14 Knuckles is a series about a scorpio femme of color fucking their way through power dynamics, boundaries, and caregiving, as an exploration of who she is and how she relates to others.

She looks ravenous. I feel filleted. She’s perched between my legs, fingers circling against the edges of my pussy slowly while she squeezes her own pink nipples. I want her to reach inside me and destroy any vestige of who I was before. I whisper, desperate, trying not to show it, “I want you to fist me,” and she smiles, this pure, angelic, wholesome smile, like she’s bestowing a gift from the heavens above. She’s the nicest top I ever met. She doesn’t call me a bitch or a slut, she won’t spank me hard enough but I think it’s cute when she tries, and getting fisted by her feels like a massage from the universe goddess herself. She smiles wider, parting her lips as she looks down at me and watches her third finger slip inside. I moan. I love seeing how turned on she gets when she looks at me and I open wider.

We lock eyes. The best part of Scorpio on Scorpio sex is the eye contact; when she looks at me, I swear I can come from that alone. Her eyes won’t leave me until she goes home. Now, the way her jaw separates and her smile widens makes her look gleeful, like she’s at a fireworks show, watching collective ecstasy spread throughout the crowd instead of just mine alone. She slips another finger in.

My moans deepen. I feel so much and I want more. I push my bound hands against the wall behind me and my body floats into her, her body into mine, she’s still as I thrust her into me over and over again, holy shit her whole hand is inside of me and now I can’t move.

It’s what shuts me up and she likes it. She looks so satisfied and I know I look like maybe I’m in pain but it feels good. I feel the edges of everything, where I end and she begins, where the wrinkles in each knuckle slide against the expansive opening of my pussy. Something happens, an air pocket forms and it sucks her further in and somehow now there’s a little more space and I love it, I love being able to feel everything with her.

She starts to move.

One at a time, I feel her knuckles curl tenderly inside of me. I push myself down onto her as she makes micromovements, first from her knuckles alone, then from her fingers, they start to swirl inside of me, then her whole hand is moving, then I’m pushing down and thrusting and it’s hot and fast and it’s so much, then her whole hand is moving in and out as she’s turning and —

“Holy shit, stop,” I say, breathless.

“What? You want me to stop?”

“Yeah get out of me.” I’m almost panicked, it’s too much, we don’t have a safe word, I’ve never asked her to stop like this.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” I gasp for breath and whimper, not in a sexy way, in a subspace vulnerable — so fucked — can’t talk way. I swallow. “Can…you…undo…my hands?”

She looks worried. “Yeah.” She unbuckles the bike strap from my wrists.

“Can…you…lay on top of me?” She lays her whole body against mine and I feel her pull the blankets up. She strokes my hair. My heart is racing, my whole body is shaking and releasing. Waves of numbness float around my body like bouncing electric light illuminating places I never think about, behind my knees, my calves my skull. Different muscles tense, totally outside of my control, and then release, over and over, and I repeatedly shudder, sometimes shooting my eyes open for a second and shaking my head, saying “What’s happening to me?”

Rachel’s the first person to make me shudder like that — wild waves flow through me even when sex is long over. When I’m lucid enough to actually see Rachel’s face, her brow is furrowed. “Hey,” I say, and try to reach my arms up around her, but can still barely move.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I just…it got to be too much.”

“Should I have not done something?” she asks.

“No, everything was great up until that last moment it just got to be so intense it stopped feeling good, it was like something bursting—”

“The corkscrew?”

I smile. “Yeah, I guess that was it.” I can finally move and I squeeze her and kiss her. “You were great.”

It takes a while, but when I’m able to form coherent sentences, we talk about what happened. She tells me all she was doing was moving her fingers, but it feels impossible that I could feel such a small movement everywhere. I can’t stop thinking about her knuckles. It felt like there was so much inside of me, so much moving. Does everyone have that many knuckles? How many distinct joints are in a fist anyway? How many knuckles are in a fist that can fit inside my body?

I can’t stop thinking about her knuckles. It felt like there was so much inside of me, so much moving. Does everyone have that many knuckles? How many distinct joints are in a fist anyway? How many knuckles are in a fist that can fit inside my body?

