Pain in the Ass, Peace in My Heart

What do you do when your ass is all blue?

A whole lotta Arnica and extra padding on the desk chair. Forget the pain relievers. I don't want to relieve the pain. This pain is my inspiration, my incentive, my story. This pain is for you.

It had been a long time since I attended a sex party by myself. At least six months. In fact, it had been a long time since I had been to a sex party at all...about four months. I took care of the latter with a trip to Club Tantra with Charlie last weekend. We became members back in the fall, and finally, finally made it to one of these events, after they moved into a new space and changed their policies and inexplicably left us off the mailing list. Meanwhile Charlie wanted to explore polyamory and I wasn't sure because it was all so old yet frightfully new and every mention of the p word or a date with another woman were like little knives in my heart. After I realized this was not what I wanted, I uncharacteristically spewed out my feelings uncensored and raw, throwing my truth onto his highway in the middle of rush-hour traffic. I could've made it unscathed or crawled away broken and left a part of myself to die at the side of the road. When you're already trembling, the worst possible consequences don't seem quite as scary. You either close your eyes and jump, not knowing where you will land, or stoke the volcano inside, which never did anyone any good. My love was at stake. It was time to jump.

"I can offer you so much! I can offer you me and threesomes and group sex and parties and kink and fantasies and all the sexual exploration you desire and more, but if you want to date other people and have other romantic relationships without me, I can't handle that right now. If that is what you want I respect that and I support you theoretically, but emotionally I don't support it. I can't explain it, it doesn't make sense, but this is how I feel. If you want to date other people one-on-one right now, I'm removing myself from the equation."

Through the quakes of our breath he uttered, "Stephanie, I want to be with you."

You could say I gave him an ultimatum. I hate ultimatums. The person on the receiving end is trapped in the ultimater's either/or with no real choice. But the universe works in magical ways. Just as I was stacking my cards of clarity and desire, he was thinking about the tryst he had experienced the night before. Lovely, but empty. Functional, but uninspired. Our epiphanies converged with perfection. My truth clarified his truth so he did not have to stop and think and weigh the options before choosing me and everything else. If I had offered only me and none of the extras, I probably would have gotten run over. But our bodies buzzed for each other and we were merely on the phone. Our bodies knew the truth before our minds. We couldn't wait to see each other again. It seemed like three years, though it had been only about 24 hours. What better way to celebrate our reconnected bliss than with a sex party sealed with a kiss?