In the early spring moonlight, the back of the river seemed to lift and heave like the body of a snake, flowing over rocks and stumps, braiding its way through copses of saplings on the flooded banks, pooling and forming eddies as it washed around the concrete pilings of the bridges.
"What does that remind you of?" I asked her as we drove along. "What does that make you think of?"
Huddled against the door, Lena glanced outside, then back at me. "What? The river?"
She turned and looked back out at the night. The water gleamed as the moon came out briefly, making it look even more like a reptile's skin, then disappeared as the moon was covered over covered by the rushing, bruised-looking clouds.
"I don't know. A flooded river. Why? Are you going to tell me something profound?"
I'd been about to, yeah, before she cut me off. Now the metaphor seemed too obvious and trying to impress her seemed kind of beside the point. It had been raining all day--all spring actually-- and rivers were flooding everywhere, little creeks becoming raging torrents. The headlights picked out piles of debris and tree branches that had been left in the highway when the water had been even higher.
"I was thinking of how the river's kind of like a person," I said, pressing on. " This is normally a pretty quiet little creek."
"Oh?"
"Teah. Kind of like a person, like we all are. When the pressure is low, we meander along in our nice, safe, channels with barely a ripple, placid little streams. But when that pressure gets too great, more than we can handle, we start to overflow and get wild, find new channels and carve out new paths, take routes we'd never think of taking normally."
She looked at me in a way that made me sorry I'd said it. "So we're going to play everything's-a-metaphor?"
I hadn't meant it about her personally, but of course that's how she took it. I gave her a disapproving look, though, and she backed off. I was treading a fine line here between taking this too casually and making a great huge deal out of it. I was trying to feel my way.
All through dinner we'd been talking about her, her own personality, rushing in the dark around some immovable obstacles whose shape she'd just been starting to discern, leaving her feeling fragmented and split.
"Tell me then," she asked. "If the river's a metaphor for the things we do in life, what's the metaphorical meaning of the pressure? What is that force that drives us?"
"I don't know. Lust? Desire? Nervous energy?"
"Love?" she suggested.
I didn't say anything for a while because I really didn't know. The river left us for a bit, curving off to the right as the car entered the darkness of a forest. The air entering the car smelled of leaves and mud and I turned the heater on.
"You think less of me now?" she asked. "I didn't really tell you anything during dinner you didn't already know."
"No. Of course not. But this is different, you know, being together like this. Before it was just words on a screen or on the phone. It's different being with you in person."
She turned back to the window. "You do feel differently towards me now. But that's okay. I knew it would happen."
She gathered her coat around her, not used to this kind of chill.
She'd been telling me about being assaulted when she'd been younger, about what she recalled, or imagined, or dreamed of it. It had been a constant theme with her, something that consumed her. The problem was, neither of us knew whether it had really happened or not, whether these obsessive images were memories, or fantasies, or some sort of mutated dreams or desires that she'd entirely made up.
In the end I'd decided it really didn't matter. Either the episodes had really happened--and there was more than one of these memories--or things back then had been so screwed up that her subconscious interpreted them in terms of being assaulted. Whatever they were, they'd left some horrible images and emotional stains on her mind that oppressed her and filled her with constant anxiety and dread. They made normal sex impossible for her and poisoned her relationships. They'd left her fragile and depressed. Damaged, was the word she used.
We'd talked about it before. We'd talked about it endlessly online, in text, in voice, sessions lasting far into the night, into the morning. It had been almost a year, a year in which differences melted and we opened up to each other. In age and temperament we couldn't have been more different, yet below this or because of this we'd become some strange blend of lovers and siblings, tied together. She'd become my lover, my protégé, my sub. I would tell her to do things and she'd do them. Tell her what to wear, what to read, when to masturbate and what to think about when she did, and she would. That was how she felt her experiences had affected her: she thought they'd made her inferior, worthy of nothing but punishment and degradation and other's control. I had a different opinion of her submissiveness, though, and we'd discussed and argued about this for months without reaching any conclusion.
