A Name

Blake: Why do you look so puzzled?

Me: Maddox said my blog post had Explicit Content. I’m trying to figure out what was so explicit.

Blake: You mean, besides the fact that your entire blog is ADULT CONTENT?

Me: Yes, besides that.

Blake: …

Me:…. Oh, I guess that makes it EXPLICIT MATERIAL.

Blake: *hysterical laughter*

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ever since I was young, I can remember a particular boy hanging around me, pestering me. At first he was very welcome, because I didn’t have very many friends, and few of them thought the way that he did. As I’ve grown up though, he’s been everything from a valuable friend to a nuisance who I could have sworn was intentionally trying to ruin my relationships, to being a confidant that I doubt I could ever live without.

Childhood

In the family that I grew up in, it would be strange to ever hear me say that I was bored. The eldest of five and a social kid, I could make friends easily and always have someone to hang out with. As the sun would set on those summer nights, I was often the one organizing hide and go seek games. I was the one that pulled all of the neighborhood together to have fun in the front yard. Our house was always the meeting place because of the lamp we had out in the front yard, and because of the fire hydrant we proudly boasted as ‘base’. But when the sun was still high in the sky and the kids were all running around doing their own thing, I found myself sitting on the front steps longing for someone to talk to instead of to chase. I wanted someone who could understand what I was saying instead of just talking. One day in particular was worse than the rest.

My dad always worked out of town during the week. Mom was in charge through the week, but having so many kids and no support alongside her, there wasn’t a real authoritative presence in the house. The kids ran wild. The boy got in trouble. The younger ones were spoiled. The middle one took it upon herself to help care for the two little ones and I was left to drift. I preferred it this way a lot of times. We each had our own chores to do. Mine were always inside. Do the dishes. Vacuum. Laundry. Cook. I hated them all. I wanted to be outside in the sunshine, even on the hot days. I wanted to see the sky and the sun and to feel the sweat pour off of me, to be rewarded with a cool shower after the work was done. The boys always had the outdoor chores. Mow the lawn. Clean up the yard. Sometimes they had to pull weeds but after the fiasco of losing an entire garden because they didn’t know which ones were the weeds and which were the vegetables, that got taken off the list of things to do. This afternoon, I sat staring at the lawn. My brother still had a few days to get it done, but he should have just done it on Monday. He was off, screwing around, doing what he normally did. That’s when this boy first appeared.

From nowhere, he sat down next to me on my steps. I didn’t really recognize him, but I didn’t really look at him either.

“What are you staring at?” he’d ask, as he slowly ate his melting ice cream.

“The lawn. Dad likes it mowed a certain way each week. Sometimes diagonal. Sometimes straight. He says it helps the grass grow.”

The boy didn’t answer at first, just continued to eat his ice cream. “Looks like it doesn’t really have a problem growing, just being cut.”

I was not amused. “Yeah, I know. It’s my brother’s chore.”

“So why are you worried about it?” he questioned.

At first it seemed so simple. Why did I care? It wasn’t my chore, it wasn’t my job. When dad got home and saw it wasn’t done, he’d be mad though, and when he was mad, the whole house was upset. Mom was upset that dad was mad after she hadn’t seen him for a week. If dad was mad, the brother was in trouble, and if he was in trouble, he made everyone’s life miserable. Everyone would hide in their rooms and we’d spend two days avoiding dad instead of being happy that he was home. For whatever reason, when he was angry, it usually fell to me. Likely because I couldn’t keep my opinions to myself, not even at a young age.

I shrugged.

“Why don’t you just do it then?”

Why would I do someone’s chores for them? I already had a list of my own that I had to do. That wasn’t going to happen. Besides, I wasn’t allowed to do the outside chores. I’d never actually been shown how to use the lawn mower. I didn’t know how to put the gas in it. I didn’t know what to do if it stopped. Half the time the boys were messing around with the things, taking them apart and messing everything up. What if I got hurt? Then I’d be in trouble for doing something I was supposed to be doing and I’d also be hurt on top of that.

The boy got up and licked his fingers clean before chomping down through the cone. He looked at me, but he didn’t say anything else. He just strode off on his merry way, not entirely unlike how he originally approached me. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. Eventually I’d discover that he was going to do that quite a bit and I ought to just get used to it.

