So Good to Me

Doc asked me the night before Thanksgiving if I wanted to engage in any of my kinks.

He had promised sex in a church the next night, so I was sitting pretty and wanting for nothing.

Don't get me wrong - I love it when we do kinky stuff together; but I'm so exquisitely satisfied with the sex without kink that just the anticipation of spicing things up is enough to satisfy.

The day after Thanksgiving, however, Doc pulled out a cane and suggested we use it, because ... well, fuck yes!

I got naked and lay on the bed face down. Doc caned me; alternating between striking and stroking me with the cane. And it made me wet. It made me so wet.

On more than one occasion, I lifted my hips and shifted closer to Doc, trying to silently encourage more, silently begging him to touch me with his hands, to finger fuck me until I came.

And he did touch me. He stroked my pussy. He probed my cunt.

It wasn't long before I couldn't take it anymore. I rolled onto my back, moved in front of him, positioned myself until Doc was between my thighs and pleaded with Doc to fuck me.

And he did fuck me. And I finally worked up the courage to pull out a mirror so I could watch his cock in my pussy as he fucked. It was the hottest thing I've ever seen.

Oh, yes. Doc is very good to me.

Thanksgiving Adventures

I grew up in beautiful church. Domed ceiling, stained glass windows, full pipe organ. Rich red carpet and oak pews.

It is a place of beauty.

The church came into existence before the town in which it resides. The founder moved there in the late 1800s and decided to start a church, a draw to settlement. In a town with five churches, it is the oldest and most ornate.

This is where my family held our Thanksgiving day meal yesterday.

We have grown too large in numbers for any one member of the family to host the meal at a private home. Twenty of us, in total. No one has the space for so many bodies.

So, I suggested we have the meal in the basement of this church where I grew up, where I first met God, where I fell in love with Jesus - the large, southern, rose window depicting Christ at Gethsemane being a particular draw for me, where I was baptised and confirmed (the only one in our family to choose to confirm baptismal vows made on our behalf in infancy), and where I would often sneak out of Sunday school and hide behind the horseshoe-shaped island in the kitchen as I preferred to listen to the adult talk about important things rather than make shoe-box Garden of Edens.

This is the church where my grandfather grew up, where my grandparents were married, where my father was baptized, confirmed, raised in the faith, where my parents were married.

This is the first church I ever preached in. My maiden sermon as I sought and obtained official confirmation of my call to ministry.

So it was that yesterday, when Doc and I arrived and after we set out the few dishes we had contributed to the meal (the turkey, cheese, and a dessert), I gave him a tour of this church that I love.

My parents arrived and we began to warm the side dishes. My siblings arrived with their respective partners, children, and friends. Everything was finished warming, the kids were playing, small talk ensued. It was the best and most relaxed holiday meal I think my family has ever shared.

When it came time to clean up, my mother washed a few dishes, I took care to send the leftovers home with those who most needed them, cars were packed and most everyone drove off into the night.

There was a bit overlap with the group that has a standing Thursday night reservation in the church basement, but my father is familiar with them and I know a couple of the members in that group from other places in life.

Once the kitchen was otherwise cleared and the group had taken their seats in the fellowship hall, Doc and I carefully and very quietly snuck up the back stairwell, through the office, to the of the sanctuary, up another flight of stairs, into the balcony where there is a couch.

Stripping off my shoes, skirt, leggings and panties, I sat at the very edge of the couch as Doc removed his belt, pants and boxers. I took him into my mouth and enjoyed the feel and taste of him. Then, he leaned me back, knelt between my legs and fucked me in the church. And it was good.

We kept things short and because I'm incapable of having a silent or even quiet orgasm, and with the group meeting two stories below us, I simply marvelled in the way Doc feels inside of me.

It was a long-held fantasy brought to life, and I experienced a level of happiness that has never before been attained so close to any family function.

Perhaps come Christmas, we'll be able to find a few more quiet hours in the church, when it's empty and silent, and I'll finally be able to convince Doc to tie me to the altar before taking me. If I'm a very, very, very good girl and ask nicely.

And if that particular fantasy never comes to be, I'll be satisfied to relive this one in my memory for years to come.

A Big Confession

If you've come looking for salacious details about my awesome kinky sex life, you should probably skip this post.

The thing about pastors is, we're human, too. We're actually no different from the people who sit in the pews of churches. We just have a different view on Sunday mornings.

Any pastor who tells you they've never doubted God is either lying or has a faith not worth trusting, in my humble opinion.

Any pastor who pretends they never have evil thoughts is full of shit.

I am not a nice person, but I like to believe I am incredibly kind. If you want an explanation of the distinction, read this.

Today, I may not even be all that kind; in reality, as a child in early elementary school, I was not all that kind. I was angry and violent a lot of the time.

Things changed when I was ten. There are reasons for the change, but I'll not go into those now. Suffice it to say the rage and violence remained, but I chose to direct them inward rather than outward. It took a very long time for the violence to end and the rage to dissipate and healing and joy to take their place again.

Two years before the change, however, there was one boy in my third grade class. His name was Andrew. This is the only time in this blog I will ever use a real name.

I do not remember Andrew's last name, but I was mean and hateful and cruel to him. For many years now I've wished I could look him up, find him, and apologize for the way I treated him. I carry the shame of my childhood sins with me.

But that is not what this post is about. This post is about this morning.

The thing about being a pastor is you end up on everybody's email list. Every church you've ever served, every church you've ever attended, every church you've ever preached at. They all get you on the roster, and the roster never gets cleaned out.

I received an email this morning from the church I grew up in. A young man passed away this weekend. He was thirty-four years old.

And I thought to myself that the world had become a kinder and gentler place with his passing.

This man was a year ahead of me in school. He was cruel to me. Not in the same ways I was cruel to Andrew, but in other ways. Constant torment and verbal abuse that was ignored by the adults in every setting.

He largely ignored me at church, but during the summers, he and his step-siblings would dunk me in the pool and hold me under water, they would taunt me about being an overweight kid from a dysfunctional and incredibly impoverished family. The lifeguards did nothing but tell me that if I didn't want to be picked on, I should go on a diet and not be so fat. The pool management said the same thing.

During the school year I only had interactions with him on the playground because he was a year ahead of me. That is until we were both transferred to a different school district some 20 miles away.

I tried to think kindly of him. He had a physical disability and came from a family not much different than my own, though perhaps slightly more well off. I didn't like the way he treated me, but I couldn't bring myself to be cruel to him. I couldn't bring myself to be cruel about him. Mostly, I just felt sorry for him, because I knew what had caused me to become an angry, bitter, violent five year old.

This all changed one day on the way home from school. There were three of us being bused from our district to the district up north. We rode in a white minivan with "SCHOOL BUS" magnets on the panels of the van.

This particular day, this boy had ridden to school, but he was nowhere to be seen in the bus on the way home from school. I asked about his very noticeable absence, and was told by the driver that he'd gotten sick at school and gone home early.

I genuinely hoped he was okay.

Then, the 25 minute ride home. I was grilled relentlessly about how I felt about this boy. I was goaded and picked at and pressured to say terrible, mean, hateful, hurtful things about him. Repeatedly I was asked, "But you really hate him, don't you? You think he's terrible, don't you?" These questions were asked by the third student and the bus driver, a woman in her late 40s.

I had never thought such things about him and I said so.

The onslaught of questions continued, but I heard a scuttling on the floor and looked under the seats. There he was, this boy of eleven, who had conspired to get me to say terrible things about him; there was the bus driver, a grown woman with adult children of her own, colluding to make a fool of me.

"It was just a joke," they said, trying to pass off their horrendous behavior as something we could all laugh about.

But it wasn't a joke when I pressed into saying thing I hadn't thought - until that moment; when it was demanded that I admit to feelings that I did not have - until that moment.

I wasn't so angry with this boy or our fellow student for their stupid and childish prank as I was with the bus driver, a grown adult who sought to humiliate me, who intentionally created circumstances and participated in behaviors designed to trap me into saying something they could use against me later, an adult who was supposed to be a safe person, who had insisted this bus was a safe space, and who violated that safety with trickery and abuse.

I exploded when I got home and screamed at her about what a vile and disgusting human being she was.

As for this boy and the third student, I cried a bit. I couldn't understand their betrayal. Weren't we all in this together? Hadn't we all been kicked out of one school to bused to another, one with more resources for "problem children" like us? Why was I the one singled out as the object of torment and insult? Weren't we all struggling with similar things?

The next day we had a new driver, the adult son of original driver who gave me an earful about how disrespectful my behavior toward his mother had been. I laughed in his face. Defending myself was not disrespectful. What she had done was disrespectful.

I read on the bus from then on and refused to speak to either this boy, the other student, or the new driver who continued to pick us up and drop us off for the remainder of the year.

But I never forgot that experience.

Some years later, while I was in seminary, the new pastor at my church mentioned that this boy, now a grown man, was in a facility, got precious few visitors, and since I was in the area often, it would probably be appreciated if I stopped by.

I never did. I didn't owe him anything.

This morning, I wanted to feel compassion. He's someone's son. He's someone's brother. He's someone's uncle. I thought briefly of sending my condolences to his family, telling them I'm sorry for their loss. But I'm not sorry.

And I do not feel compassion.

I feel relief, because my world feels a little safer and a little kinder without him in it.

A Complaint

My bed is:

• too big
• too firm
• way too freakin' cold

It's a Good Thing!

When I  was five years old, I ran my first science experiment. There was a little boy, a kindergarten classmate of mine, who always came to school with sleepy seeds caught in his eyelashes.

