"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance"

How I long to fall just a little bit, to dance out of the lines and stray from the light. ~Dar Williams

I thought I would spend the whole night dancing, but instead, he danced with me the weekend through.

He got here late, due to a combination of circumstance and misfortune. I was already stuck into the gin and ensconced at a kitchen party, when he arrived at my friend's house. The room was tiny, really I should have just sat and behaved...but I'm a bad, bad girl, and bad girls misbehave and smile while they're doing it...

I couldn't resist touching him, stroking him, I wanted his scent on me, I needed to reconnect after a week apart. I wanted to make him happy and mentally grimaced as I found myself not only opening bottles of beer for him and handing them to him - but drawing other people's attention to it. 'Look, look, see this powerful, muscular and charimatic man? I'm his!' My submissiveness made me angry at him, so I used every opportunity to let him know...digging my nails into his skin...glaring. I probably deserved what came later.

In the dingy little metal club, uninspired by the music (with so much potentially fantastic music to draw from, how is it possible to so epically fail at DJ'ing?!) I stayed off the dance floor. As I kissed a couple of friends of mine, leaning into their mouths, enjoying the whisper of their tongues on mine, I felt like a whore. And I smiled.

He reclaimed me with a hand inside my knickers, not even up against a wall or in a dark corner, just taking what was his. My eyes, shocked and slightly confused, taking in nothing but his face, became unfocused as my attention locked in to what he was doing to me. He took my first orgasm from me while I was standing, my body pressed against his for support, my cries unheard amid the pounding beat, my flushed face unseen by the press of the crowd as I buried my head in his shoulder.

Later, much later, he put his hand around my throat and made me pay for earlier. My back to the wall, he put his fingers inside my mouth and stretched it out, then pushed his hand further in until I started to gag. He let me breathe a little then continued...so erotic, so terrifying...I must have looked frightened enough that someone I didn't even know came up and checked we were okay, that I was okay. We smiled and he went on his way, happy at having done his duty.

The next day, exhausted, and (in my case) hideously hungover, we contented ourselves with just talking softly, and taking what we needed from each other - naked, skin-to-skin, gentle whispering strokes on my body, on his. Toast, tea, bath...everyday things, but special, so special because they were with him. Okay, so we might have played a tiny bit, too. ;-) The time disappeared again, as it always does.

We walked into town, had a drink and some dinner. I love to watch his face as he talks. I like having all his attention to myself, but I also enjoy watching him with other people...so charismatic, spell-bindingly so. People watch him, caught almost despite themselves in whatever story or anecdote he tells. He uses his hands to speak, more so than anyone else I know - and his hands, his arms, are so beautiful, so very....male.

Hand in hand, we walked back through town. If anyone saw us who shouldn't have done - who doesn't know I'm poly and wonders what I'm doing with a man who is not my husband - I find it hard to care. I forget myself, when I'm with him. I'm not as clumsy as I normally am, he makes me feel like I'm dancing, dancing all the time when I'm with him - a hip-swaying, heel strut of a dance, sinuous and dizzying.

We spent that night in a hotel together, playing. I don't know how many times I came that weekend, because I lost count. Each a little death, a little rebirth...I died a thousand times of love, that night for him. A strange kind of love, whose only flower petals are the bruises blooming on my skin, the poetry of which is whispered, 'whore.. you are MINE'.

I find myself hoping I've pleased him.

Covered in the smell of him, dazed with the lifetime of treasured moments collapsed into this tiny space of time, marked by the ruin he's made of my skin...I come together enough to assemble my public persona. Corsetted, heeled, and slightly unsteady, he carries my bag as we make our way to the car. Little things like this make me happy. Almost as much as having the shit beaten out of me. ;-)

We arrive at the London Alternative Market, and for a moment, I'm unsure. It's been a while since I've been to LAM, and I don't quite know what reception I'll get from friends of my ex. I needn't have worried - people are as friendly and welcoming as ever. I see lots of people I know, and enjoy catching up on the scurrilous gossip. I also meet someone I've only ever corresponded with on IC, and never met in the flesh, and am pleased to find he looks about twenty years younger in person, and tolerates my mild flirtation with good humour. God, I'm such a whore!

I can't take my eyes off the man I've come (and cum) with, though...of all the people there, I need his hands on me, his lips, so delicious to kiss, lick, and...bite. I probably deserved what happened later. Are you spotting a theme here? ;-)

We ambled around the market, picking up some interesting things to have fun with, and then taking some time out for food. The things he says to me, when we're alone, and with other people. I don't think anyone's ever paid me so many compliments...

