Sunday and Monday

She smacked the paddle against the palm of her hand, feeling a light sting blossom on her skin. Mindy looked back, surprised. Well, now she was committed to it.

"All right, slut," said Denise. "You've had your fun, now for your punishment."

Mindy ducked her head down, offering up her plump buttocks. This was it. She was actually going to hit her girlfriend -- smack her with a wooden paddle. God, this was strange. Twenty-four hours ago she wouldn't have imagined this, but now to not do it would seem like cowardice. So Denise took a swing. On the first one she took a wide swing with her wrist, but chickened out at the last minute, and it ended up little more than a tap. God, that wasn't right. She closed her eyes, tried to forget that it was Mindy's supple and sweaty skin she was hitting, and swung down the paddle again.

SMACK!

After hearing a moan, Denise forced her eyes open. The paddle had made a scarlet impression on Mindy's asscheeks, a thin red mark across the tundra of her skin. Denise stared at it for a moment. She did that. She was responsible for that mark. And, as she lifted the paddle, she realized that she was going to do it again.

SMACK!

This time, Denise could see it all as it happened: Mindy's body lurching forward at the impact, redness blossoming across her ass, her face wincing and then letting out a cry halfway between pleasure and pain. It was all over in a moment. Denise needed to see it again.

SMACK!

She was caught in a sadistic reverie, strange emotions lurching through her body, all desperately desiring only to see pain course through her lover's body. Denise found her arms moving faster and faster, in some dance she was just now realizing she knew the steps to. As she brought the paddle down on Mindy's buttocks again and again, Denise wished she had something more fluid and responsive -- maybe a whip... yes, that would do nicely.

SMACK! SMACK!

Bruises were beginning to sprout out of the red marks, and joining together to form welts. It was amazing, seeing the transformation she was reeking, and Denise started hitting harder, aiming for those bruises. Mindy let out an anguished cry. "Jesus, D, maybe not quite so hard."

"I know you like it like this, bitch," said Denise, picking up the tempo even further. This time, Mindy seemed to wince before the paddle even made contact.

SMACK! SMACK! SMACK!

"Stop! It's too much!' But Denise was lost to her cries. So the slut was in over her head now? It was only what she could expect, what she had coming to her.

SMACK! SMACK! SMACK!

"Ow! Fuck!"

SMACK!

And the next thing Denise knew, she was airborne. It was a strange, wondrous moment, until she landed hard on the floor. Mindy's naked, athletic body was on top of her, holding onto Denise's arm and keeping the air that had flown out of her lungs from thinking about returning. The paddle had clattered to the floor several feet away. Denise was confused about what was happen, caught between vertigo and the phantom feeling of having cold water splashed all over her arousal.

"I said stop it," said Mindy.

It turned out that all those years of judo were good for more than taut muscles. "I, um... I thought it was all, you know, part of the act."

"Believe it or not, I wasn't faking being in pain," Mindy said. "That's why I told you to fucking stop."

"But I thought..."

"You thought you could beat the shit out of me and I wouldn't say anything? And you go on and on about me being the fucking pervert? Put a paddle in your hands and you turn into some kind of fucking maniac."

Denise was starting to get angry. Why couldn't they go back to exploring things, having fun? Why was this now so serious? She couldn't speak, especially not with Mindy's legs across her sternum. "Um... can you get off me?"

Mindy stood up, brushing herself off and trying to restore some dignity to her nude, red-bottomed form. "Fuck." She grabbed her clothes and began hurriedly putting them back on.

"Don't go." Denise put a hand on Mindy's shoulder, and she promptly slapped it away.

"Next part of your body that touches me gets broken," said Mindy.

"Jesus fuck. I went a little too far, okay. No need to threaten me over it."

Mindy visible winced as she slid her jeans over her bruised ass. "Whatever. Keep the dildos. And with that, she was gone, violently slamming the door behind her.

Denise sank to her knees in the middle of the living room. Her frenzied arousal was gone, replaced by a dazed state in which she could only wonder what had just happened.

