Out of the Shadows

There were soft scarves, some with a whip or a flogger wrapped inside them, there were laundry clips and suction tubes, there was a heavy collar and a furry blindfold. There was a strong little paddle.

And – he had an old well-used belt. Yes he did! I shivered with excitement and recognition when I first saw it.

It was wide, and thick, and softened with usage.

He saw how I looked at it.

In that moment we passed an invisible threshold.

It was a moment of extraordinary electricity, miles of film footage of possible scenarios raced past our eyes. Then we connected again, very directly, in this moment.

He picked the belt up and held it in front of me.

I was lying on the bed in the retro-colonial room, looking up at him, half curious, half seductive.

When he showed me the belt, I slipped off the edge of the bed so that I knelt and presented my bottom.

I was already naked.

He was still dressed.

I looked up at the belt, mesmerised with all the possibilities and meaning. I felt his hand on my head, pushing me towards it. He was a little rougher now, just a little.

I submitted and followed him until my face touched the worn leather.

Then I stuck my tongue out and licked it. I licked it from the end where it was already disintegrating a little, slow wide strokes with my tongue towards the buckle. I trembled with adoration and submission. He caught me by my hair, pulling my head up slowly and powerfully so that I had to lick the entire length of his belt.

Even through my own shivers I could feel him shake, too, his whole body shook as he held me and held up the belt for me to lick and then kiss.

It was a moment of great luminosity, come to shine into our shadow lives.

I started to cry and pushed my face into the sheets, still shaking.

Then I felt the cool leather slide onto my back, curling up like a snake. My Nai arranged its coils into perfect positions while my skin yearned for its touch.

‘Hold still,’ he said.

As if I could have done anything else!!

He stood and looked at me, for a long time. I carried his belt on my naked back, the instrument of my future pain and humiliation. Strongly desired, by him and by me.

I held my own breath and only heard his. I, a warm living woman, was the image from his dreams.

It took a long time, in that first session, before I was allowed to feel his belt.

First, as he always would in the future, he told me I would get spanked by his bare hand. A lover’s hand. He slipped the belt off my back, he wanted me naked and vulnerable all over my body.

I pushed my ass in the air, quiet, quiet, quivering in quiet. This waiting and submission was so sweet.

All the sensors in my skin expanded. It made me exquisitely sensitive. For what was to come.

Even then, he caught me off guard. He didn’t like me to be prepared. He enjoyed that last little edge, where I wasn’t able to give my spanking to him, where he overwhelmed me with it.

He was a true connoisseur of spanking.

Maybe he also waited because he knew he was on the threshold of showing himself, as he really was. The first stroke was incontrovertible proof of his unacceptable and savage desires. Maybe he was assaulted by doubt and fear.

Just like me.

And as the object of those savage desires he chose me, me of all women. I was there, to receive his beating.

I was witness to his need.

Then he gave me my first hard slap, across both cheeks with his open palm. It pushed a little shout out of my throat. He gave me the next one deep on my sitting bone and I yelped, and then I laughed and we were no longer afraid.

It turned into a long-drawn-out, hard, wild, fast, and increasingly painful spanking. My Nai spanked me harder with his hand than many other men with implements. And, even that first time, he was so tuned in to my body, my voice, the slightest changes in my being and responded to them easily and fiercely.

But all that time while he gave me his hand, hard on my ass and my ass turning hot and sore under his strokes, he placed the belt so that we could both see it, in front of my eyes on a white pillow.

When I shouted out loudly, when I struggled and jerked with the impact of his open palm, he pushed me down on the bed and held me there and said, just said in his dark slow voice, a voice that had emerged only with his first blow: ‘Look at the belt.’

Colonial moments

‘I wish I had met you a long long time ago,’ he said.

We were lying on the colonial bed and smiling.

It was really the only thing we could do.

Smiling and smiling again.

I was lying on my front. He had just broken the second bamboo stick on my back.

We were quiet now.

At some point, amongst our laughs and screams, I had heard the voice of an irate Indian business man, giving a long angry speech on the phone. He must have been staying in the next room and I think he was trying to get the management to silence us.

His voice rose a few times, in futile attempts against our celebration of homecoming. Then it disappeared.

I believe, in the Thai way, he must have just been moved to another room while nobody ever bothered us.

More room for us to smile.

‘I wish, I wish,’ he said. ‘I wish I had met you a long time ago. But – but –’

I knew then that there was much more to this than smile.

And there were always so many, so many buts.

And no amount of smiles can bridge the abyss between our souls.

I shivered under the aircon. Maybe I should prepare to go. Should I pick up my underwear?

Then, turning round to me, he said: ‘I love your body.’

He walked me back to my own hotel in the early morning. I learned that there were always people in the street. Before we parted he kissed my hand and bought me a small paper fan from a hopeful all-night stall.

