Of course, Santos wasn’t giving anything away. Part of me wanted to pout and yank at his shirt to get more of a reaction, but a bigger part of me would never do that in public. Not here, either.
“Is wearing a corset considered breath play?”
Oh, shit.
I didn’t recognize the person who asked.
I didn’t even know the answer to the question.
“I don’t think so?” I winced. I was supposed to know. One glance in Eli’s direction didn’t help. They sometimes wore corsets as part of their rubber suits. It was about the restraintand looking more like a toy. “Corsets made this century are safe to wear.”
I’d read somewhere that corsets made in most centuries were, and the idea that they weren’t was a myth of some sort, or people not understanding the materials they were made of and failing at recreating them, but I hadn’t really prepared anything about corsets. I had planned to address the feminization part, but I’d been focused on the history of the kink, and how it intersected with gender and trans identities, and how, still to this day, it was used with veiled transphobic and misogynistic undertones, and it was important to acknowledge and unlearn those. I hadn’t realized people would be more interested in the practical stuff.
Ugh.
Erika was not going to let me run a workshop ever again.
“You probably don’t want to wear it for too long, though,” Santos pointed out. “I read somewhere that it depended on the model and how rigid it was, but a good rule of thumb was not to have it more than eight hours on a row?”
Huh.
“So, like binders,” Cece piped in.
It tracked that they would be the person to make themselves overheard from the back row of seats. They didn’t love the spotlight, but I’d bet they had done it to bring my attention to them and their Alpha. The two people I was more anxious about having here, because surely they’d have more complex thoughts on feminization, and there was a difference between me texting them one-on-one to go through all the nuances, and having to do it with an audience.
And spoken words.
I shivered.
“Corsets are not that obscure.” I licked my lips. “I mean, if you have questions, and you don’t trust the internet, you cancheck a store close to you. Say it’s a gift for your girlfriend or something if you don’t get the right vibes.”
I had never done that, but I’d read about people who did, and it worked.
“That’s good advice,” Santos whispered.
“T-thanks.”
Fuck.
Here I was, thinking I had the nervous stammering under control. Clearly, I did not.
No one said anything. Santos shifted closer to me, but that was all the acknowledgement it received.
It was a good thing, obviously. I was just off-kilter, now.
“So what’s in it for you, when you use she/her pronouns and words but just in the bedroom?”
Great. Someone else I didn’t know.
“Yo, next time you ask a question, how about you don’t attack someone?”
“It’s fine, Sergio.”
Abel was already holding him back, but the last thing we all needed was to cause a scene.
Besides, I could do this. Preparing for a nightmare recreation of the last time I’d given a presentation in school had worked, because in my worst-case scenario, this workshop had been full of those questions, that tone, and accusations flying everywhere.
Which was to say, I knew how to answer.
