My First Yellow in a Dominant’s Bed

I met Mateo at a photography gallery downtown. I was looking at a series on Japanese rope bondage when he came up behind me and commented on the difference between aesthetic shibari and functional shibari. He stayed with me for twenty minutes talking about tension, balance, the difference between tying someone up and holding them in rope.

That same night I asked for his Instagram. Three weeks later, I was standing in front of the door to his loft.

We’d talked a lot before getting to that door. Long voice notes, lists exchanged, questions that in other contexts would have sounded ridiculous. Does pain bother you in the décolletage or only in the thighs? What’s your limit with verbal humiliation? Have you ever had any traumatic experience with choking? Do you like being called a slut when you’re being fucked, or does that turn you off?

I’d never done anything like this before. The only thing I had tried was a pair of cheap handcuffs with an ex who never understood why I was asking for them, and a couple of hair pulls while he fucked me like it was a favor.

—Your soft limits list is interesting —Mateo had told me in a message—. I want you to know we’re not going to touch any of that this first time.

That sentence had calmed me more than I’d expected.

I arrived at ten. He opened the door in black trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He smelled of cedar and something citrusy I couldn’t identify. He offered me wine; I turned it down. We had agreed there would be no alcohol on the first night. He gave me water with a slice of lemon.

—Before we start, let’s go over everything —he said, sitting opposite me on the sofa.

He had a notebook. He showed it to me. All my things were written down. My hard limits: choking, hot wax play, visible marks. My curiosities: soft bondage, blindfolds, sensory play, control. My safe words: the traffic-light system. Green, yellow, red. And a nonverbal signal in case he gagged me: three taps with my foot on the mattress.

—Do you confirm everything? —he asked.

—I confirm.

—If at any point you want to stop, you say red and you owe me no explanation. Do you understand?

—I understand.

He nodded. He closed the notebook. When he looked at me again, something in his face had changed. The kind smile of someone welcoming a guest had folded back. What remained was denser, sharper attention. A hunter’s attention, I thought, and I was frightened by the thought while at the same time liking it. I felt my panties get wet on their own, without permission.

—Let’s go to the bedroom.

His bedroom had walls painted a dark green, almost black. A low bed with raw cotton sheets. A wooden dresser. On the bed’s headboard, two wrought-iron rings fixed to the frame. On top of the dresser, a tray with several items laid out like medical instruments: natural-colored jute ropes, a silk blindfold, a long feather, a piece of velvet fabric, a bowl with ice cubes.

—Take your clothes off —he said—. Keep your underwear on.

I did. As I took off my dress I felt cold in my arms, not because of the room’s temperature but because of the change in register. Up until five minutes earlier I had been myself. Now I was somewhere else. In a bra and black panties, my nipples already hard against the lace, I looked at him waiting for the next instruction.

—Come closer.

I walked toward him. He took my wrists, gently, and turned them palms up as if reading my fortune.

—I’m going to tie your wrists to the rings. The rope is jute, it stings a little at first. If at any point you feel tingling or cold in your fingers, tell me. Understood?

—Understood.

He started with my left wrist. The rope moved in his hands with the calm of a long practiced trade. One wrap, two, a third, a flat knot. The rope tightened without biting. He tested it by sliding one finger between the rope and my skin. Then the other wrist. When he finished, my arms were left outstretched in a cross, lifted, not quite taut.

I stayed there looking up at him.

—How are you feeling?

—Green.

He smiled. Not warmly. Satisfied.

He covered my eyes with the silk blindfold. Darkness came as an unexpected relief. Without sight, I no longer had to control anything. I felt my body weigh more, my breathing deepen. My pussy was already pulsing, a beat under my navel rising and falling with each inhale.

—I’m going to touch you with different things. You won’t know what each one is. Your only job is to say green, yellow, or red if I ask you. Okay?

—Okay.

The first caress was a feather. He ran it along my neck, down to my décolletage, tracing the curve of my breasts over the bra. The second was velvet. Then something cold on my navel —the ice cube— and my body arched on its own, not because it hurt but because the surprise erased everything else.

