Episode 7: Blind Faith

I had heard the best way to become a good Dominant was to first learn how to be a submissive.

It made sense. If I was going to ask someone to hand me their trust, maybe I should understand what it felt like to hand mine over.

So, on my drive back from New York State, I made a detour.

Captain Sully had invited me to visit.

This time, not over the phone.

In person.

His directions were simple.

Arrive at the hotel room.

Review consent.

Confirm boundaries.

Review the safe words one more time.

Once we both agreed to the exchange, I would be blindfolded.

This was where I learned the traffic light system.

Yellow meant slow down or check in.

Red meant stop. Immediately. No questions, no ego, just care.

By now I'd learned that the kink community talked far more about communication than it did about sex, and I was beginning to understand why.

Everything important happened before anything happened.

When he opened the hotel room door, there was nothing theatrical about it.

No dungeon.

No dark cave.

Just an ordinary hotel room.

Ordinary, except for one thing.

Before the blindfold went on, my eyes landed on a table laid out against the wall.

Every item had its place.

Everything was organized with almost surgical precision.

It reminded me less of anything I'd imagined from movies and more of a surgeon arranging instruments before an operation.

Prepared.

Intentional.

Calm.

Oddly enough, it made me relax.

Once we reviewed everything one last time, I gave my consent.

Only then did the blindfold go on.

I've realized since then that blindfolds have always been surprisingly comforting to me.

As a submissive, they quieted my mind.

As a Dominant, they softened my self-consciousness.

Without eye contact, I stopped wondering what my face looked like, whether I was reacting the "right" way, or whether I was being watched.

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The world became smaller.

Quieter.

It became about sensation instead of performance.

He guided me carefully, positioning me comfortably with pillows and adjusting my body with the same matter-of-fact confidence he'd shown from the very beginning.

Nothing felt rushed.

Nothing felt accidental.

There was an attentiveness to everything he did that surprised me.

As the afternoon unfolded, I understood why he called himself a Pleasure Dom.

His attention never drifted.

He wasn't chasing his own experience.

He was completely invested in mine.

When one bed became soaked, he calmly moved me to another without a second thought, as though this was simply part of the process.

At one point I felt the cool tip of a marker against my skin.

He'd started keeping score.

Each time I reached another peak, he added another mark to my body.

I had no idea how many there were.

Only that somewhere along the way I'd stopped trying to count.

I'd also stopped thinking.

There was no to-do list.

No work.

No wondering what I looked like.

No analysing whether I was doing this correctly.

For what felt like the first time in years, I wasn't narrating my own life while it was happening.

I was simply living it.

At some point my wrists and ankles were secured, and what surprised me most wasn't the restraint.

It was how safe I felt inside it.

I'd spent so much of my life believing freedom meant having every option available.

That afternoon taught me that sometimes freedom comes from not having to make a single decision.

Someone else was holding the structure.

All I had to do was exist inside it.

It remains, to this day, the highest I have ever felt while completely sober.

Eventually, he helped me to my feet and walked me toward the bathroom.

I remember laughing because my legs felt like I was trying to walk through waist-deep snow.

Heavy.

Slow.

Uncooperative.

Meanwhile my head felt like it had floated three feet above the rest of me.

If you had asked me how long I'd been there, I would have guessed maybe an hour.

An hour and a half, tops.

"So... how long was that?" I asked.

He glanced at the clock.

"Four and a quarter hours."

I stared at him.

Four hours?

How?

Time had simply disappeared.

I suddenly realized I needed to leave.

Real life was waiting somewhere outside that hotel room.

He pointed me toward the shower.

I stood under the hot water, slowly coming back to myself, watching black marker swirl down the drain.

Seventeen.

That was the number written across my body.

As I washed the final tally away, I couldn't stop thinking about something.

It wasn't the number.

It wasn't even the experience itself.

It was the realization that pleasure had never actually been the point.

Presence was.

And once you've experienced four hours of complete presence, it's very difficult to go back to living half-awake.

I left that hotel with one question circling in my mind.

If surrender could teach me this much...

What kind of Dominant was I about to become?

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