“Write me stories,” she said.
“Write me stories, and I’ll do to you whatever wicked things you do to your heroes.”
So, I wrote.
Tale upon tale flowed from my fingertips to hers. We were a team: I brought her raw materials, she crafted them into encounters. Her standards were simple and constant: Challenge myself. Balance indulgence with torment.
I filled the stories to bursting with my fantasies, page after page iterating over them from every angle. The possibilities lit up my mind constantly. She took plenty of liberties: Sometimes she would do exactly what I wrote, as if following instructions. Other times, I would not understand the connection to my prompt at all, until she would whisper the epiphany to me as her hands kneaded my most sensitive parts.
The result was that I never knew what to expect, never knew what nuanced wickedness my words might have unlocked, could never add in a detail without weighing the probability that I might be designing my own doom. She made it clear I would regret it if I went easy on myself. When I wrote weak stories, didn’t pour myself into them, didn’t give her enough to work with, there would be a consequence every time. Bruises, denial, scars. She would find a way to make me feel paradoxically judged and liberated.