When the weekend came, everything played out just as I suspected. Everyone got in trouble, everyone was mad. We all hid in our rooms to wait out the end of the weekend. Monday came, we all had new chores, but they were all pretty much the same. Every week went like this. Nothing ever changed.

One Saturday night as we sat down to dinner, an argument broke out. Why couldn’t I ever just do the dishes like I was asked? Or sweep the floor? Or do laundry? They’re not hard things to do. I was just as bad as my brother, who wouldn’t do the lawn. Why couldn’t I just help out, like everyone else? Except there was really only one who helped out. The rest were too obstinate or young. So it turned into why can’t you be more like your sister? I went downstairs to my room and I opened the window. My room was in the basement, so if I’d had the upper body strength or the desire to pull myself up and out, I could have left. I just wanted air though. That boy from before ended up in my window well, curled up to stick his face through my window.

“What’s wrong?”

I pretended as though there was nothing, but in my youth, I couldn’t keep from crying as easily as I’d learn to when I was older. “I got in trouble. Just like I knew I would.”

“About what?” He laid down the best he could, intent to hear what I had to say.

“I hate doing the dishes or the laundry or cleaning up the kitchen. I hate doing all that kind of stuff.”

“Sure, well, who wouldn’t? I don’t want to have to wait on other people either. That’s why I don’t.”

At first it didn’t make sense. But the more he talked about it, the more I realized that I had similar feelings to what he was saying. To do the dishes, I had to wait for everyone to finish eating and then clear the table, then rinse the dishes, and then load the dishwasher. Then I had to come back an hour later and unload it, put everything away. Don’t forget that wiping down the table and sweeping the floor was a part of that somehow. The laundry? I had to go to everyone’s room, ask them what they needed done, put it in the wash, put it in to dry, fold it all, and return it to them neatly. Everything was about waiting on someone else.

“That’s why mowing the lawn is so nice. Just do it when you need to. Don’t have to wait for anyone. Don’t have to go back to it, except to trim the weeds you know. You should just do that. Just trade chores with your brother.”

That sounded like a good idea. I could hear the heavy footsteps on the stairs. Either my dad or my brother, I could never tell. Dad didn’t usually come downstairs but if he did now and saw me talking to a strange boy, I’d really be in trouble. So I told him to go away and I closed the window. When it was my brother, who barged into my room without knocking, I suggested to him that we trade chores so we didn’t get in trouble. He asked what he’d have to do, and I told him, just do the dishes after we ate for the week. He agreed. Much better than having to be outside in the sun.

That week, I did mow the lawn. I did it the way that I knew dad wanted, which was straight across, because last week was diagonal. I loved the feel of the mower in my hands, the vibration that would eventually make my hands feel numb. I loved the sound of it, how I didn’t have to listen for anyone because no one would talk to me while I was working anyhow. I tried to keep the lines neat and tight the way I’d seen dad show my brother. Don’t overlap too much, but don’t make them too wide. I knew how to avoid the roots in the trees around the yard and I knew that he got mad when my brother didn’t get all the way under the plum tree, even though it was kind of a pain. The other brother had the weeds and trimming job, so once the yard was done, so was I.  I looked forward to the weekend. I looked forward to dad not being mad that the lawn was taken care of the way it should have been. I waited, and waited, until finally he got home, and the first thing I heard was ‘Why aren’t the dishes done?’.

Of course. Of course in switching chores I should have realized he wasn’t going to do his share. Why would he? Suddenly his chore was already done, so what did it matter to him if my chore was done? So that night I caught up on it all. Not a word was said about the lawn. Maybe to my brother, maybe some compliment about how everything had been so well taken care of, but not to me. I was furious, and I swore to never trade chores again.

As the years went on, I watched several times where my brothers were pulled out into the garage to help work on the car. I sat on the steps, out of the way. I wanted to be out there too, but it was late, and I should be inside helping mom. I listened to dad ask for certain tools, watched as my brother who’d never really been paying attention got the wrong ones and got in trouble. If dad got really mad, he got sent inside which was where he wanted to be in the first place. My parents made friends with the neighbors. I think it started as a lawn competition and then turned into friendship. My mom befriended the wife who ran a tight ship at her house. Her kids were older though, teenagers, and there were only two of them. We were younger. That didn’t seem to matter to this woman though. She tried to teach my mom how to lay down the law, and when she wouldn’t, she did it for her. I hated her for it.

