I have been a freak all my life. Well, maybe not my entire life, but from as soon as I started to experience myself as a sexual being. I am also a hopeless romantic, and often these two parts of me have clashed in a culture that for a long time seemed to accept women being the latter, while the former is only either expressed quietly behind closed doors or carried in a defiant, crass cloud of rebellion.

 I have often confused my lovers because as I am an openly sexual woman, the way I prefer to experience my sexuality is in open-hearted, deeply connected ways. Let me put this simply; I want my lover to choke me and while thrusting deeply into me call me his cum-slut, then kiss me tenderly and in the same breath whisper, “I adore you, my princess”. I want someone to treat me like the nastiest whore and the most precious and rare goddess. Degrade me and worship me.

In my 20s, not knowing how to express this duality comfortably, I separated these parts of myself. I drained my casual sexual experiences of care and tenderness, and saved them for the times I was in a relationship. I embarked on my sexual explorations with the crassness that I had watched “liberated” women use. I wrote myself a sexual Bucket List and proceeded to tick my fantasies off it. You know how rich people say this annoying thing, “once you get all the money you could ever want in the world you’ll realize that money isn’t everything”?

Well, I rebelled against purity culture and set myself to enjoy and express as much of my sexuality as I wanted to, in every way that I wanted to, only to realize that depth of connection was way more valuable than fantasies. The way a person treats me, and how they talk to me before they even get to touch my body makes all the difference. My turn-ons have expanded to things like respect and vulnerability and polarity. Sex, for me, has evolved from the event of touching, rubbing and penetration, and into the entire experience of being engaged mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Anyone who can do this with playfulness and curiosity, will have engaged me in more foreplay than if they were to touch my body.

And as I have gotten older, and done the inner work of integrating the darker parts of myself with my light, I have also began to reconcile these parts, discovering with delights that they feed each other. My loving part makes my dark part feel safe, and my dark part rounds out and enlivens my loving part, as India Arie sang, “shadows make you whole”. I feel whole when these two parts of me meet. And in the way this wonderfully mysterious Universe works, once I started to integrate these two parts, I started to attract lovers who mirrored this, who appealed to them. And no one embodied and mirrored these two parts quite like him.

I met him through my favorite dating app, Twitter. He slid into my DMs. The thing is, my Twitter DM requests are a real mess. Between eternal “hi”s, demands for my time or number from guys I guess are trying to show how dominant they are, to downright creepy confessions of love or even proposals, my DMs have been a place I generally avoid because it’s a russian roulette of creepy and stalkerish vibes. But this guy, he stood out because he slid in all smooth with a picture of his cute dog, attaching my tweet of how I can’t wait to be a dog mum. Clearly he was using every advantage he could. We got to talking about dogs and life, and eventually he asked me out for dinner. Honestly, I have had my fill of blind dates, and awkward interactions, so I wasn’t inclined to meet up with him. Plus, I was in the throes of confusion with another lover I had met online, so I politely declined. He handled my “rejection” like a champ, so mature and dignified that my interest was piqued even more, so I added, “if I ever feel like I’m a space to meet up, I’ll let you know”. To which he enthusiastically responded, “please do!” 

A few weeks later, I was having a particularly hard day at work, and did what any normal person would do; I went to the internet to complain about it, of course! So I typed a tweet about my frustration, and within a few minutes I got a notification for a DM. It was him, offering empathy for the difficult day. He said, “sounds like you need a care package. May I?” I have learned to let the Universe gift you, so I agreed. On top of that, out of respect for consent and my privacy, he asked me to let him organize the care package, then share the number of the person who would deliver it, so that I didn’t feel obligated to share my number with him. 

What did I tell you about respect?

Unfortunately, the person who was delivering the package did not pick up when I called, so I gave him my number with his reassurance that he would only use it for the delivery and nothing else. Within a couple of hours, a care package with red roses, a bottle of rose, chocolates, body scrub and a scented candle with a sweet card landed at my office. When I messaged him to say thank you, he responded by saying, “thank you for letting me do this for you.” And sure enough, even though he had my number, he didn’t use it. So now, here I was feeling special and spoiled, and at the same time respected, by this stranger.

So now I definitely wanted to meet this thoughtful dog-dad with good boundaries and emotional sensitivity.

I waited a respectful amount of days to not make it look like I was SO impressed by the care package, then I sent him a DM accepting his invitation to dinner and granting him permission to use my number. We started texting and immediately we started talking, it felt like we could go on for days. Nothing about our conversation was sexual or even flirty, it was just really good conversation. So good that he was chatting with me while he was working out in the gym.

