After

After the BDSM. Part 3 of my 3 part, 3 day series.

Three days later, the lowest of the cane marks have turned into flat black bruises in the crease between my bottom and thighs, and I can only see them if I bend forward and crane my neck to see my reflection in my dressing room mirror. This is something I’m doing a great deal, because it’s the only physical evidence I have that the encounter was real. Though that’s not true — if I look very carefully, I also have two faint bite-marks on my neck, an inexplicable small bruise by my ear, and a fading whip mark across one hip. But the cane marks are my favourite, because it’s impossible to imagine that they’re from anything other than the thing that caused them — that hard, after-dinner caning on our first evening. The caning that led to my sucking his cock between strokes, and then to his fucking me as the welts pulsed red across my skin. As his hands made their way into my hair, to contract into fists at my scalp, making me feel like his rag-doll, positioned as he chose and unresisting. Afterwards, we lay together, drifting towards sleep, joined in perfect tessellation, like jigsaw puzzle pieces finally back in their rightful, interlinked place. And eventually we did sleep, and woke again, still entwined, to talk of the things we’d not had time for earlier, and to plan for the next day.

Happily, bruises aren’t all I have, as mementos of our weekend together. I’m back at work, and I’m busy, with property purchase complexities, and a hideous list of new things to learn about publishing books. I should be too busy for thoughts of him to invade my mind at inopportune times — during phone calls to insurers, whilst assembling props for each day’s custom video shoot. But assuredly, I am not too busy for him. His voice comes to me, echoing from our shared near history, still close enough to almost touch. “Take it” he commands, placing a hand on the middle of my back and holding me still for the next stroke. “Did you think I wouldn’t hurt you?” He asks, with pity, standing behind me as I kneel, newly re-collared, on the cushion he’d placed on the floor after dinner. And “I’ll always be with you” he promises me, audaciously, just as though we weren’t about to spend another four weeks apart. But it’s true. He is still with me, always and in all ways, wherever I am and whatever I do. He might as well still be inside me. Perhaps he is.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. It was better than that, because it was real. Which means that it will be real again, and I will wait, with a hope which will become frightening again. Because when you have something so precious, how can you not be a little afraid?