The Many Note Challenge, Part Three

On Friday, I made up an exercise for myself: writing the same basic scene with a variety of moods. These are the last two entries in that short series, and I’ve gotten a lot out of the experience—I hope you enjoyed reading them.

Remember, If you think it would be interesting to do this, too, I invite you to participate. I kept the dialogue and specific actions very similar in mine—you could imitate that, or go your own way. Feel free to tag me on Twitter @AnnabethLeong with what you come up with. I would be so excited to see how others might present the same simple action.

And you can find out about the back story and read the other vignettes here and here.

(Image by Beverly Yuen Thompson, licensed under Creative Commons)

Five:

She pulls my arms behind my back, and instantly my mind goes blank. From the moment I saw the rope out of the corner of my eye, my worries began to drain away. I don’t need to be anything special now. I don’t even really need a name. I’m just hers. Meditation’s got nothing on this.

“You ready?” She knows how fast I drop into that wordless place. I smile, because I know the question is a bit of a tease.

To tease her back, I don’t use words to answer. I just nod.

My body knows this position. Arms behind, chest pushed forward, wrists lined up with elbows. At first, I couldn’t get into the classic, traditional shape of this, but this is my peace, my personal version of yoga. I’ve practiced a lot, so now I slide into place easily as she guides me with her hands. She pulls my head back, emphasizing the arch of my neck and spine. I feel so beautiful this way.

She begins to loop rope around my wrists. I can feel the coarseness of the fibers, but I remind myself that I don’t have to react to it. I don’t have to squirm or move at all. My breathing is slow, and I focus on making it even slower.

“Hold still,” she teases, kissing the back of my head. “I won’t get this on right if you can’t hold still.” I can hear in her voice that her eyebrow is arched and one side of her mouth quirked up.

I don’t vary my breathing or position in the slightest. I’m already a statue. It’s amazing how powerfully I can tease back without doing anything at all.

Six:

I pull her arms behind her back with a jerk, fast and sharp to force her breath from her chest. Today I feel like playing rough.

“You ready?” I growl into her ear.

She nods.

The next few seconds are about me showing her she isn’t ready. Chest forward—farther than she wants it. Arms back—higher than she instinctively goes, and then an inch higher still. I know she can take this, and today I need to make it hurt. I pull until I hear her breath catch, then freeze there, watching her realize I’m going to tie her just like this, all the way at the limit of the position her body can hold. Her eyes widen. I pinch the inside of her wrist to see if I can make her gasp, and she flings her head back. She whimpers and looks helpless, and that’s what I need. Today I want to be the predator. I want to feel big and frightening and strong.

I begin looping the rope around her wrists. I want the coarse fibers to burn, and I zip them over her skin fast enough to leave marks. She squirms in discomfort, and that makes me smile. My head rushes with the force of the power she’s giving me.

“Hold still,” I tell her, my voice heavy with ironic sweetness. The rope and I are holding her tightly enough that there’s already not much room for her to move. I kiss the back of her head. I always like that sort of gesture while I’m being vicious—it emphasizes everything about the situation. “I won’t get this on right if you can’t hold still.”

Really, I hope she moves. If she gives me an excuse to punish her right now, god knows I’ll take it. I’m not sure how hard she wants to play. I’m hoping she wants to go all the way today, like me.

***

Obviously, one could keep going basically forever. It would be interesting to do this with different gendered partners, different numbers of partners, and on and on. I hope you've enjoyed this series!

The Many Note Challenge, Part Two

I got inspired yesterday to show the same BDSM situation in a variety of moods. These are my next two vignettes, both from the perspective of the top.

Remember, If you think it would be interesting to do this, too, I invite you to participate. I’m keeping the dialogue and specific actions very similar for fun—you could imitate that, or go your own way. Feel free to tag me on Twitter @AnnabethLeong with what you come up with. I would be so excited to see how others might present the same simple action.

And you can find out about the back story and read the first two vignettes here.

(Image by Beverly Yuen Thompson, licensed under Creative Commons)

Three:

When I pull her arms behind her back, I have a moment of panic. I definitely don’t know what I’m doing. I mean, technically I do—I’ve gone through books carefully, taken classes, even practiced on her—but nothing could have prepared me for actually trying to top her. I started feeling shy the moment I picked up my rope, and when her eyes widened when she noticed it, I wanted to just drop it and run away.

“You ready?” I say into her ear, trying to imitate the toppy growl I’ve heard instructors use.

She nods.

She lets me guide her into position. It’s incredible how pliable her body is under my hands. She’s smooth as a dancer, and I get distracted worrying that I won’t lead as well as people who’ve tied her in the past. Still, she ends up mostly in the right attitude—arms behind her, chest pushed forward. She flings her head back and presses a random kiss to the side of my forehead—the spot she happens to be able to reach.

I try not to let that distract me, and begin looping rope around her wrists. She squirms, and I realize the coarse fibers are tickling her as they drag across her skin. I’m not putting rope on the back of a chair—I’m putting it on a person, my lover, someone I’m supposed to be connected to.

I pull her closer and take a deep breath. “Hold still.” I kiss the back of her head, slow this down for a moment so I can gather my thoughts. I remember that she knows me, and she knows about my experience—or lack thereof. I don’t have to pretend to be Miss Toppy Top. “I won’t get this on right if you can’t hold still,” I confess, and she doesn’t have to say anything back to make me feel her gentle, unwavering support as I go on with the tie.