The chores were brought up again, and she was told how I never did them. I got lectured until I realized I didn’t have to stand there and listen, so I went into the house, angry, upset, and confused. He followed me right through the backdoor, stood in my kitchen, and stared at me.

“Why do you let them talk to you like that?”

“I don’t know. Because they’re adults. You can’t talk back to an adult.”

He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I do. Your brother does. What happens to us? Nothing. Maybe you just need to stop being such a girl about things.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, but he didn’t stick around to elaborate either. Stop being such a girl about things? Well, if I were a boy, what would I do? I remembered seeing something on television, how the teenage son would come home and get a drink from the fridge, but he’d never pour it into a glass. His sister and mother always complained, but it wasn’t really a big deal. He never got in trouble. So I drank straight from the carton. Let that nosy neighbor lady see that! We’ll see how much I belong in a kitchen. No one ever really found out though. It didn’t have the effect that my friend was going for anyhow.

The last time I saw him that summer was when my dad took me out, one of the rare occasions when it was him doing the running around with the kids instead of my mom. My brother needed a haircut and I asked if I could go with. I told my dad that I hated having long hair and he told me I should have short hair anyhow, because I didn’t know how to take care of my long hair, not like my sister. I never put it up and it never looked good. At first I was hurt, but my friend showed up and agreed. He told me that he was right. Maybe I should just go short. “Spiked on top, like mine!” and he patted the top of his head. So I asked my dad and he agreed, but then thought better of it and made me call my mom. Short hair was for boys, not for girls.

Early Adulthood

For a few years, my friend wasn’t anywhere to be found. Every now and again I’d swear I saw him in a crowd or I’d swear I heard his voice ringing in my ears, but even if it was him, I couldn’t hear him. I had my first and second relationships and things seemed to be going alright. As I was preparing to start High School, what was supposed to be the hardest time of my life, my family decided to move. It was not an unanimous decision; my mother took off and we were told to follow or stay, it didn’t matter to her. My dad decided he wanted to keep the family together, so we were uprooted with only a couple of week’s notice to let our friends know where we were going and then we were headed across the country. I left information with a few friends of mine on how to get in touch with me. If they saw that boy, would they let him know? I had to say good-bye to my boyfriend too, but that was going to be impossible, because he’d gotten himself into some serious trouble and I wasn’t allowed to speak to him anymore. The friends that I had in my hometown didn’t carry over with me at all in my new place. No one stayed in touch. Well, almost no one.

It wasn’t until years after I was settled and started networking across the internet that I came across him again. At first it was a shock. He didn’t seem the same as the little boy that would invade my space and tell me to do things that would get me in trouble. To me, it seemed as though he had flourished into an admirable young man. Strong and smart and confident and all the things that I wished I was as well. We didn’t spend much time talking about the past, I didn’t really care to. Instead, I wanted to know what he was up to now, how he ended up where he was, and he told me that he could tell me, but that I’d have to have an open mind about it. He was going to show me something that I’d probably never seen before. He was right. I’d never seen anything like it before and it deeply colored my world.

He took me to a place that he liked to play online. There he showed me how to go about creating a character so that I could play alongside him. We logged in and I followed him wherever he went. At first everything seemed about the same as what I’d seen before: people were hanging out chatting, some had special avatars that had wings on them, and some just like to lay around idle. Eventually we wound through a special area and went through a passage way that took us outdoors. This place was sectioned off for particular people. There was a warning, a password, and then we were on our way. The atmosphere seemed to grow darker. There were bits of conversations that would never match what I’d heard before. We’d get to a particular place that had closed gates, but he had a key, he said. He opened the door for me, led me into the hall, and I will never forget the feelings I had when he first explained to me what a Slave Market was.

