D/s

Do You Want It Too?

Kate Sloan

“Being drunk is making me want to call you Daddy,” I hammer out with clumsy thumbs.

Before I can even get anxious about what I’ve said, Sir types back: “Try it.” So I do.

With the right kind of consent-conscious kink nerd, a new D/s relationship is always an exercise in trust and communication. Always a gamble that catapults my heart into my throat. Here’s what I want. Do you want it too? And then, as time goes on: Are you sure?

Three days after we met, I told this beautiful boy, “I wouldn’t say that my feelings about you are quite ‘Daddy dom‘-esque, but I am very into that nurturing, caring type of dominance, and I do feel that way about you.”

“Yeah, I don’t feel like a ‘Daddy,’ per se,” he replied. “But I do know what you mean.”

We laugh about this interaction now. He is such a Daddy. He likes showing me around his city, holding my hand when we cross the street, carrying things for me. He likes ordering for me at restaurants like I’m not even there (“She’ll have the cacio e pepe“) and letting me taste his grown-up musky cocktails (“Want a sip, little one?”). He makes me feel instantly small with just a word, a glance.

“I just came real hard thinking about you sitting on my face and asking me if Daddy was gonna come from that,” he recounts in a text. “Also, you’re gonna take your iron pills when you get home, right, baby?”

I laugh into my coffee cup in a diner when I read these over, and say to my best friend across the table: “He just sent me a filthy sext and then told me to take my meds. I can’t believe he didn’t know he’s a Daddy dom.”

I have been in too many relationships with people who gave me what I wanted only because they knew I wanted it. This selflessness is lovely, in theory, but over time, it breeds resentment. They grow to resent that I really do want “that kink stuff” all the time, and not just occasionally – and I grow to resent the asynchronicity of our feelings, the way I’m sliding deeper into a dynamic they don’t even really see.

Once, on my way to go see a boyfriend, I subtweeted him. I didn’t entirely realize I was doing it; the thoughts condensed in my brain like rainclouds and I spilled them onto Twitter almost compulsively. “Gosh, there’s such a difference between someone who bites/beats/bruises you ’cause you want them to and someone who does it ’cause they want to,” I mused. “It’s nice to bang someone who’ll beat me up when I ask, but I miss the raw ragged viscerality of a real sadist destroying me.”

It wasn’t a nice thing to do. I know that now, and I regret it. I especially regret it when I remember how he looked up from his phone when I walked through his front door, and met my eyes with a furrowed brow. “Baby, you know I like hurting you, right?” he asked with no preamble. “I like it because you like it so much.”

But therein lay the problem. I wanted him to want it too. I wanted him to lose himself in desire a little when he hit me, his heart stuttering, cheeks flushing. I wanted to feel him get hard through his jeans while I squealed and squirmed in his lap. I wanted a wolfish glint in his eye as he held me down and made me take what he needed to give me.

I guess that’s why we didn’t last. Some people want to make you happy, but the wanting is not always enough.

“You should maybe, uh, tell me what to wear and how to do my hair and makeup for our date,” I mumble over the phone to my Sir. Meek and muffled, because I know how this usually goes. Usually I float this idea and a partner either reacts like it’s totally absurd, or gives me the world’s least satisfying answer: “Wear whatever makes you feel beautiful!”

They always think they’re trying to be nice. And they are being nice, in a way. But they’re also withholding from me the thing that I want. Which is, in a different way, not nice at all, really.

“Hmm,” Sir says thoughtfully, his honeyed tenor tone vibrating against my face from 500 miles away. “Tell me what you like about that.”

No one has ever actually asked me this before, about this particular thing. It’s a conversation I always want to have, about every kink, both mine and my partners’: Why do you like that? The answers are always illuminating. It’s like walking behind Niagara Falls. You knew the exterior was dazzling; now you know its beauty from the inside, too.

I pause and think it through, choose my words carefully, one by one. “I like assignments with clear parameters,” I elucidate at length, “because I like knowing exactly how to make someone happy and being able to do it exactly right.”

“Got it,” he replies. I’ve heard him say this many times. It still makes me swoon every time. Got it. He’s got me. “So, if I was to tell you to wear all black clothing, red lipstick, and your hair styled so I can pull on it, would those parameters be clear enough?”