I could never understand this. How could he not get up and rub the sleepy seeds from his eyes when he awoke each morning? Wasn't that what everyone did? How could he not? Just the feel of sleepy seeds caught in my lashes and the corners of my eyes was enough to drive me crazy.

One day, I determined to see what this was all about. So, I got up and did not wipe the sleepy seeds from my eyes. This took a lot of effort on my part. But I had to know.

It took four days, but eventually I found out. After four days, the sleepy seeds had migrated from the inner corners of my eyes farther and farther and farther out on  my lashes. Until I woke up on that fateful fourth day and could not open my eyes.

The sleepy seeds had glued my eyelids shut. It took a blind walk to the bathroom, feeling my way along the wall, and a washcloth wetted with hot water and held to my eyelids to soften the sleepy seeds and wipe my eyes clear before I could see again.

I've wiped sleepy seeds from eyes every day since. Some twenty-eight years worth of sleepy seeds removed, washed away, cleared from the corners of my eyes each day.

After sex, Doc always jumps out of bed and gets cleaned up. It was a conflation of his habit and my science experiment at the age of five that ran rampant through my brain this week while Doc and I were having sex.

And I started to giggle. Now I had been having a terrible couple of days - sparked by a sign of a pink ribbon with Mickey Mouse ears on the side of a hospital as I drove down to Doc's Friday night.

This reminded me of a time during seminary when I had a misunderstanding with a friend. She had made a remark that confused me and the more I sought clarificaiton, the angrier she became with what she saw as my intentional obtuseness.

This memory led to a downward spiral of thought - remembering all of the times people have assumed I was affecting stupidity or confusion to derail conversation or frustrate them. People assume that because I'm brilliant, I must always get everything and thus no question could possibly be genuine.

This deeply and very negatively feeds my perfectionism. This spiral continued until I found myself washing Doc's whites on Saturday afternoon because I had overflowed my tampon and left a spot of blood the size of a grain quinoa on his bathroom rug. All I could think was, "Doc is going to break up with me if he finds out!"

Also, it's just good manners. No matter how small the stain is, if you get menstrual blood on someone's bath mat, you should throw it in the wash. With bleach.

At dinner, Doc asked about my downward spiral. I told him about everything. Except the bath mat.

After dinner, while we watched a bit of tv, I had a couple of mixed drinks - orange juice and chocolate vodka.

When we headed to bed, I thought about Doc cleaning up after sex each time. It made sense this weekend, but I was curious about every other time. And somehow, I connected this to sleepy seeds.

I began to giggle.

Doc stopped. "What?" he asked.

"No, it's okay," I tried to tell him as I giggled more. "I just.... It's a good thing," I gasped, trying to compose myself. I burst into giggles again. "I'm thinking about your penis!"

Suddenly, the absurdity of this hit me. I'm pretty sure no man on earth is going to hear their partner say, "I'm thinking about your penis" while giggling maniacally and think it's a good thing. I began to laugh harder.

"It's a good thing," I tried to say. "I just wondered," I gasped for breath, "if you didn't clean up right after sex," laughter overcame me again, "would your urethra be glued shut!?" I lost it. I couldn't stop laughing. It was just all too absurd.

Doc lost it, too.

My giggles had killed the mood. "I'm glad you're laughing again," Doc told me, "but it's just not sexy."

And I imagine his words are universally true. There's probably not much in life less sexy mid-coitus than a partner laughing hysterically while saying, "It's a good thing! I'm thinking about your penis!"

Witches' Hats and Candy Dishes

Friday, being Halloween, Doc and I had a rousing evening planned, watching a bit of TV and handing out candy to the trick-or-treaters. Doc pulled out his wizard's hat and I bought a purple and black witch's hat and we had a wonderful time.

The first group of kids started showing up mid-dinner. Doc and I alternated between answering the door. When the fifth group of children arrived, they asked, "How many can we have?" I told them, "Take what you'd like," anticipating that good manners would dictate restraint. Three children quickly emptied the candy dish of what had moments before been nearly four bags of fun-sized candy bars. Well, okay then.

We refilled the dish and when the next group asked how many they could have, I told them they could have one or two of each kind. I wanted to tell them, "Please demonstrate a culturally appropriate level of restraint in your choices, acknowledging that more children are certain to arrive," but I was sure they'd just stare blankly at me.

Two a piece it became.

And it was a LOT of fun.

I thought I was going to get a completely free pass this year and I was stoked!

You see, I was assaulted on Halloween by a stranger some years ago. This does not factor into my daily lived experience. I get a little jumpy during the month of October, and while I've been a bit anxious this month, recognizing early on what was happening has largely short-circuited my PTSD response. This is awesome.

I thought I was going to get a completely free pass this year.

Still, I brought my oldest stuffed animal with me - a stuffed raccoon I've had since I was six.

I thought I would get a free pass this year.

And then the last group of trick-or-treaters arrived. They were older boys, on the verge of manhood. The could have been in high school or even early college. And they were aggressive.

They opened the storm door to its widest point, they leaned into my personal space. As I leaned back slightly, they leaned into the foyer, their chests entering our home as they leaned past and around me. "What did you have for dinner?" one asked.

I panicked. I was terrified. I knew that I could call for Doc and he'd come immediately. But I didn't know if my level of anxiety was related to this being Halloween, or the really creepy mask one of the boys/men was wearing, or if there was a legitimate threat as they leaned into my personal space and our sanctuary.

"We had spaghetti for dinner," I responded, trying to keep it light.

"Do you have any left?" the one to my left asked, leaning farther in and bouncy on the balls of his feet.

"Sorry, no," I laughed nervously, just wanting them to leave. "Happy Halloween." I started to pull back and close the front door." But they wouldn't leave. They just stayed half-way in the house, half-way out, leaning their torsos over the threshold. They reached out and everything in me screamed to just drop the candy dish and run to Doc.

They grabbed more candy and once their hands were free of the entry door, I closed it tight and headed back to the living room, not even bothering to check that they were gone.

I curled up against Doc and rested in the safety of his embrace while we watched TV. When the show we'd been watching ended, I turned off the outside lights, closed the shades over the sidelight and locked the front door. It was late enough that we did not expect more trick-or-treaters.

Doc and I retired for the evening. Teeth brushed, I lay in bed naked awaiting him.

When he came to bed, he kissed me, touched me, stroked my legs, breasts, genitals. He stroked my hair. I smiled. I smiled the whole we embraced and kissed and touched. I smiled because I felt connected and safe and good. I smiled because I really believed I'd gotten a free pass this year.

Doc entered me and I smiled and kissed him and touched him.

Doc touched my hair at the nape of my neck.

"Please! Don't! Stop! Not that. Please, don't pull my hair," I begged as panic came swift and intense.

I would not get a free pass this year.

Doc stopped immediately. He took his hand from my hair. "Are you okay?" he asked, concern deep in his voice.

"Yes," I said. "You can continue. Just...please...please do not pull my hair."

Doc continued and did not touch my hair again.

"Is it okay if I turn you over?" he asked.

"Ummm.....let me think about it," I said, still feeling unsure of myself. I was so afraid if I couldn't see him I wouldn't be able to stay connected to the fact that I was with him. I said his name over and over and over and over in my mind. "I'm with Doc. This is Doc. I'm safe with Doc," I told myself. When I had calmed myself enough to feel present in the moment again, I told Doc he was more than welcome to turn me over, so long as he didn't touch my hair.

"It's okay," he said. "We can stay like this."

"No, really," I told him, wanting to make sure his needs were met and knowing I could be okay now. "We can change positions."

"It's okay," he said again. "I'm happy to stay like this."

And it was wonderful.

Then, Doc said, "You can get your witch's hat and wear it if it'll help."

I laughed. I laughed and I laughed and I had a hard time not giggling. "Just you saying that made everything perfect," I told him.

"I'm serious," he said. "You can get it if you want!" And he was serious. It would not have bothered him a bit.

But I love being beneath him, his body moving over mine, his arms around, my legs around his waist, stroking his shoulders, back, and buttocks while he fucks. My witch's hat was in the other room, and I did not want to stop for a moment, let alone move from beneath him and leave our bed to retrieve it.

Next weekend, though, I'm definitely wearing the hat.

A Very Long Day

The Musician is with me wherever I go.

This is not a problem. I do not wish to run or hide from his presence. At times, however, acknowledging him and explaining the role he plays in my life can be taxing.

At these times, I usually know to end my day after any such conversations.

Except yesterday when I didn't.

My best friend was in town and wanted to meet Doc. So, the three of us had dinner Thursday night. Friday morning, I met up with her for breakfast. After which, I had coffee with the pastor of the church I've been attending and which I have been serving in the capacities in which I am able.

This pastor wanted to know as much of my story as I was comfortable sharing. His interest had been piqued when I extended my tearful apology and turned down the offer to read the morning scripture one Sunday a few weeks back. "The latter half of Mark 5 is the one scripture I cannot read," I told him.

So, this pastor and I spent a couple of hours in a loud coffee shop talking about the life and direction of the church, talking about my story and how it intersects with Mark 5, talking about my interests and how I can get more involved with the community in the future as time permits.

Then, I had lunch with my best friend before she began her 4 hour drive home. I had a relatively terrible lunch with her in an extremely loud restaurant that left my body feeling gross. I am convinced that something I ate had been cross-contaminated. Blech.

After lunch I headed to one grocery store because they had a decent price on whole, boneless, New York strip and I wanted one. I returned to Doc's, got the steak put away, started a crossword puzzle and put on a kettle for tea, hoping to settle my stomach.

Then, Doc and I headed out to a couple of other grocery stores for things that cannot be found elsewhere. The first store was loud and crowded. The second more so. I also needed to mail a package to Ichthy and buy a book of stamps.

