Super Sleepy

3 D/s Protocols I’m Loving Lately

Kate Sloan
Suz at the Ritual Chamber, photographed by Taylor J Mace

There are many elements of my submission that only come out when a dominant brings them out of me. I only like calling people “Daddy” when there’s someone in my life who has earned that title, for example, and I only fantasize about kneeling to lick the boots of a select few. Dominance and submission are very context-dependent!

That’s why it took me so long to become interested in protocol, I think. I’m defining “protocol” here as a specific set of rules and routines agreed upon by a dominant and a submissive, usually with a particular trigger and outcome: “When [x] happens, you will [y].” I had read about protocol in Sinclair Sexsmith essays and elsewhere, but wasn’t sure it was for me. But when my current dominant partner started discussing it with me, I realized I felt very positively about it – with him, anyway!

Part of the difference, I think, is that we’re long-distance. Protocol is a way for us to feel closer to each other throughout our day-to-day, even though we only get to see each other in-person once every month or two. It’s a way for both of us to confirm to the other that we think about each other often, consider each other in our decision-making, and respect and value the relationship and D/s dynamic we have co-created. Isn’t kink romantic?!

We have several different protocols, all lovingly enumerated in a shared note called “Sir and little one” that syncs to all our various devices, because we’re nerds. Here are three I’m particularly loving lately.

Little one must prepare 3 “interview questions” to ask Sir for every pre-planned (i.e. 3+ hours’ notice) phone call.

This arose from the early days of our relationship, when we learned about each other with ravenous curiosity. He would sometimes teasingly call me out for asking probing follow-up questions aplenty during our conversations. What can I say – I’m a curious weirdo with a J-school education, and when faced with an interesting person, sometimes I go into “reporter mode”!

Asking him questions serves a number of different purposes that make both of us feel good. It makes me feel smart, incisive, and useful. It reinforces our DD/lg dynamic, by making him feel older/wiser and making me feel small/naive. I get to learn more about this person I love, and when he turns the question around on me (which he always does), he gets to learn more about me, too. It deepens our connection in a way that feels really satisfying, which is (IMO) exactly what protocol should do.

The questions are whatever I’m curious about: they’ve been anything from big philosophical queries to small specific ones to sexy ones. I keep an ongoing list of these questions stored up in a Google Doc and move them to an “already asked” list once they’ve been used. Here are some examples, so you can get a sense of what kinds of things I like to ask:

  • “What’s the last thing you did that was really out of character?”
  • “Which friend of yours is the most different from you, and how does that affect your friendship?”
  • “What do you think distinguishes a kinky person from a vanilla person?”
  • “Have you ever stolen anything?”
  • “What are some of your hidden talents?”
  • “Where and when do you get your best ideas?”
  • “What’s your favorite font?”

Sir gets the first taste of all little one’s drinks (excluding water) while they’re together.

My Sir is a cocktail nerd, so when we’re out together, he always chooses my drink and orders it for me. This protocol seemed like a natural extension of that. When he brought it up, he said he wanted to set this rule because a) he always wants to try my drinks anyway, to see what they’re like, and b) he wants to make sure the drinks are good enough for his little girl. Aww.

I like how deferential I feel when this protocol comes into play. Sliding my just-delivered cocktail across the table to Sir for his approval, before I even taste it myself, makes me feel small and powerless compared to him in a way I enjoy.

Protocols involving the control of food or drinks could be triggering for some folks who have struggled with eating disorders, alcoholism, etc. in the past or present, so tread carefully and communicate impeccably if you’re thinking about implementing a protocol in this category. I’m very into ours, though.

Little one must ask Sir permission to come if she’s thinking about or having sex with him, unless he’s going down on her.

Orgasm control is a big kink of my Sir’s, so from our very first sexting and phone-sex sessions, he always wanted me to ask permission before coming. When we wrote up our protocols, we made this rule official.

I was initially very hesitant about this one. My orgasms are sometimes elusive, so when one suddenly felt within reach, I didn’t want to derail it by taking a moment to ask, “May I come, please, Sir?” I worried that if I backed off for even that one moment, I’d screw up my orgasm trajectory and maybe miss out on one altogether. That seemed frustrating and pointless to me.

However, like anything, it’s gotten easier with practice. Now I’m usually able to squeak out my request without losing any headway on the path to orgasm – and I’ve developed enough trust with my Sir to know that he almost always grants me permission pretty quickly. In some ways, this protocol even lessens my preexisting anxieties about taking “too long” to come, because I know I’m not allowed to come without permission and that means my Sir wants to enjoy me wherever I am on the journey to orgasm.

We added the “unless he’s going down on her” caveat recently because my orgasms from oral sex are much more elusive and easily lost than ones I have through other means, so I’d rather focus completely on those without the distraction of having to ask first. There is something hot, too, about oral sex being a “loophole” through which I get to have “freebie” orgasms. It makes me feel even more motivated to relax into those sensations and get off that way.