It’s very thin cheap paper and meant to last a night. I still have it today.

In the tower

Darkness had fallen utterly, above the city of ancient kings.

High up in the tower, my Nai was waiting for me.

He had insisted on that journey, on taking me from Bangkok, the city of the present, further up the slow night river to this other, older, more mysterious place, entangled in time and passionate longing for a life of promise after death.

So I came out in my little dress and my steel-heeled shoes and I stood and was looked at.

Was looked at for a long time, while his body changed and his look changed and he started to smile like the snake king.

‘You look like a wicked slut,’ he said.

I smiled. My body shivered.

He rushed towards me and lifted me up, I was carried high in his arms and he threw me on the bed. I thought just for a moment but I’m too heavy for him, but he will drop me, I will crash through his arms. I will sink down and down through the pillows through the bed through the floorboards through the concrete in the basement into the earth itself. But not.

With one hand he held me down, the other he pushed under my dress until he found the top of my knickers. ‘Ah,’ he said with satisfaction, ‘here they are.’

He held me even more firmly and then he pulled my knickers down over my bottom. They knotted in front and got entangled with my pubic hairs so I tried to push myself up again but he forced me down until my head was almost smothered by the pillows. He ripped the knickers along my legs until they hung halfway between my ass and my knees and then he gave me a good slap. Hard slap. Right in the middle of my ass. The upturned face, the top of the hill, the smooth curve just as big as the imprint of his hand.

You really get to know a Dom by the way he beats you. Beating styles are just as individual as fucking or kissing or as a unique accent when you speak.

I love love love love to feel his hand on the crest of my ass. Just resting there. His fingers, his palm, his thumb. I could draw an outline for the blind school. I lie on my face, on my stomach, naked, vulnerable, turned towards him, so tender, so white, so smooth. He holds me down and I can feel his power. The tiny hairs on my back and thighs stand up in slow shared electricity. I know he is going to spank me.

Suddenly I get nervous. I slurp the air in little puppy breaths. I want to run away in my sheets and knickers.

People say you can’t feel what your senses don’t tell you, so if you can’t see or hear or taste or smell there is no way of getting information, but I don’t know. I felt his hand hovering above my ass. I could feel how he was thinking, waiting, watching me. I waited, too. I waited and the waiting filled the space between us.

His delight and excitement was all his own, just like his voice that changed and sunk down almost an octave deeper into his chest when he got to this point in the session. It was as if he became part of something greater than himself, but still uniquely him. He had a very special way of responding to my responses, with sometimes a little time delay as he adjusted to an unexpected reaction. He loved those moments.

He later said that Doms were the ‘uber subs’, watching and listening for the submissives’ signals all the time, the moans the shouts the little squeaks of delight, the big screams of pain and ecstasy, the faintest echo of terror so they can stop if we need it before we even know.

How the colour of her skin changes. How she is warm or cold.

How she breathes.

Right now I breathe hardly at all. I don’t want to disturb the connection. I don’t want to change the dynamics between us through the competing dynamics of my breathing. I don’t want to take the tiniest sliver of my senses away from sensing him.

My body is soft and white and there for him.

He is there for me.

I expand like some animal deep inside the sea. I get wide and wide and wide to receive him. I know it will come. I know I will feel it. The more sensitive I make myself to him the stronger the impact will be. But I don’t know when. I don’t know exactly where he will strike, and exactly when and exactly how hard.

I can’t see him, I can’t hear him, I can’t feel his touch, but my whole being is tuned into him. Sometimes I wish this part would last forever. Sometimes I dream of lying there, suspended, for a very long time, not knowing what will come. Knowing what will come.

The next slap is much harder, and a lot more painful. It is aimed at my hip bone, where I don’t have a lot of tissue. I give a yelp and I get another one, right next to it, it hurts even more, and another one and another one and another one, each one hard as can be. There is a force field of stung nerve ends around my right hip. And then he starts in earnest, all along my right thigh and up again almost to my waist.

He hits and hits and hits, very fast, I’ve never been spanked like this, so fast, so fast so hard, I’m used to slow strokes, with time in between, time to absorb and time to prepare. Time to enjoy? Time for devotion.

The smacks just come and come and come and, surprising even to me, my body suddenly jumps and tries to escape. There isn’t much room to wriggle out but my body tries anyway. It moves across the sheets, like a sea lion, on its belly, it tries to squiggle away on its elbows, tries to slither and crawl and just get out, out, out, from under the blows.

He stops beating me, startled, he didn’t expect that. He jumps after me, he grabs whatever he can of my body, here an arm and there a foot or a thigh, my body fights and stops and fights and stops again. The fight is breathless and exhilarating. I don’t feel I have to hide my strength.

