The last time I saw Belle was a Sunday, nearly a month ago. I met her at a tattoo shop near her apartment. We’d talked about my star idea the week before and she said she had her own star idea: small ones, a cluster of them, at the edge of her breasts that meet her arm. A few solidly filled in, one with a thick outline, the remaining two very thin outlines, grouped in a crescent shape.She’d been to this tattoo artist before, knew his work. The week before he’d tattooed two small bows made of ribbon onto her hip bones; very very sexy.

He was ready with the design on transferable paper quickly. We made small talk; Belle took off her shirt and laid on the massage table.

“It took me a long time to get over that I was causing someone else pain,” the tattoo guy said, gun buzzing, stars beginning to bloom on Belle’s breasts.

“It’s not the pain I’d have trouble with,” I said, “it’s the permanency. I’d feel somehow responsible.”

(I quickly realized that was clearly my own issue - with a capital SHOO - and hoped I hadn’t offended him. This is not really the point of my retelling the story, but was definitely an addition to my character study of myself.)

Belle, however, knows I am a bit of a sadist. That I do in fact get hot by other people’s pain. Very specific, erotic, consensual pain - do I need to specify that? Feels necessary, even if you, this Sugarbutch audience, and the sexblog community are quite understanding and forgiving of these tendencies in me.

How she looked: open. Her face was open, eyes and mouth open, in that way that only submissive girls do. What is that, exactly? Oh it’s so hard to describe, there is not appropriate language to tell about these trance-like states, the places you have to work, at times, to get inside of, but that are so unlike any other space. It takes skill, that’s what I’m trying to say. Skill, and intention.

I think she may’ve even played it up a bit, in retrospect. I wasn’t expecting to go watch her get tattooed and have it turn into foreplay, into part of our scene, but it did. It was getting us both hot, she would writhe a little and whimper, little cries from her throat and she kept my eyes, watched me as I watched her, enthralled, familiar with these looks of pain, my mouth watering, and I wondered what it was like to get fucked while getting inked, considered what would happen in the moment of orgasm: would the skin be more susceptible to the ink, or more resistant? The moments juts before coming are the best times to leave marks, best amount of blood flow in the skin up near the surface, but not actually when she’s coming, then the blood gets sucked away, back into her body, close, like something closing, a creature, an anemone tensing and trembling.

I watched her get ink for nearly an hour, more. The sprinkle of stars just at her bra line turned out very feminine, tough, delicate, sharp. Gorgeous.

We picked up two bottles of wine and went back to her place.

part two