Yet in all this time we'd never met, never had sex, never even seen each other in person. Tonight was the first time we'd laid eyes on each other, when I met her at the airport. The meeting had been no shock, no surprise, we already knew each other too well. We'd had dinner and talked, and now the inevitable. How she reacted would settle the issue. Would being put in the submissive role trigger a flood of abusive memories, or would it open the gates to her true sexuality?
"I need to get some hand cream," she said. "I don't know why I didn't think to bring some."
"We can stop."
"I don't know why, but I didn't expect it to be so cold up here."
"You still cold? You want me to turn the heat up?"
"No. I'll get used to it. I like the feel of the breeze. I like the night."
I took her hand in the dark of the car. It was cool and dry.
"Nervous?"
"Of course I am," she said. "Nervous as hell."
I looked at her in silhouette, the curly, jet black hair falling to her jaw line, mysterious eyes, pouting, little-girl mouth. My gaze made her uneasy and she looked away, looking for the river again through the trees.
There was really nothing more to say.
Maybe dinner had been a mistake, a chance for tensions to built. Maybe I should have just taken her straight to the motel and let her relax, let us both relax, engage in some easy affection, some play. She was dressed the way I'd told her to dress: a simple black dress with spaghetti straps, black nylons and heels, a black winter coat. Maybe I should have let her change into something more casual and relaxed.
"This could be dangerous," I'd told her at dinner. "I'm not sure what your reactions will be when we start to do this."
She wore a metal filigree choker with a large black stone at the base of her throat, her public collar. It symbolized her submission to me, her servitude. She said she wore it everywhere, felt naked without it, but sitting in the restaurant with her and knowing what we were going to do, it made me slightly uneasy.
"I'm not worried about that," she said. "We've done this online, in voice, and we both know how I react. I trust you, you know that. You're not going to hurt me or take me beyond what I want."
She always accused me of being too soft on her, of taking it too easy.
"That's not quite what I meant," I said.
She smiled. In the candlelight o the restaurant she looked olderand quite sophisticated, knowing. But then, she was older than her age--I suppose mature is a better word. Her pain had made her wise.
"You're afraid I'll freak," she said, smiling. "You're afraid you're going to set off some trigger or something."
"Based on your past, is that so unlikely? You know, playing these games and masturbating on line is one thing. It's something entirely different when it gets real, when I take control of you, when I get inside you."
Still smiling, she sipped her water. "We've been over that, Peter. I think your ego's showing."
I couldn't help it. I still had grave concerns about this. Her need to submit, the fulfillment she found in it, were very possibly tied to her memories of being used and exploited, or so she felt. She was afraid that her need to submit was a way of reliving that traumatic experience, an attempt to come to terms with it or overcome it. She felt, in short, that it was pathological, sick. She suspected that she wanted to be mistreated because she felt her experience made her damaged goods and worthy of nothing else.
This is a subject that I had rather strong feelings on, because I'd always maintained that sexual submission was not a pathology but an erotic preference. Yes, there were women out there who sought out the role of sexual submissive because they had miserable self-images and thought they deserved to be punished and degraded, but I didn't think this was the norm and certainly not the case with her. All the subs I had played with were very together women, confident, assured, and capable. Submission was just a role they chose in the bedroom, something they found particularly gratifying sexually. It had nothing to do with their own self-esteem or feeling of self-worth.
I was determined to somehow convince her that her submission was of this latter type. It was something to be proud of, rather than something to be shunned.
"Then what do you want me to do, Lena?" I asked. "What do you want to explore."
She chewed her food and shrugged. "I want you to do what you always do, what you do on-line. Whenever you do that, it always works for me."
Now, in the car, she'd grown quiet. The knowledge of where we were going and what we were going to do there was too strong and neither of us felt like talking.