________________________________________

Mindy was a morning person, which meant that to much of the world she surely lacked a soul. She was fine with that. She appreciated waking up shortly after dawn, seeing the city when it was still asleep, tugging its covers up to shield it from a pale pink sky. There was a sense of fraternity with the other early-risers, the eccentrics and the squares, the long-distance commuters trying to pull themselves together on the way to the bus station and the sketchy characters having one last smoke outside the convenience store before bidding the night adieu. Even on a day like any other, it was easy to feel a sense of hope and renewal in the young morning.

This morning, however, she woke up to only pain. Her ass burnt and her wrists were sore. Even her cunt was feeling a bit worn out. And when she remembered what had caused all this, it stung even more.

Jesus. Denise. How had she misjudged her so much?

Mindy rolled to her feet and poured herself her customary glass of orange juice and bowl of dry cereal. It tasted like mush this morning, probably because of her fitful sleep. She tried to go through her morning exercises, but her body hurt too much. She was doing her level best to go about her normal routine without thinking about last night, but the soreness was making it damn difficult.

She turned instead to her books. She didn't have any classes today, but had a long stack of reading to do for Tuesday. Even the wild promises of anthropology couldn't distract her though. When she shut her eyes, all she could see was the scrunched-up, maniacal look on Denise's face as she had swung that paddle over and over.

It vindicated every worry she had about sharing this part of her with someone else. In judo she had learned never to give anyone else any openings, never to put yourself in a position where they could hurt you. But she had tied herself up for someone she barely knew. She had handed Denise the weapons to hurt her with.

Maybe it had been her fault after all. She had been the one who egged Denise on. Maybe if she hadn't brought up the conversation about fantasies that night (how had it only been two nights ago?) they would still be contentedly snuggling. If it had been someone else saying these things to her, Mindy would have barked at them not to blame the victim. But when it was herself she instead felt a more pressing urge to accept responsibility.

Shit. She needed to forget about all this. It was tying her up in knots.

When half an hour of channel surfing and an hour of staring at the page of a textbook failed to do anything, and none of her wall of movies seemed worth the effort, Mindy decided to jog for a bit. Maybe she would go into the gym and hit some pads. Forget the mental beneath the physical. As though that wasn't how she had gotten into trouble in the first place.

Mindy was very bad at forgetting things.

Still, the worries of last night began to subside beneath the pounding rhythm of her sneakers on cement. She tried to keep herself to a constant rhythm, but eventually she lost control and was rushing through the streets at breakneck speed. People stopped and stared as they moved out of her way, probably thinking that she was trying to catch a bus and not just running around like an idiot. Mindy ignored them, ignored everything, let all of the bullshit and drama and petty interpersonal theatre shrink beneath the raw truth of her body.

But eventually even the raw truth of her body started to be kind of unpleasant. And then she just flat out hit a wall, stumbling in mid-stride, her muscles becoming lumps of heavy clay. Mindy stumbled and almost fell. Well, she managed to avoid tripping over her own feet on the first try, but in doing so she stumbled to the side, ended up rotating until she lost her balance and fell onto her back on some unfortunate soul's neatly trimmed lawn. Mindy could only laugh with what little strength remained in her. Once again, this was pain, but kind of a good kind -- the exhaustion of a fulfilled body.

And then there was Denise, her avenging angel, standing over her and offering a hand down from the heavens. Mindy had to blink a few times to make sure she wasn't imagining things.

"Need a hand?" said Denise softly.

"Fuck off." Mindy planted her palm in the grass and rolled to her feet, despite the protestations of her sore arms and legs.

"I probably deserve that," said Denise. "Look, I want apologize for what happened last night... I mean, things got out of hand, and I just lost control. I was trying to work up the nerve to call you, and then I saw you running by my place and, well..."

Mindy didn't want to deal with this right now. Her head was spinning, and her body hurt, both from last night and the run. And here was Denise before her, seemingly like some impossible figure conjured out of her anxiety. Maybe she was hallucinating.

"You okay?" said Denise, after Mindy had stared at her in silent confusion for a while.

Was she okay? What did "okay" even mean? The emotions that ran hot and cold through her, the desire to be controlled that seemed to clash with every other part of her -- had she ever been okay?

Denise frowned and bit her lip. She did look really concerned. "Look, you don't have to say anything... I mean, I don't need to kiss and make up. I would love it, but I don't need it. I just want to think I didn't hurt you too bad."

