After all the conversations, when they did go to bed together, it happened very quickly. He began to undress, and she did, too, wasting no time. He noted that she had managed to shed all of her layers as quickly as he had shed his.

They had shared a few very intimate hugs in the recent past, so he wasn’t totally surprised by the feminine perfection presented before him, despite the fact that she wore nothing but baggy clothing. But at times like these, reality was generally better than whatever had been imagined.

Dan had made Love with a hundred women in his life as a traveling musician, but he still got nervous on stage, and he was still overwhelmed by beauty, however often he was lucky enough to witness it, in numerous forms. Mona’s skin was so soft and smooth, warm and inviting. Her Pussy was completely shaved, he noted, happily surprised.

“Is there anything I should be doing?” she asked.

She was very nervous. So gorgeous, and so nervous.

“No,” came Dan’s simple answer. “Nothing at all.”

Dan had met Mona years earlier, at one of his concerts. He came through Hamilton at least twice a year on his tours. Any time he was doing a show anywhere near this post-industrial suburb, Mona would be in the audience, somewhere near the back.

She never said anything, but Dan’s concerts didn’t usually have more than a few dozen people at them, and so it didn’t take long for him to notice that the same woman was sitting by herself at every show he did in the area, wearing these quirky outfits that made her look like a color version of an old black-and-white photo of someone’s great grandmother. He started making a point of talking with her every time he saw her at a show. The conversations were generally short and polite, and Mona all the time seemed so nervous when they were talking, she could barely move her jaw.

Finally, once when Dan was doing a show in the town of Hamilton itself, rather than some other suburb in the region, Mona took the initiative to email Dan in advance of his arrival, inviting him for a home-cooked meal, the use of her laundry facilities, and a place to sleep.

Dan had noticed fresh bedding folded up and sitting next to the couch in the little living room of Mona’s little flat. She had mentioned, kind of in passing, that she would sleep there that night, and give him her bedroom.

The way she had mentioned this told Dan it was clearly just optional, not that this separate sleeping arrangement was non-negotiable. So when she was showing him to his bedroom and bidding him good-night, he waited for the question he knew would be coming, because Mona was a very thoughtful host. Here it was.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

She locked eyes with Dan briefly, before looking away. Was she nervous about having asked this question, in case it might be too suggestive? Or was she just nervous, generally? Dan wasn’t sure, but he assumed the former, and didn’t miss a beat before responding.

“Take your clothes off and lie down,” he replied.

He was only a bit surprised by how quickly she complied, and without making any jokes or anything like that — just enthusiastic compliance.

And now here they were. She lay still, but not the sort of still that comes from being relaxed. He knew she was just nervous. He also had learned from their conversations that she had not had a boyfriend in a very long time.

She was nervous, and still, but not stiff. Or at least, when Dan nudged Mona’s legs, to spread them aside, she readily complied, with no hesitation. Dan began to kiss and caress Mona’s body, her breasts, her stomach, her thighs, and eventually her clit, which he spent more time focusing on. Mona lay perfectly still throughout, having received no further instructions from Dan to move, after he had spread her legs aside and lifted her knees up a bit.

Mona was wet to start with, and whatever Dan did with his tongue between her legs caused no discernible reaction. No new sounds emerged from Mona’s lips, no involuntary flutters of any muscles, no perceptible reactions of any kind, as far as Dan could tell.

Mona remained in exactly the same position as Dan rose to meet her face, hovering directly above her. When he kissed her, she reacted, happily joining her tongue with Dan’s, but apart from that, she lay still. When not engaged with such activities, Mona’s face bore an expression of contentment, with a vague smile, a lot like the painting.

As Dan gently entered Mona’s awaiting, shaved Vagina with his penis, her expression didn’t change in the slightest.

“Does it feel good?” Dan asked.

“Yes,” came her quick reply.

He knew she hadn’t done this in a long time. She didn’t move at all, which might have been a sign of awkwardness, nervousness, inexperience. Dan was gentle that night, for the most part, but no matter what he did, no matter how slow or fast or deep he moved, Mona’s expression didn’t vary at all.

After a while, Mona stopped answering “yes” when Dan asked if something felt good, and she just started responding with what became her more common refrain from then on.

“I like everything you do.”

* * *

This would be the beginning of a long-term relationship. Dan started making sure Hamilton was central to lots of tour plans, and they started seeing each other more frequently, though there would generally be many months between visits.

Dan would occasionally hear from Mona, if they hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Her messages belied the fact that she missed him a lot, and looked forward to his next visit more than she looked forward to anything else in life, though she was too circumspect to quite use such phrasing.

When they were together, unless she had an errand to run or an appointment to keep, Mona’s answer to Dan’s question about what they need to do was all the time the same — “whatever you’d like.”

When visiting an intelligent woman who was a great cook and very gorgeous, Dan’s decisions about what to do, when left to his own devices, meant that the nights were dedicated to Love-making, and Free time during waking hours tended to involve interesting conversations and delicious meals, punctuated by nice walks among the crumbling factories of the neighborhood.

