the tender flower of my kink

When did you know? Or have you still not found that kernel of kink buried in your erotic loam? Has it not yet germinated, that kinky kernel, grown roots in your consciousness and come to full flower in the soft hotbed of your soft, hot bed?

This is the moment when I first realized I was kinky.

No, wait, I would be inaccurate if I told this kink-germ story first, if I told it first without the moment when I realized I was a bit different from the other girls I knew, even the ones who had tasted cock and savored it, even the ones who were on the pill without a boyfriend, even the ones who, like me, owned a vibrator and sticky copies of Penthouse Forum and Anaïs Nin.

The moment I realized I was different was when at the age of sixteen, while riding the train somewhere between Vermont and Philadelphia at Christmas time, and with my family somewhere in the same car, I seduced a college boy by putting segments of orange inside my adolescent cunt and feeding them to him with my fingers.

I fucked him in the Amtrak bathroom too, though that seems less poetic, if only because I didn’t rip it off from Erica Jong’s effulgent erotic imagination.

That was the moment I realized I was different.

(Two years later, the college boy wrote me a letter telling me how much he had enjoyed meeting me. I found it rather sweet, if disingenuous. That might have been the first moment of my cynicism. It’s rather hard to say.)

This is the moment I realized I was kinky.

I had seen this boy around, and I had found him attractive, but über-cool. Cooler than thou. So cool he was hot. And vice versa. He was hot, he was cool, he was not all-temperature, for he was never tepid. Never tepid at all.

I had seen him around and found him hotly cool, but I hadn’t ever done anything about it. And then somehow, I met him again. I was going to China. He had been to China. We had China to talk about.

So we made a date to talk about China.

There is, if I may diverge, and I do beg your permission humbly, for this will feel like quite the diversion, in Act 4, Scene 3 of William Wycherly’s The Country Wife, the hero-rake Horner has convinced all the men in the play that he is impotent so that he can diddle their wives. The excuse the wives use to visit the very virile Horner is that of looking at his collection of china, which allows the husbands to sit idly by while Horner corners first one and then another wife, and the word “china” becomes a filthy double entendre.

Sir Jaspar Fidget says to his wife that Horner is “coming into you the back way,” to which his offstage wife breathily responds, “Oh let him come, and welcome, any which way he will.” After satisfying this wife, a rather tuckered Horner begs off busying himself with yet another wife, who does not take no for an answer; “Oh, Lord, I’ll have me some china too, don’t think to give other people china and me none, come in with me too.”

This hotcool guy and I, we talked about China. And then we fucked.

But I have cut out the good naughty bits, the bits that made me cast a warm and sunny eye on my kernel, still dormant, now almost ten years after feeding my college boy juicy Chelsea au jus orange segments on that rocketing train to Philly.

I don’t remember the boy’s name, not either of them, actually, but I was referring to the hotcool guy. Let’s call him R. R told me to bring a lot of peanut butter with me to China. He told me it was hard to find anything edible. That where I was going was cold in the winter and very dusty. That I could expect to feel incredibly lonely and also to find it the best experience of my life.

He told me about where he grew up, Rhode Island, I think. He told me about his family; his father would mow designs in their lawn.

He told me that his father used to say to him when he got home from a party, Did you meet anyone you like better than yourself?

That night, I did.

I liked R better than myself.

We kissed, and I believe I enjoyed it; I don’t recall not enjoying it. I do remember three things I enjoyed a lot. This is the first: when he took off my jeans, he withdrew my black leather belt from the loops of the pants.

I watched him, as I was lying there on this collegiate bed. He removed the belt, looked at it, and turned the belt sideways. He held the belt sideways in his hands and ran its hard leather edge across my body, down my naked chest, over my hardening nipples, down my soft belly, across my tender thighs. He caressed me with my belt and I was thrilled.

Here was a man who was creative. Here was a man who was interesting. Here was a man who would and could tease me.

He slid the cool metal of my belt buckle along the contours of my sternum, my ribs, my hipbones, my pudenda.

It made me breathless. And wet.

This is the second thing he did that I enjoyed: I spent the night with him, that great belt night. I went to work the next morning, forgetting the key to my motorcycle in his room. I called him. He was interning as a photojournalist that summer, and there was no getting a hold of him. I had to hitch a ride the seven miles out to my condo; my bike parked in his lot.

I was pissed. Plus he was leaving town soon, and I needed my bike.

Around one in the morning, I heard the tell-tale hum of my Suzuki. He knocked on my door, and there he was, stuffed into my 70’s drug-addled Elvis leather jacket and my helmet. It was very excellent.

This, the third thing he did: we went to bed, of course. And he flipped me over, my face pressed into the fragrance of my futon. R began to kiss the back of my neck, branching slowly and ferociously out, fanning his kisses like hissing flames from shoulder blade to shoulder blade, igniting my flesh with his dark insistent kisses. These kisses burned fiercely, his George Michaels face-scruff abrading the tender flesh of my upper back.