"You feeling guilty?" Mindy finally said.

"Yeah. I don't like it."

"Tough." Mindy turned on her heel and began to walk away. She let her anger towards Denise fill her. The anger felt good, a hot righteousness soothing her muscles and warming her mind. It had been easy all along. She just needed to understand not to trust people like Denise -- people who looked kind and innocent, but had hidden capacities for pettiness and cruelties beneath them. She should have known, as soon as she had hounded Mindy for her eccentricities, as soon as she had made a big deal about some tomfoolery at the sex shop. The easiness of them being together had been a lie.

All she had to do was cut the bad parts out of her life, and Denise was one of those bad parts. All she had to do was banish those soft pink lips from her memory, never again run her hands down the warm slopes of Denise's breasts or settle into that sacred space between her thighs, never consider the possibilities raised by their conversations or laugh at that juvenile way she blushed or stare in admiration at the bizarre grace of her chestnut-brown hair as it flowed casually behind her.

Mindy stopped and glanced over her shoulder. Denise was still standing there forlorn, like a child waiting after school for a parent they were starting to suspect just wasn't coming.

"Do you want to get a coffee?" Mindy found herself saying.

Denise smiled cautiously. "Yeah. I'd like that."

--

There were some things you couldn't say in a coffee shop. That was, in truth, part of their appeal. It was hard to work the difficult truths out of yourself or expose your inner weaknesses when surrounded by chattering hipsters and stern-faced bohemians pounding away on their laptops, steaming mugs of unpronounceable drinks marking each table like a flag. Instead, the underlying triviality of the place assured a break from any concerns that would take up more thought than the ten minutes it took to get your way through a latte.

Denise and Mindy talked about the weather. They talked about their favourite TV shows, about the latest silly political scandals, about childhood pets and the funny things they had once done. In a way it was easy, but it also felt a bit like the opening rounds of a boxing match, the two combatants feeling each other out, testing the distance between them. Denise seemed to nod along to everything Mindy had to say. Maybe it was a sign of contrition. Or maybe Mindy was just imagining it.

Denise flicked a finger against her empty cup. The last traces of her coffee had vanished a while ago. "I think we're officially loitering."

Mindy shrugged. "It's not busy. They probably won't mind."

"Still, we should go somewhere else. I don't want to say my place, but..."

"The park. Neutral ground." Mindy found it easier to imagine having a climactic confrontation in the small windswept park that stood a few blocks away. It would be like the final scene from a movie, the two tempestuous lovers shouting their emotions at each other in an open field.

"Why don't we go to that breakfast spot again?"

"I already ate."

Denise frowned. Mindy realized that over the past twenty-four hours she had seen almost a full range of emotions from her: cheerful confidence, sullen embarrassment, that blind-eyed rage she couldn't stop thinking about, and now a kind of meek, pleading supplication. But they all had some essentially strange and intriguing commonality between them -- that particular style of emotion that made Denise, well, Denise. It was that ineffable thing that Mindy still had a grudging attraction towards.

They left the coffee shop without an agreed-upon destination. Mindy assumed they were still heading towards the park for what in her mind had attained the aura and proportions of an old west shoot-out, but they hadn't gone more than a block in that direction before the talk between them grew serious.

Denise's hands were balled into fists and hung low in front of her, as though she was presenting them to be cuffed. "I'd just like to say, first and foremost, that I'm sorry. Last night was... I think what happened was that I just got so into what we were doing -- I mean, you know, into the character that I was, the whole cruel dominant thing -- that I kind of lost control. I let that part of me that wanted to hurt you take over. And I feel awful about that."

It struck Mindy as a kind of shitty apology. Why was she trying to put blame on some kind of character, on the act they had been doing? "Wait, there was a part of you that wanted to hurt me?"

"I guess so. I mean, it was an evil part of me, I guess. After the sex shop thing I just felt like I needed to strike back at you somehow, to make you feel as humiliated as I felt. This is all subconscious, of course, and this is just my best guess. What I'm trying to say is, I was angry, and I found a very physical outlet for that anger."

More dime-store psychobabble. Mindy was beginning to get angry herself. "So this is all my fault? You just had to beat on me because I goofed around with you a bit?"

