TW: Sexual assault
What I Wish Everyone Knew About Sex is a new series by Buttertongue in which we recount our experiences that left us with a lesson well-learnt. We begin with our lesson and follow it with a story of the encounter. These stories may be funny, they may be stirring, they may be chilling but they are definitely erotic.
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What I wish everyone knew about sex is that a slap across the face definitely requires speaking about prior to the deed. It does not fall within assumed “vanilla” sex, even for the gays.
It was a lounge room date so sex was always on the table. It was with a boy that thought wearing white sneakers to the family Christmas would earn him ridicule for such ‘gay’ ways.
It had been a few weeks of talking online, a Tinder meet-cute, so very wholesome by gay standards. It was just before Christmas and we had gotten to talking about the festive season and what a crime it was that I had never seen Love Actually. And so, a date was set.
His apartment was well-dressed for the jolly season, adorned in lights that drowned the lounge room in blue. I had the oddest sense I was in a staged home based on his choice in furniture but at least it was fully ‘staged’ and comfortable.
He was polite with a wickedly cheeky grin. He made a mean selection of wine but had terrible taste in music. And I mean terrible. I refused to sit down and bear it, so I educated him that pop hits doth not put someone in the mood and changed the playlist to one of my own (I have later found out that he used it many a time after our time together).
He was a touch more of a bloke than I had dated before but at this stage I was still relatively new to dating and hook-ups, and I was exploring my horizons on the Brisbane gay dating scene. It was the first time I was presented with someone who had a very different idea what being gay meant.
We went through our motions: glass of wine, chat, glass of wine, move closer, chat, banterful push and giggle, start movie, glass of wine, inch closer, abandon movie.
He was firm, soothing an itch on my lips, fulfilling a need for powerful hands to press and tease my body. His hardness provided a permission for me to explore exerting more pressure than I had before. Clothes risked tearing as they were thrown aside and wine glasses threatened a spill as they dodged swinging limbs.
The confines of the couch became too restricting and the poddering British voices in the background too distracting, prompting a loud peeeel as skin separated from leather couch as he guided me down a dark hallway.
We went from being washed in a gentle blue light to the almost pitch black of his bedroom.
In the dark, his firm nature gained a bite, and it all started with an eager shove, throwing me on to a suffocatingly soft bed.
A shock? For sure. A sign of what was to come? Maybe, but goddamnit my skin felt electrified, I was enjoying this new edge to sex.
Sheets were strewn, senses teased, bodies traced with lips and tongues, movement held and restrained.
I was on my back with firm hands pressing and kneading away a tension beyond a mere knot of muscle. I was soothed, a craving satiated. I was beginning to snuggle into this quilt of bliss.
He drew up. Was it a stretch? A change in position? But how was I supposed to move with him on top, towering over me?
His arm arced. A withdraw much like an archer with their bow and an arrow poised before a great release.
I almost saw the motion and a great swing before a sharp ringing overwhelmed my senses, and I felt a brutal sting across my ear and cheek.
Sending me to my instincts, a bestial force overtook me and I thrashed. My hips bucked and I threw him off the bed.
Everything was stilled while I was flooded in this ringing. A head with incredibly dishevelled hair and a concerned expression popped up over the side of the bed.
We had to laugh about it. Everything had been going perfectly up until that slap. We slowed down after that, mainly because I was completely disorientated for a good five minutes after he hit me.
We talked in the shower, while soaping each other up, where he explained that he had came from a place of secure assumption. He had done it before and it was well-received. I came from a place of skepticism because surely no one enjoys a slap across the ear. The cheek, maybe. But the ear? That is a sensation that will haunt me.
Our idyll never left the walls of his apartment. Our conversations slowed and stilled and sex can only get you so far. Who knows, maybe a face-slap is the only thing getting him over the finish line. We weren’t a match but he is a memorable paramour that I don’t regret.
Although the slap was an unwelcome shock, it was something that we talked through and it’s become something I laugh about now and a story I talk about way too loudly in the workplace.
And so the lesson goes…
A face slap may be enjoyed in sex but talk about it first. Ask.
And for the love of everything jolly in the world, never clip an ear if you are slapping someone. I still hear the ringing in the dead of night.