Journey of Submission Part I

Submitted by Nicolae Parx

"Lunch meeting"

The afternoon was warm and sunny with a bright sky that only the southern city can display on a June afternoon. The skin on Nicolae's chest was tight with anticipation and it seemed almost like breathing in and out required his undivided attention. Setting up lunch seemed almost easy in email compared to the reality of sitting at a table with a dominant woman he knew only from powerful online chats.
He must have typed hundreds of millions of characters during the time they chatted online for these many months, but at this, moment, Nicolae felt as if his words were useless. His skin tingled with nervousness from pent-up energy yet his voice seemed to have vanished. Coughing several times in a vain effort to clear his throat and regain his voice, he surveyed the sidewalk café in search of a woman who was one of his closest friends but whose face he had never seen.
Couples. Nicolae saw couples enjoying salads and sipping overpriced water replete with lemon wedges in crystal glasses but he found no single woman that seemed might be his lunch date. Eyeing the diners with more intensity, he wondered what a dominant woman looked like when she lunched in the southern city. Hoping she would wear black so that he could have some criteria for locating her, Nicolae surveyed the crowd with renewed passion.
A voice rang out above the crowd's hushed hum.
"Nicolae? Is that you?" a woman's voice asked plainly.
He snapped his head in the direction of the questioner's voice and found himself nodding almost mechanically in response. Although he had practiced his opening line hundreds of times in front of the mirror and inside his head on the plane as well as on the drive to the restaurant, no words came. Chagrined at his inability to utter a single syllable to her after all these compelling months of chat and typing, Nicolae stood immobile on the sidewalk as he felt her step confidently toward him.
She reached out and took his hand so unexpectedly that Nicolae could not seem to convince his body to breathe.
Instead, he turned toward her and drank in the most sincere smile he had ever seen. Within a moment, he felt inexplicably relaxed and noticed that he did no longer have to concentrate in order to inhale and exhale. Her touch, combined with her poised self-assurance, washed over him with a comforting aura that compelled him to calm down and let go of his fear.
His eyes stared into hers as he absorbed her quiet assurance and felt oddly stronger.
She reached up and rested her palm on his shoulder and pulled him toward her in a deliberate effort to force him to bend and kiss her on the cheek. As her fingers dug slightly into his muscles, vivid flashes of his assiduous work repairing his wrenched shoulder flashed through his mind. The long afternoons he submitted to the agony of deep massage drenched him with lingering pain but her touch seemed to cleanse him of those memories. In that single touch, she purified him and his knees felt oddly weak. Yet his dancer's body had responded to treatment and he healed with the tenacity of muscles used to injury.
"Syriana?" he whispered from deep in his throat.
"Well, I HOPE so," she laughed infectiously. "Or do you bend to kiss all the women you meet on the sidewalk?"
Nicolae felt his face burn red and realized at that moment it was her intention to toy with him gently that afternoon. Even though they had agreed their styles were different and they would not make suitable play partners, her dominance wasn't something she put on and took off. It was part of her; embedded into her core. And it was from this woman that Nicolae wanted to begin his education into those odd feelings he had lived with for so long that this woman had finally named for him.
She called it, "submission."
There is a power in having the capacity to name. Syriana knew that from her experience; after all, her partners were afforded individual names as she saw fit after experiencing them in scene. However, Nicolae posed another sort of situation for her. He wasn't as much interested in being her partner as he was compelled to learn under her hand why his chest burned with a passion he could not explain during odd moments in his life.
His questions burned through the bandwidth and his sincerity seared her heart. In all her years of experimentation and practice, Syriana had never been asked to be as introspective as she was with Nicolae - - all in the guise of his personal search for answers to questions he didn't yet have the capacity to ask. She took his almost desperate interest as a compliment. After all, he had come across the seas to her for answers.
"Let's sit here," she directed and pulled Nicolae by his warm hand toward an empty table.
She knew better than to banter; instead, she waited for him to find his words and balance himself so the flurry of questions she knew would follow could find a safe venue between them. Crossing her legs carefully, she watched his eyes stare at the tip of her black boot that peeked out from her long denim skirt. As she sat back comfortably in the webbed chair, his eyes rose slowly toward her face. It was obvious that he would never remember later what she was wearing at that moment. But he would recall her voice, her fragrance and the touch of her hand on his.
The silence between them was palpable but the depth of emotion was bottomless.
At last, the server arrived to break the almost insurmountable silence.
"I'll have a sparkling water with lemon, but no ice," Syriana spoke deliberately and focused her eyes on Nicolae's glistening face. She never asked him to order; rather, she left it completely up to him. It was a summit he would have to scale on his own.
"Water," Nicolae pleaded to the smiling waiter, who turned and strode briskly inside.
"I can't believe I'm sitting here with you," Nicolae's words seemed to wear heavily on his heart. "I just can't believe it."
