Don’t Cum on My Stomach While I’m Looking at Art on Your Wall

A story about the importance of slowing down and communicating during sex

An SUV out of control, a man driving. I tell the man, “I’m glad you were able to do that without crashing, but I’m not happy about your choices.” It was in a parking garage, he was cutting into a line of traffic, speeding to cut in, turning too fast. Incredibly, he managed to miss the cement support beams, to not spin out and magically, he was able to make it into a tight gap in the line of traffic.

It was a dream, so it was, in fact magic.

But how many times in my life have I asked a man to slow down?

The man behind the wheel in my dream was my stepfather, who has, on numerous occasions, cut into traffic and accelerated too fast, came within inches of the bumper of the car or truck ahead before him before stepping hard on the breaks, despite my mother’s and my weak-voiced objections.

Weak-voiced with fear, and with a sense of powerlessness — we were not the ones behind the wheel.

But the SUV my stepdad was driving in my dream was Dean’s, who I saw yesterday for the first time in over a year.

Dean and I ended a two-year long FWB relationship amicably a couple of years ago.

I had started wanting more of a partnership, and being with him had begun feeling limited and unsatisfying. It had been nice while it lasted, interesting to experience a FWB dynamic for the first time, and he’d always been respectful about my time and boundaries.

We reconnected recently which worked out nicely. Something I’ve been thinking about lately is wanting to enter into an intentional BDSM dynamic with someone. Dale and I have a history of good sex and, because we spent two years seeing each other pretty regularly, I felt we’d built a pretty good foundation of trust. So I thought I’d broach the subject over coffee.

After some small talk and catching up on each other’s lives, I shared my desire to explore BDSM, telling him I wanted to try different things like being controlled and fighting for power, and that I wanted to do it within a safe context of having discussed and established boundaries beforehand.

I told him that something I was interested in trying was talking more before and during sex.

This is something that’s hard for me. I often find my mind so full of wordless thoughts that I can’t focus on the actual pleasurable experience that sex can be. Sometimes the things I’m thinking are simply thoughts about what I want or what I don’t want, but I’m afraid to articulate them, and other times they’re totally unrelated to what is happening, just distracting.

In a recent relationship, I’d tapped into an ability to share what was on my mind. I’d share more of what I wanted, and what I was afraid of. He’d listen and sometimes respond, other times, just give me space to talk. Taking the words and fears out of my head reduced the distraction I was experiencing from them.

Other times the abstract, disjointed thoughts and stories allowed me to tap into past trauma. Voicing the memories gave me an opportunity to process these experiences. Having someone to hold that space was a huge relief of this burden I’d been carrying for so long.

By the end of coffee, Dale and I established that we’d see each other soon.

But excitement got the better of me.

We passed availability back and forth one day with a final message from him saying, “I don’t have much time, but I’m free for a bit now.”

I was free too, so I headed his way.

“I left the door open.” His text popped up as I drove. “See if you can find the basement.”

Wondering if I was going to walk into some dungeon with handcuffs bolted to the ceiling, I entered his home with some trepidation. But in the basement, there was just a couch, him on it, naked but for a towel wrapped around his waist.

He stood and immediately began to kiss me. I kissed him back for a while before pulling away, trying to slow things down by making conversation.

“I wasn’t sure what I was going to walk into when you said, ‘Find the basement,’” I laughed. He chuckled, and then continued to kiss me.

I went with it, encouraging myself to catch up to where he already was. Before long he’d removed his towel and my dress. He was on his knees over my prone body, his erection pointing at my face asking if I’d “put it in my mouth.”

I didn’t want to. Things had been moving too fast. I was just beginning to reacquaint myself with his body, with the way he kissed, moved, breathed and touched me after such a long time of not seeing each other.

So I said, “Can we pause?”

There was an awkward moment in which nothing happened, so I pressed my lips to his, attempting to reduce the awkwardness.

My mistake — awkwardness is inherently part of good sex. It’s part of trust-building, and it’s part of intimacy. I should have let it sit.

Now, pressed against my stomach, he began to rub his cock against me while telling me how much I turned him on. I could feel he was getting really into it as he stopped kissing me to focus more on the grinding.

I froze, stared over his shoulder at the art on his walls, and thought, Is this really happening?

And indeed it was. A few moments later, he gasped, “You’re going to make me cum on your stomach!” and proceeded to, well, cum on my stomach.

(Side note, I literally wasn’t doing anything by that point, including “making him cum.”)

Afterwards, I cleaned myself off, got dressed and headed towards the door. I felt empty and could articulate none of the words or thoughts I’d hoped to grow more comfortable articulating. My shift in mood must have showed, because he asked how I was.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just wasn’t expecting that.”

His reply: “What were you expecting? You knew I only had twenty minutes.”

To be fair, though I didn’t know he had twenty minutes exactly, he had said he didn’t have much time. But as my friend said later that night, upon hearing my story:

“As if that’s the only possible outcome of a sexual experience — his orgasm.”

Honestly, I don’t know what I was expecting.

Maybe I’d wanted to be okay with 20-minute sex, and it turned out I just wasn’t.

Maybe I’d just wanted to make out a little.

Maybe I’d wanted to talk about what we’d do for 5 minutes and then do it for 15.

Maybe I’d wanted orgasmic meditation, a 15-minute timed sexual activity involving a meditative stroking of the clitoris by a partner with no goal except to enjoy the connection of sexual energy and meditative energy.

Maybe quick sex is the ultimate test for communication as a couple, and I wanted to go all in to see if we’d work out for what I was looking for. (We didn’t pass the test.)

Whatever I wanted, I didn’t have time to figure it out.

I didn’t reply to his question at first — offering only a pathetic little, “I don’t know. It’s fine, don’t worry.”

“If you didn’t want to do something, you could have said so,” he replied.

Despite having literally just read this article by Shannon Ashley, where she writes: “I can no longer carry the blame for a man who can’t take ‘no’ for an answer,” and feeling an energy of empowerment in reading it, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell him to stop.

“It’s not easy to tell a guy to stop,” I tried to explain. “You were like…right there.” I trailed off, trying to figure out how to explain the deer-in-the-headlights feeling I’d experienced when I realized he was racing to the finish line and leaving me in the dust.

The disconnect I filled in with studying his art.

He nodded and for a moment I thought maybe he got it. “It just would have been nice to take a little more time to connect,” I added.

Then he made the mistake of repeating his defense: “But you knew I only had twenty minutes.”

I laughed. “Fuck you,” I said, those words, at least, coming to the forefront of my mind. I walked to my car, leaving him standing at the front door. I didn’t look back.

I wasn’t so much upset at him for finishing, as I was about his missed attempt to actually connect with me throughout the whole experience.

Is it someone’s responsibility to make sure their partner is doing okay during sex? I don’t know, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to check in once in a while. Especially when the power dynamic is unequal, as it is between men and women.

Sex doesn’t have to be about a race to the finish line. Even if you only have twenty minutes, take the time to pay attention to your partner. Notice if they’re engaged in you or assessing your art.

Read more about relationships by Anne Shark: