The Duchess J., Part II

Where were we? We last left our adventurers in bed, post-tent-orgy and jealousy-tremor, at Burning Man. Let a day or two pass. It's Wednesday; we've been on-playa for nearly three days now, and haven't seen the Duchess since Monday night. Wednesday morning, Princess P is in a decidedly grumpy, depressed mood, for no apparent reason.

It's not something that happens to me often, so the brain searches for reasons. I had had an unusually grumpy morning the day we left for Black Rock City, too, and the moods could possibly be attributed to the fact that I had started a new pack of birth control pills immediately after finishing the hormone pills from the last pack, so I didn't get the week of placebos to have a period in (I was to be bleeding for nearly all of Burning Man, and did not relish the thought of packing all my bloody tampons & pads home with me.) Hormonal issues? But I digress. I was unhappy.

Prince B had plans to take his cycling contraption out for a spin around the city alone; I had a date with a different long-distance lover for the afternoon. The Prince tried to cheer me up for a bit, but recognizing that it didn't seem to be helping, I gave in to my mood and shooed him away, tears still inexplicably in my eyes.

I calmed down a bit and hunted up my date, Han, who was camping across the way. We had a nice time touring the city. My mood slowly improved as we played on the merry-go-round, had an iced coffee (heaven, in the desert!) surrounded by the peace of Starfucker's Oasis, and napped on a bed facing a still-being-constructed dance dome floor. We decorated ourselves with patriotic regalia for a parade, danced to the Burning Band's flaming tuba solo, got too hot, got hungry, went back to camp.

As soon as I got back to my camp, I knew I had returned too early. I knew this because A) Prince B wasn't back yet and B) I knew with certainty that he had gone to visit the Duchess without me and without telling me about it in advance, and the realization revived my insecurity and my worry and my morning's bad mood. I didn't want to mope around camp waiting for him to come back, but dinner was imminent and I didn't want to miss it. So I paced around camp like a caged tiger, not really able to be part of any conversation, not really able to do anything particularly productive or engaged, until the Prince returned. When he did, he was glowing with cheerful enthusiasm and full of bubbling happy stories about what he had done. I noticed that he didn't mention seeing the Duchess, so I asked, and then he told me about what a great time he'd had with her.

Sigh. I'm sure he would have gotten to it if I hadn't asked. But the fact that he didn't lead with it made me suspect that he was aware it would hurt my feelings, which it did, and that made the hurt worse. Sigh.

My already-wonky mood spun out into real badness. I haven't felt jealousy like this before or since. I felt betrayed, angry especially because when we had been talking on Monday I had specifically mentioned that him visiting her without me would be something that would put me on shaky ground. I never meant for him not to be able to do such a thing, and I supported his ability to do so, but damn it, it would have been nice for him to check in with me about it first rather than going off, probably already having a good idea that he would visit her, leaving me in a dangerously bad mood, and not telling me in advance what he was considering.

Here's something that I'm discovering about jealousy for me--when I feel like a part of the process ("How do you feel about me having sex with Pixie right now?") it's always easy to say yes, and the resulting action causes no harm to my psyche. When I feel like things are out of my purview, I get threatened. I'm not necessarily proud of this. But it's an easy fix--just let me know what you're about to be up to. For most things, that puts me back in a generous mood. But perhaps it makes spontaneity more difficult, and I don't wish to curb the spontaneous! So when the urge strikes and it isn't convenient to check with me, for goodness' sake do what you want--and make a point of telling me as soon as is feasibly possible, include me in the experience by sharing the story with me, and that works too, passably well. I bet there are other people out there built like me.

Here's another thing I notice about this jealousy: Prince B has had several other partners at this point. None of them have inspired in me this kind of pain, or, in fact, any jealousy at all. The Duchess is different partly because I'm smitten with her myself--and I wanted to be part of this interaction, and wasn't sure how, and at this point in the week was highly uncertain of my place in all this. The main connection with the Duchess seemed to be through the Prince, and it was envy as much as jealousy that I was experiencing, a powerful feeling of being left out of something that I wanted too. I didn't know if she wanted me, I didn't know if it was my place to go out and try to forge a relationship with someone who already had a connection to my boyfriend--would I be rejected, or, worse, tolerated for the sake of maintaining good relations but secretly not really desired?

This was the nadir, the hardest moment so far in my relationship with Prince B, and fortunately it only lasted an evening.

