Out of the Shadows and Into the Darkness
A Wild Journey to the Edge of the World You Knew in Seven Bedrooms
Senta Holland

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1: Kings and Queens above the Night

Chapter 2: Tiger Island

Chapter 3: The Secret Mango Alley

Chapter 4: The Darkened Room

Chapter 5: The Tear Stained Balcony

Chapter 6: The Frozen Tea Room

Chapter 7: The White Bed

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About Mischief

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1 Kings and Queens above the Night

Kings and queens above the night

Bones. Bones, thousands of bones that people shrunk to, over the centuries. Bones so old that they told a different history from the official one taught in schools. Bones softened into dust and bones hardened into stone. Bones sealed into hundreds of urns.

I saw them, huge deep ochre and dark yellow bulging urns covering the bones, from high up in the new hotel where I stood, naked, my body pressed into the window.

My Nai pushed me into the glass as if he wanted to force me through and I would fall and be spewed into the swimming pool. Falling, I would spread out my mantle of ash and rain onto the city and join the ancient kings. My body was pale against the dark sky, soft urn for my living bones. I felt his body against mine, skin warmed in the sun, radiating back into the night like the strong red stone.

Urns sat in gardens, in streets, next to kitchens and bedrooms. Urns like towers, urns inside towers, urns that were towers.

I felt the full force of his body, his thin hard legs digging into my softer thighs, and I could hardly breathe, he gave me no space for my lungs to expand, pushed in, in, in, against the glass, I remembered I had read somewhere that glass was really a liquid, so maybe I could be pushed through, in an eternity, or at least in as long as it took for the bones of a king to fall out of changed history.

When we turned back into the room he lingered and stroked the outer skin of the thick glass.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Breast prints.’

There they were: two oily lilies.

He took them up in the swirls of his fingertips and ate the traces.

The biggest sexual organ is the internet

At first it frightened me, I knew the names and the sites that I wanted to look at but I didn’t.

And if they came up, by mistake, or by misdirection, as such sites do, even for those who really don’t want to find them, I tried not to see them but I did see them. Oh yes.

I felt the keys under my fingers, soft fingers whose touch conveys so much information. Writing on the keyboard is so sensual. I can write with both my hands, my arms, my shoulders, my whole body.

I used to play the piano, I could slide into the keys and make them respond but my piano playing was never on the same level as my playing of the internet.

I remember the first time I had access to the web at home. It was a glorious morning.

Until then I had to go to the internet café and there I wrote some fervent letters to my lovers, but of course I was well protected from the sites that drew me magically and darkly (except in California where you could access alternative lifestyle sites from the public library).

Maybe it was a good thing that the internet at home came to me late in life because by the time I had the courage to go and look, and the means to follow it up, other women had entered those landscapes of my desire before me and had made them less hostile to us.

One dark and crisp December night, one of the twelve nights of Christmas in fact, I finally entered one of the dating sites. It was just as well it was on the internet and not in real life because I was so scared that I would never ever have made it past the threshold of a club where others could have seen me.

But I had my familiar keys, and my muscle memory, and so I entered at my own pace. I dawdled a long time in the lobby, but then, I looked. I looked at some profiles, and I read what the men there were saying, what they had typed into their own keyboards, stroking them with the unique whirls of their own fingertips.

What touched me and surprised me most was that here, they showed themselves, in a way in which many men never did on the outside, not even in the most intimate encounters.

Strangely enough I found a great lover within the first few days. My kind of lover. I think of him as my gateway to the life that led me here, here in the tower above the city of kings, here to the core of my dream, and its long, slow, painful and jubilant transformation into my life.

Deeper into the night

So we are here. Really here for the second time. It’s more than a one off. He really wants to be with me another time.

The dark city, rich red bricks ripped open, walls gaping with fragmented brick dancers, bulging with the dead so that the towers crumbled, slipped into night. Urns lit up as the city was darkened down.

I wasn’t so sure yesterday, when I rang his number and heard his uncertain reply to my nervous intimacies. I was lying on my hotel bed, a delicious soreness wrapped around my ass and hips. I didn’t know the place where I was but I had been caught with a hook of hope. A tender red mark ran around my wrist, like an exotic bracelet.

With great fear of heartbreak I made my fingers press into the very foreign phone. And speak, immediately speak so that I couldn’t hear him say nothing.

But he did, anyway.

I was hanging at the end of the rope, and then he caught me again.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘I am here,’ I said. ‘I am Senta?’

Senta in veils

I am Senta. This is not the name I was given, it is the name I chose when I chose this life.

I chose to live this life, but I did not choose the dream underneath. The dream has been with me since before I can remember. It has brought me here, and here is the beginning of this story.

This story is a journey without a map. There are no official signposts, no patterns to follow.

On the contrary, it is a path that almost everyone I knew would have warned me against, or tried to keep me away from, a dangerous deviation from the common path. If they had known I was taking it.

They didn’t know, because I spent most of my life guarding my dream in the secrecy of my mind. I lived a life behind a shimmering veil of silence.

I had good reason for such secrecy. But I had also good reason for coming out of the shadows: I was driven by my dream.

Books have been written about people like me. Most of them were written by those who warn against and disapprove and condemn.

Some of them were written by people like me, a few even by women like me. But they don’t tell my story.

I am Senta. I believe there are many like me, but as yet there are no books that tell our tale, and there is no big narrative to celebrate the mystery of our lives.

So there was no map, and I didn’t know where to go. The only thing I knew was that I shouldn’t be going there at all.

I found a way. This is the map I created, and wrote down for myself.

It’s not a straightforward path, and it may not lead where you think or even hope it will lead. Coming out of the shadows and following the dream does not lead to automatic happiness. Is it worth it even if conventional (or even unconventional) happiness is not possible? Or not possible for me?

I don’t know.

It’s not the kind of story where you know.

Midnight high over the city of urns

‘I want to fuck your breasts, your beautiful –’ he stopped as soon as he heard himself, as if he mustn’t declare his passion for me. Not even at a moment like this, when he was doing things no one should see and no one did see except me (Ah! But maybe that was the reason?) and although he wasn’t holding himself back in other ways. He grabbed my breasts hard and forced his penis in between them. He pushed my own hands away. He drove himself in slow and hard, pressed my breasts so close together that only sweat could run between them. I felt him move inside the closeness. My breasts, compressed from all sides, hardened up under his grip. They hurt where his fingers dug deep. I imagined round red grooves all around the breasts like wounded pearls.

His fingers hurt more than his penis. I wished it was the other way round. I wanted to concentrate all my sensations there but the fingers drilled harder for pearls. He looked down at me and laughed and started to move the hard breasts up and down, first together, then in a kind of asymmetric rhythm. He pushed my breast up, up against my collarbone with all his strength. I have never read about this in any books but the pressure of my breast against my heart made me shout with lust and my thighs jumped up to be met. He laughed again, very wild. He was still fucking my breasts, using them to stroke and cushion and create a complex pressure system for the thousands of pleasure points on his penis. He used my breasts and he wouldn’t do anything about my thighs. Every time he pushed up, my clitoris started to pulse. I could hardly bear the distance. I wished and wished and I began to feel the soft white liquid of my desire at the entrance of my vagina. I started to cry with longing and he laughed again. I tried to lift my hips and brush them up against his legs.

‘Stop that.’ He took one hand off my breast and slapped me hard in the face.

‘I am sorry, my Nai.’ My hips came down, but I could hardly keep them from rising again. He gripped my breasts even harder. I shouted. He laughed. I heard a deep moan of frustration, lust and pain rush out of my mouth, all mixed together, nothing held back, yielding to my body, my body yielding to his. Wild laughter, wilder screams. There is no such thing as wave and rider. There are so many waves, and we are both riding them together and each riding different ones. My clitoris was so wired, I would have given anything for a touch. Anything but the greater lust of obedience. He saw that in my eyes, I saw it in his. He slapped me again.

‘You need that,’ he said, his voice shaking.

I cried. This time I cried, I didn’t stop it. Big blurry tears.

‘Please please please.’

‘Oh no.’

But then he pushed his full weight down on me, I could feel his hot ass on my stomach, the blood must be roaring through his skin to produce such industrial temperatures. His weight came down on my soft vulnerable body. How I love to feel his weight on top of me. He doesn’t release me, he pushes down into me, full skin on skin contact, harder and heavier, a counterweight to the slow turning of the earth.

I wish he would drive me down into the earth, deep, deep, down into the earth, his bones would seal me in, until my body turned to dust, until I was the earth, bound by the weight of the atmosphere, packed in by gravity.

I have wanted that for such a long time.

Outside in the night, the ancient kings held their breaths, waiting in the shadows of their urns for another, better life.

Slow red dust drifted over the gardens and murderous motorways.

Up in the glass-walled tower, I went to the bathroom to change into my little latex dress that I had bought one afternoon in Brighton, not the first time I ever considered such a dress, but the first time I actually took it off the rack and took it into the changing room to try. I could hardly open the zip I was trembling so much. I checked and checked that the curtain was fully closed, which was not easy in a small boutique called ‘Black Tantra’ where the friendly assistants would pop in with their twice-pierced tongues.

It was very difficult to put on. I had to pull it up over my breasts and closing the zip at the back contorted me past my yoga limits. Good thing it was stuck on my hips. But the amazing thing was that I was wearing it, here, right now, and I was looking at myself in the mirror and I saw a woman in a high-collared latex dress, shiny black following her curves, and a lacy veil from her breasts to her hips. I would have to wear this without a bra!

The woman in the mirror was not me. I knew that with absolute certainty. It wasn’t a metaphor.

I was not that woman. Maybe it was a woman from my future, although at that point I couldn’t believe it. More like a visitor from another planet.

But even then I liked her.

I showed myself to him, with my metal-heeled shoes and my dress. I walked in and I stood and he looked at me. I felt beautiful. I blazed like quicksilver in the night.