My temperature rises and a sharp huff of air pushes past my lips, like I’ve been punched in the gut. He gets it, and I love that he gets it. I know my explanation is what helped him get it, but moreover, I love that he asked for an explanation instead of just dismissing my vulnerable request out of hand. I love that he took this seriously because he could see it was serious to me.

Power exchange is a collaborative mosaic of trust and vulnerability. It’s stepping out onto a rickety bridge together, promising to keep each other safe if something goes awry. Here’s what I want. Do you want it too?

I do it for him, too. I try to. Past partners have told me, when I coyly begged them to dominate me, that they worried they’d go too far – or, worse, that I would laugh in their face when they issued a command. “Oh, that? I’m not going to do that. Why would you even want that?!” So I do my best to affirm dominants’ orders. I treat these directives with the care they deserve. They may be barked or growled, but they are vulnerable nonetheless – because I could always, always say no.

Sir unbuttons his shirt and tells me to hang it up in the closet. A bratty voice inside me pipes up to wonder why the fuck I would do that when he’s right here beside me on the bed, warm and touchable and getting undressed. But I know why. He wants to see me do it. He wants to see what I will do for him. So I get up, smooth the shirt onto a hanger, and slide it into the closet, blushing from the way he looks at me. It’s a hunger and a satisfaction: he asked for what he wanted, and I wanted it too.

These moments are small, just snapshots that tell no particular story individually, but woven together, they are a heart-stopping collage. They are trust and vulnerability writ large. Writ very large indeed.

One Monday morning in New York City, I hand Sir two dresses from my suitcase. “Which one, Sir?” I query, and he chooses the red one. I put it on.

I dig through my toiletries bag for fragrances, and hand him three sample vials. He holds each to his handsome nose and selects the Tom Ford. I put it on.

“Do you like making decisions for me?” I ask, playfully, like I already know the answer – but I don’t, not really. I know what the evidence suggests, and I know what I hope the answer is, but it will be a while before I know it for certain, in the pit of my gut and the base of my brain.

“So much,” he groans in response, and I blush as crimson as the dress he chose for me.

Sexy Snaps & Photo Booth Flirtations

Kate Sloan

Being in a new long-distance relationship has me pondering ways to create intimacy across vast expanses.

I know it’s possible because I’ve felt it. Sometimes partners who lived just a quick streetcar ride from me made me feel distanced, shut out, because their hearts were walled off to me; comparatively, my darling in New York pulls me close to him via texts, images, and filthy phone-sex soliloquies. Intimacy can exist wherever you make space for it, wherever you fight for it.

We’ve been playing with digital intimacy in many forms – salacious sexts, obscene FaceTime calls, adventures with app-controlled vibrators – but I’m also drawn, lately, to combining analog romance with the digital. Photo booths are a prime example of our cultural hearkening-back to the analog: like gifting your partner a vinyl LP or sending them a handwritten love letter, snapping instant photos together in a darkened booth is a hot hit of vintage romance.

Here are 5 sexy, kinky, and/or sweet things I’d like to do involving photo booths…

“Strip” tease. I could be ordered to get as naked as I feasibly could in a photo booth, showing off first my lingerie and then my skin. I’d be respectful, making sure no one walked in or got close enough to see – but I’d have to do it, some way and somehow, because my beau’d told me to. I’d grab the strip from its slot surreptitiously on my way out, and slide it into my purse before anyone could see. Four little naked Kates, arranged so neatly for a suitor’s later consumption.

Bruise archive. In many of my past kinky relationships, part of our protocol – whether informal or more official – was the taking and sending of bruise photos in the days after particularly intense scenes. It’s a way to stretch out the sadomasochistic intimacy of those encounters for days or weeks after they occur. For dominants, I hear it can also be nice to receive confirmation that your submissive not only likes their bruises but is proud of them, wants to show them off, wants to make them last. If I had a photo booth in my neighborhood, perhaps I’d instate a tradition of heading there the day after a good beating – and the week after that, and so on, until the marks had faded – to capture my bruises blooming into glory. What a charming album that’d make.