He gets a better grip. He clamps down over me with his entire body and hauls me back. I slide and chafe against the artistically embroidered bedcover and I roll myself over onto my side and he hauls me in firmly, firmly, and then he traps me under him. Cages my legs with his legs, forces my arms back behind me and rubs himself, still dressed, in thick and rough trousers, against my ass and thighs.

He rubs up and down on top of the soreness he just created and then stops. Wedges me into the corner of the bed, against the head, so that I can’t move away so easily, less freedom, less space, and now starts beating me again with his hard, strong, wide, painful, open hand.

I press against the headboard to steady myself, and he beats the soft white tissue of my ass. I’m not much of a woman for counting but even if I was I couldn’t count the blows, so fast they follow each other. The strokes land very close together, imprints overlapping, the pain and the heat spread out like a many-fingered leaf over my ass and deeper down where it starts delicious lustful subcutaneous bruises. My ass is hot and hot and hotter. And not so very white any more I think.

After a while, I don’t know how long a while, and I don’t know how many blows except that the many-fingered leaf imprints of his hands must by now make a pattern of jungles on my skin, I can feel how the topmost layer of my ass gets numb. I still feel the impact of his blows, and I can feel the bruises underneath flowing together like a lake. But the pain has lost some of its overwhelming sharpness. Its absence creates space in my awareness for the most exquisite floating in my mind. I believe some people call this place subspace, where the submissives go to fly. If that is true, then I am now Senta the subspace pilot.

I can still feel the blows but now I feel mostly their impact, how they hit me and how their power reverberates through my body, shock waves crossing shock waves and building up high tides. I can feel all the little atoms in my body shake and run around in unexpected directions.

Like an athlete, my Nai puts all his strength, skill and experience behind each blow. He hits me with great control. He chooses the angle, the exact hardness of impact, the timing. He gives me several smacks on exactly the same spot to mark me, he hits me quickly all over my ass and thighs to feel my blood rise hot to the surface.

His whole body is in my service. His arms, his back, his legs to support him, and of course his hands, his wonderful hands. He dedicates his mind to my control and his physical talents to beating me to maximum effect. Of pain, of violent impact, of surrender. To him. To his passion. He arouses my passion, he serves my passion. He expresses his passion on me. On my body. On my soul by driving me so, so forcefully, so harshly, so relentlessly into surrender.

Now I can take his passion into me. My body is there for only one purpose: to receive his beating. I enter a plateau of pain and passion. I am surrendering to the violent shaking of my body. My body becomes his. His to use, his to beat, his to own and transform.

The inside of my vagina is humming. My lips are aching to be touched. The strokes on my ass wake up all the connecting channels between my sexual organs.

I want, I want, I want, I want, so much to be fucked. Right now. Now, now, now, under the beating. Simultaneously. Beaten and fucked. Fucked and beaten. I want a hard penis in my vagina, I want it to be rammed in and I want to be taken as hard inside as I am beaten.

My screams change to deeper moans, I can hear the change myself, I’m not controlling it, it just comes out of my body, out of my voice, out of my mouth. I’m not controlling my voice, my master controls it. My master controls me. He plays my whole body like a big drum.

I feel submission rush through my skin from head to foot. To lie here, dress pushed up, knickers pulled down, on my face, on my stomach, to be pushed into the corner of the bed, to be held down by my Dom. To be spanked. To be beaten. I am getting a beating from my Nai. He dominates me.

All that matters is his control. I am under his control. He can beat me any way he wants, as hard as he wants, for as long as he wants. I can hate it or I can like it, it makes no difference. I am his property and he beats me on my naked ass.

He works on me, he works for me, he is the master and the magician’s assistant, he sends me where he himself cannot go.

I am so free. I am flying through the night, high above death. Finally, the wild savage physical sensations match the wildness of my inner life.

I am just my wildly vibrating, hugely stimulated, beaten, flying, surrendered body.

People say

Well.

First of all.

You should not be doing any of this.

You should not be doing any of this.

But since you are, and our advice can obviously only be given from a considerable distance, from the place where normality reigns, have you thought about how dangerous this is?

Not just physically. Yes yes we know you are taking all the precautions, and yes it is proving perfectly safe and nothing is happening that you don’t want and many things are happening that you do want …

What we are talking about here is the danger to your heart.

If this man, you say, who is totally different from you, and who you still don’t know anything much about, apart from the fact that he apparently takes you to heaven and dark dust of long dead kings in sex and BDSM, really is the answer to your dreams, your lifelong dreams (or the closest anyone has come to the fulfilment of those dreams so far in your life which really amounts to the same thing since you are here, at this point in your life and not at any unknown point in an unknown future), don’t you ever think about how much you could get hurt?

You are so vulnerable.

With your big dream. How do you know his dream is the same dream? And how do you know he really wants to live it? With you? Of all people?

Don’t trust him.

He will probably never call again. He’s got what he wants.