Bonus: Here’s a protocol we tried that we ended up nixing because it wasn’t working for us:

Little one must show Sir any selfies that she plans to tweet before she tweets them. If she forgets, she must take another photo just for Sir that matches his specifications.

We thought this would be cute because it would make my Sir feel special to get a “preview” of my selfies before the whole internet saw them. I was a little wary, going into this one, that it might make me feel too owned – it felt uncomfortably close to how a monogamous ex of mine demanded I refrain from posting nudes online, even though I wanted to, because he considered that a violation of our monogamy. (That’s a totally fair boundary to set if you both feel great about it. I didn’t.)

However, as it turns out, the owned-ness of this protocol wasn’t what made it hard for me. I have a lot of anxiety about “bugging” my partners by texting them “too much” or at times when they might be busy (say, with another partner), so I found that sometimes, when I wanted to tweet a selfie, the thought of texting my Sir first was too challenging so I just… didn’t. And that meant I was posting fewer selfies and feeling kinda sad about that.

We implemented this protocol for a trial period of 10 days, at the end of which we talked about it to decide whether we wanted to keep it. I was willing to continue with it, but Sir didn’t like that it had become a deterrent to my selfie-posting, so we opted to eliminate it. It served as a good reminder for me (and maybe for you, too) that it’s okay to try protocols out, adapt and shift them as necessary, and sometimes get rid of them altogether. They are never set in stone, and that’s a good thing!

What are your favorite protocols you’ve tried, or wanted to try?

Additional resources on protocol (mostly Sinclair Sexsmith, ’cause I love them):

5 Ways to Make Long-Distance Relationships Suck Less

Kate Sloan

I always vowed, as a young naïve little thing, never to get into a long-distance relationship. Touch is one of my major love languages, and I’m not the type to need a lot of “space” in my relationships: if I love someone enough to want to be their girlfriend, usually I want them as close as possible, in every way possible.

So it was a surprise when I met a boy who lived in New York and wanted him to be my boyfriend. I knew more-or-less what that would entail, and I still wanted it. I knew how hard it would be, and I still wanted it. I had often wondered, unempathetically, of friends in LDRs, “Why can’t you just find someone closer to date?” and I see now that that’s a question akin to when folks used to ask me, “You’re attracted to butch women? Why not just date men?” The answer is, you can’t control who you fall for. When you want that specific person, it’s neither appealing nor always possible to find a passable stand-in. You want who you want, and you love who you love.

Like the relationship nerds we are, my partner and I have experimented with lots of strategies for feeling closer when we’re far apart. Here are five things I’ve found helpful…

He told me to order a Manhattan because that’s where he lives. What a dork.

Phone dates. My partner and I talk on the phone almost every day for at least an hour or two, which – oddly – means I’m in touch with him more consistently and intensely than I have been with anyone else I’ve dated, despite him living 500 miles away from me. It’s so nice!

Like in-person dates with a nearby beau, these can be either pre-planned or impromptu, and they’re delicious either way. Sometimes we talk aimlessly for hours while we’re both lying in bed; sometimes I get dressed up for a jaunt to my favorite restaurant and he chats with me throughout my meal; sometimes we have raucous phone sex (see below). In the early days of our relationship, we frequently stayed up all night talking for six or seven or eight hours, and it felt akin to those love-drunk dates where you watch the sunrise together on a rooftop or some romantic shit like that. Aww!

We also do weird-cute things like hanging out on the phone while we’re each separately working on our own stuff. Or like… I’m screensharing with him right now as I type this. (We’re nerds, okay?) Jasdev Singh uses the term “ambient intimacy” which reminds me of this kind of low-pressure, casual “date.”

Whether you go with Skype, FaceTime, or the actual goddamn phone, I think the real-time aspect is important here. Texting is fun, but it can feel like your partner lives in your phone – and you want them to feel real to you. So make the time for actual, meaningful chats.

Wearing his shirt. Aww

Physical mementos. I have a T-shirt of my partner’s that I keep in a Ziploc bag so it’ll continue to smell like him, and when I take it out and press it to my face, I almost always burst into tears. #OverEmotionalSlutLyfe, amirite?

I collect other little tokens, too: love notes he’s written me, tickets from shows we’ve gone to together, room keys from hotels we’ve stayed in, li’l gifts he’s given me, and so on. The ones that are flat enough get carried around with me in the back pocket of my Moleskine journal, so I can take ’em out whenever I need a reminder that I am loved. (Not sure what the people on the subway think I’m doing when I giggle awkwardly at a postcard I produce from the back of my notebook, but whatevs.)

