Husband socks

The hallway is where straggler clothing loiter before finding their way to the hamper. There’s no sense in overcoming this habit of disorganization; it just feel so natural to surrender pieces onto the hardwood as I strip for the shower. So there is always a smattering of clothing parallel to the bathroom, like tumble weeds made out of poly blends and cotton. Like old snow that turns ashen with each passing day. This time, when I round the corner, a small patch of electric blue screams from the floor and catches my eye. A lone athletic sock, wadded into a ball, leaning against the molding stares up at me. For reasons too slippery for my tongue, when my sight absorbed my domestic negligence my brain labels the carelessness with “my husband’s sock”.

What the hell is that?

Because that is not my husband’s sock. I have no husband. I have a lover who loans me socks when I show up to teach classes in his gym without any of my own. I have a friend who listens to the victories and insecurities engraved on my cells; a priest who offers absolution just by stomaching my self-indulgent confessions. I have a companion who compassionately feeds me dinner and volleys back inquiry about any subject under the sun. I have a soul mate who tongues my mouth and cunt with equally engaged passion; a comrade to fondle flesh with as a means of resurrecting god.

I have a rare thing, an ingenuous thing, a thing so difficult it shreds my soul bare.

But I do not have a husband and I never will. He is not my husband and he will never be.

Then why does my mind apply words with a complete disregard for their meaning? Why is that ball of black and blue “my husband sock’s”?

I want to tell you it’s because “husband’s socks” makes it easy. That you would immediately understand the significance of this relationship if I could summarize it with just one word. I want to be like everyone else in the universe and use a language that is succinct and fulfilling; a language capable of highlighting the importance and the need for protection of a relationship that stands singular to all else.

I want to tell you, that like everything else in my life, I wish it was easier. I wish I could make you understand the burdens of that come with mind. I wish I could just say he was my husband even if I’m not built to withstand the monotony of being a wife. Husband and wife aren’t titles can handle the gravity of our relentless honesty; they aren’t labels with enough elasticity for the feelings we inspire in each other. But still, I wish I could say husband and you would know that this is about a meeting of mind; the purpose behind evolution, the fluke of sheer luck that we have made it this far.

This is not about shared property and rigid gender roles. Not about limiting the range of our independent explorations. Not about grand gestures in front of a superficial audience just to prove we’ve lived and made uninspired noise.

But this is about sickness and health. This is until death do us part but understanding that vast time and spaces away from each other is not the same as death. This is about letting love move in the way that love sees most fit.

None of that makes it easy but so much of that makes it magical. I pick up his lone sock and inhale; it still smells so much like him even if I dragged it through 60 minutes of intense sweating. There is so much of him inside my head, woven in the never-ending prattle of my subconscious. This is not my husband’s sock but I wish for some way to explain that this sock defies too many physical laws. How the fuck did this sock get here in the first place?

There are 8,420 days between our birthdays and 5,317 miles between our birthplaces. We were incubated in nonconsecutive generations, seeped in vastly different culture. How did we ever manage to have a conversation, let alone share garments? And yet here is his sock sauntering up against my dirty laundry; weird evidence of love’s lack of concern about logical prerequisites for its unfettered manifestation. And here is more evidence amassed in unpredictable fashion, over weeks and months and tear-soaked years. Here are the bruises from his kisses sometimes violent undertows, turning yellow like overripe fruit, mottling my thighs. Here is the poetry scrapped from our gums after a million small moments of emotion jostled our individual souls bare. Here is a story encrypted into my maneuvering of my veins; an impetus swirling behind my blood’s flow. Here is him crying in my arms over love lost, over his broken vows for a woman who was once the reason he rose out of bed. Here is me coddling the most tender facets of his psyche, spoon-feeding him perspective and chicken soup. Here is he cradling my insecurities and salvaging the sharp edges of my bravery from a depressive monsoon that swears I am a bad mom. Here is us listening to music in the back of an outdoor café at 11 pm on a Wednesday; here is us laughing too loud in downpour while we pluck sushi from square plates.

Here is us when we are beautiful: naked, glowing, open. So much electricity in our salvia and in our syllables. Here is us as immortals, male and female, vulnerable and oscillating, one into the other. The meaning of everything in motion.

But here is us when we are brutal: sterile, insensitive, cold, so full of rage the only color in our universe is red. Here is us as demons, selfish and explosive. Here is me erupting rage when he permits his other lover too close to my force field. Here is him stubbornly resolute about not caring about the outcomes of his actions. Here is us submerged in metallic silence. Here is us creating hell on earth.