Anyway, yeah, so I was hurt real bad. I cried for an hour, got mad, got depressed. I don't remember everything the Prince and I talked about. By the end of our conversation, though, I was feeling better. I was resolved to hunt the Duchess out on my own the next day, let her know everything I'd been feeling in the past few days, spend some alone time with her, see what happened. Clear the air. My trust and faith in the Prince was restored, we were continuing to work out the kinks in this system (no pun intended), we'd figure things out by getting them wrong occasionally. I was sheepish for being so sensitive, but I'd vented and felt better.

Our camp was doing a group excursion that night, and we had talked long past the time for getting ready. They were calling impatiently for us to come out of the tent and join them, which we finally did.

But despite my newfound lightness, Prince B's expression was dark--and though most of our camp was consumed with hilarity, silliness, his steps were slower and slower, his face tired. I dropped out of the revelry to talk to him, and soon we were trailing behind the rest, trudging along in our silly costumes, and ultimately we left the party entirely to talk.

Prince B was upset for having hurt me. He'd had a great time with Duchess J, had come back to camp full of excitement and glowing happiness and the thrill of the new flame, and my unhappiness had firmly quenched his exuberance. It's not worth it, he said. If poly is going to bring this misery down on our heads whenever something special comes along (and this case was different from either of our separate casual affairs to this point; somehow this was obvious to both of us), then it isn't a good thing. His momentary happiness had thoroughly soured, and now it was my turn to feel guilty for taking that joy away from him with my pain.

Don't give up, I urged him. This sample size is too small, and it won't always be like this; we're working it out. I'm not done trying.

He said he wasn't giving up either, just feeling discouraged. And so, repeating the substance of this conversation over and over in different ways, we wandered through the surreal landscape of Black Rock City at night. Everybody lit up bright colors, wrapped in EL wire. Huge flamethrowers spouting fire nearby and miles away, clearly visible through the night; bikes whizzing by; art cars rolling serenely across a sealike smooth desert floor, spotlights raking the dust in the air, thump-thump-thumps of dance music drifting to our ears from half a dozen different playa nightclubs at once. We wandered and talked until we stopped feeling so bad, and then we wandered and talked until we started feeling even better, and then we realized that it was dark and we were away from most of the crowds and we were horny as hell. We stopped in the midst of a thicket of noisy white flags, blowing in the night breeze; we lay down on the dust of the playa, cuddled, kissed, and ultimately discreetly fucked, there under the white flags and the stars, with Black Rock City moving and shaking and thumping and gliding around us. One passing art car spotted us and gave us a randy cheer. A bicyclist whizzed past inches from Prince B's head, not even seeing us. We finished, happy, dirty, exhausted, reconciled, and wandered the city a little more before bed with clear minds and hearts. Oh, if only every fight we have ends so simply, we have found paradise.

The next day I went to find Duchess J at her camp. Joy in my heart, there she was--and so were many other friends, SweetD and Rawr and DOL and his girlfriend Genius and more. All people I know and love and would love to spend time with, but all I wanted was to extricate the Duchess. I invited her to explore the temple with me, and she agreed, and miraculously we escaped the crowd of people I love without any awkward yes-we're-going-to-the-temple-no-you-can't-comes.

So we biked out together, and had our first real one-on-one conversation since the one we'd had when we first met at Pinto's party, so long ago now, emotional lifetimes ago. Suspicion confirmed: the woman's amazing. She's smart and perceptive and thoughtful and appreciative, opinionated, educated, beautiful. We talked, reached the temple, sat in the sun. Many people wanted to photograph us; we let them. I was happy and relaxed and self-conscious at the same time, proud to be out with this woman, looking for a way to cut through all our interesting theoretical conversation about art and talk about the personal, not finding it yet.

We rode our bikes to a camp called Home, aptly named, a welcoming shady mansion of a place with couches and coffee tables and cuddly places, wallpaper, chandeliers, seriously. The moment came and she seized it first--asked me about the moment on Monday night, described in the previous Duchess J post. Did I have my arm around her already? I can't remember now. I told her about my feelings on Monday and a little less about my feelings on Wednesday. I mentioned that I had never felt jealousy like this before and she asked me why, and I told her that it was because I had never wanted to date one of Prince B's girls too, and that seemed to go over well, and we got to kissing, and that was wonderful. Just wonderful. And most of my worries about not being desired were released, and that was nice too.