“Now, the first thing you need to know about this place, is that everyone here is just pretending. In real life, they’re librarians and accountants and tech support. In real life, they have families and homes and kids and they look as ordinary as you or I. But in the depths of their imaginations, they pretend that they are someone that can be abducted, brought here, and sold to whoever pays the highest price, to be used as the buyer sees fit. Remember this and you’ll never get in trouble,” he warned me, and awe-struck, I just nodded my head. I was looking at all of these people who sat in these pens, the ones that called out, the ones that prostrated themselves, the ones that raised a fuss and yelled about mistreatment.

“The second thing you need to know-” but he was cut off before he could finish.

“Hey girly, what’re you doing out of the pens?” a tall, muscled man asked me. “You should be in with the others,” he said to me, as he wrapped a hand around my arm.

“She’s with me,” my friend said, and stepped between the brute and myself.

“She is uncollared, without an Owner.” He nodded towards me, as though I should know what this meant. I looked to my friend who wasn’t backing down.

“I choose not to display my ownership by means of a collar. She was conversing with me and she is my property. Release her to me now or I will speak to your management about your behavior.”

“Is this your Master, girly?” he asked me point blank. Unsure of what to do, I simply nodded my head. I felt his grip on my arm ease and I stepped toward my friend instinctively.

“You’d do better to show your ownership over her,” he warned, and then he walked away.

“Let me guess,” I said quietly. “Women are the slaves.”

For the next few years, I spent all of my time with my friend in this area of the virtual reality. I watched the way that he could speak and command attention. I watched the way the slaves would throw themselves at his feet. He would ignore those for the most part, and was typically drawn to those that knelt quietly in their pens. He would converse with them out of earshot of anyone else and every now and again he would take them somewhere private, where even I could not follow. Sometimes they would return and sometimes I’d never see them again. On occasion, I would see them wear a collar with a tag around their neck claiming to be his property. I admired the way that he worked. I loved seeing him in action. But most of all, I loved the way he carried himself.

My adventures were not quite as significant. There was only one person that I met that I ever had a deep connection with and his name was Ryan. Ryan was rowdy and he liked to get himself into a lot of trouble. Our story would always begin anew each day, likely with me discovering that he had a new bruise on his body from some fight. I would tend to him and care for him and explain that he didn’t need to prove his masculinity by picking fights the way he did and he’d always grow so quiet and sullen. There was a public bath that we could use and one day, I led him down there, to try to clean his wounds. This time had been more severe — he’d worn a bandage around his chest. I tried to unwrap him, and he threw a fit. He said that he was fine and that he didn’t want to scare me by showing me his wounds. I believed him and let him be. After a few weeks of playing together every day, something changed. There were feelings attached to one another. Nothing serious, just between characters, but eventually there was a kiss. The kiss led to something more and before I knew it, we ended up in one of those private places my friend had gone to several times before. That was when I learned Ryan’s biggest secret: he was actually a woman. He was a woman that wished to live as a male, but his body betrayed him. So ashamed, he left me. My character was left alone and I was left wondering what had just happened.

“I had this strange thing happen to me the other day,” I told my friend while he was waiting for one of his various slaves to show up to play with him.

“What was that?” he chuckled. There were so many strange things in the land where we played that it seemed funny to deem any of them strange.

“I was playing with a boy that really turned out to be a girl. Only felt he was a boy.” I wasn’t sure if I was explaining myself correctly.

“Oh sure. That happens a lot around here. Boys that are girls, girls that are boys. Hermaphrodites. Transgenders. Transsexuals. You get used to it. I mean, here you can be whatever you want to be. What happened?” he finally asked.

“Nothing. I was okay with it.”

“Were you in a herm zone? “he asked me nonchalantly.

“No. Just in the slave market where I normally am.”

“That sort of thing isn’t generally accepted. People freak out. He’s probably just surprised you didn’t. Or waiting for you to do it. I would just always expect it, then you’ll never be surprised. It’s really not all that uncommon anyhow.”

This was all news to me, but he seemed to take it in stride so what the hell, I might as well too. “Well what should I do?”

He lit up. “Were you going to do it with him?”

Now I was a little embarrassed. “Well, you know. Role play. It was headed that way, I guess. We were together and everything.”

“Then just pick it up and see what he does. No big deal. Unless you’re uncomfortable with it.”

