Poetic license

"Want to play?"

His breath was warm against my ear. When I craned my neck just enough, I could catch a glimpse of him in his black binder and camo shorts; he was wearing my favourite outfit of his. The binder accents his muscular arms and flattens his chest; he carries himself so differently when he's binding. The charisma he exudes is even more enticing than usual and I? I am lost in the dangerous purr of his words.

Unable to respond, I simply shake my head. No, Daddy, I don't want to play Maria Callas with you. It's a game I can never win, though it is fiendishly simple. The one and only rule: don't move, even as the razor slices deep and the cut lasts as long as her voice holds whichever note he chooses. And this is his favourite recording of her, so he cheats and picks only the longest passages, the times when she impossibly lilts up and down the scale for longer than I ever thought anyone could without breathing.

Opera singers. Sometimes they are the bane of my very existence.

But my denial is feeble, cursory at best. One of his long-standing rules is simple: I cannot use the word No when speaking to him. Sometimes, when he is feeling especially vicious, he will take a simple head-shake as a No as well, and make me pay for that. But last night he simply laughed.

"Come on, pet. We'll just play real quick." I tried my best, I really did, but every time he cut me my hips thrust helplessly into the bed, even as the tears came, wetting my cheeks. I cannot deny that the feel of his lips against the blood on my back turns me on terribly. Recently he confided that he can sometimes come simply from the taste of one mouthful of my blood, one deep slice of my skin, and that's all it took to reframe this practice of ours. Now I can take even the most painful cut, knowing that it feeds him even as it does me.

Before him I never dared to consider this kind of surrender, giving him the very flesh of my body to carve, the very blood in my veins to paint with or taste, as he pleased. Now I am fulfilled completely by the depth of our bond: fluid-bonded, soul-bonded, as he whispered to me last night, after the pain stopped. I cried then for a different reason; I have never felt love like this before. I am the luckiest girl in the world.