We’re capable of forfeiting reality and creating either fantastical extreme: heaven on a Tuesday afternoon, Hell rattling off its slumber at the most unexpected of places. In the upheaval of either universe, emotive thought dilutes my blood, oxygenates me as if for the first time. How did we get here? How does anybody ever get to either of these places when they still have these lumbering mortal feet?

It can be jarring at times, to have a love like that. To be worn down the demands of this love’s honesty and passion. But we persist, throughout all the endless reasons to cease the connection. It is not about the intercourse; it has always been about the discourse. There is something cyclical and essential in how we speak to each other; something divinely inspired that heals wounds that each of us has housed way before we ever met. There is something restorative about heading to heaven only to fall back down to hell. We do not catch each other. We do not make promises about paradise forever upheld between our flesh.

We just tell each other of the journey and wet each other’s skin with our laughing tears.

He is not my husband and I am not his wife. I am just a woman who lets him be himself and he offers me the exact same privilege in return. I have no insurance if this relationship tanks; you would never be able to offer condolences the way one would if there was a divorce. If this ends badly, I suspect the damage would be much more complicated than a divorce. We share part brain and part heart. It seems so much easier to split a bank account.

I guess when my brain slips and says “my husband’s sock”, what it’s really trying to say is: I wish it were simpler. I wish I could make you understand what the risks are and why we take them.

Sometimes, I wish I were simpler, that he was simpler. Maybe then there’d be a better label for his dirty sock.  

How it's evolving

We had dinner outside in the rain, under a maroon awning that offered the perfect amount of coverage. We ate hot dishes of beef and noodles, sipped warm sake and I told him complex stories about travel and old loves. We had the best table in the whole place, so many people cramped on the other side of humid glass, missing out on the electric feel in the air. He insisted the wind was coming from the sea last night; to me it smelt like the earth let out a sigh of relief as it drank up all that rain.

He is becoming softer around me. More and more often he looks at me with deep love and with longing; something that he guarded against showing too readily even a few months ago, even when I looked at him with an urgent desire that made me feel deeply ashamed by its insistence. During dinner, he gave me that look he does when he is totally enamored with our dialogue, when I am adorable and suave and sophisticated but fail to see any of it. He looked at me like this several times and I kept playfully busting his balls about it. He smirked and said “I’ve turned a corner”. And I smirked and said “Yeah but how many damn corners does this fucking shape have?” and we laughed because even if I don’t know what I’m talking about I can still speak about one of its truths.

This is not the first time he has mentioned turning a corner. It’s been an ongoing theme of the past two years. Turning a corner means something in him has shifted and in the process it gives more room for our relationship; it gives more me more significance in his life. There always feels like there is an imperative underlying our relationship and I’ve felt it for years before him. This is not to suggest that I think we are fated in a fairy tale kind of way. I think we are a call to arms for each other, an imperative to act to the best of our abilities embodied in each other’s flesh. I think there is an imperative specifically because our relationship can be so challenging, that it asks us both be patient and flexible in a way that neither one of us has ever had. In a way, turning a corner is like he’s submitting to his own advancement towards the imperativeness of our relationship. I just smile when he says he’s turned a corner, the way anyone would smile when someone else finally comes around to see reason. I try not to smile with too much “I told you so” but sometimes that impulse is really hard to resist.

After a 3 hour dinner soaked in conversation, we parked outside my apartment and lingered in his car. He cried in a way that rarely happens but when it does, it reveals the underlying reason why I love him so deeply. He produced all the tears that he never shed during a part of history that warranted deep release. And when I touched him, I cried too, moved by experiences that happened decades before we met. When he cries like this and when he cannot find his words, when he is so overcome with his humanity and humility, when he is fraught with feeling because he knows more than a human body could possibly express, that is when I become aware that I’ve searched for a man like this my whole life. A man made of consideration, who does the right thing at the right time, but who is also not in denial of how hard it is to live like that. A man who sometimes cries decades after a hardship because he finally feels everyone he cares about is in a safe enough position so that he can release. When he cries like that I cry in part because it fills me with relief: I cannot believe a man like this exists and that he is such an important part of my life.

