Baby Steps or One Giant Leap?

So maybe I've found an apartment. West Villagey-Chelsea-ish; cool first floor, one bedroom loft with my very own little outdoor patio. In an only in New York real estate sort of deal, despite the fact that I'd only be signing a one year lease, I have to get passed by the coop board. So I've spent the weekend compiling every last little bit of financial flailing and ghost writing personal recommendations. And tomorrow I hear about my examination exertion. Nothing like the judgment of others that will have a dramatic affect on what my life will look like over the next year.

I saw the apartment this past Tuesday evening and made an offer by text from the street five minutes after leaving. I went back on Thursday and wandered down the street, only to discover that there's a lingerie store on the block. I took a picture of the sign and emailed it to She.

I also emailed the link to the apartment listing to Ms. Mahwah Kiss. She emailed back that she'd come over and hang with me on the patio and grow basil. We'd had brunch last Sunday. Ms. Kiss had wickedly waved a pair of rubber, medical gloves at me when I picked her up in her Tribeca loft. I told her later that I'd wondered if she had a clue how purely erotic those gloves are for me. She said she figured it might make an impression. Later in the week Ms. Mahwah teased me by saying she'd bought a pair of leopard platforms and every guy in the store couldn't take their eyes off her feet. Tell me about it.

So when she offered to grow basil on my new patio, I emailed back that basil grows best when tended wearing rubber surgical gloves and leopard platforms.

I forgot to delete these emails from my Crackberry. Uh-oh...

And of course, on Friday night the wife and I had a rare, nasty, fight. We've been much more friendly recently, but this fight was bad enough that I fled the apartment to give us a much needed timeout. Didn't take the Blackberry. When I got back my wife demanded snarlingly if She-Who-Visits was "my whore" and she hoped that Ms. Kiss and I had lots of fun tending basil with her wearing rubber gloves and leopard print platforms.

Need I share that the wife had breeched the BB and emailed herself my emails.

So I did something I've never done before. I told her a bit of the truth about my kink life and have actually lived to write about it here. Mind you, I'll wake up dead if she ever finds this blog. But I told her I'd met She at a conference and we'd become very dear friends. I told her that She is in a kinky relationship with her husband and that she had helped me to feel better about who I really am. Without giving names or identifying information, I told her I had made real friends with guys who were kinky too. And I think she believes for the first time that Ms. Kiss and I are really just good friends.

And you know what? I think my wife had a bit of an epiphany. A modicum of an appreciation for what I've gone through and how much progress I've made in feeling good about myself. It's not going to save my marriage, but I think it made us better friends. Now who knows what will happen the next time she loses it, but for now I'm glad that one of my deepest secrets, my relationship with She, is revealed in a bit of its truth to my wife.

Now...about the basil. I have it on good authority that tending it in black, retro-lingerie while wearing rubber surgical gloves and leopard platforms makes the spice particularly pungent.

Or maybe something in a nice dommy cheerleader's outfit would make it zesty, peppery and piquant?

A Long Time Comin'

I have this routine in the morning. I'm an early riser. I'm up by 5:15am for a cock-crow run with the dogs through the park and by the river no matter the season or the weather. But before I go, I make coffee. I grind rich, dark, oily beans for a combination of a decaf and high-test drip brew along with a shot of espresso. These days I'm into Irving Farm beans. There's a couple of Irving Farm cafes in Manhattan and one in Millerton, a little Dutchess County berg with a great movie theater and the coolest sporting goods store around.

I was introduced to Irving Farm coffee by a pro-domme with whom I had a deliciously disasterous frolic. Sometimes, as I mill my perfect morning infusion, I'll absent mindedly and fondly flash on the frilly little red, yellow, and white apron we bought to accessorize my service that was hung on a hook in her kitchen and never used. Or her asking the Meatpacking waitress to top up my glass from the Voss bottle - tinged the faintest of golden. Or pleading with her to slash yet again and harder at my urgently offered upper thighs with the rough leather horse crop, as I deleriously wriggled on the polished pine strip floor of her Horatio Street studio in the throes of a two week stint of on-my-honor chastity.

I love a good cup of fine coffee in the morning.