While we made our way through the store, I took hold of Doc's shirt tail. He asked if I was okay, and I explained that while I was fine, I was feeling a bit anxious and would likely be a bit more physically engaged while we shopped, if he was okay with that. He indicated he was.

At the check-out, I looked at the Customer Service desk and groaned with resignation and increased anxiety at the length of the line. Doc suggested I head that way and he would take care of getting the groceries so that we could make our escape as quickly as possible.

I stood in line, occasionally checking on Doc's progress. When it was my turn at Customer Service, I told the woman what I needed. She weighed the package and grabbed a book of stamps. While she attended to that, I looked back at the check-out. Doc was nowhere to be seen.

I began to panic, searching frantically for him. It is not that I was afraid Doc had left and forgotten me. It was that I was afraid I would be swallowed whole by the anxiety I was feeling, and Doc was the one solid thing I could look to and touch and know that I was still on stable ground.

With a deep sigh of relief, I saw him standing to the side of the Customer Service counter patiently waiting for me. I paid for my stamps and we left.

Once back at Doc's house, we put away the groceries we would not be using that night and I began dinner: mushroom risotto with crispy bacon. God help me, it was a miracle.

As we sat down to dinner, I stopped. Everything seemed to hit me at once. I was exhausted. Worn out. Done for the day. I wanted to skip dinner, curl up in bed and cry into my pillow.

Doc asked if I was okay.

This seems like a relatively easy question. It seems pretty straightforward. It seems like the kind of question that has a pretty simple answer: either a person is okay or they are not.

The question and its answer are infinitely more difficult than a simple yes or no.

I had had a long day. I was exhausted. I had talked about The Musician and been incredibly vulnerable with a new person in my life.

I had had a long day. I was exhausted. My mind was full of thoughts and I was feeling a lot of things, many of which I could not get a clear idea of and which I could not understand because I had had a long day and I was exhausted.

But apart from all of that, I was fine. There was nothing wrong. I was experiencing feelings and having thoughts.

I do not value feelings as much as most people I know. Feelings give us neither truth nor knowledge. They are fickle and insignificant most of the time. Feelings come at the behest of our thoughts and are unreliable as anything other than signposts.

I knew that all of things I was feeling and could not put words to were largely a result of thoughts I was thinking and could not clearly organize because I had had a long day and I was exhausted.

I knew as well that many of things I was feeling were amplified by exhaustion and anxiety and were a result of distorted thoughts I could not immediately correct because I had had a long day and I was exhausted.

And because I knew all of this and because I knew that in reality, outside of my unclear and disorganized thoughts which were feeding mysterious and hard to classify feelings, I was perfectly safe and content and quite happy, I spoke the truest words I could find in response to Doc's question: I'm fine.

And then I asked him why he had queried.

"You're very quiet and you have an incredibly pensive look on your face."

Doc scored extra points for his use of the word pensive.

But the anxiety only increased now that I was doing nothing and though the risotto was delicious and though hot, creamy, delicious, homemade and blissfully gluten-free food made my stomach feel better, I had a hard time getting through dinner because I was having an incredibly difficult time just swallowing.

After dinner, Doc and I sat down to watch a bit of television. Because of some technical difficulties, we popped in season 2 of Buffy. About 8 minutes in, I asked if he could pause for a bit. My anxiety had simply continued to build in intensity and I was beginning to feel as though I had shards of glass embedded in my knuckles.

I asked if it was okay to take a shower. Sometimes running water helps. I sat on the shower floor, knees drawn to my chest, arms crossed on my knees, head on my forearms and cried and cried and cried while the water saturated my hair and ran down my back. When I could not cry anymore, I sat another moment, waiting for the shaking in my core to subside.

I got out of the shower, toweled off, threw on a several-sizes-too-large t-shirt and returned to Doc's side. After making sure I was feeling better, Doc turned Buffy back on and we finished the episode.

Technical problems now resolved, after Buffy, we watched John Oliver. In the midst of the episode I asked Doc if we could fuck when it over. He said yes.

So, after John Oliver, we headed to bed. I brushed my teeth. I flossed. I crawled naked into my side of the bed and waited while Doc brushed and flossed as well.

When Doc returned, we kissed. He touched me. But I was closed tight.

Doc kissed me and touched me and I couldn't accept it. I had nothing to offer in return. I did not want him to stop. I did not want to have sex with Doc. I wanted Doc to do sex to me. This was, quite evidently, not going to be satisfactory to Doc.

I could have said, "No." I could have asked him to stop at any point. Doc would have. He would not have been angry. He would not have even been disappointed. I would have cried and cried and cried. And Doc would have held me and cradled me and cared for me in that moment.

"Are you sure you're okay," Doc asked.

"Yes," I told him. Because really, I was. "Why do you ask?"

"You're reticent," he answered.

"You're really scoring big vocab points tonight," I told him.

"Because I'm using trisyllabic words?" he asked.

"Yes." And I kissed him and tried to invite him into my space. But my space was small and closed.

I tried but I could not get to the place or the moment where Doc existed. I tried to focus on the ways Doc touched me, caressed me, stroked me, kissed me. It was exactly what I wanted, it was exactly what I needed, and it was too far a distance between my brain and my skin - a chasm that could not be crossed.

I asked Doc if he wanted to fuck me and he said yes, but that he was would wait. I didn't want him to wait and invited him into my body.

He turned me over and took me from behind.

And I was in the wrong place. I began to cry.

Doc stopped. "Are you okay?" he asked again.

"I'm fine. It's okay," I said, my voice hitching.

"What's wrong?" Doc asked.

"Nothing," I told him. How could I explain?

Doc has read my vanilla blog. When we first started dating, I told a friend of mine how it was we met and how the relationship was going. I explained about how respectful Doc had been in regards to what he'd learned when read my vanilla blog.

My friend responded:

I pray this will continue in absolutely the right direction and that the H[oly] S[pirit] will keep your heart protected and your mind absolutely clear. I only say that because crazy cautious New Yorker-me has seen a few too many lovely people deceived by the person of their dreams, or so they thought. And this guy will know exactly which buttons to press with you because he has read everything.

How could I explain that as he fucked me last night all I could think was how wrong my friend had been? Because the fact is the only reason to press button and take advantage is because you have something to gain. And I? I have nothing to offer.

I expected Doc to slice me open and carve away the rind of inner self and to find Casu Marzu beneath. I have nothing left which is desirable or worthy. I expected Doc to cut me open and recoil in horror at what lay within.

Doc, however, said, "I want to keep fucking you. God, I want to keep fucking you, but only if you're in the right head space."

I tried, desperately, to keep my voice level and even as I asked Doc to keep fucking me.

He stopped, turned me over so that I was, once again, on my back. Doc looked at me and entered me and touched me and kissed me. He did not cut me open. He did not tear me apart at the seams as I had sought to do to myself earlier in my attempts to make space for him in the place of me that had retreated and shut down and closed off entirely.

Doc, instead, shone warmth and light into the terrified and hurting places. He reached out softly and gently. He invited me to come forth. He brought light and warmth and passion; in doing so, Doc unfurled the layers of protection and allowed me breathe into a new space of welcome and safety.

Feelings give us neither truth nor knowledge. I do not care how people feel about me. I care how they treat me.

Doc treats me with care, kindness, and compassion.

And when he fucks me, he makes certain it is not something he is doing to me, but something he is doing with me.

And we do it so well.

Canes and a Rubber Hose

This past week has been rife with anxiety.

Work was stressful. Home was stressful. Life was stressful.

I had an ultrasound Monday morning to see if there is any reason for the post-coital pain I experience when Doc fucks me hard in the missionary position. Late Tuesday I got the results: everything is normal. I'm perfectly healthy. Nothing to worry about and no reason for a follow-up unless the issue is persistent.

The issue is persistent. The only way to keep the issue from recurring is to explore all of the other positions in which Doc and I can fuck. Fun, to be sure. Still, it is frustrating not to have any clear reason for the pain and no way to address it other than avoid the stimulus.

The rest of the week proceeded without incident. Still, I was incredibly anxious when I left work on Friday and headed for Doc's.

I wanted to get to his place and I wanted to fuck.

And everything seemed to be going wrong.

I got stuck at work and left 10 minutes late. Due to road constructions and people who don't know how to drive, I got stuck at the intersection when leaving work and sat behind two cars at a stop sign for 10 minutes. Half-way to Doc's, I pulled off the freeway to buy gas. Half of the lot was torn up and under construction; half the pumps were out of order; the other half of the pumps were occupied.

I drove off without gas and stopped at the next station a mile down the road. I was more than willing to pay $0.02 more per gallon for the convenience of immediate availability.

All gassed up, I headed back onto the highway and hit traffic about 12 miles from Doc's. The speed limit is 70 mph. Cars in the right lane were traveling approximately 57 mph. Cars in the left lane were, for unfathomable reason, traveling at 60 mph. My frustration was high.

The final interchange before reaching Doc's house was a holy cluster fuck of everyone and their mother and a few semis merging onto and off of the freeway. I had to remind myself repeatedly that I was nearly at Doc's and I'd be there soon enough.

When I did arrive at Doc's, he opened the door, greeted me, asked if I needed help. I got everything into the house and put away the few groceries I'd brought with me for some baking and cooking this weekend.

Then, Doc kissed and I kissed him in return. "How hungry are you?" I asked him.

"Not that hungry," he responded and I started dragging him to the bedroom.

"I'll need to take care some things," Doc said, gesturing to dinner which was currently cooking on the stove.

"Oh," I said, slightly deflated. "I suppose we can wait until after dinner," I remarked, not wanting to make too much work for Doc.

