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I have never let anyone else enter my body like this. Blood has been a pleasure, a torture that I have reserved for myself. But now I hand you the blade, tell you that there is one last task I have for you tonight. You have been wonderfully submissive, and a certain power and mystery (I am loathe to call it magic) charges the air. I want to give of myself with the trusting, need-filled hunger that you show, but I can't. I don't understand submission in the same way, and fear I can't ever bridge that gap. Submitting to a man doesn't feel like a choice I can make for myself, but the fulfillment of an external expectation. But understand this I appreciate your gift of yourself to me. I feel that you do belong to me, preposterous as that notion is; right now it is the truth. I hand you the blade and tell you to cut me. I point to the spot on my left forearm where I want the mark. I've been waiting for the right time to open my flesh to you. Wanting my own mark to match the small cross I gave you a month or so ago, now a small light scar. I've been planning on re-cutting it to thicken the white keloid lines. It was only the second or third time I'd cut you, and the first time that I really let myself give in to my excitement. My sudden sense of arousal surprised me and I think frightened you. I'd slowly cleaned the blade with pre-cut alcohol swabs, savoring the sharp stinging smell as it swelled and then evaporated. I used maybe ten packets between the blade and your flesh, more than enough to prep your arm physically. Enjoying the psychological preparation and ritual sense of cleaning you, the heightened impact on all your senses that the alcohol effected. Smooth and cool on your arm, the smell hit your nose and you closed your eyes, then opened them again. You wondered if I was ready then and raised your head, no fear in your eyes as they met mine. You held out your arm, aware that it was a sacrifice, a holy act and not just kinky sex that I wanted. I picked up the clean blade, suddenly shaking with excitement. I cut you, not too deeply. Tension flowed from my body through the blade with the force to part flesh. Your skin opened, blood welled up at the apex of the cross. I bent to lick it delicately but couldn't bring my mouth away. I sucked wistfully, body writhing around the slit in your arm. Sucking and swallowing. My tongue moved into the wound, you pulled away slightly at the pain. I looked up at your face, aware that my eyes must look slightly mad, pupils dilated and burning into yours with my plea for more blood. You worked your arm, massaged the skin, made a fist to bring it to the surface for me. It was so dark against your pale arm. I wanted to cry, drip salty stinging drops on the wound and lick up the small river that would course toward the fold in your elbow. I was done sucking. I opened more foil packets, quickly cleaned the blade and wiped up the wet streaks from your arm. But tonight I hand the blade over and ask you to cut me. I'd told you before that this is off-limits behavior, and you are confused, unsure if I really want this or if I'm responding to the energy in the air or some darker force within myself of which you're still unaware. Probably both of these are true, but I know that my feelings won't shift back now that the boundary has broken open. "Tell me how," you whisper. "You're the expert." I am. In the decade of my life in which I was most unhappy, I cut myself with changing degrees of frequency, intensity, and depth. From 15 to 25 I could always depend on the blade of a knife to calm me. I still have scars on the backs of my hands and wrists that I scratched into myself during 11th grade biology class. Me, who was too squeamish to pin a worm to the tray and slit lengthwise had no compunction about using that same pin or blade to slice in to myself. I still have vague, wide scars on my breasts, cut vertically down toward the nipple. And the thin line across my cheek that I cut with a piece of glass I'd hidden in my pocket one January between semesters. This was in college when my girlfriend and I were fighting all the time, and the only way I could think to make it stop was to slap her across the face, slicing my cheek open in the next moment. The two actions parallel in my mind; the smooth clean arc of my palm slicing through the air to connect with her heated, red-spotted cheek and the twin motion of my hand moving from pocket to ear, dragging the glass forward and bringing the blood and heat to the surface. It stopped the fight and began the unraveling of our life together. I would repeat this act one more time with another woman, pushing her out of my way and into the hallway wall on my way into the bathroom, where I locked the door and opened a razor, freeing the blade. Severing her responsibility for the relationship going bad. Giving her the reasons to begin to retreat. I've only brought others into my cutting against their will, irrevocably showing them my anger and violence. But