The Carnal Suitra

I greeted him at the door on 4" heels, a high ponytail, and a satin apron.

He pushed me into my apartment with hungry kisses and desperate gropes.

I peeled back the layers of a long day at work: briefcase with a thud by the door and the friction of his belt through each belt loop. The buckle jingling as it fell to the floor.

He bent me over the table and thrust himself against my back and ass before unzipping and revealing his excitement to me. I ran the stiletto heel up his inseam while using the mental map of his body to guide my hands to revisit my treasure.

His mouth and hands raced to discover every spot that would make me gasp or moan. I cocked my head and squirmed in the shadow of his stature. The high ponytail danced against my skin.

He grasped my long brown tresses at the tip and recalled all the photos and videos in his wank bank of arched backs and bent necks.

He yanked so hard that he herniated C5-6. During the surgery for my artificial disc replacement, my surgeon found a bone shard 3mm from my spinal cord.

The man who whispered in my ear of how i was “marriage material” moved to Toronto 2 weeks after he damn near made me into a quadriplegic. He closed on a house the day of my surgery.

To this day, I jump when someone puts their hands near my head. My ears ring constantly. And every time I see one of you all post a photo of someone having their hair pulled, I think about all the pain one dumb, badly-executed move caused me.

1. Get consent. 2. Give warning. 3. Grab slowly and smoothly at the roots 4. Movement comes from the wrist (minimizes chance of injury to directional force) 5. If need be, let the person with the hair being pulled hold on to your wrist to either limit your movement or as a failsafe. 6. Over time develop trust with your partner to dial up neck extension, force, or speed.

It’s important to know how to take care of acute injuries- I actually had to wait two days because it was the weekend to see my chiropractor. In the mean time I iced my neck and took ibuprofen. Had the injury been more severe there is a real chance that even just swelling and inflammation could cause irreparable damage to the spinal cord or surrounding structures. Ice and ibuprofen are go-to when you need to treat acute injuries that have caused or could cause dangerous inflammation.

The neck is such a common feature in sex and bdsm play. It’s so important to be aware of how it’s angled and how it’s handled during sex and scenes. Always put safety first and remember to pull- not yank on anyone’s hair or head!!

You want to know why?

Because this is the harsh reality of the potential damage that kink done improperly can cause.

It’s very easy to get caught up in all the extreme activities and the rough and tumble type of play that we all love, but every so often we need to all be given a reality check that firmly plants our feet back on the ground. Something that forces us to revalue the mantra of “Safe, Sane and Consensual.”

This post for me is my wake-up all. It humbles me and grounds me every single time I read it, and I applaud with all the strength in my hands the woman that was courageous enough to post it.

She’d been on her towel for the better part of the afternoon when she noticed him noticing her.

An hour ago she’d watched his family pack up and head back toward the hotel: a wife in a cover-up, two kids dragging sand toys behind them. He’d stayed. Stretched out alone now with a book he hadn’t turned a page of in twenty minutes.

The beach had thinned out through the afternoon. A family with a toddler three towels down, a couple farther along reading separately. A lifeguard stand was visible down the sand. The whole scene felt ordinary and public and suspended in heat, the kind of afternoon where nothing was going to happen and the day would simply continue.

She was thirty-six, a mother, a wife, a woman who had spent the better part of two years becoming someone else’s point of organization. Not unhappy. Just present in a diminished way, the way you are when you have become primarily useful to other people and have quietly stopped noticing this is not the same as being alive.

Six months ago she had started paying attention again. Running. Sleeping without her phone on the nightstand. Saying no to things that didn’t matter. The bikini was blue, a fine white pattern running through it. She’d bought it three weeks ago on impulse, tried it on alone in a dressing room, stood in the mirror for a long moment. She hadn’t deliberated. She just hadn’t worn it until today.

She had a habit, she knew, of carrying certain moments longer than made sense. A look from a stranger on a train two years ago she could still place exactly. A sentence someone had said at a party once that she still turned over sometimes, late at night. Small things that lodged and wouldn’t move.

She had long legs, always had. But that wasn’t where he was looking.

He was late forties, fit in the way men get when they actually work at it past forty. Salt and pepper at the temples. Not her type in any particular way, which somehow made it better.