When we went upstairs, bleary eyed and red-faced, he put his cock inside my pussy and within three thrushes he said “I love you baby”. He said it with such relief. This is new, or at least the announcement of his love has never come this early in our sex. It has typically come later: a reflection to my own unraveling when I scream how much I love him as he glides in and out of me. He said it into my open mouth, as if I could digest his words and build parts of my flesh from his affection. He pushed his cock in deep and held it there, confessed to masturbating to me all week, wanting my body and its response to his all week, wanting what I can give him that no other woman can. He said “Hold me, hold onto me” and I wrapped all my limbs on him, my hips thrusting up to meet his. My legs are the perfect length to meet around the middle of his gyrating torso and I remembered how when we first started having sex he said something along the line of how constrictive my legs felt like that. He didn’t use those words, per se. But after that first time we had sex, I acknowledged to myself that my legs can never extract their strength, that when I use them to hold onto him, they REALLY hold onto him. When we first started having sex, he wasn’t ready for that, he was almost diametrically opposed to it. I had to let him fuck me as if I had no power to hold him in place.

Yesterday, we were genital on genital, mouth on mouth, and my legs, with their impossible tree-trunk determination, kept his hips firmly locked with mine. “Fuck”, I said into his mouth, “I love you too…”

Then we lost track of time and ourselves in each other’s bodies. Even if so much has changed, that’s the way it’s been since it began…

Baby steps with baby boy

“Oh god! Fuck…. fuck. Wait… wait…!”

All of him is constricted. Every blessed inch. His cum has split, all over his belly. His hips are still locked up, pulsing off the couch, contorted with deep pleasure.
My face is close to his open thighs. My cheek grazes the insides of one and all of his body surges again and bucks.

“Wait! …Wait…” he pants.

And I wait, letting nothing of me touch his body, even though my instincts are to scoop him up and kiss him clean. He breathes unevenly and exhales loudly.
“Fuck… fuck, I don’t even know how to describe what just happened…” he says as his body sinks back into the cushions. “God… I need a glass of water”

I get him a glass of water and bring him a warm towel to clean up the cum. When I come back into the room, he is sitting up right, looking more like his regular self. More composed. He gulps the water, audibly and when he’s has his fill he exhales dramatically, this time with satisfaction.

“Fuck. I feel like a raw nerve” he says through a sheepish smile.

Nothing has ever sounded so beautiful to my ears. I’ve accomplished the impossible: I’ve overwhelmed the man of iron nerves.

“Where you in my asshole? Like your tongue was in my ass?” he says this with a mostly giddy tone.

“Ha, no. I was just on the outside. You were too tight baby. You’re still not relaxed enough. It would have hurt if I pushed in.”

“But what were you doing? It felt like you were inside! Were you around it or on it?”

“I was right over it, licking all around. I could tell you weren’t completely relaxed, so I stayed right on the outside, and applied pressure all around it”

He balls up his index finger and his thumb and makes a mock asshole in his fist. “Wait, show me. pretend this is my asshole. What did you do with your tongue?”

I undulate over his hand, tongue broad and fluttering. As soon as my mouth meets his fist he exclaims “Oh fuck yeah, that’s what that was!”

We laugh and touch, ankles rubbing, knees knotting.

“I guess it’s like when I finger your pussy and you ask me what the fuck I’m doing.”

“Yeah, it’s exactly like that. You’re playing with a part I can’t ever see and I have no idea how you make those sensations happen.”

“Yeah, you’re right. But fuck, wow, I’m exhausted. That just took so much out of me.” He lays down, motioning for me to snuggle by his side.

“You liked it though?” I say, lips brushing against his chest hair.

“Yeah. Fuck. Loved it. You know it’s all so new to me. I’ve never done this with anyone else.”

“Well yeah, me too.”

He shifts upwards, meets his gaze with mine “Wait, really?”

“Yeah duh. Who the hell's asshole do you think I’ve ever wanted to fuck as bad as yours?”

“Wait… but really, I thought you had so much experience. Wait... can we just forget you said that. I like thinking you have a lot of experience.”

“Ha, fine. Okay” I say through a laugh as I wrap my arms around him.

We float in noiseless lull between his orgasm and mine. And what I am really thinking ferments, unsaid, on the tip of my tongue:

Such a sweet little boy. He doesn’t understand that even if I’ve never owned a man’s asshole before it doesn’t render me inexperienced. I am the master student of bottoming sex—and oh, precious baby boy, now is my time to teach.

One day, that asshole will be mine.

One day, beautiful boy, you will beg for it to be mine.

How my deviance works

At the bottom of my lingerie drawer, there is a ball gag. It is rubber and dense, opaque and black. An old lover bought it for my birthday, when I craved muteness and a deluge of saliva. We never used it and I’m not sure why. In the past few years my curiosity for it has nearly disappeared. So now, it just sits, in a tangle of panties, at the bottom of my lingerie drawer.

