A Good Student Ch. 05

"Because I don't think you understand Emma, goddamn it! I don't think you know what we have between us or how special this is, to feel what I feel for you, you bitch! To go crazy for a woman like I go crazy for you, Emma. —Ugh!— To want to whip someone and hurt someone and love someone and die for them and fuck them to death like I do for you, Emma. (Jesus!!!) Do you understand me? (Fuck!!) Do you know what I'm saying, you bitch! Do you know how much I fucking love you, Emma, (Oh GOD!!) you beautiful goddamned slut!? —CHRIST!!!—Jesus, Emma! God! I'm close, baby! Emma! Fuck, I'm close!!!"

I'm hanging over her with my cock sunk all the way in her and her legs draped over my arms, absolutely at the point of tears and Emma gets up on her elbows and stares at me astonished and says, "Oh God, Conner, Conner! What are you saying? God, what are you saying? I don't understand this! I don't understand any of this! All I want is for you to love me! That's all I want. That's all I ever wanted. Just tell me what I have to do for you to love me, Conner! Please! Because I can't stand this anymore. I don't want him! I want you. Oh, Conner!"

And then she did start crying, hard, which made her squeeze me inside with every sob.

"No!" I said. "No crying! Not now! Not now when I'm going to come, damn it! Not now damn it fucking shit fuck ass cock ball cunt dick fart!"

But she wouldn't stop, and so she laid there with her hands over her eyes crying with me with my dick inside her on the edge of orgasm and I'm on the verge of tears too, and what can you do in a situation like that? Well, I'm sorry but like a bastard I went and finished fucking her and had one of the worst orgasms of my life thank you very much and she hardly even noticed, because she was having some kind of emotional orgasm of her own, and she wrapped her arms around me and kissed me like crazy and really started sobbing and I was like suddenly drowning in the sweet salt of her tears.

Things were amazingly messy there for a moment. And then they weren't. Then they were very clean.

And then I hold her and we talk, and talk, and she tells me how afraid and ashamed she's been, certain that I only wanted her because I think she's a sub and a slut and a whore. And that's why she thought I'd offered her that collar and that's why I'd taken her to Dee's, and in fact, that's why I even bothered with her, because I thought all she was good for was tying up and whipping and fucking. She said she'd loved me all along but that she'd been afraid to tell me because she knew I'd never want to have anything to do with a sub and a fuckslut.

And I tell her that I thought all she wanted me for was as a master, someone to tie her up and whip her, that I thought she'd find me too old and weird to have as a real-life lover, and that if I ever told her how I really felt she'd get creeped out and run.

And so there we were, trapped in these ritualized sexual roles of Master and slave, unable to show our genuine feelings, afraid we'd scare the other one off.

Suddenly we're looking at each other without the masks now, and there's me, and there's Emma. She wants to know if this means she can't still be my slut, if I still won't tie her up, and I smile and say, "Don't be ridiculous."

*****

It's really late now, like 3:35 in the morning, and the streets are quiet and empty, the lights are all off. I'm sitting in an arm chair in the living room with my pants on and nothing else, a bottle of tequila about half gone, one end of a rope in my hand.

What's on the other end of this rope is my heart. She's naked, lying face down, hanging from a block and tackle attached to a beam in my ceiling. Her ankles are tied against her thighs, her elbows are tied together behind her back. There are ropes around her waist, her legs, her wrists, her breasts, her arms, her chest. They're placed along her body so as to distribute her weight evenly such that no rope cuts into her skin and causes discomfort, and in this way she can hang suspended for some time facing the floor as she wishes, her hair hanging down obscuring her face, anonymous but unmistakably female. She might be an ornament, or a captive, or a fruit that has grown in my home, a gift of my own imagining, or perhaps just a mystery, suspended between heaven and earth. I sit here and admire her, watching her as she revolves very, very slowly in the darkness, like a dream in the mind of the sleeping city, feeling all sorts of things, my heart and my mind filled with her, not sure what she is, thinking she must be everything to me. I never want to stop looking at her. In the background, John Coltrane plays, "My One and Only Love." It's a heartbreakingly beautiful song.

In a moment I'll go and untie her and help her down, help her stretch and massage out any cramps she might have. I might make her dance with me because I so love this song and I so love to dance with a woman I love. Moving your body together with someone you love through artistically structured time is one of the more beautiful things human beings do. Dancing is one of the ways we do that. BDSM is another.

I think we live our lives in other people's hearts and minds. Alone by ourselves we're not very much good at all. But when we let someone else in with their stories and all their sights and sounds and songs and smells and sensations, we suddenly start filling our shelves and boxes with books and books of them and building up our libraries.

Some of these books are pretty thin reading with faded ink and hardly any pictures and dull stories. And then others are nice, heavy little volumes filled with stories of whippings and weird, perverse sex, dark Chinese restaurants with weird food and drugs being dealt in the back, hot women coming in your hand in loud bars with brassy music playing.

It's nice when one of these books falls into your hands. It's nice when you read through the first few pages and know it's going to be a good one, and you settle down and know you've got pages and pages to go.