you, you invite yourself into the anger and violence, s/m the midwife that sees you through the pain and lets you share in the passion. You like my scars, I think they're proof to you that I'm a serious person. You trust that, like you, I know what it means to be unhappy. My lack of interest in drugs and alcohol could have worked against me, making me seem too straight-laced and boring for you. But eight years of being queer and over a decade of self-loathing under my belt seem to guarantee that there is a genuine fuck-up under the flesh. And you get to peel that open. My scars speak more to you about the person that I was than my pictures and portfolio or my scrapbooks and stories ever could. Because you know that whatever was going on around me, I still kept my secrets intact, kept the depraved sick girl alive with every slice. This you like; this you can relate to. But there is so much that you don't know. I can never just tell the story of my past, never make the words translate the experience. My scars aren't just mute white lines; they're a roadmap. Only the story has a different ending now not suicidal expectations but the possibility of traveling with someone else. Experiencing such exuberance in cutting you is new to me. Though I'd cut one person before, I never experienced the vicarious high, all the beauty and satisfaction of cutting with none of the bad after-effects disconnectedness and limp, hopeless depression. It's safe to cut you. I hope it's safe to let you cut me. I know it's still not safe for me to cut myself. I hand you the blade and a fistful of alcohol packets. I breathe the odor in slowly as it seeps out and fills the room, preparing for you. "Any words of wisdom?" you ask. Of course, I smile. I am the expert. I instruct you Cut hard. It will be much harder to cut deeply than you think it will. It's no scalpel, for godsakes, but a utility blade. That means it's serrated, and you will have to drag it hard down my arm. Trust me; it will hurt much more to re-cut over a small scratch. Do it once, using firm pressure. Remember, you can't cut too deeply, not here on my arm, not with this blade. Don't be afraid. I look into you; see that you are nervous and shaky. "You know why I want you to do this, don't you?" I ask. Not sure if the motion of your head is a response of yes or if you are just trembling. I want to belong to you too. I don't think that anyone else has cut me before, though one would think that I'd remember that, even fifteen years later. I've forgotten more traumatic incidents though, and suffered through recovering them, so I know how powerfully the brain and body can work together to reweave the past, leaving small creases in which the truth lies. My first high school boyfriend introduced me to s/m all those years ago, and I'd forgotten that until this year when you and I started playing. Back in high school I didn't have the vocabulary of s/m. Without an intellectual context, the experiences he led me to couldn't take hold inside me or gain meaning. They just sat, abstracted and forgotten until I needed access to them. He may have cut me. I know he cut himself. And I cut him at least once; making thin ribbons of blood pop up on his chest with the blade I held between my teeth. I did this at his instruction with no thought or feeling about it. I was his sexual tabula rasa, always saying yes. He must have culled these images from somewhere, tried to dress me up and bring them to life. The scenes seemed overwrought, too self-consciously devised to be genuinely sexy. I don't know if they were real fantasies for him or merely extreme scenes copied from pornography onto my flesh. He used to scratch me hard and tease me, his long, black painted pinky nail digging into me. I bled for him in other ways though. I bled every time we had sex for one year, always so embarrassed and ashamed, taking my blood as a sign that I still wasn't used to it that I was too tight, that it hurt, that I didn't enjoy it. Letting him fuck me was the only way I did begin to bleed on a regular basis, my post coital spotting a thin substitute for menstruation. You, too, seem to possess this magic of making me bleed. I have quasi-regular periods now, though at times it is hard to attribute the cause of the bleeding. I've never felt embarrassed or ashamed or inadequate with you though. You take my blood as a testament to how much I like it, how open I am, how deeply you touch me, affect my body. You roll your eyes at the squeamish and vulgar attitude of most men upon encountering blood in a woman's vagina, always remaining calm when I expected you to freak out. Even when the sheets were so soaked that they had to go into the wash immediately, along with the mattress pad while I scrubbed at the mattress, legs streaked with drying blood. Your cheeks still sticky with my blood, a random smear of it on your forehead distilled by sweat, and a darkening crust in the corners of your mouth. Or when we left a fine blood spray pattern on the sheets from the force of