Denise's eyes swept around the thinly-populated street. "No, it's -- look, I'm not used to this. There's a part of me that relishes everything that we did. That feeling of having power over people, and of causing someone else pain. Maybe I never would have realized this if you hadn't brought it up. But now I know that's a part of me, and it makes me scared of myself."

"Well, that makes two of us," said Mindy.

"Are you saying that you're scared of yourself, or scared of me?"

"I guess both."

They stopped at a traffic light. Denise was now staring at the sidewalk, or maybe just her balled hands. "I guess part of it was that when you said 'stop', I didn't realize that it wasn't a part of all that, that you weren't just playing out your role."

Mindy felt hot fury rise to her cheeks. She turned on her heel and stared Denise in the eye. "So what you're saying is that this was all just one big misunderstanding? Whoops, sound the laugh track?"

Denise visibly shrank. "No, I just mean..."

"You know, this isn't just some kind of grade-school play. Yeah, I like getting tied up, and I like getting hit, and I like getting treated like dirt. That's not just some facade I put on. That's me. And when I tell you to stop, that's also me."

"I didn't know."

Denise looked so miserable, standing there inspecting the cracks in the cement, and in an instant all of Mindy's rage left her. This also made her feel a bit angry -- who was Denise to deny her of her righteous anger, to make it all go away with a puppy-dog face? But that too was fleeting, and Mindy felt an inexorable urge to comfort the other girl.

The traffic light they were stopped at had long since changed to green and back to red again. Denise was still, the only motion of her body being the flapping of her hair in the breeze.

"This is hard," Mindy said. It was a dumb statement, one that didn't come close to expressing the tangle of emotions throbbing within her, but they were the only words that came to mind. She had never been good at words.

"Yeah," said Denise. "We should have -- I dunno. We should have prepared, talked things out... we just jumped into it. That made it really sexy, but I guess it couldn't last."

Sympathy was a strange thing. It rarely hit Mindy -- she had to make a concerted effort to consider other people's perspective, and never really felt their pain as her own. She could pass by homeless people on the street without the least tremors of conscience. But sometimes it did come to her now, and she suddenly saw all of Denise's emotions -- fear, uncertainty, a dangerous crush that looked like it just might scab over and inflate into love -- and realized her position and it was as though she was suddenly swamped with all the mixed-up feelings of two different people, two people who weren't quite getting along with each other no matter how much each one wanted to. And Mindy realized that Denise really did care for her, and had hurt her out of ignorance and innocence -- just as Mindy had hurt her in turn. And they were just two clumsy humans who couldn't stop banging into each other.

"We didn't know what we were doing," said Mindy.

"We still don't. I mean, maybe I never will," said Denise.

"If you're still willing," said Mindy (this next part was hard, and she had to squeeze the words through a throat that seemed to wisely want to keep them inside), "we could try to figure it out together."

Denise turned to her, and her smile outshone the sun. "I would like that."

--

They were back at Mindy's place, just talking. The first thing they had decided was that they hadn't talked enough about it last time, or to be more specific they hadn't talked concretely enough. Now they sat on the carpet, facing each other cross-legged, and everything seemed to be spilling out and pooling in the diamond made by their barely-touching knees.

"Can I pull your hair?" Denise asked.

"You can try, but there's not much there to pull." Mindy ran a hand over the prickly edges of her short hairdo. "Actually, you might hurt my neck, so I'm gonna nix that."

"Got it. Any where you don't want me to, uh, hit you?"

"The pussy, I guess? There's good pain and bad pain, and I think a crotch shot is the latter."

"I kind of feel like doing a teacher fantasy."

"Would you be the teacher or would I?"

"Well, it'd be hard to come up with a situation where the student is the domme... although I guess we could get creative..." Denise tapped her chin in thought.

"Are you into the leather stuff? All that gear we saw yesterday? I'm not really -- although don't get me wrong, it would look good on you."

Denise took a moment to ponder this. "Hmm, I think I'd rather be naked. But I'll think about it."

They talked quickly, changing topic at the drop of the hat, but the conversation always stayed on sex. In this they were a bit like sugar-addled teenage boys. Both seemed desperate to get out everything they could, as if this moment of intimacy and suspension and judgment was a window that would quickly close. Possibility crackled between the two women.