After salad and spaghetti with meat sauce, Doc and I headed to the bedroom and fucked.

Doc started slowly teasing me, touching me, stroking me, caressing me. "Please," I begged him.

"Not yet," he said.

I was okay with this. Honestly, I was. But Doc would touch me one place and I knew if he continued for another couple of minutes, I would cum. Then, he would move and caress me somewhere else, building my sexual frustration and I wanted to just beg him to finally, please, just fuck me already; but Doc moved between my legs and began licking, caressing, and sucking on my clit, and I thought I might die as I writhed and moaned with pleasure. I was quite happy to forgo having his cock in me for a little bit if it meant more of this.

Finally, Doc began to fuck me and I came and I came and I came. I wrapped my legs around his waist and clung desperately to him while he continued to fuck me. Absolute perfection.

Afterward, Doc and I watched John Oliver and an episode of Buffy and we started watching Blacklist, which was amazing.

We headed to bed and Doc fucked me again.

Saturday morning, I got up a little after 5:30 and fed the cats. I climbed back into bed, but wasn't having much luck getting back to sleep, so I got up and read for a bit.

I also remembered that I had purchased some dry erase markers for my office desk and left three most boring markers at work and took the three most fun colors to Doc's. The markers have magnets on their caps, so I placed them on Doc's fridge.

Eventually, I went back to bed and slept a bit more. When Doc and I woke up, we fucked again.

When we left bed some time later Doc noticed the markers, he remarked that he'd have to get a tiny whiteboard. "I was thinking I could use them to leave you notes on your bathroom mirror. Things like, 'Would you like try using your belt on me tonight?' But then, I wasn't sure if you'd find that charming or be irritated that you had one more thing to clean in the bathroom."

"We could try that," Doc said. "I noticed you have a couple of other things in the bedroom as well." This is true. Two homemade canes and a rubber hose.

We had  breakfast and Doc got a few necessary things done while I read a bit. We had lunch and then after a bit, I made us tea in travel mugs and we headed out to a local orchard to pick pumpkins and what apples we could find.

When we returned to the house, we got the groceries put away and fucked again. This time, Doc started by inserting my beaded anal plug in my ass and then he began beating my ass, hips and thighs with the rubber hose. Eventually he decided the noise it made was too silly and switched to the canes. All of this was wonderful.

What strikes me is that I enjoy this; it is sexual; but I don't derive distinctly sexual pleasure from the beating. At the same time, the beating definitely gets me wet. Every single time. Unlike when the Professor beat me and I enjoyed it but didn't get wet at all.

Doc did this things where he'd alternate striking and stroking me with a cane. With every stroke and blow I got wetter and wetter. Though I knew that eventually Doc would want to fuck me, I had not expected it as quickly as it happened. Doc was in me and fucking me from behind and it was good. It was so good.

Eventually my legs started to cramp slightly and as I shifted position to relieve the cramp, Doc suggested we move to the bed, which I was more than happy to do. Doc continued to fuck me and then moved me to the missionary position, fucking me while I played with my clit.

Doc stopped. I was confused. "Are you stopping?" I asked, lost and unsure of myself. "No, I'm just giving you more room to touch yourself," he said, shifting us to the end of the bed. He reached for the toy box again, and pulled out a vibrator.

He continued to fuck me, with the butt plug in place, while he used the vibrator on my clit. I came again. Hard. When he was done, he cleaned himself up and washed the vibrator before putting it away. I left the butt plug in place and pulled on my blue jeans.

Doc made dinner and we watched the last episode of season one of Buffy before watching a second episode of The Blacklist.

We were both exhausted and slept through the night. Around 5:30 I woke up and headed to the bathroom, planning to feed the cats when I was done. Doc got to them before me. As he prepared their wet food, I filled their dry food dishes. Doc and I headed back to bed.

At 8:30, I asked Doc if he wanted me to start coffee (Yes, thank you) and Hollandaise sauce.

Doc poached the eggs while I toasted bread and fried ham. Oh, eggs Benedict.

My Hollandaise still needs work. It's too thick and too lemony. Next week I'm going to take it off the heat before adding the  butter and see if that helps in the process. I'm also going to use half a lemon and leave the rest for some other application.

After breakfast, while we were still seated at the table, Doc sighed. It wasn't a "happy, contented, well-fed" sigh (he'd already sighed like that a few times during breakfast) and it wasn't a "frustrated with this blasted machine" sigh (which he'd sighed the day before while upgrading his OS) and it wasn't a "I have so much to do to get ready for the coming week" sigh (which he's sighed in previous weekends). "You're having thoughts," I remarked.

"I was just thinking we should get these breakfast dishes cleaned up and we have enough time to fuck before you have to shower and head to church," Doc said.

I've never moved so fast in all my life, as I moved back from the table, grabbed the plates and forks and bounded into the kitchen.

"Were you thinking 'rinsed and in the disherwasher' cleaned up or 'on the counter waiting to be washed' cleaned up?" I asked.

"Rinsed and in the dishwasher," Doc said. I was a bit miffed because sex was on the menu!

We got the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, I used the bathroom and brushed my teeth. Making love with Doc this morning was beyond satisfying. I felt things I haven't felt before when we've made love or fucked in the past.

I can't describe it, but the way he moved in me and when he came.... Shivers and happy sighs just remembering it.

Then, I showered and headed to church where I read scriptures and chatted about what the adult study group might read next.

After church Doc and I carved our pumpkins into Jack-o-Lanterns, I roasted the pumpkin seeds that Doc had carefully cleaned, and he made lunch. After lunch, we watched a third episode of The Blacklist. Then, I headed home for the week.

Thursday can't come soon enough.

Trusting Those Closest

There are things in life that frighten me.

There are things inside of myself that frighten me.

I am intimately aware of my brokenness and my rougher edges.

Because I am so aware of my faults and failings and because I want to be better than I currently am, I work tirelessly to deal with my stuff. I still have stuff.

The stuff I carry inside of myself doesn’t frighten me. Rather, it is the way I judge my stuff that does. Unacceptable is how I often feel about anger, bitterness, jealousy, resentment. Unacceptable is how I often feel about my tendency to withdraw or lash out when I am frightened or hurting.

I find other ways to sort through things and once I have everything clarified and polished, I bring it to the light in an effort to share myself with those I love.

Sometimes, sorting through things requires another voice.

This might be the biggest struggle and most damaging habit I have. Before I present my thoughts to the person who has the most right to know them, I often share them with someone else. I choose someone who can challenge me and ask good questions, questions that make me think about things in a new light or which clarify some of the fuzzy bits that are floating in the background. Sometimes, talking to an uninvolved party doesn’t even touch on the core of the issue that’s hidden behind the fog of feelings that are big and scary and unclear. But in talking about some of the feelings, I sort through them and the light of truth shines through – and this I will eventually share with the person who needs to know.

Before I met Doc, there was Ichthy. And before I met Ichthy, there was Mustache.

Mustache promised I could have what I wanted, told me explicitly he would give it to me, and then insisted I ask for it. Though it was the biggest relationship risk I could have taken with him, I did ask. And he turned me away instantly.

I could not tell Mustache either the truth that this was an enormous risk nor could I tell him why it was such an enormous risk.

Then, Ichthy called. I told him. I told him about Mustache and how Mustache had handled that situation; I told him what a huge risk it was and exactly why it had been a huge risk. It was scary and hard and painful to tell my biggest, deepest, scariest secret to anyone. Ichthy was great about it, even seeking more information and though it made me cry he tried to make something good of a very bad situation.

When I met Doc, even before we had decided to commit to a mutually monogamous relationship, I was able to share with him this secret that had become a bit smaller, less deep, and slightly less scary. I was able to tell him the whole of it, from the very beginning through all of the experiences that layered and layered and layered worse and more terrible facets of body loathing underneath and on top of my already fragile attempts at body acceptance and self-love.

I was also able to this secret to my best friend in all the world and share with her the reality of the resentments and jealousies I have felt over the years when the topic came up – because she didn’t know she was touching on some seriously broken areas or that doing so reminded me of awful experiences no one should ever have to endure.

Because of this, Ichthy has become my go-to for processing anything BDSM related before I approach Doc.

Last week, I wrote about penal substitutionary atonement. This is a conversation I had with Ichthy before I spoke to Doc. It helped me to clarify several things, which was good. Ichthy asked if I’d spoken with Doc about it and when I told him I hadn’t, he strongly encouraged me to do so. I had been planning to, but something in Ichthy’s tone made me think I had perhaps erred in my decision to process with him before bringing it to Doc.

This week, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Ichthy has said some things recently that led me to believe I may have misinterpreted his level of interest in me when our friendship first started.

A month or so ago, a friend told me that one of our former co-workers had the biggest crush on me when he worked with us, but never pursued it because he knew I was way out of his league.

I recently went out to dinner with a different co-worker I occasionally socialize with who informed me that I am not even remotely average; I am, he said, completely atypical and this is a good thing. This is a really good thing. The way he said it led me to believe that if I were not with Doc, he would be interested in pursuing me romantically.

All of this is confusing because men have never pursued me. At all. Ever. In my entire life. This does not particularly bother me because there are very few men who pique my interest and I’d rather not have to navigate the muddy waters of rejecting men I know when I’m intimately familiar with the danger of rejecting the street harassment of strangers.

Confusion regarding men aside, the real issue, as I see it, is the way I choose to engage with people. I want to tell myself that I am motivated to give Doc the best, so I work through uncertainties of my own ideas and feelings with someone else before I present him the polished work. This is unfair to him. It’s also untrue.