Minutes stopped being measured in minutes. He passed a half-melted ice cube over my thighs, leaving a wet trail that he followed with the feather. Something new, rough, maybe a bamboo rod wrapped in cotton, passed over the soles of my feet. Then his own fingers. The difference between objects and his hand became obvious: objects were neutral, his hand knew. His hand stayed where I hadn’t known I needed it to stay.

—How are you feeling?

—Green.

He lowered my bra, not all the way, just enough to leave my breasts bare. The feather returned and made circles around my areolas until my nipples grew so hard they hurt. The ice came back, pressed directly against one of them, and I gave a low cry, a strange sound halfway between complaint and plea. His mouth reached the other nipple, warm after the ice, and he sucked it slowly, rolling it with his tongue, lightly nipping at it with his teeth. I felt the pull straight between my legs, as if there were a thread from my nipples to my clit and he was tugging both ends at once.

—Please —I said, and I didn’t know what I was asking for.

—Not yet.

He sucked the other nipple. Then he blew on it, cold. He bit the side of my breast, not hard, leaving a mark. I was breathing through my open mouth. My thighs were clamped together without me noticing, rubbing against each other to ease the pressure.

—Open your legs.

I opened them.

Something changed in that moment. I can’t describe it well. Up until then I had been a careful spectator of my own body, amazed by how much it responded, measuring everything with my head. When I opened my legs in obedience, something in my head stopped measuring. I started to feel without translating.

Mateo continued with the sensory play, now closer. The feather inside my thighs, climbing until it brushed the elastic of my panties and then falling back again, cruel. The velvet over my pubis, over the fabric. His fingers, still over the top, drawing the shape of my swollen cunt through the lace, barely pressing the clit through my clothes. I was moaning low. I didn’t want to moan, I felt embarrassed, but the sound came out on its own.

—You’re soaked —he said, and his voice sounded rougher—. The fabric’s see-through.

—Yes.

—Say it.

—I’m… I’m wet.

—More.

—I’m dripping.

He laughed softly, very close to my ear. I felt his breath on my neck.

—Good girl.

And then it happened.

He pressed. His hand covered the fabric of my underwear, and the pressure was exactly what I wanted and at the same time too soon. Something filled my eyes, not quite tears, an emotion without a name building behind my eyelids. I felt that something was about to happen to me, something I didn’t know whether I wanted to happen.

—Yellow.

The hand stopped. Immediately. No question, no reproach.

—I’ve got you. I’m here. Breathe with me.

His voice changed again. It went back to the sofa voice, the recap voice. The voice of the man who had my list in a notebook.

I inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled. Exhaled. Counted to ten silently.

He pulled the blindfold up without taking it off entirely, just enough for me to see him. He was kneeling beside the bed, my left hand still tied but no longer under tension. He looked at me with an attention that was neither maternal nor clinical. It was adult attention. The kind of attention of someone who knew this wasn’t a porn game.

—Do you want to stop?

I thought. I really thought.

—No —I said—. I want to keep going. But slower.

—That’s what we’re going to do.

He lowered the blindfold again. Back to the feather. Another, I don’t know, five or ten minutes of only soft sensations, the kind I already knew. When his hand returned, it did so as a long caress, not pressure. It moved up and down my thigh. He asked how I was.

—Green.

Only then did he touch the fabric again, with an open palm, not pressing.

What followed was slow. So slow that at some point I stopped noticing time. My whole body had become skin. My head was switched off in a way I had never experienced. I wasn’t deciding. I was receiving.

When he pulled my panties aside and kept touching me with his fingers, I was already somewhere inside my own head I had never been before. His finger passed over the lips of my pussy, parting them, sliding through how wet everything was. He didn’t put anything in yet. Just the index finger traveling up and down, soaking up the wetness, sliding up to the clit to make slow circles and then back down to the entrance, lingering there, barely sinking the tip in, pulling it out.

—You’re open —he murmured—. So open I hardly even have to touch you.

