Paladin's Deepest Fears - Part 1
This story is quite the game changer for Paladin and I. This is one of my more interesting and worthwhile reads in my own opinion, so please do give it a read, and comment as you feel inspired.
.
Friday, September 23rd, 2016, was my fifth full day with Hibiscus overseas for work. (He wouldn't be back until October 8th, fifteen days later.) It was a slow, sleepy day. Unlike Thursday, when Paladin and I had rushed about from the C.S.A. pick-up and the store, Friday was quiet. Even Metheus wasn't part of my day - he was away from internet reception for the weekend, tucked away at a remote cabin on his family's land in Arcticland.
.
I won't see Hibiscus for fifteen days. I won't be able to talk to Metheus for four or five days. What am I to do with myself? I thought. I feel lonely.
.
My heart ached. I kept thinking about how I missed loving Paladin. I missed what it felt like to be caressed by his energy, to feel enveloped in his love. At times I cried.
.
Friday afternoon, while curled up with Paladin, he asked me what I wanted. I thought seriously about it for a while. Finally I said:
.
"I want to cuddle for a while, and talk with you," I began. "And then I want intimate lymphatic massage from you. Then I want to watch Romance, cuddle, talk and process about the movie. Then I want you to have sex with me. Then I want to cuddle some more and go to sleep in your arms."
.
Paladin smiled at me, his eyes showing me amusement and fear. His mouth showed me joy beneath his auburn mustache. "That is quite the lineup. I don't think I'm up for all of it. I should be going to bed soon."
.
I glanced at the windows. The sun was still up. The sun was setting around seven-forty five these days. It was the day after the autumnal equinox. Paladin had begun a different sleep schedule around the same time that Hibiscus left for overseas, getting up before dawn and going to sleep before sunset.
.
The left side of my mouth twerked upward in wry frustration.
.
"If we have sex tonight, we could not use a condom. I'm expecting my period tomorrow. I can't get pregnant on the twenty-seventh day of my cycle," I said.
.
Paladin's face flitted with a series of emotions - anxiety, desire, interest, thoughtfulness, and fear. I knew how much the condoms bothered him. Paladin derived pleasure from texture more than pressure.
.
"I don't know about that," he said softly. "But we could probably watch the movie if we started now, but I'd like something to eat first," Paladin said.
.
"Okay," I said, jumping into action. I made herbal tea (consisting of chamomile, chaste berries, lemongrass, raspberry leaf, dandelion root, and calendula). He ate an orange bell pepper and a handful of almonds.
.
We returned to my room and settled in, piling pillows against the wall and pulling my monitor over the bed. The movie opened up with a man's face being powdered. I'd already seen the movie with Hibiscus before he left. It was French. I watched it with English subtitles. This was the second French movie I'd ever seen. The first had been The Green Beautiful, or, more accurately, La Belle Verte. It had become my favorite movie.
.
I must like French people, I thought. Considering that the character I've related to most is created from the journal of French woman. I was thinking of The General's Mistress, a historical fiction novel by Jo Graham.
.
The movie Romance shocked me in its ability to winnow down to my core. The main female character was so much like myself. She felt my pain - that of never being sexually desirable enough, falling in love with a man who was afraid of sex at a deep level. Her narrative was so much like my own that I gripped Hibiscus's hand tightly through most of the movie.
.
Now, watching it with Paladin, I felt anxious for a different reason. How much will he understand? How much will he relate to? How much of me will he see in her? Will he mistake the parts of her that are not like me for being like me?
.
And then, perhaps about ten minutes into the movie, a scene includes the exposure of a man's penis. Just before it got to that moment, I said aloud, "I should probably warn you that this movie includes male nudity."
.
Paladin covered his eyes. I let him know when it was safe to look again. At one point the woman thinks to herself, "There is something to the saying that a man who screws a woman honors her. It is true."
.
I said to Paladin, "That must be a French saying. I've never heard it."