Sending each other gifts in the mail is also adorable when feasible. I will never forget the time my partner sent me an enormous flower arrangement on Valentine’s Day, for example, and it still makes me smile to flip through the book he bought me just a few days after our first date. These keepsakes make our mostly-digital relationship feel more rooted in the material world. Like hickeys, bite marks, and bruises, they remind me that someone cares about me, even when he isn’t physically there to tell me so.

Digital intimacy. I used to staunchly believe you shouldn’t follow your beaux on Twitter, but, uh, I met this one on Twitter, sooo… maybe I should reconsider that policy. I get a li’l rush of adrenaline every time my love faves or replies to one of my tweets. Likewise when he texts me, emails me, Snapchats me, makes me Spotify playlists of songs that remind him of us… um, you get the picture.

We do nerdier shit, too, like using iOS’s “share location” feature so we can keep an eye on each other throughout our days, and adding continuously to a shared photostream that chronicles our relationship in snapshots and screenshots. (And, uh, cumshots.)

Lots of my LDR-experienced friends enjoy watching shows and movies online with their partner, by screensharing or using a service like Rabb.it. Could be a cute date night!

A lot of archaic h8erz will tell you that connecting via the internet is less legitimate than connecting physically, but a) I’ll take what I can get and b) they’re wrong. It all strengthens our relationship and makes us feel closer to each other so it’s all valid and important.

Phone sex. I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT PHONE SEX. Eventually I will write some kind of how-to, although I don’t think I’m very good at it. (Suz is, though, and she wrote a good piece about it.)

Like in-person sex, phone sex can be whatever you want it to be. It can be as standardly vanilla or as deviantly kinky as you please. It can be hypothetical and distanced (“If I was there, I would…”) or immersively in-the-moment (“Get on your knees and suck my cock, little girl”). You can use toys (including app-compatible, LDR-friendly toys like the We-Vibe Sync!) or just get off the old-fashioned way. You can be yourselves, or play roles. You can craft detailed storylines, or just touch yourself and lapse into breathy moans.

Even though what we do during phone sex is essentially masturbation, it feels entirely different to me. The psychological and emotional aspects are much closer to my experience of partnered sex, and the orgasms are extra satisfying and exhausting the way that orgasms with partners usually are for me. Post-orgasm, when all that oxytocin is flooding my body, it’s so lovely to feel like I’m auditorily curling up with my partner for sweet cuddly aftercare. The whole process makes me feel so much closer to him and is often so good that I only miss fucking him IRL a little. (…Okay, more than a little. But less than I would if we weren’t having so damn much phone sex, that’s for sure.)

Doing our goodbye debrief at Reynard.

Proper goodbyes. The goodbyes my partner and I exchanged at the end of our second date were so disastrously bad that we vowed to never let that happen again. That farewell was rushed, took place in a crowded New York subway station, and ended on the sad note of us commiserating about how much we would miss each other and how hard it was to say goodbye. Then I got on the subway and he got into a cab and we both cried while texting each other about how hard we were crying. Not good!

In relationship-nerding about how to fix this issue for next time, we decided we needed to look at our in-person dates as if they were kink scenes – since they were just as emotionally and sexually intense as most kink scenes – and do proper aftercare. We needed a structured process to help us work through what we’d just experienced and float back into our regular lives without the harsh emotional drop we’d experienced that previous time.

Here’s what this looks like for us. We leave ourselves lots of time at the end of a date so we don’t have to rush our goodbye. We go for a leisurely meal or coffee. We talk about our favorite parts of the time we just spent together, both sexual and nonsexual. If possible, we try to nail down when our next date will be, even if it’s a month or more away, so we’ll have that to look forward to. We don’t say goodbye on the subway or in a cab, if possible, because that abruptness is the worst. Our goodbye on our third date took place outside his office building, where we could hug and kiss and stare moonily into each other’s eyes, etc., and we both left it feeling happy, hopeful, and only a little bit sad. Developing a farewell ritual that works for you is crucial, and worth taking the time to do!

What do you like to do to make long-distance relationships easier and more fun?

Come Fly With Me: 5 Travel-Sex Stories

Kate Sloan
A rumpled morning-after bed at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn.

I truly felt like a jetsetter the first time I sexted in a TSA line.

Leaving New York felt impossibly sad, in no small part because of the cute boy I’d just met there – but my bleary travel day was brightened by the salacious selfie I suddenly received from him as I traversed that long, slow line.

“HEEELLLPPP,” I replied immediately, my eyes sweeping over his hairy chest, blue eyes, and full pink lips. “911? Yes, sorry, I received a very fire selfie and my heart exploded. What do I do?”

Without missing a beat, he wrote back: “Yes, this is emergency services. Deep breaths, and don’t take your eyes off it. Your heart will repair itself in a few minutes once it adjusts.”

