The dance

I made him get naked on our first meet.

He had accompanied me to my apartment after we had spent some hours together. He was unbearably sweet, sinking under me almost visibly from the first; it was tangible, his submission… I could see it between us, taste it, feel it. He had already offered to head off home, breezily and sweet, happy to have met me, spent some time with me, content to catch up again later. He offered, once, twice. I declined his offer.

Instead I made him take his clothes off.

We talked about it recently, he can’t believe he did it.

“That doesn’t seem like a thing I would do…” he joked.

He was nervous, scared, and it showed… he didn’t try to hide it, he confessed it, offered it to me like a gift. I love fear, love it, and what I love even more is a man who is brave enough to let it show. It is incredibly brave, being scared and doing it anyway, but there is another layer of courage in him when he exposes his vulnerability, displays it. To me, it is incredibly, unutterably sexy.

I am in those scenarios all cool and controlled, but my mind is racing, especially when he is new to me, when our relationship is not established, when I don’t know him so well yet. It is hot and giddy-making, that dance that you do to feel each other out, I lead the dance, and I wait for him to follow. In the beginning, there is always the risk that he won’t follow. It makes me metaphorically hold my breath when I take him somewhere, whispering silently to him, “Come on, baby, come to me…”.

There is always, always that little fear that he will balk, that I have misjudged him, that I have pushed too hard too fast; there is trepidation that this is the moment where I will lose him and have to start again.

I don’t believe in negotiating every little thing, I know it is ‘the done thing’ in D/s (as are safe calls, reference checks, no play on the first date, no taking him home etc etc, and I don’t abide by those rules either), but it kills the fun for me – getting explicit agreement for a thing before I do it.

I do use a BDSM checklist fairly early on, but then I just talk, get to know him, hear what he reacts to, get an idea of what makes him shine, what makes him uncomfortable, and then, when I am in it, I read him carefully, closely, take my time so he has the space to follow where I am going.

I progress a relationship by edging into deeper intimacy, feeling him out little by little, simultaneously ordering and seducing him into it, taking cues from him, judging how he is reacting, paying attention to him to know how hard I can push, when I have to pull back. Obviously at the beginning, there is a risk in doing this because I don’t know him yet, so interpreting his reactions is not quite so easy. I think I’m pretty good at it. I get it wrong sometimes, but not often.

I was thinking about that first meet, and my boy’s fear, my negotiating the path… I knew he could handle it, and he trusted me not to push too far.

In all of this, when I lead the dance, I need to show him how it goes, I need to put him where I want him, but most of all, I need him to follow me – when he stumbles I will pick him up, but if I go off dancing my own set of complicated steps, twisting and twirling to my own invisible music and just paying attention to myself, I am likely to turn around to find that he’s not there with me, that he’s ten steps behind with a perplexed expression on his face and a look of failure in his eyes. And if that happens, then I have blown it.