Syriana refused to soften even though she was touched by his passion. Sitting silently and surveying his body language, Syriana noticed that he was hunched forward, his hands on his knees and every muscle in his neck, shoulders and arms was rock solid. Momentarily unsure if she were enjoying his discomfort a bit too much, she granted him a soft smile and reached out to touch his hand that was grasping his knee with a death clutch that she had seen so many times before.
He felt her touch like electricity that ran from his fingers directly into his brain and launched a disconnected series of words and phrases that spewed endlessly from his lips.
"I have so much to ask," he started. "Why am I here? How can I figure this out? Where did it come from? What should I do? I don't know how to say what I feel. You said that I'm not alone but I am!" His eyes were filled with the demands of the uninitiated and Syriana held his warm hand with a static but caring grip.
Instead of answering, she simply smiled. And after several silent minutes, so did Nicolae.
"Whew," he let loose a sigh of near-exhaustion.
The waiter placed two crystal glasses on the table as Syriana drew Nicolae's hand to her knee in an action so determined that Nicolae felt like the waiter wasn't even present and babbling on about if they needed more time to examine the menu which neither of them had yet opened. Her gift was allowing those who served her to figure things out for themselves. Knowing that this table would order at their own leisure, he left to attend to more pressing needs. Nicolae exhaled as he exited his line of sight and focused completely on his hand, which was now totally engulfed in Syriana's fingers.
Words were spilling from his mouth.
"There's so much I don't understand," he began as honestly as was humanly possible, "like how I got here. No, I don't mean here, but here."
She smiled at his plight. For a man whose words were so important to him, she was amused at his inability to form a coherent sentence out of his incoherent thoughts. Yet she recognized that he would soon cast out the incoherency as his turmoil diminished to the extent that she would allow.
More phrases fell out of his mouth.
"I've been reading," he started, "and talking to other dominant women. And asking questions and listening to the answers. And reading and then re-reading what they write to me. I replay those conversations over and over in my head to make sense out of them." Even without touching any part of him other than his hand, Syriana knew that his skin burned under the light blue pullover shirt he wore. With her free hand, he sipped the sparkling water and listened with delight as the lemon zest tantalized her lip.
"See, I'm not sure that they can understand what I feel. But they all, well, most of them anyway, seem to have a sort of 'knowing' about me, like I am someone they've seen before." Syriana noticed that Nicolae's eyes were wet either from his overflowing emotion or from that pesky city sun that requires tinted glasses.
He continued as if he were an overfilled water tower that suddenly had a hole punched in its belly.
"It's not that I want to just drop down on my knees and crawl to anyone," he spoke with a fervor that was as honest as it was energized, "but I want to be on my knees. Somehow."
His voice seemed to trail off before he added the magical question, "Am I just crazy?"
Shifting her legs to cross the other one, Syriana held his hand tightly and took it with her as she changed positions. Her move was purposeful and her fingers detected a slight slackening in Nicolae's muscles. You can order someone to relax, she recalled, but it never works. Instead, she looked at his eyes and watched them burn in expectation that she would both assuage his fears and solve, in a single sentence, the complexity of his ardor.
She would do neither. Instead, she simply held him in her eyes.
For the first time, she took a good look at his square jaw and light brown hair that was combed back from his face to reveal a boyish charm that tried to secrete itself under some imposed definition of what being grown up was all about. His shoulders weren't too broad and his hips and legs, hidden beneath a pair of well-fitting tailored slacks, spoke of years of practice and exercise that made them undoubtedly rock hard. Casually dressed but bearing an element of proper upbringing, Nicolae's demeanor piqued her interest as well as her passion to bring new sincere men into the lifestyle that she so enjoyed.
"You see," he seemed to have gotten a second wind, "I don't think I'm crazy. I've read all about this from those books you suggested, and I think there might just be others who might understand this. But I'm not sure - - I'm not certain. I don't know exactly where to go to explore this. I'm not sure what's safe and who's right and how to get the answers I need to …" His voice trailed off as he noticed, apparently for the first time, her ear-to-ear grin.
"I haven't let you say a word, have I?" he asked with selfamusement. "Here I am, asking for answers, and you can't get a word in." Nicolae shook his head from side to side and chuckled at his own display. "I should just shut up now, right?"
Syriana stared at his sheepish grin and responded. "I think the hard part is over, dear. Now you can begin to hear me," she commented tersely but with affection.
Nicolae squeezed her hand affectionately, as if the immense burden he was carrying had suddenly been lifted from his shoulders. In fact, for the first time since they had been seated, he raised his head and looked her in the eye.
Syriana noted how sparkling his gray-green eyes were and grinned silently. He was indeed a pretty boy who was smart enough to realize his good looks could turn a woman's head but chose not to use it and she enjoyed his embarrassment without judgment.
"What is it - - really - - that you want to know?" she asked and waited for him to form the words that identified the core of his quest. "And what would you like to eat?" she asked with a chuckle.
