CN: needles
“We’ll do it on three, on the exhale,” he says. I nod, trembling.
I want to say I never wanted this, but the truth is that I never wanted to want this. Bottoming for needleplay has been a hard limit for as long as I can remember, but hard limits born from fear are a tricky thing for someone who loves fearplay.
“One. Inhale…and out. Good. Inhale…two.” The sharp tip touches my skin and I whimper, my teeth looking for something to clench.
With needles, I’m not just offering up my skin to the sharp sensation and invasion of my body with unnecessary force. Here, I am laying open my fear, panic like an avalanche. It’s one of the only places I cannot hold my terror inside my skin; it comes spilling out in tremors and movement, incoherent words and the edge of tears trying and failing to form and fall.
“And…out.” Biting down around my knuckle, not sure if I’m praying or begging, but screaming something inside my mind that might once have resembled words like “please,” and “no.”
I hear words echoing in my mind from months ago when they were first teaching me to put needles in someone else’s skin. My hands, slow and unsteady, unaccustomed to the force needed to push it through. His eyes met mine across the table as my hands grasped at learning; embrace the violence of it, he said to me, and my hands stilled, pushing needles smoothly into the skin that now holds me taut and trembling.
“And…inhale. Thr…” My knuckle, numb where I have bitten down, whistles against the exhale.
This is not supposed to be easy.
“…ree,” and the sharp pain, a small pinch, pressure, pushing inhuman sounds from my throat.
I want to make this less than what it was because it is more than I can hold at once. And so I break it into pieces, fragments, broken shards of self spilled out on a table, into waiting hands, back into my own skin to swallow and regurgitate, over and over. Clean, clear, sharp. I offer what I lack in the loss of composure. I offer terror, the kind that comes unbidden, the frantic beats of a panicked heart trying to escape and finding chains wrought from desires and asks holding it in place.
I offer these eyes, tempestuous and brazen and tender, now fallen open to plead the words I cannot say, in case you listen, in case you don’t. I offer trust, the kind that watches you read my eyes and respond in kind, to hear the words I want to say and know they are not the words I mean, to believe that this silent plea is a moment of falter and not begged in earnest.
“Going to do another. Just breathe same way. One…good, two…”
I have given him my reactions, over and over, in rope and sex, in conversation, in the myriad of ways we interact. Affirmations and lighthearted curses, squirms and teases and begs and pleas. But this is different.
“…three.” Exhale and pierce.
I’m trembling, shaking. I do not want to want this, to want to offer these things up with him, for him, and so I cover my face with my hands, hiding, desperate and yet.
And yet.
This is a different kind of reaction I offer, one born in fear and trusting him to trust me, to know my own thresholds, to let him reach inside my skin and push against the elastic boundaries as they stretch and pull and part and yield.
Another.
Flooded with fear, and my body responds, at once terrified and aroused. Endorphin rush coursing through my blood and dripping hot and wet from my cunt. Oh god, but I hate this (and feel a pulsing throb betraying the words; I hate this but these hips are not made to run, but to grasp and hold firmly in place as they push back and forth against the infuriating pressure of nothing at all).
Another.
And shame, hot and sticky-sweet, burning across my face. I feel ridiculous, this panic unrealistic and absurd. I want to feel calm, the initial fear giving way to something gentler. It is only later, when you remind me that you like this part, the terror, the panic, the mind-numbing fear, that it hits me that the parts that I most want to hide are the places you dig your fingers in the deepest, grasp and hold and pull to the surface. I want to be still, but you would not abide my lack of movement if I tried.
Small pinpricks blossom out between my fingers where I squeeze the skin. Languid, sanguine. Dip my finger in the pool and bring it to my lips, a different metallic edge than adrenaline, the sharp spice of fresh blood. Drink it in. I look at you and my stomach sinks. Fuck. I am going to do this again.
It is too much to hold at once, flooding and coursing and running and staying impossibly stil. Arousal and fear, trapped and fighting, clawing at control with my fingertips bleeding from effort. It feels like so much, too much, to hold so openly, my body a battleground warring against itself, and turning, leaning into someone else. And hands grasped, clasped; I saw the pictures later, amused at the times and ways I clung to him, hands begging where lips could not. And I saw the way he held parts of my skin in tenderness and care; what I could accept, he offered. A hand, here. Pressure, there. Small moments of tenderness sliced clean through, a different kind of piercing, one wrought with love that I do not know how to name.
Golden-hued red light sharpened, pressed against the edges of this heart. One. Two. Inhale.
Three.
Monomaniacism 