And I loved it. I reached around and pulled his head into my neck, his mouth opened wider and wider as he bit and tore at my skin. He held my body in his arms and ate my trapezius like a joint of meat. Kiss after kiss after kiss after relentless openmouthed, hardhearted kiss.

It was heaven.

R raised me to my knees, held me by the back of my neck and fucked me doggystyle. I used my finger on my clit and I came, the first time, ever, in that position (but not the last, not ever the last).

He left very early the next morning, and when I looked at myself in the mirror, my back was a stippled purple roadmap of sex. I was covered in hickeys so deep, so profound they had left my skin raised and welted.

R had marked me, then and forever. The hickeys have gone, yes, they have gone the way of all things fleshly, but the memory has branded me. (Still I love those insistent hard relentless kisses, still I melt, still I shake my head in wonderment that there are so few men who know how to dole them out, not like sweets into the grubbing hands of a child, but like lashes of a punishing whip. Whip my shoulders with your open mouth, lash my skin with your tongue. I beg you.)

My boyfriend was coming to visit me that purple day. Have I neglected to mention the boyfriend? He was living here, in Gotham, and he was coming to visit. I had two choices, as I saw it, marked as I was with the burst open figs of R’s doggyfucking and they were these: fess up all to my boyfriend Eff; or pull Eff upstairs in the dead of night, push his head close to my shoulders, as I had R’s the night before, urge Eff to bite me savagely and claim R’s mark as his own.

What do you think I did? Tell the truth? Or fake the act?

What would you do? Or better yet, what would you have me, your perverse dark demi-goddess, what would you have me do?

(Need an answer? Read below.)

___________________________________________

There I was, stippled purple, a body of evidence of my indiscretion. My boyfriend of six years was arriving that evening.

What did I do? Did I fake, or did I ‘fess?

Once more, a bit of backstory is in order. Not the back story of R’s body behind me, fucking me with the same reckfull intent that he had shown in biting my neck and shoulders, for you’ve already consumed that tale, but a bit of backstory about Eff and me.

Eff and I had been together a while. But we had a French flavor of relationship. We often didn’t live in the same state, and while we knew the other had his or her dalliances, we didn’t ask. We didn’t tell. We lived in a benign, if occasionally irritating, willful ignorance. Which is not to say we wanted some kind of somatic proof to rip us out of our nice, comfy worlds of denial.

We did not.

But we are pragmatists, Eff and I, in many ways, and we understood the exigencies of being in our early twenties and trying to remain faithful, which neither of us had any particular interest in.

Hence the Frenchness of our relationship.

Still I didn’t want the noise of actually telling him. Telling Eff would lead to needless drama. R, after all, would in a couple of days split Vermont for his home in Rhode Island. Eff and I were going to live together here in Gotham. There was no win in fessing up to Eff.

So I faked.

And I had that disconcerting sexual experience of a game of sexual Old Maid—you know that card game where you have all the cards face down and you turn them over and try to find/remember the pair. I had R’s one-eye Jack fresh in my mind as I turned over Eff’s card.

And made him do the exact same thing to me.

And he paled, wan, pale as lilies in comparison to the dark orchid of R’s perverted sensibilities.

Sad, really.

And I enjoyed Eff as a lover very much. Often. He had the first cock I ever worshipped, on my knees, open mouth and adulatory. He had the body of a small Michelangelo’s David, all hard and cut and bisected with muscle, with a hard, round and tight white ass. He had a beautiful big nose (I love the big nose).

He had a tiny rosebud mouth, which gave him the air of a demented cherub.

And we had been vanilla progressive in bed. We had tried things with ice cream  and maple syrup (we lived, after all, in Vermont). We had fucked in parents’ bathrooms and in fields and once on a Greyhound bus. We had played.

But he had no dark passion.

Alas.

So I made Eff bite my neck and fuck me doggystyle and much fun was had, even if it was a pale soy yogurt of fun—fun almost but not quite like the original fun it was meant to be.

I faked. And then, the next day, I told him. I confessed.

For, you see, I have a compulsion to honesty. I do not write this blog to lie, as blogger Ash has playfully insinuated. I tell the truth here as I do in my life. My mother says that I am only as brutally honest as I absolutely have to be.

Which is to say I am honest. Often to a fault.

I don’t hide things well, perhaps one of the reasons I had a love/hate/love for stripping, an act that is simultaneously a gesture of revealing and concealment. I don’t lie well, though I am an excellent lay.

So, in short, I first faked and then I fessed to Eff.

We were sitting on the carpeted landing of the stairs in my rented condo. We were neither up, nor down, but on that stair in the middle. And I told him, and he was, predictably, wounded, though I suspect he had fucked some fair maiden perhaps not as recently as I had fucked R—my bed was hotsheeted with my copulatory activities—but pretty freakin’ recently.

