How I adore him. His name is Cian. He's Irish of course and has red curly hair and the brightest green eyes. He's 6' tall and weighs 280 but there is not an ounce of fat on that man. He's a year younger than I am. We met on-line two years ago and became very close friends. But in the way of the internet, we both knew that when you meet the right one, he or she is married, gay, or lives in Egypt. So we were happy friends. He was always so warm and open to me in a room full of men and women. He was always so glad to see me. He would say, "Welcome back from your travels. I hope you enjoyed them, but I also hope that now you're home, you will rest a while and be comfortable and chat some with me." I liked him a lot.
A couple of months ago, he said, "It's too bad that we'll never meet although I am open to traveling. I'm retired and I have the means and the time to travel. I live in Ft. Collins, Colorado. How far apart are we?" I was thunderstruck! We live not 45 minutes apart! It isn't possible! That warm, open, wonderful man named Watcher, on line, couldn't possibly live so close to me!
We talked about meeting someplace safe for coffee, but I can't drive; with two fatigue problems it's just not safe. I have a driver, but one hardly wants to take a middle-aged woman with her on a first date. So after much talk, we agreed that he would come to my house and we would have our first meeting. In the back of my mind was the 9 mm gun I own.
He showed up with a pizza from my all-time favorite gourmet grocery store. I found out later that they have closed all of their stores in the United States. He called Germany for that pizza and had it delivered to his home, frozen, by jet, and then he brought it to my house and we cooked it! He did that because I had mentioned once on-line how much I had loved their pizza! Is this guy a keeper, or what? He also brought salads and various drinks and we had a wonderful evening eating, drinking, and talking a mile a minute.
He came back several more times just to talk and eat and drink and laugh and talk. And then one night he said very quietly, "I wish I were making love with you right now." And I said, "Oh, and what are you going to do about that?" He was out of his chair in an instant and had me cradled in his arms, and he kissed me all the way down the hall. What's not to love in that?
He found out that my problem, a new one, with sleeping, since my shoulder surgery, is non-existent when I sleep in his arms. So now I do, every night. He's here for dinner, which he usually either makes or brings, and we spend the evenings together, and we sleep, me like a rock, for hours. And then he leaves in the morning.
It sounds perfect, right? Well, factor this in. Cian is an alpha male and I am an alpha female. Fire and fire!
He said the other night, "You have bruises on your forehead from falling asleep suddenly at your desk and your head connecting with the edge of the desk, right?"
I said that was so, yes.
He said, "All right, then you need to start going to bed by 10:00 every night so you're not so tired at your desk that you're getting hurt either hitting your head or falling right out of your chair."
I said nothing.
He said, "So let's start that tonight. We've been staying up till midnight and that's not helping you."
I said nothing.
He tipped my chin up and looked at my face. He said, "This is nothing to get angry about. I'm trying to help you."
I said, "You are not old enough to be my father, and you don't even look like him. The last person who presumed to tell me what time to go to bed was my father."
He was instantly angry. You see, Cian and I met in a Gor chat room. There, he is a Free Man and I am a Free Woman. He is also Ubar-San, the Leader of All. We are not quite equal on Gor. If I am disrespectful to him on Gor, he can force me into slavery. It is a delicious dance that I love. It requires a shade of deference but at the same time, if a Free Woman is too submissive, she can become a slave. What I said to Cian was utterly disrespectful. And that is not OK. You see, Cian and I are not Free Man and Free Woman just on Gor. It is who we are. We found ourselves in John Norman's Gor books and we believe in our places. I am never disrespectful to the men in that chat room. I was never disrespectful to Cian before. But this was a huge issue.
Factor in here Cian's profession. He was a psychiatrist. Surely he knew better than this. Sleep has been my demon since late 2008. I am 56 and I sleep half of every month. I am sleeping my life away. It makes me crazy. I hate it! And now I have central sleep apnea that keeps me from REM sleep so I'm never rested, so now I'm even more tired and more inclined to fall asleep and stay there. This is HUGE. To plow into it with no regard for my admittedly extreme feelings about it did, in my view, change the rules. If he wasn't going to respect me, he wasn't getting any respect from me either.
He turned and walked out the door, got into his car, and drove away. I watched him go in a flurry of feelings. First, I was glad; we needed to be apart for a time and calm down and address this rationally. But second, I was afraid. Was he gone from me forever? He had once said that though the typical punishment for Free Women who are disrespectful is slavery, many Free Men choose to handle it differently. Most force her to sleep on the floor under the bed; that's silly considering my health and sleep problems. Some force her to stand and take several slaps across the face. He is all muscle and I am fragile. He rejected that utterly. And so what he decided on was to separate us for a week, or if I tried to contact him in that week, for longer.
He had said, before walking out the door, "Punishing you with a week of separation punishes me, too. But I won't take that mouth. You know better, and you know punishment is correct in the circumstances."
