I often get asked what a 24/7 TPE dynamic looks like. While there are, of course, times I subject my sub to various brilliantly sadistic torments, the majority of time we spend in space does not look like that that at all.
For one thing, inflicting pain on someone is tiring.
For another, being brilliantly sadistic requires creativity and quite frankly, who is inspired to sadism on a rainy Sunday afternoon. In my book, rainy Sunday afternoons should be reserved for a warm sort of domesticity. A quiet and contented time to read and not feel obliged to do anything in particular.
I have also been asked how I don’t get burned out sustaining a 24/7 dynamic. In short, it’s because I’m not the only person sustaining it. Dynamics can’t be imposed unilaterally, and I think this post illustrates that quite well too.
As I often say, submission is not passive. Without my sub occasionally offering and putting in effort to get me into space, like on this occasion, I would have gotten burned out a long time ago.
So, what follows is a description of a fairly average rainy Sunday afternoon, complete with random emotions, scraps of conversation, and thoughts.
Sunday Afternoon
As befits a Sunday afternoon, we had just finished watching the football. The football is something I generally don’t interfere with. It would be entirely within my right, but I think it’s important to have hobbies and all that and more importantly, I find the noises he makes while watching the football incredibly entertaining. In fact, as a rule, he will watch the football and I will watch him.
‘Are you watching that?’ I said, as the next match began.
‘Only because it’s on,’ he said. ‘You can put something else on. Or I shall I mute it?’
‘Yes, mute.’ I was focused on fiddling with my embroidery and the noise was making me feel tense.
We talked about the prospect of reading something together, which I had brought up the evening before, and what we should do with the rest of the day.
He said felt like there was something he ought to be doing, but he didn’t know exactly what. I put an arm around him. The conversation meandered through the possible reasons, finally arriving at the conclusion that what we both needed was time in space.
I will just clarify here for those who are not familiar with the concept – space (as in dom and sub space respectively) is something that I have always thought is best understood as akin to a swimming pool. It has a shallow end and a deep end.
The little rituals and routines which are woven into our daily life amount to dipping our feet in the water or maybe having a quick splash in the shallows. The kind of quick dip which doesn’t require getting all the chlorine out of your hair afterwards.
But that kind of thing is never a substitute for a proper swim, let alone a deep dive to the bottom. You know, at the very end of the pool, where the water gets darker. That place where all the noise fades and you are just immersed in a vast expanse of water and, just for a moment, things slow down.
So, when I say we needed time in space, I mean to say that we needed something more than the shallows. The middle depth, where your feet can’t quite touch the floor, if you like.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I needed that just as much as he did.
But nonetheless I felt a prickle of reticence. It was after all a Sunday evening and getting into deeper space takes work, particularly as the dominant. That is not at all a complaint – it’s effort that you generally don’t notice and quite enthusiastically and naturally put in. Nonetheless, from the perspective of a sleepy Sunday afternoon, it seemed like… effort.
Have you ever had some horribly enthusiastic person of your acquaintance materialise for the sole purpose of dragging you out to a [insert social event / restaurant / or other place which isn’t currently your sofa here]? And you don’t exactly want to at that moment, but you don’t not want to, and you know that you’ll enjoy it once you start moving? Well, it’s a bit like that feeling.
I felt a slightly irritated tiredness at the prospect of doing anything at all really, and I had said the previous day that I wanted to read together and grimbly grimbly bim *grumpy dom noises*.
He cuddled into me and asked me what I wanted. ‘I can make bread, or I can be under your feet and read, or get some sort of impact play instrument…?’
I felt myself tense up slightly and he added ‘I just want to make you happy. What can I do for you?’
The tension melted away. I hugged him closer, feeling his breath on my neck.
I considered a moment.
‘I’ll take the reading,’ I said, ‘but with some… accessories’, as I traced a finger under the unzipped part of his hoodie.
‘You’re not wearing a shirt,’ I said half in surprise and half in satisfaction as my fingers found a nipple. He bit his lip slightly as my fingers brushed over it.
I told him to clear the table and clear the floor space we would need, while I relocated our dog to the other room. We laughed when I picked her up complete with her bed and she much resembled a Shiba hot dog.
I told him to get cuffs. He pointed out the rash on his wrist probably prevented that and we opted for the metal ones. Our kink equipment lives in two, heavy, grey velvet trunks. He helped me lift them down and hunt down what we would need.