“Whatever you’d like” was a refrain that had more and more resonance for Dan in the night-time context. It became increasingly clear to him that if Mona had a sexual orientation, this was it, but for Dan it was all still fairly mysterious.

Why had Mona not had a boyfriend for twenty years? Why the decades of celibacy and loneliness? In light of this, he thought how it was that now that she was sexually active again, she proclaimed to like everything Dan did, and he had no indication that this wasn’t the case.

Except that no matter what Dan did, Mona never seemed to have anything Dan could identify as an Orgasm.

Dan had learned from experience quite early on that women can often feel all kinds of pressure from their lovers to have orgasms. He knew, at least from stuff he read, that women often faked orgasms. He figured they did that especially if they were under some sort of pressure from their boyfriends to have them, or to have them on command, or to have them sooner, or to have a series of them, etc. So Dan intentionally took a low-pressure approach when he was in a new relationship, exploring different avenues that might lead to an Orgasm, without talking about it, necessarily, and without, he hoped, having any particular expectations about such things.

In every other relationship Dan had been in, however, there had been a consistent factor, among others. Dan found that every woman he had ever loved was at least capable of having an Orgasm. Even if in some cases this could be quite challenging to achieve, Dan had all the time found that eventually he was all the time able to make every woman cum. With some women that meant a fairly exhausting, 30-minute cunnilingus session, whereas with other women, just touching them in the right place seemed to provoke explosive orgasmic reactions. Most women were somewhere in between, Dan found.

Eventually, Dan resorted to verbal communication.

“What makes you have an Orgasm?” he asked her one night, while he was on top of her, casually moving in and out of her wet Pussy, with her legs open to each side, knees up slightly, just where Dan had placed them.

“I don’t know,” came Mona’s unexpected reply.

“No one has ever made you have an Orgasm?” Dan asked, somewhat incredulously.

“No,” she replied.

“How do you make yourself cum?” he asked.

“I don’t,” came her reply.

Dan wasn’t sure if she meant she just rarely masturbates, or that she had actually never masturbated in her life.

“You’ve never even tried to make yourself cum?” he asked.

“I never really think about it. I’ve never had an Orgasm,” she said, without seeming to feel devastated by the notion.

Dan knew that lots of people were uncomfortable with talking about Masturbation. He knew that some people liked to pretend they never did such things, because of course it has been and still is taboo in many circles — to do, to discuss, etc. But having achieved this level of intimacy with someone, Dan wondered it seemed unlikely Mona was being disingenuous.

He had on several occasions been responsible for providing young women with the first clitoral Orgasm they had ever had that wasn’t self-induced. On many other occasions, Dan had succeeded in introducing young women to their capacity to have vaginal orgasms, who only knew themselves to be capable of having clitoral ones. But he had never been lovers with someone who had never had an Orgasm, even from touching themselves.

And here they were, him on top of her, moving in and out of her inviting Pussy, feeling the smooth surfaces of her hairless labia, looking at her gentle smile beneath him.

Dan had once been lovers with a woman who couldn’t cum from him eating her or fingering her, and also didn’t cum from the vast majority of sexual positions. But if he fucked her hard for an extended period, with her legs up in the air, as fast and deep as he was capable of, she would eventually cum this way — and only this way. She of course praised Dan’s sexual prowess to no end, as a result of their mutual discovery.

This aggressive approach was a bit of a last resort on Dan’s part. It just seemed so unlikely. But with no opposition from Mona whatsoever, he moved her into the completely prone position he wanted her in, and proceeded to thrust into her with such force that he had to pause to adjust pillows around her head, so she wouldn’t hit it against the wall every two seconds.

As all the time, no matter how hard Dan thrust inside her, regardless of which angles, there was not only no hint of an Orgasm anywhere, but also no change in Mona’s contented expression.

Dan had found that there were women whose bodies seemed to be designed in such a way that they were just completely compatible with his, and regardless of what he did with them in bed, it all felt good. For the vast majority of women Dan had been lovers with, however, there were some angles that felt better than others, some that felt downright painful and others that induced screaming orgasms, and so on. With Mona, he thought if it was just that everything felt good, as she all the time said, or if there was anything else going on that he couldn’t perceive. If so, he couldn’t perceive it.

Eventually, Dan collapsed in a pool of his own sweat, which he had already drenched Mona and her bed with. The next morning, Mona had an extra load of laundry to wash, and this seemed to make her just a little bit happier that day, though it could have been something else.

* * *

Dan was enjoying Sex with Mona immensely, and the phenomenon of Sex with Mona also making him think.

When he did find what made one of his lovers have an Orgasm, or what positions made her feel really good, and which ones maybe hurt a bit, Dan enjoyed playing with all of that in the course of Love-making sessions.

To use the water-kettle analogy trendy among the Taoist-oriented books about sexuality he read as a teenager, he liked to play with bringing the pot of water to boil slowly — and keeping it from boiling until he wanted to make it boil, too.

But Mona never came to a boil, in any sense. She was a shy person when Dan met her, and she continued to be. A reserved woman who never lost her cool, either out in the world, or in bed with Dan.

