Author’s note: This is — by my standards — a hard, rough BDSM scene between two people who find out each other deeply and intimately, and who have arrangements in place for the therapeutic use of what looks — from the outside — like dubious consent.

It is also a story about being neurodivergent and having the kind of meltdown that can happen to you.

So: trigger warnings for all of that.

#~#~#

I was curled up in bed when I heard the throaty growling of Merle’s bike pulling into the driveway, and the crunching of gravel under its tyres. I did not move.

I heard, filtering up from under the other side of the house, the clank of his side stand going down, the hard sounds of his boots on the concrete, the snaps of his bag unclipping. Crunching of gravel. His boots thudding on the back stairs. The door opening.

A single serotonin receptor in my brain managed to fire, but it was swamped by whatever was responsible for shame.

“Hello!” Merle called out before the door clicked shut.

“Mph,” I managed, not loudly enough to be heard even in the depth of night, let alone late afternoon.

I heard Merle’s boots clump through the back of the house. A thump of his bag on its table. Creaking of the old chair he had restored. Buckles unsnapping. Boots thumping onto the ground as he took them off.

Velcro opening. Zips. More movement of fabric.

Then Merle’s pantherine, soft steps as he came back through the house, up the corridor.

“Chrys, honey,” he said softly from the doorway, in case I was asleep.

“Mph,” I managed, again.

“Are you OK?”

“No.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Is it something I’ve done?”

“No.”

The bed creaked and shifted as he moved onto it.

I smelled him before he touched me: nothing sour, but clean sweat, clean musty maleness, a faint odour of his riding pants — even a faint trace that might be the woollen undershirt he wore which somehow stopped him smelling sour.

This time, enough serotonin receptors fired to make a difference. Unfortunately, I was not in the mood to be happy.

I burrowed my head into the pillow as he settled against my back and tucked his legs behind mine. He grasped my head firmly and lifted it so he could slide his lower arm under my neck, then gently lowered my head back down. I did not respond. On any better day, it would have made me giggle. It did not.

Merle nestled his upper arm over me.

“Did you do something wrong?” he asked, his voice vibrating against the back of my head as he cradled me.

“Everything,” I muttered.

His arm over me wormed underneath the pillow I was hugging against me, up over my chest between my breasts. His other arm folded up over the pillow. Gently, but firmly enough to make me gasp, he squeezed.

If you know the phrase “crushing the soul back into my body”, you know.

He held it until I almost had to gasp for air, then slowly relaxed but still held me tightly.

“What went wrong?” he asked, gently.

“Everything!”

“What went wrong?” he repeated, squeezing very slightly harder but with no change in the gentle, compassionate tone of his voice.

“I couldn’t get anything finished, and I tried to make bread and it went all wrong, and I tried to get quotes for under the house and nobody answered and nobody has called me back and I’m stupid and…”

My sullen litany terminated in what was almost a squawk as he crushed me against him.

My hands opened reflexively and he ripped my pillow away.

“What do we do when we’re feeling useless and stupid?” he asked, calmly.

“Give that back, fucker,” I said, trying to reach for it. He held me too easily. I could have fought and could have given a good user account of myself, but if I was in the right head space to do that, we would have been having a very different conversation.

“What do we do?” he repeated.

“Tell you to fuck off,” I said, pushing the entire day’s frustration and self-directed rage into five words.

He pulled his upper arm out and brought his hand down hard onto my thigh where it was exposed by the short nightie I was wearing, so it stung like a bitch.

“Fuck!” I screamed. I didn’t move.

“What do we do?” he asked.

“Tell you to fuck off!”

“Roll over,” he said.

“Fuck off.”

He slapped my thigh again: Harder, this time.

“Fuck!” I wanted to tell him it stung like a bitch, but I was too sulky.

“Roll over.”

“Fuck you.”

“What’s your safeword?”

OK. So he was serious. If I had enough energy to appreciate how much he cared about me, he wouldn’t have had to ask. But the question shifted a track in my brain. Made me aware of what he was planning. Which was, in its own way, the begin of therapy.

“…Hibiscus,” I muttered.

“Roll over.”

I didn’t bother saying anything then, I just buried my face in the pillow under my head.

His other arm, which was still cradling me, moved so his hand could slide over my upper breast — covered only by thin cotton — and discover my nipple. He pinched, hard.

