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My lover moved up and down my body, whipping every part of me, pausing a moment for my flesh to be soothed by the air, before he began the assault again, working down from the tenderness of my nipples to the most sensitive parts of my feet. The night disappeared into the sting of the leather.
But he can’t have spent the night whipping me. The cat o’ nine tails is a vicious implement; I would have been flayed. And although I was often marked after one of our nights together, the red lines always faded. I was never scarred, even though I wanted to be. Even though we both knew I wanted to be.
In truth, on that night he would not have spent more than an hour teasing and tantalizing me with his cat o’ nine tails, and the time that the leather was actually on my skin in a violent manner probably would have been less than a minute. But time is never consistent. A moment can be a drop of eternity with a skilled lover.
In the shadows, as I watched him work on my body I loved his experience, I loved his wife, I loved his girlfriends, I loved his one boyfriend, all the people who had moulded him and helped him, who had taught him how to hold a whip in the correct manner, how to hurt without hurting, how tantalizing the mind was essential to the physical pleasure. I loved them most of all for not hoarding him to themselves, for being foolish enough to let him go. I loved that he was here in this moment and he was mine. As much as any person had ever been mine.
After he completed whipping me we didn’t have normal sex. Sometimes it was too crude after the spiritual high of the giving and receiving of pain to revert to our animalistic selves and dissolve into being no more than vessels for our cock and cunt. Although there were so many other times when all we wanted to be were beasts lost to all conscious thought.
When he finished, when he knew I’d reached my limit, he put the cat away and left me tied up and alone in the room. He always left the door open as if I was a young child requiring the comfort of knowing there were other people moving about in the house, that I wasn’t left on my own with the darkness and the ghosts.
He went away and did his thing, I never knew what. I didn’t strain to hear his every movement; maybe I was supposed to? I lay still and listened to my own breathing, mentally retracing every place that I had been whipped, patiently content to await his return.