Rachel has never been a top before me; she’d never fisted anyone before me. We’d met on Tinder and I became her bottom as soon as we kissed, as soon as she took my clothes off, as soon as I told her, “I really like sucking fingers.” She later revealed that with her last girlfriend, she was a chatty, bubbly bottom; with her husband, she gets tied up and blindfolded. With me, though, topping comes naturally—she takes control, she trusts me to tell her what to do and when to stop, she feels her way in and through my holes.

The only other person who’d fisted me was a sexually abusive ex. As I’ve gotten to know Rachel and shared certain sex acts that could link back to my ex, I’ve had to pull myself into the present. I remind myself: I am with a wholly different person than my ex, I have lived so many lives since my breakup, I am capable of healing. Just because one person hurt me and used my vulnerability as a weapon to harm me does not mean that everyone will. Staying present with the person in front of me, in this case, Rachel, has allowed me to see a person for who they are, to notice when a dynamic is becoming a chaotic disruption to my life, versus when someone is trustworthy and capable of respecting me.

Rachel was the first person I truly bottomed for after my ex and this is, partially, a timeline thing. Before I met Rachel, I wasn’t ready to have something as big as a fist inside of me, I wasn’t ready to be vulnerable or release control. To let myself be penetrated is a profoundly vulnerable experience. It has required doing so much internal work that so many people simply refuse to do; it’s the work that undermines American capitalism and dismantles internalized racism, queerphobia, sexism, and self-hatred. To open up, I have to feel my body. I have to access an understanding of what I want and, somewhere in me, believe that I deserve to get what I want. With a sex partner, I have to voice that desire, which requires that I trust my perception enough to believe myself, a femme of color, worthy of being listened to. This alone has been a huge learning process. There’s so much involved in trusting another person to enter my body, to leave the memory of their body against my mouth, ass, or pussy.

The work of healing is in service of the collective, it’s the kind of work we need more and more of as we attempt to collectively heal our relationship to the earth, as we’re confined into smaller spaces and are building relationships across distancing that some of us couldn’t have imagined before.

The work of healing allows for the vulnerability inherent to penetration. When Rachel enters my body, she becomes part of me and yet, I still know where we end. By knowing she will listen, and leave me when I ask her to, I can let her in.

The work of healing allows for the vulnerability inherent to penetration. When Rachel enters my body, she becomes part of me and yet, I still know where we end. By knowing she will listen, and leave me when I ask her to, I can let her in. Because I can trust that my boundaries and requests will be respected, I have a safety net onto which I can fall apart. I can open up because I know she won’t push me into anything I’m not ready for. I can let her in deep enough to feel her vibrate in every cell of my body.

After my abusive ex, I couldn’t wholeheartedly trust anyone with my body like that. And that’s not to say that the lovers I had in the interim weren’t trustworthy — it’s just that I’m going through my own journey based on the experiences I need to heal from, just as each of my lovers are. In slowly building a relationship over time, I’ve learned to trust Rachel, to breathe into the spaces she makes within me, to not speed myself up to just have an orgasm so it’ll be over. It’s in this space that I’ve learned to let go.

Rachel had never had someone abruptly stop sex like that. I’d only safeworded out a couple of times, but enough to know that I need someone to cover me up and weigh me down. Rachel did an amazing job responding to my needs without guilting me or making my response about her performance, the way other lovers have. She tells me I’m a good bottom and it’s in the ways that I know what I want, know what my limits are, and what I need when they’ve been reached — like when I ask her to stop — that lets Rachel be the top she never imagined herself to be.

Healing my relationship to my sexuality, including my sexual trauma, is truly transformative. When I teach Rachel how to tie me up and fist me, when I ask her to tell me what to do, when I teach her exactly how I want to submit, I give her permission to go on a journey with me and dive into an exponentially expanding world of pleasure within the connection we build together. While Rachel had always been a bottom, she’s found a world of toppiness within herself. I was able to gift her an experience of witnessing someone else’s vulnerability beneath her touch and the thrill of controlling another’s pleasure safely — something that I truly hope all bottoms can experience. So much sexual space has opened up within her that she hadn’t discovered before, and that’s how I know that my individual healing is collective. My lovers are able to inhabit spaces they’ve never known.

Some days, I ask Rachel, “How many knuckles are in a fist?!” We laugh through impossible questions whose only correct answer was, and will forever be, infinite.

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