Beautiful Agony (A Tale Of Savage Love, Part I) (3 page)

Yet,
if I gave someone that kind of control, that kind
of dominance, and then let him
take
that visceral power
over my
all-consuming self-flagellation -
out of my own hands,
and into his…what would happen?  Could ‘he’
truly wield
it
as
a sledgehammer
of devastating proportions, annihilating my own inner
torment
, destroying my pain, and crushing my self-hatred,
without
also damaging and possib
ly even eventually obliterating
‘
me
’
?

Because I did honestly need help tearing down the harmful
impulses of self-destruct
ion that drove me without limit: 
b
efore
they pushed me over the brink entirely.

Not to
the point where they were gone.
I didn’t ever deserve to have them gone.  But at least to the point where they were ma
nageable,
to
where I didn’t need booze,
drugs,
and
self-mutilation
just
to make the bad dreams
go
away
for a while
. 
I was intrigued, fascinated, mystified.  I thought about it
morning and night
.

And then, inevitably, came the
day
that
I
finally
made up my mind.  I was going to
go for it.
 
All
of it.

I knew from t
he get-go that I
would need to
delve
so far
deeper than just being spanked over a desk,
being forced to wear
some interesting get-ups,
or being sexually frustrated while
my
boss masturbated all over
my
back
, like in the movie.  I mean,
holy hell
, it had some potential for sure, b
ut it was definitely
“film industry
friendly
”, and I needed something Triple-
X rather than merely
R-Rated.

I also certai
nly didn’t need some fictional,
unimaginatively-overbearing
,
“father figure”
of a billionaire
to push my
sexually inexperienced
and absurdly “virginal” buttons, either
(like in a quasi-adult book that was currently making the rounds in my
editorial
office)
. 
I’m sure it
held many
great
possibilities
f
or
women who were beginners to S&
M. 
But even though I’d had yet to actually
try it, I
still already
knew
instinctively that
I’d need so much more.

Hell, as far as sex went,
I guess there really wa
sn’t
that
much about the subject itself that I didn’t already know. 
I certainly wasn’t a young woman trying to “sow my oats
”
or anything
.  I was
twenty-nine going on ninety; having lived a life-time of pain already. 
As
such, I
had no misconceptions that men like
those (made famous in sappy romance books and movies), really
even existed
.  Nor would I want them if they did
. 
You see, I needed a man who’d lived a life just as fucked up as I had.  Otherwise, how would he ever know how to help me?

Regardless, I did realize up front that w
homsoever I
eventually
settled
upon, would almost certainly have a specific
agenda
of his own
.
  In other words, as I
repeatedly
told myself;
“He ain’t gonna do it for free”.

As I mulled over the different ways that I could go about selecting an appropriate “partner”
over the
next
few days
, I began to
comprehend
one certain truth:  this wasn’t
simply
about seduction.

I knew how to do that
, for sure,
and
I knew
how to do it well. 
But I didn’t just need a man for a fling, or a
“
no-strings
”
,
“
no-frills
”
one-nighter. 
And since I was lookin
g for a man to use and abuse me
sexually
,
the last thing that he needed to worry about was seducing
his way
down my pants.
  As long as I found the right guy, it would pretty much be a sure thing.

None of that was
the
real
problem
. 
The most pertinent issue here was that m
y torment ran so hard and so de
ep, I’d literally need an
expert
.  Someone to push my mind and body to the ends of the earth and beyond. 
But that would take time, energy, and dedication.  And it would take at least as many “sessions” as I’d sacrificed to my most recent therapist (twenty-five, and c
ounting). 
Which almost sounded like
something akin to a “relationship”; if not in the typical s
ense of the word, at least in this
current manifestation.
  So, how to find the right person?

It’s not as if
you could sidle up to someone in a bar and say, “Hey, do you think you might be able to slap
the stank
outta my brain?”  Or, “When’s the last time you managed to cure mental illness with your dick?”

