As we head into Saturday evening, we are high on the electric connection our new power dynamic has created between us.  And the evening begins nicely, with Michael tying me in a breast harness.  It is like slow hypnosis, as I feel his hands move against my skin, and the rope tighten around me, I feel my body relaxing, becoming pliable.

“I feel like I’m wrapping a precious jewel,” he says, and that’s how I feel as he takes his time, making it perfect, his precious object.

He takes me by the wrist and leads me into the bedroom, then slides my panties down my legs, tells me to get on the bed.  I lie down naked in the middle of the bed on my back.  I can’t wait to feel helpless, can’t wait to feel myself fall into the net of my trust for him.  As I wiggle in anticipation, he tells me not to get too excited, this rope-tying session just for “practice,” not for sex.  But I am feeling so lovingly held in that harness, so warm and swollen with pleasure and lust, that I cannot imagine there will be no sex.

He takes my right leg, bends it, moves it to the side, then places my wrist against my ankle and starts to bind them together.  My bare pussy is now exposed, open, I can’t close my legs.  Oh this is amazing, the stuff of years of fantasies about being exposed, helpless to do anything about it, oh I am happy.  But as he continues wrapping arm and ankle together in ever more intricate patterns, I start to feel a trickle of worry.  The rope is thick, heavy, and the knots so elaborate, I start thinking about how long it could take to free me.

All at once the rope feels less like loving embrace and more like a trap.  I feel a jolt of panic, and my chest tightens with fear.  I try to breathe it away, waiting, impatient, for him to finish the knot.  When he is done, I go limp with relief, I made it, I can make it through this.  I expect him to go around and do my left side, wrist to ankle.  Instead he gets down on the floor to secure the rope trailing from the first knot to the leg of the bed.  The panic flares huge, takes hold.  It’s too much, I’m too vulnerable, too much heavy entrapment, wrapped too many times around me, unwieldy and uncomfortable.

“No, I can’t, no,” I say.  “Take it off, can you please take it off?”

He raises up to look at me in surprise.  He doesn’t say anything for a long beat.  Then, being the sweet and considerate man he is, he obliges.  He starts unwrapping me, and I am grateful, and my panic subsides, I breathe.

As soon as I am free of the rope, I sit up and grab a blanket to cover myself.  But I am already regretting asking him to take it off.  I have failed to submit, I don’t want to fail.  I still want the experience.

“Will you try again?” I ask him.

He gives a short shake of his head.  “No, I’m done for tonight. We can try again tomorrow.”

I feel an argument jump to my lips, I want to say, no, please try again, just not so elaborate and overwhelming, just a simple knot, please.  But if I argue, that will make me a double failure at submission.  It will be me trying to take control of the situation, get my way.  The rope experiment is over.

I get dressed, and as we settle onto the couch to watch TV, he seems oddly cheerful.  I suspect he could be feeling burnt out by all the intensity of the last week and actually prefers to do nothing tonight, prefers to not be responsible anymore.

I don’t really blame him for that, and he has that right.  But I am not at all cheerful.  My submissive trance of the last week has evaporated, the delicious spell has been broken.  In my mind, newly discovered “subspace” is a magical thing, but also a black-and-white thing.  I don’t yet recognize shades of gray, it is either all there, or all not.  And now it’s not.  For the first time since we began, I’ve lost my wonderful dominating Daddy, painful sudden, and I have no idea if he will ever come back.

Quick Cool Kisses

I am all at once relegated back to being ordinary wife with her sweet and considerate husband.  I love my sweet husband, but I feel bereft the rest of the evening.  And when we go to bed, our kisses are cool and quick.

I wake the next morning, and lie brooding as dark turns to light at the edge of the curtains.  I squirm around, “accidentally” brushing against him until he stirs.

Oh, I say, sorry, did I wake you?  He yawns, says it’s okay.  I roll over to put my head onto his shoulder.  I bring up the night before, ask him how he is feeling about it, but I don’t wait for an answer.  I need to admit my feeling of failure, tell him how sorry I am I wasn’t able to see the rope experiment through.  I tell him I must need to be more slowly conditioned to being bound and tied.

“Maybe use a lighter rope next time, not so many knots?  Maybe then I wouldn’t panic.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he tells me.  “It’s no big deal.  We needed a break anyway.”

This isn’t what I want to hear.  I repeat again, “But I failed.”

He laughs a bit.  “Oh don’t worry, your punishment will come.”

I laugh, too.  It is a good thing to say.  We had been reading about “training” a submissive, and discussing the idea of punishment.  But after my laugh fades, I sink into even deeper brooding.  I have the terrible suspicion that even though the D/s has felt very real in the past week, it is still a role play game between us.  We had been playing it well, but last night revealed that it is still a game that can suddenly become too much for me, and be dropped any time.

Before I can express this thought to Michael, he tells me to put his cock in my mouth, suck on it until he comes.  I kneel between his legs and suck him to orgasm, but the thrill of submission is no longer attached to me.  It was just an ordinary blow job, which I wanted to get done.  It didn’t make me feel all warm and adoring toward him, not like just the day before, when his cock seemed like a magic scepter, object of my adoration.

I do not tell him how the spell has broken for me.  I am too confused, don’t know what happened.  What I do know is that I don’t want the failure to be all mine.  In fact, I don’t want any of it to be mine.  And as we go about our Sunday afternoon, I am secretly assigning the failure completely to him.  I decide we weren’t able to complete the rope experiment because he decided to stop dominating me.

I tell myself that when I panicked the night before, instead of immediately untying me, he should have remained the dominant yet still-caring Daddy, and tried to soothe my panic.  He should have let me know I was still safe with him, even though I felt scared at that moment.  After all, a real Daddy wouldn’t let his little girl quit if she stumbled while trying to learn something new, say for example, riding a bike.  A real Daddy would kiss her hurts and give her sympathy, but then urge her to get back on the bike and keep trying, right?  Of course, he would.

Clearly, Michael should have tried to calm me down until I could get more comfortable.  And maybe I would have been able to calm down, and maybe I wouldn’t have.  But if I still begged to be released, and he’d decided to let me go, he should have delivered some immediate consequence for failing to submit.  If he’d done that, then I wouldn’t have tumbled out of that lovely subspace.

By evening, I am practicing in my head how I will convince him of his responsibility for the collapse of the dynamic.  How can a woman successfully submit if her dominant gives up on dominating when she gets skittish?  Even if he finds he wants only to sit around and watch TV at that moment, there must be a way he can do that and still make sure his girl stays in state of submission regardless.

As we sit over dinner, I wait for the right moment to bring it up.  But I don’t.  Because I know I am wrong.  It is not his fault.  It is, I am suddenly sure, no one’s fault, but the fault of the dynamic itself.  It is too complex a psychological interaction to sustain.  It is too burdensome a responsibility for the dominating side to always be responsible, too difficult for the submitting side to always be submissive.  My fears have been confirmed, we have been fooling ourselves into believing the game is real.

For the second night in a row, our goodnight kisses feel quick, perfunctory.  I can no longer feel the vibrant connection that seemed so life-changing just a little over 24 hours earlier.  He falls asleep, but I just lie there, curled away from him on my side, staring into the dark for long, empty hours.