sensation
“Your eyes are beautiful.” I’ve told you this before, and I’m telling you now. The light is off in your room but you wouldn’t know it. Today I brought thirty candles, a lighter, an honest-to-God brass candle snuffer that made you laugh for a solid thirty seconds, it was so typically me, and an actual miniature fire extinguisher. When I asked why you didn’t laugh at me when I brought that one out of my bag you looked at me with such fondness in your eyes, saying, “I don’t know, your obsession with safety is cute. I like how much you care,” and I had no choice but to enclose you in the tightest hug you’ve had in a week.
Those eyes are smiling at me now. The candles make of the bed an oasis of light, soft on your naked body. Silk sashes tie your wrists and ankles casually. You could overcome them, but they are comfortable, and carefully tied under the mattress to give you wriggle room but to keep your body open.
“There isn’t a part of you that isn’t beautiful,” I murmur, my eyes moving down your body. You can almost feel it like a physical presence, a phantom touch tracing the curve of your jaw, lingering on your lips, slipping via your throat to collarbone and breasts. Breasts that sit heavier on your lungs now they’re hefted up and aside by slice after slice of pizza, an early evening extravagance over which we talked and talked.
Well, talking finished, and your food baby weighs you down like a pleasant, warm anchor beneath your ribs. It speaks, near constantly, a gurgling, grumbling mass pleasing to us both.
My gaze passes over your engorged stomach to places you can’t see, though I clearly adore every part I’m looking at. You squirm against the bed, testing the sashes and teasing me with the sheer animated joy of your movement.
“Kink’s about being present and cutting through bullshit, as much as anything,” I say, leaning down to kiss your belly button. Kisses trail up to the corner of your mouth. “Not just pain, not just sex, not just control. So lie back. Don’t fight. Don’t even look.” I lift a blindfold of the same silk tying your limbs. “Your eyes are beautiful. Close them and just feel.” I slip on the blindfold.
It’s not perfect darkness but it’s impossible to see, so you don’t strain to see anything. Instead your other senses crowd in. You feel the smooth, slightly cool silk slide over your temples as I adjust the knot not to sit uncomfortably behind your head. Something citrus wafts into your awareness: I’ve scented the silk. It’s bright and spicy.
You inhale deeply, then surprise yourself as a burp ripples out of you: braaAAARrp. The scent of departed tomato shares the air, and your stomach plays a satisfied low gurgle, it’s contents shifting in a slow dance.
My hands on your face draw your attention back upward. Then a surprise sensation on your cheek: light and delicate, almost tickling. A feather?
With no other input it’s so easy to focus on the sensation. Scintillating is a good word. Nerve endings fire like tinkling bells as I draw it along your jaw, down the side of your neck. It disappears a second then reappears at your lips. You don’t even notice that the stimulation causes you to open your mouth. A soft exhale from me is a laugh: I’m charmed by your reflex to consume.
Another teleport to your belly button, causing your abdominal muscles to squirm. My hand on your shoulder reasserts itself, guiding you to remain still, just feel.
You do. The stroke wanders to your flank, then marches alongside the stretched skin beside your tummy. Shivering follows in its wake. Goosebumps manifest as you become hyperaware of the sensation of wrapping your food, containing it. You feel taut.
You must have made a reaction I liked because I do the same thing several times, bottom to top, each time making your midsection feel heavier and fuller to you. You reckon you can feel the muscles of that first stage of your gut rhythmically contracting, sparking squeaks and rumbles as air fights for escape. Sometimes finds it, sometimes is forced deeper.
You yelp as the feather trips to a nipple, more from surprise than sensitivity. That laugh-exhale again, then I circle the peak of your breast a few times, widening to stroke the squashed curve it makes against the top of your stomach; then tightening back to your nipple again. You feel the peak tautening, tightening, reacting like your belly sounds its food.
Sudden warmth and the sensation of wet soft roughness. My mouth takes in your other nipple. You breathe in sharply and tug unconsciously against the sashes at your wrists. Citrus, maybe bergamot, perfumes the air.
I release the nipple and blow on it. Once hot and filled the blood, the cold causes a different timbre of that tightening sensation. The skin of your whole chest tingles, wanting more sensation.
You don’t get it, not right away. The bed creaks as I shift my weight. Hearing comes to the fore, finding my slightly quickened breathing, the whisper of silk as your hips twist unconsciously against one another and move the ankle bindings, and… the lighter?
You go still. The air in this room feels cool on your Shortly, the bed creaks again and I position myself. The hand reappears on your shoulder, gives you a little squeeze.
On your belly, the soft plap of something liquid falling, and then heat! A tiny fire starts on your skin and you reflexively pull the ties, but the heat disappears almost instantly.
My finger touches where the napalm hit and cooled. It flexes slightly, soft but firm.
“Wax,” I murmur, tracing around the little spot of set wax. “Green?”
Mute, you nod.
Heat begins to patter down, one droplet every two, three, four seconds. At first each hits like first lowering yourself into a bath, eliciting a little mewl of protest; but soon enough the incessant sensation causes the rise and fall of pain to blend, becoming a sort of searing tour of the skin of your belly. Your mind follows the sensation and so discovers anew your own fullness.
I must be drawing a shape you can’t guess at as I make a circle and maybe some lines pointing toward your crotch.
After some unmeasurable time I seem to be content with the wax. Your belly feels even heavier, though there can’t be terribly much wax on there. The pattern makes your hyper aware of your own breath, resisting as it does the expansion and contraction of your diaphragm via your bulging tummy.
Next surprise: cold metal flat against your inner thigh. You don’t make a sound this time but you react, opening your legs and twisting away from the sensation.
The blade—surely that’s what it is, you can feel the burr of the cutting edge lying flat against your skin—doesn’t for a second make you worry. Whatever else I might pull, you know implicitly that I worship your body as I do your mind.
Coldness raises more goosebumps as it slides up to your belly. Does your stomach sound less noisy, like it’s nervously trying to hide? No, ridiculous thought, although here comes a nervous fart, an early escapee from the pizza slaughter, or the remnants of an earlier meal.
The cutting edge of the blade levers beneath a plane of wax and I begin peeling it from you. Once we get going, satisfying chunks come away one another the other. The exposed skin is raw and fresh, uninjured but newly experiencing the air.
Several more sensations follow, in different tempos and in different places. Ice follows fire, journeying from belly to inner thighs, causing you to squirm like your prey so often squirms inside you. Rough rope threatens to burn you in whip-thin lines, but only scratches the surface. And the steely regularity of a pinwheel steadily explores your flanks with its train of pinpricks, causing sweat to bead on your skin.
The penultimate phase is the longest. Tools laid aside I straddle your hips and apply oiled hands to your belly, flanks, abdomen, commencing a deep-tissue massage that squeezes your busy stomach tightly, makes you feel full all over again. Regular pressure eases your food through its opening promenade in your deep and secret passages.
For the final phase, you feel me shift and undo your bonds, with a final burst of citrus. The blindfold we both leave on. Heat from the candles and my body perfuse you as I lie beside you and draw you into a long cuddle. I kiss your forehead and your cheek and tell you over and over again how I enjoyed seeing your reactions, how proud and grateful I am that you trusted me to let me do those things to you. You don’t have to answer, circling as you are a deep sleep that steals over you slowly. The last thing you feel is my heartbeat close to yours, my arms around you, and the beautiful slow weight of your packed stomach, beloved by us both.