We ran into SweetD and Rawr at the sno-cone giveaway we stumbled into after that. And that was a lovely reunion too--spending time with all these people with whom I had reached a level of physical intimacy that was comfortable and rewarding and exciting and clear. Rawr had recently been naturalized into the Bunny Nation, and she wore bunny ears and facepaint, which she got all over our faces when she kissed us goodbye. I invited Duchess J back to camp for dinner. She said yes.

The story goes on, and gets better and better, but there'll have to be another post or five about it, because it is way past a Princess's bedtime. Love to anyone reading this. There's lots to go around.

Saturday night

We attended a stunning play party hosted by excellent folks I'll call Mr. Fabulous and Pixie. It was my third such event, and Prince B and I remarked to each other later how easy it felt, how warm and lovely and relaxed. Our rules for behavior at sex parties have changed by only one measure from that first party we attended. We are still obligated to ask for attention when we need it (because of jealousy or loneliness or just wanting some), and to honor that request when it comes; in addition, now we check in with the other if intercourse with another person is proposed (my suggestion, after that twinge I felt at the first party watching the Prince get out a condom).

This was our first chance to apply that second rule. I had watched Prince B play with Pixie all night, and when he extricated himself to approach me while I was chatting with my friend The Spinning Angel (henceforth TSA) I knew already what was on his mind, and consented happily to their fucking. I felt no twinge of jealousy; rather, I had difficulty focusing on the conversation I was having because Prince B and Pixie were making such an arousing spectacle of themselves in the midst of the small, sex-drenched room we were in. I made eye-contact with Mr. Fabulous once, when Pixie turned over and Prince B entered her from behind: oh my god, we beamed to each other, our partners are hot. What a wonderful show. Ironic, because Mr. Fabulous and I have gone on a date or two, but never quite had the time to squeeze into each other's schedules, and now there were our boyfriend and wife, getting along smashingly and getting farther...er...into each other than Mr. Fabulous & I have ever gotten.

Until recently, I've never thought of myself as much of a voyeur, preferring by far to be watched than to watch. But more and more I am discovering that, while observing the sexual interaction of strangers, even very sexy strangers, doesn't arouse me all that much, watching my friends and lovers play with each other is intensely erotic. This is doubly true for watching Prince B. This is the second time I've been present for him entering another woman (more on the first time later) and both times the memory has survived as an intense and recurring fantasy.

I wonder what's going on, psychologically, there. Dan Savage proposed (or reported, I don't think the theory was invented by him) in one of his columns that people sexualize the things that threaten them. Hence rape and cuckold fantasies, masochism, and all kinds of power play. In the bedroom people seem to get up to all kinds of things that seem drastically counter to what they would deem acceptable in everyday interaction. So am I responding as a voyeur to my partner sleeping with other women because I have subverted my potential jealousy into arousal? Does it even work that way?

If it does--if the human brain is capable of taming a negative emotion by turning it into a pleasureable one--hurrah. The thought is both mildly disturbing and utterly fascinating. I would hope I wouldn't somehow decieve myself into encouraging activity that is actually damaging to me. However, letting my partner sleep with other people is a conscious and enthusiastic choice on my part, one I truly don't believe *is* damaging to me, and being able to enjoy it in this way seems ideal. And awesome.

One week until we visit Duchess J! Whee!
xoxo
Princess P

Duchess J., part I

This story comes in many parts...here's an arbitrary chunk of my/our excellent interaction with a beguiling woman.

The duchess waltzed into my life during the party mentioned in my last post. She lives far away. Post-party, the Prince pinged her on Facebook--she pinged back--not wanting to miss out, I pinged her too--she pinged back--I wrote her a longer response--she wrote me an even longer response, and one to Prince B too--the Prince and I started sharing her responses to each of us with each other--we made it more efficient and began a lively three-way email discourse, writing each other pages-long emails about love and life and jealousy and the geometry of three-pronged relationships. And, thanks to the Duchess, about food.