.
"Yes," Paladin said, "Nor I. The French are different."
.
The French sound more like my people, I thought. All except for the smoking cigarettes part.
.
We were about twenty-five minutes in when my computer crashed. It had been having issues the past couple days, seemingly revolving around some automatic Windows 10 update. Paladin had concluded that the computer had crashed during the update, causing the update to go severely awry. My files were working on being duplicated on the server as we watched the movie.
.
The computer refused to reboot. I nodded to myself. It made perfect sense. We're meant to talk about what has transpired thus far before we go further. The movie gets heavier from here. It will be good to process this part on its own.
.
Paladin's movements were jerky. He put his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. Panic was written all over his body.
.
"It's okay," I said to him. "Really. What's the worst? You have to back-up everything and reformat the drive? Or maybe you have to buy a new one?"
.
"It might not be possible to back it up anymore," he said.
.
"Maybe. Even if so, most of my recent work is backed up to the cloud or the server. I'll lose some things, but not too terribly much," I said.
.
He sighed, clearly relieved. My mind jumped to a file I had worked hard to create, part of my most recent game-creation inspiration. I would be rather sad to lose it, but it was, thankfully, the only thing I could think of that I would be losing that would be hard to regain.
.
He pulled out my hard-drive and put it into his computer. After ten minutes he was able to conclude that he could safely copy the files from it. I asked to access it and copy the important files to me first. I started with the file I had been thinking remorsefully about. A minute later I felt much better when it had successfully copied to our triple-mirrored server.
.
Paladin went on to try various scans of the hard-drive while I began to play with his hair. I began putting in small, tight little braids up against his scalp. French braids to go with the French movie, I thought. I braided his hair for around thirty minutes, making an occasional comment here and there.
.
"The timing of the movie makes me feel like we're supposed to talk about it before watching more of it," I said, putting on the last rubber band.
.
"Okay."
.
"Do you still need to do anything with my hard-drive right now?"
.
"No, I'll let it fully backup first," he said.
.
"Okay, let me take some photos of your hair, then let's talk."
.
"Okay," he said. I went into my room, fetched my camera, returned to his room and took a number of photographs of his hair. I showed him a couple of the best shots and then returned the camera to my room. I returned to his room and settled on his bed mats and blankets.
.
He got up from his gray-upholstered, metal-wheeled office chair and crawled onto the bedding beside me.
.
"What feelings came up for you watching the movie thus far?" I asked.
.
"It made me feel sad," he began. He expressed his remorse about not being able to have gratifying sex life with me. We compared the man in the movie to Paladin. The man in the movie was clearly more repressed than Paladin, completely disguising his own fear as indifference. Paladin could perceive that more clearly than I, as he felt empathy for the man. Paladin, at least, had enough access to his sexual blocks that he felt no need to justify or rationalize them with cop-out statements like, "There is more to life that that."
.
Paladin, at least, wanted a sex-life with me. He just didn't know how to get there past all of his anxiety and pain.
.
"When we met, it was different," I said. "I had so much to learn from you. You were sheltering me, protecting me, and teaching me. I gained so much every day that I was with you. You read to me. We played games together. We experimented with food together."
.
I took a sip of water through my silicone straw. The purple quart jar had been an early gift from Hibiscus, back when he was feeling romantic toward me - many years more recent than the time I alluded to with Paladin. (2015 versus 2010.)
.
"Then after we left Sunnyland, I lost much of that. I had already learned most of what you had to teach me. But I believed you shared my dreams. But you don't share my dreams. And what you have left to teach me are things I either am not interested in - such as how to repair computers - or information so hard to access that it isn't readily teachable.
.
"I want a relationship with you, but that means sharing something together. I would like it if you still read to me, if you came to me to braid your hair. If we could learn to communicate better, and if you wouldn't get triggered and storm off, maybe we could learn to work together."
.
