Sleeping on the Floor

Socially, the first two years of college did not differ much from my high school days. My time spent on-line decreased as I spent more time in classes and hanging out with the other guys in the dormitory. Still, it didn’t take me long to figure out how to check for other users on the college network and send talk requests to random women to see who would respond.

I met with some success, seducing two or three of those girls into rather intimate conversations. This is how I found NE.

We only spoke once or twice, but I managed to get her to admit she was getting turned on – no mean feat considering she was in a computer lab surrounded by friends. Although we only had a couple of conversations during my freshman year, her name stuck with me over the next few years.

Midway through my junior year, I began to come into my own as a qualified social human being. I had weaned myself away from the on-line world. Through the guidance (and corruption) of a good friend, I got drunk for the first time and was forced into situations where I had to prove my value as someone worth hanging out with. I learned how to turn my quirks into interesting personality traits. I gained confidence. I helped start an underground literary magazine. I DJ’d for the college radio station. Those years spent seducing and manipulating women on-line had honed my intuitive skills – it was easy to make people feel comfortable around me.

The night I met NE in person, I was sitting on the steps of my dormitory and smoking a clove. We shared a mutual friend, SB, so when it was time to head back inside, we invited NE to join us. I knew who she was, but I wasn’t sure she had made the connection.

She had. As I later found out, after our on-line conversations she had taken to keeping an eye out for me (especially at lunch where I would often sit along and enjoy a good book while I ate). She knew my habits and friends. It would have been disconcerting if it wasn’t weirdly flattering.

As mentioned, I had a knack for creating a comfortable social setting and NE was looking for a hiding spot (she was dealing with her own social issues) which made hanging out in my room ideal. I spent the rest of the semester getting to know her while playing cards and just goofing off. I even had a movie date with her.

The interesting thing was, I never felt pressed to do anything. I had past the point of needing social validation, so enjoying her company was purely gravy. When we all left for the semester break, she gave me her number and said I should call.

Several weeks into the break, I did. Her mother said she wasn’t available, so I left a message requesting she get in touch with me. She never did. I was rather annoyed, but I wasn’t going to pester her.

For my last semester at college, I got my own room. This room would quickly became the social hang-out for my group of friends. Everyone had the room combination, I always had good music playing (the dawn of MP3s), I didn’t mind people smoking in the room, and I had a fold-out table that was easy to play cards on. I never pushed NE on why she hadn’t called but I did distance myself from her a bit and took to pretending to be upset with her, which drove her crazy. Each evening around 1am, when I would kick everyone out, she would hang back to spend a few minutes alone with me. Minutes became hours, and talking became something else.

But I never gave her as much as she wanted. I would give her long intimate back rubs. Gradually I upped the ante, teasing her until I knew she wanted, needed, more. And then I would send her back to her own room. Night after night of this left her confused – and hooked. After one particularly late night, she asked if she could sleep over.

I relented. I told her she could sleep over, but she’d have to sleep on the floor.

She did.

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.

Finely Tuned Instrument

Lines are where it all begins and where all good (bad) things end. They delineate. They divide. They border, they bind, they define. Lines are blurred, stirred, concurred and perturbed by the right questions and wrong answers. Words paint lines in broad bold strokes that encircle, entice, intrude. Words resurrect you. Words nudge aside, limbo underneath, and soar over the lines in our lives.

I love a good word whore. The syntax of their needs is a language I speak in many tongues.

***

futile finger length concepts
Slip, supple, sap, spilling across the page
dripping sarcasm like lovers
feels like frosted torture against black veins
that spider across the white parchment
we call skin

mediocre maybe –
     but I take my lessons from the pen

lap the edge like honey,
     and take this line, from behind my innuendo

you can play it like a violin.
   or wrap it around your finger, lest you forget
you can wear it like jewelry,
   or weave it into a web for unsuspecting honesty
you can hang yourself from it,
   or you can wind it about your body like a cocoon

just don’t trip over it on your way out.

because this line

can hold you together

Chapter and Verse, Part I

I’ve gone over my first time engaging in ‘hot chat’ (which is BBS slang for tinysex which is MUSH slang for – and I’m using the technical phrasing here – getting nasty on-line), discussed how I learned about sex through pretending to be older then I was (by, oh, fifteen or twenty years), and I’ve even discussed how I got hooked on phone sex.

One interesting ancedote from that period: I remember the exact conversation when I learned in a very personal way the difference between first person and third person narrative. Forget high school English – this is the way to learn about story telling. I was having a conversation with the person to whom I would eventually lose my virginity to (not that great a story and a rather forgettable experience). Until this point I had written all of my prose as such:

“Shadow strokes her hair gently,” or, “Shadow presses her down to the floor.”

After a bit of this, my partner gently suggested, “Why don’t you address these missives to me instead of…her? It is me you want to be doing these to, isn’t it?” Well, yes. Of course. Why hadn’t I realized this before?

I still do use third person at times – it has some very specific uses, such as when I don’t necessarily want to scare the person away by making it too personal – but I learned a very valuable lesson that day: I want to fuck you, not her.

So where did I go from there? Aside from honing my skills and learning some valuable lessons about relationships, two highpoints stand out: actually meeting some of the people I spent hours writing erotic missives to and gaining an understanding of the kinkier aspects of play (D/s, B&D, S&M, and half a dozen other impressive acronyms).