And I said, perhaps unwisely, "No, it isn't, Cian. This isn't about Gor. This is about a man and a woman, both alpha, reaching a substantial disagreement and that's all it is."
And that was when he walked out the door. The father remark was a mistake. The response to his punishment statement was a mistake, and calling him Cian when I had shown him such disrespect was also a mistake; his name at that point was no first name; his name when I had disrespected him was My Lord. And my final mistake was pretending that anything between us was NOT Gor. We are Free Man and Free Woman.
I could do nothing but wait. If he was gone forever, my heart would shatter in a million pieces. If he was gone for a week, I couldn't contact him to find out if it was just a week or forever, or the week would get longer. I paced the house for a time, and then I went on-line to talk to a friend on Yahoo who I'll call Max. Max is also a dominant man, but he's my friend, too. I told him what had happened and I didn't get any support from him. He was deeply disapproving of the father remark.
I closed Yahoo. I didn't need both of them harping at me and it hurt my feelings that Max took Cian's side in it.
And then the door opened. And Cian came in and sat at the dining room table with his hands folded on it. He said, "Come, Woman, sit, and listen to your Man."
That's Free Man talk and all it could mean was that I was in trouble. I went and I sat. I was surprised when his hands gently covered mine.
He said, "I wasn't even ten miles away when I realized that Free Man that I am, I am also a psychiatrist and I dropped the ball. We don't poke with sharp sticks at tender spots and I know the high wire of tension you walk over your fatigue. I'm sorry. I should not have approached that the way I did. But I promise you that I was not trying to manage you or give you orders. I was trying to take care of you and I handled it badly. Will you forgive me?"
I said I would.
He smiled a little and he said, "OK, let's just drop the subject for now. At some point later we might talk about how to deal with all this and keep you from banging your head and falling out of the chair and hurting yourself. But that's for later. We'll work together on it and see what we can do to help somehow, all right?"
I agreed that it was all right.
He said, "But hear your Man. The next time we disagree, and we will, find a better way to say 'Cian, stop and listen to me. You're not hearing me.' Find a way to say it with respect. Understood?"
I said that I understood and that Max had said much the same.
He smiled, stood, kissed my cheek and went to my study. He was there a while, and I could hear him typing so I was pretty sure what he was doing. He had gone to my computer, noticed that Yahoo was off, opened it, and was talking with Max. Cian has been pretty jealous of Max. Max and I were an item until I discovered that he had a slave girl. In town, real time. I gave him the choice of the alpha or the slave. He chose the slave. For a long time, we didn't speak. And then I was cleaning up my Yahoo contacts and he emailed and said he would really like it if I would add him again and maybe we could be friends. I agreed, and we are the best of friends now. Cian has felt leery of that old love, but apparently he had things to say to Max.
He came out after a while and started making wiener schnitzel as he had promised to do for dinner that night. We had dinner and it was a quiet meal. I didn't have much to say, and that was wisdom. I had annoyed him unspeakably, and it wasn't over. He had given me a command to find a more respectful way to tell him to stop and hear me. That wasn't just a suggestion. That was a command to find that way and review it with him.
It was the next day before Max and I spoke again, and I told him what Cian wanted me to do. We kicked around ideas and I offered the best I could find to Cian that night. I said, "If I just walk right up to you, my body against yours, and put my arms round you and say, 'My Lord, please. Stop a minute and hear me,' will that work for you?"
He gawked. He did that for a while, in fact. And then he said, "Lady, if you trust me enough to walk into my arms when you know I'm angry, you don't have to say a word; I'll be too stunned to stay angry."
I said curiously, "I'm not afraid of you, Cian. Angry or not, I'm not afraid of you."
He held me for a long time. Cian is a big man and he has to be careful with me, in bed and out. And he is. He is the gentlest man I have ever known. I cannot fear him. His muscles aren't there to hurt me. They carry me to my bed and cradle me as I sleep. They protect me and shelter me. I am not afraid of him. I know, though, that Cian had a life before America and it was violent. I know that because when he holds me sometimes he says I am his path to forgiveness. I am good, and I believe in good, and I cannot love evil. He is not evil. He is a man who has done some evil thing in his past but he is not evil. So he reasons that if he is as good to me as he can be, he will earn redemption.
I don't think he needs me for that. When he came to the US, he went to law school and became a lawyer. He then became a judge. He sentenced a man to death. That man escaped and killed Cian's wife and his eight year old son Connor. He came back a few weeks later to kill Cian, too, but Cian was ready for him. That's not the evil he did, though. That's just justice.
Then he went back to school and became a neurologist. Then he went back to school again and became a psychiatrist. He's in the business of helping people and has been since he came to the US. I am not his redemption. He is.
I adore him. And he adores me. And yes, there are arguments to come, but we've figured that out too. One of us will say, 'We love each other and we want forever together. Is this how we're going to get it?' The other is then bound to stop and defuse. We will find a way to stay together, that amazing man and I.
And I see that I failed to mention that when Cian speaks, it is with the most delightful Irish lilt!
