I’d considered many routes through this session: Punishment. Humiliation. Bending him to my will. Making him kneel for me and call me “sir” and put himself into all kinds of degrading poses until he repented. Taking his submission by force. But now that we came to it, I thought what he needed most was my tenderness. To be soothed, not subdued. To be coaxed to a place where total loss of control could feel safe. I only prayed I possessed the skill and wisdom that would be required.
The first step, certainly, was to separate him from his security blanket. “Avery, I need you to move over here,” I instructed, getting off the bed to make space. I helped support him, compensating for his severed abdominal muscles while he shifted to the side where I had been. Then I tilted his chin up for a brief kiss. He would need to trust me as much as Julian would.
Next I turned to my quarry. “Bring the stool to the foot of the bed,” I instructed, stepping around to meet him. Julian obeyed, his movements unerring as always. I sat at the edge of the mattress, knees apart, and indicated the space between them. “Sit here, facing the door.”
He complied again, settling in front of me, the lower profile of his seat erasing his three-inch height advantage. From here, he couldn’t see Avery or me, which I hoped would enable him to focus on where I needed him to go.
I took one slow breath before speaking, compassion gentling my tone.
“When I ask you a question, you’re to answer it honestly. That doesn’t replace your obedience, but it’s important that I can get accurate feedback from you while I’m in charge. Understood?”
“Understood,” Julian repeated.
“Good.” I’d planned on settling my hands at his shoulders to ground him, but wariness still emanated from him. With his back turned, he felt more like a wounded animal than a gladiator. Animals can’t tell the difference between attempts to help or hurt; if they feel trapped, they’re likely to bite. I needed to prove I wasn’t a threat before I could get close enough emotionally to bind any of his wounds.
“I’m going to put my hands on you,” I told him. “I’m confident you’re familiar with how it feels to hit a hard boundary, versus simply being pushed beyond your comfort zone. If you experience the first one, I want you to tell me.”
He didn’t say anything, so I placed one palm at each powerful deltoid. The anxious tension in them set my heart aching. I yearned to ease his fear far more than to achieve any other kind of surrender — to get back to a place where he welcomed my touch instead of distrusting it.
“Julian, I know that what happened last week brought you to a very dark place, and I know your concern for Avery has absorbed all your energy. But right now, Avery is fine. He’s right there behind us. He doesn’t need anything from you except your attention to this scene. He’s going to be present as a witness, but this is between you and me, ok? There’s nothing else you need to be worrying about.”
He nodded, but he didn’t relax any.
“I love you, very much,” I continued, letting the truth of it infuse my voice as well as my hands. “That’s the single reason for everything we’re going to do tonight. Yes, it hurts that you chose to shut me out during a tragedy that deeply affected us both. That you dedicated yourself to Avery’s well-being while ignoring mine. That you were even ready to abandon this relationship altogether. But we are all here now. We got through it. And I don’t think you’ve taken much time to acknowledge that.”
I waited for the space of another breath before issuing my orders. “So that’s what I want you to do. In this moment, just be here with me. You know this practice: Close your eyes. Attend to your breath. When other thoughts come, just notice and let them go. Let everything go except this, until I call you back. Will you do that for me?”
He was required to obey, but this wasn’t the kind of thing I could force compliance with. I couldn’t know what thoughts were in his head. He had to choose it.
“Yes,” he said, so I followed my own instructions through one breath, then another, then another. Every time a memory rose — Avery weak and pale in the hospital, Julian’s anguished loneliness — every time I started to worry what he was thinking about or what I should do next, I redirected my attention to the sensation of my torso expanding and contracting, pushing the old air out and pulling the new air in. A continuous process of nutrient exchange that unfolds eternally in the present.
It’s possible to sit in mindfulness for days, weeks, even years without exhausting its benefits. But it was probably about five minutes before I sensed Julian was with me.
“Thank you,” I told him quietly. “Take as long as you’d like, and let me know when you’re ready to move on.”
It was still for another minute or so before he said, “I’m ready.”
“Great. You can open your eyes. Then pull this off.” I indicated his fitted t-shirt.
He lifted it smoothly over his head, folded it, and tossed it onto the desk before returning his hands to his thighs.
“Avery, will you hand me the oil and towel?” I asked next.
When my other partner had retrieved the supplies from the nightstand and passed them over, I surveyed the magnificently muscular, skillfully inked canvas in front of me. We typically used this bottle to lubricate for anal sex, and sometimes for hand jobs, but after ten days with barely any contact, Julian and I needed to return to basics before we could attempt any intimate activities.
report I’d been planning to pour some liquid into my palms and start a massage, but I feared even that simple act might startle him. Another wave of sadness passed through me, that this man I’d been so close to should now be afraid to accept my affection.
I swallowed my grief so I could alleviate his. “I’d like to rub your upper body with the oil. As long as that doesn’t feel like too much.”
There was a slight hesitation, but he said, “You can.”
Once I’d tossed my tank top out of harm’s way and lubricated my palms, I smoothed them slowly across the broadest part of his back, working from his spine outward, repeating the strokes and adding more oil until the skin over his shoulder blades was glistening. I didn’t have any particular expertise with this, but I knew what felt good when I was tense, and mainly I just wanted to connect with him. So I followed my instincts, applying soothing pressure to the classically male contours of his frame.
“I’ve missed you,” I told him while my palms curved across his collarbone and down to his biceps. “I’ve missed this — just being able to feel you, and make you feel better. I know how stressed you’ve been. You don’t have to carry that on your own. Let me take some of it.”
He drew a long breath and exhaled it in a slow sigh, and soon it felt more like the massage was something we were doing together, rather than something I was doing to him. I pressed fingertips along the back of his neck, tracing gentle furrows up to the base of his skull, and he sighed out some more tension.