And then he asked me to marry him.

Out of the blue.

And I said No.

Because I felt he had asked me because he felt threatened. He had asked me because he had felt me slipping from his hands. He had asked me because he had wanted control.

He had not asked me because he wanted to spend my life with him, and I had said no because I didn’t want to spend my life with him.

And yet I went to Gotham anyway. Yet I went and lived with him. And it, predictably, turned out badly. But that’s a story for another rainy day. (It rains here in Gotham today. The black railings of my fire escape are blacker, black as a puppy’s nose, and the brick of the building behind me glows rosy as a vulva.)

Eff, by the way, is well and happy and living in Brooklyn. He owns property there and in Vermont, lavish houses well appointed with high-count sheets and designer appliances. He is married and has two children.

I’ve never seen the houses, the sheets, the Viking ranges, the wife or the children. But they are there, along with his happiness.

And I am here, tending my sundry, occasionally sordid,  metaphorical purple flowers, for your pleasure, and for the pleasure of others.

Comments

[VJ]

You faked it for all you were worth. And it seemed to have worked for awhile. Until the next time...
Cheers, 'VJ'

[Danielle]

I would've had you take Eff upstairs and had him savagely bite and kiss you the same.

But, I'm a fucked-up ho. :)

[Goose]

I cast my vote with the bloggers above. I like hearing a belt come off too. But that is another story.
Goose

[figleaf]

Would you have told us about Wycherly if you really wanted us to guess? I won't be shocked to be wrong, but I think it would have been cynically kinkier getting him bite you in the dark.

On another note you may have inspired me to dust off my leatherman's tools and start making belts again.

Thanks for the great post. Also thanks for the reference to Wycherly. I don't get to the theater often enough but I love to read plays.

figleaf

[ravenna]

Oh darling, of *course* you made Eff fuck you savagely in the dark and mark you doubly to merge R's marks with his. And he loved it. (And if you didn't, please tell us you did!) But I don't believe that qualifies as faking anything. Every lover leaves a mark, visible or not; every lover save the very first must realize that his (or her) marks are only the latest tracks in the trail they have all left on your body (and your soul). And of course it can also be a form of flattery, a good deed; when the second or third man of the night fucks my already come-filled cunt let him think, How wet I make her! And what a mighty ejaculator I am to have filled her so full! (And I say, Of *course* it's all yours, darling, why I was a dry well before you touched me...)

[ash]

Once again, let me bring this discussion back from the edge of an estrogen-soaked cliff and show you what really happened that night:
Yeah, I screwed you that night. Nailed you hard as fuck. Because I could smell that skank motherfucker on your ass a mile away. You weren't pulling anything over on me, babe.
I was the one with the power that day, that day that's now all so much purple prose to you. I laugh to myself, thinking back. You, overly affectionate. You and your fucked up futon. You, to me, a joint of meat, indeed. Your flattery: "it's all yours darling..." Right. I'll play along.
But where was I before I came in you?
I've been to china. And back.

[chelsea girl]

Oh, Ash,

You are so cute when you're delusional.

Pout for me, baby.

[ash]

Darling Chelsea, I don't lie. To myself. But I do so love it when you lie. Lie with me, on me, to me. Lie for, under me, with me. I'll lie back. And enjoy.

[Edgy Mama]

Oh, tell Ash to fuck off, Chels. He's showing off for you. He's just jealous that you want me.

[figleaf]

Thanks, CG,

As predicted I'm not shocked to be wrong. Well, half wrong in the sense that after you played the Wycherly card you confessed, but anyway I'm not shocked.

"And I am here, tending my sundry, occasionally sordid, metaphorical purple flowers, for your pleasure, and for the pleasure of others."

I hope it's for your (mental/emotional) pleasure too. Considering your sometimes melancholy tone I again wouldn't be shocked if it were otherwise but I'd be saddened too.

Take care,

figleaf

[chelsea girl]

You know, Fig, I had thought a couple of times of ending the piece "for your pleasure. And for the pleasure of others. And for my own."

But in the end I opted not because I thought what with all the self-proclaimed paens to my orgasms, it might just be overkill.

Is my tone sometimes melancholy? Yup. But it's also occasionally mirthful, intermittantly angry, sporadically sardonic and flickeringly goofy. Blue is just one of the many amazing colors that make my rainbow, dear Fig.

Thanks for caring enough to comment. I love the comment, especially yours.

CG

[Introspectre]

I have done similar things...the acts have always left me feeling disconcertingly schizophrenic (as oppossed to comfortingly schizophrenic). One reality, two realities, let's pretend they're the same reality-

That's why I can't lie. And why I would make a terrible terrible stripper. And waitress as a matter of fact.