I was gratified and, admittedly, slightly surprised to discover that I am as good at being with a woman as I am with a man.

I wasn't entirely sure that I would be - I have had little actual experience with women, despite their predominance in my fantasy life, and in my "real-life" encounters, I have usually been on the receiving rather than the giving end. Until recently, I had been more or less limited to drunken make-out sessions (well, of those there have been many, but usually with the sorts of women whose Sapphic inclinations only seem to manifest themselves when drinking, and only as way to get attention from men) and sharing a man during the occasional threesome. Not exactly the best forums in which to explore all of the possibilities - and, again, most of the women with whom I have been involved in that way have been givers. Which is fine insofar as it goes (I'm certainly not complaining), but none of them were much interested in reciprocation.

So, I've always been a bit nervous of the prospect of being with a woman one-on-one.

Like many women, one of my first sexual experiences was with one of my girl friends growing up. Practicing kissing at slumber parties is apparently a widespread enough practice as to have become cliche.

She was a church friend, natch, whose grandmother watched me after school. We spent a lot of time together, our parents unawares of what was really going on behind our closed bedroom doors when we had sleepovers. It went on for a while, maybe a couple months, and progressed a little bit further than your typical practice-kissing.

The first time it happened, we were playing "house". I am not sure whose idea it was, and whether or not it started out innocently or whether the game was an excuse for what was to come later (pubescent adolescents are a lot more aware of what they are doing than adults want to give them credit for). The first kiss was on the lips, but relatively chaste. No tongue.

The next time she stayed over, it went further but she, for reasons I can't quite fathom to this day, insisted that when we kissed we do it with a protective layer of saran wrap between us. Our tongues got tangled in the plastic.

She didn't, however, insist on it later when I kissed between her legs. Things progressed, as with each successive sleepover we tested the new waters between us, moving from fingering each other as we lay side by side, and once we were brazen enough to fondle each other's nipples in the back seat of my mother's car while cuddled up under a blanket and pretending to sleep as she drove us home from a long road trip.

She told me that she didn't want to do it anymore because she didn't want to be a lesbian. Then she stopped talking to me. I stopped going to church, changed schools, and became boy-crazy enough to put it out of my mind. She eventually moved out of state with her grandparents. Life went on, and it was a long time before my adolescent desire for other girls resurfaced - and even longer before I began to act on it.

At first, I didn't know what to do. Men are easy, they take no effort. With women I felt totally out of my element. What was I supposed to say?

Once, I had a golden opportunity, but I was so shocked by it that by the time I came to my senses it was already too late. I squandered it.

I was at a bar, visiting a friend who worked in the kitchen, sitting alone on a dimly lit couch and nursing a drink whenever he had to go back to take care of an order. That's where I was when she came to me. She had been sitting at the bar, eying me for a while - as I later realized - probably waiting for me to be alone again.

She walked straight up to me and, much to my surprise, kissed me full on the lips.

She was a bit shorter than me, with wild, curly hair that an art-critic would describe as Boticellian. Her figure was Rubenesque. She told me that I was beautiful and her name was Shalom. Then she turned around and went up the staircase behind the couch I was sitting on. I suppose that she wanted me to follow. I wanted to follow. I should have followed.

Instead, I sat there like an idiot, not quite sure exactly what had just happened or what I should do. My friend came back out from the kitchen, and as I was telling him what had happened she came back down and kissed me again on her way out the door.

I have thought about her frequently since, and the night we could have had. Imagining the things I would have done to her beautiful body and getting tangled up in her crazy mane of curls. Shalom.

***

She moaned loudly as I slid my tongue up and down her pussy, lightly teasing the barbell that pierced the hood above her clit. I was afraid, at first, that I would hurt her. When she assured me that I couldn't tear it out I went at her more vigorously, sucking and nibbling while fucking her with my fingers. With my other hand, I reached up and played with the rings in her nipples. She came hard, and after she left I could still smell her on the sheets.

Lessons to come...

- The Guitar Lesson, Balthus

I've had some interesting lessons this week. More on that soon.

"So, you gonna..."

Sometimes I think I hate sex.

I know; it's an odd thing to write in a blog which is, in fact, about sex.

When I think about it rationally, I know that it is not actually sex that I think I hate. It's the issues surrounding it - the murky waters of love and emotion, attachment and relationship, which I have such a hard time wading through and which sometimes, when it seems that I'm drowning, just don't seem worth it.

What it comes down to is that I am horribly, horribly, confused by my own sexuality.

It can be so hard to straighten it all out - what do I really want? What do I convince myself that I want in order to make someone else happy in order to get what I really want? What do I think that I want which, when confronted with the reality of it, I can't handle after all?

Well, I've got at least one tried and true answer to that question. Once, after B. told me of some of the sexual exploits of one of his exes, with whom he had first spent time at a gang-bang, I thought that I was turned on by the thought of myself in such a situation. He arranged for it to happen at a hotel right out of town and when, a few minutes after we got there, he told me to get on my knees and suck off the guy whose room it was - who, at that moment, was sitting at his laptop and arranging the arrival of the other participants - I freaked out and couldn't do it. We had to leave.

