“Yes Ma’am.”
“Yes Ma’am.”
The words rolled off my tongue as naturally as they always do, but this was different.
@pollyannadom and I had talked about it in vague terms in the months leading up to the event, and the night before we’d spent time talking and casually playing with me as hypnotist and striking a rather more toppy tone than usual.
But that was, in many ways, a negotiation for the scene to come - the scene where “ma’am” turned from the the default Southern honorific I use constantly to something rather more particular.
Reader, you may be saying to yourself, “You used an honorific? Awesome. Wow.” but I’ve never done it before in my hypnosis play. Indeed, I have always been studiously neutral when it comes to dominance and submission - for a long time, the “traditional” understandings of D/s were frankly really off-putting to me.
Don’t get me wrong: I had some glorious scenes where there were for sure some power dynamics at play, but they also were pointedly *not* central to the scene. As I noted in my pre-con wishlist, though, I’d done some light dabbling with it, and was ready to see what a formally negotiated submissive scene would look like.
Which brings us back to “ma’am” - I wholly underestimated how powerful that word could be.
When we started the scene, she asked if I was ready and I answered: “Yes Ma’am.”
Things spun so fast. I was giving away thinking. I was giving away anything but total focus on her - on that moment. It was intoxicating to disallow my own distractions, or rather, to have them disallowed.
She moved me up and down, she positioned and repositioned me. Our interactions before this had been in such a different context that it took me by surprise in the best of ways. There was a moment where I was sure she was putting her full force into holding me down; I later learned it was a simple lean. She took me in and out of trance and used her hands and her words and her will to put my brain where she wanted it to be.
From the outside, it would have looked like a pretty normal hypnosis scene, but in my mind it was not. There was something intensely freeing about the trust I put in her for that period of time (was it an hour? Two? I haven’t a clue). The words she had me repeat, which escape me now, were so very important in that moment.
It wasn’t magic, of course. There were moments of doubt and moments of joy; there were lots and lots of color checks and making sure we were on the same page.
But on the whole? It was divine. I’m not ready to jump into some kind of 24/7 power exchange, but I’m also going to be way more willing to explore that submissive side with intent. Having someone willing to work to set those expectations and dynamics and also willing to help set them back to equal afterwards was a genuine gift, one for which I’m deeply grateful.
The best part? After a long time spent laughing and finding equal ground, she didn’t bat an eyelash when I slipped into Southern mode and called her “ma’am” again. That was then, this was now. The safety in that knowledge was nearly as freeing as the experience itself.
Still, I can’t wait for the next chance to say it the other way, too.