I do want to Doc to have the best of everything in life. He deserves the best. Doc is the single most amazing man I know. Doc is open and honest; trusting and completely trustworthy. Doc is more willing to risk than anyone I’ve ever met and he really, truly, deeply believes that it’s okay to fail; it’s not okay to give up. When Doc encourages me to pursue my dreams in spite of my fears, he does so with an air of support that assures me success or failure, he’ll be there; his opinion of me isn’t predicated upon my success or perfection.

Here’s the thing – I’ve completely bought into my relationship with Doc. I’m all in. I’m committed to, excited about, and fully engaged (head and heart) in this relationship. And that is a terrifying thing.

I’ve come to realize that the reason I only share fully formed polished product with Doc isn’t because I think he deserves the best (though I do), but rather because I’m afraid that Doc will be as frustrated and confused by my initial attempts at understanding as I am. I am afraid that Doc will not want to invest as much energy in understanding me and my thoughts and feel as I want to invest in understanding myself and in understanding him.

Doc has done nothing to elicit this fear.

Ichthy has done nothing to engender this trust.

Except…. I am in an intimate, mutually monogamous, committed relationship with Doc and Ichthy is a friend. It's all about me.

I have invested rather a great deal of my heart in my relationship with Doc. I have invested much in my relationship with Ichthy, but not in the same way and certainly not to the same degree.

If all of my frustrating, unclear, confusing feelings and thoughts rooted in the unresolved stuff of my past freaks out Ichthy and he decides he doesn’t want to be friends anymore, it will hurt, certainly; but I will have lost a friend and a friend who probably wasn’t all that much of a friend in the first place if my darker secrets and sharper edges can frighten so easily.

If all of my frustrating, unclear, confusing feelings and thoughts rooted in the unresolved stuff of my past freaks out Doc and he decides he doesn’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore, it will hurt; I will have lost a friend, companion, lover. The stakes are much, much higher. The risk is much, much bigger. The potential loss is much, much scarier.

But the reality is, as things currently stand, I am robbing Doc of an opportunity to know me in ways that he, more than anyone else, has a right to know me. That is unfair to him. I am denying him an intimacy I want to give him while offering that intimacy to someone else. I am not okay with that.

So from this point forward, while I will still be friends with Ichthy and we will still talk about our lives and our jobs and our beliefs and our theologies and our struggles and our joys, I may not share the real deep me-ness with him in the same way; and I certainly will not share it with him first.

Doc will be the first to get the me-ness, the mess, the confusion, the feelings that I cannot yet identify or understand. Doc will be the first to hear about the stuff inside of me that scares me. Doc will be the first to hear my insecurities and my worries that what scares me might also scare him – and scare him away.

Doc will be the first and probably at times the only one who gets to see those parts of me that aren’t polished and pretty and perfect; but they are the parts that are real and important and lovely in their own way, if for no other reason than that I would choose to share them with him in an act of sacred trust – believing that Doc is the single most amazing man I know, believing that Doc is open and honest, trusting and completely trustworthy.

It is time to translate those beliefs into actions and begin actively, rather than passively, trusting Doc because I want to continue building and deepening intimacy with Doc. Doing so means being real and open and honest and trusting with all of the me-ness that is me, including the unpolished, unpretty, darker, scarier, sharper parts.

Letting Doc see and know all of me is an act of love and trust. And no matter what happens, it will be worth it.

When Soteriology and BDSM Collide

The problem with the soteriology of penal substitutionary atonement is that it glorifies punishment. Punishment is not just glorified, it become necessary. Because punishment is both necessary and right, when one does bad thing, one must be punished and this punishment is both right and therefore good.

The inverse must also be true. If something bad or unfair happens, it must be a punishment and if one is being punished, it must be for a reason.

This is a soteriology I reject with my whole mind; but it is the soteriology of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. After two years in seminary, I was kicked out of a small group at the church I was attending because I questioned this understanding of Christ's death on the cross and it's devaluation of the human person.

Specifically, the church I was attending was offering a course, "Christ-Life Solutions," to its congregants. I had several issues the course material, beginning with the poor grammar in the workbooks which made the readings damn near impossible to get through.

My issues extended beyond that, however, to the theology of the material itself. The overarching theme of the course was that we, as sinful human beings, are filthy, awful, irredeemable creatures without value or worth, completely unlovable as we are. We are deserving of nothing but God's righteous anger and punishment. But Jesus, who was perfect and sinless and deserving of nothing but God's love, was crucified to satisfy God's wrath against our ultimately sinful nature, and if we only accept Jesus and his sacrifice, then God will look on us, wearing the cloak of Jesus's blood, and finally we will find "His" favor and be spared the punishment we so rightly deserve.

Pardon my language, but this is FUCKED! The final week before I was kicked out of the small group the reading was one in which the author compared humans to a cooler.

Specifically, he wrote that he had once gone on a business trip. At the end of the trip, he had been gifted with rather a large quantity of high quality steaks. He loaded the steaks into a cooler full of ice, in the trunk of his car, and headed home.

He parked his car in the garage, unloaded his luggage from the backseat, and went about his weekend, in the southern United States, in the middle of August. Monday morning as he readied himself for work, he remembered the cooler of meat in the trunk of his car.

Opening the trunk, the stench of rotten meat hit him. He pulled out the cooler, carried it to the edge of his lawn opened it. The steaks had completely liquefied and there was a soup of rotten liquefied meat and maggots in the cooler. He dumped the content and cleaned and sanitized the cooler, and left it int he sun, hoping it would be deodorized over the course of the day. Returning home from work that nigh, the stench still stained the walls of the cooler. It was a total loss.

THIS, the author declared, is what humans, in their sinful state, are like to God. We reek of the stench of death and rot and it is so embedded in our nature NOTHING can ever make us clean. Except Jesus, if only we accept his sacrifice on the cross.

In the middle of the small group discussion that week as people talked about how meaningful this anecdote was to them, I seethed with anger. What kind of loving God would want people to value themselves so little? Wen it was my turn to speak, I said, "I'm sorry! But I'm calling bullshit on ALL of this! The Bible declares that God created humankind and saw that it was very good. I refuse to believe that anything can so change or alter the work of God as to make it completely other than what God declared it to be. If God called us good, and sin can make us so other than what God declared, how can God be the omnipotent deity we claim? If we really can, by an act of disobedience, utterly corrupt what God has called not just 'good' but 'very good,' how all-powerful can such a God be?"

I was asked to leave the group and not return.

I have actively rejected this soteriology. I have replaced it with a vastly different, more holistic and ultimately loving soteriology which I might fill out at some point. However, the remnants of my early Christian education remain. And, like a bad habit, kicked and replaced with a new, healthier habit, in times of stress, it is the default to which I return on an emotional level, even though intellectually I reject it completely.

Last week, I wrote about the panic I experienced when Doc sighed. It goes back to a terrible time in my life when the Singer died, and despite the unfairness of that loss and the unbearable pain, my early exposure to penal substitutionary atonement popped up and I felt that his death was punishment for some terrible sin I had committed and if only I could figure it out and repent, maybe, just maybe things could be made right.

So, even though I reject all of this, Doc's sigh, having brought it all back for a moment, and still aching from the loss, I knew deep down in the pit of my stomach where horrendously fucked up theologies that damage people still reside, I knew I am still deserving of punishment.

And so I was tempted to ask Doc to beat me. With his belt. I did not want it in a fun, sexy, exciting way. I did not want it in a way that would press me in ways that go beyond my comfort zone in a BDSM context. I wanted a brutality that was abusive and punishing and which would, ultimately, destroy my belief that I have anything good or valuable within me and which would confirm absolutely the fears first instilled in me by penal substitutionary atonement - that I am, in my essence, unworthy, without value, unlovable, and ultimately deserving only of abusive punishment and even death as payment for the sin of even existing.

Some part of me simply wanted to be destroyed to rectify the impossible to rectify sin of being.

This is one problem with penal substitutionary atonement. There are others, including the othering of in-group/out-group, the saved and unsaved, the one-size-fits-all theology that narrowly defines God's love as only for the few because they believe the "right" things.

It is rooted, I believe, in the mistaken understanding of sin as disobedience to God's expectation of perfect obedience to any number of mysterious demands.

Recently, I've been reading Marcus Borg's The Heart of Christianity. I agree with much of what Borg writes concerning the central tenets, the heart, of the Christian faith. I agree with Borg's treatment of the Christ event in the person of Jesus. I agree with Borg's discussion of the reasons for Jesus's crucifixion.

However, I believe Borg's treatment of sin is lacking in one profound way. Borg offers a number of common and historical understandings of sin, including: disobedience, breaking the rules, being bad, hubris, estrangement, unfaithfulness, or idolatry. In all of these, "forgiveness" become the response to sin.¹

Borg, however, offers biblically based alternatives to our single understanding(s) of sin and instead calls out: blindness, bondage, exile, closed hearts, hunger and thirst, lost-ness. The resolution/response to these is: sight, liberation, return, open hearts, food and drink, found-ness.²

What Borg fails to mention, however, is the actual meaning of the word "sin." Sin is an archery term that literally means "to miss the mark." As such, the correlate response to sin would be "correction." This understanding of "sin" as an all-encompassing term addresses all biblical notions. Blindness is corrected by sight. Bondage is corrected by liberation. Exile is corrected by home-coming. Closed hearts are corrected by opening. Hunger and thirst are corrected by food and drink. Being lost is corrected by being found.