Cuteness quartet. It’s nice to receive a “traditional” gift, like a DVD I’ve been wanting, a gift certificate to my favorite store, or a soft sweater in my power colors. But I’m even more thrilled by personalized and offbeat gifts. I could see a partner snapping a few photo booth strips of himself for me, making all my fave faces and wearing that shirt that makes his eyes look extra blue. Maybe he’d slide it between the pages of a book he thought I’d like and mail it to me, like the photos were an afterthought, a mere bookmark – but I’d know better. I’d see in the shots how much effort had gone into them, and I’d know that meant he cared. A lot.

Date documentation. I love romantic traditions: these little touchstones we return to again and again, simply because they bring us so much joy. That diner you always go to after all-night fuck-fests; that movie you watch together every year around the holidays; that one alley you can’t walk past without making out in it for old times’ sake. I like the idea of taking photo booth pictures together at meted milestones in your relationship. I’m a sap, so I’d probably tape them into my journal, or have them framed.

Phone sex. A photo booth would be an interesting place to call up a beau and have them breathe hot and heavy in your ear. You could capture your authentic reactions to their words – gasps, blushes, moans – and snap your lapful of photo strips on your smartphone to send them. And hey, not to get crass, but I wonder what happens to photo booth ink when the strips get splattered in cum…!

What sexy/kinky/sweet things would you like to do in a photo booth?

 

This post was sponsored by the lovely folks at Ninja Photo, who will rent you photo booths across Canada and so many other places!

3 Hot Fantasies I Have About Sex Dolls

Kate Sloan

Eerie voyeur. Sir is kissing me, and peeling off my clothes, when suddenly… “Hang on, I forgot something important,” he breathes against my lips. My eyes drift open and I watch him stand up, grab the sex doll sitting on her chair, and wheel her around to face us. Her cold eyes catch mine; in them, the slightest hint of undead mirth.

“Is she going to watch us?” I ask uneasily, and Sir nods, before climbing back on top of me and pressing me into the bed with his body.

As long melty minutes tick by between kisses and caresses, I can almost forget the doll is there. That is, until Sir mutters in my ear, “Look at her.”

By then he’s got his fingers in me. I’m self-conscious about my moans, my twisted grimace of pleasure, my wetness seeping onto his hand. And it all seems so much more pronounced when there are two people watching me – even if one of them isn’t actually alive.

“Keep looking at her,” he continues, darkly, his fingers pushing into me in exactly the way I like. He’s going to make me come like this. My face flushes hot. My thighs tremble. The doll’s eyes stare unflinchingly. I’m uncertain. I’m uncomfortable. I’m coming.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. As my breathing slows, I realize my eyes are closed. And there’s Sir, in my ear again. “Didn’t I tell you to look at her?” he warns. I know I’m in trouble, and I can’t stop smiling, and the doll’s still there looking placid and placated.

Learning vulva tricks. “Babygirl, you’re gonna learn something new today,” Sir says, gently pressing me forward over the bedroom threshold, and my heart judders at the sight of a silicone love doll on the bed. She’s spread-eagled, hair pooled beneath her like a yellow-gold puddle, and she looks like she knows what’s up.

“You keep saying you don’t know how to eat pussy,” he continues, and he’s right; this comes up whenever we flirt about threesomes, my incessant fear I wouldn’t know what to do with another vulva if it looked me square in the face. “So daddy’s gonna teach you.”

He pushes me down onto the bed gently, next to her, and pulls up a high-backed chair for a good view. My lesson begins with gentle warm-up – “Kiss her thighs” – before progressing to more insistent teasing – “Lick along her pretty pink lips” – and then to full-on giving her what she wants: “Suck on her clit, little one.”

I melt under his words, eyes sliding shut as I press my face further into this soft silicone vulva. I can almost hear the noises she’d be making if she were alive. I can almost feel like I’m giving someone real pleasure. And when I glance over at Sir, and see the way he’s biting his lip, I know that I am.

Hands off. I’m in trouble, because I made a bratty comment at dinner. I can tell from the stormclouds in Sir’s eyes that I am in for a punishment tonight – but I never quite know what it’s going to be. That mystery itself is part of the punishment.

He shoves me through the doorway, shuts the door, and slams me up against a wall. Instinctively, I reach for him, pining for kisses and warmth, but he pins my wrists over my head and growls, “No. No touching tonight.” I whimper reflexively. No touching? But how?