“No, I’m not. It was okay. It was kind of exciting.”

“Oh, Sas is finally online. I’ve got to go finish up what we were doing last night. You have fun with your boy.”

Eventually Ryan did come around again. Eventually our role play played out the way it should have in the beginning. I never called him any differently. I let him go through the motions of being a boy and I really enjoyed it. He told me he thought it was strange that I wasn’t creeped out by him, but it wasn’t a big deal for me at all. At some point, he disappeared again, and so did all of the connections I had with my character. There was something missing and I didn’t know what it was. I’d never had trouble making friends, but I couldn’t seem to get anyone to want to play with me.

Finally, one day, I was able to pull my friend aside. I was able to sit down and talk to him a bit about what he did. How was he so able to get people to play with him, to crave being around him, to log into this game and seek him out specifically. What was he doing differently from me?

“I practice BDSM. D/s specifically. A lot of people here are here for the humiliation, for the toys, for the degradation and abuse. That’s what they crave that they’re not going to get in their real life. If Susie Homemaker went up to her husband and told him to slap her across the face and call her a slut, odds are he’s going to think she’s a complete lunatic. So instead, she logs into this game, dresses up her avatar, puts herself in a pen, and she knows that anyone that comes up to talk to her is going to fantasize about doing just that. She won’t fear rejection. Everyone here wants something like that.”

“Except you?”

“Well, I’m a little different, yes. I prefer the control aspect of it. I want people to do as I say. I don’t want to make them do it though — I want them to do it because they want to do it. I just help them realize that. I tell them to show their submission by kneeling and they do. I tell them to serve me and they’re happy to. I give them ways to show their affection for me in nonsexual ways. This works great for people who are in relationships and feel that role playing sex is cheating. It’s also great for people who might naturally be submissive. This seems to be more of what they seek. It just so happens that there are plenty of these kinds of people around, so I get a lot of play. A lot of the times, I just offer to protect them, so that if they’re playing around with someone and someone’s not playing like how they should, they can always say that they’re going to report them to me, and I’ll take care of it. Most of them like just that aspect of it.”

“Do you role play sex at all then?” I questioned, wondering if someone could literally have a relationship without any sex and be happy about it.

“Not usually. Every now and again. Truth of the matter is, it’s not all that important to me. And I can’t have sex the way that I want to.”

The last part of what he said didn’t quite make sense, but I wondered if it had something to do with this new lifestyle I was learning about and just something I hadn’t had exposure to yet.

“I can’t seem to find what I’m looking for here. I love it all, especially what you’re talking about with the control, with watching someone submit to you naturally, but I’m not experiencing any of that. I think I’m going to take a break.”

For a moment, I thought I could sense his sadness. We’d gone for so long without talking to one another already that I suppose maybe he was upset that I was willing to cut connection from him again. But with so many new ideas floating around in my head, I really just needed time to let them sink in.

Over the course of the next year, I stayed away from my friend and the life that he showed me. I was married at the time, and I doubled my efforts to be a good wife. I started to clean, at least just a little. I tried to learn how to cook. I wanted to start a family. Every woman I’d ever known had wanted to grow up and have a ton of babies. They couldn’t think of anything better than raising a family. I wasn’t so sure about that, but since it seemed to be the thing to do, I proposed it to my husband. There was no enthusiasm for it. In fact, he said he rather enjoyed not having kids. Maybe we could talk about it in a little while, if it was still something that I really wanted.

In the bedroom I was bored. Though we didn’t use the same position every time and we had a few toys in the drawer, there was just no spark like what I’d felt walking around a virtual world. I scolded myself, comparing fantasy to reality though. What had he told me? These people were just pretending. They were accountants and tech support and homemakers and normal people. People didn’t really submit to one another. They never knelt. They didn’t want someone else in control of their lives. The erotic spankings that I saw that were meant to build a relationship stronger, those didn’t happen. People weren’t really chained up to beds and teased and edged until the orgasm they were given was so magnificent they’d never dream of having a regular boring sex induced orgasm ever again. I was depressed. I sincerely wanted all of those things to be true.