Salvation, then, Borg writes, "In its broadest sense... means becoming whole and healed. The language of 'wholeness' suggests movement beyond fragmentation, and the language of 'healing' suggests being healed of the wounds of existence."³

Or, in preserving the term "sin" and radicalizing our understanding of what that means, the appropriate way to correlate sin and salvation - missing the mark and correction - is clearly seen. Salvation in a context of healing and wholeness is the correction of what went wrong, why we "missed the mark" in the first place. This entire process, then, can be understood as the work of reconciliation - the restoration of all things to their rightful state, the work God is doing in partnership with us, through the person of Jesus as experienced in the Christ event in which God is reconciling the whole of creation to God-self. And the WHOLE of creation does not leave room to exclude some based on their rejection of a narrowly defined orthodoxy.

I reject any theology based on in-group/out-group, exclusivity, or narrowly defined and often vague but no less stringently enforced rules.

This weekend, I explained the soteriology of penal substitutionary atonement to Doc. "That's fucked up," Doc said. Yes. Yes, it is!

I brought this up in the context of sharing my thoughts with Doc concerning the previous weekend. I explained that I was not asking him to beat me brutally, nor do I ever imagine doing so, no do I imagine he'd ever be comfortable with such a thing. "Mostly because if I did, I think the effect would be to validate that theology I've worked so hard to reject and replace," I explained. I like when Doc spanks me; I like the idea of him beating me with a belt or a rubber hose (thank you vanilla friends for thinking of me!).

I enjoy the idea of Doc hurting me, so long as he does not harm me. And anything that validates punishment or penal substitutionary atonement can only do harm. I am grateful that I can recognize that truth and that Doc, having little church experience and no training, can declare with even greater certitude than I, that penal substitutionary atone is FUCKED up. God bless that sexy, sexy man.

*****
1. Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 166.
2. Ibid., 168.
3. Ibid., 175.

Enough

I really hate the month of October.

There are things I love about fall - the colors, the flavors, the experience of the season (we all have our rites and rituals and pumpkin spice anything is a marker of fall and it typically arrives in October). There are things I dislike about fall - the ever shortening days, the colder and longer nights, the potential for sleet and snow, the tendency toward gray skies and drizzle.

It isn't the seasonal changes which October brings with it, though, that makes me hate the month.

It's the anxiety. Anxiety I'm usually not cognizant of until all hell breaks loose and I've just snapped at someone I love and they look at me as though I'm a total stranger to them. And in those times, I am a stranger to them. In those times, I feel estranged from myself. That's what anxiety does to me - it disconnects me from myself and from all of those around me.

The anxiety began earlier this year than it has before. Or perhaps I became aware of its presence much sooner. I wrote on my vanilla blog this past week about some anxiety I had been experiencing in my relationship with Doc, and how I had come to process and deal with it. All well and good.

Until I saw him Friday night and we fucked.

I arrived a bit later than usual due to some minor car concerns and a need to shuffle vehicles to make repairs happen.

When I did arrive, Doc was finishing up dinner - steak, medium rare, with chimichurri and broccoli. This man must adore me to feed me broccoli so often. *sigh* It's heavenly, really.

We were half-way through dinner when I asked, "What would you like to do after dinner?"

Doc gave me a look - perhaps quizzical, perhaps confused. "I'm just asking a question," I told him. No hidden agenda. Traditionally, we do a bit of clean up in the kitchen before watching a little tv. We nearly always get distracted and retire to bed before whatever show we're watching is over.

At this point, though, I've already had trouble keeping my hands off of Doc.

"We could fuck," he says.

"I like that plan."

And we did. God, did we ever. He fucked me and fucked me and fucked me. As I came, he came and it was exquisite.

After, we watched John Oliver and an episode of Buffy.

It was during the episode of Buffy that it happened. I was snuggled into Doc's chest as we watched. All seemed to be going well.

And then, Doc sighed.

Immediately, I was gripped with a panic so deep I could barely draw breath. A tear leaked from the corner of my eye. "I can't.... I can't.... I can't...." was all I could think, not entirely sure what I couldn't, just that I couldn't. I wanted to run away. I wanted to tell Doc, "I'm so sorry, but I can't," before fleeing from his presence.

This is ridiculous. And I knew, in that moment, that whatever it was in Doc's sigh to which I was responding was not as scary or as dangerous or as worthy of the fight or flight response as my body seemed to have going.

Was this because of the simultaneous orgasm we had shared not more than an hour prior? It was one fucking amazing orgasm and the intensity of the experience was profound, but to lose all words and thoughts and return to the base instinct of survival which so often means fleeing is not a reasonable response.

But Doc sighed.

That's what they told me when the Singer died. They heard him exhale, as though sighing, and it was over. The medical explanation was something to the effect of all muscles losing tension at the point of death, thus a final expulsion of air from the lungs as the diaphragm relaxes. The Singer died before the final "sigh."

My head resting on Doc's chest, I could feel the rise and fall as he breathed, the tempo of his breaths double-time compared to my own.

Doc is alive. But someday, he won't be, and that reality frightens me.

I do not love Doc in the ways that I loved the Singer. But I love them both and while the idea that - because sometimes things don't work out - my relationship with Doc might one day end makes me sad, the notion that Doc might die overwhelms me with fear.

Which is ridiculous. Doc is young, hale and hearty; he is a healthy eater and he exercises. He also seems to manage any stress well.

After Buffy had ended, we went to bed. Saturday brought morning sex, a day of baking (I volunteered to make the communion loaf - gluten free - for my church), a birthday party. I made chicken tarragon and oven roasted squash for dinner. We ate key lime custard and vanilla ice cream for dessert. We watched two episodes Buffy and headed to bed where we had sex again.

While I cooked, I would occasionally sit with Doc when things didn't require immediate attention. A couple of times, as Doc kissed me, he gripped my hair (pulled back into a ponytail) quite firmly. It made me so wet I soaked through my panties and it made the crotch of my shorts wet.

This time, Doc initiated anal sex in response to a request I'd made earlier in the week. It was absolutely heavenly, especially when I used a vibrator turned on high vaginally and rubbed my clit. It was so intense and so good I begged Doc to go down on me. He happily complied, but having used his hand to apply lube for anal sex, he took a moment to wash up before going down on me.

He jumped in the shower and began washing off. I couldn't keep my hands off of him for that long, so I joined him in the shower, asking him for the bar soap, working up a lather between my hands before washing his cock. I've never understood the appeal of shower porn. Visually, the appeal isn't there for me. Having stroked Doc's cock with sudsy hands in a shower, I have a much fuller appreciation for shower porn, as the tactile sensation of giving a soapy hand-job is fantastic.

After rinsing off, Doc spent a good deal of time going down on me and then he fucked me. Hard. And he spanked me while he did it.

Snuggling after, I told Doc how much I enjoyed smelling myself on his hands. Then I kissed him. "I love tasting myself on you," I told him.

"I don't understand men who wouldn't do that," Doc said.

"Me either," I sighed. "I taste awesome!"

Sunday morning brought more sex, coffee and breakfast after which we snuggled on the couch until I had to whip cream and Doc had to attend to a bit of work.

I'm left-ear dominant and snuggling, my left side turned in toward Doc, I rested my head on his chest. My left ear was resting on the lapel of his robe. I could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed in and out. I could hear the beat of his heart. It wasn't enough.

I pushed the collar of Doc's robe aside and rested my ear on his t-shirt. I could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed in and out. I could hear the beat of his heart more distinctly. It was not enough.

I reached into Doc's robe, pulling at the hem of his shirt. I shoved it up to his armpits and rested my left ear on his chest, directly against the skin, right over his heart. I could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed in and out. I could hear the beat of his heart - his strong, steady heart. Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub. I could picture the ventricles and atria of his heart drawing blood in and pushing it out to the rest of his body. I could feel the strength of this fierce and good-hearted man. I was comforted.

It was enough.

World's Best Pizza

Simulatenous orgasm.

Rule of Three

Two weeks is entirely too long. On this, Doc and I agree.

But it was worth the wait!

I'm so tired and worn out and my body is delightfully achy in places I didn't know could ache in the way that they do that I am beyond satisfied. I'm also looking forward to our next date.

So much happened this weekend! I can't even begin to recall it all.

Doc made dinner for me. Enchiladas, black beans, margaritas. I brought margarita bars for dessert/late-night-post-sex snacking. The enchiladas were the BEST enchiladas I've ever eaten. Delightfully fresh and spicy. The black beans were fantastic. The margaritas Doc makes are always beyond compare.

Then, there was sex. Really good sex. Sex without a condom for the first time in my life.

It started with Doc going down on me, but after just a few minutes, I stopped him. "I'm sorry," I said. "It feels so good, but it's been two weeks and I'm impatient to have you inside of me!"

Doc was great about it. He moved up my body, kissing me as he entered me.

I love looking at Doc while we fuck. It's the only thing about him taking me from behind that I do not enjoy.

But this time, face to face, Doc using slower, more careful thrusts, I looked up at him and remarked on the difference between sex with a condom and sex without. "It feels better," I said. "It's also scarier. I feel more naked," I told him. Which is ridiculous because I'm usually naked or very close to and Doc is the one who is literally more naked without the condom. "I feel more emotionally naked," I said.

And that is scary for me. But it's also okay, because I know that I am safe.

At some point, we took a break, had a snack, started again.

Saturday morning, I woke up and pestered Doc for sex again. "Come over here," he commanded. I rolled over, on my knees, ass in the air, face on the mattress. "No," Doc said, a hint of humor in his voice. "I want you to straddle me."

We'd tried this once before, and I was a bit uncoordinated. This time, I was ready. It was amazing. Once we were done, Doc and I got up. I showered, he made breakfast. He showered. Then, we ran errands. Doc bought cheese and apples and crackers and some household staples he was short on.