He smiled when I pulled out the chains, his eyes widening as he slid slightly more towards space. I attached the metal cuffs in the bedroom, returning the pin to its little tin box. I always have the idle thought as to what would happen if I lost it. One of those idle half-fantasies, which would be extremely irritating in practice.
I told him to go back to the living room, while I rifled through the conglomerate of padlocks and keys to find a matching set. It’s much like trying to find a pair of matching socks in a laundry basket, only the socks all look very similar and won’t function if you don’t find a matching pair.
When I joined him, he had already shut the blinds and was kneeling neatly on the mat. I asked him to move closer and swung the metal bracket of the collar around his neck. ‘It’s been a while since we have used this’. I had anchored the chain to the leg of the sofa earlier, while he was in the bathroom. With a smile, I locked it to the O-ring on his collar.
‘Woah, that’s heavy,’ he said, as I let go and the weight of it yanked him forward.
‘I know,’ I said, with a grin.
It was why we had bought it, once upon a particularly entertaining trip to B&Q.
I attached the chain, linking his proffered wrists. He then swung his feet up on the couch for me to repeat the treatment with his ankles.
‘That’s the middle, I think,’ I said, connecting the two chains with a spare link. He wouldn’t be able to straighten entirely like that. He was sliding deeper into space. I could see he was enjoying the weight, pulling against the chains to feel the resistance.
I clipped the chains shorter for good measure and fetched the dildo gag from the other room, much to his pleased surprise. It slid effortlessly all the way to the back of his throat. When we talked later, he said that when we bought the gag, he couldn’t have it in all the way for a few minutes, let alone for a few hours.
We both found that a satisfying reflection. In part, because I have had aspirations of doing away with his gag reflex altogether for quite some time and progress to that end is satisfying. And in part because it means I can relax into my enjoyment, without being as vigilant as I once had to be.
I stepped on the taunt length of thick chain which ran from his collar, yanking him to the floor. He wasn’t expecting it and toppled forward. It took a rather awkward scramble for him to rearrange himself onto his side like I wanted. I added a pillow under his head and scrutinised the result of my efforts.
He was trying to twist his hips, evidently attempting to hump the mat. ‘Do you want a cushion? To hump?’ I asked. He nodded vigorously. With the pillow lodged between his legs, I handed him his phone, book already selected. I proceeded to use him as a footrest, while I opened up the same book on my own phone.
‘I’ll leave you gagged for… Well, as long as I feel like,’ I told him, ‘and then we can discuss the book’.
He nodded again.
We passed a very contented few hours. At first, I alternated between resting my feet on his face and letting him hump them – the pillow didn’t quite offer sufficient pressure. I fetched the Doxy wand when that got uncomfortable for me. I told him to position it as he wanted and he humped it happily.
Retrieving my laptop, I began making notes for our discussion later and highlighting passages I found interesting. In what was possibly my peak of hedonism, I grabbed a chocolate finger or two a few times, and groped him on my way back while eating it. He moaned and arched into the touch.
The chains rattled whenever he moved slightly. When I pressed on the wand, he would close his eyes, not able to really think about anything other than the pleasure. I sporadically put my feet on his face, or used a foot to idly stroke over his ear, or leaned down and petted his hair. I felt as contented as I imagine anyone could feel on a relaxed Sunday afternoon.
It had occurred to me that the wand might become too much and at one point, I thought it had, because he switched it off and put it aside. I went to remove the gag, but he shook his head and used the search bar on the Kindle app to type ‘it was just too hot. I remove it so it cools down. Then more’, followed by a series of smiley faces.
More Than Fun
I pulled him up onto the sofa after a few hours, still chained and shackled, and tangled my fingers in his hair. We talked, still in space, about the book and our thoughts and the vague prospect of dinner. I wanted him to cook for me, so we ordered groceries from one of those ‘takeaway but from a supermarket’ services. The perks of London living.
We both felt profoundly content. D/s is rather wrapped up in both of our idea of romantic love. We are not connected in quite the same if we don’t spend time in space regularly and often.
A lot of people ask me what I find fun or enjoyable about 24/7 D/s, but really, the fun is incidental. For us, it’s a means of being fulfilled, content, and connected.
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