Snapshot

The Pedant has responded to my last seximafied email with “Pity I’m both unavailable for most of this week and suffering from a yeast infection.  Sounds like it’d have been a good week to come over.”

And he responded to my previous, merely chatty email at the same time, telling me that work is keeping him really busy – last week they made him work a twelve hour shift for four days in a row and he spent his entire two days off catching up on sleep.  Plus they switch him sometimes from night shift to day shift, which must be wreaking absolute havoc on his circadian rhythms.

It’s been just over a month since we’ve seen each other last.  Before that, we were averaging once a week.  Some days, it pisses me off that The Pedant hasn’t made any time to see me since he started this job; back when he wasn’t working I’d told him I prefer it when he stays the night, but frankly at this point I’d take damn near anything – a morning quickie on his way home from work, anything.  Some gesture that he actually misses me and wants to see me.

But it sounds like his new job is really gruelling; if I were in The Pedant’s position, I’d probably be all kinds of stressed out and need to spend my days off at home staring blearily at the wall.  Which is probably more-or-less what he’s been doing (and even if he’s actually managed to socialize a bit, well, he doesn’t owe me his days off.  I don’t own him).  The Pedant is definitely going through a rough patch and therefore now is the exact wrong time to whine to him about how I never see him anymore.  I’m gritting my teeth and trying to shut up about it until the dust settles.  My one concession is my sexts and naughty emails to him, which are meant as a tease to make him miss me more and build anticipation, not as pressure of any kind.  God, I love the idea of making him have to go masturbate immediately.  I’m not actually sure a sexy phrase from me could have that effect on him (although arguably it did once), but it’s still fun to picture.

Moving on to other topics, the cleaning session with V was pretty awesome.  She wasn’t kidding when she told me she’s good at organizing and orchestrating things.  When I try to tidy my place, I’m like a butterfly in a field of daisies or something (if the daisies were made of garbage, laundry, art supplies, and dirty dishes) – I flitter around randomly from task to task.  Everyone always says to attack just one room at a time, but I get distracted.  V had a slightly different approach: first, she proposed we tackle all the most obvious stuff – put any garbage or recycling into bags, put any dirty dishes in the kitchen, and put any clothes in the hamper.  That alone made a pretty noticeable difference to how the place looked.  Then she focused her efforts on one room at a time.  I like this system.

Also, V is an artist herself and has many artsy friends, so she knew that stuff that looks like random flotsam might actually be part of a project I’m working on.  She was really really good about asking which items should be thrown out.

And!  Between the two of us, we managed to get my old 50-pound CRT television down the two flights of stairs to the curb!  That fucking beast was taking up about a sixth of my living room for the past year or so, and partially blocking the window, and now it’s finally gone.  Hooray!

The two of us worked on the apartment for three, maybe four hours, after which we decided to finish for the day.  I made us some bacon and eggs and we watched some Greg the Bunny together, which she’d never seen.

During all of this, V kept a polite amount of physical distance from me.  Which is fine (since I’m not sure I want to pursue anything romantic with her, after all), but a bit perplexing.  I mean on one hand she said she was interested in me and even attracted to me, and on the other hand she previously identified as asexual.  So I’m not sure if she’s super into me but politely maintaining personal space until I give consent otherwise, if the attraction she feels to me is just so new and tentative that it doesn’t manifest itself in her wanting physical contact, or if she, too, has decided there’s not really an attraction there after all.

At one point we got into (yet another) conversation about BDSM and what we each want out of it, etc.  We already knew that she’s into being bitten and I’m into biting; now she asked if I’d mind biting her as hard as I would in the middle of play so she could gauge what that would be like.

I must admit that despite my fickle and vague attraction level toward this woman, I do get kind of aroused by the way she talks about her love of pain.  And I still wonder whether it might be possible for me to have a D/s relationship with someone that’s not – or not particularly – sexual. 

“Where do you want me to bite you?” I asked.

She offered me her forearm.  I held her wrist in my hands.

“Normally I get bitey very much in the heat of the moment,” I said, “So it’s really hard for me to try to recreate that headspace and know how hard I would actually go, but, maybe…?” and I gave her forearm a chomp.

“Honestly?” V said, “That is nothing to me.  That’s seriously all you’d do?”

“It…might be?  Like I said, heat-of-the-moment is a very different thing.  And by the way, I can bite way harder than that, I just…typically haven’t.  And this may be because all my partners have had a pretty low threshold.  I’ve never been allowed free rein in this area; I’ve always had to stay vigilant, maintain a strict hold on myself, and make sure I didn’t go too far.  If someone finally took that ceiling away, things might be very, very different.”

“So let’s see how much harder you can go,” V said.

I took her arm again and clamped down in earnest until she said “that’s more like it.”  I could’ve gone harder than that, even, but opted to stop there.  Human flesh, when you bite it really really hard, makes a crunching sound that kind of grosses me out.    And also I was slightly afraid of drawing blood, which would also gross me out.

Over the course of the evening, V intermittently taunted me about that first bite, saying things like “Honestly, no offence but you have the lightest bite of anyone I know who says they’re into biting” with a gleam in her eye.  Finally, after about the third such comment, I looked over at her and asked point-blank “Is that a challenge?”

“Maybe,” she said, grinning.

And yeah, it was tempting to try to prove her wrong or whatever.  Of course it was tempting.  Especially because her taunting brought up a bit of baggage for me.  But no.  I told her: “See, the thing is, if I let you provoke me into biting you right now, then you’re the one with the control.  And I don’t like that.“

She looked at me with a new respect and said “good call.” 

I’m still not sure whether she was giving me some kind of “how truly dom are you” test with her brattiness, or just hoping to be bitten some more.  Maybe both.  And honestly, in an established D/s relationship I don’t think I’d mind a little brattiness or provocation from time to time.  But not from someone so new – not at a time when, as far as I’m concerned, we’re both auditioning for each other.  She needs to know that I have iron self-control and will not be manipulated.  If I ever capitulate to her brattiness, it’s because I motherfucking choose to.

In other news, I’m working two classes a day for the next three days.  It could be worse – only one of those days sees me actually travelling to two different locations (of the other days, one comprises a morning and an afternoon class at the same school and one comprises a class right near my house and then, two and a half hours later, a different class downtown).  But I’m still feeling some trepidation.  On the bright side, last night I slept better and longer than I have in ages, so that’s a good start.

And!  A place where I’ve done costumed modelling in the past wants me back in a couple of months to play a cartoon character.  The other two times I posed there, I was some kind of villain or monster – and as much as I thought I liked doing the dark/creepy stuff, I’m super looking forward to acting cheerful and wearing primary colours for a change.  I think I was getting a little sick of being typecast as the bad guy.  It’s hard not to take that sort of thing personally, sometimes.

And that’s how my life is going right now.