Power
by T.C. Mill
I’ve always wanted to feel power. The thing itself, not its effects or trappings. The effects aren’t bad; like hell I’m going to protest getting what I want. But they’re not exactly what I want, if that makes sense. I don’t care so much about the symptoms, but I want the disease.
Power is a disease, as you always bring up at some point in our political-philosophical-spiritual conversations. I nod along to your sermon, which I do agree with. Power is killing the world with deaths of a thousand cuts, exploitation, extraction. But that’s not what I’m talking about when I talk about the power I want.
It’s not in the slinky black PVC dress, though it looks great on the model online, and neither is it in the fishnets barely visible under my thigh-high leather boots. The netting imprints a pattern on my skin for the rest of the night. I love how the boots gleam and hug my calves, but those heels—“Shouldn’t you be the one in a torture device?” I ask.
You’ve marched and signed petitions against torture, the real kind I mean, but our conversations never get lost in that particular labyrinth. It makes so much difference when it’s consensual that it takes an effort to connect the two meanings of the word. Also, you don’t preach half as much when we’re playing—fucking with power.
Your hands rub my aches away. There’s a special energy in that, in your hands moving warm and firm over my heels, my ankles, up to my diamond-stamped thighs. Your touch somehow reaches into my flesh, soothing and exciting at once, and all at my command.
Still, this was just costuming. Turning me into someone else, or at least the imitation of her. It can make me feel freer or more obvious, but it’s not a source of true power. True power I’ll be able to feel in complete nakedness. True power I keep searching for, and you let me mark and bind your flesh into a map.
At first it’s like acting. Wearing the outfit, or not. Wielding the tools and the toys, learning their quirks. Behaving the way I want to want to. And then comes the moment of magic, the transformation when she becomes me.
I’m surprised the first time I feel it. I freeze up, as if in panic, but it’s the farthest thing from fear. The shock lasts only a microsecond, and I doubt you notice my stillness—of course, you’re kind of tied up at the moment, as the pun goes, no less true for being predictable.
I’m suddenly a different person. At least I feel different from how I’ve ever felt before. And it feels so good. Not to be confused with erotic arousal or even the mindfuck glow of satisfaction, of getting what I want, but instead a whole-body triumph, brimming up from a place I hadn’t been conscious of. A dark fire starting deep in my marrow and beating outwards.
It comes because of your expression. Because you look scared.
Because I’ve scared you.
I never want to hurt you, I know you know it. But in this moment, the full force of your helplessness strikes you as you realize I’m the only one in this room who can move freely. It’s all up to me. I could run my fingers over your swollen sex, I could stroke or press one digit into you, bringing pleasure or pain or some fascinating mixture of the two. I could pull your mouth to my groin and take whatever sensation I want. And yes, I could hurt you. I don’t want to at this moment but I can, I can.
You don’t know for sure what I’ll do. I could do anything.
I ride out the feeling. One hand idly traces over your body, naked except for the ropes. I keep in motion, keeping all my options open. My whims rise like swimmers surfacing, gasping in great gouts of possibility.
Power. Completely undeserved—the ideas I sort through, tempted, before discarding them, only prove my wicked unworthiness; it is a disease—but real nonetheless.
As I choose to straddle your mouth, it’s a simple act yet it means much more. It’s the compression of everything else I could have done to you. Your lips and your worshipful tongue are the culmination of everything you would offer. And when I come it’s like I’m filled with the pleasure of every one of those possibilities at once.
I carry the memory of that power into my daily life. It’s subtle but pervasive, felt at every moment, even when you are not in the room. Not that you’re ever beyond my reach. When I tell you where to go, what to do, in text message commands—assigning errands, making choices at your request, sometimes your master and sometimes the much headier version of a coin flip—it builds confidence in my own choices, my own whims. Where should I eat? What should I wear? Which brand of yogurt? Which pair of pants? Decisions, decisions. While I curl up in worn-soft sweatpants and my bra strap slides down one shoulder.
Do you want me collared?
My fingers fly on the keys and I feel awash with it. A feeling of warmth, of nakedness, of suddenly being ten times larger in the best possible way.
I come to take it for granted sometimes—not even stopping to think how most people wouldn’t kneel just because I snap my fingers. You make it seem so natural. And I’m thankful—and I show my thanks, mouth full of you and ears full of your whimpers—showing my gratitude thoroughly, relentlessly, without losing a scrap of my power.
T.C. Mill is a writer and owner of a small editing business (one answer to the question ‘What do you do with a philosophy degree?’). Her fiction has appeared in anthologies from Storm Moon Press, Circlet Press, and in Cleis Press’s Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Vol. 2. With her co-editor, Alex Freeman, she runs the New Smut Project micropress, which releases collections of literary erotica. More updates about what she's doing next can be found at TC-Mill.com.