‘Hmm,’ he said. He sat and he looked. My body filled up with brilliance. I could have stood there forever. I wanted to be looked at, like this, with this desire, with this nascent lust, I wanted to be this stimulating, satisfying shape forever.

Many times, in the past, before I began this particular journey, I was looked at like that by a man and in time I looked back, with the same, with at least the same desire. Many times, as I was blossoming under the gaze of a man, I was then brutally rejected. Told that he didn’t really look at me like that. Told that he had looked at me but that now he had changed his mind. Told that he would never have looked at me if he had known what I was really like. And certainly would look at me very, very differently now that he had discovered my outcast sexuality.

‘But but but,’ was all I could stammer, in my mind, if I was lucky, out loud, to be shouted at, called names, threatened with pathologies.

For me, a man’s desire is not a given. Not something I can operate from, take for granted, choose from, even play with.

So in this moment I was standing there, a shape in my Nai’s gaze, I was very aware of how precious it was. He loaded me up with all the ancient attributes of being female.

My body creates desire. My Nai looked at the place where my legs met the edge of my very short dress. He saw my breasts, half tight secret shapes, half uncovered under the lacy bondage. My nipples could feel it, the progression from smooth to rough, soft pearly sweat under rubber skin to where the pattern of the lace imprints itself into the delicate substance of my breast.

All breasts, all legs, all hidden vulva. All body, woman’s body. All surface, all curves, all shapes. Shape of desire in man’s eye. Desire that will make him act, make me act.

Shape to create sex and create life.

I look at him and I see all that. He looks at me and he sees me and sees more than me. He sees the shape I am and the shape I will be. I take all the power that is in his gaze and let it load me up. It fills every pore and atom of my body. It makes the electrons race. They dance and jump and bump into each other. They’re celebrating life with great abandon.

There is this theory that the shapes your body assumes in yoga positions are shapes of ancient rituals when men and women would slide into the spirits of animals by assuming their forms. The cobra, the lion, the swan. Some people go even further and say that those shapes are already there, waiting for us in the form of hidden energy. They wait, and spring into life when we enter them. Then, these people say, we don’t just assume the shapes of the cobra, the lion, the swan. We become them.

Maybe the shape of the woman is one such shape. The shape of the woman that I feel now, painted inside the walls of a cave, on the shell of a turtle. My Nai’s gaze is the catalyst that helps me to find it.

The way I look back at him, with my eyes, with my mind, with my body, transforms him too. He looks, he gets excited by my shape. He is changed, his body is changed, the composition of the chemicals in his brain is changed, the outward shape of his body is changing. This is how he shows his adoration, his devotion. It’s a kind of tribal dance. It’s the Sunday school of the DNA.

Personally I think, when I can still think, before I melt away, that the positions we assume in sex are maybe just like the yoga positions. They are there, waiting for us, waiting for us to slip into them and then they take us over.

Power exchange

I am looking at him.

No, he is looking at me. And I am taking it in, the way he looks at me.

There is promise and thrill in this exchange. And a lot of love and trust. I am strong, I am free, I am wild. Just as he, in everything.

And I am here by my own choice.

I take in his energy. I let it go down into my very core.

He can see exactly what is happening. I hold the moment. I am in control. He humbly waits for my decision.

I choose to surrender.

Slowly, the balance of power between us shifts.

I give myself to him. He takes my power from me.

This is a complex, sophisticated process.

And it is wonderfully erotic and deeply fulfilling and dizzyingly wild. And it can happen without a word, without touch. Breath by breath.

I submit. I submit to his domination.

That is what I want. That is what he wants.

I am his submissive. Maybe for a lifetime, maybe just for now.

The tension between us is generating its own charge.

Submission to him arouses me. This is my true sexuality. Not my social role, not at all, but my sexuality.

Like many sexual orientations, it needs the right match to thrive.

Looking at each other, we have found it.

I am naked.

He is fully dressed.

He reaches out towards me.

He could do so many things to me, right now.

My submission calls for them. My vagina is opening her soft red mouth.

I want to yield and I want him to meet my softness with ruthless force.

I long to be subjected. In my way.

He touches my hair. Follows the long strands down over my shoulder and to the tip of my breasts. I am still.

My hands are bound behind my back.

Safely, in soft wide leather cuffs.

Securely, I cannot undo them, not that I want to or have ever tried, and I am powerless before my lover.

My dominant, my Dom.

He touches me, any way he wants.

I hold still. He gives, I receive. And I am in his power.

I don’t know what he is going to do next. And he doesn’t say.

That is another kind of power.

He tells me to go down on my knees.

My vagina gives a satisfied little tug.

My mind plays with the infinities of erotic subjugation.

I sigh.

I kneel on the floor, naked. He stands over me, still fully dressed.

‘Look at me,’ he says and slaps me softly in the face. A very light touch, almost a caress but not quite. I understand it perfectly. I should have looked at him without being told. This is part of his discipline. The understanding between us is part of the power exchange. We are very tuned into each other.

I look up at him.

My perspective has changed. I am much lower down now. This is my new and rightful place. At his feet.

I am getting dizzy. I am getting closer to the place of powerlessness, to the place of total yielding.

He slides his hand over my hair again but this time he grabs it, hard. All the nerve endings on my head start to scream. I have goose bumps all over my skin. He is making his domination physical.

I look into his eyes the whole time, although mine are filling with tears. He smiles. My subjection has been forced out into the open.

When he is satisfied, for now, he lets go of my hair and I kneel, hands bound behind my back, head dizzy in more than one way.

My master’s hands wander to his own body.

I am getting very moist. I think I know what is going to happen.

‘Watch,’ he says.

I do.

Slowly, very very slowly, my master is taking off his belt.

The sound as he undoes the clasp is humiliatingly, exhilaratingly familiar. I couldn’t stop looking if I tried.

He draws the belt out. Long, wide, well-worn leather. He slowly runs his hand along its length. I’m going to give up breathing.

He takes a step towards me until he stands so close that his crotch is pressed to my mouth.

I don’t know what he is going to do. Whatever it is, I will submit.

He is my master.

‘Down,’ he says quietly.

I understand. I obey.

I bend forward and lower my head until my face touches the floor, right next to his shoes. My bound hands sink into my back and come to rest on my shoulders.

Power has been exchanged.

He is the owner of my body and my soul.

He will do with me what he wants.

He may use his belt, on my naked, pale round ass, exposed and presented to him. He may turn round and take me from behind. He may play with the deep band of female arousal that goes from my ass to my clitoris, until I forget my name and even that I used to be a simple human.

Oh – what is this, exactly? Is there a name?

People call it BDSM. Yes it’s a Californian committee term.

I call it my sexuality.

My true sexuality, hidden under transparent veils.

The round-the-world ticket

I only ever wanted to stay in Bangkok for three nights.

I remember sitting in the travel agents in London, looking at the coloured bands spanning the map of the world, smooth and slightly rounded to fit the curvature of the planet. The bands were the journeys I could take. It was my choice. But there were certain conditions.

I’d found my way around California, New Zealand and Australia and now I was stuck.

‘You’re going to need another stop on your round-the-world ticket,’ said the travel agent. A fingernail traced the coloured band, swerving slightly as if with the vibrations of the flight, predicting turbulence.

I had heard of Bangkok. Of course I had heard of Bangkok. Enough that I didn’t want to go there.

You see I didn’t know it then.

On the other hand, it did seem to be well connected.

Outside, the snow was falling in thick fairytale flakes.

It mounted up on the pavement, it even covered the street, between cars, it was too abundant, the tyres couldn’t smash it down.

I thought of my shoes. I was going to be dancing in wet slush before I got home.

‘OK,’ I heard myself say, ‘let’s put in Bangkok.’

‘Yes, I think that’s a sensible choice,’ said the London travel agent. ‘It’s a good place to get to somewhere else.’

Sensible choice! Ha!

The snow flakes, big as my palm, pressed their spokes against the window. They didn’t look real but they were. All snowflakes are like that, it’s just that usually you can’t see it.

The back-up date

The smells. The smells were so different. So very strong, so individual, like the soup of seven spices. And the sound. So much sound. So much sound altogether, so many layers: the crickets that never, never stopped, even right in the middle of the city, the cars, the horns, the music. And the people. So many people.

I was overwhelmed. Just less than twelve hours ago I had been in the Australian desert looking at a sky with stars closer than humans. And all my life, right up to this point, I had always been a little chilly, somewhere deep in my bones. It was not good, but I was used to it.

When I got into Bangkok I felt the heat and my body expanded. Then I entered the jungle. The jungle of buildings. The jungle of smells and sounds.

My mind was flooded. My body was happy. This was her kind of town.

We had made contact on the internet.

I was by that time quite good at finding, selecting and meeting men. I had found them in London, San Francisco and Sydney.

I had no great hopes for Bangkok, but I made dates. Of course. I always made dates, and apart from him I had a few back-up dates.

Well, actually, my Nai was the back-up date.

That’s why we met so soon, just hours after I flew in, into the new continent. It was the only way I could fit him into my dating schedule.

So tired, the top of my neck was a glass fibre skull, I lay down on the strange hotel bed – run down and shabby like many before but filled with a different kind of air.

The smells were everywhere and I couldn’t decode them.

I could feel the moistness and remembered that the city swam on a vast underground river.

I took out my little golden book that had become quite plump from its journey and I looked at his phone number.

Part of me kept shouting: ‘I want to sleep! I want to sleep!’, another part was drifting off without speaking, and I kept waking, clutching the little book, staring at the number, looking at the small sturdy clock that was efficiently showing the passing of the new, Bangkok, time.

It’s always scary, hearing the voice for the first time. It is often so disappointing.

It confronts me with my dreams.

Today, swimming in the jungle with my eyes closed, it didn’t feel so sharp. How to judge anything? I was in a different world.

