Out of the Shadows. Senta Holland

it is a path that almost everyone I knew would have warned me against, or tried to keep me away from, a dangerous deviation from the common path. If they had known I was taking it.

      They didn’t know, because I spent most of my life guarding my dream in the secrecy of my mind. I lived a life behind a shimmering veil of silence.

      I had good reason for such secrecy. But I had also good reason for coming out of the shadows: I was driven by my dream.

      Books have been written about people like me. Most of them were written by those who warn against and disapprove and condemn.

      Some of them were written by people like me, a few even by women like me. But they don’t tell my story.

      I am Senta. I believe there are many like me, but as yet there are no books that tell our tale, and there is no big narrative to celebrate the mystery of our lives.

      So there was no map, and I didn’t know where to go. The only thing I knew was that I shouldn’t be going there at all.

      I found a way. This is the map I created, and wrote down for myself.

      It’s not a straightforward path, and it may not lead where you think or even hope it will lead. Coming out of the shadows and following the dream does not lead to automatic happiness. Is it worth it even if conventional (or even unconventional) happiness is not possible? Or not possible for me?

      I don’t know.

      It’s not the kind of story where you know.

       Midnight high over the city of urns

      ‘I want to fuck your breasts, your beautiful –’ he stopped as soon as he heard himself, as if he mustn’t declare his passion for me. Not even at a moment like this, when he was doing things no one should see and no one did see except me (Ah! But maybe that was the reason?) and although he wasn’t holding himself back in other ways. He grabbed my breasts hard and forced his penis in between them. He pushed my own hands away. He drove himself in slow and hard, pressed my breasts so close together that only sweat could run between them. I felt him move inside the closeness. My breasts, compressed from all sides, hardened up under his grip. They hurt where his fingers dug deep. I imagined round red grooves all around the breasts like wounded pearls.

      His fingers hurt more than his penis. I wished it was the other way round. I wanted to concentrate all my sensations there but the fingers drilled harder for pearls. He looked down at me and laughed and started to move the hard breasts up and down, first together, then in a kind of asymmetric rhythm. He pushed my breast up, up against my collarbone with all his strength. I have never read about this in any books but the pressure of my breast against my heart made me shout with lust and my thighs jumped up to be met. He laughed again, very wild. He was still fucking my breasts, using them to stroke and cushion and create a complex pressure system for the thousands of pleasure points on his penis. He used my breasts and he wouldn’t do anything about my thighs. Every time he pushed up, my clitoris started to pulse. I could hardly bear the distance. I wished and wished and I began to feel the soft white liquid of my desire at the entrance of my vagina. I started to cry with longing and he laughed again. I tried to lift my hips and brush them up against his legs.

      ‘Stop that.’ He took one hand off my breast and slapped me hard in the face.

      ‘I am sorry, my Nai.’ My hips came down, but I could hardly keep them from rising again. He gripped my breasts even harder. I shouted. He laughed. I heard a deep moan of frustration, lust and pain rush out of my mouth, all mixed together, nothing held back, yielding to my body, my body yielding to his. Wild laughter, wilder screams. There is no such thing as wave and rider. There are so many waves, and we are both riding them together and each riding different ones. My clitoris was so wired, I would have given anything for a touch. Anything but the greater lust of obedience. He saw that in my eyes, I saw it in his. He slapped me again.

      ‘You need that,’ he said, his voice shaking.

      I cried. This time I cried, I didn’t stop it. Big blurry tears.

      ‘Please please please.’

      ‘Oh no.’

      But then he pushed his full weight down on me, I could feel his hot ass on my stomach, the blood must be roaring through his skin to produce such industrial temperatures. His weight came down on my soft vulnerable body. How I love to feel his weight on top of me. He doesn’t release me, he pushes down into me, full skin on skin contact, harder and heavier, a counterweight to the slow turning of the earth.

      I wish he would drive me down into the earth, deep, deep, down into the earth, his bones would seal me in, until my body turned to dust, until I was the earth, bound by the weight of the atmosphere, packed in by gravity.

      I have wanted that for such a long time.

      Outside in the night, the ancient kings held their breaths, waiting in the shadows of their urns for another, better life.

      Slow red dust drifted over the gardens and murderous motorways.

      Up in the glass-walled tower, I went to the bathroom to change into my little latex dress that I had bought one afternoon in Brighton, not the first time I ever considered such a dress, but the first time I actually took it off the rack and took it into the changing room to try. I could hardly open the zip I was trembling so much. I checked and checked that the curtain was fully closed, which was not easy in a small boutique called ‘Black Tantra’ where the friendly assistants would pop in with their twice-pierced tongues.

      It was very difficult to put on. I had to pull it up over my breasts and closing the zip at the back contorted me past my yoga limits. Good thing it was stuck on my hips. But the amazing thing was that I was wearing it, here, right now, and I was looking at myself in the mirror and I saw a woman in a high-collared latex dress, shiny black following her curves, and a lacy veil from her breasts to her hips. I would have to wear this without a bra!

      The woman in the mirror was not me. I knew that with absolute certainty. It wasn’t a metaphor.

      I was not that woman. Maybe it was a woman from my future, although at that point I couldn’t believe it. More like a visitor from another planet.

      But even then I liked her.

      I showed myself to him, with my metal-heeled shoes and my dress. I walked in and I stood and he looked at me. I felt beautiful. I blazed like quicksilver in the night.

      ‘Hmm,’ he said. He sat and he looked. My body filled up with brilliance. I could have stood there forever. I wanted to be looked at, like this, with this desire, with this nascent lust, I wanted to be this stimulating, satisfying shape forever.

      Many times, in the past, before I began this particular journey, I was looked at like that by a man and in time I looked back, with the same, with at least the same desire. Many times, as I was blossoming under the gaze of a man, I was then brutally rejected. Told that he didn’t really look at me like that. Told that he had looked at me but that now he had changed his mind. Told that he would never have looked at me if he had known what I was really like. And certainly would look at me very, very differently now that he had discovered my outcast sexuality.

      ‘But but but,’ was all I could stammer, in my mind, if I was lucky, out loud, to be shouted at, called names, threatened with pathologies.

      For me, a man’s desire is not a given. Not something I can operate from, take for granted, choose from, even play with.

      So in this moment I was standing there, a shape in my Nai’s gaze, I was very aware of how precious it was. He loaded me up with all the ancient attributes of being female.

      My body creates desire. My Nai looked at the place where my legs met the edge of my very short dress. He saw my breasts, half tight secret shapes, half uncovered under the lacy bondage. My nipples could feel it, the progression from smooth to rough, soft pearly sweat under rubber skin to where the pattern of the lace imprints itself into the delicate substance of my breast.

      All breasts, all legs, all hidden vulva. All body, woman’s body. All surface, all curves,