Unable to bring Mona to a boil, unable to either make her have an Orgasm, or even make her wish for one, unable to discover a sexual position that she liked more or less than any of the other sexual positions he put her in, Dan gradually stopped trying.

Dan stopped trying to turn her on, to make her cum, to make her want to beg for more, or any of the things he was accustomed to doing.

He realized he felt conflicted about it, but most of the time, he enjoyed putting women in a position where they wanted something enough to ask for it. He enjoyed teasing them with his tongue until they begged him to go faster and make them cum. With others, he enjoyed fucking them gently, until they beg for him to fuck them hard and make them cum. Or he enjoyed fucking them in a position in which they couldn’t cum, or a position that might hurt a bit, until they requested a change in position, or until they indicated through a wince or a whimper that he was going at it too hard.

He enjoyed all of those games, but he was never sure how they should go, what the rules should be, how much he should make a woman beg before what was joyful could turn into something more dark, potentially. How much a little pain could be a turn-on, before it became a real turn-off, potentially. He loved pushing envelopes and playing with that water kettle, but loathed the idea of crossing lines and really hurting someone. Wherever he went, though, if it was naked in bed with a woman, it seemed to Dan, those lines were all the time there to contend with.

But now they were all gone, it seemed, no matter where he looked for them to be. When he began to realize this, at first he worried he might become bored. Maybe, he wondered, he needed all of this sexual drama in order to be turned on. But those worries didn’t last long. Instead, he found Mona’s mysterious mix of total dedication mixed with this sort of asexuality completely intoxicating.

“What would you like?”

Dan grew fond of asking this question, knowing that the answer was all the time gonna be the same.

“Whatever you’d like.”

When Dan requested Mona eat him, she would rise off the bed and quickly move towards his penis, all the time ready to fulfill this request on a moment’s notice. This was the only initiative Mona would really take in bed, and Dan found this worked fine for him.

He had also discovered that there were no lines to cross in terms of when Mona was prepared to enthusiastically carry out this request, day or night.

Sometimes Dan just wanted to relax for ten or twenty minutes in the afternoon before taking a nap, and unbuckling his belt became all the indication Mona needed, if he did that in the afternoon, if they were together in her bedroom at the time. Other times, after hours of Sex in the evening, Dan would wake up at 3 am wanting more. Often he hadn’t cum earlier in the evening, and at 3 am, he wanted to, so he would request fellatio from this gorgeous, sleeping woman, who would invariably all the time wake up and immediately comply with this request. Usually, it seemed, she was already awake before the request was made.

It took some time for Dan to fully accept the fact that Mona really just wanted him to do whatever he wanted to do with her, and her only real concern was that he might be bored by this fact.

Along with accepting this reality came a feeling of liberation for Dan, like a weight was lifted off of his chest. For all the joy he found in Sex, it could all be very complicated, with concepts of reciprocity, mutuality, and with the complexities around questions of pain and pleasure, subordination or egalitarianism. But this was so different. It was just all about Dan, and his pleasure, which actually turned out not to be so complicated at all.

With no lines to cross, the lines Dan had been so conscious of in every other relationship he had ever been in just disappeared. When it came to anything related to Sex or physicality, Dan entered into every new day and every new night with Mona with the notion that whatever he felt inclined towards was good.

Mona almost never initiated physical contact with Dan, except to hold his hand briefly now and then, if they were walking down a sidewalk together, just because she hoped to build a very minor scandal among some of her more nosy neighbors by doing so. Otherwise, physical contact was Dan-initiated, and done so frequently.

He loved how she would stop whatever she was doing during the day if he wanted to reach his hands under her bra, or take her to her bed. And the way she took off every garment of clothing when she got into bed pleased him very much. Did she somehow know he liked that, or was that just what she did? For many of Dan’s lovers, the default would be to take off one garment at a time, part of the extended foreplay, but not with Mona.

He especially loved how every night, all night, she was so clearly his to do with what he would. She’d cuddle if he just wanted to cuddle, and when it turned into something else, the transition was as smooth as could be. The notion that anyone might ever say something like “slow down” or “wait” or “not now” or “no” in the mildest of forms eventually stopped being a notion that Dan ever wondered about, as he increasingly grew to take it entirely for granted that Mona just liked anything he wanted to do with her.

After all the many nights Dan and Mona spent together, long after Dan had given up on figuring out what might make Mona tick from an orgasmic perspective, long after he had become happily comfortable with Mona’s almost total passivity, and had embraced the idea that he should just do whatever he felt like with her when they were together, it was something Dan said that had more impact on Mona than perhaps anything he had said, or done, before.

“Are you my Sex doll?”

The question hung in the air like a thundercloud. As soon as he said it, he wanted to retract the words. He suddenly worried he might have offended Mona — but he needn’t have. Mona exhaled. It seemed like she was exhaling air that had been stored at the bottom of her lungs for a long time.

“Yes,” she said, with an emphatic quality that surprised Dan. “Yes,” she repeated, with a more even tone. And then again, quietly, demurely, but with more intensity than ever: “yes.”