After we returned to his place, he prepped a salad for us as I sliced an apple and some of the cheeses. We both tried Iberico cheese for the first time. It's a blend of cow, goat, and sheep milks. And it's DELICIOUS!

We were both quite tired and lay down for an afternoon nap. I had intended only to rest for a bit. About an hour into the nap, having mostly just lay in the dark and quiet bedroom, I was feeling more refreshed, but Doc didn't seem near ready to get up yet. So, I curled more closely around him and we both slept for another hour and a half.

When we'd both come fully awake, I asked Doc what time it was. "5:00," he told me.

"Mmmmm," I responded, still a bit sleepy. "We should either get up or have sex," I told him.

"Or both," he replied.

I was game!

We began to kiss and touch, both moving to take off our clothes. I tried to roll out of the side of the bed only to run into two cats and had to make a fast re-route to the end of the bed. Naked in bed again, we continued to kiss and touch.

"Would you like to try spanking again?" Doc asked me.

"Yes, please!" I almost squealed in delight.

While Doc had been out of town, I'd sent him an email about the Rule of Three. The important parts read as follows:

...I had a really distinct orgasm that got me thinking about the Rule of Three. I realized this is kind of a consistent pattern in my life. I'm a little sad right now that you're unfamiliar with Gilmore Girls. There are things about the series which are super problematic for me, but they come up so rarely. I digress.

Anyway, there is an awesome scene about the Rule of Three. So, here's an exchange between one of the main characters, Lorelai, and her mother, Emily at a soup tasting:

LORELAI: Haven’t you already tasted that one, Mom?

EMILY: Mm.

LORELAI: Twice, you’ve tasted that soup twice.

EMILY: You’re keeping a running count?

LORELAI: I’m morbidly fascinated.

EMILY: Well, Lorelai, when you’re tasting anything, the first taste acclimates the palate, the second establishes the foundation, and the third is to make your decision.

I think much of any experience for me is like this. It was that way with the cunnilingus. It felt good at first and then amazing, but there was all this stuff going on in my head that I explained after, and all these new sensations going on that I couldn't differentiate and was just....a lot.

Then, the second time, I asked, and I knew there would be less in my head and it felt so amazing (really, there needs to be a better word, but I can't come up with one), but it was all still just so new and I wanted to move, but I was afraid to because doing so might make it feel less good and I didn't want it to stop.

The third time I had to move my hips because I just couldn't stop myself and then HOLY MONKEYS!

So, I think the whole BDSM thing will probably be similar.

I know I got very, very, very quiet. I was acclimating my palate, as it were. What I felt when you spanked me was good. It was very good. I needed to process what was happening. When and how you spanked me; which strikes were stingy (good) and which were thuddy (good); left cheek vs right cheek; bending over the bed and if something else might be preferably - OTK perhaps? because that would be HOT; it felt good, but it was our first time so asking for more might be a stretch; we hadn't done much in the way of negotiations prior....

When we talked a bit about it the next morning, you mentioned me being quiet. I know I'm pretty responsive and verbal in other experiences, but this is so new, it's just taking me a bit to process. So, I might be really quiet again next time, as we "establish the foundation."

Please do NOT worry about going too far or doing too much. Please feel complete freedom to press into the experience and do as much as you feel comfortable and safe doing. This is what safe words are for! I'm not a fan of coded safe words, because it's one more thing to remember and keep track of.

Much like the first night we had sex, if it's too much, I'll ask you to pause. If I need it to stop, I'll say so. If I need us to change things up in intensity, I'll be clear about that. I will say, "Wait" or "Stop" or "I need ...." I won't yell out "Banana" because even though I hate them and have no reason to talk about them otherwise, bananas aren't what I want to be thinking about when you're doing all sorts of really lovely things to me.

If I'm completely silent, it's absolutely acceptable for you to check-in. I also want you to have confidence that if I'm silent, I'm okay with what you're doing. I WILL speak up if it starts to feel not okay. Eventually, I'll speak up if I need more intensity. Best to take those things slow, though.

So, when Doc offered spanking (Thank you, GOD!) I was definitely in, because I felt confident in my ability to receive what he was offering me and confident that we'd be able to communicate adequately during the experience.

I asked Doc how he wanted me, at first lying on my stomach as Doc spanked me; eventually he asked me to stand, bending over the end of the bed while he spanked me. I told him explicitly what felt good, what I wanted more of, when his strikes were exactly right.

Then, he touched. Doc began to gently stroke my cunt with his other hand, slipping a finger in me. "That's unfair," I whimpered with intense pleasure.

"Unfair?" Doc asked.

"It just all feels so good," I told him, desperate for him to continue.

And he did continue, fingering my clit and penetrating my cunt in turn, spanking me all the while. "I love feeling how wet you are," Doc said to me.

"That's what you do to me," I told him breathlessly.

Then, Doc was in me, "Fuck, yes," he moaned softly. Then he fucked me. He fucked me and he spanked me and I couldn't even begin to think as complete bliss filled me.

Later, Doc apologized. "I'm sorry," he said. "I just had to take you. It was so clear you were enjoying yourself and I had to be in you." No apology needed! Even now my brains goes blissfully silent when I remember what he did to me.

Then, Doc made me dinner. Tilapia and broccoli. God, my taste buds are happy!

Doc offered me wine, which I accepted. He refilled my glass in tandem with his own. Doc introduced me to Kir Royale. Tasty. Champagne and Creme de Cassis. It was quite tasty.

After this glass, however, Doc indicated he thought he'd perhaps fed me too much booze. He sent me to the couch while he cleaned up a few things. I plopped face down into the pillows, on my knees, ass in the air, delightfully comfortable. Doc joined me shortly thereafter, took one look at me, and declared with absolute certainty, "I've definitely given you too much to drink!"

Once he settled into his corner of the couch, I snuggled against him and we watched tv for a bit.

After an episode of Last Week's News Tonight and a bit of Buffy, we headed to bed. Doc was exhausted and knowing this, I didn't want to wear him out too much. However, earlier he had offered to masturbate me and I was more than willing to take him up on that offer!

Lying in bed, Doc beside me, we kissed. I touched his chest, his arms, his face. Doc began to stroke my pussy again. I moaned in pleasure. It was so good I knew it wouldn't take much for me to cum and I began to move my hips, melting into his touch and the building intensity.

Then, Doc said, "I'd like to try something."

I was on my back, Doc on his side next to me. My legs spread, my left one was out to the side, and my right leg was casually thrown over Doc's. In this position, he entered me, reaching around to help guide his cock into me. I thought I was going to explode with pleasure.

Immediately, I reached between my legs and began to stroke my clit in time with Doc's strokes. My orgasm built and exploded in me. I came so hard I couldn't think of anything and my whole body quivered with the intensity of the pleasure. "I love feeling you cum on my cock," Doc told me. I love it when he tells me these things.

Eventually we fell asleep. We slept in quite late this morning, but when we were both awake, we had sex again, Doc fucking me slowly, face to face. I wanted more and asked if he'd like me to change positions. He took me from behind again, and it was wonderful.

Showered and breakfasted, I headed to church. Which was amazing.

I've found a community in the midst of this place I consider exile. I have found a spiritual home, at least for the next bit of time. I have found a place where I know I will fit and where my skills and abilities and what I have to offer will be accepted.

I am happy and fulfilled.

13500

I was up rather late last night perusing the website.

I happened upon a quite funny post on K&P by an individual and decided to spend some time perusing a bit of his profile. Having read a few other of his posts, I decided to break most of his rules for initial contact and send him a recommendation for travel based on something he had shared.

Now it happens that his post making K&P apparently garnered enough attention that his inbox was flooded. I was apparently one of the many. Because of this deluge, and in part he told me, because of my email specifically, he created a test based on his preferences as a weeding out process, requesting that anyone who wished to contact him score themselves based on his scales and use their score as the subject line of their initial contact.

We exchanged a few friendly messages based on some of his writings and my travel recommendations when he told me that because I'm smart (flattery will get you places, my friends) and because he has struggled with the balance of weeding out people based on his and their preferences but having to find a way to do so online based on poor and arbitrary word choices, he wanted my help, if I had any ideas.

My response is below.

*****

The reality is, (name redacted), that most of what you write will be offensive to a large swath of human beings because:

1. The world fucking revolves around each individual person
2. Your preferences on any topic are about the particular individual who does or does not meet your preferences; they aren't actually about your preferences, because 
3. The world fucking revolves around each individual person

or so most people seem to believe.

I'm extremely straightforward and honest myself. It's one of the reasons I do not make sense, culturally, in the (location redacted). In regards to that, I really need to update my Fetlife location, as I am no longer residing in (location redacted) but (location redacted), population (statistic redacted). Just as you don't joke about being 6'5", I don't joke about my hometown's population.

As someone who does not do "(location redacted) nice" (born and raised in (location redacted), my existence made sense for the first time when I moved to (location redacted)), I will share with you my personal views concerning definitions, and perhaps it will help you refine your writing in such a way that it does not offend the sensibilities of the navel-gazers amongst those on the interwebz.

I have repeatedly explained to people that I am not a "nice" person. I am exceedingly kind, but I do not do nice. I'm also not an asshole. This tends to create a lot of confusion for the vast majority (read "every single person") I've ever said this to, and so I've had to create a way of explaining the difference between being nice, being kind, and being a douche-bag.

Imagine you've been asked to tag along on a shopping trip with a friend. Assume your friend is female, and if it helps, you can imagine she looks something like me (that is to say 5'10", 215lbs, size 14, brunette, green eyes). She wants to get an outfit, but wants something that she not only feels comfortable and confident, perhaps even sexy, wearing, but which is also flattering to her. She steps into the dressing room, gets naked, and then re-dresses in her first choice.