One day, I finally had to hunt down my friend. I had to know. “Is the reason why I couldn’t find what I was looking for because I’m a girl? Is it that I can’t be Dominant if I’m a girl?”

“It’s not that you can’t be Dominant as a girl, just that most people are less likely to take you seriously if you are. Men are considered to be naturally Dominant and so people gravitate to them. Think about it like this: women are emotional, women can be overpowered, and women cannot naturally penetrate. How often do we think of penetration as a Dominant act? What is more naturally dominant than a penis being thrust into a vagina? How do you compete with that kind of thing?”

“So if I want to partake in any of this, I have to be submissive?”

“No. You can be Dominant. There are female Dominants out there. They’re harder to find. You have to go through a lot of women who are pretending to be  Dominant. There are stereotypes you have to fight through. But if it’s what you want, you can have it.”

That was all I needed to know.

Adulthood

Eventually I found out what my friend was talking about. Lucky for me, I found two excellent role models early on, otherwise I surely would have given up before I even got my start. Like my friend, I found that control was pretty much what I was after. I enjoyed the service side of things. There was a lot of play I enjoyed as well, but in most examples that I found, after a sound beating, there was sex. It went straight from caning or flogging to penetration, something I was incapable of doing. So I set that aside. I practiced what I enjoyed and left it at that. For the most part, I was fulfilled. I started suggesting things to my husband. Chastity, for example. But he laughed and said no sane man would give up orgasms, no matter who asked him to. Flogging, I asked about, and he told me it was just pain. There was nothing romantic about it, there was no real sensation, there was nothing in it for him, so no thanks. It came as no surprise a few years later when the marriage dissolved and we each went on our own way, finding a new path in life.

After this, and after reflection, I sought out my friend once more. I asked him to talk to me and for a while he declined. I wasn’t ready to hear what he had to say. Just like when I was a kid, I was always reluctant to act on his advice. I knew that he gave good advice, knew that he would never hurt me, but for some reason I just didn’t trust him. I agreed, and told him that when I was ready to really hear what he had to say, I would come back and speak to him.

I sought out relationships of a D/s nature. I found a few and while they ultimately failed, they were also successful. I learned something new from each of them. I liked feminine men as much as I like masculine men. I liked all kinds of women, but none of them ever seemed all that attracted to me and I couldn’t figure out why. Each person that I had contact with taught me a little more about myself, but it wasn’t until just recently that I had a friend who recognized something in me that I had never really wanted to admit to myself. She spoke to me about how people are always made up of feminine and masculine traits and how sometimes we wrestled with which one we preferred to exhibit to the world. After that comment, others that I met in the future would all say the same thing. There was something going on that I was not ready to talk about with anyone other than my dearest, oldest friend.

For years and months and days I’d thought about asking him what he meant that day he told me he couldn’t have sex the way he wanted to, if it related to my life at all the way everything else he offered me related to my life. But I was afraid to hear what he might have to say this time. After all, he’d never been wrong. I had come to the conclusion that I would have to face it eventually, or face losing him. He wasn’t going to wait around forever. So I found him. I told him that I was ready to hear what he wanted to say and that we should just talk about everything, just come to terms with it all, have it all out in the open, and then be done with it.

“I thought you’d never come back,” he told me when I found him.

“I always come back.”

“Last time we were so close to being happy together, to building something lasting, and you ran away from me, the same as you always do.”

That stung, and I didn’t want him to know how bad, so I closed my eyes. “I want to know something.”

“I know you do,” he told me. “But you already know the answer. I’ll tell you anyhow though, if you really want me to.”

I settled in and allowed him to speak, to just say whatever it was he needed to say to me.

“The pinnacle of my fantasies has always been to have an all encompassing relationship. Find a girl, fall in love, and build a life together. We would be in a D/s relationship. I would control her completely and she would love me for it. Ideally we would play. There would be pleasure and pain and pushing of limits and that would be fine. But all of that aside, we could do everything a normal family would do as well. I dream of proposing to her and having her accept. I dream of marrying her. I dream of impregnating her, forcing that upon her, something that she would suffer just for me, something that she wanted so badly to give me, and at the end we would have our family. It’s a beautiful dream, I think.”

