flavors of pain

I once traveled all the way from Brooklyn to Queens to have hot candle wax poured on me for the first time by a stranger.

credit: Elena Zaikina

He led me up to his apartment which, to my horror, was entirely coated in dust. The coffee table, the dishes in his sink, every surface of the furniture lay covered with a thin gray film, suggesting that nothing had been touched perhaps in years. “This was my childhood home,” he explained. I smiled nervously.

He placed a blue tarp on the ground—making it now the cleanest surface in the room— and instructed me to lay down. I began to undress, second-guessing my judgment as I unhooked my bra and pulled my underwear down from around my ankles. I politely requested a pillow for my head, wanting to avoid dust in my hair.

This was only our second time meeting. We’d met on an app for people in the BDSM / kink community. Mostly I just used the site to read forums and respond to the occasional DM, but a week or so prior I’d attended a meetup (known as a “munch”) and had shyly introduced myself to a few strangers over the course of the evening, including him. It had come up in conversation that I was interested in temperature play—namely wax, and he invited me over to try it. I had little regard for my safety, so naturally I said yes without hesitation.

He was an older man - late fifties - with kind eyes and for a stranger I found him very respectful, especially given the situation. I laid naked on the floor underneath him flat, legs apart and arms fanned out a little. I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect. He lit the first candle, and it took a moment for the melted wax to pool enough to drip. I winced. It stung, a little, and then it didn’t. It was kind of nice, I realized. Arousing, as well.

We toyed with an array of variables - using different colored candles (some colors have hotter melting points), dripping closer to the body versus from a higher distance (hot!), and we tested the sensitivity of various body spots - my nipples, my stomach, my thighs. I was used to the pain of impact play, and this was a new brand that I felt more willing to endure.

Elements of it were still the same: a lack of control, the unpredictability, the anticipation and the release. The pleasure was in the ebb and flow of that tension and catharsis, the pain continually varying in its intensity as the nightmare alternated between being either worse than the reality or a gross underestimation.

It had not been so long since my last encounter in the home of some other old man who relished the prospect of introducing me to pain. Last time, rather than candles, I had sampled the flavors of being hit with various objects: a flogger, a cane, and then a single tail whip. The cane had hurt most of all.

I had stood there, enduring blow after blow, unclear when the man would tire of whipping me and striking me with the canes, until eventually I began quietly crying. I was surprisingly quiet during these sessions. I would flinch, squirm and grit my teeth and weep if I had to, but there was not much noise I emitted beyond that—I knew tears would not save me. And it was within this session that I unlocked the trick to transcending the pain, gradually focusing instead on the sounds of my own breathing and the rush of the air between lashes. Slowly, the bite of it became almost meditative, and somewhere in the negative space of it all was my relief.

I was pleased to learn, during this stint with wax play, that the locus of pain was much smaller comparatively, like getting tiny pinches across the body rather than blunt strokes from a broad instrument. It reminded me of the whip, which, like the melted wax, had been more of a sting, fast and sharp. I enjoyed the added sensory contrast of hot and then cool across my body. By the time I even registered the heat, it was basically over. At one point the candle decorated my stomach with a warm drizzle and my eyes sparkled with pleasure.

That would be the first and only time I formally played with wax. But sometimes I think about this encounter when I lay down to get a Brazilian. Although those appointments have never been sexy or fun, many elements are the same: the wax, the tension, the pain, the repetition. I lay there and I let it hurt and there’s a satisfaction in knowing I can take it.

I laid there on the tarp in that dust-laden apartment and allowed myself to be covered head to toe in melted candle wax. When he was done, and all the wax had dried, the old man then pulled out a switchblade and instructed me to stay very still. I held my breath as he traced the outline of my body with the knife. He operated with a steady hand, careful not to do me any harm. And a moment later, I was free, like a butterfly sliding shyly out of her chrysalis.