Still, when I heard him, I felt a little amused and I felt a little wary. Now I look back on it I smile how my impressions shifted – from the way he talked on the phone I thought he must be in his fifties. He spoke American with a softness of accent that seemed a little British and that reassured me. He was a man of many nations. He told me that he used to work for a newspaper, so I imagined an older journalist, maybe left over from the Vietnam War, maybe a correspondent who was no longer up to date and chose not to return to the Western life. Drinking gin tonics and relaxing into another rhythm. He talked to me with an old-fashioned American politeness, and he listened to me so that I felt less like a total stranger. Who had just flown in from another continent. Who he was meeting to discuss playing BDSM with.

But what did I know? I had only been here for a few hours.

I fought it but I did fall asleep again, just woke up in time to stagger up and put on my lucky red velvet t-shirt. And go out, into the smells and the sounds and meet him. In a place I would have to find without a map.

Crickets were waving a carpet of silver sound the night we first met.

The night we first met, boats and stars threw lanes of golden light on the river.

They did, they did.

Mosquitoes danced to their deaths.

Exotic rum circled our blood.

This is not the kind of observation that makes people take you seriously, and so maybe I shouldn’t say it, but it is true. It was that kind of night.

I walked through the evening crowd, pavements submerged under stalls selling more smells, and many colours, swimming through the reef of people who belonged here. I didn’t, but I did not feel out of place. I just floated along with them. I could see the bar at once, it was quite big, open air, very loud. The sun had already set, at 7 p.m. in the summer, and the mosquitoes were flirting with electricity.

I did see the bar but I didn’t see him. That is, I did see him but not the man who went with the voice of the afternoon. This was a young man’s bar.

But he saw me.

Maybe I described myself better to him than he did to me. Maybe I look more like my voice? Or maybe there just weren’t many white women of my age wearing dark red velvet tops moulded over DD breasts around. (In all my time in Bangkok I never saw more than four or six of them, including the two in my mirror.)

He called. He called my name. ‘Senta. Hi, Senta.’

I love it when I hear that name, and it means me.

‘Yes, I am here.’

‘Yes, I am Senta.’

Yes, I am Senta. You just created me. Well, I created myself. But you called me. Called my magic like a spirit.

Less than half a day in that strangest of cities and already I was Senta.

Someone had called me by my name.

I recognised the voice.

It must be him. His voice came out of a slender young man sitting by himself on a bench against the wall, a well-worn backpack by his side. He was wearing a loose white shirt, he was very pale, and he had deep, dark eyes. Later I was told by other women that he was a very attractive man, after the fashion of the day. I have to admit I didn’t see that. All I thought was: he talks so old and looks so young.

Out of shock I said ‘yes’, and there we sat, next to each other in the evening.

When I think about it, the most wonderful lovers I’ve met never made much of an impact on me with their looks.

At first I was just sitting there, looking at the young face, listening to the old voice. I decided to drink an orange juice.

He looked at me, his eyes blazing, and he drew me into easy conversation. I later discovered that he was very used to making conversation with first time strangers, even when he was a boy, and that for most of his adolescence he used to show his parents’ post-colonial friends around when they came to Bangkok. So he seemed quite fluent in this situation, making small talk, laughing with me, putting me at ease, welcoming and open, but not too smooth.

But I could also tell he wasn’t as used to dating as I was.

And that was how it would be: he was the one who lived here, who knew his way around, who had done many things I only dreamed of, and he was the one who was a little shy, and unused to things, and had never done many things that he himself was dreaming of.

He led and I followed, I led and he followed me. Not as easily, not as magically as on that first night, but always a little bit.

It was the magic of the power loop.

Looking at him, sitting in his white shirt against the wall, talking about something or other that was the custom in Bangkok, I felt suddenly very happy. This is how it was supposed to be, in other people’s books, mostly men’s, mostly fantasy, flying into a new continent and meet a lover by nightfall. And now it was happening to me.

I was by that time an expert at first dates, and I kept all the precautions. I listened for things that didn’t make sense, I tried to connect his talk about himself and his real life experience as far as I could tell, and I tuned into the feeling between us. I had developed a sensor for the kind of relationship I wanted. I asked him all the right questions, and he gave me all the proper information.

So yes, I listened to the voice of reason, but already I couldn’t hear it so well, maybe because of the night carpet of silvery mosquitoes. Under my bones, my blood was singing.

We walked over to the restaurant through a temple, no monks, no visible sign of religion except the buildings, but many people strolling around in peace and moonlight, and then we sat, outside, under a wide canopy, straight by the river.

He spoke Thai, of course, ‘I grew up over there,’ he said, waving his arm in a mysterious direction that called up visions of tropical gardens and high society ladies drinking gin tonics in the afternoons. The waiters looked astonished, he didn’t speak their language like a foreigner, but he looked like one.

He politely answered what must have been very familiar questions and then turned back to me.

‘My mother was away a lot so I learned Thai from the servants. People are confused when I speak, I speak Thai with a local accent.’

My image of him was changing. He was more relaxed in the semi-darkness, light gliding in from the river, surrounded by a whole table of food to share, exclaiming at the fact that I was vegetarian, ordering fried morning glory for me, asking the waiter to write it down, in Thai.

He looked at me more freely, and more deeply.

‘I have something for you’, he said, reaching towards his backpack and opening its top just enough so that his hand could reach in.

He gave me a fragile garland of jasmine. It was smaller than my hand. I smelled its intoxicating scent. I pressed my face into it and then looked up at him.

This is the way I look up to my Nai.

He looked back, and he didn’t smile. He held his hand out to me and I touched it with jasmine fingers.

Behind him I saw the river and big working boats floating through the night as they had for so many centuries.

It almost felt as if he was a local spirit come to welcome me.

I told him that.

‘No, no, no’, he said.

But I didn’t believe his denial. I had power too.

We ate, a little. We drank, a special concoction, mixed by the waiter on a separate table with precautionary high rims, more than we ate, but again, not much.

I realised quickly that he was very different from me, and from most of the people I knew. The reason why he was so easy to talk to, and why he knew so much about such different things as photography, Thai princes, internet games and the stock market was that he was rich. Not the kind of rich you get when you work very hard. The kind of rich that allows you to be open and genuine. The kind of rich that comes from your ancestors and makes you a citizen of this world. He bore a well-known name.

My own ancestors were peasants who were not even citizens of their countries. And, I worked very hard all my life but I was on a tight budget.

We looked at each other and we talked. We talked.

We talked about sex.

We talked about bondage positions, about impact sensations and the various instruments that we loved and desired.

We talked about blindfolds, about leather straps and ecstatic altered states.

It is the way of the BDSM people.

Talking like this is our tradition.

I believe it was originally introduced by the name of ‘negotiations’ between people who might become play partners, perhaps for a while, perhaps only casually.

Negotiations were and are considered necessary to establish the ‘limits’ particularly of the submissive partner, the boundaries of what could happen between them.

For me, and certainly on this evening with my Nai by the river, it was much more.

It was a way of talking about our identity.

Both our separate individual identities, a much more intimate way of introducing yourself than telling your date a potted personal history, and of course much more to the point.

But even more so we were establishing our common identity.

With every cautious, polite and gentlemanly question we showed each other our most intimate sexual desires and revealed our secret and carefully guarded true nature.

I saw the look of recognition in his eyes when I told him how much I loved to feel the touch of the bonds holding my wrists so tightly behind my back.

He took his fork and wrapped it round a morning glory stem, coated in garlic sauce, and put it down again. He ran his finger along the old seams of his backpack.

This was not just a statement about sexual preference, not just a more precise identification of where we stood within the world of BDSM, although it was that too.

It was finding, against all odds and all experience, someone who shared the dream.

And who might, if all went well, perhaps, possibly, eventually share it with us.

Right now, though, it was all the magic I could take to just see him share my dream, and I his.

And to talk with each other in the ways of the BDSM people.

I sat there, just as ineffectual with my food as he, raised my glass to my lips and put it down again.

I closed my eyes experimentally. He might disappear.

That would be the reasonable expectation.

When I opened them and he was still there I knew that a new age had descended, or perhaps I had been translated into another, unearthly realm.

Transformed into the person I wanted to be.

He made no assumptions. He never touched me except for that one time with the jasmine garland. He said who he was. And he was who he said. Against all attacks, he had preserved his innocence. In the strangest way, he was like me.

And, of course, in many other ways, we knew nothing about each other. When I finally said to him, over the roaring of a defective tuk tuk, so that I had to shout in his ear like a public announcer at a sports event, that I would like to have sex with him that very night, I had no idea and maybe not even any intention of anything beyond that.

Through a cascade of sparkles from the roof of the Royal Palace and hundreds of smoking and argumentative tuk tuks and sudden desperate hunger satisfied with deliriously sweet banana goo, and late night fears and confusion we somehow made it, we made it into our first night, in the way of the BDSM people, but even more so in our own way, the first night of Senta with her Nai.

I never bothered with the back-up dates.

How did I get here? – I was a BDSM hermit

That is a journey longer than my life.

When did it start?

I was lying in my bed.

My whole body cramped with longing. I had tied my ankles together so that I could feel the sweet surge to my vagina.

They say that self-knowledge makes you free.

Maybe. It counteracts the demons inside your soul.

But it also makes you feel your pain more acutely.

All these years I knew who I was.

I didn’t feel guilt, I didn’t feel shame.

I felt this was just me.

But I didn’t know how to make it real except in my own bed and within my own mind and soul.

I was a BDSM hermit.

Sometimes, most times, I could live with it.

I said to myself: yes, I want to be a Submissive to a Dominant in real life.

But I couldn’t be.

I said to myself: yes, but I’d like to have my own opera house too.

Some dreams are only possible for a fortunate few, a very, very fortunate few.

So then I was lying in my bed, awash with longing.

So much longing it spilled out in tears.

I saw my shadow on the wall and it was all I had.

I did have lovers.

Of course, throughout my long life before I found my Nai, of course I had lovers.

But they were not the lovers I saw in my deepest dreams.

I had sex, but I did not live my true sexuality.

What was it like, in the long, long years before I found a way to meet my Doms? (Yes, I did meet them, on my journey, even before I met my Nai.)

Before I even thought of having the courage of trying to devise a way to go and find them?

