surprised by how harsh his words could be. That's more like it, | thought

surprised by how harsh his words could be. That's more like it, | thought. Some S&M encounters have a rhythm to them, a poetry: a beginning and an end that become clear to the participants as they go along. This one didn't -- at least not to me. So I didn't rely on him to bring it to a close. After a while, I safeworded out, and took a breath to still my tears. Mr. Ambition was quiet again. I was having trouble reading him. There was some energy caught inside him, coiled like a dragon, but I couldn't tell if it was violence or something else. I put a halt to my own emotional cycle and tried to focus on him. "How are you feeling?" I asked, but he couldn't tell me. I asked a few more questions, and he just couldn't answer. He just didn't know. I never got another word from him on how he felt about that encounter. I wondered if I was being too careful in how I asked about it; I wondered if he wanted me to push harder; I wondered if I'd already pushed him too far. I suspected there were some dramatic feelings trapped in Mr. Ambition. But I wasn't sure I currently had the warmth to coax them out. te Ok ok In the past, I've fallen in love so hard that I felt like the world was black-and-white when I was away from my lover; I felt like I only saw color when I was with him. I have dated men where the chemistry was so intense, so obvious, that it hung in the air between us like smoke. I've had sex that felt like telepathy. It's pretty awesome when it works. And it's easier to get that with some people than with others: some guys, I meet them and it's like we speak the same language already. With some guys, it's not instant, but it also doesn't take long to build our mutual vocabulary. And then I've dated guys where the learning curve -- both sexually and temperamentally -- was much longer. It was less instinctive. But it was not impossible. So I know for a fact that people can build chemistry. Sometimes it's just there, but sometimes you can create it. My relationship with Mr. Ambition was definitely polyamorous, but a few weeks in, I decided I was really into him... and I started managing my incentives. There was another guy I saw occasionally, with whom I had stronger instinctive chemistry. This other guy agreed with me that we didn't want a Big Important Relationship. This other guy will screw up my incentives if I hang out with him too much, I thought, and I limited my time with him. I set rules with myself: I didn't call him, I didn't text him. I knew: /fJ let myself get too intensely into this other guy, that could inhibit my ability to bond with Mr. Ambition. I told the other guy that once my relationship with Mr. Ambition was more stable, we might be able to pursue something more intense. By the time we had the conversation, he said he'd already been thinking similar thoughts. That he didn't want to distract me from something that could be beautiful. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018621