I don’t want to make a spectacle. Regardless of my personal politics of wanting a world where collars are as welcome as wedding rings, we want to go some place private and fuck, not have our covert kink in a national park.
I want him chained to my bed, instead I am picking a goth lite outfit, and a cream and blue picnic tablecloth, while refreshing the weather report over and over again.
We definitely do not want to make our way through the neatly manicured lawns of the park, and past every other couple doing the same thing to find this relative privacy. I have to throw a blanket over our laps because my nibbling on his ear gets him rock hard, and all our twining up together causes my skirt to ride up to my waist.
From time to time there is a pause as passerbys stray too close. We are mindful of the fact that this is a “family” park. I think there was even a wedding going on at one point.
Fuck. I want to practice the glide of a strapon in and out of his ass, and instead we are discovering an advanced form of footsie.
A boomer grandpa, local, notes we have been there almost long enough “to pay taxes”. Silver deflect politely would that jocular kind of conflict prevention Midwest politeness that he seems to manage to keep everyone at arm’s length with.
I really, really don’t want any of these people involved in my love life, but here we are, like a couple of teenagers dodging our parents, sighing with a sticky yearning that glues our gaze to each other. This is time two, last time was for my birthday, covertly hypnotizing my submissive at the park.
But it’s a date, and I have taken care with my makeup, although the humidity pulls my dark hair into curls. A halo of short pieces standing up about my scalp, while the first hints of my grey hair peek where I will brush dye this week to turn it back dark. Nonetheless, I feel content that I look pretty, and feel myself. The only real hint of sexuality is black thigh highs, opaque and fixed to my pale skin with sock glue.
Silver’s dressed casually too, just like last time. Fabric soft to my touch, tasteful, and if you didn’t know there was a pattern, rather camouflaged by maleness to appear invisible. I guess the word is Normcore? I like it. He makes me feel safe in a way I haven’t figured out how to articulate completely yet.
He also brings other supplies in a black duffel bag, and a slightly imperfect latte order, which he handles getting wrong with an acceptance I prefer. The picnic lunch for me is berries, olives, cherries and smoked salmon, and for him a simple wrap.
I meet him where the path leads off into the American parking, hopping the edge of a decorative flower bed to get closer quicker to kiss him. Over the course of this long quarantine he’s lost a little bit of weight, and I feel it when we press together. As usual he has almost no scent other than the imperceptible pheromones that I suppose you can’t really put a smell label to, but there is that warmth in aliveness of another human, and that presence that I love.
By now in our relationship I’ve learned the density of his body the stiffness so well, I could recognize him by touch. It’s an exploration that started the first time I pushed him down onto his carpet. I can’t be so bold, here in the park.
But femdom isn’t about the obvious costumes, and it isn’t about needing elaborate furniture. It’s not even about sweeping gestures you can see from a mile away. I can be subtle and I can be so appropriate I could carry on in the front pews of a church. I fit our dynamic into this space, where it belongs.
The only hint of what we’ve done so far is like an inside joke only we get: a pocket watch that hangs around my neck on a long brass tinted chain. It doesn’t look naughty, and if you weren’t a hypnosis fetishist or you didn’t know what we did together, you wouldn’t know what it implied. When I show it to him, after we’re cuddled up together, he ends up with his hand wrapped around.
It’s less what I do, this time, but what it means.
It means I love him. It means that I see the idea of swinging a watch and speaking in a trance pulling sing-song sexy. It means that I meet him half-way on any perversion, not out of indulgence but because it makes me wet.
So much of kink really is just elaborately overwrought romantic gestures with a fig leaf of harshness. All the business of collars and promises of obedience, and the other ridiculous backstage scaffold to make power exchange work, ridiculous romantic drama. I swear half the attraction to this is your ability to go over the top and keep your street cred.
Take our little bit of sneaky bondage: binding Silver’s wrists with a hand dyed grey silk ribbon. The gesture is covert kink again and not so obviously in bondagey anyone can tell what we are doing. Later, the ribbon ends up around his neck as an eccentric accessory.
Who specifically obsesses for weeks over finding ribbon soft and perfect enough to be suitable? The poor etsy purveyor who expected to sell it to decorate bridal bouquets contends with a lower star rating because I think it frays too much for the aesthetic I wanted.
I care so darn much about these things.
Meanwhile, his urge to serve means he has yet again brought me flowers, this time pink lilies, with almost tiger like stripes. He wants to give more to me. I can tell he really does.
Normal relationships don’t let you do that kind of thing. You would come across as weird and obsessive. Maybe on special ritual occasions it would be permitted, but things like him automatically bringing me a bouquet just for this casual little hangout (at least for white educated, middle class leftie nerds), would otherwise be seen as a bit much. Here? Perfect.