Telling a man

Lying in his arms, holding him tight and wishing he would hold me tighter, feeling his hand on my naked skin.

My body there, and my mind was dreaming and longing.

I sighed and shivered, but not from my lover’s touch.

Outside I was with him, inside I was with him too, but with a different version of him. Him as the Dom.

Inside myself, I tried to magnify his tentative stroking of my back so that I could imagine a spanking. When he put his hand between my legs I longed for him to be more forceful. I wanted him to take me completely and shake my whole body. I wanted to look into his eyes and see the joy and triumph of domination.

Instead I was alone, trying to amplify faint signals on my skin into the huge waves and towering storms that are my true home.

I often felt like a hollow doll.

Then sometimes, though less and less often as I learned from experience, I would tell him.

How to tell? So difficult. Particularly when what I wanted was still only a desire, a reality inside, the inner life of the doll, stuffed full to bursting but divided from the air by her porcelain shell.

Now it is easier, now I can start by telling a story from my life. I can hint lightly. I can watch out for signs with so much more knowledge.

I can also not have sex with vanilla men. At all.

But then?

When I was very young I sort of knew you weren’t supposed to be into BDSM. But at the same time I was so joyfully aware of the full range of my sexuality that it was hard to take that seriously.

I liked to welcome a penis in my vagina. I equally liked to welcome a hard hand on my ass, and a rope forcing my wrists together.

The men I dated then were very young too.

Maybe that was the reason.

Maybe it just was the times. People just emerging from the deadly shadows of enforced respectability.

But every single time I brought the subject up, stammering, blushing, fearful and hopeful, I got the same reaction.

I was rebuffed, rejected and despised.

The nice boy looked at me and told me I was disgusting, I was sick, I had a mental illness.

I was a pervert. He was not. He was normal.

I stood there like a witch found out. In my white shift of condemnation. I was lucky I wasn’t burned.

Only thrown out and quarantined from his healthy life. I don’t know what he told others.

There were a few of him until I shut up. For many, many years.

Before I travelled round the world.

Before I found myself, high above the dark red city of ancient kings, forced naked through the liquid glass by my master, by my Nai.

My Nai

It was a lovely room.

The style was ‘retro-colonial’ which seemed appropriate for my Nai, with a nice big white bed and dark oriental mirror and furniture. It was quite new, and in the light of the new old lamps a sudden happiness bubbled up inside me. Everything was strange, unknown, never happened before. Everything was here, together. He looked back at me, he had me, I was here. All his.

I did feel my usual mixture of soft expanding exhilaration (We’re really here! It is really going to happen!) and fear (I don’t know this man, I am a stranger with a stranger in a strange place, what if he kills me?).

It was not an altogether rational fear, because he had told me his real name, and some further details, and I realised that he was quite well known here, and I had taken a few other safety measures like leaving his details on a computer record.

And with him the fear was not so very strong, maybe because I felt that he had a deep sense of having a place in the world, of being himself, of having little to prove, I don’t know. In a way, my Nai is one of the least macho men I have been with, and that is quite curious considering all his conservative opinions and extremely dominant sexuality. Maybe it was also partly because he looked so young, and was so open, and maybe, just the tiniest bit, because he made me feel a little motherly.

On the other hand, the fear is always there, in this life, in the way we BDSM people have to live.

And of course there still was, there still is, always is, a risk, a possibility that this is the one psychopath who I couldn’t detect, that this is the price I have to pay for my way of life, for daring to be myself, to become myself, for daring to offer myself to a world that may contain my killer (of course this world contains my killer anyway, a microbe, a virus, a weakened blood vessel I carry around within myself night and day).

I have sometimes, at this point, pulled back. I have also, sometimes, gone on, against my better judgment. I wish I could say I only took the considered risks. I didn’t. I wish I could say I was only bold when it was really worth it. I wasn’t.

I know I could die this way. I also know that it is very, very unlikely. And I hate the fact that I have to take this risk. I don’t want it. It doesn’t excite me. On the contrary, it makes the first time a little, no, actually a lot less full and enjoyable than it could be. But until I find the one Dom who is the last one I will play with until the end of time or until BDSM becomes acceptable and we all walk the streets tall and free, I will have to continue to take this risk.

So I looked at my Nai, not my Nai yet in so many words, in fact I didn’t even know the word Nai yet, and what it means, I looked at the bed, the white sheets which might become my burial shroud, and the dark carved wood which might become my coffin, and then I looked at my Nai again. He smiled then said, a little more strongly: ‘Go and take a shower’. He looked very beautiful, and I had a good feeling. But of course you can never ever, ever know.

I took a last look into his eyes, I felt a connection, but I also knew that, ultimately, there is no connection that you can trust, and I looked at the risk and I looked at myself and I gave my soul a little nudge: this moment, if I have to? Am I ready? Yes. I am ready to die.

I am here! I am here! With him! With an intelligent, sensitive, secure male Dom who looks into my eyes to turn my body into spicy banana goo. And now I was going to feel the delirious sweetness.

He looked around the room and put his bag on a stand. I was getting really curious about that bag. A little old backpack, a bit torn at the edges. He slowly undid the clasp, it was an old clasp and stuck for a moment in rusty hinges. Then he slid both hands in and widened the opening, just enough to take out the first of many treasures. That bag looked so small but it turned out to be a bottomless trove of delights.

The first thing he took out was a long, long rope of sky blue material. I remembered how he had talked about it over dinner, over his spicy dish and my cooked flowers, with the lights drowning themselves in the river behind him, how he had said that the best material for bondage that he knew were the silk and high-tech fibre ties that he used for flying high in the air with just the support of a little engine, his body harnessed in just such a blue leash. I liked the image of him flying in the air, tied the way I would like to be.

He laid them out on the white white bed.

Then he ran his fingers down my spine, the first touch.

Less than a day since I arrived here. And I already was at the heart of things.

My Nai’s desire

I always knew exactly how precious it was.

And how unlikely.

To have found someone whose desires matched my own.

Not in the sense that they were exactly the same, of course not. There were many areas of difficult compromises.

But in the sense that when we played he was fulfilling his desires just as I was fulfilling mine, by fulfilling mine.

What we played exactly, the exact actions and practices evolved slowly over time.

The first few times were like very tentative sketches. We did a few things straight away that we both loved. We did not do many other things for a long time.

But what was right there, right from the first moment, was the matching of desire.

This was my true sexuality, my true life.

And it was his.

I knew that very soon, before I even touched him. It was like meeting someone who speaks your own, very rare and secret language.

The curious backpack

The backpack was old. A little torn at the top, where you had to draw a string together to keep it closed, and with rough edges that showed a pinkish colour underneath the black skin.

It was the backpack he carried on the night when I first met him. When he had looked so much like a man who had remained behind from former times.

He told me later: ‘I was very surprised, on the first night, when you said you would have sex with me’.

‘But,’ I said, ‘but you had your backpack.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘always keep the doors open.’

It was a lot to carry just for an open door.

And then there were the freshly cut bamboo sticks. He had cut them that day in his garden.

All the objects in the pack had been put carefully together. They were both a snapshot through the layers of that moment in his life and a collection from his whole history in BDSM.

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.

I gripped it with the same desperate and trustful grip that I’m holding his with right now.

But I know I will have to let it go when the pain grows worst.

At the airport, the same place where we met all these many hours ago, and every one of these hours is embedded deeply into the ridges of my core memory, I followed him from station to check-in station, all disguised as palm trees.

He put his bags on the cart, and he had to pay the airport tax, and then finally it was time and he had to go.

I followed him around with tears glistening in the tropical midday sun.

He didn’t say much and I found that I was making little remarks in a small voice.

At the end, I trotted along beside him and cried.

So much to lose.

So much just found.

So much life just opened up.

So much to develop, and maybe cut off.

Now I wasn’t sure why he had given me the pictures, though I was glad I had them.

‘I’ll call you,’ I said again.

‘Yes, on Saturday,’ he replied, again not looking at me.

We stood in the sun, beside the too cute little hut that was really the boarding gate.

The lady in the shadows nodded to him.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

Would he have just turned?

I didn’t give him the chance.

With all my strength I threw my arms around his neck and hugged him with my whole body.

He gave an embarrassed little laugh and then he hugged me back.

This may be our first fully clothed hug I thought.

How strange to hug him when I’m not naked.

I kissed him. He didn’t really kiss much, but this time I just drank and drank and drank his mouth dry.

I remembered the sea mussels, all soft inside. I was one of them. If I could have changed myself into liquid, I would have soaked him through his clothes and seeped in through his pores, so that I could travel inside him. Wherever he went. Losing cohesion would be a small price to pay.

Then I let go.

I was never one to fight to the last.

Always hoped they would stay of their own accord.

He said ‘goodbye’ and went.

I saw him give the attendant his ticket, I saw him walk past the barrier.

He turned round and waved. I waved too. The waving cut through my breath. It seemed final.

Something in me pushed and pushed.

He turned again.

I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t hold it back. I hadn’t held anything back for the last three days and five hours.

It came up in an awkward shape, unformed, unfiltered, unheard of, unthinkable.

‘Don’t go!’ I blurted out.

He stopped and blurted back.

Just as awkward and unfiltered.

‘I have to.’

Yes.

Then he was gone.

I saw him drive past, sitting on the little wagon where I had spotted him when he arrived.

I waved again, but it was too late.

Then he was gone.

The sun was very hot and bright as I walked back from the airport to the main tuk tuk ring road. It was a long way, particularly carrying my computer in my backpack. I cried and cried and cried.

My feet rubbed raw against the cheap new flip-flop shoes. I didn’t care. I was accosted by motorcycle drivers and then insulted and cursed when I didn’t want to ride with them. I didn’t care. I cried so much water I could have passed out from the dehydration. I grew a monumental headache, so that I nearly didn’t see the tuk tuk when I finally reached the main road.

I didn’t care.

In the main fishing town I found an email place, inside an electrical repair shop.