our fucking, a fine mist showering down each time your body impacted against my upturned ass. Your own hand stained from opening me up, small jelly-like clots stubbornly sticking further up your arm. Or when I've masturbated with your cock still inside me, lubricated with my own blood, coating my hand and cunt. Later finding random bloody fingerprints on the sheet or wall, scrubbing my nails and still picking crusted crescents of blood out of my cuticles later at dinner. Sucking the blood off of your cock has almost sent me into sensory overload, the creamy coppery taste mingling with the smoky fecund taste of you. Or when your mouth has been latched tight to me while standing over you, hot ochre drops of blood dripping onto your chest and running down to stain your cock and hand. But tonight we've showered after fucking, washing away blood and come and lube, and I'm clean and pure and offering myself to you. Take blood from me and make me yours. I breathe deeply, open my eyes, and look at you with no fear. You make the first cut down my arm. It's deep, it hurts, and I feel it like a regular person. I worry for a second that you'll go too deep, but you don't of course. There's a half inch opening in my arm. You reposition the blade and push in, I feel the pop as the point breaks into my flesh, and the slow dragging scrape as you cut crosswise. It catches slightly as it crosses the center of the other cut, and you compensate by pushing in deeper, startling both of us. The half inch cut is now a deep, slightly uneven cross from which blood is starting to drip. I'm transfixed by the path it is wending down my arm. You're crying a bit; a few tears drip off your cheek. You bend in to suck, not ravenous as I am, but licking lightly the way you first do when you encounter my clit. Then slowly and methodically, careful to catch each rivulet with the wet upsweep of your tongue. It's exhausting and breath-taking. You can't believe that you've done it you're amazed, shaky, a little disgusted, but also somewhat proud, savoring the moment in a kind of triumph over your fear. "It's wrong," you say. "But you like it," you whisper, curling my hair between your fingers that knot up into a fist. I nod yes, supremely calm and centered. I feel I'm at the center of creation, sitting still while everything else spins around me. You clean my arm and the blade; insist on putting the band-aid on, playing nursemaid all the way. It feels so normal, yet I'm slowly remembering that others would be horrified by this. Even you say "it's wrong." You're crying and shaking, so I pull your head close to my chest, a mother's gesture bringing you into the center of my calmness. I feel as if someone should be filming us, like we're specimens about to be analyzed. I shake my head to clear the negative thoughts, concentrate on the alchemy we've performed. Is this what they mean by "blood sports"? Blood sports are always defined as edge play, even among experienced players. It's not just the risk that the fluid brings with it, the possibilities of HIV and Hepatitis. Blood play is generally not allowed in public play spaces, even when universal precautions are used and biohazard bags are available. It's an automatic stop in action. I bled at the first big play party I attended. I was face down on a wooden table, full length black silk skirt pulled up over my ass, which was getting really worked over with a variety of paddles and brushes. A small dot of blood appeared on my ass, everything stopped abruptly while the dungeon monitor was called over. He inspected it and slapped a band-aid on, giving us the o.k. to continue. Later in the evening I went to the bathroom and discovered I was bleeding, my vagina making a way for the blood to leave my body. I vaguely remembered reading that tampons were a necessary item to bring to play parties. I was without, so I stuffed my underwear in my purse, my ass still too hot to tolerate them, and left early. I wonder how we would manage if we weren't fluid bonded. The barrier of a condom or glove wouldn't be effective. Blood seeps into our sex incidentally, we can hardly ignore it. To bring it about purposefully seems safer. Cutting without tasting seems wasteful, decadent, like smashing champagne bottles against a boat. Blood letting doesn't feel that risky. It feels extreme to me only when I view it from outside. I joke that in the pervert world we're married now. But we are in some way. We've shared the most intimate of fluids, bonded in a way that none of our other current lovers can access while we're still together. We've taken the step into fluid-bonded polyamory that precludes barriers of plastic or emotional barriers. Married by similar mars in our flesh, like-marked left arms with tiny pink cross cuts that will heal smooth and white, tiny beacons of the body inviting you to come here, look closer, see what's inside. Taste of my body. Taste of my blood. |
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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