After the party, we didn't see her outside of the virtual world until Burning Man, where we eagerly anticipated meeting up. (for any readers not familiar with Burning Man: it's a big, I don't know, technohippie art festival in Black Rock Desert, NV. Once a year, fifty thousand people (largely upper-middle-class liberal white people, but I hear the diversity is growing (racial and geographic diversity, not so much economic or political diversity)), from all over the world (but mostly the western half of the US and also NY) go there for a week and build a temporary crazy city in the middle of a fuck-ton of white desert dust. They call the earth there playa and they call the city Black Rock City. That's prob'ly all you need to know for the purposes of this blog. It's better than I'm making it sound.) The first day in the desert we pedaled over to the Duchess's camp in Prince B's two-person pedal-car built for the occasion, and there was a big dust storm and we were in the right general vicinity but couldn't see more than a few feet in front of us. So we parked the pedal car and walked toward the first structure we could make out in the dust, and lo and behold! It was the Duchess's camp, a group of 20 or 30 people, many of whom we know.

So we saw her again. We cuddled up in the dust storm with her and DOL, also part of her camp, and talked and stroked each other's arms, waiting for the dust to lift enough to find our way back to camp, where I was scheduled to cook that night. Seeing her was shocking, a little bit--our correspondence had so colored my image of her that seeing her in the flesh--shorter than I remembered her? But then most of the time I had seen her, that first night, was more horizontal than vertical--made of skin instead of pixels--such a stranger still, despite all the intimacies we had poured out electronically, that it was a bit like meeting a new person. But a new person one feels one knows, a new person who comes with that feeling of recognition that you get when meeting a very good friend for the first time. The storm blew on around us. We talked through our dust masks and goggles and listened to each other and turned slowly white from the light-colored dirt in the air on our skin, in our hair, extricating ourselves only when it was past time to return home.

Later that night we went back to their camp to excursion with Duchess J and our other friends SweetD and Rawr, a couple we had met at the same party we first encountered the Duchess. We explored Black Rock City, returned. I was a tired Princess but the notion of staying over in SweetD and Rawr's tent with the Duchess was bandied about and seemed rather irresistably attractive.

I swore I would sleep. I collapsed on the mattress inside the tent. The other four, less tired, sat around my curled-up body and began stroking me, and immediately it was clear that my sleepiness wouldn't last. But I let them go on touching me, and watched as they started to kiss each other, letting my sleepiness give way to my arousal. Only when I couldn't stand it any longer, when the delightful burn in my pussy and flutter in my tummy reached a pitch that I couldn't ignore for one more second, did I allow my hands to slide up along their intertwined bodies. The kisses descended to me, to my lips and face and shoulders and thighs, and I rose to meet them. The subsequent fivesome was heavenly, and again, the details blurred by the passage of time--has it already been a month and a half? Indeed. Next time I'll be writing about this sort of thing while it's still fresh. Moments I remember--the two beautiful women, the Duchess and Rawr, side by side on their backs, underneath me, one of my knees in between each set of their thighs, just looking at their beautiful softness and leaning forward to kiss two incredible sets of nipples, feeling them grow firm between my lips. My nipples brushing theirs. Two gorgeous men running their hands over my naked body, behind me, while the ladies kissed each other below me, the softnesses of their bodies pressing against each other and me.

At one point in the night, Prince B and Duchess J got somehow separated to the other side of the tent. He was sitting up and she was in his lap, his cock in her mouth. SweetD was sitting on his heels and I was leaning against him, restrained by his arms, while Rawr parted the lips of my vagina, tickled my clit with her tongue, made me rock back over and over again against SweetD's warm hardness straining into my back. I was missing the Prince at that moment, feeling echoes of the jealousy I had felt at the party where we met, and I looked over and locked eyes with him. Watching his arousal grow enhanced mine, I felt our connection surging back, and suddenly the incredible eroticism of my current position overwhelmed me. My Prince & I were together, surrounded and attended to by sexual beings; we were their masters in one moment, in another moment their slaves, following each other's orgasms with eager & devouring eyes. Ohmigoodness. And shortly thereafter, we were ready for sleep again.

The queen-size mattress was too small for five. We lined up, the boys on the ends, I in the very middle, and despite my genuine bone-deep exhaustion, I could not drift off. Duchess J was between me and the Prince, and in my sleep-deprived state the earlier moment of jealousy returned to me, grew. Following our rule for immediate sharing, despite the fact that I knew he had drifted off to sleep, I leaned over the Duchess and tried to whisper in his ear, returning them both to alertness.

"Hey, love--sorry to bother you, I know you're sleeping, but can I talk to you for a moment?"

He struggled to open his eyes. "Of course."