That’s what these people are like, you know. The perverts. They can’t relate. They use. They are out to hurt you.

Stop.

Stop and leave.

Now.

It can’t be done

He rolls over and lies there on his back.

He just lies there on his back and I lie over here and I don’t know how he feels.

I’m not even sure how I feel!

But somehow I still feel good. He is vulnerable and he is showing it. Well, he can’t help showing it.

‘I can’t do it,’ he says.

‘Maybe you haven’t done this for a long time,’ I say.

‘Apart from the other night,’ he says, still lying on his back, still not looking at me, ‘I haven’t had sex for seven years.’

‘And, I have no discipline.’ (I understand that this is a judgment on his entire life, a judgment made by somebody else on him, something that equals the devastation of impotence. So much for protection by money.)

This is all said so openly, so directly. I know conventional wisdom says I should not believe him, but I do. (What has conventional wisdom ever done for me?)

I get a glimpse into those seven years. Seven years of waiting, of looking, of writing messages on alt.com, of meeting, if anyone, the wrong people. Also, of course, probably, seven years of reminding himself of other priorities. Of having and developing those other priorities.

And now we are here, in bed, in a hotel room high over Ayuthaya, the town of ancient kings waiting in their urns, and we do things that the seven years dreamed of, long and long and long, and here is a woman who puts on a latex dress for him, and who holds a blue, curved vibrator inside her vagina for him, and who blushes when he tells her that now she will be punished as the vibrator falls out with too much wetness, and who sings with delight as her knickers are ripped off and who screams big screams as he spanks her, a festival of spanking after seven hungry years.

A woman who licks his penis and caresses his ass and puts her fingers in, puts all her four fingers in and strokes his sensitive spots.

A woman with soft, beautiful skin and large breasts that can be so tender that you can feel the path of each vein and so hard that the nipples push into your palm as if they want to pierce it through.

A woman who has a lot of experience and who makes little passing remarks about her previous Doms and lovers and who can come from the lightest touch on her clitoris, or a fingernail drawn not quite sweet and not quite sharp over her delicate vulva lips. And from being spanked. By him. On the right spot.

A woman who knows jokes about condoms.

A woman who matches so many of his dreams with secret dreams of her own.

Falling out of history, the urns crack open.

And now, after seven years, the moment has finally come and he is impotent.

How is a relationship defined?

By its best bits?

By its worst bits?

Is it defined by how it ends?

Oh, look, here is a tragic story, oh, look, they are happy in the end …

Everything takes on that colour …

But when they lived, when they lived it, they didn’t know.

Only the reader knows.

I had to leave

I stood in the phone booth at the station. The station and the booth and the phone were outlined in grimy black, we were all in mourning.

Grief is not clean.

I didn’t know if my coins would work. I had tried before.

I had to leave.

After Ayuthaya, he did not call again. He did not say, my darling little sub and slave princess, can I kiss you and hold you and smack you again until you sing and cry?

He did not say, be with me. He did not say, I’m sorry I have to leave you.

I was on my journey anyway. I had to go.

So I cried, black-rimmed grimy tears, and I rang him from the railway station back in Bangkok, rusty diesel engines sweating out poison fumes into a shrouded afternoon, my suitcase wedged into a decaying steel frame.

I had enough money for a minute.

He said hello and I said goodbye.

I gave him my number on the island I was going to, again. I didn’t say I was leaving forever, I wasn’t leaving the country, I gave him a chance, a more than even chance to reach me if he wanted to be with me again.

He said yes. I said goodbye.

I had met my Nai. I didn’t know what would happen to me if I stayed.

After so many years, there was someone with the same dreams. But he didn’t know if he wanted to live them, could live them. With me.

It was more than I could take. I had to leave.

Chapter 2 Tiger Island

My private monsoon

I sat on my side of the taxi and held his hand.

I sat very still.

My dream might be over.

No, all that would be left would be my dream.

Nothing else.

I tried to look at him as much as I could.

To remember him if necessary.

He was very remote.

I don’t know why, or what he was feeling.

He’s not the kind of man who’d tell anyone.

I know what I thought: I thought, he’s withdrawing. He’s preparing himself for going back to his life in Bangkok.

And, depending on what he feels when he is alone enough to feel it, he will be gone. Or not. Or be there again. Oh, I don’t know.

As I looked, something was blurring my vision.

I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. It was a very private monsoon.

I gripped his hand more strongly and pressed it like a child.

He returned my grip but didn’t look at me.

I remembered when I was very young and had to have really painful surgery done on my foot. It was awful, like being butchered. And there was no one who even showed me any sympathy.

Cold-hearted old men in white coats. Did they know what they were doing to me?

I felt so alone.

I held somebody’s hand.

I don’t remember whose.

Only that it was the only hand that was there. Somebody human. Something other than fear and desolation and pain. Even if it was an old cold-hearted man.