Out of the Shadows. Senta Holland

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СКАЧАТЬ I saw him, riding on the last cart, wearing an island hat.

       Intimate studies

      ‘Now you want to come,’ he said.

      ‘No. Well, OK, yes.’

      I snuggled into the crook of his arm.

      ‘I know,’ he said. ‘When you’ve been spanked you want to come.’

      I had never thought of it like that. I had thought of spanking, of course! And had been spanked. And I love sex. But never like that, a connection that describes my sexuality.

      ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised, ‘that’s true.’

      ‘I’m beginning to know you.’ He was so pleased.

      I was pleased too. No, I was thrilled. To be known, so intimately. To be so intimately studied. To lie here, skin to skin, touch to touch, under the pink duvet, with my Nai.

      My Nai always travelled with his pink duvet.

      And he always turned the aircon to zero.

      This was one of the many ways in which he acted like an upper class Thai. Although he was American, he had lived here in Thailand longer than anywhere else. He had grown up in a garden in Bangkok with mango trees and spoke Thai with his nannies while his mother spoke English with princesses.

      When I first got to know them I didn’t realise how important names are, to Doms. Every Dom has a very specific desire, and he wants to be called by a specific name.

      To me, that was quite alien. My desire to submit didn’t focus on magical names (well, that’s not entirely true, it didn’t focus on magical names for Doms, but there was some word magic elsewhere). But when I understood, I started to find this quite endearing. Adult men with identities had the chance of re-naming themselves, and of naming their passion.

      Of course there were quite a few whose imagination wasn’t so original, or who had been powerfully attracted by tradition. They did want me call them ‘master’ or ‘sir’ and at first I just did it to please them, it held no special meaning for me.

      Later I met those who had other ideas. Some names emerged from amorous nicknames, some were cryptic and clearly carried a lifelong significance that would or would not be revealed but would resonate with my lover every time I said his name, some were unashamedly the names of impossible daydreams, and some the names encountered in the shadow lands.

      And now my lover and Dom had a completely new, unheard-of name.

      My Nai.

      The two go together.

      My Nai.

      Like my Lord.

      So new then, the word Nai, and what it means to him. Actually, I am still not sure. What it means to him. I know it is a Thai word that means something like ‘lord’ or ‘head of the family’ or ‘someone of high rank’. But to him, I think, it means a lot more.

      It means being accepted and recognised in the culture he lives in and grew up in. That may never happen in Thailand, since he is after all a foreigner, tall and pale. The certainty of never belonging.

      His servants call him Nai. Oh yes, he has servants. He has a driver, and a cook, and several maids. He has a wing of the house where he lives. And another wing for his estranged wife, when she visits. And a guest wing for parents and American relatives.

      I had never been intimate with someone who had servants.

      I had never been asked to call anyone Nai.

      I didn’t. I called him my Nai.

      He smiled.

      ‘I am the Nai,’ he said. ‘My household knows that. If I change, they have to change with me.’ And he held himself up more proudly and smiled again.

      At moments like that he looked so fragile. I could have held him in my palm and broken his wings with a snap of my finger. At moments like that I opened my heart to him. Of course, moments like this would also turn against me. Right now, I was the personification of his freedom. Later on, in his mind, I would join the ones who didn’t let him be, didn’t let him be the Nai.

      But at that time, all I could see was a boy who would be Nai. Just as I was a woman who lived her dreams.

      I shivered with secret delight, I was me and not me, I was becoming the other person, the person who lived in my dreams. Because I didn’t know her, at least not very well, in many ways I didn’t know how she would react.

      In the morning I took my shirts out and we saw a huge spider, more like a scorpion or a tarantula, running with hairy bended knees out of my armhole. All my life I would have been struck with dread and screamed and run, out of the door. But because I was the new person, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how she would react to a monstrous spider creeping out of her armhole. So I stood and looked and said, very calmly, ‘I am afraid of spiders.’

      He stood very calm too and said, ‘Yes they are everywhere.’

      ‘Even in such a nice hotel?’

      ‘Yes, even in such a nice hotel.’ He laughed very quietly.

      ‘They live here!’

      Maybe he was used to them. Probably. Or maybe he was a new person, too. Maybe he, too, no longer knew if he was afraid of spiders.

      Another interesting effect of becoming a new person is that your lover gets to know you better than you know yourself, in certain ways.

      So that he can say: you want to come when you’ve been spanked.

      And he loved that. He adored the fact that he knew me so intimately. I’m not sure if he realised that I didn’t know myself so well. I’m not sure if he realised that I was becoming a new person.

      How could he know? He never met the old one.

       Humiliation in the jungle bed

      The hotel room was like a little house, with a tiny garden and white bricks and carved monkeys on the table.

      We had no neighbours except the sea, just a few metres from our heads when we slept.

      He had his backpack with him.

      ‘How did you get that through airport security? With all those weapons?’

      I still don’t know but he did.

      Again he began the unpacking of the treasure. He had a lot more rope with him, blue like the sky it was designed to make you fly in.

      He unpacked the well-used belt, the collar, and a pretty new leash from the weekend market, the puppy section.

      We were lying close on the jungle bed, after a long wonderful session trying out so many things, for the first time together, and maybe even for the first time ever. Then we whispered, only a little louder than the sea, but so close that our skins could lip-read, СКАЧАТЬ