Tag: break ups

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The Last Time

Published on by AmyLeave a comment

I know tonight is goodbye. I didn’t let myself think about it as I drove over here this morning, or I knew I would crumble and compromise on my needs just to keep the relationship afloat for a little longer. We have given it a damn good go, me and him, but we have come to the end of the road. This road we have been walking together has forked, and we have to go in different directions.

I didn’t plan to end up in bed with him after all the hours of talking. After the conclusion that there really is no way forward. At best, I expected a bittersweet hug and a tearful farewell. At worst, I envisioned slamming doors, screamed grievances, scorched earth. There’s none of any of that. Just the wistful sadness that comes with an inevitability you’ve both been putting off for far too long.

The disentangling will begin in earnest tomorrow. Tonight, though, we will say goodbye in the only way we know how. People talk a lot about first time sex. First time ever, first time with a new person. First time with a person of a particular gender, or trying a particular act. We don’t talk anywhere near as much about last times. But that’s what this is.

I don’t want him to be gentle with me. This isn’t a tearful what-could-have-been, but a last hurrah. We both understand the urgency without needing to say it. He reaches for me, and I for him, and we devour each other as though we are each trying to imprint ourselves forever on the other’s memory. His three-days-unshaven face is scratchy against my cheek when we kiss, and his fingernails claw at my skin as he pulls my jeans and then my panties off.

He wraps his arms around my legs and pulls me to him, burying his face in my vulva and inhaling the scent of me. His tongue finds my clit, circling and flicking at it in exactly the way that makes my toes curl and my eyes roll back in my head. There’s nothing like sex with someone who has known you, your body, and all its quirks for years.

He slides a finger, and then two fingers, inside me, curling them to push against my G-spot. I hear myself make a sound somewhere between a whimper and a growl.

I reach for him. “Fuck me,” I plead. “Just fuck me.” I need to feel him inside me. One more time. He reaches for a condom from the nightstand and hands it to me. I tear it open and unroll it over his hard cock the same way I’ve done thousands of times before. Then his hands are on mine, pinning me beneath him, and his cock is sliding into my cunt. I squeeze my muscles around him, relishing his moans and the way his eyes flash with desire. We hold each other’s gaze and his hand slips into mine.

“Rub your clit,” he commands, bending to kiss me. My hand slips down between our bodies and a gasp escapes my lips as my fingers find the right spot. For a short, blissful time – maybe a minute, maybe five, I don’t know – there is nothing but sensation, nothing but him and me and this moment.

The memories unspool like a roll of film. The first time he went down on me. That time we decided to try swinging, but quickly realised it wasn’t really our scene. The mutual discovery of how much we both loved it when he spanked me. Our experimentations with pegging and double penetration and fisting. All the years of experiences and experiments, of love and lust and laughter, all come down to this. This last time.

In the moment before I orgasm, I remember the way he cupped my face in his hands the first time he kissed me. My climax tips him over the edge, too, and I feel his heartbeat pulsing through his cock as he comes inside me. Neither of us says anything. What use are more words now?

I let myself cuddle with him just long enough for our hearts to steady, then extricate myself from his arms and his bed and his life.

I do not let the tears fall until I am driving down the motorway at 70 miles per hour, the breakup playlist I preemptively made blasting at full volume.

This strange little piece of smutty-ish fiction was written as part of Smutathon 2021! You can check out all our work and learn more about the challenge on the Smutathon website. Please consider donating to this year’s charities, Gendered Intelligence and Trans Lifeline.

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Empty Spaces

Published on by Amy1 Comment

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I recently ended my relationship with the person I referred to as The Artist. As with the ending of any long-term relationship, the reasons were complex and I won’t be going into them here. Please respect my/our privacy and don’t ask me to spill details, because I won’t. Please don’t make assumptions or demonise them, even under the guise of being supportive.

When you end a relationship, especially a long-term relationship, it inevitably leaves empty spaces behind. People think that us polyamorous folks can just brush off a breakup. “You have other partners, right? So what’s the big deal?” they ask. To that, I want to say this: if you lose a dear friend, do you just shrug it off because you still have other friends? Of course you don’t.

Yes, I’m in the fortunate position of not being alone. Yes, Mr CK has been an absolute fucking rockstar in all this, supporting me through making an incredibly difficult decision and caring for me through my heartbreak. But you know what? I broke up with someone I loved. It still hurt like absolute fuck.

When you love an artist, you inevitably accumulate a collection of their work over the years. The choker-definitely-not-a-collar they made for me is still hanging on the back of my office door as I write this, wondering what the hell to do with it now. There are empty picture hooks on my wall where the paintings they did for me used to hang. I took them down and packed them away because looking at them was a visceral reminder of the loss and grief in the immediate aftermath. Memories shoved into a closed drawer, maybe to be revisited someday when the pain is less immediate. Empty spaces, a fitting metaphor for the total obliteration of everything we had.

