Warning: Use Caution When Swinging from Chandelier

Rough sex. Acrobatic, adventurous, heart-pounding sex. Swinging from the chandeliers and shaking the rafters sex. Is there anything better?

Few things feel sweeter than that morning after, when the muscles are sore, skin aching from love bites and overeager hands, tender parts tingly with the aftermath. The morning after a good romp, even walking through the house feels sexy, as though I can still feel him between my thighs. Looking in the mirror makes me smile – my eyes are bright with sated passion, my lips are swollen from kisses, and my neck is sometimes covered with those little bites, delicious marks of his teeth.

Sometimes my wrists are red from handcuffs or scarves. Every now and then I will find a rug burn on my knee. Occasionally there will be a bruise somewhere else, perhaps on my hip or the inside of my thigh, where he held onto me while he was doing something decidedly naughty. Sometimes he gets marked with scratches of possession across his back.

From time to time, a rough-and-tumble play session becomes an extreme sport. Have you ever made love in the shower and then slipped halfway through a good thrust? Or used lotion all over your lover’s skin, only to be betrayed by slippery hands that almost let you fall to the floor when you reach to hold onto the headboard? What about losing all sense of direction and coming back down to earth – literally – when you fall off the edge of the bed?

There are dozens of stories about the leg cramp that made her hop out of bed while howling at the top of her lungs, or the moment he thrust a little too hard and missed the mark. There’s prolonged sexual play with popsicles or ice cubes, when your nether regions become so numb and tingly that you really can’t feel anything down there anymore, much less enough to have any sort of orgasm until things...well, heat up again.

Sometimes it’s just the opposite, and adventures in bed become a little too hot to handle. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of leaning too close to the candles – the sudden scent of singed hair was enough to dampen the mood. We put out the fire before the curtains caught, but I’m sure other couples through the years haven’t been so lucky. Can you imagine telling the fire chief exactly how your bedroom went up in flames?

Things sometimes go to extremes. We’ve all heard the snickering stories of foreign objects someone just happened to “fall on” and get lodged in some intimate part of their body. Some of those stories actually manage to make the news on a slow day. A little more common is the horror story of the time a guy reached into the bedside drawer and pulled out a bottle he thought was filled with lube. In the darkened bedroom, he didn’t notice the lube was really the Icy Hot until it was far too late...but simply writing that makes me cringe, so let’s not talk about that anymore, okay?

A good friend of mine once fooled around in a car with her husband, trying to recapture the feeling of her youth. Their playground was a secluded park while they got it on in the front seat (hey, the seats were heated! And they reclined!). One of them got too close to the gearshift, and somehow moved that stick from park to neutral. A good definition of true panic: A man with his pants down around his ankles, right on the verge of orgasm, happens to glance out the windshield and see the swiftly approaching shoreline of a massive lake.

Since my friend is alive to tell the story, her husband obviously managed to find the brake before things went over the edge, so to speak. Once the crisis was over, my friend laughed so hard, she cried. Her husband didn’t find it nearly as funny, and didn’t speak to her for a week.

My own “you can’t make this shit up” moment came when I woke up one summer morning to find that in addition to the little aches and pains of a night well spent, I also had these incredibly itchy spots all over my back and shoulders. I climbed into the shower – first thing anybody would do, right? – and it only got worse. So much worse, in fact, that when my lover called later that morning, I tried to play it cool but failed miserably.

“My back itches and I have little red dots on it and I don’t know what it is.”

I was met with the kind of silence that assured me he was trying hard not to laugh out loud.

“Go look under that magnolia tree,” he said.

I went straight of the house, across the back field and to the big tree in the corner, where we had made love the evening before. It was the most beautiful place, secluded and quiet, a soft carpet of green underneath a sweet-smelling tree. The moonlight had streamed through those leaves and turned his skin golden, almost making him glow. At the time, that was all I cared about – I hadn’t bothered to notice everything around us. What we thought was a benign place to take a tumble was filled with small, distinctive green leaves. One look in broad daylight answered all my questions. It was poison ivy.

Lesson learned: when getting frisky in the great outdoors, take a good look around you before you roll in the hay.

A tube of medication from my doctor and I was okay within a week. My lover laughed at me over that for months but he never got a single itchy spot, which serves to prove that there really is no justice in this world.

So far, I haven’t done anything even close to landing me in the Emergency Room, nor have I done anything so incredibly stupid I wouldn’t own up to it. I admit to the guilty pleasure of reading about the occasional bedroom mishap in a newspaper and snickering, all the while thinking that it couldn’t possibly happen to me, even as I know it very well could. Does anybody know of a sex toy shop that sells helmets for extreme bedroom sports?

Playful Cheers,
Gwenny