He put one finger in. Just one. All the way, very slowly, and left it still inside, feeling me clench around it. I moaned, a long vowel with no consonants.

—You’re not coming until I tell you to.

I nodded. I couldn’t speak.

He started moving the finger, drawing it almost all the way out and pushing it back in, curling it upward inside to touch that spot I could almost never reach on my own. He added a second finger. The stretch was slight, my pussy was so wet the two slid in like nothing, and his thumb found my clit and settled there, turning in a steady rhythm while the fingers inside me fucked me slowly.

He took me to the edge three times. Three times he stopped just before. The first time I felt it coming from far away, that wave that starts in the lower belly, and when it was about to break he pulled his fingers out and left me empty, throbbing around nothing, my hips moving on their own, searching for him. The second time he didn’t even pull his fingers out, he just stopped moving them and pressed hard on my clit to cut off the rhythm, and the wave withdrew deeper inside, lower, and I started shaking in my thighs and couldn’t stop.

The third time I cried. Not from sadness, I cried with relief, like when someone takes something heavy off your shoulders and you hadn’t known you were carrying it. His tongue replaced his thumb without warning, hot and soft against my swollen clit, sucking me gently like I was candy, and when I was almost there he pulled away and blew on it, and I begged please, please, please, without any shame now. Mateo kissed my forehead every time he stopped, told me things I don’t remember in words, only in tone.

—Now —he said on the fourth time.

He went back to my mouth. He sucked my clit with two fingers inside, curled, pressing that upper spot while his tongue worked outside, nonstop, without slowing down, without the mercy of the three previous times. And I came. I came with my back arched, pulling against the wrist ropes, biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream and screaming anyway, an animal sound that came from somewhere in my chest I hadn’t known I had. My pussy clenched around his fingers in spasms that wouldn’t stop, one after another, and he kept sucking, kept moving his fingers, stretching the orgasm out until I thought something was going to break.

When he finally pulled his mouth away I was still trembling. A second wave rolled through me, smaller, without him touching anything, just from the echo of the first. I was left with my legs spread, my breath shattered, my thighs wet halfway up, and a low sound coming out of my throat that wasn’t a word.

I have no way to explain it. What I felt was not just pleasure. It was an opening. A release.

***

When I came back, Mateo had already untied my wrists. He was sitting on the bed with my head in his lap. He had draped the sheet over me. He was stroking my hair slowly.

I was crying. Not really crying hard, just soft crying, tears sliding down on their own, without my chest moving.

—I’m here —he repeated—. Drink some water.

He helped me sit up and put a glass in my hand. I drank. Then he gave me a square of chocolate. I chewed it without thinking.

—You’re beautiful like this —he said, and for once I didn’t feel like it was a compliment, I felt like it was a fact.

We stayed silent for a long while. He massaged my wrists where the rope had left a pink mark, faint, that wouldn’t still be there the next day. He brought me a robe that smelled like him. He put it over my shoulders.

When I started being able to speak, I told him:

—I didn’t know yellow was going to be like that.

—Like what?

—So easy. I thought it would feel like I was ruining something.

Mateo looked at me for a while.

—Yellow doesn’t ruin anything. Yellow is what makes this this and not something else.

I nodded. It was an obvious sentence and at the same time it was everything.

I stayed until four in the morning. We didn’t touch each other again. We ordered food, talked about the next day, talked about silly things. At some point I laughed at something and he laughed too, and the difference between the man who had kept his voice low and steady an hour earlier and the one who was now laughing with me was not a contradiction. It was continuity.

When I left, at the door, he kissed my temple.

—Tomorrow I’ll text you to see how you’re doing.

—Okay.

—It’s not optional —he said, smiling—. It’s part of it.

I understood.

In the taxi home, looking out the window at the soft lights of the avenue, I knew two things. The first, that I was going to see him again. The second, that something inside me, a tension I’d carried for years without a name, had finally let go.

It wasn’t the sex that changed me that night. It was the word yellow and what happened after.