It's Not Good

We're heavy breathing and hot fumbling on the bed and he's hard against me and I know we could fuck again and I would come and he would come and it would be so good, such intense pleasure, everything working like it should and suffusing us both with wonderful sensation and then lying there in warm drifting loving bliss.

So why do I want to make him angry? Why do I push him off me, sit up, casually make another drink, light another cigarette, just to try to make him force me to carry on? Why do I torment him and taunt him, clever nasty carefully-chosen words? Why does seeing his face troubled and twisted up like that make my stomach go hollow?

Our eyes catch each other's; there's a long tremulous moment. Shimmering possibilities. A blur of visions - blood and violence and rape and tears - but we both just sit there, and in the end it's me who cracks and looks down.

It's not good, you know, he says. It's not a game. It's horrible to feel like that. Anger and hatred and violence. I can't just snap out of it.

I know it's not good. It's not like my brain's wired up wrong, I say. Not like that, anyway. It's not that pain feels good. I can tell the difference between pleasure and pain: one hurts and one feels nice.

It's not about the pain as such. It's the structure of thought, the tangled mess of feeling, that I want at moments like this, not a cheery happy mutually-agreed spanking/biting/whipping session. I don't care what he does, as long as he's not ok with it, as long as he hates himself for doing it, and me for making him do it. Hurting me is just an easy way to make that happen.

We are young(ish) and healthy(ish) and there is love and lust and we have time and space and we know how to conjure up sweetness and glowing light. It's all there - it should all be there - it should be enough.

It's just that... when he looks at me like that and his eyes are bluest blue with blackest black tunnels in their centres, and I see the spectres before me, the possibilities, the visions of him grabbing me and slapping me and tearing at my flesh and hating, hating, angry, vicious, hot, cold... the room tilts around me and the world holds its breath.

Blood, Biting and Badness

It's a cliche that sex is better when it's wrong. But I understand it. Because, if you shouldn't do something, but you still end up doing it, you must really really want to.

It's come into play a lot recently with B. For him, every aspect of his desire for me is wrong. It makes him feel bad and guilty. And that turns me on. A lot. Not so much the real-life badness when it starts to fuck up our friendship, but the "oh god I shouldn't but I want to so much" badness.

Way way back in 1996 when I first met R, I was really into blood. I used to cut myself, badly enough that I ended up in hospital, but I wasn't angsty about it. I had quite a detached relationship to my own body and could cut or burn it (or have someone else do it) without feeling any particular emotion. I liked the aesthetic.

Sometimes I wrote him letters in blood. I used a ceramic cup which I'd smashed up. I kept the pieces in a plastic carrier bag in my bedside table, and used their sharp edges for both cutting and writing. The variation in the shape of the pieces, and in the viscosity and colour of the blood, created nice calligraphic effects. From his perspective, the strangest thing was that the content of the letters was mundane: just scraps of institutional news and thoughts about what had been on telly. But - incongruously - scrawled in blood.

At times, with R, this cutting spilled over (sorry) into something like sex. The first time I ever went to his house was around my 16th birthday. We stayed up all night talking. Eventually, around dawn, the inevitable sofa snogging session began. There was fumbling and groping and heavy breathing, but it only got properly heated when I persuaded him to bite me. The harder he did it the more turned on we both got. There was something in his savagery which made me lose my mind a little bit. Something about being meat. The smell of blood and sweat. His absorption in his own violence.

Then the fateful moment: he looked up momentarily and caught sight of his reflection in the mirror above the sofa. The sun had risen and he saw his own face, pale, his skin and teeth stained with my blood. I saw the horror in his eyes and felt him growing cold. I took him by the arms, tried to pull him back to me, to relight the fire. But it was too late. He was scared, disgusted, by himself and by me. He stood up and went to make tea instead, refusing to go any further down that road.

Writing this eleven years on, what sticks in my mind is the look on his face when he saw himself. Not because I liked the horror, not because I wanted him to stop, but because... If he looked like that, if he was so horrified by himself, then it meant he hadn't quite known what he was doing. That he had, somehow, lost control. Lost his presence of mind. Was carried away by desire and by the physical. He'd betrayed himself, betrayed his better judgement and his reason, to blindly follow the urges of his body.

I'm not really into blood anymore, but that doesn't matter. Some people have a thing about specific acts, specific objects, but I don't especially. Whether it's biting or choking or groping in an alleyway, it's making someone do something they know they shouldn't. Divided between their own desires. Driving them to the point of savagery and violence. I want to make them break themselves.