Why was that? Why couldn't I go through with something which I, myself, had suggested? I have thought about it but found no clear answer. To some extent, I think, the outright, well-then-get-to-it-ivness of the situation was too much for me.

Slut though I may be, I do have some peculiar attachments to setting, to foreplay - and just going down on some guy who I've just met without so much as a hand-shake whilst he's staring at a computer screen doesn't quite fit into my idea of whatever it is that means. At least, I didn't think it did at the time.

I am sure there's more to it, but I'm not quite sure what. (Did I think that's what B. wanted? Did I have a sense of competition with the ex, perhaps? Of wanting to say "hey, I can do that too?")

Though I hadn't made the connection before now, there is something about that reticence (okay, cowardly flight) which reminds me of another situation in which I had found myself, a few years prior:

I was, I thought, madly in love with James. We had met at a concert and subsequently hung out a few times, having a drink or watching movies on his roommates couch. Nothing had happened yet. He had been out of town, and while he was gone our flirtatious messaging escalated to ridiculous innuendo.

The first time we got together after he came back we were, as usual, watching a movie together when, seemingly out of the blue, he just looks at me expectantly, sort of motions to his crotch, and asks, "so, you gonna..."

Don't get me wrong, I wanted to suck his cock. Badly. I had been thinking about it for weeks. But I was horrified. He could tell, and asked what was wrong. I blushed and stammered something about his not having even touched me and that he made me feel like a prostitute.

For the record, I did suck his cock that night, swallowing his first load before he fucked me in the ass. He almost always fucked me in the ass - my hands against the wall, his arms wrapped around my throat, he whispering dirty-sweet nothings in my ear as he came. It was his favorite position. (And, for quite a while after I met him, mine).

In retrospect, especially after having actually been paid to get fucked in the ass after sucking someone off, I find something hilariously ironic about the fact that, at the time, I objected to his blatant proposition because it made me feel like a whore.

My fling with James actually serves as a perfect example of my confusion, of how mixed up and emotionally invested I get when, when it comes down to it, it's just about the sex. And the better the sex, the more worthless stock I've invested in it.

Sex with James was better than good. It lasted, off and on, for several months - even after he moved a state away, resuming whenever I happened to be in town. Many people, I think, can just count themselves lucky for a regular lay of such quality, enjoy the other's company for the duration of the fucking, and leave it at that. Not I. I was In Love with someone who, ultimately, I knew next to nothing about. I had all sorts of stories about who I thought he was which, I am sure now, had little resemblance to his true character. If I had had any amount of sense I would have seen that, but I was young and naive, and a bit of a romantic - a character trait over which I have caused myself plenty of grief. Once, after he moved, I had to leave an art gallery because I started crying over a sculpture of nails welded into the likeness of the tip of a penis perched between a pair of plump, steely, lips. It reminded me of him.

Most of my sexual partners, previous to B., were acquaintances to whom, in one way or another, I became as emotionally attached as I did to James - and usually on even flimsier grounds than I had with him. There were a few one night stands, and even fewer actual relationships, peppering the mix, but for the most part I fucked my friends.

The picture I paint here is of a romantic monogamist. Someone who has, mistakenly, used sex as a path to completion with The One; and perhaps subconsciously that is exactly what I was doing. Perhaps what I really want is just to be wanted. But while there might be some truth to it, it's an incomplete picture, a misrepresentation - because I've never really believed in The One, that someone else's wanting can make up for whatever it is I think I'm lacking, and I've never been any good at monogamy. And by "never been good at", I mean that I've never managed to sustain it. And by "never managed to sustain it", I mean that in every relationship I've entered into it wasn't long before I went straight out the side door and became a dirty, cheating, whore.

Sometimes I hate myself for it, and when the hopelessly confused self-loathing kick turns on it's easier to deflect it by deciding that sex, itself, is the culprit, and that I'd be better off without it.

Then I do it again and wonder, "what the hell was I thinking?".

- from "Bum Paintings", by Gillian Carnegie

The time that I became a whore - for real.

He paid $75 to fuck me in the ass.

I don't remember his name, or if I even knew it. B. set it up, and for one night, my husband became my pimp.

From the beginning of our relationship - as he likes to quip, the one night stand that never ended - our sexual dynamic has been one of control and degradation. I am a natural submissive. Something which, he has said, he realized immediately by the way that I responded to his first kiss, which took place only hours after we met, still seated closely in a dark booth in the seedy, tiki themed, dive bar which was the location of our first date.

I still remember the look of intense excitement on his face the first time that I asked him to slap me - "harder" - while we were fucking, not too long after that first night.

Everything was exciting then. It still is, just in different ways. There is little that rivals the first exploratory flush of new relationship sex. Though, admittedly, when one half of the relationship has as hard a time talking about sex as I, the revelations keep coming longer than average. As B. read The First, the first thing that he said was "I didn't know that you have had sex 'bent over the hood of a car, or in otherwise unoccupied theatre restrooms'" - which is exactly the kind of thing that he likes to hear about.