Questions
Ordering a grilled chicken salad was much easier for Nicolae than answering Syriana's question about what he really wanted to know. He had spent almost 40 years trying to figure that out and attempting to compact it into a single question seemed an unreachable goal. Instead of talking around his fundamental need, Nicolae took a few minutes to put his singular question into words.
With a great deal of effort, he finally found the words.
"Am I deluding myself?" he asked so honestly that Syriana's heart leapt out to him, "or can I have this?"
"No, and yes," she cooed at him. "But it's entirely up to you as to what you make of yourself."
His perplexed expression spoke volumes and Syriana continued in her Socratic fashion as she gripped his hand tightly in her own.
"Your submission is your gift to give," she spoke softly and with resolve. "No one can take it unless you offer it and it is accepted." Syriana paused to allow her words to sink into his brain.
"But I have terms!" Nicolae fairly shouted. "There are things I want, things I've thought about and analyzed and come up with a scenario that might work and…"
A single finger to her lips hushed his tirade. "What you want, what you analyzed, what you think will work?" Nicolae understood immediately that this series of questions was rhetorical and he sat silently, hunched over so she could hold his hand firmly against her knee.
"It doesn't work that way," she giggled softly behind her sunglasses and Nicolae wished he could see her eyes sparkle. "There's one thing you haven't even mentioned yet, and I'm truly surprised." Her voice trailed off and Nicolae struggled to regain his footing. What had he omitted? What had he forgotten? For so many months, he was absolutely certain he had covered all the bases and now was faced with omitting something fundamental. His brain raced but his lips remain closed.
"You're backing up," Syriana observed, "walking away from our conversation in your head. She smiled, "As if when you're confronted with a different way of thinking that your initial reaction is to run." He felt his body tense at her accusation and was about to retort when she added quickly, "Is that submissive behavior?"
Her smile metamorphosed from kind and gentle into a harsh grin that troubled his heart. She had set him up, and he felt a sort of angry terror rush through him. But her grip
on his hand was firm and warm and the touch of her thigh, even under her long denim skirt, was consoling and reassuring.
"No, I guess not," he mumbled and her ears picked up his insincerity.
"Why are you still here talking to me, when you could have gotten a taxi and been back at your hotel already?" she asked pointedly.
Nicolae had to mull that one over because the simple answer was that he didn't know why he was there in the first place, let alone why he was staying when she was obviously toying with him and challenging everything he believed.
"I'll tell you why," she began, "if you will open your ears, your head, and your heart and hear what I say."
Syriana sat silently and waited for Nicolae to nod affirmatively before continuing.
"Say it," she half-demanded. "Say the words."
Without understanding what had just happened, Nicolae felt words fall from his lips. "Yes, I will," he said, and added almost inaudibly, "yes, Ma'am."
They both heard the capital "M" in his voice.
No fireworks went off and no bells clanged in the distance. No camera panned into the hills and no sunset abruptly fell atop the seated pair. But Nicolae had crossed a chasm willingly and of his own accord. Syriana felt the jolt that passed between them yet Nicolae still struggled with the odd sense of elation that surrounded his soul. Sometimes, the best response to the awesome is silence.
The pair sat in a hushed calm and Syriana allowed Nicolae to sort his feelings before continuing.
"I'm here because I want to be here," he started slowly. "Because you can teach me. Because I," and here Nicolae paused noticeably, "trust you."
"Trust is something you have to feel, not type," Syriana insisted, "Up until now, you trusted the distance between us because I could not hurt you. Now," she spoke deliberately and slowly, "you understand trust better." Nicolae sat and stared at her lips that had just spoken the unsaid words that he could not manage to form.
"You were safe behind a keyboard, dear," she concluded, "but now you are in reality. It's not a time for fantasies; rather, it's time to touch your submission."
For two and a half hours, Syriana and Nicolae explored his quest for submission and his journey into understanding it. Words flew, questions were asked and asked anew, and Nicolae slowly fell into a comforting glow of attention mired in appreciation that seemed to thaw any remnants of misgivings he might still have harbored. With his salad almost untouched and his head reeling with information and a strange elation, Nicolae realized that Syriana was still holding his hand in a comforting yet determined manner and that for an undecipherable duration, she held him in that hunched-forward, tight-shouldered position without a moment's let up from forcing his concentration to her eyes, lips and words.
His parched throat told him that he done most of the talking.
Her smile fascinated him. Not only did she seem pleased with the effort he expended in concentrating on her words, but also Syriana's lips were barely parted in an affirming grin that enveloped him in an odd sense of safety. Nicolae felt like he could tell her anything and realized that he just had. Her sincerity was both conspicuous and insidious and drew out of him those private feelings he had once believed would remain locked in a tight box within his soul.
Fumbling for a credit card, Nicolae paid for lunch and felt he had gotten much more than his money's worth. He simply didn't realize that she had much more of this lesson in store for him.