“Ow, FUCK!”

“Roll over.”

“Fuck off.”

He pinched my nipple, grinding into it until I screamed and flailed away from him — not to get away or to knock his hand away, but to obey.

He immediately let go and pulled his arm out from underneath me as I flopped onto my belly with my right nipple smarting and throbbing.

He pushed himself up onto his knees as I pushed my face sullenly into the pillow. I knew what was coming even before he pulled my nightie up off my butt.

When I had ripped off my clothes in a final tantrum in the afternoon, I had only put the nightie on because I hated myself and my body. So I was bare-arsed because I had been gonna shower before I had lost my temper at the shower curtain and stormed out of the bathroom, screaming.

A second later, his hand landed on my arse.

I gritted my teeth.

Merle knows what he’s doing. He starts gently unless he’s making a point, working up to going hard, so the first few hurt but weren’t bad.

He alternated one side to the other, as I ground my teeth together and shoved my face into the pillow and tried not to make any sound as the spanking settled into a steady rhythm.

Then he hit me with the leather paddle we keep hanging on the headboard.

I screamed “FUCK!” while trying to buck off the bed.

His hand slammed into the back of my neck, shoving me down onto the bed as he cracked the paddle down over my other buttock.

“MTHRFGHER!” I screamed, muffled by the pillow.

He struck again, and again, as I started trying to writhe out of the way. My arse was on fire, each blow sending pain exploding through me as I thrashed around without actually trying to escape.

When he stopped, it took me a few seconds to realise.

He grabbed my wavy hair, twisted it into a rope, and pulled my head up.

“Are we feeling better, now?”

Better? Not yet. I was feeling more alive, though. I was feeling like I was able to want something more than oblivion. There was enough adrenaline in my veins for that, now, even if it wasn’t enough to make me feel worthy enough to ask for help. Or anything else.

“Get fucked,” I said, my voice strained by the angle my neck was at.

He dropped my head, so my face slammed back into the pillow.

“Ow,” I said, muffled.

He slapped my thigh — lightly. “Up.”

I made a half-hearted thrashing with my legs, but didn’t move meaningfully. If I don’t have the mental energy to move properly, I need assistance.

He slapped my arse again, so it stung. “Up!”

“Fuck!”

The burning, stinging pain of the blow gave me enough energy to scrabble my legs up the bed, reach between them and grab the backs of my knees from the insides. Which lifted my arse to the right height, while serving as a reasonably effective spreader bar because a comfortable grab has my knees at shoulder-width aside.

My nightie fell forwards, bunching around my shoulder and pooling under my tits. It was loose. I had been in no mood to wear the tight ones that make me feel sexy.

Merle moved to push his hips against the side of mine to hold me in place, facing the other way, and got a good grip on my opposite hip with one hand.

“Are you going to apologise to yourself and accept that you have worth and need to look after yourself?” he asked.

“I fucking don’t,” I said indistinctly into the pillow.

He slapped my cunt. Lightly, and with years of skill so he didn’t do more than terrify my clit, but it still stung on my labia.

“Fuck!”

He slapped again, for the same reaction.

“You’re wet, so your body’s working even if your dopamine production isn’t,” he said.

“Fuck off.”

He shoved two fingers inside my cunt.

I bucked, but he was holding me in place and my hands weren’t moving from my legs. Not so much because I had so much practice of doing what I was told, but because I didn’t have the mental energy to do anything else, yet.

“If you don’t want to feel good, I’m going to have to make you,” he said, and started fucking me with his fingers.

“No!” I tried to shake free, but all I could think about moving was my hips, and he was holding them securely.

He had barely started and he was already getting to me. I don’t have a spanking fetish, but it does get the adrenaline pumping and when there is adrenaline in your bloodstream, arousal is at all times an option. And when arousal is an option, Merle holding me and force-fucking me makes it a certainty.

“I don’t want to feel good!” I wailed, wriggling desperately.

“Good, you can say something. So tell me to stop.” His fingers kept thrusting vigorously in and out of my now sopping, clenching cunt.

“Stoooop!” I wailed.

“Use your safeword, and I’ll stop immediately,” he said, perfectly calmly, while his fingers made me ache and crave more.

