Chapter and Verse, Part II

(Chapter and Verse, Part I is here.)

The second highlight – learning about D/s – really began with BG. I learned a lot from her and she was my first in many ways: my first phone sex experience, my first meet-in-real-life, and my first exposure to what a submissive really is.

But let me back up a step. My handle on Argus, unbeknownst to me, had certain connotations. The handle? Darklord.

I know – sophisticated, right? Pretentious, definitely (coming from the devil himself). But I was seventeen and it sounded cool. And it did end up paying dividends – it set up certain expectations with several of the women I would end up conversing with – expectations that helped along my D/s education. BG was one who saw Darklord as something I would have to grow into. She placed on him certain expectations that she wanted – needed – to be true. In coaxing these expectations out of her, I began to learn.

Now is a good place to note that my education in this area took two paths. The first path was driven by a simple need: my desire to taste, experience, and enjoy people. I wanted something from the people I was meeting and the most effective way to get it was to convince them that they wanted it too. Most of the time, this wasn’t terribly hard – because they did want it, they just didn’t always know it yet.

I craved that tension. That line between what people should do and what they want to do. Should you give your phone number to me, a stranger? Should you admit you have your hands buried between your thighs while reading my words? Should you tell me how badly you want more? Maybe you shouldn’t – but you want to. It was up to me to make these wants into needs – and these needs into reality. This is a skill that defines me. It is not enough to have the confidence to tell someone to do something (although, with the right woman, this will work sometimes). It is not enough to understand their needs (alone, this won’t actually get you anywhere).

You have to do both. You have to be able to make someone obey you because it is what they need.

You create a need for them and then hold it just out of reach until they come to you on their knees. You create a need for you.

The second was learning the traditional precepts of a D/s relationship. Over the next few years, as I spoke to submissives, a professional dominatrix, and others who shared an interest in the lifestyle, I began to put together a more formal vision of what a Dominant was. I learned the language and the acronyms (like any field of study, it has quite a few); I learned enough of the rules others played by that I could decide which ones suited me; and I began to understand that although there is a lot of common ground in this community, there is also a great deal of variance.

During this time I tried, in a virtually-spiritual-textbased mindfucking-real-imaginary kind of way, just about any kink I could think of. Role-play based text games provided a window into which I could slip between time and place, spending 1800s in a vampire-dominated Paris, present-day in Dublin, and some future fantastical world based entirely on a slave caste system. I tried the other side (however briefly) as a submissive (but was I really? Subterfuge was in my blood, and there was little I wouldn’t do to get what I wanted); I played a Priest who worked in a brothel and on one interesting occasion, a nameless, sexless Guest: I shared a body with two other genderless voices, inhabiting the space in a voyeuristic intellectual masturbation that confused gender and self in a one-way ticket through Alice’s mirror.

And what did I learn from this orgy of indulgence? I learned what really interested me. I may enjoy the occasional fetish, but my true love, my true path comes down to this.

Nothing beats the feel of a warm neck nestled in the firm grip of my hand; and this hold, this place where my hand rests like a living collar so close to the skin I can feel the beating of her heart and each drawn breath like life itself – in this place exists everything I need know about who I am.