What she noticed, after the noticing, was that he was managing himself. He wasn’t approaching. He wasn’t performing casualness the aggressive way some men did. He was trying not to look and not quite succeeding, and there was something in that, in the restraint itself, that held her attention. Men who tried not to take things felt different from men who assumed they could.

She felt it before she confirmed it: a weight lower than her legs, lower than her waist. Centered. Deliberate. She let her eyes drift over the top of her sunglasses and caught the angle of his face.

He wasn’t looking at her face.

He wasn’t looking at her legs.

He was looking at the space between her thighs.

He’s looking at my pussy. Right now. While I lie here and let him.

The heat that moved through her was immediate. She breathed through it and let herself feel it without apologizing, which was something she was still learning to do.

She was married. Happy, mostly. Her husband was a good man. This wasn’t about that. This was about the part of her that existed outside all of it, the part that could lie on a beach and feel a stranger’s eyes settle between her legs and feel genuinely, inconveniently, thoroughly turned on by it.

He thinks he’s taking something, she thought. He has no idea.

She looked back down at her book.

A Little More was the kind of novel she only admitted to reading on vacation. The scene she was in the middle of had slowed her down. The woman in the chapter was at a rooftop party, wearing a dress she knew was slightly too much, and she’d caught a man across the room watching her. Instead of leaving or deflecting, she’d made a decision: let him look. Give him something worth looking at. Do it so naturally he’ll never be sure you did it on purpose.

She read that part again.

What caught her wasn’t the woman’s confidence. It was the precision of the decision. Not whether to be seen, but whether to choose it. She hadn’t thought much about the gap between those two things before.

She looked up over the top of her sunglasses. He still hadn’t turned a page.

She recognized something in that woman that she didn’t immediately want to examine too closely.

Then she stretched. Arms above her head, the long pull of it, real because she actually needed it. She resettled on her towel and let her knees fall open slightly wider than before.

She reached for her sunscreen.

Calves first, then her thighs, slow and thorough, the way you are when no one is timing you. Her fingers moved higher, inner thigh, close to the edge of her suit, and her knuckle grazed against her lip the way it had a thousand times in showers, in dressing rooms, in the unremarkable navigation of her own body.

This time it stopped her.

Because she was wet. She had registered it the way you register weather, a fact already in progress, and her own finger had just confirmed it. Not building. Already there. Her body had been keeping pace with this the whole time while she sat above it pretending the decision was still hers to make.

I’m soaked. He hasn’t touched me, hasn’t said a word, and I’m already this wet.

She left her hand there. A grown woman on a family vacation, on a public beach, mid-afternoon, quietly undone by a glance from a stranger who wasn’t even looking at her face.

She thought: this is ridiculous.

She thought: what kind of woman.

But the second thought stalled before it finished. She wasn’t sure what answer she’d expected. She was less sure she wanted one.

The warmth there. How sensitive she already was. The fact that a man not thirty feet away was watching her hand and had no idea what it had just found.

The idea arrived whole.

She didn’t weigh it. Didn’t negotiate with herself the way she would have at twenty-five. She wiped her hands clean on the edge of her towel. Then her fingers moved to the blue fabric and she pushed it aside. Not a tug, not a shove. The lazy half-motion of a woman adjusting a suit that had ridden wrong, the kind of thing anyone not watching closely would have read as an accident. Plausibly deniable. Except she wasn’t going to need to deny it, and she knew it.

Just like that.

I just opened my suit on a public beach. I’m bare. Anyone could look and that man already is.

She had done it before she’d finished deciding to do it. That was what she registered first. Not regret. Not panic. Just the small, clarifying fact that she had already known. She had been moving toward this since she opened the book, maybe since she spread out her towel, maybe since she’d walked out of the hotel and felt the sun on her legs and thought: today. She hadn’t known what she meant by that. Now she did.

The air hit her and she went completely still.

She was exposed on a public beach. That was the fact of it. Lips parted slightly against the heat, bare to the afternoon sun.

She looked at her book. Read nothing. Turned no pages.

There was a version of this where she was mortified. She could feel it standing just off to the side of her, a whole self she’d carried for years who would have flushed and corrected the fabric and spent the drive home convinced everyone had seen. That woman was right there. She just wasn’t the one in charge of her hands right now.

What moved through her in that first moment wasn’t nerves and wasn’t quite thrill. It was clarity. She was uncovered on a public beach and no one in the world knew except a man she’d never spoken to, and the combination of being fully seen and completely unknown sent a pulse through her that had nothing to do with the sun. She was wet before she’d made a decision to be. Her body had already voted.