I started sobbing into the pillow, knowing full well what my safeword was but helpless to use it because using it would mean I deserved the right to.

But while I was crying, my hips were beginning to writhe of their own accord.

I’ve had a fetish for forced orgasms since the first orgasm I ever had. I knew it was a fetish since the first time I saw bondage porn and realised that my desire had a name. And Merle has been taking benefit of it since approximately two seconds after he found out about it.

It’s such a strong fetish that although it started out being about vibrators, it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Any time, any time at all that he decides he wants me to come but I don’t want to because I’m busy or I’m trying to be on top or I just want to last longer — if he can touch my cunt, I’m gushing and shaking and helpless. It’s got nothing to do with being ordered about with submitting — they’re just cute, fun things to add to our play to spice it up. No, it is entirely to do with being controlled. Dominated. Forced.

When my brain is working properly, we like to wrestle. We do it naked and we make every efficient erotic move legal, and we go to submission. I’m actually more skilled than Merle is, and not a lot less strong, and I’m quicker, but he can pin me seven times out of

10. If he can get his hands to my cunt, it’s over. If he can get fingers inside me, he can fuck me and I begin losing all self-control, followed by will, followed by the match. If he can get his cock inside me, I may as well tap out right then.

So as I’m kneeling there with my arse in the air, crying into the pillow, I can feel the familiar feeling rolling over me and I hate it because it feels good and I don’t deserve to feel good but there’s not a goddamn thing I can do to stop it and Merle knows that and he’s making me feel good and I could stop him but I can not because I don’t believe I deserve to.

If it made sense, he wouldn’t be needing to do it to me.

“You’re going to come soon,” he said.

That was completely unnecessary.

“Nooo, fuck, nooooo!” I moaned, my voice ragged with arousal as well as crying, as my hips began jerking and my cunt squeezed even tighter around his fingers.

“Here you go,” he said, calmly, reading me perfectly.

I screamed wordlessly, still muffled by the pillow, as my hips bucked violently and an orgasm exploded through me, giving my brain a violent shock of pleasure and flooding it with many of the neurotransmitters it had sulkily refused to produce when I actually needed them.

The orgasm left me gasping, shaking, and furious at myself. But I was halfway between furious that I had let myself feel any kind of pleasure, and furious that I had fought it. So that would have been progress, if I had been able to realise it.

“Did that feel good?” Merle asked.

I didn’t even say anything. I didn’t move. I tried to ignore him because my brain was operating at the level of hoping he would go away if I did that.

But he knew that me not responding was progress.

“Do you accept that you deserve to feel that?”

All I could do was violently shake my head, which was the same movement — handily — as trying to burrow my face into the pillow.

“I’m going to take my shorts off,” Merle said. “If you don’t want to feel good, sit up and tell me to stop. Otherwise, I’m going to fuck you until you come again.”

I started crying again. I knew it was coming, and I felt worthless to do anything about it. My mind was a raging mess of contradictory desires and a black demon trying to tell me that pleasure was sinful and I didn’t deserve it.

I’ve never believed in sin in my life because I’ve never believed in any god. That’s how badly my bad days fuck me up.

I dimly heard him moving. I felt the bed move as he did. I knew he was peeling his shorts off and on any other day, I would be eagerly watching, or reaching for him, or shivering with anticipation and getting horny all over again.

Then he moved behind me and I felt his fingers, assertive but not rough, rub my labia before pushing inside as far as he could get them once more. I gasped involuntarily and pushed back, and hated myself for it.

“Are you going to ask me to stop?” he asked.

I just tried to push my face further into the pillow.

“I’m going to fuck you until you come because I love you,” he said. “And because you deserve to feel good.”

I didn’t try to say anything or to move. I didn’t want to acknowledge what he said because I couldn’t cope with the idea of self-worth.

When he pulled his fingers out, I gasped and tried to push back after them and hated myself for that, as well.

Then he pushed the head of his cock into my cunt and the crying that had begun to fade came back because I still didn’t think I deserved to feel that good.

I had never been so depressed that if my body was aroused, I didn’t feel wonderful when Merle’s cock slid inside me. It was his presence inside me. It was the proof of how much he desired me. It was how much he filled me. It was how good his cock made me feel. It was comfort as much as pleasure, reassurance as much as hedonism.