"Earlier--when you & the Duchess were together on the other side of the tent--I was feeling some jealousy. I just wanted to tell you that."

He looked at me, sleep fogging his face, confused and frozen. The Duchess was contrite. "I'm sorry," she whispered, squeezing my shoulder. But it wasn't her acknowledgment I needed at that moment. The Prince said nothing. I realized that he was too sleepy, really, to process what I had said, that we were discussing something publicly that we had only really talked about in private before, we were surrounded by people who had given us a pretty fantastic night and needed to sleep, and that this wasn't going to get very far.

"It's okay," I told him. "I just wanted to let you know." I settled back in amongst the incredibly hot people I was there to spend the night with. Everybody shifted until we were all arranged just so, pressed up against each other, and I was too warm and uncomfortable and even more distracted, knowing the timing was awful but feeling rejected by my prince's blank stare instead of reassured by the warmth I had expected from him. So I leaned over again.

"Hey," I whispered again. He woke, sort of. "Hey, I just wanted to make sure that you heard what I said earlier." (He'd been mishearing me/not hearing me all day, and we had concluded earlier that he'd gotten something in his ear or something.) He looked at me. "Yeah," he said. I waited. Nothing. "I just--could you just tell me that it's okay for me to feel that way?" "Yes--yes, of course!" "Oh. Okay."

I settled back in again. But that was too much. It wasn't at all the reassurance I needed, and the lack of that, combined with my extreme sleep-deprivation, was turning what had been a pretty minor twinge of jealousy into full-blown hurt. I was frustrated with not being able to sleep, knowing that the desert sun made sleeping in impossible, and feeling shut out, and suddenly not at all a part of the pile of beautiful bodies I was inhabiting. Besides all that, I had to pee. I struggled up and out of the tent, trying not to cry. SweetD said, "hey--are you coming back?"

I hadn't been sure, but I told him that yes, I would, I was just going to the portapotties, which I did, and then cried outside for a minute before I headed for the tent again (it gets cold in the desert at night!) I hoped to get to sleep on the edge of the people pile when I returned, but my shifting had roused everybody, and the Prince had gone to the bathroom as well by the time I returned. We settled in again, me on the edge, but of course when the prince arrived he took the outer spot again, and I was hemmed in and sleepless and upset and not sure at all what to do about it. The tears returned, and I let them fall silently. But I did consciously let some of them fall on Prince B's neck.

Diversion: have any other cryers out there done this? I know I have more than once. You're upset--you don't want to harp on it--but the people you're with may not know you're upset. And the tears are there, and you don't want to sob loudly, but maybe if you're curled up in bed with someone you let the sobs shake you--just a tiny bit. And maybe you let a few tears touch your partner's skin. Just to let them know. Is that manipulative? Passive-aggressive? Or is it just a wordless form of communication? Take your pick. Sometimes the tears work when the words don't, for making the understanding happen. The dishonesty comes in, I suppose, if you're pretending to try to hide the tears, when actually you want them seen. I can't claim never to have been two-faced about that. I'll try to be more up-front in the future.

Anyway. Prince B noticed I was crying, woke up for real, and asked if I would talk to him outside, which I gratefully consented to. (I suppose I could have asked him for that myself. My courage had failed me, maybe, or I wanted somehow to be able to deal with it without leaving the nest of bodies--I mean it honestly hadn't occurred to me to ask for a private conference. The troubles of sleep-deprived minds, maybe. Or maybe I just *am* passive-aggressive. Damn.)

Anyway, so we talked shivering outside, naked under our coats, holding each other for warmth. It turns out that Prince B had heard me the first time, had been a bit deer-in-the-headlights because of the public scenario, and too close to sleep to respond properly, not realizing how much I needed it. The second time I spoke to him, when I asked if he had heard me--he actually hadn't heard that, and was confused about why I was looking at him so expectantly, and still mostly asleep--anyway. I cried on him about how I had felt shut out, and he felt terrible and apologized, and gave me all the reassurance I needed, and it felt better, and then we decided that if we were going to get any sleep at all we should bike back to our own camp, which we did after saying goodbye and collecting (most of) our clothes. Blessed sleep, renewed connection.

There's more to this story, but I'll continue it in the next post. This incident was a good experience for the Prince & I--the first time either of us had hurt the other's feelings, and we proved ourselves capable of sorting it out well. Events in the coming days got more difficult before they got wonderful. The rest of this story coming soon.