We met on a Saturday night. I had spent the day with one of my best friends, she kept me company as I got ready for our dinner date at Inti. When she asked me if I was nervous or excited, I told her, not really. I had no expectations of this meeting. All I knew was that the conversation would be wonderful, if our texting was anything to go by. I had no idea how this guy looked or whether there would be any attraction. But our interactions so far had been amazing. 

I forgot to mention; I had found out that one of his best friends and one of my best friends were related. So my sense of safety with this guy was growing.

I got to the restaurant late. And as the hostess asked me to wait before she took me to the table, I felt the nerves starting to build up. As she led me towards the table, the first thing I saw was looooong legs stretched out. And then these legs were standing and seemingly going on forever. The next thing I saw was big, sexily hooded eyes, you know the kind that make someone look constantly sleepy? And then a deep voice with a slight British accent, the kind that lets you know that someone went to schools that called their teachers “Miss” and “Sir” and had “summer holidays’ ‘ greeted me. 

I don’t remember much about the first few minutes of our date. I was trying to reconcile this person to the conversations, trying to wrap my mind around the attractiveness of this person. But once I glanced at him, and realized just how nervous he was as well, I relaxed into it. And then we began talking and didn’t stop until the restaurant was almost empty. As we started to wind down the date, I began to have an internal dialogue with myself… Do I want this guy? Will he kiss me? Do I want him to kiss me? 

He offered to walk me out, all the time I’m still asking myself what I want to do. He paid for my parking, like the gentleman he is, then he walked me to the car, wished me a good night, asked me to text him when I get home, and then he left. He didn’t try anything, or even ASK to try anything. 

Throughout the next week, we chatted some more, so much more. We agreed to meet up for dinner and a whiskey tasting that he INSISTED on (because all whiskey snobs believe that anyone who doesn’t like whiskey just hasn’t had GOOD whiskey). 

This time, we were more relaxed and fell into an easy playful banter, interspersed with deep conversations about family, our hopes and dreams, and all that stuff. As the night went on, as I kept looking into those eyes and listening to that voice, and watching his full lips move, I began to feel attraction slowly unfurl and spread from my abdomen to the rest of my body. At the whiskey bar, watching him speak passionately about the different tones and tastes of the whiskeys he loved, I felt myself sink deeper into the warmth of desire. While we had our drinks he began to do this thing where when I was speaking, he would instinctively reach out for my hand, then stop himself and pull his hand back. He did that a few times until I stopped talking and gave him permission to touch me. He lightly put his large hand on mine. And that first touch felt more erotic than actual sex. The conversation got a little more flirty, but nothing was overt, yet. 

I had ubered this time, so he offered to drop me home. Once we got in the car, it felt like the propriety we had both been carrying ourselves with the whole night fell away, and we started talking about the things that we enjoyed sexually. I said I like to submit and be dominated, he mentioned that he liked dominating. I said how I have a praise kink, he said that he loved being called Master. On and on we went, and what became apparent was there was so much overlap between what we enjoyed. By the time he pulled up and parked outside my building we had worked each other into such frenzied, urgent desire that we both sat, panting in silence. When he spoke, it sounded like his words were strained.

“I want to take you upstairs, and I want to do all the things that we talked about to you. 

And I don’t want to ask for permission.”

I drew in a breath, and exhaled my response; “Don’t ask.”

Inside my house, right there at the front door once I closed the door, he pulled my body tightly against his and kissed me. Then he turned me around, pressed against my body and gently pushed me to lead me into the house, which I laughingly resisted because I still had my boots on. As I was trying to get them off, he wouldn’t even let me have a moment to. We playfully wrestled, and then he gently led me onto the floor and somehow between the deep kisses, nonstop touching and gasping and moaning, we got my boots and some clothes off. Right there on my beige living room carpet, he thrust into me. Round that room we went, me on top of him, him on top of me, him standing behind me as he held my hands behind my back with one hand, and wrapped his fingers around my throat with the other on, as he called me princess. Then back down on the floor, with slow deep thrusts as he cupped my face gently and called me his slut.

Somehow we got to the bed, where he lay down, and looked at me pleading, “please sit on my face”. I rode his mouth until I came, and then slid down his body and rode him until he did. We woke up with our limbs tangled in each other, and continued well into daylight. In between the explorations of different positions and rhythms, of spanking, biting, fervent calls of “Master”, we kept pausing to ask each other, “how??” “how am I this comfortable with you already?” “how do you seem to know what feels good?” “how do you know to fuck like that?” It felt instinctive, animalistic, and natural. 

When it was time to leave, he put on his shirt (which had foundation and dirt stains from my boots) and his suit, kissed me and thanked me all the way to his car. As I walked back to my house, I laughed to myself and marveled at the Universe’s ability to bring us just what we want in the most unexpected ways. What are the chances that your deepest fantasies can be fulfilled in exactly the way you want them to by a stranger on the internet?