dozen. He took things slow, but I wasn’t sure why that was. By the seventh dinner, I’d grown tired of attempting to make polite conversation as we continued to get to know one another, and I told him as much. Again, I wasn’t sure what I’d expected out of the encounter, but it hadn’t been for Jake to take me back to my apartment and politely talk his way inside.
We had sex for the first time that night. There had been a little domination on his side, but again, I knew he’d been taking care with me. He treated me as though I was fragile, but the sex had been good, so I’d given him the benefit of the doubt. More sex, a little more domination. Firm words, a couple of commands. I kept waiting for more, but it never came, so once again, I told him what I wanted.
I should’ve realized at that point that he wasn’t a Dominant. He wanted to play the part, but it was like an ill-fitting suit. Just didn’t sit right on him. The same could be said for me making a go at being a submissive. In my mind, being a submissive was something far different than what I found it to be. I’d romanticized it, turned it into a fairy tale.
For the record, I still wanted that fairy tale, regardless of whether it made me a submissive or not.
I had genuinely liked Jake, and I thought perhaps we could explore the world of BDSM together. I was as clear as I could be about what I wanted, and he made efforts to meet my needs. Most failed, others I simply ignored. Roughly ten months in, I realized that, at some point, the roles had reversed. I had become the dominating partner, Jake the submissive. I had hated it. Immensely. And I suspected he had, too.
Whether we just hadn’t meshed or neither of us really knew what we wanted, it hadn’t mattered. Eventually we agreed that we were not going to make one another happy and had parted ways. Almost immediately, I returned to the website, desperate to find someone who could satisfy the needs that had been building over the year Jake and I were together. I went on two dates with two different men shortly after that. Neither had gone well. One guy had been ridiculously rude and demanding; the other could not stop saying the word pussy.
I gave up at that point, convinced it wasn’t for me. I’d romanticized the notion partly because of Ransom but mostly because I had relied on fictional storytelling as my basis. Hearing my brother talk about some of his encounters and reading about those happy-ever-afters with mind-blowing sex, I’d clearly set my expectations too high.
In my defense, it wasn’t like Ransom gave me the intimate details of his real-life rendezvous. We were close, sure. Not only was he my brother, he was my best friend, but there were still some things that were off-limits. However, I did enjoy hearing his thoughts on it. Not the gory details, but what he got out of a scene or an interaction with one of the many submissives he encountered.
When I told him what had happened with Jake, how we couldn’t find a middle ground that pleased us both, Ransom told me I would have to experience a lot of that before I found the one Dominant who would truly understand me and before I would find the Dominant I was eager to please.
Problem was, I didn’t want to weed through men in an attempt to find the one, Dominant or otherwise. While I enjoyed sex immensely, there were too many risks involved, and being promiscuous didn’t sit well with me. For one, I tended to lead with my heart, not my vagina. In turn, I looked for an emotional connection. How would I get through a handful of men that way?
The simple answer was, I wouldn’t. So, I had given up trying. If relationships required that much work, I had no interest in them.
However, I did still have an interest in understanding the intricate relationships that developed within the BDSM realm. And right here, beneath this very roof, were several I could probably learn a lot from.
One thing that was important to note, visiting websites and forums dedicated to BDSM was entirely different than witnessing it firsthand. For one, looking away wasn’t really … well, an option. Not because anyone was forcing me to participate. Like the