Out of the Shadows. Senta Holland

sweet banana goo, and late night fears and confusion we somehow made it, we made it into our first night, in the way of the BDSM people, but even more so in our own way, the first night of Senta with her Nai.

      I never bothered with the back-up dates.

       How did I get here? – I was a BDSM hermit

      That is a journey longer than my life.

      When did it start?

      I was lying in my bed.

      My whole body cramped with longing. I had tied my ankles together so that I could feel the sweet surge to my vagina.

      They say that self-knowledge makes you free.

      Maybe. It counteracts the demons inside your soul.

      But it also makes you feel your pain more acutely.

      All these years I knew who I was.

      I didn’t feel guilt, I didn’t feel shame.

      I felt this was just me.

      But I didn’t know how to make it real except in my own bed and within my own mind and soul.

      I was a BDSM hermit.

      Sometimes, most times, I could live with it.

      I said to myself: yes, I want to be a Submissive to a Dominant in real life.

      But I couldn’t be.

      I said to myself: yes, but I’d like to have my own opera house too.

      Some dreams are only possible for a fortunate few, a very, very fortunate few.

      So then I was lying in my bed, awash with longing.

      So much longing it spilled out in tears.

      I saw my shadow on the wall and it was all I had.

      I did have lovers.

      Of course, throughout my long life before I found my Nai, of course I had lovers.

      But they were not the lovers I saw in my deepest dreams.

      I had sex, but I did not live my true sexuality.

      What was it like, in the long, long years before I found a way to meet my Doms? (Yes, I did meet them, on my journey, even before I met my Nai.)

      Before I even thought of having the courage of trying to devise a way to go and find them?

       Telling a man

      Lying in his arms, holding him tight and wishing he would hold me tighter, feeling his hand on my naked skin.

      My body there, and my mind was dreaming and longing.

      I sighed and shivered, but not from my lover’s touch.

      Outside I was with him, inside I was with him too, but with a different version of him. Him as the Dom.

      Inside myself, I tried to magnify his tentative stroking of my back so that I could imagine a spanking. When he put his hand between my legs I longed for him to be more forceful. I wanted him to take me completely and shake my whole body. I wanted to look into his eyes and see the joy and triumph of domination.

      Instead I was alone, trying to amplify faint signals on my skin into the huge waves and towering storms that are my true home.

      I often felt like a hollow doll.

      Then sometimes, though less and less often as I learned from experience, I would tell him.

      How to tell? So difficult. Particularly when what I wanted was still only a desire, a reality inside, the inner life of the doll, stuffed full to bursting but divided from the air by her porcelain shell.

      Now it is easier, now I can start by telling a story from my life. I can hint lightly. I can watch out for signs with so much more knowledge.

      I can also not have sex with vanilla men. At all.

      But then?

      When I was very young I sort of knew you weren’t supposed to be into BDSM. But at the same time I was so joyfully aware of the full range of my sexuality that it was hard to take that seriously.

      I liked to welcome a penis in my vagina. I equally liked to welcome a hard hand on my ass, and a rope forcing my wrists together.

      The men I dated then were very young too.

      Maybe that was the reason.

      Maybe it just was the times. People just emerging from the deadly shadows of enforced respectability.

      But every single time I brought the subject up, stammering, blushing, fearful and hopeful, I got the same reaction.

      I was rebuffed, rejected and despised.

      The nice boy looked at me and told me I was disgusting, I was sick, I had a mental illness.

      I was a pervert. He was not. He was normal.

      I stood there like a witch found out. In my white shift of condemnation. I was lucky I wasn’t burned.

      Only thrown out and quarantined from his healthy life. I don’t know what he told others.

      There were a few of him until I shut up. For many, many years.

      Before I travelled round the world.

      Before I found myself, high above the dark red city of ancient kings, forced naked through the liquid glass by my master, by my Nai.

       My Nai

      It was a lovely room.

      The style was ‘retro-colonial’ which seemed appropriate for my Nai, with a nice big white bed and dark oriental mirror and furniture. It was quite new, and in the light of the new old lamps a sudden happiness bubbled up inside me. Everything was strange, unknown, never happened before. Everything was here, together. He looked back at me, he had me, I was here. All his.

      I did feel my usual mixture of soft expanding exhilaration (We’re really here! It is really going to happen!) and fear (I don’t know this man, I am a stranger with a stranger in a strange place, what if he kills me?).

      It was not an altogether rational fear, because he had told me his real name, and some further details, and I realised that he was quite well known here, and I had taken a few other safety measures like leaving his details on a computer record.

      And with him the fear was not so very strong, maybe because I felt that he had a deep sense of having a place in the world, of being himself, of having little to prove, I don’t know. In a way, my Nai is one of the least macho men I have been with, and that is quite curious considering all his conservative opinions and extremely dominant sexuality. Maybe it was also partly because he looked so young, and was so open, and maybe, just the tiniest bit, because he made me feel a little motherly.

      On the other hand, the fear is always there, in this life, in the way we BDSM people have to live.

      And of course there still was, there still is, always is, a risk, a possibility that this is the one psychopath who I couldn’t detect, that this is the price I have to pay for my way of life, for daring to be myself, to become myself, for daring to offer myself to a world that may contain my killer (of course this world contains my killer anyway, a microbe, a virus, a weakened blood vessel I carry around within myself night and day).

      I have sometimes, at this point, pulled back. I have also, sometimes, gone on, against my better judgment. I wish I could say I only took the considered risks. I didn’t. I wish I could say I was only bold when it was really worth it. I wasn’t.

      I know I could die this way. I also know that it is very, very unlikely. And I hate the fact that I have to take this risk. I don’t want it. It doesn’t excite me. On the contrary, it makes the first time a little, no, actually a lot less full and enjoyable than it could be. But until I find the one Dom who is the last one I will play with until the end of time or until BDSM becomes acceptable