“In a very…you sort of way, yes, I can see that. But you can do all of those things.”

“Oh, sure. Under the right circumstances I believe I could fall in love with a girl. I suppose that I could even propose to her. Marrying her might be a little tricky in some places,” he mused to himself, but he recovered quickly. “But that’s where it stops. Most women are going to want to have a family, they’re going to want a normal life to go with their abnormal life. Just because we’re D/s doesn’t mean we don’t also have normal tendencies, normal dreams and desires.”

“I guess I don’t understand.”

He sighed, as though he was trying to explain to a brick wall about what he was incapable of doing. “I could never impregnate her. No matter what. I just wasn’t built for it. So to go through with all of that and fall short in that one, tiny regard, it would feel false. Sort of like how aligning yourself with FemDom and strap-on play alleviates you a bit in your greatest desires, but still leaves you falling just a little bit short.”

Now he’d actually gone too far. Now he’d said more than I wanted to hear and I desperately wanted to run away, but he wouldn’t let me, not this time.

“You intentionally seek out these boys to play with who enjoy anal, because so do you. You love the look of them turned over something, the way that the toy slides inside of them. The sounds that they make. You like the primal savagery that can erupt within you when you take them. You love the way a boy will ask for more, I know it. You look for boys that are bisexual, because it relieves you of your worry. But then — and you always set yourself up for this, don’t you? — they tell you their deepest fantasy. They whisper so shy in the dark of the night about how sometimes they dream it was a real man that was fucking them. They want to know what a real cock feels like inside of them. How it reacts. How they can clench around that cock and it can be felt and to feel that hot cum dripping inside of them when he finally orgasms and pulls out.”

All I could do was sit there and listen, and fight the tears that were stinging in my eyes.

“So neither of us can really have what we want. We already know that. What I don’t know is why you insist on keeping me a secret. I don’t understand why you don’t ever allow anyone to see me. We’ve been together for nearly your entire life. I am as much a part of you as you are of me. Yet you never talk about me, not even to the most important people in your life. Is it because you can’t have it all? Because you can’t ever go all the way with me? Is it really that necessary? I know you’re happier when I’m around. You feel fulfilled, complete. Yet you push me away.” He wouldn’t let up, not even when he could see that he was crushing some part of my heart. “Just let me out. Just once. Just to one person even. Test the waters. Talk about me. If you’d ever let anyone see me, I bet they’d be okay with it. I bet they’d even understand. Why can’t you do that?”

I thought about it then. For the first time ever. I always pictured him looking a particular way. So handsome. Fit. Dark skin with spiked dark hair. But that really wasn’t what he looked like at all. He was just an average kid that anyone could look past. He wasn’t some stud that everyone wanted to jump in bed with. He was just this guy who had a Dominant streak, who usually knew what he wanted, and right now, he wanted to be seen.

“Weren’t you the one that said you didn’t want to be anyone’s secret?” he drilled. I knew where this was going. “Well I’m tired of being your secret.”

I finally opened my eyes. I looked straight back at him. Short, red hair. Sometimes it was spiked and sometimes it fell to the side, doing whatever it wanted. Blue eyes. Sometimes they could look green. When I looked in them, I saw my mother’s eyes — one of the few things that I remember about her. Broad shoulders, something that I really liked about him. But then he would start to disappear. Then all I could see were breasts and curvy hips.  We covered them up well though, in t-shirts and jeans and boy shoes. On days like these, it was hard looking at him. It’s hard looking in the mirror and seeing someone no one else sees.

So I steeled myself and I asked him, “What do you want to wear? And what is your name?”

For so many years he’d been in my mind, showing me how to act and what to say, how to carry myself. He spent years breaking down the ideas of what social norms dictated I do because to them I was nothing but a girl. For years he fought with every person who told me what my place was because of my gender. For years he stood alongside me when no one could understand the struggle that was going on inside of my head, and more importantly, my heart. He was right. It was about time I let the world see him. It will be a long journey before we are happy with one another, until we can look the way each of us wants to look. It will be a long journey to accepting the fact that we are both a part of one another, wholly and completely, and that neither of us, not even him, is happy when the other is gone completely from the other’s life. It will be a journey well worth it all.