The Exchange
For most of my life I did not think of myself as a masochist. Somebody else noticed it before I did: that in rare moments, with a very small number of people, I take pain and enjoy it. Scratched down the back during rough sex, in the heat of it, barely registering the pain as pain. When it was pointed out to me I recognised it at once, which is the uncomfortable part. It had been there the whole time, unfiled.
It did not fit the picture I had of myself. I was dominant and I was a sadist, and those two things had been true long enough to leave no room for a third. Then I began working professionally, which handed me a second reason to leave it alone. A Dominus with an appetite for the other side is an easy thing to misread, and I had a name to build.
The honest reason is neither of those, and it took me years to say it plainly. An appetite made public becomes an invitation. If I announce that I enjoy pain, then every person reading it is standing at an open door, and I have never wanted that door open. I choose with great care who is permitted to give me pain, and in two decades that has meant a handful of people and only ever inside sex. Beyond that, nothing. It was not concealment. In twenty years nobody had made me want to.
Then Hekate.
Being convinced
I had watched her work long before I considered being underneath her floggers. I was helping film an advertising video, she was flogging a masochist, and at some point I stopped doing my job and simply watched. The economy of it. Nothing wasted in her body, nothing wasted on his. Whatever it is that separates a person who owns a skill from a person performing one, she had it, and it was legible from across a room through a viewfinder.
So when she asked, some time later, whether she might flog me, the question was never whether she could. It was whether I would open something I had shut deliberately, and then reinforced professionally, and then left alone for twenty years.
I took a long time to answer. When I finally said yes, I said it on its own terms. I had once asked whether I might flog her, and she had not answered, and I accepted her offer with none of that attached. Whatever she chose to do afterwards was hers to choose.
Under her floggers
Room Gold, in front of the floor to ceiling mirror, standing at her mobile cross and holding on to it rather than bound to it. The mirror meant we could see each other's faces throughout, which served her more than me. I spent most of the hour with my eyes shut.
She warmed my skin with heavier floggers and then began experimenting, deep and dull against sharp and stinging, reading which my body wanted. German has a word for the first kind, dumpf, and English has nothing as good. I already knew my answer and gave it directly, without ceremony: deeper rather than sharper, back rather than legs. Hekate is an artist of the finger floggers, and that is where the hour eventually went.
What I had not prepared for was how hard my own body would fight her.
For the first ten or fifteen minutes I could not put the Dominus down. He is not a costume, he is muscle. The resilience, the defiance, the reflex that meets pain by hardening against it and taking it and giving nothing back. I have spent twenty years training that into myself and it does not switch off because its owner has decided to have an evening away from work. I stood at that cross and refused, without meaning to, everything she was offering me.
Then it began to crack.
My muscles softened before my mind did. I started breathing into the pain instead of against it, and somewhere in there a low moan came out of me that I had not decided to make. I stopped tracking the room. My eyes were already closed, and my thoughts simply went out.
I want to be precise about how rare that is. I have ADHD and an internal control freak who works double shifts. I cannot meditate. I have tried, and the only place it has ever happened to me is while tying with rope. That evening it happened under leather: my mind went quiet, stayed quiet, and my body followed it down.
Since my last burnout, which I earned in tech long before this work, my nervous system has run hot. I do too many things at once. This profession, the activism, a company, a life. The alarm never quite switches off, and a body living on its own adrenaline loses the ability to notice that it is doing so. That evening it noticed. What arrived was not pleasure exactly. It was release, the kind of unclenching you cannot instruct a body to perform and do not get to schedule.
An hour, perhaps a little more. I drove home grinning like an idiot, looking at a city I have lived in for years as though somebody had cleaned the windows. She has written her own account of that evening, and I will leave the rest of it there.
Her floggers, her body, my authority at the door
Weeks later, she let me flog her. One condition, set before we began: no hierarchy, no power dynamic. None of the thing I am usually there for.
So I arrived with nothing of my own. Her tools, her body, her language, my authority left at the door, and all of it fitted the evening exactly. I was not there to dominate her. I was there at eye level to share something, and the ego that might have objected had not been invited.
I warmed her with my hand first, working from the top of the glutes down through to the end of the hamstrings, spending time on the sit bone, the one that carries your weight in a chair. Impact there sends a wave through her entire body, and I knew that before the evening started.
People ask how you come to know a thing like that about somebody. It arrives from three places. What the body says back to your hand. The small high inhale with a low moan underneath it, which means you have found something. And what a person tells you in conversation beforehand without any idea that they are telling you.
Once the skin had come up to a good warm pink I moved to her floggers, and immediately had to find my feet. I chose a large one to begin, wide leather strands shot through with something soft and fluffy, on the theory that it was the gentle option. Its impact area turned out to be far too broad to aim. I could not land twice in the same place, which is most of the point. She noticed before I had finished admitting it to myself and told me so, kindly, with enough play in it that we both laughed.
I swapped it for something heavier and thinner stranded, all leather, and the evening changed shape. Now a stroke went where I intended it. I found my zone, and as I did her instructions thinned out, and then stopped altogether.
After that we danced. That is genuinely what it becomes once you stop aiming and start moving. Rhythm first, then breath, hers and mine matching without either of us arranging it. My feet in constant motion, because the angle of an impact is decided by where my body stands and not by my wrist. The gaps between strokes doing as much work as the strokes. Sometimes slow and deliberate, sometimes quick and delighted, the whole thing circling her like a tango.
I laid a pattern across her back that began to resemble wings. I watched her threshold and moved between back, glutes, legs and the outsides of the thighs so that nothing ever became predictable. I brought in a paddle for a stretch, a different family of sensation entirely, which she half enjoyed and half did not, and both halves were useful. Then a single tail: a hiss as the first line went across her, from the whip and from her at the same moment, then a series of them, red over glutes and thighs and back. I let the speed come up until the tail was cracking small sonic booms above us, which is its own reminder of what is travelling across a person's skin. Then back to a heavy flogger.
Somewhere in there the work changed hands, and what followed belongs to the two of us. She has written what that evening was like from her side, which is hers to give.
What is left when you take the authority out
Remove the hierarchy from a session and you discover what your craft actually consists of. Attention. Timing. A willingness to be led. The ability to fill a room without taking it over, and I did expand into that room, all of me, mixing with the space she was already occupying, simply not as anybody's superior.
I did not miss it, which surprised me a little. Being trusted with somebody's release is no smaller a thing than being obeyed.
People assume an evening like that must have changed how I work. Honestly, it has not. I already read a session with an eye open for precisely these moments, and I did not need to be flogged to learn how to watch. What it changed was me. She offered first, I took a very long time to accept, and what I received was something I had withheld from myself for twenty years. Then she let me give her something back. Neither of us was above the other at any point.
I walk lighter now, and I am more at peace with all of myself, including the part I spent two decades declining to name.