Today, while putting away laundry I saw its black curve poking out beneath the thongs, saying hello. And I thought:

I want to wrap that ball gag I never used in pretty pink paper, nestle that bundle in a tiny gift bag. I want to give it to my current lover. I want to tell him to use it on his other lovers, but of course, that he is free to use it as he wishes, that he can enjoy it or store in his underwear drawer, untouched, if that suits him too. 

But really, what I really want is for him to use on her.

I want her mouth wide, tongue curved behind the gag, cheeks taut underneath the straps. I want her eyes vigilant, skin heightened in its sensitivity. I want her hair free and wild, the bulkiest part of her unleashed like an oil spill on the bed.

I want her almost naked, splayed like the letter x, wearing only the gag that was wrapped in pretty pink paper. I want her waiting for his touch, mouth agape and full, mute with want.

Mute with lust.

Mute with what could have been mine.

I want her to put that gag on willingly, excitedly, because he gave it to her, simply with a smile and a small phrase “I thought you’d like to try something new”.

I want her to put it on to please him, wet from the assumption that this gift was solely his idea. I want her toxically aroused, oblivious to the symbolism, pussy drenched with how much she trusts him.

I want the hush of his bedroom air circulating the liquid of her lips. I want his eyes locked on hers, his patience chipping away her resolve. I want her body to squirm, hips rising, trying to expedite the contact of his tongue between her legs.

And I want it to be implausibly slow. A slow standoff between their eyes. A slow silence between their lips. A slow spread of his palms. A slow spread of her pussy. A slow whine fumbling from behind the blockade of her mouth.

A slow slather of tongue on a muted pussy, confounded on the bed. A slow trickle of spit, sliding down her face, the sloppiest reaction, thick and urgent, cascading down her neck, pooling in her clavicle.

I want it to be delirious, feral, charmed. I want her expansive when it’s over; I want him hallowed when it’s done.

I want it to be all the things that it will never be sitting in my underwear drawer. 

...a work in progress

“You’re such a good boy, telling mama all that. Mama’s so proud of you baby!”

That’s what I croon, seconds from orgasm. His knuckles are plunged, front and center, to the mecca of my juice. His eyes are hurricane blue, lush with arousal, locked onto the approval on my face.  He’s such a sweet little boy, telling mama of his travels. And I overflow when my baby is honest, when he tells me where his hands have wandered.

We’ve been playing this game called radical honesty. It starts like every other game: with dueling wit and eyebrows perked, all parts of us alert and mischievous. We chatter until the talk turns visceral. Until our psyches are inflamed and open for whatever form the exchange might take. But this time, after we have kissed until my face is red from his stubble, and after his belt has streaked my skin, and after I sweetly lie and tell Daddy I will only ever want his cock and no other boys, and after that lie makes his cum bubble onto the outer lips of my pussy, that is when the real game begins.

That is when we play Emotional Russian Roulette.

That is when Mama pulls her pussy apart, legs sprayed with not an ounce of shame, fingers undulating over her hungry clit. And that is when his baby floats to the surface, even though I can see that little boy all the time, thinly veiled by his grown up 55 year old man movements. I call him out with just “Baby” and baby responds always with a soft variant of  “yes, mama, what do you need?”

He’s such a good little boy, smitten with life. He’s jovial. Loving. Kind.

Curious.

It’s his curiosity that gives him the most trouble, that poor little boy. 

Where the fuck am I on this Kink Spectrum?

Exploring sexuality is not new for me. I’ve been probing those borders for as long as I can remember; I was that kid whose curiosity bled beyond what we usually consider "childhood interests".  So in many ways my sexuality is almost as old I am. I've dragged it almost everywhere in my life and I've watched it shift and change, revert and move forward.

Kink is also not so new for me, though my awareness of it is younger than my awareness of my sexuality. I’ve had a lot of visceral and mind-altering sex. I’ve played with power, service, dipped in and out of roles. I’ve tongued cock and pussy, groped multiple limbs at once. I’ve been beaten and bruised, probed and pulled apart. These are all glorious and beautiful moments, where I’ve connected deeply with other people; moments that triggered my greatest growth in how I understand myself and how I express love.

For a very long time, I believed I was submissive. I liked the idea of being a submissive, in fact I still love that idea: to be at the mercy of an unyielding and powerful dominant, to be flooded in the feelings of it, to shine with love for him even in the midst of cruelty. I’m infatuated by that image and by that kind of connection. I've had several relationships that reach this summit and then… then reality comes back and I remember:

I don’t like the restriction of definitions. Which makes me kind of a lousy submissive. 