Paladin's eyebrows showed his pain. His eyes were closed, his mouth fixed in a line. Even beneath his beard I could see the tension in the set of his jaw. Then his face crumpled, opened and expanded with grief. My heart expanded as I watched. He looked the same as he did the first time I'd seen him cry - after the very first three-week visit I made. He cried at the airport, looking at me through the glass on the other side of security. My heart had expanded and filled with him then, just as it did now.
.
I placed my hand to his heart. His voice was hoarse and high-pitched when he spoke: "I don't want that. A relationship of logistics and reading? That isn't enough." He sobbed harder, clutching me to him as I wrapped my arms around him.
.
He really wants me, I thought. It was a small revelation. So rarely could I perceive that he actually wanted me, actually cared for me. So rarely did he show it. So rarely did he give me this vulnerable, grieving part of himself. I sucked it in, purring in soft moans of compassion. My fingers stroked the braids I had given him, my touch filled with attentive, slow affection.
.
I held him for a long while. In order to process his fears around sexuality, he needs more awareness of them, I thought. I put my hand on his thigh. Slowly, watching his face, I brought my hand toward his crotch.
.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
.
His mouth twitched. I brought my hand up a little further. "Nervous," he said. "Afraid."
.
I nodded slightly, although he wasn't looking at me. He was staring into space, seeing the inside of his emotions. I drank in the sight of him - vulnerable and exposed before me. He was fully dressed, but his face showed me a piece of his heart.
.
"Where do you feel the fear?" I asked, putting my hand over his cock. Through the fabric I could tell he was soft, not-at-all aroused by this exploration of his anxiety.
.
He reached his left hand toward his right shoulder and groped for his shoulder-blade. "Here," he said after he had finally reached the part of his back. "And here," he said, touching his forehead, "and here," he said cupping the back of his neck.
.
The three places he most often feels pain, I thought. Headaches, neck pain and back pain. It is anxiety. I tucked away my thoughts like notes written on a clipboard for later examination.
.
I began to stroke him softly and slowly through the fabric. "What else do you notice?"
.
He shook his head slightly. "Afraid," he said.
.
I took my hand away, suddenly feeling afraid too. I'm going about this all wrong, aren't I? I took the silence and stillness of the room to collect my thoughts. He is vulnerable. He is afraid, I reviewed. I'm vulnerable. I'm afraid. I don't need him right now. It is a safe time to experiment. There is no way around the issue - only through it. He needs to be vulnerable to move through it. I nodded to myself, feeling more sure of myself again.
.
"How do you feel now?" I asked.
.
After several long seconds, he said, "The fear is slowly fading."
.
I touched him again. "Does it come back right away?" I asked.
.
We went on like that for some time. I tried kissing him gently. I stroked his nipples. Everything made him feel afraid, anxious, guilty, hurt, pained, strained or exhausted.
.
"I'm afraid you're expecting something of me that I can't give," he said, at last offering to me more explanation.
.
"It is okay. You don't have to give me anything. Just feel," I said.
.
He nodded and then began to cry. I held him. I cried some too. We were at our best when we cried together. It was our communion.
.
"I'm sorry," he said.
.
"It's okay. Crying is good," I said.
.
He shook his head and cried that it didn't help, that it wasn't enough.
.
"It is important," I said. "Crying is healing. It is relief," I said.
.
"What about yours?"
.
My throat choked up. He cares, I thought. He really cares. So often I had felt shamed by him. I felt like my sexuality was wrong around him. But now, in his raw and ragged voice, in the midst of his terrible grief, he asked: What of my relief?
.
My own tears came in earnest. My own relief, of a kind. I curled over his legs and wrapped my arms around them. I cried hard. He stroked my back. His touch was so welcome. He loves me. He cares about my relief. He cares about me, I thought.
.
My breasts to his legs, my face in his covers, and my butt hanging somewhat in the air . . . the position felt so sexual. And dangling in my mind was hope. I felt the familiar pull between my legs and immediately shuddered in fear.
