Out of the Shadows. Senta Holland

I was the new person, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how she would react to a monstrous spider creeping out of her armhole. So I stood and looked and said, very calmly, ‘I am afraid of spiders.’

      He stood very calm too and said, ‘Yes they are everywhere.’

      ‘Even in such a nice hotel?’

      ‘Yes, even in such a nice hotel.’ He laughed very quietly.

      ‘They live here!’

      Maybe he was used to them. Probably. Or maybe he was a new person, too. Maybe he, too, no longer knew if he was afraid of spiders.

      Another interesting effect of becoming a new person is that your lover gets to know you better than you know yourself, in certain ways.

      So that he can say: you want to come when you’ve been spanked.

      And he loved that. He adored the fact that he knew me so intimately. I’m not sure if he realised that I didn’t know myself so well. I’m not sure if he realised that I was becoming a new person.

      How could he know? He never met the old one.

       Humiliation in the jungle bed

      The hotel room was like a little house, with a tiny garden and white bricks and carved monkeys on the table.

      We had no neighbours except the sea, just a few metres from our heads when we slept.

      He had his backpack with him.

      ‘How did you get that through airport security? With all those weapons?’

      I still don’t know but he did.

      Again he began the unpacking of the treasure. He had a lot more rope with him, blue like the sky it was designed to make you fly in.

      He unpacked the well-used belt, the collar, and a pretty new leash from the weekend market, the puppy section.

      We were lying close on the jungle bed, after a long wonderful session trying out so many things, for the first time together, and maybe even for the first time ever. Then we whispered, only a little louder than the sea, but so close that our skins could lip-read, and he came up with the next one I delighted in.

      Now I think he must have made a list, from all the things I wrote to him on Mr Hong’s ancient world access machine, or told him on the phone, in the hot midday sun in the dusty main street on the other island’s shanty town. All those days, he was working on the list.

      So he whispered to me, after a long exciting session of breast bondage, all done by the book, but not quite by the book, in his own, Nai style of doing things.

      With intense concentration he worked on my nipples. He made my breasts swell so that they overspilled their D cups, and had to be bound, securely he said, to be tormented in the proper way. And when he was done he tormented my nipples, so shy, so quick to retreat at any hint of danger, they grew hard and long and red, and ached from the air that touched them.

      I still have a photograph of those tormented, huge, wildly excited nipples standing out from my aching breasts.

      He had asked me, respectfully, if he could take pictures of me.

      ‘Of your body, only, in play,’ he said earnestly. ‘I’ll make sure no one can identify you, not that I want to show them to anybody.’

      And when I looked a little hurt he said: ‘Of your face at breakfast.’

      When we left for the tropical airport he gave me the pictures on a data stick. True to his word, there was not one that combined my face and my body.

      My body was sensationally beautiful. He had chosen the most sexually outrageous moments and the closest close-ups of my most intimate places.

      My face at breakfast looked confused and insecure.

      There was not one picture that showed both of us, my Nai and me, together.

      ‘So,’ he whispered into my hair, after he had released my breasts into his long, bony hands, and kissed them long and wetly, ‘what is it that you want, in humiliation?’

      I couldn’t say it, straight away.

      ‘Come on, you’ve mentioned it, now you’ve got to say it.’

      ‘Oh. Yes.’ I had mentioned it, when he asked me what I wanted. As usual, I had just said the truth. Never thinking he would listen.

      So I closed my eyes, really fast, and snuggled up to him, stomach to hip, skin to skin, and all I could do was whisper: ‘I want to be made to say things. Embarrassing things. Humiliating things. About me.’

      He gave me a hug.

      ‘Now, make yourself come.’

      ‘I don’t know if I can, my Nai.’

      I started to try. But it didn’t work. Partly because I’m not very good at making myself come when there’s somebody else there, it’s too private! Almost like cheating on my most trusted and most vulnerable lover, me. And partly because I didn’t really want to. After all, I can make love with myself whenever I am in a romantic mood, but I can’t make love with him if he’s not there. I suddenly felt very sad, not knowing if, after these few days, I would ever see him again. So for those precious moments, those few precious moments, he is here, and I’m supposed to make myself come all by myself!!

      I looked at him, sort of forlorn.

      He said: ‘Think of being spanked.’

      In spite of myself, I felt my pelvic muscles go soft and finally a few drops of moisture coated the lower end of my vulva, just outside the entrance. What I think of as rolling out the red carpet for my lover.

      It was just so overwhelming, so recent, the hot hard fast, never-ending spanking, so hard and fast and hot and sharp and close, so close his arms his legs, all hot and the spanking, the spanking so furious time looped on itself and there really was no end.

      My body was still there, still glowing and swollen, my brain hadn’t had the time to lay down memory coils, so it was all fresh, all still there – I grew more liquid under my fingers, and slowly I could feel the big inside muscles relax and shiver playfully.

      I could hear my Nai giggle. A giggling Nai! He only giggled if he told me stories about silly people. Or dogs who peed into flower pots.

      ‘You do so love to be spanked,’ he giggled.

      ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do.’

      How wonderful to say it, like that. So directly. So clearly. No smuttiness, no twisted ‘I am doing this but really it is dirty and so are you,’ no adolescent forty-year-old swagger.

      Just real.

      I feel as if I am being seen without mirrors. Without filters and mirrors, without distortions. It feels as if it is me who is being seen. Not like so many times, a man looks at me, and all he sees is just himself in drag. Like my first lover on alt: thinking about where he should have been, rather than be with me. Looking at me, making me into the symbol of his sexuality, the part he craved and despised, the part he rejected, the part he looked down on.

      That was one of the best things about my Nai: he looked at me and he saw me.

      Sometimes. When we were having sex. When we, and more importantly when he was engaged in a scene. It was as if being my Nai in a scene gave him the ability to see me. To see. A transformation that brought him into his full power, and beauty, and brought all his talents into balance. Passion woke his hidden powers. Passion made all the parts of his body and mind more clearly defined. Passion was the catalyst that blew him into another dimension. A higher frequency of himself.

      When he was out of it, he was just as blind as other men. Sometimes blinder. Often, because, as a traditional, unquestioning conservative, he was not a member of the reality-based community. Outside passion, he could only see the world as handed down to him.

      But not now. Now he had eyes like