Guiding me to a chair with firm tugs on my dress, he deposits me where he wants me and then loosens his necktie while I watch. His strong hands guide it over his head and then he’s wrapping it around my wrists and the arms of the chair in quick loops and knots, so fast my eyes can’t keep up, like a con man playing three-card Monte. Find the lady, find the lady. Am I the lady?

No. There’s another lady. Sir pulls the doll from the closet and tosses her on the bed. He climbs on top of her, the way I like. He kisses her lips and then her throat, the way I like. He grazes one hand along the swell of her breast, the way I like.

I don’t like this. And also I do.

Sir makes me watch for long minutes as he bites and smacks his little proxy-me, drags his fingernails along her ribs and hips, presses her thighs apart with his. I like when he treats me like his little fuckdoll. This is not that. This is something else entirely.

He tugs his shirt off over his head and throws it at me, so it lands on my face, obscuring my vision. I’m torn between leaving it there so I can inhale his scent and shaking it off me like a dog so I can see him again. Eventually the latter option wins when I hear him unzip his jeans. If I can’t have that cock inside me tonight then I at least want to see it.

I extricate myself from his fragrant tee just in time to see him pushing two lubed fingers inside his doll, warming her up with slow and deep strokes that make my cunt clench sympathetically. And then he’s pulling his hand out of her and replacing it with his cock, one steady slide all the way inside her. He quirks an eyebrow in my direction, and I realize I’m drooling, quivering, whimpering. Who knows how long I’ve been this way? (Sir does. Sir always knows.)

Eventually, he comes inside her, panting and grunting, and I’m so desperately jealous that there are red welts on my arms from where I’ve struggled to break free of this divine and devious torture.

 

This post was graciously sponsored by the folks at OVDoll, and as always, all opinions and words are my own.

The Departed Dominant & the Jilted Submissive

Kate Sloan

My collar is too tight. I keep tugging at it, loosening it, shifting it against my sweat-slick throat. It doesn’t feel quite right, because my submission doesn’t feel quite right. It’s been five weeks since my dominant dumped me and my submissiveness still doesn’t feel quite right. I’m simultaneously sympathetic to my own cause and furious I’m not over this shit already.

“This is the first time I’ve worn a collar since my breakup,” I tell my best friend, realizing only as I say it out loud that it’s true.

“How are you doing with that?” Bex says, their brow furrowing because they understand the gravity of what I have just said, in a way a vanilla friend might not.

“I’m doing okay,” I respond. Still tugging on the collar even as I try to let it lie.

Whenever someone breaks my heart, I become outraged I let them touch so many things in my life I cared about. Like a bad apple in a barrel, cruel lovers ruin whatever they come into contact with. I can’t watch Steven Universe or listen to DVSN anymore; I can’t order from that one Thai place we used to frequent; I can’t even enjoy media featuring characters who share his first name. It’s all painful and I’m furious it’s painful.

But what hurts even worse is the places he touched that are buried deeper in me, more central to my heart than my entertainment preferences: my sexuality, my sensuality, my submissiveness. I let him own me while he was my dominant; it’s unfair he still gets to own part of me now that he’s gone. I want those parts of me back, but that’s like trying to make dirt-trampled slush back into clean white snow.

I miss my bruises. I miss my bite marks, scratches, and hickeys. For the first several days after the breakup, I think this thought at least once an hour and cry every time.

Holding my ghost-white forearm out in front of me while sitting on my friend’s bed, I splutter, “There’s a bite mark here. You can barely see it. Soon it will be gone, and I’ll have none left.” My friend is listening but I might as well be monologuing to myself; I’m so absorbed in my own internal drama these days.

Later, I tell Bex the same thing via text. I’m repetitive when I’m heartbroken. “You’ll get more,” Bex suggests.

“I don’t want more from anyone else.” It feels true when I type it. It feels like it will always be true.

“You will one day,” Bex replies. “Or not. And that’s okay too.”

My heart folds in on itself then, crumpled and dissolute. What if they’re right? What if this prophesied nightmare comes true and I never find my way back to my submission? What if I left my kink in that man’s hands and he still has it and he’ll never give it back?