.
"Fuck!" I cried, sitting up, my hands clasping into fists and releasing again. I wanted to take him, I wanted to push him back on the bed and make him mine. To hell with his blocks. But I can't do that. He'd feel violated. He wouldn't be able to trust me. He wouldn't be able to stay hard. My nostrils flared, and then a small revelation dawned on me.
.
Perhaps he is so afraid because he can detect my desire to take him - perhaps he can feel my "inner rapist" even when I don't let it show.
.
I took in a deep breath, letting my anger melt into despair. There was no action I could take. "I can't have hope," I said. "Hope will make me want you." My voice was anguished. The desire was scary - if I wanted him then he could disappoint me. He could devastate me if I wanted him too much. That wasn't safe at all. And my desire would make it unsafe for him to explore his desire. Fuck, fuck, fuck, I repeated to myself. Hope is not going to make this easier right now.
.
I began crying hysterically. "My walls against wanting you keep you safe," I said through my tears, fumbling for another tissue. "I need them, and they've melted away."
.
He began crying again too. We blew our noses together and tossed the tissues into the growing pile on the floor. I had already once gathered them up and moved them to his compost bin.
.
"I'm sorry," he said.
.
I pulled him into my arms again. "I'm sorry too," I said.
.
When we had thoroughly emptied our sinuses, we sat quietly again. I looked at him and he looked at me. I touched his leg, somewhat suggestively. Usually he wouldn't be able to read the sexuality in my touch, but in this context, I thought he could.
.
"I'm so afraid," he said. I nodded sadly and leaned in to kiss him. He pressed his lips to mine. He seemed relaxed, until I touched my tongue to his lip. I felt him tense. I stilled again, and he kissed me a little, slowly relaxing. I stayed still, not moving my lips. He seemed to like that - just pressing his lips to mine as I stayed still, placidly accepting his stillness or movement.
.
He eventually moved away and looked at me again.
.
"You're not afraid when you're in control," I observed.
.
Click here to keep reading.
.
Friday, September 23rd, 2016, was my fifth full day with Hibiscus overseas for work. (He wouldn't be back until October 8th, fifteen days later.) It was a slow, sleepy day. Unlike Thursday, when Paladin and I had rushed about from the C.S.A. pick-up and the store, Friday was quiet. Even Metheus wasn't part of my day - he was away from internet reception for the weekend, tucked away at a remote cabin on his family's land in Arcticland.
.
I won't see Hibiscus for fifteen days. I won't be able to talk to Metheus for four or five days. What am I to do with myself? I thought. I feel lonely.
.
My heart ached. I kept thinking about how I missed loving Paladin. I missed what it felt like to be caressed by his energy, to feel enveloped in his love. At times I cried.
.
Friday afternoon, while curled up with Paladin, he asked me what I wanted. I thought seriously about it for a while. Finally I said:
.
"I want to cuddle for a while, and talk with you," I began. "And then I want intimate lymphatic massage from you. Then I want to watch Romance, cuddle, talk and process about the movie. Then I want you to have sex with me. Then I want to cuddle some more and go to sleep in your arms."
.
Paladin smiled at me, his eyes showing me amusement and fear. His mouth showed me joy beneath his auburn mustache. "That is quite the lineup. I don't think I'm up for all of it. I should be going to bed soon."
.
I glanced at the windows. The sun was still up. The sun was setting around seven-forty five these days. It was the day after the autumnal equinox. Paladin had begun a different sleep schedule around the same time that Hibiscus left for overseas, getting up before dawn and going to sleep before sunset.
.
The left side of my mouth twerked upward in wry frustration.
.
"If we have sex tonight, we could not use a condom. I'm expecting my period tomorrow. I can't get pregnant on the twenty-seventh day of my cycle," I said.
.