I giggled maniacally at my screen, blushed hard, tried to collect myself. “I’m in a TSA line,” I explained, “and the people around me 100% must think I’m an idiot right now.”

“Welp,” he replied, “sorry if I set off any alarms.”

“Yeah, I’m probably gonna end up on the no-fly list because of all the stars in my eyes,” I mused. “Those seem hazardous.”

I watched the undulating ellipsis as he typed, until his next words appeared: “Guess you’d be stuck in New York then…” Oh, what a tragedy that would be.

After dropping my friend Mia off at her swanky Airbnb post-drankz one night.

The sluttiest night of my life was the time I accidentally booked two sex-dates for one night. It was purely a scheduling error, not intentional at all – but fortunately, both dudes were amenable to the situation.

Dude #1 was my dommy fuckbuddy at the time. I dropped by his place for an early-evening fuck around 6PM. Wanting to try something new, I’d packed some Kegel balls to insert pre-spanking. A far cry away from traditional vibrators, these jiggly little balls vibrate your bits from the inside out every time you get hit, and they don’t even have a motor. It’s a neat trick, and it went over smashingly.

After that date was done, I rushed home and showered for my next one. Dude #2, a Twitter crush visiting from out of town, picked me up and drove us to my favorite pub. Midway through a giggly, tipsy dinner, I texted my dom from earlier, “Should I fuck this guy? I can’t decide.” He weighed the options carefully, taking the decision seriously, and eventually decreed that yes, I should return to this bro’s hotel with him. It turned my dom on, he said, to imagine me fucking someone else just hours after fucking him. (Dude #2, I should say, knew about this whole exchange and was on board.)

Hours upon hours of hotel-sex and fitful sleep later, I got up at 5AM to head out to my 6AM dayjob. As I walked down the creaky old hotel hallway, I heard a creepy clicking sound that seemed to follow me. When I stopped, it stopped; when I continued walking, it started up again. I looked behind me, ahead of me, and around me, but there was no one. My heart froze in my throat.

And then I realized it was the Kegel balls in my coat pocket, clacking together like a taunting soundtrack for my walk of shame. Whoops.

Dressed up at the Holiday Inn Toronto Downtown Centre.

At Woodhull 2016, a fellow blogger held a gathering in her hotel room. She offered up her collection of reject dildos for us to choose from. What an absolute saint.

I knew what I wanted as soon as I saw it. Unlike vibrators that are inspired by nature, this one was inspired by the utterly unsubtle dick of a fantasy creature. It was a behemoth of a dildo, in my blog’s branding colors: pink and blue. I thanked Luna, its original owner, and then cradled it under one arm as I walked down the hall and got on the elevator to take my prize back to my room.

The thing about conferences held at hotels, though, is that there are always guests who aren’t part of the conference, and you have to contend with them. I’d learned this when I took the elevator down in a loud vulva-print dress the day before – and I learned it again, as I endured an uncomfortable elevator ride with two suit-clad blushing businessmen and one giant dildo in plain sight.

I prayed for time to pass more quickly, and wished I’d brought a bigger purse. And as soon as I stepped off the elevator on my floor, I burst into humiliated giggles. What a trip.

At a hotel somewhere in Chicago.

Pros of using Hotwire to find a hotel room: it’s easy, allows for impulsive sex getaways, and is, above all, cheap.

Cons of using Hotwire to find a hotel room: you have no idea, really, what kind of hotel you’ll end up in until it’s already booked. And that’s scary. Sometimes in a sexy way. Sometimes not so much.

My first anal sex experience took place at the Knights Inn, a low-budget hideaway in Toronto’s infamously rough Regent Park neighborhood. The inn itself was sketchy and mildly unsettling, like a scene from The Shining if the film had gone a little tattered and yellow at the edges.

My valiant fuckbuddy knew what a momentous occasion this was, and how much preparation should go into it. He spent long minutes relaxing me, making me giggle, turning me on. And though he is vanilla as fuck, one way he attempted to rev my engine was by spanking me.

The trouble was, the walls were paper-thin. We could hear a cadre of frat boys getting drunk and rowdy in the next room, and though I considered this par for the course, my FWB was spooked. I could feel him backing off the spanking again and again, terrified of making noise, even though the guys on the other side of the wall were being louder than we would be all night.

My handsome friend bunched the thin hotel-bed sheets in his palms and draped them over my upturned ass, as if that would muffle the sound. He experimented with punching instead of slapping. He fretted and overanalyzed and adjusted and readjusted. Finally, enough was enough, and I told him – laughingly, lovingly – to stop.

Hotel sex is supposed to be an escape, but sometimes you still can’t escape your own inhibitions. It’s okay. There are always other things you can do.

Naked and incredulous at the Standard.