Four:

I pull her arms behind her back, careful of her range of motion. I know what an act of trust it was for her to ask for this. Every takate-kote is individual, and I push down a flash of anger at the top who hurt her, the one who tried to force her unique body into position as if the rope was a cookie-cutter and she was a raw piece of rolled dough.

“You ready?” I murmur. I’m watching her carefully for signs of discomfort, my fingers light on her left shoulder joint, the one where she said she had the problem last time.

She gives me a nervous smile and nods.

I feel so protective of her. I guide her toward position, but not into position—I told her when we negotiated this that she would be the one to decide how far she wanted to stretch, but I show that, too, with the gentleness of my hands, the looseness of my grip. She pushes her chest forward, and puts her right arm all the way behind her, though I’m glad to see she doesn’t strain the elbow, letting her forearm fall into an obtuse angle. Her left arm nudges back, but not far.

She flings her head back, fixing me with a rueful stare. “It won’t be a real takate-kote,” she moans, looking ashamed.

I begin looping rope around her wrists. I let her feel the coarseness of the fibers, knowing that sometimes sensations like that can help people get out of their heads and into their bodies. “Who says it won’t be real?” I ask her. “It’s real to me. It can be to you, too, if you let it.”

She squirms.

“You feeling okay?” I ask. “You still want to do this?”

She nods again.

“Then hold still.” I kiss the back of her head to make the command as gentle as possible. “I want to be precise here, and that’ll work best if you hold still.”

***

Check back tomorrow for my last two vignettes!

The Many Note Challenge

Today, I got into a conversation on Twitter with @TGStoneButch (who writes incredible erotica under the name Xan West) about the way that representations of kink can sometimes feel one-note, as if there’s only one way to react to certain sensations and experiences.

I commented that this phenomenon feels isolating to me. As someone who always worried that my sexual reactions were “wrong,” sometimes the experience of reading kink erotica or hearing presentations at cons can make me feel alone in an environment where I had hoped to be included.

I think it’s really important to think about how the same actions might be given and received from very different perspectives.

Indeed, what kicked off that conversation was something from the Forbidden Fiction release party last night. There, I was talking about how I initially got a thrill from seeing trangressive words or actions in erotica, but that over time that faded. Now, what gets me—interested and/or aroused—is characterization and psychological intent. All of which depends on the opposite of that one-note approach.

It’s serious, important stuff, and I want to think a lot more about it. That led me to an idea for a fun exercise.

I want to show this variety of characterization and intent in action. So I’ve written a series of short snippets about the same simple activity, each one demonstrating a different mood. I’m calling it the Many Note Challenge.

The activity I’ve focused on is the tying of a takate kote—a box tie that fastens a rope bottom’s arms behind their back.

I wrote six of them. I’ll post the first two now (so I’m never showing one mood in isolation!), and then the rest over the course of the weekend. The first ones I wrote were from the bottom’s perspective, but I wound up writing an even number from the top’s as well.

If you think it would be interesting to do this, too, I invite you to participate. I’m keeping the dialogue and specific actions very similar for fun—you could imitate that, or go your own way. Feel free to tag me on Twitter @AnnabethLeong with what you come up with. I would be so excited to see how others might present the same simple action.

(Image by Beverly Yuen Thompson, licensed under Creative Commons)

One:

When she pulls my arms behind my back, I giggle. From the moment I caught sight of her rope out of the corner of my eye, I knew playtime was about to start. Just that word, playtime, makes me happy. I feel like a kid again, being just naughty enough to have a good time.

“You ready?” She purrs into my ear.

I nod.

I feel silly in the position she guides me into—arms behind me, chest pushed forward. I ham it up, flinging my head back as if I’m on the cover of an old-style romance novel and she’s ravishing me. We both giggle this time.

She begins to loop rope around my wrists. Its coarse fibers tickle me, and I squirm in her arms.

“Hold still,” she admonishes playfully, kissing the back of my head. “I won’t get this on right if you can’t hold still.”

Two:

When she pulls my arms behind my back, I drop straight into the feelings I normally pretend I don’t have. Rage. Helplessness. Rage. From the moment I caught sight of the rope out of the corner of my eye, I knew where she wanted to take me. I think I can do this today—I think I want to—but I can never quite be sure until it’s happening.

“You ready?” She whispers into my ear.

If this goes the way we both want it to, it’ll clean me out, leave me exhausted but purified, give her the feeling that she does have a way to reach the deep parts of me that I normally keep from her. If it doesn’t—well, we’ll have a long conversation ahead. Nothing we haven’t dealt with before.

“If either of us says no at any time, everything stops, right?”

We both know that, but I always have to say it.

“Of course,” she says. Her fingers tighten on my arms, and I can feel how badly she wants this.

I nod. “Go ahead.”

She guides me into position—arms back, chest forward. I already hate it. There’s a slight strain on my shoulders and an unpleasant stretch across my sternum. I fling my head back to get a big, clean breath of air as I endure it. I remind myself that I usually like what I find on the other side of a session like this.

She begins to loop rope around my wrists. The sensation of its coarse fibers gives me slight relief from the stormclouds already gathering in my head. I squirm in her arms, trying to feel more of them.

“Hold still,” she admonishes, giving the back of my head a kiss that I know is meant to show she’s not upset with me. “I won’t get this on right if you can’t hold still.”

***

That's it for today. Check back tomorrow for the next two vignettes!