Paladin's face flitted with a series of emotions - anxiety, desire, interest, thoughtfulness, and fear. I knew how much the condoms bothered him. Paladin derived pleasure from texture more than pressure.
.
"I don't know about that," he said softly. "But we could probably watch the movie if we started now, but I'd like something to eat first," Paladin said.
.
"Okay," I said, jumping into action. I made herbal tea (consisting of chamomile, chaste berries, lemongrass, raspberry leaf, dandelion root, and calendula). He ate an orange bell pepper and a handful of almonds.
.
We returned to my room and settled in, piling pillows against the wall and pulling my monitor over the bed. The movie opened up with a man's face being powdered. I'd already seen the movie with Hibiscus before he left. It was French. I watched it with English subtitles. This was the second French movie I'd ever seen. The first had been The Green Beautiful, or, more accurately, La Belle Verte. It had become my favorite movie.
.
I must like French people, I thought. Considering that the character I've related to most is created from the journal of French woman. I was thinking of The General's Mistress, a historical fiction novel by Jo Graham.
.
The movie Romance shocked me in its ability to winnow down to my core. The main female character was so much like myself. She felt my pain - that of never being sexually desirable enough, falling in love with a man who was afraid of sex at a deep level. Her narrative was so much like my own that I gripped Hibiscus's hand tightly through most of the movie.
.
Now, watching it with Paladin, I felt anxious for a different reason. How much will he understand? How much will he relate to? How much of me will he see in her? Will he mistake the parts of her that are not like me for being like me?
.
And then, perhaps about ten minutes into the movie, a scene includes the exposure of a man's penis. Just before it got to that moment, I said aloud, "I should probably warn you that this movie includes male nudity."
.
Paladin covered his eyes. I let him know when it was safe to look again. At one point the woman thinks to herself, "There is something to the saying that a man who screws a woman honors her. It is true."
.
I said to Paladin, "That must be a French saying. I've never heard it."
.
"Yes," Paladin said, "Nor I. The French are different."
.
The French sound more like my people, I thought. All except for the smoking cigarettes part.
.
We were about twenty-five minutes in when my computer crashed. It had been having issues the past couple days, seemingly revolving around some automatic Windows 10 update. Paladin had concluded that the computer had crashed during the update, causing the update to go severely awry. My files were working on being duplicated on the server as we watched the movie.
.
The computer refused to reboot. I nodded to myself. It made perfect sense. We're meant to talk about what has transpired thus far before we go further. The movie gets heavier from here. It will be good to process this part on its own.
.
Paladin's movements were jerky. He put his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. Panic was written all over his body.
.
"It's okay," I said to him. "Really. What's the worst? You have to back-up everything and reformat the drive? Or maybe you have to buy a new one?"
.
"It might not be possible to back it up anymore," he said.
.
"Maybe. Even if so, most of my recent work is backed up to the cloud or the server. I'll lose some things, but not too terribly much," I said.
.
He sighed, clearly relieved. My mind jumped to a file I had worked hard to create, part of my most recent game-creation inspiration. I would be rather sad to lose it, but it was, thankfully, the only thing I could think of that I would be losing that would be hard to regain.
.
He pulled out my hard-drive and put it into his computer. After ten minutes he was able to conclude that he could safely copy the files from it. I asked to access it and copy the important files to me first. I started with the file I had been thinking remorsefully about. A minute later I felt much better when it had successfully copied to our triple-mirrored server.
.
Paladin went on to try various scans of the hard-drive while I began to play with his hair. I began putting in small, tight little braids up against his scalp. French braids to go with the French movie, I thought. I braided his hair for around thirty minutes, making an occasional comment here and there.
.
"The timing of the movie makes me feel like we're supposed to talk about it before watching more of it," I said, putting on the last rubber band.
.
"Okay."
.
"Do you still need to do anything with my hard-drive right now?"
.
"No, I'll let it fully backup first," he said.
.
"Okay, let me take some photos of your hair, then let's talk."
