The Lawyer’s queen-size bed is just big enough for a classic spread-eagle. He uses ties, men’s ties, with the tie knots and all. Windsors, I think. One time he had an aluminum rod to my thighs, and I broke the one on my right ankle. I wasn’t crying then, but I remember being mighty upset — enough to break a tie.

This time I was on my back. No chance of breaking out in this position. He lifted his hand and cracked me across the face. It didn’t sting my cheek as much as it felt like a concussion waiting to happen.

After a few of these slaps, sounds started deep in my chest: grunts, almost sobs. He kept slapping me, turning my face over with each hit until I tried to burrow it into the bed. I couldn’t bring myself to tip my face back up, so each strike was dead weight, slamming on my cheekbone and jaw.

I felt the crying come on from a long way away, like being pulled down to the depths of a pond. Tears welled up in earnest. Then my chest heaved and I started to bawl.

Crying is an odd and involuntary reaction. My body thrummed itself like some possessed guitar. The dark makeup I’d donned for work ran down my cheeks, stinging my eyes and making me blink.

My other reaction surprised me: crying desexualized sex. Being fucked was awful. I was mortified to be seen crying, more so because I was having sex. I wanted to apologize and yet I was furious with him for it. But there was no stopping the action. I turned my wet face up to him instead, hoping this was what he was looking for.

He did stop hitting me for a little.

After some violent fucking he went promptly back to it. Each time he’d slap me until I began to sob again. “Don’t hit me,” I begged. I tried to hide my face, and he kept at it — three, five, six more strikes, pushing my face into the bed. Then more fucking as I cried and cried.

I cried so hard I physically couldn’t stop. Possibly I had not cried so hard since temper tantrums in my childhood. Strangely, I couldn’t come; usually nothing on heaven or earth can stop me from reaching orgasm while being fucked. I had to grab it during a lull between face-slapping sessions, when for one blessed moment, the tears slowed and my misery transformed into mere anger.

Then back to the slapping. Oh God! I was going to have a sore jaw from this one.

When he came, he rolled away on the bed to catch his breath. He didn’t untie me. I lay there drawing ragged breaths and feeling sorry for myself.

In a minute he roused himself and reared up over my tied body again. He put a palm across my wet face — not a caress, more of an affectionate cuff — and I flinched away. I was shaken up but good. As he took one hand and then the other out of the ties, the tears started again.

He lay down with me, and let me put my face in his chest and cling to him and shake and weep. A couple times I got myself under control, and then started to cry again. He let me, unruffled.

Maybe I was wobbly because of my residual hangover from the night before, when I’d been drunk enough to pay for a cab home from the East Village. Maybe it was the leap of trust, still, to sleep at his place in that state (”Did we fuck? No? Good, because I don’t remember it”). Maybe it was moodiness from work. That afternoon I’d come straight from the dungeon, where a client had told me his life story — maybe fictional, maybe not, it is my job to make the difference not matter — spanning decades of his quest for dominant women in all the wrong venues.

Whatever the reason, in his arms, I felt a profound gratitude. I was thankful that he could take me to that place that scared me so much, and not only take it in stride, but desire and appreciate it as much as I did. It seemed so very unlikely.

I couldn’t put this into words, so I said nothing.

He stroked my hair and I cried some more. Several times I worked up to reassure him, decided he could damn well reassure himself, and concentrated on taking deep breaths. At length the shudders slowed.

“I’m good,” I said into his shoulder.

“I wasn’t worried,” he said mildly. “I don’t mind you crying.”

Oh, the understatement. “I figured,” I said. “Considering that once you made me cry, you went back for more… Four or five times…”

This made him laugh. “Yeah. Maybe I did.”

He hugged me close, compressing the air out of me in a squeak. I smiled, and through my growing headache, thought: I am the luckiest girl in the world.

Posted in bondage, submission (or the lack thereof), face slapping, rough sex, tears, crying, the lawyer