After I finished taking the paintings down, I automatically picked up my phone and scrolled through messages, my fingers tingling with unsaid words. That little green bubble by their name showing they’re online, and the do-it-don’t-do-it battle not to send the message. I still love you. I’m sorry. I wish I’d had any other choice. Typing and untyping, writing and deleting, imagining them seeing the little dot-dot-dot next to my name, all the things we both said and didn’t say and probably should have said and definitely shouldn’t.

I have had a tendency, in the past, to jump from one serious relationship directly into another. Though this hasn’t always gone badly (Mr CK and I hooked up very soon after I left my abuser, after all,), I don’t think it is a healthy pattern overall. The result is that I end up basing my worth and my sense of self on my romantic relationships.

That’s why, in the wake of this most recent breakup, I decided to take a long break from dating new people. I don’t know yet quite how long this break will last or what it will look like. At the moment, I’m tentatively considering getting back on the dating apps after the new year. But right now, even thinking about it is exhausting. The idea of sitting across the table from a stranger and trying to figure out if there is any chance of us fitting together, the idea of having to disclose that I’m a survivor and have a history of mental illness and oh by the way I have a sex blog, fills me with dread.

So I’m hitting the pause button.

As a polyamorous ethical slut, there’s sometimes an internalised sense that I should always be dating new people or at least open to dating new people. Isn’t closing myself off to new connections just a holdover from monogamous culture? Well, no.

I need to get to know these empty spaces inside me that I have filled or attempted to fill with one relationship after another after another since I was fourteen.

I’m still a polyamorous person. Just having the one serious partner (as well as a couple of casual or not-sure-yet-it’s-early-days connections) doesn’t negate that part of my identity. Just like being bi isn’t dependent on the gender of my partners, being polyam isn’t dependent on the number of them there are.

I’m just doing things differently this time. Instead of trying to fill the empty spaces with another new relationship that is probably not a great fit in the long run, I’m filling them with other things that nourish me. With hobbies and friends, with self-work and self-compassion, with therapy and writing and fitness and literally anything else.

I’m lucky to be able to do this from the position of having a secure, stable nesting relationship as a base, and I am immeasurably grateful to Mr CK for providing that base. But the ending of any relationship still leaves empty spaces behind, and I am both excited and terrified to explore those spaces and see what I want to fill them with next.

I’ll think about dating again when doing so fills me with excitement.

This post was written as part of Smutathon 2021! You can check out all our work and learn more about the challenge on the Smutathon website. Please consider donating to this year’s charities, Gendered Intelligence and Trans Lifeline.

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Sometimes It’s Okay to Hate Your Ex

Published on by AmyLeave a comment

In the queer, polyamorous, and kink communities, we like to eschew many cis-hetero-mononormative relationship tropes. One of those is the idea that you must hate your ex.

I think letting go of this trope is a good thing. Relationships end for many reasons, most of them nothing to do with one party being a garbage human. Our communities and friendship circles and dating pools within these subcultures are small, so if we go out of our way to avoid our exes, we might end up not going to a lot of things.

But sometimes I think it’s okay to hate your ex. Sometimes I think it can even be a source of power and healing.

I don’t hate you because you’re my ex, I hate you because you abused me

At this point in my life, I’ve had quite a lot of relationships varying in seriousness from “very casual” to “genuinely thought I’d marry him”. That means I’ve amassed quite a few exes.

I don’t hate, or even dislike, the vast majority of my exes. There are those I remember fondly as a beautiful presence in my life that lasted a limited time. There are those I think of wistfully once in a while, allowing myself to think of what might have been in another life. Some I can happily wave or chat to when we bump into each other at the occasional event. Others I really don’t think of much at all any more.

But that ex? Him I hate. Viscerally and deeply and with a power that sometimes frightens me. Not because he’s my ex, but because he abused me. Because I sometimes still have nightmares. Because I had to wade through so much pain and spend so much money on therapy to escape him psychologically long after I escaped physically.

I don’t hate him because he’s my ex. I hate him because he abused me. (I’m reliably informed he hates me, too. That’s fine – his feelings have no impact on my life whatsoever at this point.)

Anger and hate aren’t always toxic

Toxic positivity would have us believe that “negative” emotions are always bad and to be avoided. I don’t believe that’s true at all. Yes, anger and hate can hurt us and eat away at us. But they can also be sources of incredible power.

My friend Sarah wrote this incredible post about not forgiving their abuser. I return to it again and again when I need a reminder that yet another well-meaning “forgive him for YOUR sake, hun!!!” is not good advice for me. I return to it when I need reminding that:

“Survivors never need to forgive our abusers. We don’t need to accept any apology, no matter what others think about its strength or veracity. We don’t need to be thankful or grateful or appreciative. We can be as angry and disgusted and unforgiving as we want to be.”

