I was never shy about “correcting” him when I felt our fingers were awkwardly clasped, and he would eventually acquiesce to my rigorous hand-holding protocols, so that our fingers fit together easily, secure but not too tight, together but not so clasped as to encourage clamminess. I had it down to a science!

Little did I know how fraught with meaning, how complex the intricacies of holding a lover’s hand would become. When my boyfriend and I had a third person as part of our relationship, there was the awkwardness of who would be in the "middle” and therefore get to hold both hands, and all of that was moot if we were in public, since a girl holding a girl and a boy’s hand simultaneously could be taken for three friends walking together but the boy in the middle was just going to draw too many questioning glances, and I was rather more sensitive to such things in my youth.

It is funny how, even as I grew older and developed rather complex sexual appetites, the simplest of things can fall by the wayside, only to be rediscovered in the context of kink. I look back on my relationships with dominants and realize that the seemingly simple intimacy of hand-to-hand contact was not an integral part of our relationships. I never held hands with my dominants. They touched me in many, many other ways that resonate for me even today. The intimacy of touch is revealed in myriad, nuanced ways that never cease to leave me amazed, shocked, blushing, breathless, awed, shaking in terror or loving myself in a new way.

I have been amazed by the power that even something as simple as a hand gesture can have over me. My first dominant had an assortment of hand signals – some of them cribbed straight from dog training manuals – that were used to communicate in various situations. Kneeling, sitting, silence, all of these could be communicated without verbal cues. And even as part of my mind was vaguely humiliated by the thought of being ordered around, like a trained animal, with a mere flick of the wrist, this aroused something within me. My most recent dominant partner managed to detour the usual niceties of verbal communication when, within perhaps a day and a half of us becoming acquainted, I found myself reflexively obeying him with a gesture, repositioning myself to his command even though we’d not negotiated such things. These small gestures have such amazing weight and startling impact that I found myself defenseless.

I have been shocked by the amount of pain and discomfort and pleasure that someone can provide me with the same pair of hands. Fingers that gently caress one moment can, within an instant, switchback to pincers that pull and abuse willing flesh into new realms of pleasurable pain. The hand that softly strokes my face can, within a flash, slap the breath out of me, leaving me dizzy and reeling, gasping and blinking in the flashbulb aftermath of an astonishingly fast contact that leaves me longing in terror of the next strike.

I’ve blushed furiously when my hands have been offered to the service of another, and I found myself being ordered to pleasure myself. Under the watchful eyes of someone commanding me to make myself come, and not to stop until I was permitted to stop. Lying whilst writhing uncontrollably and flushed with embarrassment as this other person sat and watched the patterns and rhythms that were my own secret communication with my own body’s rhythms of desire. My hands became their tools, by proxy, an instrument for my own revelatory gestures, showing them the way that I please myself, simply to please them.

I’ve been breathless and overcome with a torrent of overloaded emotions when the depth of my own touch was mirrored back to me in unexpected ways. I recall experiencing a new lover for the first time, and since it had been a very long time since I was afforded the luxury of intimately touching and experiencing the body of a partner I pressed my hand to his face, covering his eyes, tracing my fingers across his mouth, feeling the thinness of the skin about the artery that pulsed so close to the surface of his skin. I could feel it thrumming to my touch. I allowed my fingers to trail his sides, the skin on his belly, finally daring to press my hand to the center of his chest, one hand lightly touching the skin there, the other moving smoothly on the skin of his arm, as I breathed and felt and drew in as much of him as I could to taste all of that with my hands.

]
images by Aeric Meredith-Goujon]He smiled at one point, a lazy grin that closed his eyes and he murmured “I can feel you listening to me…” even as I hesitated, because I hadn’t had words for the incredible intimacy of this touch, and yet he was absolutely in the moment of listening with me, and I was staggered at how something so deceptively simple as my hands on his body carried so much information, longing, connection.

I’ve had my thoughts bleached by terror at the loss of the use of my hands. I remember being in the heat of a scene of particularly elegant torments inflicted by a lovely play-partner who loved nothing more than psychological bondage. She wasn’t a huge fan of physical bondage, but would with a smile and a whisper, order my hands to stillness as she stood before me, whip in hand, trailing the four feet of braided leather across my vulnerable skin. My normal reflex would be to cover myself, you see, and this got in the way of her whip.

“I need for you to hold your hands together behind your back...Thank you…keep them there…” and even as the gentle strokes from the whip went from soft susurrations, to stinging snaps, to shrieking slashes that terrified me with the intensity of the pain that soul-seared me? My hands remained clasped behind me, obedient and willingly standing down so that she could enjoy my suffering, unfettered. It terrified me into a dreamlike ecstasy that my hands, accustomed to preserving the sanctity of my skin, would themselves submit, seemingly independent of my mind’s shrieks for surcease, and remain patiently mutely cloistered within one another until she gave me permission to reclaim those docile extremities.

It was at the hands of a lover where I first learned appreciation for parts of me that I had previously rejected. In the throes of a passionate encounter, I found myself repeatedly removing the hands of this guy I was just trying to fuck, goddammit, from my belly. The moment I had pried his grasping fingers away from the excess avoirdupois of my abdomen, he went straight for the fat on my upper thighs.

I was, at first, confused, then embarrassed, then annoyed. I was not sure how much more clearly I could non-verbally communicate “Do NOT touch me there!” than repeatedly pulling his acquisitive, amorous hands from these parts of me I pretended I didn’t care about, but towards which I secretly felt shame and distaste. And here was this guy, grabbing me, grabbing my fat like that was acceptable!

As things heated up, and we were fucking, he turned me over so that he could fuck me from behind and to my absolute horror he grabbed onto my belly with both hands, leveraging his gorgeous cock even further inside me, and while this felt really good physically? It also felt pretty awful emotionally and I finally spoke up, twisting myself up and around while attempting to pull his hands from their persistent manipulations of my gut.

“Will…you. Stop…grabbing…my fat?!?” I hissed, surprised at how angry and shaky my voice was to my own ears. I expected him to back off, to get the goddamned point already, but he shoved me back down, my head hitting the pillow with a stunned squeak.

“Shut up.” He drawled “I like it.” And he fucked more deeply inside me, his hands sinking into my skin, my flesh, into me. All of me. And I realized I had been so busy in my own head, feeling shame, feeling uncomfortable, that I missed the lust and desire carried by his hands as the pleasured themselves taking in all of me…all of me, and loving it.

I have been gifted with touch of all sorts, loving, brutal, rough and gentle, and all of these inform, delight, move and uplift me. Whether soft and delicate, or callused and hardened, I am grateful for the affection and intimacy of touch, the loving caress of a spanking, the possessive gesture of fastening a collar around my throat. The fingerprints of the hands of all of my lovers and partners and friends remain on my heart, a mosaic that I carry within me, all colors and patterns and scars and stripes, all beautiful. All mine.