[NOTE: The character named Anamaria in the first chapter has had her name changed to Arianna. Often in the course of writing a long story, a better, more appropriate name suggests itself as the character develops. Such was the case here, as 'Arianna' conveys a womanliness and level of sophistication that the more youthful 'Anamaria' doesn't suggest.]
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There's something that goes on between a man and a woman that's deeper than sex, maybe even deeper than love, and possibly even deeper than words can express. It includes love and sex, but also something more, a kind of magic that changes our world and realigns our stars, and makes us bloom in colors we didn't even know we had. It's something built into us as human beings on a fundamental level, as deep as our sense of self and deepest, unimagined desires.
It's a longing, a need. You might say it's a need for love, but that doesn't do it justice. We long for the opposite sex like the dark longs for the light and like fire longs for fuel. I don't want to disparage the gay world, and those who find what they want in the same sex, but n my case, at least, I long for the feminine, for the world she represent and the quality she supplies. God bless gender equality, but thrice bless those gender differences that make masculine and feminine possible: a man's hardness and physicality and even his oafishness; a woman's nurturing and comfort and welcoming softness.
The difference between male and female isn't one of status or ability. It's one of quality, such that either consciously or not, we all divide the world into masculine and feminine, and yearn for that which we don't have.
All this came to me during my dark days after I'd lost my job, when things between me and Dana hit the skids and I spent my time immersed in magic and mythology, searching for a way out of the prison of rationality and reason. The differences between male and female saturated the pages of what I was reading, the longings and conflicts and complex relationships; the division of nature into him and her, light and dark, positive and negative, aggressive and receptive.
And the more I studied, the worse things got between us. I needed for our love to be deep and our sex even deeper, complete and impassioned. That was more than the kind of routine vanilla affection Dana and I'd fallen into. I needed her to be the archetypal female to my male, and to be respectable yet seductive, pure but whorish. I needed her to fill this hollowness I felt and with warmth and acceptance, faith, trust, and giving.
But that was more than she could give, and probably more than I could accept at the time. As I said, those feelings are beyond words and therefore hard to grasp. They're best expressed through the language of sex, through the pleasure and pain and longing and violation, the tenderness and healing that speaks to us more directly than words. But by the time I realized that, Dana and I were finished. Our well had run dry.
And now I was involved with a girl I was sure was fluent in this language, even down to the dialect she spoke. Our one sexual encounter had been brief and unplanned, but even so had given me a glimpse of Arianna's hidden passion and an intensity of feeling that I desperately wanted more of. This was the language I wanted to speak, and this was the woman I'd been waiting for, I was sure of it. She only needed to be prodded and provoked and taught how to release this energy and there'd be no telling how far we could go. I couldn't let her get away.
Everything I'd learned of her said that Arianna Zamora was sexually submissive, but in a state of denial. That's not surprising. As I said, those feelings can run deep and strong and are often fiercely repressed, to the point where a woman might bury all erotic feeling rather than expose these threats to her self-image.
The significance of her being submissive wasn't that I could use and exploit her. The significance was that Arianna contained an entire, unexplored world of repressed female sexuality that no one had as yet tapped into or even begun to reveal. She was a stranger to herself and only marginally aware of those things locked up inside her, things that I perhaps possessed the key for. And that sense of erotic potential was enough to invoke that bigger change in me, realigning
my
world and stars and offering me a path back into the land of the living again.
But I'd have to be careful. I'd have to be tender with her. I didn't want to shock her or scare her off. The sexual part of this relationship still meant less to me than the friendship part. That, I didn't want to jeopardize.
I gave her a couple of days, then called. Nothing about the sex and what had happened, just a friendly call to see how she was doing. I didn't mention that night, and she didn't either. She'd been busy, looking for a lawyer to handle the divorce, and also beginning the search for an apartment so she could move out of her parents' house and start her new life as a single woman.
And on top of all this, there'd been her Christmas shopping. She still hadn't found the right gold bracelet for her mother.
"Well then come down here," I told her. "There's jewelers and import places all up and down the street. I'll be your guide. I know just the place."
I did know a jeweler who made gorgeous stuff, but my real reason for asking her was of course to see how she felt towards me now, and whether she'd come or keep her distance.
"That would be great David, but I couldn't do it tonight. Maybe Friday?"
I smiled into the phone. "Friday night? Sure."
"I'll come over about seven? Is that okay?"
"Perfect."
"Great! I'll see you then."
I know that in most stories of dominance and submission, the dom just takes control of the sub by virtue of his compelling presence and commanding personality, but I assure you, that's not how it works in the real world. BDSM is just like love, only more so. And unless she's just playing or showing off, you're going to have to earn her submission by establishing bonds of trust, respect, familiarity, and affection, and those don't just happen overnight, no matter how good your Svengali face is.
It can happen, though, that breaking through someone's defensive shell can trigger a reaction that's way out of proportion to the deed. Sexual repression takes a lot of energy, and the repressed sub can be like a straining wall or a baited bear trap, ready to spring. Remove the right brick or touch the right trigger and you can set off an avalanche of feeling and freed emotion.
That's all I could figure when I met Arianna that night. I went down to meet her when she rang the bell, not wanting her to come up and revisit the scene of the crime until I could gauge her mood. It was a good thing too, because her mood was something I'd never seen in her before. She was actually happy, even almost a little giddy as we dodged shoppers on Clark Street, chattering away about everything she saw. She clung to my arm so we wouldn't get separated, and for once that aura of constant sadness seemed gone.
Part of it might have been the excitement of Christmas shopping and all the people and decorations. But part of it was something else, something inside her. She felt like a person who had a future again. And she was wearing a skirt too. Her little pink knees were visible between her coat and her suede boots, something I couldn't fail to notice. I'd never seen her wear a skirt outside of work, and that seemed significant to me.
"You seem in an awfully good mood tonight." I pulled open the door to Kramer's Jewelers so she could enter. "What happened?"
"Happened?" She smiled cryptically as she breezed past. "I can't imagine. Maybe you can tell me?"
And then we were inside and she turned all business, as if I wasn't even there, until it was time to model a gold bracelet on her slim wrist for my opinion.