She stayed exactly like that.

After a long moment she let her eyes drift up.

He had moved. Face down on his towel now, chin on his forearms, sunglasses pointed nowhere in particular. Very convincingly relaxed.

He’d rolled fast. Not the slow resettling of a man getting comfortable, but the quick turn of someone with a reason to get onto his stomach. And in the half-second before he did it, in the moment he pushed up off his back to flip, she’d seen the front of his board shorts.

He had seen what she was showing him, and it had made him hard. That was the whole sentence.

The understanding moved through her slowly and warmly. He had seen her. He’d seen the exact moment the fabric shifted, seen what she was now offering up to the afternoon, and something had happened to him that he needed to press into the sand.

She had done that. Without touching him. Without a word. Without doing a single thing except sitting in the sun with her suit pushed aside and a paperback in her lap.

Not because he’d decided to look. Because she had decided to let him. The difference between those two things felt important in a way she hadn’t had words for until just now.

She looked back at her book. Stayed exposed. Let herself feel the throb of it, the pull of being open and watched and anonymous all at once, a woman with no name to him, just a blue bikini and an afternoon and a decision she hadn’t technically made yet but had already made.

A minute passed. Maybe two. She looked up again.

Still face down. But his head had turned. Those sunglasses had pivoted from the waterline to the space between her knees. Precise. Deliberate. She filed that away.

Still hard, she thought. Hiding it in the sand because of me.

She looked up at him one more time, and something in her settled. She could feel the exact shape of the choice in front of her. She could smooth the fabric back. She could pick up her book and let the afternoon conclude unremarkably, with no one knowing anything. She had done that before. She had always done that before.

Fuck it.

If he liked looking, she was going to give him a show.

She leaned back on both palms, face tipped toward the sky, and let her knees fall open. Not a little. Not accidentally. Wide enough to matter. Wide enough that the blue fabric, still to the side, still not corrected, left absolutely nothing to his imagination.

She heard him shift on his towel.

There. Look at all of it. I want you to.

The sound of it went straight through her, low and warm, and that was when she understood the thing she hadn’t let herself name yet. It wasn’t his looking that had her heart going like this. Men had looked her whole life. It was that she had handed it to him. The air on her, the sun on her bare skin, every nerve lit and open: she had done all of this on purpose, for no reason except that she wanted to. She had spent two years being needed in a hundred small ways that asked nothing of her except her availability, and here was a thing she was taking instead of giving.

She held her face to the sun and felt everything: the heat between her legs, the air moving over her, the dizzying exposure of being completely open and making no move to close. She let it build. Let herself sit in it. This was what the woman in the book had understood: the power wasn’t in being seen. It was in deciding to be seen and feeling the difference.

She sat up slowly. Set the book across her lap, open, convincing. Knees where they were.

Wiped her hands clean on the towel.

Then her hand moved to the inside of her thigh.

Like she was resting it there. Like she wasn’t doing anything at all. Her fingers found the edge of the fabric and she let one fingertip slide against herself, just barely, just enough to feel how wet she already was.

She exhaled through her nose. Kept her face aimed at the page. Moved her finger in one slow circle.

She was touching herself on a public beach while a stranger watched. That was what was happening.

My face is in this book and my finger is on my clit and he can see all of it.

She was absolutely pretending not to be watched.

Every nerve she had was focused entirely on being watched.

In her peripheral vision she saw him shift. He rolled to his side now, head propped on one hand. The picture of casual boredom. His other hand dropped, slid into the pocket of his board shorts, and stayed there. Plausibly deniable. A man with his hand in his pocket, nothing more, except for the slow movement she could see beginning underneath the fabric.

She kept her eyes on her book.

Her finger moved in another slow circle.

Wet enough now that she could feel it against her own hand. The sun on her exposed lips. The slow pressure of her fingertip working in patient circles while a man twenty yards away had his hand in his pocket and his eyes on her. She turned a page and kept moving and held herself just below the edge of it because she wasn’t ready for this to be over.

She glanced up over the top of her sunglasses.

His hand was moving inside the pocket. Small, controlled, not controlled enough. His jaw was clenched, tight against something he was working to hold onto. Every part of him that wasn’t his hand was working hard to look like a man lying on a beach doing nothing.

