Shy about kinks

When my mom travels to the city to pay me a visit, I tidy the house. Last time, as I showed her around the house, she stared for a while at the ceiling of the living room. Then she looked at me and said in her dry Scots accent, “Och. Those hanging plants aren’t goin’ tae be falling doon for lack o’ support, are they?”

I like to say I live my life with no closets and precious little drapery, and I don’t cater to the tender sensibilities of the general public. I recall fondly the time when our macho plumber retiled our tub faucets while an eight-inch blue-veined realistic dick-complete with wrinkly testicles-stared broodingly at him from the shampoo rack. And don’t even get me started about the time a would-be thief kicked in a window, crawled through, and found himself in my dungeon, from which he fled precipitously.

But I confess that I’m a big chicken about showing my perverted side to some folks. At the sudden advent of relatives, I’ve had occasion to smartly kick paddles under the coffee table, throw my coat casually over the ropes and cuffs still tied to the couch arm, and separate the buttplug-lying almost overlooked in the bottom of the tub-from the bathplug. And of course, given time, I hang plants from the bondage/suspension points in the ceiling.

Embarrassingly, my relatives aren’t the only folk to turn me shy about my kinks. My basement flooded once while I was out of town. By the time I got back to a panicky housesitter who had foolishly called my landlord (a nice but very straightlaced kind of guy) for rescue, I had barely four hours to turn my dungeonette, which was furnished with a full set of heavy-duty BDSM-specific furniture, into a space that wouldn’t frighten the horses.

I dashed about, ransacked my craft bins, and in a twinkling converted my pussy-red dungeonette into a fine little sewing room, complete with sewing machine, scraps and threads. I draped the dungeon furniture in sheets, threw a few measuring tapes and bobbins into the fray, and lit the whole thing with a harsh fluorescent lamp. The finishing touch was a garish yellow clothesline hung with swathes of material and half-sewn items. Just in time! My landlord walked in, squishing slightly on the wet carpet. He looked past the wrought-iron cage door I’d hung with drapes, overlooked the St Andrew’s cross covered in a fitted floral bedsheet, and stopped, attention riveted by the ceiling.

“Well,” he said “That clothesline isn’t coming down anytime soon, is it?”