Which I knew, deep in my bones, I didn’t deserve.

He moved inside me tenderly, not ramming in but making sure he was thoroughly lubricated before pushing further, until his hips pressed against my aching buttocks and the head of his cock was a hair from my cervix. I don’t get cervical orgasms and I’m jealous of women who say they do, and it hurts if anything touches my cervix too hard, but oh my goddess, the fear of it happening is better than a nipple clamp.

I moaned, my hands tightening on my legs and my cunt clenching around his fat, delicious cock.

His hands, which could make me feel so many things, wrapped around my waist gently. I knew he was being tender. I wanted him to be punishing. To be cruel. To use me brutally, if he wanted his own satisfaction. To let me believe he wasn’t doing this for my advantage.

For a few seconds, he was still, pressing against me, the fire in my still-burning buttocks fuelling the fire in my now-burning count.

Then he started pounding the fuck out of me.

So, what I told you about my forced orgasm fetish?

It took about five seconds for me to be so consumed by being dominated, controlled and made helpless by the undeniable inevitability of my impending orgasm that I forgot to hate myself.

Sometimes, all it takes is the spanking. More usually, Merle can reset me with fingering me to climax. It’s a bad day when he has to fuck me as well but it almost never takes more than fucking me until I’m screaming, and it’s never yet taken more than fucking me until I scream twice.

And it starts with me getting so overwhelmed that I forget to hate myself.

“Oh, god!” Even muffled by the pillow, my voice was clear enough for Merle to find out.

“You’re going to come because I’ve decided you’re going to,” he said, breathing deeply but not strenuously. “I’ve made this easier for you by taking all your self-control away from you, so you can relax and know there are no consequences for you here.”

See why I love him? Why I’ve given him permission to have this power over me?

“Oh, GOD!” I wailed.

“And you’re going to come in three, two, one, now,” he said, and I screamed into the pillow as I bucked wildly on his cock.

He didn’t time that to perfection. Being commanded to lose all control and come helplessly like the slut for him that I am is also part of my fetish. Once he had me almost there, he really could set me off with just a word.

As I was still shaking, he slapped my fingers where they were still clamped around my knees. I obediently let go.

He grabbed my hair and pulled me upright until he could crush me against him with one arm while his other hand lightly held my throat as an added reminder of who was in charge. My nightie fell halfway down, but was trapped against his chest and his arm kept it raised as he cupped a breast.

I gasped and then I moaned in delight, my eyes fluttering closed so I could feel him fully without distraction as my hands reached blindly to feel his thighs and glorious arse.

“Feeling better, my Lady?” he asked, his voice a purring caress against my ear that made me shiver deliciously. He didn’t really need to ask. He knew he had reset me.

“Yes, my Lord,” I whispered.

“It’s been a few months since you last had a day that bad,” he murmured.

I just nodded fractionally.

“What happened?”

I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to remember. But I needed to, and he deserved an explanation and besides — in that moment, I was a good girl who obeyed him.

“I had a good morning but then after lunch, I tried cleaning that wall but I couldn’t get started or focus on more than getting all the gear out for an hour and so I tried planning dinner, which meant ringing the engineers about the deck, but after I psyched myself to ring them they were engaged, so I tried to email them but their website had a broken link so I lost my temper with the vacuum cleaner because it’s stupid, and went to bed and I forgot about the bread dough I made this morning so it’s just sitting on the verandah and is probably ruined now.”

Because he understands his neurodivergent girlfriend, Merle did not question any of that.

“What do we do when that starts happening but switching tasks doesn’t help?” he asked.

I sighed. “I walk away from everything and make a cup of tea.” Making a cuppa is the last thing I will be unable to do, and the only thing I will be able to laugh hysterically at if I do fuck up.

“Or?” he prompted.

“Go and talk to the birds.”

“Or?”

“Swear inventively, then go and watch Lord Of The Rings.”

“Or?”

I couldn’t not put a naughty spin in my voice. “Dress up in my latex maid costume and role-play being ordered to do things.” We had bought it as a joke but neither of us had been able to take it seriously for sex games. But I looked damn hot in it and I could have fun pretending to take it seriously, which was often the focal point my brain needed to produce the goddamn dopamine.

“And?” he rumbled against my ear.