"I didn't know" and "you never told me" are things that he has to say to me far too frequently, and usually in reference to things that he very well should know, and that I should have already told him. And though he often exhibits more patience with me than one might realistically expect to receive from a saint, I can sometimes hear the faint tinge of resentment lingering underneath the surface. Why do I withhold?

I do go through occasional bouts of uncharacteristic openness - it was during one such time that I told him that I had fantasized about prostitution. We already had quite a few sexual adventures together racked up, and we were discussing my taking a regular lover in addition to the assorted strangers that end up in our bed. He likes sharing - in the way that one proves one's ownership over something by doing so.

It was with that frame of mind that he sold my company. I had already fucked someone else that night, while he watched from a crack between the closed closet doors. As I lay in bed after, stretching my aching hip joints and recuperating from the pounding that I had received, B. found my John.

Again, B. watched - though, if I remember correctly, this time through a slit in the curtain which separates our bedroom from the patio. He was youngish, tallish, and slightly awkward - I suspected that it was his first time engaging in a financial transaction for the sake of sex as well as mine. I don't remember too many particulars about him. Except for his cock; it was big, and it hurt when he penetrated my ass with it. The sex didn't last long, though he tried to prolong it (to get his money's worth?). He came quickly once he was inside me.

Before he left, he tossed his wad of cash on top of my naked body, as B. had instructed him to do. Once I was again alone, B. came back into the bedroom and beat me for being a whore. Then he took me himself, his sweat and semen mingling with that of the two men who I had already fucked that night.

On the pleasures of face-fucking...

"When the blowjob turns that seedy corner into the dark alley that is face-fucking, control is no longer mine. My skills, my play, my mouth cease to matter. The lips, the mouth, the throat, they become not much more than another cylinder of wet pink flesh and I am merely along for the ride. My lover wraps my hair in his fist like the reins of a half-broken horse and he rides my face at a gallop, pistoning his thick dick with thoughtless, somatic, and often painful, imprecision. Make no mistake: it hurts to be face-fucked, regardless how able a sword-swallower you are. The pain is integral."

- Chelsea G. Summers, ‘Choke’,

The First

I don't like talking about sex.

I was brought up in a strict, fundamentalist church, and as a child I was taught that sexual thoughts of any kind are tantamount to adultery. In which case, happening to have some decidedly sluttish tendencies roiling beneath the surface of my outwardly Puritanical demeanor, I've committed more than my fair share.

I think about sex. A lot. I have sex. A lot - and with few reservations when it comes to the action that takes place between the sheets. Or bent over the hood of a car. Or in otherwise unoccupied theatre restrooms. I just don't talk about it.

I'm not even quite sure, at this point, how many sexual partners I have had.

Before I got married, I think the number was hovering somewhere around twenty. Since I got married, I've lost count. The number has tripled, at least. I am an adultress. A sodomite. A whore.

When I was a kid, and still actively attending church, I used to masturbate and then pray. Not too long ago, when my husband asked me about my masturbatory fantasies, I could barely speak; evading and stalling, finally, hiding my head under the blanket (we were already in bed, post-fucking) until he managed to wheedle out of me stammered descriptions of the scenarios that I imagine to make myself come. He said he knew that I wanted him to know; and he was right, I did. But, on some level, I think that I should not have these thoughts, that they are unclean, and that by extension thinking them makes me unclean.

Sometimes, when I am laying alone in bed, vigorously rubbing my clit with the fingers of one hand, clenching my nipples or filling my cunt and asshole with the fingers of the other, imagining that they are not my own but the hands, tongues, and cocks of others, I find myself ashamed of my thoughts. And after, the compulsory impulse toward my childhood prayer nags in the corner of my mind -

"Dear God, please don't send me to Hell. I won't do it again. I promise."

I always did it again. Because, paradoxically, the burn of shame heightens the pleasure - I'm certainly not the first wayward soul to discover that truism. I know that I am not alone in my experience of the tittilation to be found in the taboo. In this, my husband understands me better than I understand myself.

He makes me tell him, and makes me act on the desires that I don't even want to admit to, because he knows that I want to be made. My perversities are his pleasures - not to say that it is an ideal situation. There have always been significant drawbacks and frustrations in my inability to be voluntarily forthcoming with my sexual appetites.

For starters, before meeting B., who is older, more experienced, and more comfortable with his own sexuality than I, few satisfing encounters can be found on the long laundry list of my sexual past. I have been so conflicted in both my motivations and desires that I have too frequently found myself having the wrong sex for the wrong reasons. And after, when the shame overcame the desire - as it must when such inner conflict is unresolved - despising myself for it. Sometimes because I didn't like what I had done, and sometimes because I had liked it too much.

But I am getting away from my point. Where was I?

I don't like talking about sex. Which, because I am a married, bisexual slut who likes to have affairs with random strangers, can be challenging. This is my attempt to reconcile what I want and what I do with what I'll admit to and what I pretend to be.

These are the things that I don't talk about. This is the pillow-book of my secret life.