him I saw the river and big working boats floating through the night as they had for so many centuries.
It almost felt as if he was a local spirit come to welcome me.
I told him that.
‘No, no, no’, he said.
But I didn’t believe his denial. I had power too.
We ate, a little. We drank, a special concoction, mixed by the waiter on a separate table with precautionary high rims, more than we ate, but again, not much.
I realised quickly that he was very different from me, and from most of the people I knew. The reason why he was so easy to talk to, and why he knew so much about such different things as photography, Thai princes, internet games and the stock market was that he was rich. Not the kind of rich you get when you work very hard. The kind of rich that allows you to be open and genuine. The kind of rich that comes from your ancestors and makes you a citizen of this world. He bore a well-known name.
My own ancestors were peasants who were not even citizens of their countries. And, I worked very hard all my life but I was on a tight budget.
We looked at each other and we talked. We talked.
We talked about sex.
We talked about bondage positions, about impact sensations and the various instruments that we loved and desired.
We talked about blindfolds, about leather straps and ecstatic altered states.
It is the way of the BDSM people.
Talking like this is our tradition.
I believe it was originally introduced by the name of ‘negotiations’ between people who might become play partners, perhaps for a while, perhaps only casually.
Negotiations were and are considered necessary to establish the ‘limits’ particularly of the submissive partner, the boundaries of what could happen between them.
For me, and certainly on this evening with my Nai by the river, it was much more.
It was a way of talking about our identity.
Both our separate individual identities, a much more intimate way of introducing yourself than telling your date a potted personal history, and of course much more to the point.
But even more so we were establishing our common identity.
With every cautious, polite and gentlemanly question we showed each other our most intimate sexual desires and revealed our secret and carefully guarded true nature.
I saw the look of recognition in his eyes when I told him how much I loved to feel the touch of the bonds holding my wrists so tightly behind my back.
He took his fork and wrapped it round a morning glory stem, coated in garlic sauce, and put it down again. He ran his finger along the old seams of his backpack.
This was not just a statement about sexual preference, not just a more precise identification of where we stood within the world of BDSM, although it was that too.
It was finding, against all odds and all experience, someone who shared the dream.
And who might, if all went well, perhaps, possibly, eventually share it with us.
Right now, though, it was all the magic I could take to just see him share my dream, and I his.
And to talk with each other in the ways of the BDSM people.
I sat there, just as ineffectual with my food as he, raised my glass to my lips and put it down again.
I closed my eyes experimentally. He might disappear.
That would be the reasonable expectation.
When I opened them and he was still there I knew that a new age had descended, or perhaps I had been translated into another, unearthly realm.
Transformed into the person I wanted to be.
He made no assumptions. He never touched me except for that one time with the jasmine garland. He said who he was. And he was who he said. Against all attacks, he had preserved his innocence. In the strangest way, he was like me.
And, of course, in many other ways, we knew nothing about each other. When I finally said to him, over the roaring of a defective tuk tuk, so that I had to shout in his ear like a public announcer at a sports event, that I would like to have sex with him that very night, I had no idea and maybe not even any intention of anything beyond that.
Through a cascade of sparkles from the roof of the Royal Palace and hundreds of smoking and argumentative tuk tuks and sudden desperate hunger satisfied with deliriously sweet banana goo, and late night fears and confusion we somehow made it, we made it into our first night, in the way of the BDSM people, but even more so in our own way, the first night of Senta with her Nai.
I never bothered with the back-up dates.
How did I get here? – I was a BDSM hermit
That is a journey longer than my life.
When did it start?
I was lying in my bed.
My whole body cramped with longing. I had tied my ankles together so that I could feel the sweet surge to my vagina.
They say that self-knowledge makes you free.
Maybe. It counteracts the demons inside your soul.
But it also makes you feel your pain more acutely.
All these years I knew who I was.
I didn’t feel guilt, I didn’t feel shame.
I felt this was just me.
But I didn’t know how to make it real except in my own bed and within my own mind and soul.
I was a BDSM hermit.
Sometimes, most times, I could live with it.
I said to myself: yes, I want to be a Submissive to a Dominant in real life.
But I couldn’t be.
I said to myself: yes, but I’d like to have my own opera house too.
Some dreams are only possible for a fortunate few, a very, very fortunate few.
So then I was lying in my bed, awash with longing.
So much longing it spilled out in tears.
I saw my shadow on the wall and it was all I had.
I did have lovers.
Of course, throughout my long life before I found my Nai, of course I had lovers.
But they were not the lovers I saw in my deepest dreams.
I