I knew he couldn’t have written, he was on the plane. I needed to read what other men had written to me, so that I wouldn’t drown.

I found many letters from men on the alternative lifestyle website: they gave me brutal commands without knowing me, they just wanted a fuck for the night, they felt all women were whores and they needed me to do all sorts of things for them while they themselves weren’t going to do anything for me. They weren’t really quite sure what they wanted. I wasn’t good enough for them anyway.

I sat between the cut-off cable rolls and the conversion plugs and thought of my Nai without panic. Even if I never saw him again, my Nai had given me an experience that was in a different world from men like that. He had been himself. I had had a chance to become myself. More of myself than I ever dreamed of. I would probably never have a relationship again, considering what was usually on offer and expected, but I had been with him. For a whole three precious days. And five hours.

I stopped the internet connection but bought the conversion plug.

It would be nice to put on the fan AND the laptop at the same time when I returned to my hut on the other island.

I remember waiting for a long time on the pier, under a thatch and between sweets stands, never quite sure when the ferry went and if I would be called for the right one and in time, surrounded by blood red dragon boats, and just looking out on the sea.

It was completely calm.

The other island

I had always planned to go to the island, sit in a hut, and write.

And that was what I did.

The hut I ended up in was right on top of a hill, overlooking the South China Sea. It had a view of green, still water in the day and of the same water, black, at night, with a string of huge lights reflected on it. The lights were spooky. They looked as if a big city had settled on the sea at nightfall, or the faraway coastline of the Gulf of Thailand had suddenly closed the gap, but they belonged to the bottom draggers who had already fished the region almost empty. All that was left when you went down to the little beach, dodging the water bottles and broken stones, was empty sand and empty salty sea. The bottom draggers themselves looked like huge spider crabs with bright white eyes at the end of their many feet. They were on the verge of replacing biology. The only animal inhabitants left here were vicious amphibians who could swim and dig through the sand with equal determination and who would cling to human toes and sting.

The only other animal inhabitants were youthful tourists who had been hoping for an authentic experience and ended up staring at the emptiness, consuming various legal and not-so-legal substances and nursing their bitten feet.

Up on the hill there were only a few of us, and our huts were far away from each other. I had a stylish veranda with artistically cut logs that still showed the stumps of their erstwhile branches under elegant veneer where I could sit and write. Thousands of ants used that log railing as a highway to circle the hut in endless ceremony. At night, dog sized lizards heaved themselves onto the veranda to survey and hiss at the scenery. Huge cockroaches and hand sized tiger-pattern spiders raced each other round my mosquito net.

We had electricity for a few hours at night, unless the owner decided to play his special moonlight collection. In that case I had more time to use my laptop but I also had to listen to his music.

I worked on my project, as I had intended, and with great dedication, considering that each night I had to choose between my laptop and the electric fan.

Every few days I climbed onto the owner’s four wheel drive truck and went on the hour-long journey on deep red tracks hacked into the virgin jungle and desperately trying to heal themselves with long green creepers, into the island’s only larger village. There the owner went off to look for visitors coming off the ferry, while other hut inhabitants went for a much needed dose of cheese in the Western café.

I walked down the dusty street and looked for a phone.

There were no internet terminals in the jungle huts, but the dusty boom town street had them.

The first time I came down with the jeep I almost didn’t dare to enter. My Nai hadn’t contacted me, not at all, since I had left on the train, but then there were many possibilities or reasons. One of them was of course that he didn’t want to contact me.

Still, I had proved to myself that I was strong. I had found him. I had realised that he was what I wanted, and more. I had given it my best, I had made it clear to him and to myself. But I had not raised my hopes, and consequently I had not had them dashed.

So I was telling myself when I went into Mr Hong’s world-wide connection shop and sat down at the ancient computer with the encrusted keyboard that did its best to crank itself up to the speeds required by global communication. The lights on its old curvy screen flickered dangerously.

I had many other people to look up of course. I decided to start with those others first, and end with them. Looking for a mail from my Nai would have to be sandwiched in between. Safety insulation.

So many mails never come.

In my journey on that round-the-world trip, the most common mail I got from a Dom was the first.

And still I looked out for my Nai’s mail from the corner of my eye.

What does it matter, the project, the island, the fear, the hope, the lizards on the veranda.

The only thing that counts is his skin touching mine. And knowing that he is, so finally, so simply, so improbably the one who understands me.

He was there.

His mail was already a few days old.

He had tried several times, he said, but there was no getting through on the phone number I had given him. But he had set up a special account, just for us, just for him and me, if I wanted to write to him. Ever. Or now. Or ever.

I ran out into the hot street, startling the dying dogs and Mr Hong who had never seen a tourist leave the shop with minutes of airtime still unpaid. The next time I went there he was cautious, as if he suspected me of not really being a tourist. Or carrying some other dark secret.

He had a good instinct.

I knew I didn’t have a lot of time left. I had to catch the truck before it went back through the wounded jungle.

Of course there were no phones. All I could find was a lady in a travel agency who let me use her mobile, at an exorbitant fee.

It rang. It was the wrong number, no it was the right number.

He answered.

I stood in the relentless sun, getting my skull burned.

My ear filled with sweat.

He answered.

What matter the details?

He answered and his voice was small. He didn’t recognise the number, he said. Of course not! It came from jungle island.

‘You are calling,’ he said. Twice. Then he said it again.

‘I tried to ring but they said you weren’t there.’

‘So I went away. Right now I’m – being blessed. At a temple.’

He made a little embarrassed laugh.

‘And now you are calling.’

Of course he could not come to the jungle hut. My lizard would never have allowed him in.

For weeks I stood there in the dusty sun, talking to him on the phone. Yes, there was one. The locals used it and they had made it look as if it was broken. They needed the income from the mobiles.

But I was such a frequent user, I was given access to the proper phone.

Then I went back on the truck, squeezed between water bottles.

‘I’m going to come and meet you,’ he said. ‘On the other island.’

He gave me a time.

I would have gone there straight away. If I ran I could have jumped on the ferry. I could see it from where I stood.

But it seemed he had a schedule that we both had to follow. It would mean a complicated journey and a tremulous wait on the other island where they had an airport.

Just like my life.

I told everyone.

Well, not about the BDSM, but about the meeting.

I told the owner, I told my fellow hut residents, I told the ants and the lizard. When the cockroaches raced across my bed before the swift claws and poison of the tiger spider I smiled benevolently.

I counted the hours, I counted the days.

I drank coconuts at the airport.

I never thought he would really come.

But I saw him, riding on the last cart, wearing an island hat.

Intimate studies

‘Now you want to come,’ he said.

‘No. Well, OK, yes.’

I snuggled into the crook of his arm.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘When you’ve been spanked you want to come.’

I had never thought of it like that. I had thought of spanking, of course! And had been spanked. And I love sex. But never like that, a connection that describes my sexuality.

‘Yes,’ I said, surprised, ‘that’s true.’

‘I’m beginning to know you.’ He was so pleased.

I was pleased too. No, I was thrilled. To be known, so intimately. To be so intimately studied. To lie here, skin to skin, touch to touch, under the pink duvet, with my Nai.

My Nai always travelled with his pink duvet.

And he always turned the aircon to zero.

This was one of the many ways in which he acted like an upper class Thai. Although he was American, he had lived here in Thailand longer than anywhere else. He had grown up in a garden in Bangkok with mango trees and spoke Thai with his nannies while his mother spoke English with princesses.

When I first got to know them I didn’t realise how important names are, to Doms. Every Dom has a very specific desire, and he wants to be called by a specific name.

To me, that was quite alien. My desire to submit didn’t focus on magical names (well, that’s not entirely true, it didn’t focus on magical names for Doms, but there was some word magic elsewhere). But when I understood, I started to find this quite endearing. Adult men with identities had the chance of re-naming themselves, and of naming their passion.

Of course there were quite a few whose imagination wasn’t so original, or who had been powerfully attracted by tradition. They did want me call them ‘master’ or ‘sir’ and at first I just did it to please them, it held no special meaning for me.

Later I met those who had other ideas. Some names emerged from amorous nicknames, some were cryptic and clearly carried a lifelong significance that would or would not be revealed but would resonate with my lover every time I said his name, some were unashamedly the names of impossible daydreams, and some the names encountered in the shadow lands.

And now my lover and Dom had a completely new, unheard-of name.

My Nai.

The two go together.

My Nai.

Like my Lord.

So new then, the word Nai, and what it means to him. Actually, I am still not sure. What it means to him. I know it is a Thai word that means something like ‘lord’ or ‘head of the family’ or ‘someone of high rank’. But to him, I think, it means a lot more.

It means being accepted and recognised in the culture he lives in and grew up in. That may never happen in Thailand, since he is after all a foreigner, tall and pale. The certainty of never belonging.

His servants call him Nai. Oh yes, he has servants. He has a driver, and a cook, and several maids. He has a wing of the house where he lives. And another wing for his estranged wife, when she visits. And a guest wing for parents and American relatives.

I had never been intimate with someone who had servants.

I had never been asked to call anyone Nai.

I didn’t. I called him my Nai.

He smiled.

‘I am the Nai,’ he said. ‘My household knows that. If I change, they have to change with me.’ And he held himself up more proudly and smiled again.

At moments like that he looked so fragile. I could have held him in my palm and broken his wings with a snap of my finger. At moments like that I opened my heart to him. Of course, moments like this would also turn against me. Right now, I was the personification of his freedom. Later on, in his mind, I would join the ones who didn’t let him be, didn’t let him be the Nai.

But at that time, all I could see was a boy who would be Nai. Just as I was a woman who lived her dreams.

I shivered with secret delight, I was me and not me, I was becoming the other person, the person who lived in my dreams. Because I didn’t know her, at least not very well, in many ways I didn’t know how she would react.

In the morning I took my shirts out and we saw a huge spider, more like a scorpion or a tarantula, running with hairy bended knees out of my armhole. All my life I would have been struck with dread and screamed and run, out of the door. But because I was the new person, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how she would react to a monstrous spider creeping out of her armhole. So I stood and looked and said, very calmly, ‘I am afraid of spiders.’

