Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Kiss

Author's Note: Please see the post labels if you would like to know what triggers this piece might contain before reading it. If you notice something else in the piece that seems like a common trigger that I have not marked, please leave a comment to let me know. I would like the sharing of my work to be as safe as I can make it for my readers.




On her knees, she waits.

She can hear him moving behind her, choosing. The slide of leather on wood, rubber on metal, as he moves things out of a toy box whose contents she knows like the back of her hand, except for the occasions on which there is a surprise. Then, he’ll instruct her to retrieve something from the box, letting her open the lid and discover a new item for pleasure and torment and sensation.

Sometimes when he is moving things, she can tell what is in his hands. The drag of heavy falls that means a flogger with its heavy thud. The light clink of nail tips on their ring. The whisper of rope slipping coil against coil.

Now, she hears a slithering glide of coiled leather. And then the shuffling stops, and she knows what is coming. The crack and burning sting that should not be so amazing and compelling to someone who strongly prefers a heavier thudding pain, but always intensely, inexplicably pulls on some deeper desire within her.

He comes to stand before her. She bends her head and presses a kiss to the whip.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Silence

Author's Note: Please see the post labels if you would like to know what triggers this piece might contain before reading it. If you notice something else in the piece that seems like a common trigger that I have not marked, please leave a comment to let me know. I would like the sharing of my work to be as safe as I can make it for my readers.

In this case, that list is a bit more complicated, as most of it is just in reference/passing, but I've put all of the things I notice in the labels anyway.





 
There are many kinds of silence.

There’s the silence of anticipation. That is the calm before the storm, the moment between movement and contact, between contact and the physical sensation of the blow. There’s the silence of satisfaction, wrung out and languid, a still tangle of disparate limbs. There’s the silence of stubbornness and desperation, just before need overcomes pride and leads to begging. There’s the silence of companionship, two people slotting smoothly into each others lives and patterns, working at opposite ends of a table on entirely different projects, but still there with each other.

There are other, darker unwanted silences. The silence of shame in the specter of things past that stand in the way of things present. The silence of fear in an unwilingness to speak up and risk rebuke or censure, a terror of facing disbelief. And there are intentionally darker silences that dance on the knife’s edge of what they want and what they are willing to risk. Pleasure and discomfort and humiliation in the downcast eyes and spreading blush of being publicly introduced as someone’s slut. Wide startled eyes staring at the point of the blade, hardly daring to breathe as it comes closer and closer to skin.

Sometimes silence is voluntary, and she is still and quiet out of her own sense of the moment. Sometimes the silence is mandatory, enforced by gag or protocol, “Don’t speak until you’re spoken to,” or “Little girls should be seen and not heard,” where her right to speak is his, and he is choosing to remove it. Sometimes silence is imposed, a hand or a mouth darting it and cutting off whatever she was saying.

There’s something within her that rarely shuts up or turns off. It runs and analyzes, computes and examines, and while it is an inherent and often helpful part of her, it interferes. She spends endless time trying to predict how interactions will go, struggling to parse them correctly in the moment, and picking them apart after the fact. She fucks and she wonders if she is responsive enough, too still, if there’s something more she could do to satisfy her partner. She kisses and she find herself adjusting based on their angles, movements, and responses. She thinks too much. Pain sometimes quiets her thoughts, but often she thinks too much then, as well. She is whipped and she tries to predict the next blow, worries about if she’s too quiet, too loud.  She starts analyzing and stops experiencing.

It isn’t that submission always involves not thinking. Neither of them believe that submission is just shutting off one’s entire brain and mindlessly following orders with no individual will. Sometimes it involves a lot of thinking, about what she wants, what he might want, if there are things she could do to improve in her responses, what to do when he hands her the menu and says “Order me something” while they’re out. But sometimes it does involve not thinking, in an almost trance-like mode of subspace where she can simply let herself react without mentally processing and analyzing the reaction.

There’s a certain quietude in a lot of her submission. When she waits, or he holds her down - not just down on her knees, down on her back, belly exposed, neck bared for his teeth, I yield - but when he keeps her mind down, in that space. Where she has the task at hand and nothing else to focus on for now, or he is controlling what happens and her only responsibility is to take it, or where he is demanding her full focus, dragging that part of her into alignment with the rest of her brain to pay a-bloody-ttention.

And for a little while, there is silence.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

The New AgAg Site: Now With Twice As Much Silver

Hello everyone, it's Des again, stopping in to throw out an update that I am really excited about. Most of you, I'm sure, read my last post. In it, I talked about Google Wallet shutting down our account, preventing us from accepting sales through our website. It feels like decades ago that we Agreeables were stymied by The Man. We were but children then, now we're two weeks older, and two weeks wiser, and have a website that is, without a doubt, at least two weeks cooler.

That's right, I'm here to announce the release of our spanking new and improved storefront. Now with 100% less Google. We've started over from the ground up, with a fresh and exciting shopping cart backend. I was adamant that this time around I wanted to start with an open source base, so we built our shop on top of OpenCart. It's not yet perfect, but we're proud of what we've put together so far, and excited to see where we can take this new platform.

Our payment system will start out supporting Paypal, but we may expand to allow other methods of payment as well. We also support cash on pickup, for those of our customers who want to order online, and pick up their product in person.

We know there will be some bugs for the moment. As I write this, I know that the US Postal Service hasn't yet activated our ability to use them for shipping, but that will likely be fixed before the majority of people read this. There are certainly other strange edge cases, and, as with most things, Your Mileage May Vary. If you run into problems, please, use our contact form to let me know, and I'll look into them. In the meantime, please understand that, especially now, this new site is still beta, but we will work out the kinks, so to speak, and whip it into shape in no time.

And so it goes that I find myself up late the night before a convention, hammering away at the latest iteration of a site to go live before the festivities. It's the only way to code.

Now, before I jump back into it, I just want to say, thanks to all of you for building such a great community with us, we hope to have you with us through the next time we get our website shut down.
Be well everyone, hope to see you all at GKE tomorrow!
~Desmond