When trouble came, in the form of a large group of loud, burly, vulgar men (let in through the door on strict instruction that they would have to leave when the downstairs closed in an hour), he sent me round the other side of the bar, and positioned himself where he could quietly calm matters if possible, and keep an eye on things. Unbeknownst to him, I was on the other side of the bar, keeping an eye on him! Although, as he pointed out when I told him this afterwards, I'm not sure what I would have done, had a massive fight kicked off...fallen over in my heels on them, possibly? Got my knockers out and distracted them? Fainted in my corset and landed on them?

All was well in the end and everyone ended up safely upstairs, the ignorant blokey blokes dispatched in a taxi with directions to the other side of london, courtesy of my young man *preens*.

And so then to the play which occupies a particularly special place in my mind, I think quite the most fulfilling and transcendent public play I've had to date. I wasn't sure we would play at all...the LAM afterparty can be quite a surprisingly unsexy and unatmospheric place, brightly lit and set up more like a school dinner hall rather than a sex club. Compounded by the fact you can't actually have any kind of penetrative sex in it, something I got a very gentle reminder/ warning about from Cosmic while I was sat on my dom's lap, legs open, flashing the room. Why I got told off, I really don't know - I'm not the one in charge!

We were sitting right at the back of the hall, where it was a little darker and more intimate. No-one else was up there, at that time, and so I don't know who saw, when he decided to make me pay for all the little scratches and bites I'd given him throughout the day. He dragged me off the chair by my throat, and threw me up against the wall, banging me into it again and again and again. I honestly thought we might crash through it at one point, as he lifted me onto my toes, choking me, pulling my hands above my head, or to the side, kissing me so deeply, and then slapping me as I pushed and struggled to get away from him.

He let go of my arms a few times and I used this opportunity to get a few blows in, with one very powerful slap to his face. I was furious...feral...channelling all the anger, all the frustration from a very difficult week. His face was transformed, like an animal, bestial, brutish. His colour darkened...when veins started to stand out on his face I knew I was in trouble. And still I hissed insults at him, uncaring that he would shout back at me, inches away from my face, his spit hitting my cheeks with the force of his words, vicious, degrading words, abusive words...words that got me even more soaking wet than I already was from his use of me.

He dragged me to my feet by my hair, and thrust through the crowd, his fingers digging deep into my arms, causing instant bruising. By my hair he pulled me, and then threw me over the piece of kit - a flat-bottomed barrel with restraint straps. He hauled up my skirts and started beating me in earnest. I fought free of him for long enough to slap him again, and he heaved me back over the barrel and held me down as I flailed wildly against him. He hit me so hard I gasped for breath, blows raining down, pouring over, onto me. And still I screamed. I swear there was a moment when I called him a fucking cunt at the top of my lungs, when the whole room took a breath. He tied me into the restraints and took out the thick crop-like whip he'd bought that day, that I had no idea he'd kept on his body. His rage showered down on me, and still I fought, spitting into his face, the moment he ceased to hold me down. He wrapped the body of the whip around my throat and spat into my face, I was terrified...I couldn't speak with my mouth, I let my eyes speak for me, instead. Then he smashed me back into the barrel, putting his full weight into holding me there, and he beat me, and beat me, and beat me, breaking me down, until finally, at last, at last, I could give in, give up, to him. Exhausted, I lay my head against the barrel and made little utterances of submission, murmuring that I was sorry, that I loved him, please...please...anything, take anything from me that you want.

And he did. He slowed, but continued to spank and beat me, and do whatever he fucking chose to, to me. Because he was in charge. I'd at long last, surrendered. He took some more from me...I wanted to give him everything - I wanted him to fuck me, over the barrel, with everyone watching, so that they could see I was his, his woman, his choice. All my rage, my thunderous fury, gone. When he'd finally finished, and he stopped because he wanted to, not because I wanted or needed him to, he lifted my dead weight up, and carried me over to the side of the room. He held me up against the wall, as I stroked his head, my eyes luminous in the dark, soft and loving, as he took me, kissing me, mauling the flesh he had just won, caressing my face.

He sat me on his lap, and we held each other, as if the world was ending, the cosmos turning to dust in the void, and us uncaring. The perfection of a newborn self glimpsed for a moment, shattered pieces of my soul collected one by one, an infinite jigsaw puzzle made whole, pressed back together again by the magic and the mystery, accomplished by the consummation of love through play.

Is it any wonder that I cry sometimes, from the sheer joy of it, afterwards?

And then he took me home, driving me all the way back to Brighton, before his own long journey home.

This is how it should be. Always, is too much to ask for. Sometimes, is enough, when it's as good as this.

Je vous remercie de tout coeur, mon loup.