He stood very calm too and said, ‘Yes they are everywhere.’

‘Even in such a nice hotel?’

‘Yes, even in such a nice hotel.’ He laughed very quietly.

‘They live here!’

Maybe he was used to them. Probably. Or maybe he was a new person, too. Maybe he, too, no longer knew if he was afraid of spiders.

Another interesting effect of becoming a new person is that your lover gets to know you better than you know yourself, in certain ways.

So that he can say: you want to come when you’ve been spanked.

And he loved that. He adored the fact that he knew me so intimately. I’m not sure if he realised that I didn’t know myself so well. I’m not sure if he realised that I was becoming a new person.

How could he know? He never met the old one.

Humiliation in the jungle bed

The hotel room was like a little house, with a tiny garden and white bricks and carved monkeys on the table.

We had no neighbours except the sea, just a few metres from our heads when we slept.

He had his backpack with him.

‘How did you get that through airport security? With all those weapons?’

I still don’t know but he did.

Again he began the unpacking of the treasure. He had a lot more rope with him, blue like the sky it was designed to make you fly in.

He unpacked the well-used belt, the collar, and a pretty new leash from the weekend market, the puppy section.

We were lying close on the jungle bed, after a long wonderful session trying out so many things, for the first time together, and maybe even for the first time ever. Then we whispered, only a little louder than the sea, but so close that our skins could lip-read, and he came up with the next one I delighted in.

Now I think he must have made a list, from all the things I wrote to him on Mr Hong’s ancient world access machine, or told him on the phone, in the hot midday sun in the dusty main street on the other island’s shanty town. All those days, he was working on the list.

So he whispered to me, after a long exciting session of breast bondage, all done by the book, but not quite by the book, in his own, Nai style of doing things.

With intense concentration he worked on my nipples. He made my breasts swell so that they overspilled their D cups, and had to be bound, securely he said, to be tormented in the proper way. And when he was done he tormented my nipples, so shy, so quick to retreat at any hint of danger, they grew hard and long and red, and ached from the air that touched them.

I still have a photograph of those tormented, huge, wildly excited nipples standing out from my aching breasts.

He had asked me, respectfully, if he could take pictures of me.

‘Of your body, only, in play,’ he said earnestly. ‘I’ll make sure no one can identify you, not that I want to show them to anybody.’

And when I looked a little hurt he said: ‘Of your face at breakfast.’

When we left for the tropical airport he gave me the pictures on a data stick. True to his word, there was not one that combined my face and my body.

My body was sensationally beautiful. He had chosen the most sexually outrageous moments and the closest close-ups of my most intimate places.

My face at breakfast looked confused and insecure.

There was not one picture that showed both of us, my Nai and me, together.

‘So,’ he whispered into my hair, after he had released my breasts into his long, bony hands, and kissed them long and wetly, ‘what is it that you want, in humiliation?’

I couldn’t say it, straight away.

‘Come on, you’ve mentioned it, now you’ve got to say it.’

‘Oh. Yes.’ I had mentioned it, when he asked me what I wanted. As usual, I had just said the truth. Never thinking he would listen.

So I closed my eyes, really fast, and snuggled up to him, stomach to hip, skin to skin, and all I could do was whisper: ‘I want to be made to say things. Embarrassing things. Humiliating things. About me.’

He gave me a hug.

‘Now, make yourself come.’

‘I don’t know if I can, my Nai.’

I started to try. But it didn’t work. Partly because I’m not very good at making myself come when there’s somebody else there, it’s too private! Almost like cheating on my most trusted and most vulnerable lover, me. And partly because I didn’t really want to. After all, I can make love with myself whenever I am in a romantic mood, but I can’t make love with him if he’s not there. I suddenly felt very sad, not knowing if, after these few days, I would ever see him again. So for those precious moments, those few precious moments, he is here, and I’m supposed to make myself come all by myself!!

I looked at him, sort of forlorn.

He said: ‘Think of being spanked.’

In spite of myself, I felt my pelvic muscles go soft and finally a few drops of moisture coated the lower end of my vulva, just outside the entrance. What I think of as rolling out the red carpet for my lover.

It was just so overwhelming, so recent, the hot hard fast, never-ending spanking, so hard and fast and hot and sharp and close, so close his arms his legs, all hot and the spanking, the spanking so furious time looped on itself and there really was no end.

My body was still there, still glowing and swollen, my brain hadn’t had the time to lay down memory coils, so it was all fresh, all still there – I grew more liquid under my fingers, and slowly I could feel the big inside muscles relax and shiver playfully.

I could hear my Nai giggle. A giggling Nai! He only giggled if he told me stories about silly people. Or dogs who peed into flower pots.

‘You do so love to be spanked,’ he giggled.

‘I do,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do.’

How wonderful to say it, like that. So directly. So clearly. No smuttiness, no twisted ‘I am doing this but really it is dirty and so are you,’ no adolescent forty-year-old swagger.

Just real.

I feel as if I am being seen without mirrors. Without filters and mirrors, without distortions. It feels as if it is me who is being seen. Not like so many times, a man looks at me, and all he sees is just himself in drag. Like my first lover on alt: thinking about where he should have been, rather than be with me. Looking at me, making me into the symbol of his sexuality, the part he craved and despised, the part he rejected, the part he looked down on.

That was one of the best things about my Nai: he looked at me and he saw me.

Sometimes. When we were having sex. When we, and more importantly when he was engaged in a scene. It was as if being my Nai in a scene gave him the ability to see me. To see. A transformation that brought him into his full power, and beauty, and brought all his talents into balance. Passion woke his hidden powers. Passion made all the parts of his body and mind more clearly defined. Passion was the catalyst that blew him into another dimension. A higher frequency of himself.

When he was out of it, he was just as blind as other men. Sometimes blinder. Often, because, as a traditional, unquestioning conservative, he was not a member of the reality-based community. Outside passion, he could only see the world as handed down to him.

But not now. Now he had eyes like an eagle satellite. That could spot a Russian submarine from twenty miles up in space. That could see everything for what it was. He had eyes like an eagle and moved like a tiger. The tiger that was already there of course. He lives here. On this island. In this jungle. Maybe he’s lived in this hotel room all the time. Waiting for my Nai to show up. Waiting to be him.

Waiting to see me.

What could be difficult, after this?

I get closer. My Nai can sense it. Whenever I lose the way, I concentrate on the burning sparkles from the spanking in my ass.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘say: “I am such a slut.”’

Interesting. This isn’t even a very powerful word for me. The world of sluts and, what would be the other side? Good girls? Moral women? Whatever it is, it doesn’t carry much of an erotic charge.

But when he tells me to say it, out loud, I feel its connections to other, wilder, more humiliating words.

I have to say, out loud, in front of another person, who I am, deep inside, in the dreams that nobody knows. I have to bring my darkest identity out and show it. Show it to him.

Something that I have been hiding. From the outside world, from the accusations of evil, from the insinuations of deviance, from the suspicions and the attempts to change me, or cure me, or push me out of society. From myself, even, for a long time. If he only knew, my Nai would tell me to say some other words, words that are far more loaded for me, loaded so deeply that, for a long time, I couldn’t say them, not even to myself, not even to my therapist. And that was when I finally decided to talk to a therapist just about that, my sexuality. I couldn’t say the words any more. It was as if a big iron door, too long unused, had rusted and settled into its closed and shuttered state, so that the only way to open it would be to push it until it collapsed. Or to explode it or melt it down. Or to laser it away with the newest technology. Or for the earth to open up and eat it all.

If he knew he would tell me to say: ‘I want to be spanked. I deserve to be beaten. I need the belt. Please, Nai, I need the belt.’

These would be the words of power.

For a long time, I would never say them. For a long time before that, I wouldn’t even write them, form them in my mind. When somebody else said them, with apparent ease, either because they said them so often they had become desensitised or because the mere saying of words didn’t have, for them, the same power, I got a charge from them, like an electrical shock. I thought it must have been visible to the speakers of the words, but maybe not. Maybe not if they don’t feel it themselves. Maybe not if they didn’t watch me closely enough. Like my Nai.

I came closer to coming, opening up from a lot deeper inside now.

‘Say it, say it now. I am such a slut.’

I opened my mouth. I ran my fingers over my clitoris. I formed the words in my mind, but they didn’t come out.

Say it.

‘I … I … I …’

‘Say it, slut.’

So I have to say it. Now. I dive deep down.

My Nai holds my hand. Literally. He holds my hand away from my clitoris. He holds it hard. No way to wiggle. No way to escape. No danger of escape.

‘Say it, slut, now.’

I open my mouth again but nothing comes out, not even a sigh or a syllable.

My Nai gives me a sensuous soft stroke, with his hand and with my own hand. My arms and shoulders and neck melt away with softness. He touches my breasts very tenderly with his other hand, almost flying over them, lingering over the bruises, making them feel hot and releasing more memories.

‘Now,’ he says. ‘Don’t stop. In a moment I’ll let you come. Are you ready to come?’

‘Yes, yes. Yes, my Nai.’

My Nai reaches into the slim triangle that I have opened up at the top of my vulva. His fingers join my fingers.

‘Hmm, nice. Nice and wet,’ he says.

It’s taken me a lifetime to understand what a man means when he says that something is ‘nice’. I would probably translate it into ‘wild’, ‘exciting’, ‘makes me go crazy’. But for a man, it’s ‘nice’. So, now, here, in the presence of the tiger who is dragging open the long-closed doors of my heart with its bare teeth, I, the sexual being, am ‘nice’.

His fingers push much harder than mine, and, at this stage in our relationship, a little too hard for me, and a bit too fast. No inkling of the clit fests to come. When I was contorted on the floor with continuous orgasms, one pushing the other, pushing the other, until my stomach muscles cramped, until I felt I was going to throw up.

‘Now,’ says my Nai, his mouth very close to my ear so that I could feel his breath, ‘open your eyes.’