Sarah Brynn Holliday

I don’t forgive my abuser, either. I’ve tried. I have cried and yelled at the sky and punched pillows and been through years of therapy and burned everything he ever gave me. But I do not forgive him. If anything, the older I get, the less I forgive him.

But that anger gives me strength. It helps me to keep myself safe, to ensure that I will never again ignore the parade of bright fluttering red flags I ignored to be with him. It allows me to support other survivors, to speak out against intimate partner abuse in all its forms.

You’re allowed to hate people who hurt you

Whether they abused you or cheated on you or emotionally neglected you or something else entirely, please hear this loud and clear: you are allowed to feel anger, resentment, and even hate towards people who hurt you.

Being friends with your exes can be great in some contexts. But it’s not mandatory and sometimes it would do more harm than good to even attempt. Don’t feel obligated to listen to the people who tell you that forgiveness is the only way. It isn’t.

You are allowed to feel indifferent. You are allowed to be cordial but distant. And it’s okay to hate your ex if they caused you harm.

Will I ever stop hating my abuser? I don’t know, but I know I will always hate what he did to me.

A bunch of dead roses. For a post about a D/s break-up

“Bring the Collar:” The True Story of a D/s Break-Up

Published on by Amy1 Comment

I don’t want to write this post. I really don’t. I’ve been mulling it over all day and a huge part of me just wants to go, “oh fuck it” and write a generic “how to get over a break-up” listicle.

But I feel like that’d be a cop-out. Today’s 30 Days of D/s prompts is all about break-ups, and to be honest I’ve been inspired by Kayla’s amazing raw honesty in telling the story of her own D/s break-up a few years ago. So… here goes nothing, I guess.

15.05.2015

Realistically, I knew we were breaking up. Our relationship had disintegrated beyond repair now I’d finally, a good five years too late, begun to stand up for myself.

We were to meet in the park. Neutral ground. The stated aim: to have the make-or-break conversation. My true intention, though: to escape as quickly as possible with my head held high and my dignity intact.

All of this to say, dear readers: I knew it was over. It was overer than over. That relationship, like Marley, was dead as a doornail.

Still, it was three words on a text that broke me into pieces and tested my get the fuck out resolve to its limit.

“Bring the collar.”

Of course, I’d known he would want it back. That was in the contract. The Contract, to love and protect on his part. To love and obey on mine. Worth less, in the scheme of keeping us together, than the notepaper it was written on. But even so, this was the moment it sunk in. Master is releasing me. He doesn’t want me any more.

My subby heart broke then. I’d thought I was as good as over it – mentally checked out of the relationship I was technically still in. I’d mourned the man I’d loved, come to accept he’d never been real and this monster who now stood in his place had been him all along. The guy who told me I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known, one perfect night in a student dorm room when I was nineteen, and the man who looked me in the eyes five years later and told me I was poison, were one and the same person.

But as his sub – his slave, he’d called me, though I was never entirely comfortable with the connotations of that word – I’d tried so hard to please. To obey, do everything he said, shut my mouth and look pretty and never take up more space than my little allotted corner. A toy isn’t supposed to complain when it’s tossed aside once playtime is over.

What I felt then, when I kissed the little silver lock of the collar one more time and handed it over to him while I tried not to cry, was that I’d failed. He’d thrown it at me plenty of times over the preceding weeks, while whatever was left of our love dripped down the drain. Bad sub. Not really submissive. Disobedient. If you’d just shut up and do as you were told, we’d be fine.

For years, I’d twisted myself until the core of my identity was being his. I wrote him a poem in the early days. In it, I said, “You are life. You are oxygen. You are everything.” My blood and breath. My heart and soul. More myself than I am.

What I know now, and wish I’d known then, is that I wasn’t the one who failed. I was just a young girl who got thrown into a lion’s den too complicated and fucked up to comprehend, and then spent years trying to tame the most vicious, dominant lion while he snapped and snarled at her heels.

He was the one who failed me. He promised too much, delivered too little, broke me down too hard. I gave love, loyalty, obedience, absolute devotion, and what I got in return was emotional devastation, over and over and fucking over.

In that moment, I saw him as he was. All my idealistic, teenage bullshit fell away and I saw a man who could never love me. A man who can, in all likelihood, never truly love anyone. In that moment, I took myself back. I gave him back his collar but I took back my agency, my power, my life.

You’re not my blood and breath. I am.

I belong to nobody. I am free. And I am happy.

No kinky item today. This is too raw to add anything to it. If you want to help with my ongoing therapy bills, just hit the buy me a coffee button!