Senta Holland - Out of the Shadows

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 and we all walk the streets tall and free, I will have to continue to take this risk.

So I looked at my Nai, not my Nai yet in so many words, in fact I didn’t even know the word Nai yet, and what it means, I looked at the bed, the white sheets which might become my burial shroud, and the dark carved wood which might become my coffin, and then I looked at my Nai again. He smiled then said, a little more strongly: ‘Go and take a shower’. He looked very beautiful, and I had a good feeling. But of course you can never ever, ever know.

I took a last look into his eyes, I felt a connection, but I also knew that, ultimately, there is no connection that you can trust, and I looked at the risk and I looked at myself and I gave my soul a little nudge: this moment, if I have to? Am I ready? Yes. I am ready to die.

I am here! I am here! With him! With an intelligent, sensitive, secure male Dom who looks into my eyes to turn my body into spicy banana goo. And now I was going to feel the delirious sweetness.

He looked around the room and put his bag on a stand. I was getting really curious about that bag. A little old backpack, a bit torn at the edges. He slowly undid the clasp, it was an old clasp and stuck for a moment in rusty hinges. Then he slid both hands in and widened the opening, just enough to take out the first of many treasures. That bag looked so small but it turned out to be a bottomless trove of delights.

The first thing he took out was a long, long rope of sky blue material. I remembered how he had talked about it over dinner, over his spicy dish and my cooked flowers, with the lights drowning themselves in the river behind him, how he had said that the best material for bondage that he knew were the silk and high-tech fibre ties that he used for flying high in the air with just the support of a little engine, his body harnessed in just such a blue leash. I liked the image of him flying in the air, tied the way I would like to be.

He laid them out on the white white bed.

Then he ran his fingers down my spine, the first touch.

Less than a day since I arrived here. And I already was at the heart of things.

My Nai’s desire

I always knew exactly how precious it was.

And how unlikely.

To have found someone whose desires matched my own.

Not in the sense that they were exactly the same, of course not. There were many areas of difficult compromises.

But in the sense that when we played he was fulfilling his desires just as I was fulfilling mine, by fulfilling mine.

What we played exactly, the exact actions and practices evolved slowly over time.

The first few times were like very tentative sketches. We did a few things straight away that we both loved. We did not do many other things for a long time.

But what was right there, right from the first moment, was the matching of desire.

This was my true sexuality, my true life.

And it was his.

I knew that very soon, before I even touched him. It was like meeting someone who speaks your own, very rare and secret language.

The curious backpack

The backpack was old. A little torn at the top, where you had to draw a string together to keep it closed, and with rough edges that showed a pinkish colour underneath the black skin.

It was the backpack he carried on the night when I first met him. When he had looked so much like a man who had remained behind from former times.

He told me later: ‘I was very surprised, on the first night, when you said you would have sex with me’.

‘But,’ I said, ‘but you had your backpack.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘always keep the doors open.’

It was a lot to carry just for an open door.

And then there were the freshly cut bamboo sticks. He had cut them that day in his garden.

All the objects in the pack had been put carefully together. They were both a snapshot through the layers of that moment in his life and a collection from his whole history in BDSM.

There were soft scarves, some with a whip or a flogger wrapped inside them, there were laundry clips and suction tubes, there was a heavy collar and a furry blindfold. There was a strong little paddle.

And – he had an old well-used belt. Yes he did! I shivered with excitement and recognition when I first saw it.