I think as much as people focus on kink as whips, leather and giving yourself as an object, kink is just as much about the permission to transgress social boundaries without transgressing personal boundaries. It’s the meaning we assign to symbols, not the symbols themselves that have the power.
And some covert kink is more physically hidden.
It’s funny, even with hours of the spooning up together, for the first half we talked about very little. I suppose that’s why they call it sweet nothings; coming up with a dozen synonyms to say that you love someone.
He discovered a new cruelty in this situation. Because we do not want this to be shared with the public, when I touch him, I command him not to move. Not one wriggle, hump or thrust. Nothing to get more sensation than what I give him, and the moment that unavoidable biological programming makes him break, I stop.
And then he collects himself and, when I know I won’t violate anyone else’s comfort, I start again.
He says I have ruined him in a dreamy sort of voice, before flopping off to the side. It’s terribly butterflies inside producing for me, making him this helpless.
The worst, for him, is when he is kneeling in front of me, just about the length of my legs, far enough to have to lean to kiss me. My dextrous feet find the outline of his cock through his pants and up between his leg, pressing that spot where that length of his cock tucks back into his body. Silver is built so it is uniquely close to the surface, and that grab between the legs turns him into a submissive puddle. This is barely a pat, but because we have that shared memory, if I can’t just handle him like we do in private, I can take him close to that place.
I have long toes, and a fair amount of flexibility in my feet. This is easy, sitting sock footed, grinding and stroking his cock with the ball and arch of my left foot, while my right keeps up the pressure on his perineum. All this is concealed away under a blanket and his palms, by my command, stay flat on the ground. It’s also memories of being a silly dumb teenager in a park with another virgin, doing way too much PDA. He’s “middle aged”, I am almost there. I see what people mean when they say love makes you feel young again.
Remember: No moving. No hints. Keep it hidden. Keep it tasteful.
At one point he gets so overwhelmed that he reveals another quirk: his natural tendency to bite.
The poor thing is self conscious about it. I had my suspicions when he out of the blue suggested biting my breasts the first time he got his mouth on them. He swore he was simply anticipating my masochism.
Silly man, your secrets are all mine eventually. I know what you crave even before you have learned to articulate it.
The next round of teasing my hand is in his mouth, ordering him to bite down. I am much too aroused to find this painful and I enjoy forcing him into what he likes.
It’s a fun kind of dehumanizing. After, each time I have matched prints and realize some upper middle class dental requirements of his childhood took a couple of the front teeth, to give him that perfect white, even American smile.
He seems perplexed at the tooth imprints even as I admire them, and kisses them at my command. He says he feels like he should apologise and I tell him if he does that I will slap him.
I watch his mind process that, until a smile of complete content smugness washes over his face. He realized the game is rigged: He always wins, exactly the way I want him to.
One apology later and I deliver a pop-slap from a short distance, discreetly but with a sting. That’s the least covert kink activity the whole time, very careful.
The real and heavy.
The last hour gets oddly serious because I talk about my trauma. We are discussing the general operation of our brains- him navigating not wanting to insult me by saying that had our connection via pastimes ceased, prior to the revelation of my interest in him and my kinks he would have continued merrily along in bachelor isolation.
Nerd love. He is an island unto himself, I described myself as having a personal affect like the Prince Ali number midway through Aladdin. I am not an open book, I am an animated billboard spelling out my seemingly innermost thoughts.
You, reader, cannot hurt me as you have no access to this vulnerability: that I could be made happy in a way that made me care if I got more. Silver and I have managed to mutually catch each other by something we deeply need.
So it takes more courage to gently let him know just how insecure I am. That my initial refusal of random acts of delivery soup when I am ill, or being doted on with material things is a particular kind of lengthy damage.
There’s that Hozier song “It will come back”.
I know who I am when I’m alone/
Something else when I see you/
You don’t understand, you should never know/
How easy you are to need/
Hozier
The kind of damage you give a child by alternatively depriving and smothering them. Where they learn to be wary in love, because that’s how you get got.
It’s not a kink thing, where I dominate because my mother abused me and my father abandoned me. My desires exist separate to that. On the contrary the predation of my kinks get tangled up in the gunshy vulnerability of a serial abuse victim- I don’t feel submissive in this vulnerability, but I feel more cautious because to let someone submit to me is to open myself to joy.
It’s always been easy to love someone, and never been easy to be loved properly.
Last week, as well as enduring seventeen days of migraine, I examined my history in the context of past relationship choices. Brain weasels skip about. I feel incredibly embarrassed about this.
But it is who I am and what I feel.
Canada will later extend the border closure, surprising neither of us. By the time this is written, the park will be closed again on the Canadian side, citing that the sheer parking overflow was causing issues, even if the meetings themselves were safe. A petition to reopen the park is at over 2500 signatures now, and ticking up, but who knows when or if I will hold him in my arms again?
But, we endure. What other choice do we have, for now?