Sex with Shakespeare by Jillian Keenan

Author:Jillian Keenan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-02-25T05:00:00+00:00

3.4 Antony and Cleopatra:

Here Is My Space

I gasped and sat up in bed. To my left, on his side of the mattress, David was still asleep. He hadn’t noticed me move.

It was our senior year of college. I was twenty-one, and David was twenty-two. We had been dating for more than a year and living together almost as long. We both recognized the recklessness of moving in together so fast, but, as Shakespeare points out in Antony and Cleopatra, “there’s beggary in love that can be reckoned”—in other words, love that can conform to reason is stingy love indeed. So we had submitted to our less practical impulses and signed the lease.

Besides, I was suppressing enough impulses.

In our shared apartment, our things, like our lives, blended: David’s biochemistry books mingled on the shelves with my Kafka and Edith Hamilton; we used each other’s laptops all the time; I stole his comfortable T-shirts more often than I wore my own.

Wait—we used each other’s laptops all the time.

It was a terrifying realization. My search history felt like a crime scene. I could only imagine what David would think if he were to discover that journal articles and fantasy travel itineraries weren’t the only things I looked up online.

David already knew that I had an interest in “edgy” sex play, of course. But it was a far cry from that trendy euphemism to the graphic spanking stories I read to lull myself to sleep whenever I had insomnia. (Trust me, it’s more fun than counting sheep.)

After that first awkward experience, David did spank me sometimes—if slapping my ass a few times during foreplay or sex counts as spanking, which, to me, it doesn’t. But it was enough to keep my physical needs almost satisfied. I filled in the holes with capsaicin cream, a medication that produces a painful burn when applied to skin, and with the Internet.

I also joined an exercise class.

“Stand up!” yelled Marcus, the instructor, standing over me with a weight bar. “We’re not done!”

“No, please, I can’t,” I moaned, shaking my head. “It hurts.”

“It’s for your own good,” Marcus replied. “Ten more!”

And figging, of course. How shall I explain figging?

Figging, let’s say, is “the act of using peeled raw ginger root for anal stimulation.” In other words, you peel a finger of raw ginger into the shape of a butt plug and stick it where God and Julia Child never advised.

According to the Internet, figging began life as a disciplinary tactic in ancient Greece, and was widely used in Victorian England to dissuade spanking victims from clenching their butt cheeks during their punishments. (That’s probably apocryphal; I can’t bring myself to make the phone calls necessary to confirm the historical origins of anal ginger play.) For years, the BDSM communities have embraced figging, often as a supplement to spanking. It hurts. The ginger oils warm up and then burn. It’s painful and amazing. I regard this paragraph as a public-service announcement. It’s not fair for the BDSM communities to keep figging to ourselves.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.