The pounding in my head is as unbearable as his touch on my skin is soft, and while I lay across the bed — flattened by pain, eyes neither open nor closed against the dim light — his “Shhhh…” stills the effort of my limbs. I stop trying to help him get me undressed and instead expend my energy on quietness. My breathing slows. One by one I force my muscles to relax, working up my body, starting with my toes.
Before I was diagnosed with migraine headaches, I was dealing with incrementally increasing levels of pain with each new onset. No over-the-counter medication made a dent unless I took 3-4 times the recommended dose, and one of the worst bouts of pain I had — the the headache I had right before I ended up in the emergency room with blurred-green vision and ice cold with fear of having had a stroke — was eased under the ministrations of my spouse’s ‘naturopathic’ methods.
Though I can feel him sliding my shorts off my hips and recognize his grip against my thighs as he moves my legs into a V, I can feel the pain more. It is through this pinball-fast throb-sore head fog that I recognize the firm-light movements his lips are making, first up the inside of my right thigh, then from knee to groin on the left. Blurred is his breath on my skin, the slight tickle of stubble a ghost-scratch on my pussy lips. Then his lips, there, kissing slow and soft.
It is difficult to explain to anyone who has never experienced it themselves, but the sheer magnitude of pain that accompanies a migraine is debilitating. And that afternoon — so long ago now, yet the memory lingers — if you had asked me, before he started administering his medicine, “On a scale of one to ten, what is your pain level?” I would have said “Eleven.”
I feel my muscles tensing in my thighs and lower back, my instinct being to rise — to meet his mouth, to kiss the lips on his face with the lips between my thighs. But he stops when I do. Shushes and soothes. Says, “Don’t tense up. Just relax.” And I let go of the tension, gradually downward from spine to knee, while he kisses deeper. I feel the un-insistent gentle-wet of his tongue, the barely-there suction of slow-stim pressure. He alternates between not-quite-penetration and savory devourment, steadily pacing, unhurried, solicitously demanding my body to respond.
I have long believed that orgasms are a wonderful cure. They are good for ‘bettering’ a multitude of ills, physical and emotional. And while I’ve always known that the ‘high’ that accompanies an orgasm is due to endorphins, it was not until that afternoon that I really understood the term endorphin shot in terms of a medicinal.
And my body does respond. With continual effort placed on relaxing muscles that naturally want to tense in preparation for orgasm, the throbbing that has been so unbearable in my head begins to move, a little at a time, to other parts of my body and lessen in intensity with each wave downward. It is diminished first to a strong electric bass thrum, then to a tympanic gong, and finally to a heartbeat.
My heart beats steadily now against his tongue and somehow — without tightening any muscles purposely — my muscles ripple in auto-response, a long bodily exhale of pain into pleasure, and on soaked sheets… I sleep.
.
