The Mark and the Caul: A Sexy Part

There's a cool thing that happens when it takes a story a very long time to get published. By the time it's out, I get to read it fresh, as surprised as the reader might be. So I checked out my story "The Mark and the Caul," which recently came out in Sacchi Green's Witches, Princesses, and Women at Arms: Erotic Lesbian Fairy Tales, and I got to remember some of the things I enjoyed about writing this story.

The princess, Lucinda, has been told all her life that she's disfigured, and it takes her a while to trust her lover, Sam, with her body. I always find tentative explorations hot, and I also really enjoyed writing about how Lucinda and Sam navigate Lucinda's insecurities. Here's one of their early sex scenes:

"May I touch you?" Lucinda asked.

"You may do with me as you please."

Lucinda stepped close. At first, despite her question, she touched only with eyes, her fingers too timid to bridge the gap between them. When she lifted a hand at last, she flitted it around Sam's body like a butterfly too skittish to alight. Feeling ridiculous, she brought a fingertip to rest on the blunt tip of Sam's broad nose.

They both froze, and then Sam laughed, and the sound freed Lucinda to gather her wife into her arms more boldly. She learned the shapes of Sam's shoulder blades, the curve of her spine, and the solidity of her hips. She tucked Sam's muscular buttocks into the palms of her hands, but the powerful response in her body alarmed her and she retreated to Sam's elbows. Lucinda, however, could not resist stroking upward from there, outlining her wife's upper arms, which were strong and thick from helping the miller.

This supposedly less intimate territory still made Lucinda's stomach flutter. She rested the side of her face between Sam's breasts, barely trusting her legs to hold her up. Wrapping one arm around Sam's back, Lucinda allowed her other hand to wander to the hollow of Sam's throat, over the point of one taut breast, along the side of her rib cage, and finally, between her legs.

"Moon above and river below," Sam cursed.

Lucinda smiled at the reaction and petted the damp hair that grew over Sam's pubis. She knew the pleasure her own body yielded when she explored this place. "There is a river below indeed. I feel the signs of its presence, though I have not found it yet."

Sam widened her stance. "You seem clever enough to track it."

"You will not be able to remain standing under the force of its waters once I make them flow," Lucinda said. She led her wife to her bed and helped her in. Then she rubbed the top of one of Sam's thighs, as if she were a great mill horse in need of steadying. Slowly, Lucinda parted her wife's lower lips, revealing the extent of her wetness.

"Ah," Sam sighed. "You've found it."

"I've found the path that leads there." Lucinda began a thorough examination of the territory, at first simply stroking and discovering, then later responding to the hiss of Sam's breath and the catches in her throat. She trapped sensitive flesh between her first two fingers, squeezing lightly, tugging, and rolling.

Sam gave a full-throated cry, and her firm body became rigid and hard beneath Lucinda's touch. Pleasure shattered off her and pounded through the room, rolling from Sam's body in waves that Lucinda could feel at her temples. Sam gasped, and finally caught her breath. "My mother told me the pleasures of the marriage bed were not for women," she said at last. "I've never known her to be wrong before, and yet I can imagine nothing sweeter than what you have done to me."

Lucinda stretched out beside Sam, still in her clothes. She slipped her hand beneath her veil so she could inhale Sam's scent, and shivered all over at the spice of it. "It heartens me to hear this from you. I was always told that it would hurt."

Sam clutched Lucinda fiercely. "I swear I'll never hurt you."

"I know you won't."

"Will you let me please you, too?"

Lucinda drew a deep breath. "Soon," she promised. "But not yet."

Sam nodded and held her, and the two women whispered secrets to each other.

If you'd like to read the rest, you can pick up the book here.

Me, On Safewords and Edges

Right now at Oh Get a Grip, our topic is edges. I wrote about my experience of using safewords in BDSM, and the realization that finding the "right time" to use one isn't nearly as precise as it sounds.

An edge sounds like a line, a clear point. You’re on the cliff, or you’re falling off it. You’re in Florida, or you’ve crossed into Georgia.

But in my experience, borders are not nearly that clear. I think my edges in BDSM work more like beaches than guard rails. At what point are you on the sand or in the water? There’s a transition process. There’s water that seems shallow until the tide suddenly comes in. There are stretches of beach where you can walk a long way out “into the water” but somehow never get more than calf deep.

So, I don’t want to be in the water to the point that I drown or am otherwise harmed, obviously, but I do want to be in the water. It’s not necessarily easy to figure out how much water is too much water. Knee deep? Waist deep? Chest deep? Do I want to dip my head under for a few seconds?

And an ocean doesn’t just sit still and wait for me to figure that out. Neither does a BDSM situation.

If you'd like to read the rest, you can find it here.

When BDSM Lacks Safewords

I don't talk about it much, but my first BDSM relationship was quite abusive. I was young, and had no idea that there was a community, or even that other people understood the things I desired, shared those desires, and had given them names. When I got together with someone who started tying me up, introducing spanking, and so forth, I was excited, ashamed, confused. He was older, and I leaned on him to know what we were doing.

We didn't have safewords. We didn't have negotiations. He just did things to me, and we had all the problems you might expect. There was no way to differentiate between fun "no" and serious "no." There was no way to express that -- really, truly -- I wasn't ready for something. And I was too dependent and not in control of my own sexual fate.

Why am I talking about this now? In conversation on Twitter the other night with @eroticawriter (author I.G. Frederick) and @MenageReviewer (Mary's Naughty Whispers), the question came up: "Is there such a thing as nonconsensual BDSM?"

I understand where the question came from, because these days to me BDSM is deeply intertwined with consent and negotiation. I'm sympathetic to the idea that if there's no clear sense of consent, it's abuse, not BDSM. I wish we lived in that world. But the truth is, we live in a world where a lot of people (including my past self) aren't very educated about sex, and don't have a good sense of how to take charge of what happens to them in a sexual context.

As part of the conversation, I discovered two incredible blog posts on this subject written by I.G. Frederick. I think they're must-reads for anyone who's ever been in a BDSM relationship that felt "off."

The first lays out the difference between abuse and BDSM:

But without training and experience, without care and consideration, abuse can happen even with consent. Someone who consents to a D/s relationship without prior knowledge of what it involves or the person to whom he/she is submitting is a perfect candidate for emotional abuse. This statement, in a “slave’s” online journal, speaks volumes about what the person writing it has experienced in the past. “i need some security and to feel good that i am not going to be thrown away for a simple reason.”

The second describes the anger that inspired Frederick to write disturbing erotic novels on this subject:

These novels are not romances. They’re cautionary tales about abuse and the meaning of consent. (In Broken Jessica consents to enslavement by her professor when he threatens to expel her from the university and blacklist her.) I know some readers find them arousing. Others have found them revolting. But, my intention was that readers find them thought provoking and that has indeed been the case.

This is a great example of why I think it's important for there to be at least some erotica that exists apart from the requirement of a happy ending. I need to read stories like this sometimes to understand the things that have happened to me. Other stories have given me a vision of hope -- the idea of what a BDSM relationship can be. But sometimes, I just need to know that someone else understands these situations in all their complexity -- pain and arousal both included.