.
"Okay," he said. I went into my room, fetched my camera, returned to his room and took a number of photographs of his hair. I showed him a couple of the best shots and then returned the camera to my room. I returned to his room and settled on his bed mats and blankets.
.
He got up from his gray-upholstered, metal-wheeled office chair and crawled onto the bedding beside me.
.
"What feelings came up for you watching the movie thus far?" I asked.
.
"It made me feel sad," he began. He expressed his remorse about not being able to have gratifying sex life with me. We compared the man in the movie to Paladin. The man in the movie was clearly more repressed than Paladin, completely disguising his own fear as indifference. Paladin could perceive that more clearly than I, as he felt empathy for the man. Paladin, at least, had enough access to his sexual blocks that he felt no need to justify or rationalize them with cop-out statements like, "There is more to life that that."
.
Paladin, at least, wanted a sex-life with me. He just didn't know how to get there past all of his anxiety and pain.
.
"When we met, it was different," I said. "I had so much to learn from you. You were sheltering me, protecting me, and teaching me. I gained so much every day that I was with you. You read to me. We played games together. We experimented with food together."
.
I took a sip of water through my silicone straw. The purple quart jar had been an early gift from Hibiscus, back when he was feeling romantic toward me - many years more recent than the time I alluded to with Paladin. (2015 versus 2010.)
.
"Then after we left Sunnyland, I lost much of that. I had already learned most of what you had to teach me. But I believed you shared my dreams. But you don't share my dreams. And what you have left to teach me are things I either am not interested in - such as how to repair computers - or information so hard to access that it isn't readily teachable.
.
"I want a relationship with you, but that means sharing something together. I would like it if you still read to me, if you came to me to braid your hair. If we could learn to communicate better, and if you wouldn't get triggered and storm off, maybe we could learn to work together."
.
Paladin's eyebrows showed his pain. His eyes were closed, his mouth fixed in a line. Even beneath his beard I could see the tension in the set of his jaw. Then his face crumpled, opened and expanded with grief. My heart expanded as I watched. He looked the same as he did the first time I'd seen him cry - after the very first three-week visit I made. He cried at the airport, looking at me through the glass on the other side of security. My heart had expanded and filled with him then, just as it did now.
.
I placed my hand to his heart. His voice was hoarse and high-pitched when he spoke: "I don't want that. A relationship of logistics and reading? That isn't enough." He sobbed harder, clutching me to him as I wrapped my arms around him.
.
He really wants me, I thought. It was a small revelation. So rarely could I perceive that he actually wanted me, actually cared for me. So rarely did he show it. So rarely did he give me this vulnerable, grieving part of himself. I sucked it in, purring in soft moans of compassion. My fingers stroked the braids I had given him, my touch filled with attentive, slow affection.
.
I held him for a long while. In order to process his fears around sexuality, he needs more awareness of them, I thought. I put my hand on his thigh. Slowly, watching his face, I brought my hand toward his crotch.
.
"How do you feel?" I asked.
.
His mouth twitched. I brought my hand up a little further. "Nervous," he said. "Afraid."
.
I nodded slightly, although he wasn't looking at me. He was staring into space, seeing the inside of his emotions. I drank in the sight of him - vulnerable and exposed before me. He was fully dressed, but his face showed me a piece of his heart.
.
"Where do you feel the fear?" I asked, putting my hand over his cock. Through the fabric I could tell he was soft, not-at-all aroused by this exploration of his anxiety.
.
He reached his left hand toward his right shoulder and groped for his shoulder-blade. "Here," he said after he had finally reached the part of his back. "And here," he said, touching his forehead, "and here," he said cupping the back of his neck.
.
The three places he most often feels pain, I thought. Headaches, neck pain and back pain. It is anxiety. I tucked away my thoughts like notes written on a clipboard for later examination.
.
I began to stroke him softly and slowly through the fabric. "What else do you notice?"