I bend over in front of a mirror and stare at my ass, dappled with bruises from a scene with a one-off hookup last week. I stare and stare at the wine-dark marks and feel blindingly angry that these meaningless splotches still linger while that bite mark, that one last precious vestige, is nearly gone.

Relationship psychology fascinates me, and so do sex toys, and one intersection between the two is the intriguing question: who keeps the sex toys the two of you shared when you break up?

My toys are mostly mine, purchased with my own dollars or acquired with my professional clout. But them being technically mine and mine alone does not stop them soaking up meaning from past relationships. There’s the metal hanger rail I can’t bring myself to use with anyone but the man who pried it out of a hotel closet for me; the silicone dick extender I got to fulfill a specific partner’s fantasy and likely won’t use again; and now, the multitude of kink implements that remind me only of the dom who debuted them on me.

How long will it be until my favorite paddles no longer feel like his? How long until I can use my shiny new wand vibe without thinking of how he, at my request, tied me down and held it against me until I squirmed and screamed? Will I ever be able to repurpose the wooden dowel he bought for me at a hardware store, sawed and sanded down to size, and used to smack stripes onto my skin?

A week after the breakup, he drops by to return the nipple clamps I forgot at his house. I’m filled with bitter rage – Yeah! He SHOULD give those back to me! I bought them with my own money, dammit! – while also knowing it might be a long, long time before I want to use them again. I hold the clinking clamps in my sweaty palm and tear up, thinking: You damn fool. Crying over nipple clamps.

I move into his neighborhood – not on purpose, just a cruel coincidence – and develop a crippling fear of running into him. I won’t leave my building without first slipping on a low-key disguise: sunglasses, headphones, modern shields against creeping invaders. I add extra blocks to my walks so I won’t have to take streets I know he frequents.

What am I so afraid of? He did this, he fucked this up; I don’t have to be ashamed. But I’m scared that if I see him, he’ll still feel like my Daddy. Or worse, I’m scared that he won’t.

I pass by his house and (insanely) want to knock on the door. My phone beeps a text tone and (insanely) I wonder if it’s him, wanting me back; wonder if I should text to ask. A distant ex sends me a long-overdue apology out of the blue, and (insanely) I consider seeing him again. I don’t do any of it, and (insanely) I very, very much want to.

I try to make everyone into my dom, because I feel unmoored without one. I say self-effacing shit until friends have to command me to shape up; I pretend my to-do list is a written decree from a bossy babe; I spend more time around my parents because there is no one else now to make me feel small and cared for. When texting with casual beaux and Tinder randos, my once-flirty banter tricks like “Is that an order?” and “Make me!” become, instead, thinly-veiled desperate pleas.

But just as a tree falling in the forest is inaudible if there’s no one there to hear it, a bratty submissive is just an aimless failure if there’s no one there to rein her in. When I make silly decisions, like skipping meals, forgetting my iron supplement, and putting off my work until late at night, no one scolds me or spanks me or throws me a stern look. No one tells me to straighten up and fly right. I am neither punished nor rewarded for anything I do. I must be a Goddamn Adult and supply my own motivation. I can barely remember how.

In navigating this sudden crisis, I am reminded of the existentialist philosophy classes I took in high school and university. When existentialists came to the ultimate conclusion that there is no God, no watchful deity, no inherent meaning or purpose to life, at first they felt deeply anxious and upset. It was like being cast out of an airplane with no parachute, reeling, not even certain where the ground lay. But soon, they came to realize: one can make meaning out of one’s own life. One can select a purpose, a direction, a vision for oneself, instead of waiting for some distant God or Divine Right Order to do it. What was terrifying at first becomes empowering as you sit with it and think it through.

I have to make my own meaning. I have to be my own dom. I know this. And one day I will figure out how to do it.

 

This post was sponsored by the amazingly generous folks at SheVibe. As always, all writing and opinions are my own. Check out their selection of restraints, spanking implements, fetish wear, and other kink products!

5 Ways I Flirt As a Submissive

Kate Sloan

1. Unprompted service. Three weeks ago, we went out to lunch and you ordered a Mill Street lager. Tonight, I show up for our scheduled fuckdate at your house, carrying a six-pack of Mill Street lagers. If you were a vanilla boy, maybe you’d seem surprised, or embarrassed that you didn’t get me anything in return. But you’re a dom perv who gets off on my diligent service, so you just take the beers from me, put them in the fridge, and say, “That was very good of you.” I quiver in my boots.

