rapt spectators. The pressure of the beads, their subtle friction against the sensitive opening of her vagina – against the thick leather pintle in her backside – and the concentrated, controlled muscle tensing and relaxing as she released an egg into an upturned palm waiting between her legs, conspired to inflame Jenn. By the second recipient her vulva was dilated and pulsing; by the fifth, her knees were quaking; after the sixth, her breath came in gasps around her gag as her whole body shook; it took her every ounce of resolve and fortitude she could muster to deliver the last two without collapsing. As the final egg slipped out into the waiting hand, her control disintegrated; she was inundated by wave after wave of such orgasmic intensity that the spectators simply stared, mouths agape.

Lisa supported her as she shuddered through the final throws of the kind of orgasm that never ceased to amaze her. As frequent as they were, she had not – could not – get used to them. Her eyes remained glazed, cheeks red, heart pounding, as Lisa led her gently from view to a more private room where she could effect her recovery.

Jenn knew that her complaisance – her acquiescence to the rigors of submission was, now, total. Still, she felt it was different from how it appeared. Her embrace of systematic degradation was due to neither self-destructive tendencies nor loss of self-esteem. On the contrary, it was due more to a free, uninhibited spirit of adventure – an unbridled thrill seeking and an insatiable desire for self-gratification. She knew herself to be an unabashed hedonist, and she knew that her pursuits were selfish as much as anything; nonetheless, her selfishness was manifested in the giving over of herself in completely. Paradoxically, the more she craved, the more she gave up, and vice versa. Her satisfaction was inversely proportional to her control – directly proportional to her capitulation. It actually made some sort of weird sense – to her, at least.

Amidst the jangle of emotional exhaustion, Jenn thought that she finally understood the look of rapture on Bouguereau's Psyché in Le Ravissement...; her own face must have radiated that same warm glow of utter satisfaction, as she closed her eyes, sighing softly through a beatific smile. Lisa's arms enfolded her.

Sometimes, if she and Matt hadn't managed to connect at home for a few weeks – "What a strange concept, this relationship," Jenn thought with an almost sour humour – they would spend hours unabashedly sharing their experiences. Nothing was too delicate; embarrassment didn't exist.

Matt told her about an experience at The Club. He was jerked off into the face of a young female initiate, then she was told, "He's 42! Bring him off again and don't stop until you do." It was a marathon manual and oral ordeal.

Jenn recounted her experience as maid, plaything and floor show at a swank party at a huge mansion on Southwest Marine Drive. She and Lisa were basically commissioned as high-priced whores – or whore and pimp. Lisa had dressed Jenn as a rather cabaret impression of the part: black 'biker-boot' stiletto heels, complete with dangly chains; 'painted on' black stretch jeans; a low, low scoop neck leotard top; and a short leather biker jacket with a collar, a large front wind flap, and lots of chains, rivets and zippers. Jenn had begun the evening with a striptease and masturbatory sex show that ended, inevitably, in a gang-bang; then she had been tied up as a sort of side show and subjected to repeated spankings and whippings before being laid out once again for a come-what-may grope and fuck session. Lisa acted as her manager. They had been paid well, but that was, to Jenn, beside the point. She had simply loved the whole experience, although she still had some difficulty with understanding why.

Matt asked if he had unwittingly been the catalyst in Jenn's rapid transmogrification. She only laughed, softly. "I don't really think so. It was all just latent, I guess. I'm just fulfilling my destiny – as are you, I s'pose." They could talk for hours, discussing and rationalizing their strange circumstances – their new lives. And they often did.

Matt accepted humiliation as something he deserved. He certainly derived pleasure from it but was always a little self-conscious of his enjoyment. It was an ordeal filled with base sensation; an animal instinct to satisfy; an utterly sensual, masochistic pleasure. Intellectually, the humiliation was always accepted and endured as a just desert. He seemed to recognize that he was really no more than a hedonist, but allowed himself to rationalize and justify seeking out situations and opportunities for further humiliation and degradation – reaping rewards from the seeds of guilt he sowed.

Jenn knew she was now so deep into what she recognized as pure self-gratification that she could justifiably consider herself a genuine, pure hedonist – the real thing; no holds bared; nothing sacred. Her world revolved around sex – her sex. She had become genito-centric.

Still she wondered – wondered and worried. How can we discuss this so calmly? How can we talk about it as if it were normal? What violences to our psyches have rearranged our realities so much that this, in fact, is normal? Such questions were, however, without answers.

For as much as Jenn had always suffered a fear of the unknown, it held a strange fascination. It enticed and enchanted her. Even as a child she had relished the titillation of irrational fear. Invariably timid in new situations, she compensated by flinging herself into things regardless of her apprehensions – fear and curiosity ever vying for dominance. The dread of things unknown, was still able to ice up her veins but her automatic reaction had become an attraction all its own. Now the trepidation generated by novel situations and circumstances beckoned her, calling her insidiously to move forward and challenge it – challenge the unknown. She was afraid of the dark, both literally and figuratively, but was inexorably pulled into it by her own curiosity. Her apprehension seemed to draw her towards its source – to expose it – experience it. The fear, the challenge cajoled her. What was the worst that could happen? She felt herself pulled along, cautiously perhaps, boldly at times, pulled by a nervous excitement, a refusal to acknowledge fear – her ever-present fear.

Jenn's world seemed to be filled with 'perhapses' and 'maybes'. Everything was conditional. What she did was often contrary to her basic beliefs – fundamental feelings, but "despite", "still", "nevertheless", "yet", as often as not, described it all – where, figuratively, she went. She was captivated and drawn in, despite dire warnings from the small voice of reason still residing somewhere in her psyche. Her fear mingled with her curiosity to produce a perverse delight in challenging the unknown – the darkness. And this, here, was just a darkness she was investigating, a darkness in her morality.

As she moved more and more toward total submission, she held to the T-shirt philosophy, 'No Fear', despite scenes from deSade's Justine, which would occasionally waft through her mind – grisly scenes depicting the gruesome demise of helpless victims. She would not crumble before her personal demon – her natural timidity, her fear of the unknown – fear of the future. Retreat had become inadmissible. It was not masochism; it was discovery.