The first time I banged my Sir, we were staying at the Standard High Line in New York, one of the most beautiful hotels I’d ever stayed in. I was so nervous I could hardly walk in a straight line.

As we checked in, the clerk asked, “Are you sensitive to noise? This room is right underneath a nightclub, so it can get loud.” It wasn’t an issue. We had no intention of sleeping, and we planned to be pretty loud ourselves. Not that we told the clerk any of that.

My beau pressed the wrong elevator button twice before he got his shit together and hit the right one. He was nervous. It was cute. I was smitten.

I had packed a slew of sex toys, anything and everything I thought we’d need: impact toys, fancy glass dildos, travel-friendly vibrators, cuffs, a blindfold, a book we both loved (which is indeed a sex toy, depending on how you look at it). At his command, I laid it all out for him to look at, arranged it carefully like an Instagram flat-lay, because I wanted him to be impressed.

He must have been impressed, because as soon as I was done, he bolted toward me and pushed me against the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window looking out on the city. His kisses were fierce and hot and immediate. I knew what was coming and I knew I would be taken care of. I will never forget the way he looked at me, so tenderly and searchingly, as he removed my clothes for the first time – and the way that cold, cold glass felt against my back as my heart pounded in my chest.

Hotel sex can be many things, but it is almost never boring. I can tell you that much.

 

This post was sponsored by THE LILY by Fleurotics. (They’re running a crowdfunding campaign currently that you should get in on!) As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Story Time: My First Date With My Sir

Kate Sloan

It wasn’t even supposed to happen. My next trip to New York wasn’t booked until February, and that seemed eons away. When the cute nerd from New York slid into my DMs after some back-and-forth flirty tweets and asked if I’d ever want to “meet a Twitter admirer in person over coffee or something,” I thought it’d either happen months from then or not at all. But it was a nice fantasy, for a moment. “Eee, a Twitter dude is flirting with me,” I texted my best friend, and I kind of thought that’d be the end of it.

But then pieces fell into place – it’s a long story involving a sugar daddy, a plane ticket, and an unexpected break-up – and I found myself going to New York in mid-December instead. By that time I had almost forgotten about the cute boy in my DMs, until one night when I pondered the trip ahead and made an impulsive decision. “Hi! I’m gonna be in NY from Tuesday to Friday next week,” I tapped out. “My schedule’s a little packed and it’s kind of a last-minute trip, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to squeeze in coffee with you, but I’d like to if we can make it work!”

“Hi! I’d like that too,” he wrote back, and we picked a time and place.

The day came. I wasn’t thinking about our date much. I wasn’t even sure it was a date. I had plans for later that day to get on a train to Long Island and go do a pre-negotiated knifeplay scene with a beau, so this coffee with my “Twitter admirer” was just a fun diversion to fill the remaining time until then. My only expectations were good espresso and maybe good conversation. That’s how you should go into every date, really: expecting nothing, so if anything the slightest bit lovely happens, it’ll be an unforeseen treat.

I walked into Culture Espresso on 38th at the appointed time and spotted him immediately: this blue-eyed boy in a blue button-down in front of blue floral wallpaper. He was a vision from the first. I wasn’t expecting that, somehow, even though his big blue eyes in his Twitter avatar were half the reason I’d tweet-flirted with him in the first place. He was cute in the way that usually makes me write someone off, like: There’s no way he’d be interested in me. But he was. He’d asked me out. I didn’t know what to make of that.

“Hi! Can I buy you a coffee?” he asked, bright and extroverted. I declined, wanting to buy my own drink, because paying my own way on a date makes me feel strong and independent and like I don’t owe anyone anything. He told me later this threw him for a loop, made him wonder if I was indeed viewing this as a date – but he recovered well.

I sat down with my latte and we asked each other about our work, our non-monogamy situations, our favorite musicals. (His was Sweeney Todd. I was immediately more interested in him. And I was already pretty interested in him.) I told him about a story I was working on at the time, about unrealistic sexual expectations; when I said “Lots of guys think they can make a woman come from PIV alone,” he rolled his eyes exaggeratedly and that was the first moment I thought, Yeah, I’d like to fuck this person.

“Do people ever make false assumptions about you because you’re poly?” I asked at some point, fascinated. He’d been non-monogamous for years longer than I had, so I went into journalist mode, probing him for wisdom. He pondered that and said, “Totally. People often assume I’m not serious about the people I date. But I’m very serious about the people I date.” A shiver went through me, a quiet premonition that maybe he could be serious like that about me someday. It wasn’t a “chill” thing to say on a first date, but I’m the least chill person I know, so I wasn’t put off – just intrigued.

