It wasn't really my idea. I don't think it would've occurred to me before it happened that first time. But when he slapped me hard across the face, I knew it was right. I felt the electric shock of it, the sudden awareness spreading from the heat rising on my cheek of being completely present in my skin, and completely in the moment in that hotel room with a man I did not know.

But it wasn't exactly a surprise, either; I knew it was coming. We met online three years ago. He was in New York and I had just moved to Philadelphia. We exchanged emails for a few weeks and had a couple of brief phone conversations that lightly danced around the notions of rough sex, and I understood what I was getting into. Or so I thought. I had read about BDSM and lurked in some chat rooms. I knew people tied each other up and whipped each other. I eavesdropped on their pride in taking it. And I was more than a little intrigued.

It wasn't hard, then, to step into the role with a stranger who seemed to know his part. In those virtual exchanges, I readily admitted that I was a willful girl in need of "instruction," that he knew how to turn pouty women into the good girls they wanted to be. It was all very playful and perhaps a bit scripted. So when he finally took the train to Philly, I thought I was ready. When we met for drinks at Buddakan, and he turned to me and said, "I'd like to slap that pretty face," I swiveled on my stool to lodge my knee between his, and I gave him my best "I dare you" smile. I asked for it.

Still, I didn't know it would be so quick. Standing in his hotel room, he kissed me carefully the way new lovers do. He stepped back and looked into my eyes. I was expecting him to say he wanted me, or some version of the half-dozen things people say when they're about to have sex for the first time. Or I was expecting him to pull out some rope. But instead he simply stared at me, taking measure, then cocked his right arm and swung. I didn't know how much I'd be caught off guard, taken aback by it, by the commitment of it and the force of his six-foot frame leveraged behind his right hand.

It was an arc of lightning that drove through my jaw. I felt the sting and the burning rise on my left cheek. I felt my eyes tear and the vibration of every muscle, from my forehead beginning to ache to a quiver in my calves.

I wasn't sure I'd ever noticed my heart in my chest before. I felt my lips trembling, trying to form a smile. And yes, I felt the wetness pooling between my legs. And when I opened my eyes and saw the look on his face, turned on but also concerned and questioning, I felt powerful. I felt in control. This man, twice my size, had just hit me across the face with his full weight, and I took it. I absorbed it. I was fucking strong; I half expected him to fall on his knees in front of me.

But he hit me again. And again. And each time was like the first. No less bone-shaking or heart-racing. If he'd kept slapping me, I think I would've come from the sheer vibration of my Hooksexups. But he stopped short of that. He slapped me until I cried, until something else in me broke loose. Some little hard kernel in me shattered apart. And the amazing thing was, he knew it before I did. He watched me, and he saw it happen, that cathartic moment when I turned inside out, and he stopped. He held my blushing face in his hands, and then he took me by my wrist, led me to the bed and fucked me. It wasn't rough sex. It was slow and tender. And I experienced each single gesture — his hand gliding down my shoulder blade, or my lip against the lobe of his ear, each touch we learn from tired romantic movies — I experienced as if it were the first gesture anyone had ever made. And when I came, though it was one of the best teeth-rattling orgasms I've ever had, it was almost like an afterthought given what had come before.

"I'm just wondering," he said, "why isn't it abuse?"

Without thinking, I gave my most honest answer: "Because it feels good."

I learned two things when I hit puberty. One was the power that comes from the self-control to take pain, the other was the ability to disappear from my life. These sound like the lessons of abuse, but my abusers weren't other people.

They were my own genes. By the time I turned twelve, my spine was already twisting and bending itself into an eighty-seven degree scoliotic angle. I tried my best to ignore it, and it was pretty easy since there wasn't yet much pain. I simply stopped looking at myself in the mirror, denying myself any chance to see the hump forming on my back or the evolving bow of my torso. It was made all the easier when I got my first body cast, which encased me in plaster from my neck to my hips. I just adopted the habit of not taking notice.

The pain, though, came with the surgery, and it got my attention. In the worst moments, when the simplest movement of raising my arm a few inches made me go blind from the hurt, I stumbled on another trick. Rather than trying to occupy my mind with something else, trying to forget it, I focused on it. I really had no choice. I drilled into it with every thought in my brain until I smoothed down the jagged edges. I took control of it, and having control turned it into something else. It still hurt like hell, but it wasn't altogether unpleasureable. And each time I got better at it, and each time I learned how to be in my body again. I learned that I wasn't quite dead.

But then I healed, and the most I had to contend with in the next year was a succession of more casts, which weren't painful but were nasty to look at. The last cast came off just before I turned fifteen, and by then, once again, I had mastered not quite being there.

For twenty years, I had the memory of that pain tucked away in the back of my mind, but I'd never picked it up and held it in front of the mirror. Not looking had become the routine. Since then, I'd had a normal life. I'd had vanilla sex. I'd enjoyed it, and sometimes it was really, really lovely. But I was never quite there. Even when the man knew how to touch me, how to elicit those post-orgasmic shivers, even when he loved me, there was always a part of me hovering in a corner of the ceiling and looking away — not quite alive.

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