I take a dim view of calling it a relationship until a crucial test has been passed: the participants therein must have successfully negotiated their first disagreement. In short, they must have fought. If the conflict can be conducted under civilized terms (ie, avoidance of bloodshed and fisticuffs, self-worth of all participants more or less continuously intact), then and only then can there be any chance of things becoming real. Five weeks after receiving the initial email from the person I’m calling T.¹ we’ve not yet reached that landmark. Although we haven’t seen eye-to-eye on various minutiae of politics that’s not brought forth the degree of personal animosity necessary to earn the classification of argument. And so I wait, and wonder how we’ll fight.

I’m in no rush. It will happen soon enough.

As it turns out T. is fond — very fond — of leaving oversize handprints on the backsides of willing ladies. While spanking is not even in my list of Top 100 Ways to Spend a Saturday Night², I am nothing if not a willing facilitator of my partner’s kinks, so a few weeks ago I gamely titled up my fanny for the first few exploratory slaps. These were delivered with slowly increasing intensity until my snickers changed to gasps and then a series of OW!s that cycled through surprise, indignation only partially feigned, and then finally outright pain.

But I didn’t tell him to stop, because I discovered that while my bottom stung the discomfort went no more than skin deep and the rest of me…well. The rest of me rushed brim-full of happy chemicals, sexy thoughts and downright euphoria. More, I said, instead of begging him to stop. And harder.

That session over and floating along in a haze of sensation I introduced T. to the toychest, which I’d not dug into in many³ weeks. So long had it been that I’d forgotten what was stored away in the third drawer. “What’s this?” he said, and if I could have I would have turned back time for what he’d seen was this and holy Honeybadger I did not want him to use it on me.

I hoped he’d forget. Oh how hard I hoped! And steered conversations deftly away! But when next it was time for a meeting he requested — nay, demanded! — that I choose three impacty tools for use on my butt. Three, I thought. Surely I can round up three that don’t include the paddle! Quickly I found this, and this, but the last one…ah. I knew somewhere there was a bunny flogger but I couldn’t put my hands on it. Had I given it away? Or loaned it to a friend? I was on the verge of phoning up the most likely candidate, my very spank-tastic friend, when I found it in the depths of the closet. Oh thank god, I thought. My behind is safe.

And then I got a text. “One of them has to be the paddle,” it read, and no amount of arguing (read: whinging) on my part would dissuade him from this demand.

Fuck I thought, and having turned up nothing useful after Googling “how to make paddling feel less painful” I put on my game-face, picked up the now overburdened ho-to-go bag and went to his house.

He’s good, I’ll give him that. He gave me so many orgasms before flipping me on my belly that I believe you could have lit up a firecracker in the small of my back and I wouldn’t have cared. Also he worked up from most gentle⁴ to most annoying⁵ before bringing forth the paddle.

Which, I’m happy to announce, did not hurt nearly as must as I feared. Oh never fear: it was intense. I squeaked with each blow and wiggled piteously as he held it above my ass, taunting me with its eventual downward stroke, but I never once felt I needed to sing out the safeword and stop the fun. When it was done he brought me a bottle of water partially frozen which I downed in a single greedy gulp before rolling over in his arms.

Surely I needn’t tell you how fired up everyone was after the spankings, right? Everyone was indeed fired up, so much so that I forgot the icy bottle clutched in my hand until a sudden jostle brought it into contact with my breast, and even though in the past ice-on-nipples has never been my thing, with the amount of blissed out happiness running through my brain it felt just grand.It felt so grand that I passed off the bottle to him. He used it on me until I was squirming but I still wanted more: more sensation, more cold, more intensity, more more.

If only I were less of a klutz. If only I’d managed to do what I intended to do, which was to crack the lid so barely that a tiny stream of 0°C water trickled onto my nipple. Alas it did not work that way. The lid came off in whole and out rushed a frigid river onto me, onto the bed, onto him. Reader, I laughed. Of course I laughed, and miracle of miracles so did he. It is a beautiful thing to share pleasure with a fellow human being but even more so when it can transition so easily to mirth.

This is also a test. And we passed.

1. It read in part, and I quote: Everything below your brain is just icing. This totally gave me a boner. [↩]
2. Eating sushi? On the list. Indulging in Buffy marathons? ON THE LIST. Cleaning out the sock drawer? Even that would be on the list if not for the fact that I seldom wear socks. [↩]
3. Many [↩]
4. NobEssence flogger [↩]
5. Stupid stingy elastic thingie [↩]

On the first date after the coffeedate he made a math joke and my scaly little heart, long hardened against y-chromosome weirdness ¹, cracked open just a hair.

Not just for the math, you understand, but the math didn’t hurt. So when a few weeks later I agreed to come to his house for a short meeting, one that would not be anything close to long enough for sex, I demanded that he be the one to keep things under control. I won’t have much willpower, I said. You’ll have to have enough for both of us.

“I’ll have four times as much willpower as you,” he promised, and I believed him right up to the point that my left nipple was pinched between the thumb and middle finger of his right hand while his left performed a similar move on my clit.

What happened to four times the willpower I gasped. He took his mouth off my breast long enough to remind me what was the product of any number times zero. Foiled! I thought, and then fell into enough pleasure that what we were doing did indeed qualify as sex.

I better be careful around this one I said to myself, and I was! Until last week when he presented me over email with a small conundrum he was facing.

“These are the two choices,” he said. “Tell me the pros and cons of each and maybe that will help me decide.”

Will I be rewarded for my work? I asked, and in response he laid out, explicitly, what reimbursement I should expect. Bearing that in mind I set to work with the utmost of dedication until I was interrupted by the ping of my inbox. Is this a third option, I asked, and upon being answered in the affirmative I said pointed out that he would now owe me 33^1/3% more of the reward he’d previously promised.

There was a pause. “You mean 50% more,” he simply said, and I went crimson because I knew that, of course I knew that, but somehow I’d fumbled the joke.

Right, I tried to recover. I meant that you owed me 33^1/3% more oral plus 16^2/3% fisting.

“Sure you did,” he said, and now I am prepared. Now I will carry about my person at all times up to and including during sex, a calculator. Would that be too obvious? Is there a better way to approach this? Do they make jewelry designed to mimic the abacus? Or am I just going to have to accept that in this relationship, I am the one who is the worst at math?

1. Really all weirdness [↩]