At one point, he asked me, “Do you think kink is an orientation?” and I brightened even further at the sex-nerdiness of the question. “I think it is for some people. I think it is for me,” I told him. “I’m a submissively oriented person, and I tend to be attracted to dominant, masculine folks, regardless of gender.” His face remained carefully neutral. I wondered if his ears had perked up, somewhere in there, but I wasn’t sure.

We made each other laugh. We shared a chocolate chip cookie. We traded phones to look at each other’s podcasts. He stared into my eyes with such intensity and depth that sometimes I lost my train of thought completely and could only spout excuses: “I’m sorry, you’re just really, really cute.” He smiled opaquely, politely; I couldn’t tell how he was feeling, only knew how I was feeling. I was feeling a lot.

After about an hour, he asked, “Have you eaten? Do you want to go somewhere else?”

I looked out the window at the bitter wintry urban landscape and mused, “If it were summer, I’d say we should go make out in an alley, but it’s pretty cold out there, so.” I have no idea what possessed me to say this. This is the type of line I might bust out if I was 110% certain someone wanted to kiss me, but in this case I wasn’t. I wanted to gauge his interest, and didn’t have much to lose – we didn’t even live in the same city, after all.

This dare of sorts worked as well as I could’ve hoped, however. “That’s a solvable problem,” he said, without missing a beat, and pulled out his phone.

There is an app called Breather, where you can rent nearby office spaces by the hour for meetings, presentations, and work sessions. Not for makeouts, you understand. That is explicitly against the terms of service. But we are rebels.

As he explained his plan to me, he scrolled through the available spaces, picked one, and showed it to me. He titled our reservation “Important Meeting” and leaned across the table and into my personal space to show me the briefcase emoji he had included. I wanted to kiss him right there, but knew it would be better to wait.

We trekked out into the cold and he led me down blustery city streets toward our “meeting” space. “Your shoes are so shiny,” I commented mindlessly, having no idea I was foreshadowing sext-a-thons about shining and licking his boots that would come weeks later. “Thanks,” he replied with a roguish smile. I wanted him to take my hand and lead me where we were going. I was vaguely aware I was following a near-stranger through the streets of a city I barely knew, and that maybe this was ill-advised, but I wanted the warm kisses I was pretty sure awaited me at the end of this chilly journey.

When we got to the building, he greeted the receptionist with more charismatic confidence than I have ever had in my life. As we rode the elevator to the 10th floor, I asked him, “They 100% know what we’re doing here, right?” and he said, “Oh yeah, totally.” I wanted him to push me against the elevator wall and kiss me hard. I wanted some tangible sign he wanted me as much as I wanted him in that moment. I would have to wait.

We were slightly early for our booked timeslot, and someone else was still using the room, so we waited outside. I leaned against the wall and focused on his beautiful face, to the exclusion of all else. “I’m trying to figure out what celebrity you remind me of,” I murmured. He smiled and stared into my soul with those deep blue eyes. Later I would realize it was Cillian Murphy he reminded me of. Um, the boy is very fucking good-looking. Have I mentioned?

When the room freed up, we walked in and took a look around. Ample natural light flowed in the windows. We plugged in our phones. I took some pictures. We busied ourselves with these things for the minute it took us to gather our courage to do what we had come there to do.

I was mid-sentence the first time he kissed me. Neither of us remember what I was saying. He just walked up to me in the middle of that minimalist room, put his hands on my waist, and pulled me toward him. It knocked the words out of me. Our faces were still cold from the winter wind and our noses were running a little and I wanted more of him, more, more, more.

So I told him to sit on the plush grey couch on the far wall, and I straddled him. I like this position for enthusiastic makeouts because, as per Gala Darling, “this way they are [consensually] TRAPPED and can’t escape until my lips are satisfied! I am sneaky like that.”

I leaned into him for long, hot kisses, feeling his body pinned beneath me and his big warm hands traversing my hips and my thighs and my ass. It occurred to me suddenly that I was tugging on his hair without having asked first, and that might be a problem for when he headed back into work after our date; I leaned back and said, “I’m messing up your hair; is that okay?” and he shot back, with a wry smirk, “As long as you put it back after.” We kissed some more and I felt his tongue slide against mine as his stubble scraped my chin.

In a sudden shift of power, he grabbed my wrists and grasped them together behind my back, so I was writhing above him but in a much more submissive manner than I had been a moment before. “Are you a little dommy?” I asked, tentatively, having theretofore assumed he was on the vanilla side of the spectrum. “I’m a switch,” he responded, with the well-worn ease of an actual kinkster, and excitement sparked inside me even further. “I think I want you on top of me,” I breathed.

We shifted; I laid on my back on that beautifully-lit sofa and he climbed on top of me, staking out a spot between my legs with no tact or pretense whatsoever, just pushing my thighs apart with his slim hips. He ground into me through our layers of clothing and kissed me roughly, animalistically, all-consumingly. “You can bite me, if you want,” I offered, shyly, and showed him where. He bit me hard until I moaned, and made me take it. “Good girl,” he purred against my mouth, and I laughed and said, “You’ve done your research!” He flashed me that disarming grin and said, “Maybe,” before giving me his lips again.

