Manic – Part 2 – Moments with Sir

For someone’s birthday… since she wants to know… and because I keep fading to black… Sigh.  Happy birthday!

This is the second half of Manic.

***

The fog of dreams gives way to a replay of last night across the back of my eyelids.  I groan and throw my arm across my eyes.  It does nothing to stop the flood of memory and I pull my pillow over my face.

Sir tugs it away and I cover my face with my hands.

“What?” I can feel him shift in the bed beside me but I don’t move my hands.

“Me!”

He shifts again and I feel his fingers close around my left wrist and pry it away from my face.

“What about you?”

“Last night…” I can’t bring myself to say more, but Sir allows the silence to swell and I finally open one eye to look at him.  He is propped on one elbow, looking down at me, his expression gentle.  I look away.  “It’s like being drunk, except I don’t even have that excuse!”

“You were fine.”

“Ugh!” I try to pull the sheet over my head, and Sir snatches it back.  “I was horrible!  I was… I was…”

“You were manic.”

“I hit on Devin!”

“And me.”

“Uuugh!”  He has let go of my wrist, so I bury my face again under my forearms.

“Are you retracting the offer?”  I can hear the amusement now in Sir’s voice, but I can’t share it.  I hate myself.  I literally want the earth to open up and swallow me, and I hate the cliche.

“Sir…” I put a whine in my voice.  I don’t want to be laughed at right now.  “Devin is going to hate me!”

“No, he isn’t.”

“He is going to be terrified I’m going to proposition him at every turn!”

I hear Sir sigh and the bed heaves and rocks as he pushes himself up to sit cross legged in front of me and firmly pulls both of my arms away from my face.  He holds them while he looks at me, his face set now in firm lines.

“Number one, he understands mania, he’s not going to make any ignorant assumptions about anything you did or said last night.  Number two, he isn’t remotely terrified of being propositioned by you OR of having sex with you.  If that’s what you think, you should have a conversation with him.”

“Oh, God, no!”

He gives my wrists a sharp squeeze.  “I am serious.  And you need to stop this self-recrimination, now.  You were manic.  You’ve been cycling, you’ve been sleep-deprived, it was inevitable.  And it wasn’t even that bad.”

“Not that bad?!”  I screech it out, trying to pull my arms free of his grip.  “Where were you last night?”

“I was up, with you, at midnight, helping you come off of a manic state.  Which wasn’t your fault.  Is nothing to be ashamed of.  And needs your compassion.” He ticks off his points on his fingers.

“I don’t have any compassion!  It is… humiliating!”

“That’s something to have compassion for, isn’t it?  How sad that you have to go through something so painful for you, and that you can’t control it or stop it from happening.”

I grind my teeth.  I don’t want to have compassion.  I want to hate myself.  I want to blame myself for not having better control, for not stopping it, for not… being better than that.  “I don’t even know why you stay with me, I’m a crazy person, you’d both be better off without all my drama in your lives.”

I hear Sir sigh heavily and I feel my belly slowly knot into a painful clench.

“That’s the third time this week you’ve said something like that.  We’ve talked about this.”

“I can’t help how I feel,” I mumble into my hands, but the defense is weak and I know already the words that will come next. I resist the childish urge to mouth them along with him as Sir delivers them.

“You can help how you speak.  Get up.”

The twisting dread in my belly becomes a spear of ice that jabs the breath from my lungs.  I curl in on myself, twisting toward Sir, reaching a beseeching hand toward his.  “I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!”

“Up.”  There is no anger in his face or voice, but something immovable in his tone crushes the weak flutters of hope in my chest.  I curl my forehead to his knee.

“Please…”

He reaches out and slaps the outside of my thigh.  The pain is bright and shocking and freezes me for a moment as my brain tries to process it.  I clamp my hand against the sting and my breath hisses out in a soft keening gasp.

“Up.”  His tone is implacable, and I force myself to roll, ungracefully, off of the bed and onto my feet.

I hug my belly, rocking myself slightly, already near tears as he shifts his back against the wall and stretches his legs in front of him.  The he pats his left thigh twice.

I hate you!  I hate this!  I hate… everything…  My brain reverts to helpless, childish protests, but I keep my mouth clamped shut.  Taking ragged breaths through my nose, not at all sure whether I’m angry or afraid, and pretty sure it’s both, I put my knee on the edge of the bed, reach over Sir’s legs, and leverage myself across his lap.

