What do I want?

May I come visit?  Visiting has a very specific meaning.  It means “may I climb up into your lap?”  Climbing up into his lap means on my knees straddling his lap facing him close, nose to nose.  It is the way we have our talks.

He had just gotten done telling me that he wanted to see a particular movie.  He then asked me if I wanted to see it too and I had looked at him with clear, calm conviction.  The very fact that he had wanted it, made me want it too.  “Sure.”

He had looked at me with those calculating eyes.  “No, not what I want.  I want to know what you want.”

And that is the thing… I don’t want to have wants.  I want to be told what to do… I want to be told what to want. 

So there I was, in his lap, trying to put this into words… that when he asks what I want, like, prefer, feel like… all those things… those words sort of echo in an empty place, that when I must answer that kind of a question, I grope around in that empty place trying to find the right answer but the only right answer for me is, “whatever you want”.  I tried to explain that I don’t want to be asked what I want, I want to be told.

I knelt there, nose to nose, saying those words in the softest of voices.  “I don’t know how to say it exactly but… but… there is no what I want, it is only what you want.”

Now don’t get me wrong… there are lots of times I do have very clear wants and even clearer ‘don’t wants’… but when he caves into them it makes me feel awful.  It makes me feel unfettered, loose, and frighteningly free.  I don’t want to be free.  It scares the fuck out of me.  I don’t want that.

And there he was nose to nose, listening and for once not arguing with… um… oops ‘correcting’ me.  And then he reaches up and takes hold of each nipple and pinches and twists, hard, really hard and shoves me over backwards a little, making me lose my balance and start to tip over backwards.  And as I dangle there, held up only by his relentless grip on my flesh, he fires at me, “What do you want?  Tell me.  Tell me now.”

I wince and gasp and squirm and refuse to answer. 

He jerks me back and forth a little, literally twisting me back and forth and interrogates me some more.  “I want you happy, bitch.  Tell me what you want!”

And I realize that one reason I don’t answer is that I don’t want him to stop.

I gasp out between clenched teeth, “As usual you get it completely opposite, but with a twist… literally.”