Page 21 of Control

“Right?” Reyna said back to me. “What’s so wrong with knowing more than one language? Like it’s some crime that I’m more educated than they are.” Reyna and I spoke more and joked about our personal experiences with racism. As we bonded and she told me more of the reasons why she had the kink she did, it began to make a strange kind of sense to me. It opened my eyes and made me realize more and more why some of us have the kinks we do. So many of them, even my own, are tied to trauma and often times that trauma can or has defined who we are so we lock in on certain aspects of it.

“If I have some white man constantly getting after me and abusing me,’ Reyna explained, giving me more direct examples of her thinking and reasoning behind her kink, “then over time those hurtful things he says to me just don’t affect me the way they used to.” I adjusted myself on the floor and eventually ending up leaning against the wall as well as I stared at her warm eyes while she explained. “If I have them slap me and call me a mouth whore and a spic and all the other worst things you can say to me, over time those words lose their power. They start to feel like nothing because I’ve heard them so much. Me hearing those words, it’s sort of like….” Reyna paused as she thought of a way to explain it.

“Exposure therapy,” I said, offering her a way to help her get her point across. “It sounds an awful lot like that. If you are forced to face your fear over and over, but in a somewhat controlled environment, you can sometimes overcome that fear and work through it.” Reyna paused and looked at me as she digested my words.

“Yes,” she said, her voice settling down after having it raised from her frustrating explanations. “It feels so much like that. Like…if I can sit there and let them do their worst to me and force me to…suck them off while they treat me like shit, treat me like I’m nothing, then after a while it stings less. Over time I’ve started to feel more like I was the one in control. Like I was the one exerting my power over them. I could control how they felt and not the other way around. They could call me every name in the book, but it didn’t hurt me. If anything, it built up my resolve to do it more. To pursue this more. I started to do it so much that I almost felt compelled to seek it out. I wanted to have white men around me, using me like that.”

“And to many it would look like you were being abused,” I said, knowing where she was going with this. “To those that had no idea, they’d think you had simply given yourself over to being abused when really you found a way to control the narrative. It might look like those white men were in control, but it was really you who was controlling them.”

“I controlled how they felt in that moment,” Reyna said, some of the explanations admittedly making me think beyond what leeway I had previously given her. “It made me feel like I had the power in that moment. I imagine sometimes that I am surrounded by rich and powerful white men that could force me and my family out of the country because of all this racism around. But if I can control them in that way, I could possibly control more aspects beyond what people would think. Imagine if I…sucked off President Trump! It sounds ridiculous, right? Because it is. But now imagine me being able to stop something like mass deportation all because I sucked him so good that he changed his mind. As stupid as that sounds, can you imagine someone changing their mind all because I gave them the best blowjob they ever had in their life!”

Reyna and I continued to talk about her kink and it felt as if she was beginning to blow off some steam with me, obviously having had to shoulder the ridicule and abuse thrown her way by having such an extreme oral kink. I’d know that some people in Aurora and even in the real world had specific preferences when it came to who they either associated with or who they chose as love interests or simply sex partners. Some white women prefer black men. Some black men prefer Asian women. The more I ponded the reasons why people had such preferences really made me think about how I viewed the world. What one person may see as simply a personal preference may actually be more.

I’d never had any sort of preference with my own sexual partners, leaning more on their character and if they were someone I’d want to actually spend time with. I’d thought back on all the partners I’d had in my life and not a single one had I found more or less attractive because of something like their skin color. Black, White, Asian, other Latino people - I’d never had a real preference. But why did these other people have theirs? What was their deeper reason for this? Reyna had made a point that others who sought to make the world easier to understand would simply use a blanket reason for why people had these preferences and admittedly to some degree that may be true. However, to assume it’s the only reason people had these preferences was asinine and approaching ridiculous.

Reyna and I sat there against the wall for what felt like hours as we talked about ourselves and our past traumas. I explained to her what had happened between me and my ex and she began to understand why I’d had my meltdown. She understood why this was so hard for me, the physical and mental violence I had to endure for so long and my stupidity for actually having gone back to him even after he’d done what he did to me. I told her about how I lied to the judge to help get Will a far lighter sentence than he would have probably gotten. Instead of getting years in jail, Will was let off with probation…which I paid for.

His mother was eternally grateful to me for not sending her song to prison. She was and still is one of the kindest and gentlest people I’ve ever met which I believe played a role in me choosing to lie about my thoughts on why Will did this to me when the judge asked. Still, Will would have to be on probation, pay a hefty fine…well, I paid the fine, and he’d have to attend anger management classes for 12 weeks to help avoid any future flare ups.

While Will did manage to get off of the Xanax, he did take up smoking and had become passive aggressive in his approach to me. He’d begged me to come back to him and I eventually did only for him to often treat me with contempt which led to off hand comments on various mundane things like washing clothes or the way I drove my car. The only solid thing he did for me in that time after I came back was he never smoked in the apartment…unless he got angry which did happen fairly often.

“I stayed as long as I could,” I told Reyna. “It got to the point where…I just couldn’t handle the constant cloud of judgment that hung over our marriage. He’d just grown so cold and harsh. It felt like nothing I ever did was enough for him. I paid his fine, his probation, I kept us afloat after all that shit went down because he had to sit in jail for a while and lost his job. Even when I had left him and stayed with my mom, I still paid the rent at the apartment. I still kept the lights on, the water, I paid for cable TV and internet for him so he had something to do while I was back in San Antonio.”

