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"I will, though I'm not really sure I have a good one. When I got into BDSM, it was a pretty mundane entry. A friend suggested I go with him to a couple play parties. He thought it would interest me, since vanilla relationships didn't really grab me. The first part of my life was a little too off the wall. I guess he realized my sexual interests would be the same."
She smirked at him and he crossed his eyes at her. "I did play with the fire stuff for a bit, and I'm not bad at it. Whip play, the precision of it was cool, and what guy doesn't want to pretend to be Indiana Jones? But I kept going back to the rigging. It absorbed me at all levels, sex and intellect, and it also quieted the voices."
He paused. "You hear that a lot in BDSM, but I think it applies to whatever thing you find in your life that grounds you. Like you and your stage. Or a singer when they're singing, a writer when they're writing. So that was how it happened. Maybe because I'd spent a lot of my early years tied up in knots over the physical crap, making sense of knots and tangled rope was soothing to me, kind of a symbolic taking control of the lines."
"You've thought this through." She considered him. "You think most things through, though."
"Yeah. I do." He held her gaze, and she knew he was talking about way more than rope. "I'm okay, love. All good now."
She pressed her lips together. She wasn't so sure about that, but she wasn't going to let this moment be about that, either. Seeing it, he continued in a casual tone.
"Now the Dom part, that was easy as breathing." He winked. "Whenever I was with a woman, I needed to take complete control. I had a couple bad experiences with women totally not into Dom/sub stuff before I figured what my issue was. Talk about awkward moments. Good women, but we were just like this..." He passed one hand directly over the other, parallel tracks going in opposite directions.
"Well, you're really good at it. I'm glad you figured it out. And, though I'm not sure I'll ever be completely comfortable with watching you do it as a performance or scene with another sub, I don't want you to stop doing that. You should be able to grow as an artist. I get that."
She pointed to the cover of one of his books, where the subject was in a full Chinese split, her legs tied to a long pole that ran from one ankle to another, her upper torso flat on the ground and chin propped up on a chin rest. "I can't do that, and will never be able to. I don't want to hamper your art. I just...I know there's always a sexual and intimacy component to it. There has to be, for the right energy to surround it. I just don't know if I can handle you actually having sex with her, of any kind, and go forward together."
There, she'd finally said it. After what she'd faced earlier in the night, it wasn't as hard to get out, but she still hesitated to look at him right away. But Marcus was right. She wasn't a coward. She wasn't ever again going to settle for less than what she wanted. The timing might seem odd to Des to bring this up, but maybe she was still riding the self-empowerment Des had given her at the theater. She wasn't in the mood to wait. She was ready to put it to rest once and for all.
Des touched her chin, guiding her attention up to him. As he did, that grip shifted and he was holding her face firmly. "You don't have to worry about that. I've found who I want to be with, Julie."
She let a hint of a smile play on her lips, though his look gave her that lower vitals quiver. "Uh, just for verification, me, right?"
He blinked once, the sternness of his lips easing a fraction. "Unless Marilyn Monroe comes back to life, yes. Though I think your similarity to my fantasy Marilyn pulled me toward you from the first. Who's to say you're not a reincarnation?"
"She was a blonde," Julie said, amazed at being compared to the bombshell.
"She was a brunette who dyed her hair blond," he corrected her. "And I love your brown hair, so I'd rather it stay that color." He drew her attention down to the ropes, where one of her restless hands was fingering the coils. "Would you like to try doing a form on me?"
Her gaze snapped back up to him, and she saw he was serious. Julie tangled her fingers in the coil of jute. Her kneejerk reaction would have been no, but as her attention coursed over his bare upper torso, she had a different answer. "Can I? Is that weird? I don't have any desire to top."
"It's not weird at all. Come with me and bring that rope you're touching. It should be long enough for what we'll have you try."
She did, unaccountably shy but very intrigued. She followed him to the center of the room where they stood on a cushioned mat in their bare feet. He turned and faced her.
"Okay, a rigger always coils his rope so it can shake out with minimum tangles and so he knows where the bight is, the folding-in-half point." He took it from her to show her, shaking the rope loose. His deep voice took on a different cadence when teaching, but because he was teaching her, there was an intimacy tagging the syllables that increased the density around them.
"That's because most shibari forms utilize doubled-over rope," he continued, "and that's what we'll be doing here. I'm going to guide you through a diamond pattern harness on my upper torso, all right?"
"It won't restrict your hands, will it?" She pinkened a little under his look.
"Not at all. I'll be able to touch you as much as I want. I'd never deprive myself of that." His fingers closed over hers on the rope as she followed his direction. "Here's your bight. Slide that around my neck, as if you were helping me tie a tie. Like I was one of those guys who goes into his office in a suit every day."
"I could never imagine you that way. You belong on your rooftops."
He touched her face, running his hands down her arms as she guided the rope around his neck and let both ends fall down his front and drag the floor.
"There's so much of it."
"About eight meters, which is a good length for this tie. Don't look worried. This is straightforward. You can't hurt me. Okay, I'm going to guide you through what we call a stopper knot, five of them, down the front of my body."
It took her a couple tries to figure it out, but he was patient and it was a fairly simple knot, according to him. Now that she thought more closely about the ones she'd seen him do, she realized the knots could look entirely different, even if they seemed to serve the same function.
"Like different words to say the same thing, in a
bunch of different ways," he explained. "There's a poetry to rope, just like there is for spoken language."
At another time, she might have summoned a Yoda or Grasshopper joke, but the timbre of his voice, stroking her with every word, didn't encourage levity. She was content, marinating in a simmering arousal.