I open my eyes and I can see his face so close to me. He looks into my eyes, and he whispers: ‘Say it. Say it. Say it to me.’

‘I don’t know,’ I say, my body shivering because in all this time he hadn’t stopped rubbing my clit and I hadn’t stopped running my fingers around my labia either.

‘I don’t know if – if I can. I’ve never said this. I’ve always kept my eyes shut.’

‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Yes, if you keep your eyes shut you can always pretend it isn’t you. Look at me.’

Actually, I think, it’s not so much that it isn’t me when I keep my eyes shut. It’s more me, even. It’s that I don’t have to bring it out to you. Show my insides, my deepest secret insides, to you.

‘Yes, Nai,’ I say, and I do.

I look at him. He looks back into me.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Now say it.’

I want to have some peace, to collect myself. I want to meditate on it, make the private, secret core of me rise from the depths, slowly, as slow as it needs to be, and then I want to take a good long time to think about it, and hold it in my heart, and head, and then, maybe then – maybe –

Maybe then the doors will still be rusted. Rusted shut from all that time in the rain.

Maybe then it will be perfect. Maybe then it will come out in a full, mature, perfect shape. Completing the circle.

But that’s not how it is. That’s not how it’s going to be. No peaceful retreat. No thoughts. No maybe tomorrows.

My body trembles with different rhythms. I’m already catapulted into speaking. I feel my Nai’s body along mine, all along the length of it, the silky skin touch, the muscles that held me down, with such determination, the bones underneath.

I look into him, I go cold with fear, I feel faint, I feel disoriented, I don’t know any more what is up and what is down, the room is slanted, it stands on its side, pierced on fear.

I want to run away and hide, outside with the spiders and snakes. I want to stay here, close to my Nai, and just give up and crumble into a ball and cry and be held by him.

I want to jump and rush and slide down the stream while I scream, loudly, the words, so that they can be part of the wind.

I look into my Nai’s eyes and I can feel the shame creeping up my neck and cheeks, and for the first time I see in his eyes the satisfaction he feels at calling up the shame, and making me show it to him, to him alone, the owner. I feel his body press hard and his penis grow harder.

Tears streaming out of my eyes, I never look away. I say the words.

‘I am such a slut.’

A strange jungle sound follows them. It must be that all the animals, crowding the darkness beyond the hut, stopped for a moment in their business of killing and eating and fucking and running and fighting. The sound comes from my throat. Something ripped out of me. Something is pushing through the rusted doors.

‘I am such a slut,’ I say again. It’s a little easier now but my burning cheeks are only beginning to bloom. I can see how it pleases my Nai.

‘I am such a slut, I am such a slut.’

He rubs and clamps and tears at my clit.

‘I am such a slut, I am such a slut.’

The words are just sounds now, they mean nothing in themselves, they mean I am yours Nai, you are my Nai, I am showing myself, you tore this out of me, and you receive it. You receive the full power of my anguished soul and the full triumph of me going up in flames. I shout at you, I hack at you, I overwhelm you with the force of my finally freed being.

You take it and you better be strong.

You take it and you better be able to take it in, and hold it, and make it part of yourself, because it is no longer just part of me.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, I come.

Yes, I come with you.

And see such a smile on the face of my Nai.

In the sea

Over lunch, I talked to him about having sex in the sea.

It is strange, now, looking back, that all this time he hadn’t even had a full orgasm yet inside me. He had given me some great orgasms that morning, and he was happy about that and he was proud.

Proudly playing with me in the sea, showing off his catch.

But still, I was a little worried for him. For me. I was worried that if he didn’t have a full orgasm inside me soon he would give up on the whole affair.

He sat there, not eating much, telling me a story. We had just tried again and when he didn’t stay erect he had turned it into some other play.

I looked around for inspiration. I told him that I’d never had sex in the sea, and that was true. He told me about his diving life. I could see he was feeling a little more relaxed.

He seemed so laid back, almost fatalistic, that it was hard to judge how much he was affected by his impotence.

I had loved sleeping in the same bed with him. My skin brushed by his skin. My scent wrapped up in his. I could have lain there forever. Sleeping with him for a night, a whole night, the first whole night! I never wanted it to be morning.

In the morning he had smiled and counted my orgasms, and made me say (with much blushing) ‘Spank me, my Nai’. He was proud of my orgasms like a boy of treasures he found on the beach. He wasn’t hard to read then, he was very happy.

And I was a little less anxious, since I had managed to become his proud possession.

But still – he didn’t mention his own missing orgasm, and he didn’t really attempt it any more.

Except to say, occasionally, that he was growing old and that I should have known him ten years ago.

So I sat under the thatched roof of the seaside restaurant with him, having lunch by ourselves at I don’t know what time, except that it was not lunchtime for anyone else, and talked to him about having sex in the sea.

We didn’t look into each other’s eyes.

We looked at the table and the water and we talked, very indirectly. Diving in the big waterholes when he was a dive master. Feeling the water around you. How people had looked at my breasts, this morning, when he ripped my top off in the water. How my breasts were developing sunburn. How I’d never had sunburn on my breasts.

For me, with my strong feelings and my aroused body, it was difficult to extract from his nonchalant stories how important it was for him to manage to fuck me.

But I did find out when he suddenly stood up, took my hand, pushed my head down just enough so that I couldn’t see where we were going, only the ground and his feet, and led me to the quiet cove, next to ours, where the water was deeper and the hotel was hidden by a big flank of a hill, populated only by the jungle.

I let myself be led, it was such a heady delight to be led, not knowing where we were going, not having to know, not having to find out. I was no longer the navigator.

It was just a walk by the beach, but for me it was a walk into the unknown realm of submitting to him, of following the creature that had risen from the sea.

This cove was much deeper, and there weren’t so many corals to cut your knees on. He started to run, to draw me in, and we put our flippers on and swam properly. He showed me how to spiral round and round and I lost my goggles and we had to look for them under the sea, and then, suddenly, he found them on some rocks, high enough for us to stand on without drowning, between the hill and a small dragonback island and faraway from the beach. He kissed my shoulders and rubbed my newly sunburnt breasts in the salt water and then, suddenly and very roughly, he pulled my swimsuit down all the way. I tried to hold on and I tried to let go and then he dived down and grabbed me and pulled it off my legs. He squeezed it under his armband, very professionally, and pulled his own swim pants off. He took his time with the preparations and held me in an unforgiving grip. I realised that it was going to happen now, I was going to be fucked in the sea, and it was going to happen whether I liked it or not. He slapped me a few times in the face and ordered me to grab him round the waist.

‘I’m going to take you, slut,’ he said and his face was flushing dark red.

I felt his penis. It was there, it was hard and, maybe one reason that explained his problems, apart from the long solo tours, it was very large. I couldn’t see it in the bottle-green water, he wouldn’t let me look down, only into his face, into his eyes, that had a savage look in them that I had not seen before. I felt a matching savage lust.

His penis rubbed against me under the water, and I tried to catch it with my thighs, and squeeze myself onto it.

He slapped me again and again, not cruelly, but hard and well practised (he knew how to slap with authority but also without causing injury) and his breathing changed.

I just wanted to be taken by the monster from the sea. Legend had it that such monsters lived under the rocks that rose ragged and spiky out of the island waters. One day they would rise up and pierce us with their dragon claws.

I was looking into his eyes and smarting from my last slap when he suddenly rammed himself into me. All the way.

I could see his fierceness and his delight when I screamed. His penis rubbed salt into my vagina, and I could feel my secret skin inside rise up with thousands of tiny scratches. It made me feel his whole length, and alerted me to every nuance of his movements.

I was being subjected, mastered, used and hurt for his pleasure. It made me crazy with lust, and with submission. And I still had to look into his eyes, open and naked and no defence and no retreat.

He thrust in deeper, and I felt him open me up.

I just wanted to throw myself back and splash my arms and legs and I didn’t care who saw me and heard me and if my head went under the water and I joined the fish.

His penis slipped out.

I looked at him, I wriggled close, still aroused, but now I was also anxious.

I didn’t want to lose my lust, but even more I wanted him to come, to come inside me, take me with his penis, now. Now or never.

He pushed it back in, and I screamed again, new salt water biting the old marks.

‘Push yourself against me.’

I held and I pushed and I squeezed and I shouted and felt and felt him, and his body was so hot, the hottest spot in the entire South China Sea, visible from space, there must be alerts on the satellites.

He held me up in the water and his face and neck and chest were dark red, suffused with hot, purple blood, just under his skin, a scratch away, and he breathed and breathed and breathed, and I moved against him and with him as much as I could, without anything to hold onto but his body.

All the time I was crazy with arousal, and dizzy from the sun and being taken, naked, in the sea, the way he liked it and the way he wanted it. I was delighted that he could take me the way he wanted it and I was feverish with hoping that he would, the whole way.

Because underneath my delight and my animal lust and my special submissive arousal at being taken while my vagina burned, and slapped in the face and made to move the way he told me, I was dancing a delicate dance, trying to encourage his penis to stay hard and stay in, squeezing my vagina muscles enough but not too much, finding the right angle to push, not to be persuaded away by the slow current of the tide, coaxing this hard, big, exquisite, unexpected huge penis to stay in the dance and feel me and push me and pierce me and not fall back, shrink, slip out, but stay and grow and be as wild as its master. And my master.

I felt how my Nai worked, his legs trembled where he stood, his whole slim body generating desperate energy, wanting to let go, just like me, wanting to dissolve into the sea, but not too soon, wanting to feel his erection and enjoy it and be proud, and feel me around it and hammer me and fuck me and blast me and master me and subject me in penetration as he was subjecting my mind and body in so many other ways.

He wanted to, so much, and yet he was wary of just giving himself to it, let it flow, in case it stopped again, in case his body let him down as he had felt it had let him down before.

I remembered how quickly he had pulled out and given up, that night in Ayuthaya, not given himself a chance to start up again, and I was glad I hadn’t tried to, either, just lain there with him, resting my head on his chest, caressing and licking his body, not his penis, softly, tenderly, talking.