Suddenly, we heard what sounded like urgent knocking at the door. He bolted and, in a moment, was sitting on the opposite side of the couch, smoothing his hair and attempting to regulate his breathing, like a dishevelled businessman whose boss just walked in on him with his secretary. After all, making out in a Breather is against the terms of service. A few moments’ hard listening sufficiently convinced us it was just some construction workers hammering across the hall. When he crawled back over to me and took my face in his hands again, I managed to mumble between kisses, “It makes sense, because you make my heart… hammer.” He laughed. I was so, so happy that he laughed.

He wrapped his arms around me and dipped me in a deep kiss, and for a terrifying moment, I thought I was going to fall. “Don’t drop me!” I squeaked, and he held me firmly and said, “I won’t. I promise. I’ve got you.” It felt good to hear that then; it felt even better to hear it weeks later, when, on difficult days, he would text me things like, “Remember our first date when I told you ‘I’ve got you’? I meant it then. I mean it now.”

His hand kept grazing my ass like he wanted to hit me, but he bit his lip and looked past me at the paper-thin walls through which spankings could probably be heard. “I wish we could be louder right now,” he growled ruefully, and I said, “You know what’s quieter than slapping? Punching…” And that is how I ended up stretched over his lap with my ass in the air.

He pounded his fist against my ass, over and over, making me mewl and moan into the arm of the sofa. I writhed against his hard cock, both of us still fully clothed, deliciously so. He volleyed a steady stream of affirming dirty-talk about what a good girl I was, how well I was taking the pain, how much he liked the noises I was making. “You’re so hot like this,” he said, and I still couldn’t believe he really thought so.

“Is this okay?” he asked at some point, and I melted even further and made happy, positive noises. “So then I guess this is probably okay too?” he added, as his fingertips dipped between my thighs and found my clit through my leggings and underwear. As he circled it and made me moan, he commented on how wet and hot I was, and it seemed ridiculous he could feel that through all those layers – and yet I believed it. This boy had rendered me a puddle of arousal and submission, seemingly without even trying.

We didn’t go any further than that. I’d wondered if we might, but somewhere amid all those blurry kisses, he told me he had to get back to work. People would be wondering where he’d gone. It’s not often someone just disappears on their lunch break. And I had to be getting to my train.

We gathered our things, walked down the hall, and got back into the elevator. This time, he did kiss me. He pressed me into the wall and I could feel every contour of that warm, lanky body I longed to see more of. As he snaked a thigh between mine, I worried I’d get his jeans wet. I was that unraveled, that shocked into my body.

The elevator stopped and some strangers got on, some well-to-do businessmen talking about taxes or sports or god knows what, and we jumped apart and stood silently side-by-side, our hearts thumping, our molecules mingling. We reached the ground floor and stumbled out into the harsh winter sunshine together, dazzled, disoriented. “Will you walk me to where I’m going?” I asked. Google Maps could’ve helped me, but I wanted more of this boy. Just a few minutes more. Or whatever I could get.

He said yes. We weaved through city streets together looking for the store where my best friend Bex works; he was going to drop me off there so Bex could walk me to my train. “I feel weird,” I commented, all light-headed and foggy, and I realized as we talked that I was in subspace. It’s unusual for me to lapse into that space from such a short and, frankly, non-naked interaction – but he had made me so submissive and turned on that it made sense. He didn’t hold my hand as we walked, but he told me later that he wished he had; he was just shaken up and worried about me and worried about how long he’d been gone from work.

We got to the store and paused outside. “I’ll let you know when I’m coming back in February and maybe we can hang out,” I said, trying too hard to seem chill and unaffected.

“Yeah! Totally,” he replied, internally breathless but externally calm. We kissed goodbye, smiled at each other, and I went into the store, wanting to watch him stride off into his city but worried that’d seem uncool of me.

I didn’t think I’d see him again, honestly. I didn’t think he liked me enough to stay in touch. I didn’t think he wanted more from me than just that one weird almost-hookup in a Breather. But I’m chronically insecure about such things; he was showing interest, I just didn’t see it, didn’t believe it.

That afternoon he texted me a screenshot of the Breather receipt, captioned “for your records.” The following morning, I texted him, “Still thinking about those extremely good kisses,” and he replied, a mere eleven seconds later, “I was literally just thinking the same thing.” The next night, we sexted for the first time, while I was curled up on Bex’s living room sofa. The morning after that, he sent me a blisteringly hot selfie while I was waiting in a TSA line at the airport. The next day, when I was back in Toronto, he told me, “I’m really enjoying playing with you and getting to know you. I hope you know that.” I still didn’t quite believe he wanted me.