But
on the other hand,
being coy would get me nowhere
as well
.  I’d have t
o take some serious action.  Even so,
if I did, if I could actually make it happen and find the right person,
could
he somehow
really
save me from myself?
  I was beginning to
believe that perhaps
he
actually
could.  What else did I have left, after all?  This last psychologist was failing me, yet again, my
recent
drug consumption (illegal ones, not the ones the
previous
doctor had prescribed) was increasing, my alcohol use was doubling, and my cutting was getting more and more frequent.  Yet, through it all, I was doing better at work than ever before.

My mask had truly been perfected.  Ask anyone wh
o knew me at the office, and he or she would
say
that
I was one of the top e
ditors in the industry
;
hell in heels, a bitch on a broomstick.  I was feared in boardrooms, l
oved in
workshops
, and the authors I
assisted
adored me.  The few me
n who were above me in the firm
were scared a
s shit that I’d take their jobs.  A
nd they had every reason to fear. 
In my career, I was an unstoppable force.  People respected the fuck out of me, and that was the most important thing
that
I could say about my
present
business capabilities.

No one
knew about the booze or the coke
, or the Valiums, or the Percocets.  No one knew
that
I hadn’t been with
a man whose name I’d actually known in
more than two
years.  It wasn’t like I w
as a slut.  I’d only screwed
three
men in that entire time.  I just hadn’t wanted to know the first thing about them.  All I’d cared about was that they didn’t ha
ve wedding bands, and they hadn’
t mind
ed
wearing
condoms.  Still,
for me,
it had only
b
een about being lonely.  None
of them had turned me on
very
much, and they
sure as heck
hadn’t made me come
.

So,
considering the fact that my bleak
personal
future wasn’t getting any brighter on its own,
after my
twenty-sixth, and
final
visit to the therapist,
the second I got home
I
fixed myself a
Jack and Coke
and clicked open
my
slim-line laptop. 
Making detours back to the kitchen whenever I needed a fresh
drink, I
began
my
long seri
es of searches.

I’d decided to do all m
y looking online.  Bars were out as a place to find someone,
because only losers went there; either men looking for quick, easy scores or men with no interest in
a relationship with a chick
as screwed up as me.  I had to find someone who stood to get as much out of this as I did, otherwise, where was the draw?  If having someone pleasure and punish me helped
to
relieve
my
pain, then surely being able to inflict that pleasure and punishment must do
something
for others as well.  If not
, why
else
would there be so many
people who did it?

And
apparently, there were
thousands
of people
who called this lifestyle their own
, right here in the heart of New York
, because
locally,
the internet was
littered
with such ads; masters seeking women to dominate, subjugate, humiliate, you name it!  There was even one website dedicated to men who liked to urinate on women.  That one, when it popped up, shocked me so goddamn bad I snorted
fizzy
whiskey
straight
through my nose.

But
as I roamed through page after page of debauchery,
I
realized that I
didn’t really want to get into a site where this
type of
lifestyle was so much a normal part of
a subscriber’s existence
. 
I
certainly didn’t
want
someone who did this kind of thing every single day with a brand
new
woman,
but
someone who wanted to stretch this experience
out
over time
,
with just one gal.  Plus, a
s I realized before, if he had something
personal
to gain from
it, too, he would be much more likely to do it right.

I thin
k having someone who was in it purely
for the sexual gratification
(as all the men on these sites seemed to be)
,
was just
a little too s
eedy for
me.  And I
also
hoped that by finding someone who didn’t make this into just a “sex game”, someone who really wanted to
use it
to work
through
somethi
ng painful or difficult in his
life
like I was, would make it that m
uch more positive for the
both
of us in the long run.

Glancing through another webpage
, though
, I realized that
I
was the exception rather than the rule. 
The females placing ads on there seemed to be just as bad as the men. 
Crap
. 
I
certainly
wasn’t after some sort of
new
“sexperience”
like
these
women
were
.  I w
asn’t hitting my thirties with riotous fear,
needing to recapture my youth through wild and vulgar sex acts.  I was someone who simply needed to reclaim my freaking sanity.  As such, I
decided then and there that I wouldn’t use a BDSM site after all – a place
that clearly waved
nude and graphic
ban
ners advertising what th
ey had to offer (like bartering flesh
at a grocery store).  Instead, I settled
on a
local
site, figuring I’d use
a regular service, for regular-
old dating, and
then
simply
allude
to what I was looking
for
.