Pretty Is

I assume he thinks I'm pretty. I believe he finds me attractive, desirable, that he wants me.  I need to think that stuff, it's part of what makes us work, part of the balance of power and desire between us, is my faith in that stuff, but I think it's actually mostly true too.

I need to feel desirable to him. I need to know he wants me. Tons of our relationship is based on sex. He won't love me saying this, so let me say it this way. Sex was the initial attraction, the initial foundation on which we built everything else. Sex was the original reason for the building.

I know there are things he would "improve" about me if he could. He'd like me thinner. I'd like me thinner. I don't seem to be doing much to get myself there, and in that absence, I sense he is about to intervene. To be fair (fair?) it's impossible for me to exercise at the moment. I have a broken foot, and the exercise I am allowed to do right now is lie on the couch and turn the pages.

Sometimes he wants me to dress sexier. Umm, I think that's partly about the look of it, partly about the power of being able to impose it on me, and partly just to know that I'm thinking of him, wanting to please him.

But I have a basic faith in my prettiness.

I'm certainly not beautiful, though of course like all the other girls I wanted to be, and still do.

I think I was a plain shy little girl. I wanted to be gorgeous with blond curls, but I was a serious little brown haired girl. By my teenage years I had figured out how to manage cute most of the time.

Some time around then I discovered life's basic beauty secrets, stand up straight, wash your hair, brush your teeth and smile.

So it's not that I think I'm gorgeous, but that I think he thinks I'm pleasing, that my appearance pleases him. Because we have this relationship where if I've pleased him I've succeeded somehow. So him thinking that I am pleasing is like a "good girl" stroke.

I'm better looking when I'm smiling. I'm a thousand times prettier when I smile. I make friends when I smile. 

Is it why he picked me out of the crowd? My looks, my face, my smile? No, I don't think so.

He loves my smile, and then he loves to wipe it away. He loves to make me suffer and tremble and cry. He loves to wipe away any prettiness, in need or in sweat or in tears.

He uses my desire to be pretty, to stroke me or to humiliate me.

And oh, he loves to control it, to use it, to control me.