It Only Seems Kinky The First Time (Part One)

"It hurts to set you free, but you'll never follow me. The end of laughter and soft lies, the end of nights we tried to die. This is the end."

I've been meaning to do this post for a while, given that so much of this blog has already touched on sex and sexuality. I wanted to get it out from behind everything and do an essay/story on it, just so people stop mentioning a) how frustrated I've appeared lately, and b) the fact that I haven't posted anywhere near as filthily as promised. I don't think I'm going to get too dirty here, but there's a definite possibility of a controversial view or two. As usual.

So I was talking to my older sister tonight. It's actually fairly rare for us to meet up online, mostly because every time we do it becomes a debate about something. In this case, we kicked off with my lack of gainful employment, found our way along the well-trodden paths of my disdain for convention, then wound up arguing about what is or isn't natural in relationships and family. That, ultimately, is the point I want to get to in this series of posts. But the road to that argument is long and winding, and there's some fairly funky scenery. So let's do it.

Firstly, my views are obviously based on my own experiences and those of the people around me. I come from a broken home, and the very reason that home was broken was my father's drinking and infidelity. In the aftermath of the break, my mother saw a lot of different men. It was obvious why, even to a child. She settled in the end, but I don't think my father ever would have. The only thing that stopped that guy was death.

I was around a lot of relationships that shifted and changed and broke up and came together again. I can think of three stable, traditional partnerships within my extended family. The rest are all over the place. It seemed normal to me as a child and it seems normal to me now. To stay with one person forever is not, in my experience, the done thing.

I lost my virginity at either fourteen or fifteen. I've forgotten the exact date, telling you just how memorable the experience was. The girl who took it seemed to want to do so simply to get it out of the way. She was pretty popular, and I harbour no illusions that I was her first. I did have a huge crush on her, though, which was why saying no was almost unthinkable. That experience, in my memory, is a two-minute loss of self-esteem. That orgasm is not one that has stayed with me. That girl...I saw her a few weeks back. She didn't recognise me. I made no effort to be recognised. I noticed her and then kept my eyes resolutely forward. What would we say to each other?

I slept with a few other girls during my time at school and college, but there was nothing dramatic or exciting about those encounters. I don't recall actively caring about those people. If that sounds cold it's because I was a cold person then. Puberty was a nightmare for me. My father died, my mother remarried, we moved to a new town. I was cold because I didn't know how to express the sadness I felt in some way that would make it different to everybody else's sadness. The things I did were just things I did. I didn't attach significance to anything. I drifted through life like a ghost. And yes, there's no doubt that my behaviour during those times hurt some people. It was who I was. In some respects, I still am that person.

Sex came alive for me when I met Denise. I thought about not naming her in this story, but there's no point in anonymity. Anyone that knew me through that period of time knows who she is, and it's only a name to those that didn't. The chances of her reading this are somewhere between slim and none. But if she ever does, I'd like to think I'm going to give an honest account of her.

Denise bowled me over. She killed me. We'd known each other by sight as children, but never on a personal level. One bright summer day in 1996, I was walking out of a record shop in Edgware when I heard a girl calling my name. I turned around and there she was. Denise. Maybe five-feet-two standing on tiptoes, slim and pale and fragile like all the girls in my fiction since, owner of the blue eyes I got hooked on, of the wide and wonderful mouth that was usually either kissing or talking or trying to do both at the same time. If talking was an olympic event, Denise would be a multiple champion. I loved that about her. I loved talking to her, arguing with her, listening to her. In bed, I was always surprised at the way that beautiful mouth could frame itself around such dirty words. It seemed wrong somehow, wonderfully deviant, like graffiti scrawled on a priceless painting.

We were opposites in many ways. At seventeen, I was confused and emotionally uptight. I didn't know what I wanted from life, and I spent much of my time buried in books. I was studying politics and sociology, and the theories of Karl Marx were just beginning to set bells ringing in my mind. Denise was closing on her nineteenth birthday, taking a year out between college and university in order to make some money and - as she put it - 'find herself'. For my new girlfriend, this exploration became almost exclusively sexual. With the benefit of hindsight, she always had the zeal of a fresh convert to some cause. She could talk politics. She could talk about pretty much anything. But she preferred to talk about sex. She liked to voice new ideas and she preached the gospel of limits, a theory that's stayed with me ever since.

You're probably thinking, but Michael, that sounds like fun. That sounds like a big ol' box of joy and sexual ecstasy. And you'd be right. It was fun. At first.

We fucked on the first date. And the second, and the third. We fucked anytime we could get away with it. I started staying over at her house. Just the night at first, then weeks at a time. I couldn't get enough of her. I'd turn up to her house from college and we'd go straight to bed if her dad was home. If he wasn't, we might just go for it in the hallway, or the lounge, or the kitchen. Then we'd take a shower and wander down to the pub, where we'd sit and toss theory around for a few hours before heading back home for more sex and then the kind of late-night, wrapped-in-each-other conversations that will always be my favourite part of any intimate relationship. That's a typical night in the early stages of our relationship. It wasn't every night, but that was mostly what we did.

In a way, she was training me. Training's the wrong word, but it fits. Maybe waiting for me to get acclimatised. The first few times we were intimate, she did everything. Over time, she encouraged me to come out of myself. I was falling for her, and she found it easy to get me to do things. Again, with hindsight, maybe I could have stopped the spiral that followed. But I didn't see and I didn't know.

"Don't you see?" she said. "This may be the only chance we get to do these things, to live like this. We should try it all, open ourselves up and see what happens."

I did see. But as it turned out, I didn't see in quite the same way. We started out with a little light bondage, nothing serious. We tied each other up, we played sensory deprivation games, we played with lit candles and ice cubes. We laughed while we did it, sometimes nervously, sometimes because it was genuinely ridiculous. It was always Denise who encouraged the next step. She'd ask me about my fantasies, ask me if I wanted her to dress up, if I liked the idea of taking her roughly or even hurting her. I wasn't comfortable enough with myself to answer those questions. I'd shrug or change the subject.

But we got there in the end. I did want to explore those things, but I didn't know how to say it. She seemed so bold to me, so fearless. She introduced a roleplaying element to our time together. She'd play the whore or the unwilling innocent, loving every minute of it. I'd be the embarrassed client or the lover that wouldn't be denied. Denise got so into her roles that she introduced a codeword in the event that things got out of hand.

"If I say 'red'" she told me, "it means I'm telling you to stop. Immediately."

That was how we got into the pain games.

Hell, I'm sure you've all had your own experiences. I'm sure you've read the books and seen the movies. Some of you, no doubt, have even got the T-shirt. So let's just say that, while things were escalating, it never got serious. There was no blood and no major bruising. My arms ached sometimes, and I had some pretty awesome scratchmarks about my person, but that was about the extent of it. We were having a lot of fun. Both of us.

Then she told me she loved me, and everything changed.