Stepping from the dressing room, she's slightly out of breath, her hair is quite messy, her face is a bit pink from exertion. She thinks her cheeks have a great "glow" to them because she looks so amazing in a more-than-skin-tight, sequined, tube dress that is obviously four sizes too small.

If you are a nice man, you'll hold it together long enough to gush with GREAT (well faked) enthusiasm (because you know she loves this dress and wants it to be the one), "OMG! You look sooooooo AMAZING! You should buy one in every color!"

If you are a kind man, you'll hold it together because you genuinely care about your friends, and you'll say, "I'm not sure the cut and fit of this dress really accentuate your best features. Let's see if there's something that might be more flattering and in which you'll feel even more comfortable, confident and sexy!" Then, you'll discreetly choose 3-4 dresses with sleeves, appropriate necklines, no sequins (Dear God, can we please just get rid of sequins altogether now? The '80s have come and gone. They were a bad idea then, they're a bad idea now. Thanks!), in a size that actually fits. You'll pay attention to your friend and not only how she looks as she tries on each of these dresses, but you'll critically assess what does and does not work with each, and you'll encourage your friend to own her body and stand with proper posture. After all, proper posture can make anybody feel more confident in a heartbeat. It's that whole bio-feedback loop.

If you're an asshole, you'll not bother to hold it together at all. Instead, you'll simply roll your eyes and exclaim for the entire store to hear, "You look like a fat fucking whore in that. You disgust me. You need to take that shit off and put on something that fits and doesn't make you look like an overstuffed sausage that took a trip through the sequin factory."

Assuming you're still with me, and you get the explanation, you should be aiming for kindness. Clear, concise, direct. Honest and respectful. I really think it's a matter of stating your preferences in a fashion that does not intentionally seek to violate clear social norms about appropriately respectful behavior when dealing with total strangers. You actually seem to have this down pat, for the most part. In those instances where I find myself responding with thoughts like, "Hmmmm, this guy (name redacted) is a bit more asshole-in-disguise than I'd first imagined," it's probably because:

1. The whole world revolves around me
2. Your preferences are soooooooo obviously about me and not you, and
3. The whole world revolves around me

Once I come back to reality and accept that your preferences are yours and I remember that we're all better off knowing what we, as individuals, want from life or friendship or partners or sex or play, and I acknowledge that I have preferences, too and one of those preferences is that people be clear, concise, direct, honest, open and respectful, I think to myself, "Maybe this (name redacted) guy isn't such an asshole after all. I actually appreciate his willingness to not play games. We may never be a match romantically, sexually, in play, or as friends (that fucking Oxford comma!), but I appreciate him as fellow traveler in this journey called 'life.'"

I don't know if that helps. I suppose it reads a bit like, "Here's a long story and a test. Can you figure out what it means? By the way, you may or may not be an asshole depending on how self-absorbed I am."

In short, I think it's ok to have preferences. I think it's okay to state them. I think your two flights of stairs test is funny but also sufficient. You also do a marvelous job of being kind in most of your writings which I've had time to peruse. As such, I think your standards work as they're written and do a wonderful job of not only weeding out those who are overweight and unhealthy rather than overweight and active/actively seeking better health but also weeding out those who would never be a good fit because they want to live in a fantasy land where they cannot have real relationships because they are not willing to be honest about who they are and what they want/need in a partner as demonstrated by their unwillingness to accept someone who is honest about what he wants/needs in a partner (that "he" would be you).

Was any of that helpful?

*****

This individual loved my response so much he's planning to "plagirize the hell out of it."

Sometimes, it's the little things in life that make me smile.

Actually, it's always the little things. If the little things aren't enough, the big ones never will be.

Serving and Subbiness

I sometimes wonder if I'm really all that kinky at all. I have my preferences, the things I enjoy, but I also have my limits. Most, if not all, of my limits are hard limits. There is no negotiating my limits. There are no "soft" limits in which I might be willing to do p, q, or r if the circumstances were right. And the things I enjoy, want, ache for tend to be very light in regards to kink. In fact, I might be more French vanilla than either vanilla or kinky.

I enjoy impact play, breath play, intelligent conversations, oral hygiene, and I absolutely LOVE anal sex. Traditionally, I had considered myself submissive. There are a lot of reasons for this which I'll not go into here.

Then, my community put on a high protocol dinner. It was billed, largely, as an event for Dom/mes and their subs, however, the possibility was left open for singles who wanted to experience an HP event to come as singles and the creators would pair unpartnered Ds to unpartnered s-es. Great. This seems like a great option for everyone!

Fuck no.

This is actually the point where I began to question whether or not I was a submissive and began to think of myself as a bottom rather than sub. I like play, but I want my body to be played with/upon. I do not want to inflict any kind of anything painful on anyone else, no matter how much they might enjoy it. Even knowing they'll enjoy it, because I know how much I enjoy it, I still can't bring myself to appreciate the notion of topping anyone.

My response, emotional revulsion, to the idea of serving at an HP dinner had me wondering, "Am I a truly a sub? Maybe I'm a poser. A twue sub. Someone playing the part because it's fun and exciting to be spanked by Doc and because he's willing to use a belt on me if I'm really, really, really well behaved and ask politely." Actually, I'm making that last bit up. Doc was moving his belt from the pair of pants he'd been wearing the day before to the pants he was wearing on that day and my eyes lit up like the Rockefeller Christmas tree.

"We can build up to that if it comes to it," Doc said.

"Ok!" I responded, getting giddy at the very notion. It's actually quite a shame Doc's out of town at this precise moment, because now I'm thinking about Doc and his hands on me and his belt....

Not the point of this post.

Doc once told me he might not be the domliest dom of all doms on the planet and I'm completely ok with that. I was beginning to think it's because I'm not a very good sub. I was beginning to wonder if maybe I'm just a bottom lite.

Then I decided that, since Doc is out of town this weekend, I would visit my best friend and her husband for a few days. And bake. Because they're my guinea pigs when I'm fixing recipes I've found elsewhere.

My best friend and her husband both know that I bake for them when I visit. As I was prepping the first test batch of awesomeness (savory Thyme Lemon Bars with Raspberries), the husband came in and asked what I was making. "Something that's going to make you hate me later," I said with a sigh. It's the nature of his being someone who loves food and wants to eat healthier and the nature of my making that difficult when I stop in.

"Probably," he said, "but I'll love you for it first!"

My best friend is also a minister. Her husband is in the family business. They both work 80+ hours a week.

I explained to Doc once that my former and current roommates have often found me nearly impossible to live with. "I don't think my expectations are too high," I told Doc. "Wash your dishes and pick up your shit. That's all I've ever asked of my roommates." This was also a problem in grad school when my fellow students would leave a week's worth of dirty dishes in the common kitchen. Ugh. (Love you all! But seriously....)

Doc told me, "That's not an unreasonable expectation; it's a task of daily living." Oh, that everyone in the world would get this.

Given that my bestie and husband are so busy, I know that when I visit, I'm likely to find a few dishes and other detritus in the sink. I'm okay with it. It's not my home, not my kitchen. I'm just visiting.

Truthfully, I actually kind of like the fact that there are a few dishes in the sink and food scraps in the drain traps. The reason is this: I like serving my best friend. I enjoy putting her clean dishes away, reloading the dishwasher, and scrubbing out and wiping down her sinks. It makes me happy to serve her. Acts of service is her love language and this is a practical way I can love her.

More than that, though, it really makes me happy to serve people I love. Not so much people I occasionally resent or have strongly ambivalent feelings for. It just pisses me off to have to clean up after those people, especially in our shared kitchen, when I just want the space and equipment to make a meal.

I've come to realize that this is not an issue of not being subby, or not being subby enough, or not being the subliest sub that ever subbed in the world of subbiness.

It's about relationship.

Just as I'm not going to play with everyone who asks (and if you're wise, you'll not ask for the reason if I politely refuse your request), I'm not going to be submissive to anyone just because they've asked, suggested, or expect. For me, play is about a very specific type of chemistry and we either have it or we don't.

Submission is about our relationship, and we either have it or we don't.

I love serving. But I'm not a service sub. I love serving. But I'm not going to serve or service just anyone. I love serving, but I'm not going to do it for anyone as a member of a submissive group serving a dom/me among a Dominant group. I'm not a fucking show monkey.

While there are a lot of things about Doc that get my juices flowing (everything to date) and few things that give me pause or evoke less pleasurable emotions, the fact that Doc is inordinately clean does both.

Seriously.

It makes me disgustingly happy that he's clean and neat and organized. It makes me happy that when I walk into his house, I'd never know he has cats until I see them. It makes me happy that I can walk into the room where he keeps the litter box and not know that's the room where he keeps the litter box.

It makes me happy that I've never seen dirty dishes in Doc's sink and that I've never seen much in the way of dirt on the floors. It makes me happy that his closet is well organized, from the brief glimpses I've caught when the door was slightly ajar and I was packing my bag near it. (I swear, I wasn't snooping!)

But it also makes a little sad that I can't serve Doc in this way. It makes me a little sad that when I come over and ask how I can help, there isn't much for me to do. I love pitching in to help with the dishes as he cooks or helping to set the table. But it makes me sad that there isn't much more for me to do. I want to contribute more, and I don't know how.

Because Doc has earned my respect. Because Doc has earned my appreciation. Because Doc has earned my vulnerability. Because Doc has earned my service, I want to serve him.

Even if I'm not the subliest sub in the world of subby submissive. Even if he's not the domliest Dom in the world of Dominant.