Only now, exploding with heat in the sun, fucking hard in the sea, yes, yes, because that’s what we were, fucking hard in the sea, I realised how much he had wanted this, and how fragile everything still was, in spite of the wild movements, in spite of his reassuring continued size, in spite of the dominant thrusting and ramming himself into me.

I felt the wave of my own orgasm building up. Every movement of his penis made me contract, and the point behind my cervix where the tension collects before it opens out and swallows sea water until it drowns, happily, was gaping its hungry mouth.

I wanted so much to come, my body wanted to come, but, more than all that, I wanted him to come, to grow as hard and full as he could, and then come to orgasm, inside me.

I wasn’t sure.

I felt his heart beat, fast, so fast, I felt his breath, I looked into his eyes, I gave him my lust and my submission. I felt his penis but I didn’t know for sure, I couldn’t tell, and I tried to hold my own orgasm back, so that I wouldn’t squeeze too hard, didn’t disturb his rhythm, didn’t spoil it for him, he was so close, so close this time, to coming inside a woman, after seven years.

Finally, he threw his head back and held me so tight I sputtered for air.

Then he relaxed.

I had to look at him, I didn’t know. I saw it in his face, yes, he had come.

The peak for my own orgasm was past, but seeing him so happy made me dance with joy and I coaxed some of the contractions back, and he held me, tenderly, joyfully, trying to make sure I got my fill, and I came, a few times, as his penis sunk back, out of joy and release, and knowing that in the future, if there was a future, I would come and come and come, with that huge penis, and being fucked and opened up like that, my vagina still wasn’t closing herself again, as if in shock, or, maybe, gaping for more, until I, too, dropped back into the sea, and we both floated, hair and arms and legs drifting over the coral reefs, a pair of still hot satiated choice morsels for any passing shark, for the sun to shine onto, for the angry little fish to snip at, and for the locals to point to and photograph.

Until that moment I think I never fully realised how vital being able to fuck a woman with his penis and come inside her is for a man. I had had some limited experience of impotent men before but they always played it down, so I did too. I had heard advice on the radio and I had seen training videos for counsellors which all seemed to say that it wasn’t such a big deal.

I never really understood men until this moment in the sea with my Nai.

Until that moment with my Nai I didn’t know, not really, not intimately, not from my lover while he fucked, how much a man’s whole being is affected by the performance of his penis.

Only now the circle had closed for him, and only now was he really free to give himself to our play.

Because of this moment the relationship took on a whole different dynamic. He was wilder in his play, and I had found a very deep, intimate place in his affections. Because I was the woman who had been with him in this moment. Who had been with him through this moment. I was the manifestation of his rebirth as a sexual being.

While for me, he simply transformed my entire life.

So that was fair.

I could have reflected on all this that same evening, in our bed, when he was taking me into the deepest and most intimate humiliation I had ever known and always desired.

But by then I was again flying without a pilot, and so much immersed in the present that I didn’t even notice it.

The match

So what is it that I want so much?

So much that I travelled round the whole world and spent so many years looking?

I want to fulfil my deepest needs. And I want to find someone who has and knows his own deepest needs.

I want someone who matches my desires, so that I fulfil his and he fulfils mine, just and exactly by being who we are.

It sounds impossibly ambitious, and it is very simple.

On the most primal, biological level, it is not at all too much to ask.

On the contrary, it is the most common relationship dynamic in the world.

Animals have it, plants have it.

They have it with other animals, other plants who are genetically developed to match them. They also have it far beyond that – with the environment they live in, with the temperature, the moisture in the air, the chemical composition of the soil and the water. With their choice of planet. I don’t know if they feel fulfilled, but they are. They each have what they need and they give to their partners what those partners need.

On some level I claim the same rights as a duckweed or a one-cell amoeba swimming in a slimy pond. I want to be matched. And I can provide the right match.

But of course it’s not always so easy.

Particularly for humans whose needs appear to be so much more complex, although I don’t actually think mine are.

Still, the matching process doesn’t always work.

A dog in a city apartment, a flower on a windowsill, or a worm eating earth of the wrong kind of acidity will not find it.

I don’t know how much they suffer. I don’t know if they even know the cause of pain.

BDSM as I practise it is a very sophisticated concept, evolved and refined over thousands of years of human culture. It involves biological, mental and psychological aspects. As do romantic love, team sports and international politics.

But BDSM is also a primal need. For us, the BDSM people. It’s not something that we choose, it chooses us. It is who I am, just like the grass, just like the cricket that sings in it.

People say it is naïve to look for a perfect match in those complex mental and psychological constructions we carry in our evolved little heads, but I don’t think I am. I am quite happy to accept a rough match that leaves many areas of my life open to other relationships. But I do need someone who matches the core.

People shake their wise human heads and predict self-inflicted failure.

But I don’t accept that.

After all I only want what every plant and dog has.

If they are allowed to go out and find it.

If they are allowed to evolve in the environment they need.

If they can develop into their true nature.

That is all I ask.

I stayed

I didn’t realise until much later why he took the photographs.

He thought he would never see me again.

He wanted to be able to prove to himself, old and alone and masturbating to the internet again, that this had really happened.

So I stayed.

I left the jungle island and the dusty boom town, I left the lizard behind who guarded my door. I abandoned all other plans.

Our phone talks had changed.

Calmer, more matter-of-fact, discussing details of my coming to Bangkok.

Underneath, my body was expanding into the heat. My heart gave a steady joyous beat. Sometimes we stopped talking and just said are you there? Yes I am there for a few minutes.

Then he would say something outrageous and I felt very lonely with my unspanked bottom. So I had to tell him that. So then he came up with something even more outrageous until my skin tingled in the dusty heat.

I didn’t tell him I was going to stay for a long time. I only said I would come up to Bangkok. He made plans.

‘We need a place where we can make noise,’ he said eagerly. ‘An old building, with thick walls and large rooms and no neighbours.’ It seemed that he was on a mission to look into such places, and he had found one. He was excited. He was rediscovering his own city. A different layer of the city opened up to a different man. The hotel was just round the corner from where he lived. He’d never been there.

‘It looks like a palace,’ he said, wondrously. ‘And you are going to have two empty floors around you.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘I said it’s a guest who makes a lot of noise,’ he said proudly, ‘and they said it was no problem. They’re probably used to strange requests.’

He made me sound like a rock star.

He was looking forward to making me make the lots of noise.

Of course my Nai was not single

My Nai was not a very young man, and like me he had had lovers before. He was married to one of them. He had been married to her for a very long time.

His marriage was a strange affair, at least to me.

He didn’t actually live with his wife, but he also didn’t live as a single man. His wife lived in another town, an elegant place by the seaside, and she visited his house, where she had her own wing.

My Nai had his own wing too and there was a shared central part of the house for entertaining guests and official activities. Yes, he was that kind of rich.

When she was in Bangkok, she attended various social functions, and took part in a lot of events. To some of these occasions she was accompanied by my Nai. I believe a lot of the money was hers.

They had not had sex for seven years but they were economically and socially interwoven.

Many men in my Nai’s position here in Thailand, with a formal marriage that they honoured in public and a wife who was an integral part of their official life and their own social position, would at some point enter into a second relationship.

In Europe we would have called such a woman a mistress (I remember that the French president was accompanied at his funeral by both his wife and his mistress who had been with him for over thirty years).

In Thailand they were called ‘second wives’ and until recently they had had a clear position in society.

Nothing in my European upbringing had prepared me for the eventuality of becoming a ‘second wife’. I had never even seriously thought of being a first one!

I had never wanted to marry, and had never been married. Relationships had been on a voluntary basis, agreements between free and independent parties. When love changed, relationships changed too.

I had never even considered taking a married man for a lover. I felt we wouldn’t have a lot in common.

When I decided to come and stay in Bangkok I knew about the local customs, in the abstract. I didn’t really think that they might apply to me.

I was sad that my Nai was not single.

I was happy that he was my Nai.

The fact that he was not single had so far been a concept. It had not had a lot of consequences in reality for me.

And in fact, as our relationship developed, he was rarely unavailable because he was married. He was sometimes unavailable for other reasons, because he withdrew, because he shut himself away from everyone except his broadband, because he suddenly went away with his diving friends and equally suddenly returned.

The fact that he was there, that he had appeared in my life, was real.

As far as my life so far had taught me, he was the best available match. And I was his.

I did say it was an unconventional story, didn’t I?

The dream

If you have had a dream forever – forever so you can’t even tell its origins in time.

If this dream had come to you, fervently, night after night, day after day.

If this dream had been hidden from everyone.

If you had heard many times, during your youth, that such a dream is a sign of a diseased mind, of a deterioration of morals.

If you had heard such a dream be laughed about, with dirty heaving mouths.

If you had seen how such a dream was dragged down and made shameful.

If then, after many years, you had been able to realise that none of this was true.

If then, after many years, you were able to see it again as you had seen it at first: a manifestation of your true self.

If then you had been able to say to yourself, not to others: yes, this is my dream.

And your dream had risen up again, fresh and new, like a swan through the mud.

If then, even, you had found the strength (and it is an incredible strength) to follow the map of your true sexuality and embark on the long hard journey of finding others who could be companions.

If then, even, you had the unlikely and almost unbelievable luck to find them, some of them, not for long, not always the best match, but searchers, like yourself, bruised, battered, scarred, like yourself, from the long struggle both inside and outside, but, like yourself, never giving up, not surrendering to despair (except sometimes when the dream is so strong, and when the pain of not living it is sitting on your chest like an unbearable shadow – but you are strong, and you recover), keeping hope alive, as long as there is life.

If then, you had found a partner who slowly, cautiously stepped into some of your other dreams with you, and you into his, you all the while kept holding your breath for fear it would all disappear, and you would be there again, alone, sitting there with nothing, soothing the broken dream, no, no, darling, don’t cry, I will go on trying to find you a way to come out into the world, you are my dream, my beautiful dream –

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