It’s Sunday, and that means Ask Me Anything day! I’m excited to share this post because I’m always giving advice on BDSM in the AMA posts and I think sometimes that gives the idea that I’m some super-sub that’s immune to making mistakes or doing stupid shit or completely freaking out, and I want to assure all of you that I am absolutely just as much of a mess as most of you. Curious what the #AskMeAnything is? Check out the official AMA page on my site over here.

Before we really dive into the topic for the Ask Me Anything today, I have to answer the question I’ve actually been getting the most via the website, email, and various social media. ‘Black Light: Exposed’ came out yesterday and it is book 2 in the Black Light series, unfortunately Amazon has yet to link the previous books on the book page so that readers can easily find Book 1. We think this is because Livia Grant wrote the prequel and book 1, so to make it easier we’ve added Author notes to the book pages, and I’m sharing it here as well.

  • Infamous Love (Prequel)Amazon
  • Black Light: Rocked (Book 1)Amazon
  • Black Light: Exposed (Book 2)Amazon

Okay, now that’s all done with… let’s get to it!

Q: Can experienced subs get surprised too?

A: I’ll be honest right now that this question is tailored from a few different comments/questions so that I could share this story, because I feel like it’s important. It’s been a week since the play session I had with my Dom last Saturday and the more time that passes the more clear I am about A) what went down, and B) how important it is to never assume you won’t get surprised by yourself / your body / your limits – no matter how long you’ve played.

So, what happened?

Well, I have had an incredibly stressful time of things lately. I decided it would be a good idea to have THREE books come out within 30 days of each other, and there’s always so much last-minute work before the book goes live, and then all the work of promoting and supporting the book. If that wasn’t enough, my mom is very sick (fuck cancer) and so I see her a couple of times a week to help out and keep her company. Then I’ve still got the day job, the Dom, and all my other obligations that I continue to make because I’m insane. So – I’ve developed some insomnia, and I’ve been on edge, and last Saturday my Dom knew what my little twisted masochist painslut brain/body needed… pain.

We played hard, but it’s definitely not the hardest we’ve ever played, or out of the norm. I was rope-tied into position on the spanking bench, including collared down, so there was really no way for me to struggle or break position. This is a gift because it lets me drop into whatever headspace I want without worrying I’m going to fall off the damn spanking bench if I get too relaxed. Bondage = free to drift, unbound = obedience of holding position and serving him by keeping myself there. Both are hot, but whenever he ties me down I know he’s doing it for me so that I don’t have to focus or think. He started off with a flogger, quickly ramped up to hard swats from it, then switched to his belt (which is my favorite), and I was riding the pain and feeling all that tension fading, and so he switched to a cane. Now, in a weird way I love canes. I love the insane feeling of the cane strike, the full heartbeat where my body doesn’t register anything, and then the incredibly sharp pain. It always spikes my adrenaline, dumps endorphins, and even though it hurts like hell I like the results.

And tied down, teetering on subspace, well, it all worked, but things kind of went haywire. Normally, it takes a lot to even make me cry, but after I came the first time during the caning something snapped and I started crying, and then as we continued, and he added a rubber flogger, I was sobbing, and it turned into this really intense cathartic thing. It honestly had nothing to do with the pain anymore, the pain had just unlocked all of this internal stuff and *poof* I was suddenly a sniffling, snotty, sobbing mess of a sub.

The Dom took me down, wrapped me up in a blanket (and him) and laid with me for a long time – but I couldn’t stop crying. I remember thinking in the moment how fucking weird it was, but I was so deep in my headspace that I couldn’t pull out. I am pretty sure I cried (in this quiet way where the tears just wouldn’t stop) for at least an hour or more, especially if I count the session time too. He made sure I was okay and made us dinner, etc. We ended up having fun later, but I spent a couple of days completely surprised / freaked out / concerned about how I’d reacted.

All I could think was – that isn’t me. I’m the insane masochist, I love pain, I don’t lose my shit.

Except, I had. Totally and completely. Fragile, weepy, crybaby style… and I’d done it in front of my alpha male, sadist, cool / calm / collected Dom. There were a couple of days where I panicked that I’d freaked him out (and many thanks to the lovely ladies in the subs group I’m a member of on Facebook for talking me off the ledge, I adore you guys). I had become so accustomed to handling anything he threw at me (except maybe take-down breath play…) that I had given myself a false sense of submissive badassery.

I’ve played for over a decade now (holy shit!) and I’ve done some crazy stuff, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d had 6 months of experience or thirty years of experience – I was an emotional mess under the surface, and there’s nothing like pain-based play to peel back the layers on what we’re trying to hide. While I didn’t want to admit to myself just how unsteady I was, I think he knew, and I think he was prepared. We haven’t talked in-depth about what happened (emotions make us squeamish 99% of the time), but when I brought it up he told me he had not been surprised in the least that I broke down. He told me he knows how much I have on my shoulders, how proud he was of me for taking the pain and letting it open me up, and that if I ever need to do that he wants to be the Dom that takes me there. (Our version of romance, hot, right?) Then he verified that I was okay now and shrugged it off.

And you know what? He’s right.

The whole point of the trust he and I have developed with each other is that we don’t just have mind-blowing sex, we’re also there when our kink serves other purposes than just bringing about an orgasm. BDSM does so much for both sides involved, too much for me to detail here, but I’d forgotten that one of the things it can do is give you a cathartic release when you’re a headcase. I’d become too used to how our sessions went. Pain > orgasms > rough sex > aftercare > food & alcohol. I’d become too confident in my ability to handle my emotions, to keep myself controlled and calm, and last Saturday I got the wake up call and reminder that… even experienced subs can get surprised.

Moral of the story?

I have to remember that even with 12’ish years of experience, a long list of kinks and implements I’ve tried, and some really fun sexual experiences in my history book – my body, my brain, and my emotions are still human. Which means things can change, situations can change things, and I have to give myself a little lee-way in the expectations I hold myself to. No super-sub complexes.

And that means all of you need to do the same! None of us are immune to surprises from our experiences, and I think we all deserve a little grace and a little self-forgiveness.