.
He shook his head slightly. "Afraid," he said.
.
I took my hand away, suddenly feeling afraid too. I'm going about this all wrong, aren't I? I took the silence and stillness of the room to collect my thoughts. He is vulnerable. He is afraid, I reviewed. I'm vulnerable. I'm afraid. I don't need him right now. It is a safe time to experiment. There is no way around the issue - only through it. He needs to be vulnerable to move through it. I nodded to myself, feeling more sure of myself again.
.
"How do you feel now?" I asked.
.
After several long seconds, he said, "The fear is slowly fading."
.
I touched him again. "Does it come back right away?" I asked.
.
We went on like that for some time. I tried kissing him gently. I stroked his nipples. Everything made him feel afraid, anxious, guilty, hurt, pained, strained or exhausted.
.
"I'm afraid you're expecting something of me that I can't give," he said, at last offering to me more explanation.
.
"It is okay. You don't have to give me anything. Just feel," I said.
.
He nodded and then began to cry. I held him. I cried some too. We were at our best when we cried together. It was our communion.
.
"I'm sorry," he said.
.
"It's okay. Crying is good," I said.
.
He shook his head and cried that it didn't help, that it wasn't enough.
.
"It is important," I said. "Crying is healing. It is relief," I said.
.
"What about yours?"
.
My throat choked up. He cares, I thought. He really cares. So often I had felt shamed by him. I felt like my sexuality was wrong around him. But now, in his raw and ragged voice, in the midst of his terrible grief, he asked: What of my relief?
.
My own tears came in earnest. My own relief, of a kind. I curled over his legs and wrapped my arms around them. I cried hard. He stroked my back. His touch was so welcome. He loves me. He cares about my relief. He cares about me, I thought.
.
My breasts to his legs, my face in his covers, and my butt hanging somewhat in the air . . . the position felt so sexual. And dangling in my mind was hope. I felt the familiar pull between my legs and immediately shuddered in fear.
.
"Fuck!" I cried, sitting up, my hands clasping into fists and releasing again. I wanted to take him, I wanted to push him back on the bed and make him mine. To hell with his blocks. But I can't do that. He'd feel violated. He wouldn't be able to trust me. He wouldn't be able to stay hard. My nostrils flared, and then a small revelation dawned on me.
.
Perhaps he is so afraid because he can detect my desire to take him - perhaps he can feel my "inner rapist" even when I don't let it show.
.
I took in a deep breath, letting my anger melt into despair. There was no action I could take. "I can't have hope," I said. "Hope will make me want you." My voice was anguished. The desire was scary - if I wanted him then he could disappoint me. He could devastate me if I wanted him too much. That wasn't safe at all. And my desire would make it unsafe for him to explore his desire. Fuck, fuck, fuck, I repeated to myself. Hope is not going to make this easier right now.
.
I began crying hysterically. "My walls against wanting you keep you safe," I said through my tears, fumbling for another tissue. "I need them, and they've melted away."
.
He began crying again too. We blew our noses together and tossed the tissues into the growing pile on the floor. I had already once gathered them up and moved them to his compost bin.
.
"I'm sorry," he said.
.
I pulled him into my arms again. "I'm sorry too," I said.
.
When we had thoroughly emptied our sinuses, we sat quietly again. I looked at him and he looked at me. I touched his leg, somewhat suggestively. Usually he wouldn't be able to read the sexuality in my touch, but in this context, I thought he could.
.
"I'm so afraid," he said. I nodded sadly and leaned in to kiss him. He pressed his lips to mine. He seemed relaxed, until I touched my tongue to his lip. I felt him tense. I stilled again, and he kissed me a little, slowly relaxing. I stayed still, not moving my lips. He seemed to like that - just pressing his lips to mine as I stayed still, placidly accepting his stillness or movement.
.
He eventually moved away and looked at me again.
.
"You're not afraid when you're in control," I observed.
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