A month went by, and we’d managed to find an excuse to see each other again – a conference at the school he taught at, which happened to have to do with my field of study. We spent some of the time at the conference, but most of it in the beautiful hotel room I was staying in (where he ended up staying with me). We were both on spring break, so we had plenty of time to explore one another and find out our specific preferences.

Now, I had always known that the fantasies I had were not ones that could be casually shared the way the girls in my dorm liked to talk about shirtless Josh Hartnett or the like. From the time I started thinking about sex, I could not stop myself from thinking about being kidnapped, tied up, and otherwise humiliated. There were times when I felt like this was wrong and tried to stop thinking about it, but that never worked for long. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was a name for that kind of feeling – sure I’d heard of “S&M,” but wasn’t that all about leather and high heels? I had no particular interest in leather and high heels, and had concluded that the fantasies I had tended to focus on the extreme as some way of compensating for the fact that they weren’t real. No, that doesn’t make any sense, but you try reconciling being a radical feminist and a submissive woman. It’s much easier to live in denial.

Anyway, as soon as our sex life started it was obvious that I liked it rough. The first time he spanked me (at my playful suggestion) I simply could not believe how good it felt. I liked being bitten, too. And teased verbally. And told what to do… and in general, things that required me to stop at the store and buy a tube of concealer for my neck and chest before going home to my parents… Suddenly things that had been mysterious for years made a lot more sense.

There was one moment that weekend, though, that stayed with me for a long time in my head. The morning before I had to leave, we were fooling around in bed. As he resolved a bit of banter by pinning me down by the shoulders, I told him “I’ll do anything for you. Tell me what you want me to do.”

He got quiet and looked out the window for a second. The shades were drawn and indigo-colored morning light was just starting to seep through. “I can’t do that,” he replied. “The one thing I want is something that wouldn’t be fair to ask of you.”

For a moment I was afraid to say anything, but I had to ask, “what?”

He looked back down and met my eyes. “I want you to stay.”

I breathed again, deeply relieved. But in the split-second before I’d found the nerve to ask, I’d recognized that I was experiencing something that was going to be important again someday, in a situation far more intense. I went back home that evening exhilarated, but with a sense that there were feelings between us that were a long way from being resolved.