We’ve been dating for three months now and I still don’t quite believe it. But I’m happy about it nonetheless. I’m happy I answered that DM, happy I went on that coffee date, happy I kissed that boy in that Breather. I’m happy about it every day.

Hypnowink: That Time I Got Tranced Accidentally

Kate Sloan

As I’ve mentioned before, my Sir is into hypnokink. The first time he ever tranced me was an accident, and practically as soon as it happened, I thought, That’d make a great story to tell at Tell Me Something Good!

So I was excited when I got called up to close out the show at the Playground Conference edition of TMSG. I knew my story would be one of the weirder ones told that night, especially since it didn’t actually contain any sex, but I was excited to tell it to a room full of sex nerds anyhow.

Here’s an audio file of me telling the story, and a transcription of what I said. Enjoy!

Content note: hypnosis, winking, and long-distance D/s.

Okay, so, I have a new long-distance partner. He’s my boyfriend; he’s my Sir. And one of the things that’s interesting and new to me about that is finding ways to bridge the gap, intimacy-wise, so we’ve spent many many hours on the phone together.

And one of the things that he does for me that makes me feel closer to him is he sends me videos of him winking, because I have a winking kink. I’m the only person I’ve ever met who has that. There’s fewer than 50 of them on Fetlife. We call each other “winksters.” Or, I do.

So, first of all, don’t come up to me and wink at me, ’cause it actually is a sexual thing for me and gives me weird non-consent-y feelings when strangers wink at me, so don’t do that. Ask first! You know.

But so, my partner would send me videos of him winking. He has a really good wink. He’ll optimize it to my preferences. It’s very nice.

So, one night I had done something that was kind of scary and difficult, and I wanted to watch a video of him winking as a reward, and I was going through all the videos that he’s sent me of him winking. We were on the phone. This was fairly early in our relationship, so he was like, “How many of those videos have I sent you?” and I counted and there was four. There’s many more now! There’s an archive of winks.

And when I told him there was four, I was like: What if I open them all up in QuickTime, and tile them all next to each other, and loop them all, so there’s just this chorus of winking angels in perpetuity? Just, like, asynchronous winking forever.

When he winks at me, I have this giggle reaction, and he’s listening to me on the phone watching these looping winks for like half an hour, and I’m just like: “The great thing about this is, this is useless to anyone but us. Like, no one else would appreciate this. There’s nothing else you could do with this. I could maybe set it as my screensaver. I could maybe watch it after a hard day. You could strap me down and I could watch it until I couldn’t take it anymore.”

And then I said something which, as soon as I said it, I was like, “Oh! He likes this!” I was like, “You could hypnotize me using these winks.” ‘Cause I should mention that my partner’s biggest kink is hypnosis, and he’s very good at it. He’s usually a top; sometimes he switches. So we had been negotiating some hypno stuff we wanted to do the next time we saw each other in person, so I had said I was down to do it, but we had not done any of it yet, and I was really excited.

So he got really excited when I said that, and he was like, “Yeah, I could tell you that with every wink, you were going a little bit deeper into trance for me, so if you didn’t drop on the first wink, you would drop really hard on the second one, and if you didn’t drop on the second one, you would drop on the third one, and eventually, one of their eyes would close and your eyes would fall closed, and you’d be in a nice, warm, relaxing trance for me.” And I realized that I had fallen into trance. Whoops!

This had never happened to me before, so I didn’t know what that would feel like, but my entire body felt really heavy, and I felt really focused and warm, and my eyes fell closed. And we were on the phone, so he couldn’t see me, so I needed to communicate this to him. So I was like, “Uh, Sir, something’s happening! Something’s happening to me, Sir.” And he, fortunately, is experienced and he knew what that meant. We hadn’t negotiated how long I would stay under, ’cause this was an accident, but he wanted to leave me under for a few seconds so I would get a sense of it, and then bring me out. So he told me about how nice and relaxing it is to not have to move your body, and to just focus on his words. And then he said, “I’m gonna count to five, and when I count to five, you’re gonna feel awake, alert, and totally normal.”

He counted up to five, and he said, “Hi, little one!” and I said, “Hi, Sir!” and he said, “How do you feel?” and I said, “I feel really good!”

I did feel really good. And what I felt, too, was that I never had known what this winking kink was supposed to be. Like, I never really knew how to play with it. It was sort of awkward, like, “Do you just wink at me during sex? I don’t really know how to use this…” It was like our two kinks had come together and made this cute little scene that neither of us had ever known could exist because we didn’t know that the other person existed and had these interesting kinks.

And the other thing I felt was that I really wanted him to trance me again a whole bunch, which he has done a whole bunch since then, and it’s really nice!