For a short while, I wanted so badly to not be so messy. It’s messy to not have a definition. Kink and BDSM offer a kind of relief for people who feel like their sexuality is radically different. There are words and labels for complicated feelings and situations. There is a whole juicy language that you can use to explore your desires. And so often, when I view people on Fetlife, I see people find joy in discovering words and phrases that convey what it is they seek and what it is that drives their relationships. Because there's really deep joy in being understood, in finding belonging. But sometimes, I'm envious of those exact people who appear to fit comfortably inside of the labels the BDSM community uses. Because I don't seem to fit comfortably. Because kinksters are outsiders of mainstream culture and if I am outsider of the outsiders’ then fuck what am I?

Well... I'm not a submissive.  

It's taken me a long time to come to terms with that, but it's supported by my experiences and the broad range of my desires, so it's kind of dumb to deny that fact any longer. In truth, I'm a bad submissive because I have a tremendous appetite and though the submissive impulse has been fun to satiate it doesn’t even chip away at the hunger within.

But what am I then?

Well... a women aflame with desire who adores manipulating emotions, who gets wet from pushing boundaries.

I desire huge emotions provoked from sincere expression with my partners. I desire confessions sung at the height of orgasms, taboos shredded down to their innocence. I desire the emotional jugular—I want to find where your pulse pivots into your soul and I want to stab right the fuck into it.

I desire the pain that deeply loving someone brings. I desire the pleasure in acting like we are not mortal when we try to kill our egos in our sex.

I desire pleasure in all its preposterous forms.

One day I will probably be a full-fledge dominant. That is where it feels like I am going but I am not there there yet. Being a responsible dominant requires a commitment of time and energy that my current life doesn’t allow. So currently, I'm in a strange grey space in how I connect intimately with other kink-minded people. I am realizing more and more that I can see deeply into the psychological underpinnings of my own and my lovers' behaviors. It is hard to be submissive when you see all that. It is hard for other people “to get ahead of me”, cause I'm typically 23 paces ahead, and also because, fuck, I love learning how to lead, I like being at the helm. But more than all that I realized: I want to use my sight to penetrate someone else. I want to explore stripping other people of their power, flex my own without apology. 

I want to bring pain with the intent to heal.

I wish I could comfortably say that I'm a switch. If there has to be a label, I guess that is the label. But I can't settle into it because even as these words come out the ratio of my desires shift, becomes something nuanced and more developed.

All I can tell you is that I used to be submissive and I've experienced what it does. 

And one day, I want to bring others to the places where submissiveness will bring you.


It's just that I'm still learning skills to get us there. 

That time we brought jealousy to bed

“You’re gonna fuck his cock? Hmm? His young, fat cock?”

He’s sneering and he’s pinning me down, the fleshy part of my arms pinched to the mattress, crucified by his urgently angry knees. He’s been ramming things into my throat: his fingertips, his hostile, painfully erect cock. He’s been ramming things into my face: his open palm like lightning across my cheeks, doubling back on the other side. He’s been ramming things into my windpipe: braiding his fingers around my neck, plying his elbow to produce wheezing gasps.

He’s been stapling my nipples into pancakes between his rough fingernails.

And I’m not flinching in the slightest. I’m not fucking threatened at all.

I’m seeping spillage, leaking lust all over the bed.

“Yes, I’m gonna fuck his cock.”, I crooned, with a wide smirk canceling out the tears in my eyes and salvia on my face, “I’m gonna have him cum in my pussy and bring it back to you, make you watch it fall out of my cunt.”

The anger boils in his eyes, like a spark before the explosion. That anger makes my insides squeal, makes my pussy unravel in desire. I poke that anger with my long, curious stick:

“That makes you so jealous, doesn’t it? That I want his cock so bad? You're so jealous.”

We are smirk-on-smirk, dueling each other into an erotic truce. He thrust his tongue urgently into my mouth, violently, possessively. We kiss like we need each other’s carbon dioxide to live. He rakes my hair through his knuckles, yanks my head back to expose my ear.

“Yes, it makes me jealous. Bring it back to me. Let me see his cum in your pussy”

And like that: we fuck. Hard, raw, nasty. A spiral of jealousy that transmutes into possession that diffuses back into love. There is no more talking, no more negotiation. There is just this blazing honesty on our sweaty skin. We fuck like animals, thinking of this imagined future tryst. We fuck like animals, marking our territory, stake our claim in each other’s flesh.

We fuck like humans, desperately trying to use our bodies and sex to convey the immense size and scope of our love.