The first highlight – meeting people in person – was tricky at first. Most didn’t know my true age. A few did. Most of the women I was speaking to were in their thirties. I was about seventeen. When I came clean (which only happened because I wanted to meet them), some reacted in shock, some in anger, some in amusement. All of them got over it and eventually agreed to meet me, despite how young I was (I wonder what that says?). I lost my virginity this way. Not all encounters ended in sex, but enough did that I realized something important. Real life sex was a bit of a disappointment.

Bad and mediocre sex didn’t even come close to what I could experience with words, voice, and imagination. And while some of the experiences were fun and exciting, none of them were great. With this understanding came another important realization – it wasn’t the medium (real life vs. virtual) that was at fault. It was the fact that in a world of words, I had a lot more control in how things would work out. I needed to learn how to make this work in reality.

In time, this came. And with it came the true rush of fulfilling expectations and enjoying the sins of the flesh. But it came with me in control. While some of my most blissful moments have come when I flirted with relaxing control with someone I trusted, I have yet to abandon myself completely to someone else’s vision and promise of pleasure. There are times I will think about this and feel something akin to wistful regret…but I have long accepted it as part of how I live my life today. Some day perhaps.

But not yet.

My Sordid Past (Or, the clit is…where?)

Setting: 1991. Massachusetts.
Loation: The multi-line BBS Argus (envision it as IRC/IM/Chat Room of choice before the Internet was widely used and people used 2400 baud modems to connect).

You should probably start by reading about my first time in ‘hot chat’.

I migrated from Future Wave, a BBS with 12 lines, to Argus, a BBS with 128+ lines. At the time a BBS this large was almost inconceivable to me. Imagine the cost of running 120 phone lines to your house. Those that ran this BBS did exactly that. Oh – there were other BBS’s out there with a significant number of lines. But none that were free. I had paid a good twenty or so dollars to join Future Wave. Argus was much larger than any other multi-line BBS and didn’t charge a cent. Because it was free and anyone could be on it, us Future Wave users used to look down our noses at Argus users. People always value more the things they pay for.

Of course, people also like free stuff. I forget what eventually motivated me to move there from Future Wave, but move I did. I just never got over the feeling that there was a catch somewhere. Sometime after I moved from Massachusetts and stop visiting it, they did implement some sort of charging scheme.

But really, that’s not the story. This story is how I learned about sex. My first obstacle was my age. I was fifteen or so. I was not going to have the conversations I wanted so long as people thought I was a young teen. Sex wasn’t the only motivating factor either – I found the random exclamations being expounded by my fellow teens was an ordeal I could live without (“STevE TylEr is a GoD!”).

No – I was better than that! Or at least I thought I was.

I told people I was a 20-something. It wasn’t hard acting older than I was. Using capital letters (when appropriate), proper grammar, and the ability to speak on topics beyond Aerosmith and The Divynls was more than enough to set me apart from the rest of the adolescents. I was surprised at how easy it was to convince people I was something I’m not. Confidence and imagination were key. This would serve me well for a long time (long enough for me to grow into who I wanted to be).

The best and worst part is, I was at an age where I had no remorse about lying, about misrepresenting myself. Perversely, today the inverse is true – I am almost obsessive over self-honesty. I am almost honest to a fault about who and what I am. If you know how to ask the right questions, I will tell you anything. The trick, of course, is knowing what to ask. But honesty is a topic for another day.

In any case, I was not a bad kid. I was just amoral. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I didn’t think about the consequences either. This would, of course, eventually lead to trouble.

Back on topic – Argus provided a fertile ground for my teenage hormones. The problem is, I was terribly interested in sex but knew next to nothing about it. And let me tell you, learning about sex from a text-only medium is, shall we say, interesting and led to some – then confusing, now amusing – difficulties. I couldn’t let people know I didn’t understand what was going on. I had to fake it and figure things out as I went along. Some of the more interesting conundrums I faced:

1) The clit…is where? Ok, I know it feels good when I describe teasing it. I know it is located somewhere between your thighs. I know it is near your pussy. But where exactly is it? Is it inside? Underneath? And it gets hard when stimulated? No kidding. Me too.

2) Wet. Wet = good. This one was especially tricky, because the first time a girl mentioned she was getting wet when I touched her there, I had no idea if this was a good thing. Of course, next was hot and wet. I learned that if I had them in this state, I was making great progress.

Quiz time, multiple choice.
What is the moral of this tory?

A) Sex Ed in the nineties was sorely lacking.
B) I didn’t date much in high school.
C) I didn’t date at all in high school.
D) Unless you count the older women I met on-line and convinced to meet me.
E) I was a peculiar teenager.
F) All of the above.

Still, I turned out alright. Didn’t I?

The First Time

I was fourteen. It was the eighties and I was on a 2400 baud modem. I’d only recently discovered the excitement of being able to chat on a BBS with two or more people simultaneously. There were even rumors of Bulletin Board Systems out there that had twenty, thirty people on at once.

Outrageous.

The BBS was called Future Wave, and it was homed out of Massachusetts. I had struck up a conversation with…well I don’t recall her handle, but her real name was Jenny. She was about the same age as I and was feeling rather down about something.

So I tried to cheer her up. I was a very creative fourteen year old. Described taking her out to a nice restraunt. The snowfight afterwards. She decided she needed to shower to warm up after having snow poured down the front of her shirt.

She described the towel she wore as she stepped out of the shower.

I don’t recall what happened next – but it did not involve hot naked sex. I think I might have fled in confusion over what to do next.

But I had tasted something – and, well, I wanted more. I never did manage to get Jenny in a one-on-one chat again.

Still, she did send me a rather nice Christmas card.