To be bent over like this.
Naked.
Pinned down.
Spread wide. Taken.
Slapped, whipped, called a whore—where did it all come from?
Can it be feminist, she wondered as she spread her thighs, to want this? Can I still be on the side of liberation? All those years of anti-rape work before Me Too, in the peripheries of culture, shouting into the void; all those marches and petitions; all that Taking Back the Night. And now this hunger.
What was this desire?
Why did she beg and beg for it?
How could she feel so safe with this lover who brutalized her with such blazing generosity?
Succumbing.
Surrendering.
Lion was behind her now, fully dressed. Observing. She waited for Lion’s next move, for Lion-who-was-Papi’s next move, for a signal, for a force that would sweep her off like a leaf in a storm, toward a freedom deeper and wilder than anything she’d previously imagined.
Lion, whom she’d first seen at a leatherdyke social meetup taking place in the same bar where she’d just wrapped up a boring-as-hell first date, thinking maybe it was time to give up on Tinder, what was the point, these draining meetings with strangers when she could be in her own apartment catching up on work. On the way to the bathroom she passed a back room and saw the black-clad women and not-women-but-not-cis-men—trans guys? butches? genderqueers? she wasn’t sure but knew better than to assume—laughing and talking and making a raucous music all their own, and there at the center stood a top, in their leather vest, holding their date—could you call them a date?—by the leash. She met the top’s eyes. Electricity, immediate and strong. Look away. Rush to the bathroom and out of the bar. Try not to think about that woman (butch? trans man? burning person) with the leash. Try and fail. Find out when the social group meets in that bar again. Show up. Stand outside in the cold wind for too long staring at the neon beer sign in the window, tattooing it to your vision, before you finally go in. Tell yourself you’re not looking for any one person, until you find them and your eyes meet again. Lion. It was right there on the name tag, along with pronouns: she/her/he/him/Papi. Of course, she thought, this is the Bay Area, where queers can go by names like Lion if they damn well please (for it wasn’t until later that she’d learn about scene names, their hows and whys). As for that last pronoun, it seemed a portal to a thousand things she longed to know.
But she’d had to prove herself, that evening and over coffee with Lion the next week. She’d laid all her boundaries and fantasies bare, the way kinksters did, something she’d heard about but never done before with a potential lover, let alone in a bustling hipster café. It made her voice shake and her whole body run hot but she managed to language her wishes and wonderings, her Yeses and Nos and I-Don’t-Knows. She had her safewords: red, yellow, green. Once they got to the bedroom, the one she used most was green. To say: keep going. To say: push further. To say: I’ve plunged into that vast nonverbal zone of sweet obliteration, of annihilated bliss, so I can’t shape the words to tell you that I’m okay and I want more.
Twenty years before, in college, in those marches to Take Back the Night, as she and her fellow activists shouted anti-rape slogans at the stars and the shuttered windows of frat houses and administrative buildings, knowing full well that the only listeners who gave a shit were (possibly) the stars, they had trespassed onto manicured lawns, and at the start of the march in the gathering twilight, the grass had still shone green. The strength of their steps and voices had given her the illusion of power, bright and fleeting. She thought of it now as Lion hovered behind her, at the canvas of her bare ass, poised to unleash something new. How, back then, her body had seemed a vessel for something large and thrilling. How she’d longed for the green beneath her feet. How she’d wondered what would happen once the night was taken back—if they ever took it back: what they’d use it for, whether night could be home, could be harnessed as a place to come alive.
