by Jamie
Sophie and I started this blog to celebrate sex and to exercise our writing muscles. Normally we recount the joys, the ecstasies, the ghosts and goals, the frontiers conquered, the athletic heights scaled. But sometimes life gets in the way.
the pain, the pain
One week ago today, I suffered a major-minor injury – an injury that did not require a trip to the emergency room but that left me in a lot of pain. The details aren’t important, although perhaps we’ll get into them at a later date. Suffice it to say that my ribs are bruised purple and yellow, my range of motion is severely limited, and I feel pain somewhere between a cattle prod and a lightning strike if I sleep through or otherwise miss my pain-med window.
Normally Sophie and I don’t waste blog space on these things, but I thought in this case I should write about it. For one thing, if I don’t, she likely will, and this way I can frame the events. Heh. And two, she has been an angel in the aftermath, taking care of me in ways above and beyond the call. In case my feelings haven’t been made clear already, I consider myself very lucky to have her in my life.
But since this is, after all, a blog about sex, allow me to fast forward a few days into my convalescence, when I was feeling well enough to remove my clothing (without assistance, no less) and we both enjoyed long-overdue orgasms. Keep in mind that when my injury took place, Sophie and I were in the process of getting reacquainted; the demands of everyday life had already kept us relatively idle for nearly two weeks. For us, that’s an eternity. In that sense, my injury could not have come at a worse time. It was a cruel cosmic joke, the kind that makes you shake your fist at the sky and yell, “Am I cursed?!” But it had been a good day. A spark of desire was peeking like a bright star through the thinning haze of pain, and we took advantage of it.
There was no way I could take charge as usual, serving as the imaginative, ever-changing piston in our sexual engine. I still can’t, in fact. So Sophie took the initiative. First, she stroked me to life – which didn’t take long, as I was as hungry for connection as she was. When I was ready, she threw a leg gently over my semi-supine body, teased herself open and wet with my turgid cock, and then lowered herself slowly onto me.
We were cautious at first. I could upthrust a little with no pain, so I did. Likewise, her bouncing downthrusts created no problems. We began to relax and chase the sensations. As our pleasure grew, I reminded her not to rest an arm too close to my bruised side or put too much weight on my chest. That contact I could feel all too well, for the wrong reasons. Not surprisingly, Sophie’s orgasm was swift. After all, she was doing most of the work, and she had been in orgasm jail for far too long. As always, it was a pleasure to watch her flush crimson and shiver with pleasure.
When her ripples subsided, she rolled off and we went back to the plan that had brought us to bed in the first place, before optimism and appetite got the better of us. She intended to finish me off by hand and mouth, usually a long hit-and-miss process that has been well documented in previous posts. But this time, I could tell almost immediately, it would be neither long nor hit-and-miss. My pleasure welled up quickly, eagerly, almost desperately. And as my mind drifted, playing a private movie in response to what I was feeling, I caught an echo of a similar experience from almost exactly a decade ago. And from there I caught the spark of an epiphany.
the big snip
Ten years ago, I had a lover. She was one of the best lovers I have ever known, and she remains a close friend. The sex was amazing, and we were committed to the open-ended exploration of that frontier. We didn’t want anything to complicate our pleasure, and that included condoms. Other than being clean, which we confirmed, the only issue was avoiding pregnancy. A natural sort of woman, my lover was disinclined to chemically disrupt her hormonal routine. So that left us trusting to the pull-out method and the lunar calendar, so unsatisfactory at so many levels.
When she suggested that I consider getting a vasectomy, I was surprised. The idea had never crossed my mind before. But as I thought it through, I realized it made good sense. I had no desire for more children. The procedure would greatly simplify this part of my life in general, not to mention putting my lover’s mind at ease. She even offered to split the cost for the procedure. And so, not too long after that casual suggestion, I found myself semi-supine in a medical chair.
As surgeries go, the procedure is as simple as it gets. After the proper prep, a small incision is made in the scrotum, through which the vas deferens – the tubes that transport sperm from the testicles – are briefly accessed. Two quick snips, a bit of cauterization, a stitch or three, and all that’s left is to go home and sit on a bag of frozen peas for a day or two. I convalesced at my grateful lover’s home, propped up by pillows in front of the television.
But something strange happened along the way to sexual self-direction. I was surprised by the intensity of my reaction to what I had done, a feeling I have come to define as an almost superstitious dread. My logical brain knew a vasectomy was a positive, prudent, and healthy decision. But emotionally, down in the ol’ lizard brain, other feelings ran rampant. Part of it was the novelty of surgery, with which I have very little experience. The idea of a “willing injury,” inviting a stranger to breach the walls of my corporeal castle, was unsettling. (The brief burning-flesh smell of cauterization was no help.) There was also the radical redirection of what had become a comfortable and familiar safety regimen; the rules I had been following, and their attendant assumptions, were suddenly irrelevant. Eventually I got my head around a startling realization – I had literally severed myself from the bio-reproductive cycle of life. I wasn’t sure I liked that outcome, even if I intended never again to actively participate in it. That old margarine commercial from childhood kept popping into my head: It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.
To paraphrase myself from a prior blog post: No matter what we do to have fun within the sexual space, at its root sex is about genetic immortality. That’s the hard wiring. And to the extent that I had been tapped in to the unalloyed enjoyment of that impulse, however repurposed, suddenly I was cut off. As melodramatic as this sounds, what started out as a simple and smart surgical procedure led me to this existential question: Who am I now?
So I set out to answer that question. It was time to have sex. Right then. I left the couch, dragged my lover by the hand into the bedroom, and lay back on the bed. My lover was – understandably, I suppose – reluctant.
“The doctor said to wait until – ”
“I don’t care. I need to see something.”
“I think we should – ”
“If you don’t help me, I’ll do it by myself.”
And so began the most hesitant, timid hand job in the history of modern medicine. But her timidity, my ambivalent history with this particular act, none of it mattered. Deep down inside me, past the embarrassing memories and mental challenges, past my depleted post-surgical state, something primal was fighting to find voice. All the orgasms I never had, all the wet dreams that never occurred because I was so proficient at masturbation from such a young age, all of them united and rose up and out like magma. I had the most intense orgasm I have ever felt, as if the entire universe of pleasure was flowing from every extremity to my core and then out through a single point, leaving a glistening white lake on my belly and an indelible mark on my lover’s psyche (somewhere between horror and awe on her spectrum). And I knew I was still alive.
jump cut to now
This decade-old memory took shape and passed across my inner screen in an instant, even as Sophie’s hand and mouth worked to create the sequel. I lay still, none of my usual distractions and mental complications anywhere to be found, as once again my response rose out of me like a separate living thing. Once again my orgasm began outside my body, flowed through the top of my head and the tips of my toes and fingers, gathered its strength at my core, and left my body like the original orgasm from which all others are defined.
“Wow,” said Sophie in a muffled voice. “That’s a lot.”
And once again, I knew I would live though the current difficulties. Once again, I knew I was alive.
amaranthine border 