When She Cries
Bitter With The Sweet. Femdom Erotica. Episode X20.
Sometimes, he will look up from subspace and find her crying.
They stop play, and she puts on a robe and makes tea, or maybe they go for a walk.
He used to ask, “Is something wrong?” He still asks, but he doesn’t really expect an answer.
Sometimes there’s an answer she’s willing to provide, but even then, as often as not, it’s a cryptic, “Because” or “I don’t know.”
He’s no stranger to random crying. He finds himself tearing up at insurance commercials and pictures of kittens more often than he’d care to admit, so he gets it.
It used to worry him a lot. It still does, but he’s learned to contain his worry better.
Later, she will usually discuss it with him. Some lingering pain suddenly overcame her, some rush of emotion reminded her of a friend she’d wronged, a relative she’d lost, a lover she’d betrayed. It’s also easy for the slave to forget, the same overwhelming feelings that course through him also flow into her. When the slave cries, the owner is ready to catch him, but who catches her?
And at first, her explanations always left him comforted. He was worried that he was the cause, and if he wasn’t, then he was okay.
But later, he began to hate the part of himself that took comfort from knowing it wasn’t his fault. He loved her, he didn’t care if it was his fault, he just wanted to be able to fix it.
He tried pressing her more deeply in their postmortems. He tried reading books on the kinds of emotions she described. He made lists in his mind of things to say when the moment came, of salves to offer and telltale signs to follow.
None of it seemed to work. None of it seemed to yield a greater resolution of the things that made her cry.
This began to trouble him immensely. How could he be the one for her, if he couldn’t fix what made her so sad? It wasn’t his fault, but he wanted it to be his responsibility.
He wanted to heal what made her cry.
Eventually, he told her all this, not when she was crying mind you, but on a nice day in the sun.
She looked at him quizzically.
“Is that what you want me to do to you? To heal the things that make you sad? You cry more than I do.”
“A lot of the times I cry are because you’re beating me.”
“Tomato, tomato. I saw you sobbing watching Wreck-It-Ralph last night. You’ve seen it like six times.
“It’s a touching film.”
“You’re evading. Do you expect me to fix it when you cry?”
“Well, no. I wouldn’t expect you to do that. That’s too big. I have to do that on my own. You can help, but it can’t be your responsibility.”
“So why do you think you should do it for me?”
“Because I’m supposed to do things for you.”
“You are. But this one’s too big.”
“But when you hurt, I hurt. I want to know what I can do to help you feel better.
“You do that just by being you.”
Then he cried for a few minutes, for which she teased him mercilessly ever after.
It took still longer for the message to sink in, but it eventually did. Real epiphany is achieved over time as a vision glimpsed in a flash is fully realized and integrated into the broader psyche.
It used to upset him when she cried. Now, he knows better.
He knows that all people are driven by terrible and complex demons. All people carry the scars of tragedy and loss, all human stories are really tales of perseverance in the face of defeat. Healing those wounds takes a lifetime, even for the most powerful among us, no matter how deeply their supplicants love them.
Now, when she cries, he doesn’t try to fix it. He just goes to her, ready to be anything she needs. A pillow, an ear, a cup of coffee, a drinking buddy.
He knows he can’t heal her crying. The best he can do is share it.