“Jesus,” Reyna said to me, a look of astonishment on her face. “You really took care of him and while I admire it, I have to ask…why? Why take care of someone who did all that to you?”

“I was married,” I said. “I went into it all really believing what I’d said in my vows. The whole ‘through sickness and health, good times and bad’…I really meant that. I felt that meant something and so even though he’d done all that to me, I still felt some…stupid sense of responsibility to him and to our marriage. I felt like I should at least give him a chance to get better. And for a time he did. He always visited his probation officer when they called him, he found work again and went to work every day. He started helping me pay the bills. He got a new car. We moved to a different place to try and get away from the old memories. And the new place was far nicer than the last one. It really felt like we’d moved up in the world. We’d moved over to this area called Lake Travis in Austin and it was so nice! We’d gone from a 4 room apartment to this incredible town home with a garage. I wasn’t all that crazy about it at first, but it grew on me and I began to really like it.”

“But you left him anyway,” Reyna said to me. “His passive aggressive nature was too much, wasn’t it.” I looked down at my hand which all these hours later was still holding hers.

“Was more than that,” I said to her, my eyes still on our hands. “He was fine for a while, but over time…he started to become violent again. At first it was just little things like he’d throw a glass or…this one time he threw a brand new bottle of A1 steak sauce against the wall and the glass went everywhere, steak sauce all over the place. I had to clean it up. He just went upstairs and slammed the bedroom door which was basically his way of telling me he hated me.”

“He still wasn’t able to get over that you were a dancer,” Reyna said to me. “He still held that over you.” I nodded.

“I remember I got all the glass swept up into the dustpan and I just sat on the kitchen floor,” I said, feeling the sting of that memory come back to me. “I remember looking at the glass and thinking about what I was doing. Why was I even there. Why did I come back….” I leaned my head forward, almost falling into Reyna, but managed to stop myself. “What had I become? Why could he not get over it? Was I going to have to pay for this the rest of my life? I knew in my heart I’d done nothing wrong and I was open with him about all of it. He knew I had danced and he knew that when I moved to Austin to be with him that I was leaving that life behind. I mean…I could have just said no and kept dancing and made far more money than I did when I worked at the stupid call center. I could have worked half the hours and made twice as much money but no. I told him I’d stop and I did.”

“But it wasn’t enough,” Reyna said to me, knowing where I was going.

“No,” I said. “No matter what I did for him, quitting the club, paying all the bills, getting him out of trouble, screwing him when he wanted, no going out, having no friends….”

“It was never going to be enough,” she said to me, confirming what had taken me years to figure out. “With people like him, the jealous, stubborn, controlling types…it will never be enough. You could have been his personally slave and it still wouldn’t be enough.” Just then Reyna leaned forward and touched her forehead to mine. “You did everything you could. You did far more than most would. You went back to him when everyone else would have walked away. You kept his life going for him even when he didn’t want to.” Reyna pulled her hand from mine, raised it up to my face and touched my cheek, running her thumb along my bottom lip. “It’s not your fault.” I nodded my head, causing my forehead to rub against hers.

“I know,” I said, feeling the tears working their way back to me as the song Stay by Hans Zimmer came over my in-home speakers.

“Hey,” Reyna said, pulling back from me and lifting my chin. “You did nothing wrong. All this…all this shit he did to you…it’s not your fault.” I couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“I just wanted him to love me,” I said as the heartache overtook me and the tears began to flow again. “Why couldn’t he just love me?” Reyna leaned forward and took me in her arms, my anguish pouring out of me. “Why, Reyna? Why!”

“I’m so sorry,” she said to me, pulling me as close as she could, letting me cry into her chest. “You did nothing wrong! Nothing. You did everything you could have.” I cried into her and she, someone I’d purchased at a slave auction, stayed with me even though she had no reason to. She could have gotten up and left at any time during everything that had happened in the room that day, but she didn’t. She chose to be there with me while I spiraled and she chose to hold me and comfort me, someone she’d only just met. She chose to stay. She held me there in the corner of my room until I’d managed to settle down enough to speak again.

“This whole world really is screwed up,” I said as I pulled myself from her chest and wiped away more of my tears. “The real world is screwed up and even this world is warped in it’s own way.” Reyna nodded at me as I directed my now very swollen eyes up to hers. “I mean what’s the point of this place if you can’t even…go around and suck a bunch of white dicks when you want.” My joke had caught Reyna so much by surprise that she gasped and spit out a huge laugh unlike any she’d shown me in the short time we’d know each other. I’d managed to make both of us laugh as was my intention. We smiled at each other and the mood seemed to instantly lighten.

“I know you’re joking,” she said with a smile on her face. “You shouldn’t discount that kind of thing though.”

“Oral sex?” I asked, still using my humor to try and keep things lighter. “I think I’ve done that a few times in the time I’ve been here.”

“Not exactly,” she said to me, looking to make a point. “What I mean is…what if you sort of…surrendered yourself to that situation. If you purposely put yourself in a position to be surrounded by…five or six men, all with their cocks out and ready to go.” I squinted my eyes at her, unsure if she was being serious or just joking.

“Are you saying I should get into some sort of orgy?” I said with a smirk on my face. Surely, she was joking. “I may be an escort but even I’ve not considered doing something that wild. Besides, I had my time being surrounded by men when I was a dancer in the real world.”

---