And then she did the thing she hadn’t planned.

She moved her fingers and held herself open. Not to feel it. That part barely registered. She did it so he could see all of her, every part she’d kept covered her whole adult life, laid bare in the sun for a stranger twenty yards away. On display. Completely. The thought of what he was looking at right now, of how little was left to his imagination, went through her sharper than anything her own hand was doing.

She heard it more than saw it, the catch of his breath, the small broken stillness of a man losing the fight.

She glanced over.

A dark stain spreading at the front of his board shorts, slow and unmistakable, blooming out from under the pressure of his hand.

He came. Watching me hold myself open. I made him do that without a single word.

The rush that hit her was total. Sudden and deep and so sharp she had to press her lips together to stay quiet. He had come, right there in the sand, eyes fixed on a woman he had never spoken to and would never speak to, who had decided for reasons entirely her own that today she wanted to be seen. Not touched. Seen. She had pulled this man apart on a public beach without a single word between them, and the knowledge of it rolled through her in a wave that left her flushed and gripping the spine of her paperback and wanting to laugh out loud at the sheer audacity of what had just happened.

She removed her hand from between her legs.

Smoothed the blue fabric back into place.

Reached for her sunscreen. Applied it to her shoulders with great care.

She did not look at him again.

She didn’t need to. She already knew what she’d find: a man lying very still, staring at the water, working out how to stand up.

She read three more pages. A couple walked past at the water’s edge. Someone’s child was crying, far down the beach. The afternoon resumed its business.

She packed up slowly, shook the sand from her towel, gathered her things. When she passed him she didn’t slow her pace. She didn’t look over. She walked back toward the hotel with the sun on her shoulders and her bag on her arm, and she felt completely ordinary.

That lasted until the elevator.

She stood alone in the mirrored box watching the floor numbers climb. I made a stranger come in his shorts on a public beach and I never said a word. She turned it over like an object she was still deciding what to do with. She had been exposed, and a man she had never spoken to had come apart because of a decision she’d made, and she had sat in the sun and felt every second of it, and then she had fixed her suit and walked away.

She had expected guilt somewhere in the elevator. She checked for it the way you check a pocket. It wasn’t there. In its place was something she had no clean word for, adjacent to guilt, the same temperature, but pointed the opposite direction. Not I shouldn’t have. Closer to I didn’t know I could.

She thought of her husband, who was up in the room right now, probably half-asleep with the kids’ tablet still glowing on the nightstand, and waited to feel like she had taken something from him. She didn’t. What had happened on the beach had nothing to do with him, lived in a room he didn’t have a key to and never would, and she understood for the first time that she’d been keeping that room locked even from herself.

What was there, underneath, was harder to name. Something she’d felt once before, a long time ago, after saying something true she’d never said out loud to anyone. The feeling of having gotten away with yourself.

She thought briefly about the woman in the book. She hadn’t thought about the woman in the book since the beach started.

That night at dinner she lost the thread of what her husband was saying. She’d been describing the afternoon in the easy shorthand of vacation small talk, nice, quiet, got some reading done, and somewhere in the middle of a sentence the beach came back to her, not the man, exactly, but the precise feeling of the air on her, the moment she had decided, and she went somewhere else entirely.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was somewhere else.”

He smiled and asked if she wanted dessert. He hadn’t noticed anything. That was the strangest part, that she could carry a whole secret country inside her now and sit across a table from someone who loved her and have him see only a tired woman on vacation. They ordered the crème brûlée and split it.

She let it be what it was. Let it sit without a label, without a verdict. They checked out Thursday, drove to the airport, flew home. The usual re-entry: laundry, groceries, the particular exhaustion of returning to your actual life.

Three weeks later she was at a red light on the way to school pickup, radio low, thinking about nothing in particular, when she remembered those sunglasses pivoting from the waterline to the space between her knees. The clench of his jaw against something he was working to hold onto. The moment she had let her knees fall open and felt the air move over her.

Her hands tightened on the wheel.

The light turned green. The car behind her tapped its horn.

She drove.

She thought about it the rest of the way. About the woman in the book and what she had understood, and what it had taken an afternoon and a stranger’s sunglasses on a Tuesday to confirm.

The power wasn’t in being seen.

It was in choosing it.

She had always known what kind of woman she was. She was just still learning the whole of it.