His body is warm and solid and it is a strange comfort that I reach back for with my left hand, finding his leg and wrapping my fingers as far as I can reach around his calf.  I pull my right arm under my forehead to avoid suffocating in the bed sheets.

I feel Sir’s fingers slip under the leg of my panties, and I make a face.  Not roughly, but with brusque efficiency, he pulls the material of my panties between the cheeks of my bottom and pulls it snug.  Pressed against his leg, I can feel the muscles of my stomach twitching as I begin to shudder, still not crying, but in that ragged place of everything but tears.  I hate when he does this.  I hate the discomfort, the embarrassment, and the way that more delicate skin is exposed this way than if he simply pulled my panties down or off.

He gathers the material in his right hand at the small of my back, keeping the cloth firmly and uncomfortably in position.  His left hand comes to rest across my bottom and I flinch, despite the light touch.

“Life is hard enough without your cruelty and judgment.”

Sir doesn’t usually talk once I’m over his lap.  Usually any conversation, clarity, or scolding is over at this point and all that is left is punishment.  This break from routine,  the simplicity and the criticism in his words, feels as if it lands against my heart unprotected, and finally, tears do rise in my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, knowing he can’t hear me, and not completely sure I meant the words for him.  Guilt is a twisting, oily darkness in my gut.  Though not, as it usually is, guilt for disappointing him.  This time it is guilt for myself, for the truth in his simple statement.  As much as I value and work to be kind, to fight judgment and cruelty when it comes to others… I am… truly… unspeakably hypocritical when the subject is myself.

The first swat, as always, is a chaotic melange of sound and anxiety and sting preceding a quickly building overlay of burning pain.  My brain, occupied with the searing aftermath of the first swat, is never as clear in processing the sound and sting of the second, until the conflagration reaches its peak and by the third swat (now overlapping already scorched skin) my brain releases my lungs and I wheeze and whimper, twitching, fighting the desperate urge to twist myself out of the way, or even (in my irrational state) to just expose skin to Sir’s hand that hasn’t already been seared under his palm.

Sir paces the swats slowly, so my panicked first response to each has time to settle before the next, but not so slowly that any of the sting or burn has faded, and in fact, seems to only be peaking by the time the next swat falls.

I always start by counting but by three or four I’ve lost focus and throw all of my will into remaining, the best that I can, in position and clamping my voice down to a choking squeak.

In spite of my efforts, I can’t stop myself from twisting and writhing and Sir, eventually, presses his forearm into my back to keep me on the bed.  An action which brings a desperate sob to my throat, knowing he isn’t finished, that there is still more to endure.

At some point my efforts to choke back my cries have dissolved and I am sobbing, “Sir!  Sir!  Ow!  Sir! Ow!”  My hand has come free from his leg and I have pushed myself onto my forearms, bedding twisted into knots in my clenched hands.  But in an irony I’ve never understood, I don’t cry.  It is as if my brain has too much else to worry about and can’t afford the resources for tears.

I am frantic before he finishes, gasping and sobbing and thrashing against his restraining strength.  And even for minutes after the swats have stopped falling, I continue to writhe and struggle and would squirm off of his lap if he released me, and so he doesn’t.  He holds me down, one arm across my back, one across my thighs, silent, waiting for me to process the cessation and collapse, relieved of the primal drive to flee.

Each breath comes out with a soft keening whine.  I can feel my legs twitch as my nerves try to process the trauma that has befallen them.  My bottom feels scorched, like a terrible sunburn has penetrated my skin and into the muscle below.  Across my skin, random pinpricks of brighter pain spark like electric shocks above the undulating sea of stinging heat.

Slowly, my breathing slows and I feel a stillness creep over my consciousness like a thick fog, softening, obscuring the jagged landscape of my mind until everything is formless, white mist.

The pressure on my back and legs relents and Sir’s hand on my shoulder guides me up to my knees and I stumble, unsteady and wincing, to my feet.

Sir slides down in the bed so his head rests on the pillow, and he pats the empty space beside him.  “Come here.”  The hardness has gone from his voice; now his tone is gentle, and it breaks me.

As I crawl onto the bed and lay my head on his chest, as his arm curls around me, warmth and safety and forgiveness, as the anxiety, struggle, pain, and guilt fade from present to past…

Finally, my tears come.