But it's a ritual of process and transition, my morning routine. From sleep I spend fifteen minutes of labor over the literal daily grind. And this morning as I write these words I really have to remind myself that my life is in complete makeover mode. In a little over a week I learn my bar exam fate from the gods of grading. In four months I'll be in a new apartment. There's nothing like looking at real estate in Manhattan to make you feel like an inadequate slacker who has utterly failed to attain a remotely respectable level of financial firepower.

This week I was out at a work related meet and greet and met two attractive, divorced women. Despite a fun chemistry with one, my fet-detector told me she was clueless about kink. I woke up this morning festering that I'm just flat-out undatable. Who wants to deal with a workaholic, aging hipster of a submissive, who comes to a romantic little restaurant with a separation agreement, a domme in the Caribbean who he adores, and huge pile of debt. Oh come on! It'll be fun. You'll see.

But the french roast rites of an April dawn hold aromatic promise. After the grind, the exertion of the run; the stretches, crunches, pull-ups and downward dogs - I get my reward. I just have to keep the faith because ready or not - a change is gonna come.

Underneath It All

I suppose I just should have been flattered that the lunkhead, twenties-ish, rental apartment broker chose a fifth floor walk-up as the first apartment in the West Village he'd show me to be my new single-guy home. Nothing like a dark, dirty, postage stamp sized, fifth floor walk-up in the Village for $3500 a month to make you want to move to Miami. I figured he was doing a bullshit broker bachata - letting me see dreck to soften me up for a kill shot in the fancy full service building at four stacks a month.

At the urging of friends and shrink I've expanded the search for my aging kink-boy bachelor pad to include neighborhoods other than the FiDi. While I'd love to walk to work and I've found a great building, the Wall Street area does button up early and, save for the tourists, is pretty dead on the weekend. So I'm having to put up with broker shennanigans. Spare me.

To boot, I've decided not to go see She. I may not have shared that She lives on the same balmy beautiful island where twenty years ago this fall, my wife and I ran away and were married at sunset, on the beach, with our bare feet planted firmly in the sand. I figure at this stage, the downside risk of being caught is just too great. If I can manage to get one of these snake oil selling brokers to get me a decent apartment, in a few months I can go visit She with a clearer conscience and less chance that I'll turn an amicable separation into the battle for Bastogne

But I'm really sad I'm not going. These days I'm either sad that I'm separating or sad that I haven't seen She in going on five months. Plus, other than her unexpected and totally sweet invite, She is in the throes of what I've come to think of as seasonal disconnective disorder. Sunday will be a month since we've spoken. It's hard to do anything but email her as she's always shooing me away from g-chat or a quick phone conversation while she's working. One would think she is the executive assistant to POTUS. Mr. She's car is permanently kaput so they're car pooling in the morning and She can't call me. She doesn't do email or text much and has said it makes her uncomfortable if I call when Mr. She is around.

I guess the thing is I've been here before with her need to disengage. It seems if I just suck it up and focus on other things, She cycles back. Try as I might though, underneath it all, my little insecurities begin to croak and bleet like a chorus of spring tree frogs until they reach this unbearable cacophonous, crescendo of doubt and need.

But I abruptly shake myself and say, "Snap out of it, fool." Life is good. Just around the corner the loutish purveyor of rooms for rent will show me the coolest one bedroom loft with a little terrace on the Lower East Side. I'll pick my way through early morning tenement streets lined with hip restaurants and hot bars for a run along that other river. I'll find a little local coffee joint where they make my extra large red eye to mainline caffeine with my endorphins. And one day soon She will whisper something incredibly hot and dirty in my ear and all this festering puzzlement will be worth it.

Or maybe one night there will be a certain someone across the bar in that new little local joint I eat dinner in twice a week ... I know some real bad tricks and I'm in need of a little discipline.

Come On And Let Me Know

She-Who-Visits invited me to visit her. She's all alone on her island paradise and she asked me down next weekend. She was very cool about telling me that if I couldn't swing it I shouldn't stress. She knows me well and knows that I stress.

Why stress? I'll soon be living alone, foot loose and fancy free. This seems like an opportunity not to miss. The invite was "Want to come down and clean my apartment?" So hot! Then she allowed as to how she "kept a tidy home." More like OCD spotless.

But I love me in nothing but an apron being bossed about by Mistress Frogperson as I ineptly brandish Lysol and a toothbrush for all those hard to reach nooks and crannies.

Stay tuned. Will he stay or will he go?