The Sound of His Boots.

I was waiting for him in an empty office while he was off in another part of the hospital, perhaps he was seeing a patient or doing whatever people who work in hospitals do on a daily basis. I can only assume it involves doing crafts with bandages, playing diagnostic guessing games based on the hues of people’s blood and having scalpel fights in the break room. The corridor outside was very quiet, only intermittently could I hear people walking from one end to the other and no one seemed to speak at all as they did so. A little while into waiting, I heard the door at the far end of the wing open and a familiar tread began to get louder in its approach towards the door. It’s really hard to explain how I can tell the sound of his step apart from the hundreds of other standard-issue boots that abound in this building, but I can.

To me, it’s no different than being able to distinguish his touch from that of another calloused hand, no different than being able to tell the sound of his voice or the smell of his neck apart from another. His tread in those shoes is unmistakeable, not just to my ears but my entire body, even before I recognise it, my body responds to it. As the tapping of the heel against the floor got louder, my breath started to get shorter, I gripped my palms in fear, my body started to tense and my cunt, so unnoticeable just a moment ago, started to leak and throb. As he appeared in the doorway and caught my eye, my body was ready to drop down to the floor and wait for him to walk on me. It took every bit of restraint I have to just stand up and look at him like an ordinary person might look at their partner in the ordinary routine of visiting them at work during an ordinary day in an ordinary life. I mean, it is an ordinary life, it’s just that ordinarily, in this one, he has trained my body to respond to the sound of his boots in a certain way, and while I am uncertain about whether it began advertently or by accident, I know it has been deliberate and exacting for a long time now. When the boots changed a while ago, the sound changed a little bit, but the reaction caught up in a hurry, as his enforcement of the reaction adapted to the need for adjustment, too. That’s how you *train*, I suppose.

To be honest, I am quite wary of discussing *training* as a concept or practise that may exist within a relationship as a deliberate choice because of the connotations of it that already exist. In my experience, it’s always anal-training or orgasm-by-command training that gets discussed and fetishized, and it is not my intention to denigrate anyone who enjoys that and has worked hard to achieve it, but to me, that’s a bit boring. Why train my ass to fuck it when it’s so, so much worse if it’s unable to bear anything you do to it, right? And I certainly have no interest in being trained to orgasm on command simply because..well, orgasms are bleh to me and they’re kind of overrated too (and again, I am happy you love your orgasms, and I understand how the pleasure-gap and body-politics even make them an act of subversion and empowerment for many, but I just don’t love that so much sexual pleasure is contingent upon and measured by the orgasm, like I couldn’t possibly be sexually normal if I don’t want them, don’t have them and within D/s, don’t make them a central conceit of control. There is much more to power than the orgasm, and to me, the ability to arouse, in a thousand specific ways, and tie that arousal to specific emotions, is much more powerful than the ability to enforce or deny orgasm).

That’s not all, though. I don’t know why but *most* discussions about training give me the cringe. Maybe it’s because of the archetype of a certain type of dominant who talks about training *the most*. It’s too damn stereotypical to take seriously, it’s almost like a caricature and all of the discussion coming from that source sounds like male-gaze defined fantasy more than achievable, actionable, *comprehensible* reality. Of course, I also encounter absolutely brilliant and thoughtful people who engage in various forms of *training* but those conversations are much quieter and less exposed. Regardless, this is why I don’t talk too much about training because I am not convinced what I mean is what is being heard. To me, it’s not the ass-or-orgasm, when I say I fetishise being *trained*, I am talking about something else entirely. Let me be more explicit in my description of it.

For years, every time he was about to start slapping me, he would stroke my cheek, three times with his thumb, and now, every time he strokes my cheek, even if he doesn’t hit it, I am flooded with the anticipation, memory and my body is braced to take it. He never ever wakes me up in the morning, I wake up when and as I wake up, he only ever leans over and shakes me awake if he intends to use or hurt me, so even when I am asleep, when I feel his turn over to me, grip my arm and shake me a little bit, even before I wake up, my body and mind know how to act and position myself to take what I am about to get. For so long, he hit me harder and harsher if I screamed or moved during a scene, amongst other things, and now, for years, I know exactly how to behave and act during one. For so long, he would crush my fingers under his shoes immediately upon entering a room until, in my head, the sound of his boots and placing my fingers before them became ubiquitous, as did the fear in response to the sound, and now, sometimes he even forgets that is what is happening to me when he approaches with sound before presence, but when he sees me, he knows and I know what has happened. That is the kind of thing I mean by *training*.

See, in my head, and probably deeply unnecessarily and serving no purpose other than whimsical pedantry, the distinction between an association, a reaction and a trained response (or training) matter quite a bit. We all react to things all the time, right? Some reactions are completely natural. For instance, if someone were to wave a knife or a fist in your face, taking cover would be a natural physical response and fear would be a natural emotional response, and I can get off to natural reactions, but there is something distinctive about a trained response that *defies* the natural and I get off to that a lot more. For instance, I think he trained me to put my arms behind my back when I see a fist coming towards my face, instead of lifting them up to cover my face, that is the kind of training that is much more gratifying to me. It makes no fucking sense, it scoffs at nature and something about it just feels wrong. It’s the training of a *wrong* reaction, too. Fear is a normal response to threat, but what is threatening about someone stroking your cheek or walking in boots that make a sound against the floor? Reacting with fear to those things is a result of something else. It’s not training, to me, to elicit the reaction that would have come from a situation anyway, it’s training to curate a reaction based on a deliberate, repeated outcome. A part of that is the tailoring of it, another part is the demonstration of power and yet another is the intentionality of it.

The intentionality is where it differs from association. Association is a process that I generally love as a trait of human behaviour. We are so cute. If we’re happy and we eat a popsicle, we love popsicles and if we’re sad and we eat some hazelnut chocolate, we hate hazelnut chocolate. It's fucking adorable but as a process, association like that is free, in a sense. I'm free to associate whatever I want or happen to associate with the scent of him, the thought of him, the idea of his love and the representation of his violence but with *training* it's much more deliberate. Both the emotional response and the behavioural response are curated, deliberately. I hear the clack-clack of his arrival and I feel fear and arousal, and I act by getting on the floor because that is what he wants me to feel and do, and that is what really works for me about the process. It's not a free-form sense of association governed by my own thoughts or feelings, it's things I've been made to think and feel. There is a delicious sense of control to that. Yet, these things, they're either so nebulous or so oddly specific that it is difficult to simply say that he has trained me this way and leave it that. It's just a sound, I hear a million of those every day, but there is a whole world inside it.

Just a clack, clack, clack and I crumble.