Halfway through explaining to a customer how a particular vibrator works, you accidentally drop its instruction manual on the sex shop’s tile floor. Without speaking, interrupting your pitch, or even giving it any thought, I kneel down and scoop up the booklet from under the toy counter where it fell. “Oh, you don’t have to –” you start, but then I hand it to you from a kneeling position before you, we lock eyes, you set your jaw, and you murmur with a small smile, “Thanks.”

2. Complimenting your dominant qualities. “Time to sweep and mop,” you bark, when there’s an hour left til closing time. Then your tone softens: “Sorry, that was bossy. Time to sweep and mop, please.”

En route to the supply closet to grab the broom, I retort over my shoulder, “It’s okay; I like it when you’re bossy.” I hear the pause as you process this, and then you reply, “I’m not sure how to take that…” I grin. And then I get to sweepin’.

Your cat is being an asshole: scratching at the door, yowling incessantly, fucking shit up. You say his name sharply, in the tone of a dad who’s just walked in on his kid drinking chocolate milk straight from the carton.

“I’m really weirdly into it when you get dom-y with the cat,” I enthuse swoonily. Your eyes slide over to me and narrow in mild confusion. “Yeah?” you say, and I nod, wishing you’d speak to me sometime with the sternness you reserve for misbehaving calicos.

3. Alluding to past experiences. At her request, you hit our friend with a leather riding crop so she can see what it feels like. “Wow! I’m surprised that didn’t leave a bruise,” she says, minutes later, as she examines the spot in a mirror. “Crops don’t usually bruise that much,” you and I both start to say, in different words but echoing the same sentiment. Our eyes meet. I feel a hot pop of recognition – the electric familiarity that clicks into gear when kinksters spot fellow kinksters. Oh, hello.

My friend finishes our lengthy spanking session, and I push myself up off the sex club’s gorgeous leather spanking bench, freshly and darkly bruised. “How was that?” you ask. “A good warm-up?” It’s a joke, but it’s also a challenge, a barometer, a test.

“I’ve had worse,” I reply with a saucy shrug. And then I take the paddle my friend was hitting me with and place it in your hands. I don’t know what you’ll do with it, if anything, but I’m curious to find out.

4. Honorifics. We hug goodbye outside the diner after a cozy breakfast. “Be good,” you tell me as we part ways. I shout back, “Yes, sir!” and watch the bemused smile bloom on your face.

We’re at a party, and I make a dumb joke that doesn’t land quite right. Someone calls me an awkward turtle, and I shake my head and inform them, “I’m not a turtle. I am an awkward bunny.”

You look at me with cool appraisal and say, “A bunny, huh? Yeah, I can see that.”

How did you know that “bunny” is one of my kink honorifics, despite the totally vanilla nature of the conversation in which it appeared? I have no idea. You have sub-dar, apparently. And it’s working. I attempt to swallow the sudden dry lump in my throat, and reiterate: “Yeah. I’m a bunny.”

5. “Is that an order?” We tread water in the heated pool under the stars. “Is the deep end really deep?” I ask conversationally, and you say, “Nah. You could definitely swim to the end and back, no problem.”

I bite my lip. “Are you telling me to do that?”

“No,” you say immediately, “you don’t have to,” and I exhale the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. I do it anyway, like it’s a dare from the dom you unfortunately aren’t.

Plotting a threesome via text, I mention that multiple orgasms aren’t exactly in my wheelhouse. “What if you took a break from masturbating for a few days beforehand?” you posit. “Maybe we could get 3 out of ya ;)”

I pause, stare at my phone screen, try to breathe. And then I type a phrase so loaded for me, I’m almost scared to make it real by committing it to text. “Is that an order? ;)”

There is a minute of silence during which I become convinced I have scared you away forever by wanting too much from you, climbing too high on the kink ladder while you’re still meandering through the vanilla wilds below. But then your reply comes back: “That is an order. Are you gonna be a good girl and wait a few days for my cock?”

I scream at my phone, throw it across the room, and cover my face with my hands. I am going to be such a good girl for you, sir.