For Christmas, I got LadyCobra (a leather worker, among her many talents) to make up a play collar in a rich, dark chocolate brown to add the Wildcard’s Christmas basket. It’s a prototype, as she expands her business, and it was something missing from the toy collection.
Why a collar? D/s involves a lot of purely-in-your head stuff. As much as I generally avoid anything with a whiff of Olde Guarde Leather and don’t like being called Mistress or otherwise dabbling too much into the Sekret And Strikt Tradition of BeeDeeEssEm shtick where there is one right way to be, but it seemed like a really practical tool for what we are trying to do.
Coming together as we did, knowing precious little, other than practically palpable physical chemistry to a degree that sends me mewling about like a cat in heat and our blissfully intellectually compatible brains, we went straight from chaste friendship to trying to figure out everything all at once in a backdrop that wasn’t what I’d describe as conducive to pacing.
Additionally, while Wildcard wasn’t a complete novice, a lot of this is pure theory to him that he wanted to try, and something that, fundamentally speaking, I only had slightly more practical experience to help us figure out what we’re doing.
Add an extra level of self imposed pressure- if he was, fresh from the land of vanilla, immersing himself with me as a guide, I of course allowed myself to get completely wound up about the fact that done wrong it might leave him with the wrong impression about some aspects of kink. Things went in little nibbles, a little impact play, a little rope- nothing big picture. Hell, roll back about six months ago and the poor man was convinced I was some sort of submissive. Whoopsies.
The other challenge for me was a desire to take him to a place, mentally, where I wasn’t sure he was capable of going, as much as he was down to try anything once. He had, at the outset, described himself as “bedroom only”. Realistically, that in itself is a fairly non-descriptive summary, since it means anything from trying to set yourself apart from the people who form their whole lives around their kink identity, to literally confining it to the immediacy of sex.
But in our case it’s not a relationship where I can simply, at any time, pull his hair and drag him to his knees to “force” him to submit to me the way I want. And I had no way of knowing precisely what his psychological construction around this is, even the means of just outright asking. He’s also fairly conservative about talking about his fantasies- I’ve not so stealthily been watching porn with him just to figure out precisely what he’s responding to.
When it comes to collar shopping, when he first got hints that was what I was plotting, he he declared “I reject any and all symbolism!” In the sort of pleased, fighty voice that suggested a certain degree of pleasure that I was going to enforce precisely what he claimed not to want. Of course I could have just gone the Pet Smart route, but the reality was that getting it custom made was one of those Things That Feels Right. It’s a play collar, but it’s got loads of symbolism attached because it’s an attempt to express my feelings. Which of course means lots of awkward fumbling, denial and blushing on my part.
But… it works, thus far.
The collar I mean, not the fumbling and getting a warm face. I mean that with it on, he’s much more focused in the moment and being where I’d like him to be. He shows it in his body language, the way he sits and curls up. Nothing is a panacea, and we’re still experimenting but it is pleasing and very good for my need to dominate.