About nine months after we moved in to our new house, I was awarded tenure. Brooke and I celebrated with dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in the next town over. The extra money that came with my promotion, while not substantial, was certainly welcome. We hired a general contractor to begin renovating the downstairs guest bedroom and bathroom as well finish our basement by creating an office, a small workout room and a half bath.

Meanwhile, Brooke had gotten into the habit of going out with her friend Michelle on Saturday nights. At first, I thought nothing of it – two good friends having a girl’s night out. Michelle was Brooke‘s age. They had known each other since grade school, growing up together in a town about 30 miles away from the one in which Brooke and I now lived. But whereas Brooke went to the college nearest to where she grew up – namely, the liberal arts institution where I taught – Michelle had attended Ohio State in Columbus, where she majored in business. After graduation, Michelle moved back to her hometown, where she now works in marketing for a midsized manufacturing company. In my humble opinion, Michelle is not the stunner that Brooke is, but she’s certainly well above average in the looks department. She is about an inch shorter than Brooke at 5’ 6”, with long blonde hair, sultry eyes and slightly larger breasts than Brooke (whose breasts are perfect, to my eyes, along with every other part of her).

I didn’t know what Brooke had shared with Michelle — who, I’m sure, like everyone else, must have wondered how someone so beautiful could end up with an older, dweeby guy like me — about the nature of our relationship, but she did not openly exhibit her dominance when Michelle came over to visit, at least not in the pre Luke days. Don’t get me wrong, I would cook and serve dinner for the three of us, get them both drinks, make popcorn when we watched a movie together, etc. Once Brooke put her feet up in my lap as the three of us sat on our sectional sofa, watching a thriller, and asked me to massage them. I thought I saw the two of them exchange subtle smirks. But that was about the extent of it. Michelle would make seemingly off-hand comments like, “Wow, you really have him trained well, don’t you?” And when we had a little cocktail party to celebrate my promotion, with Michelle and Neil Lawson as guests, Michelle gave me an apron as a gift. Everyone laughed (I’m sure I blushed).

Usually when they went out on Saturday evenings, Brooke and Michelle wore jeans and t-shirts, or similar casual attire. However, one Saturday about two weeks after the cocktail party, I was reading in the living room while Brooke was upstairs getting ready for her night out. Michelle was coming over to pick her up as usual. When Michelle rang the doorbell, Brooke hurried downstairs. She was wearing a short black dress that hugged her body, really accentuating her curves, with sheer black stockings and ankle boots. Michelle was similarly dressed to kill. As I regarded her with a stunned expression, Brooke said to me as they left the house, simply, “Don’t wait up for me, tonight, Walter. I may be late.”

“Very late,“ added Michelle. The two of them giggled.

The way Brooke was dressed, I couldn’t imagine men being able to keep their hands off her. I was sad and anxious all evening, but tried to distract myself by working on my book. The feelings of jealousy I was experiencing fit in perfectly with the subject of my book: how the rich history of male masochism in Western literature likely originated in the poetry and conventions of medieval courtly love. This book was to be part literary criticism, part history and part psychology, as I intended to trace the influence that medieval literature’s depictions of male masochism in courtly love have had not only in fiction but in real life relationships. Such as my and Brooke’s relationship, for instance.

My study was to begin with an analysis of the earliest texts describing this type of relationship, Chretien de Troyes’ Knight of the Cart (Le Chevalier de La Charrete) in the 12th century and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in the 13th century. The Knight of the Cart tells the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, including the public displays of humiliation that he subjected himself to as her servant. Most notably, Lancelot had to ride in a cart to rescue Guinevere, who was being held prisoner. In Arthurian England, it was considered deeply dishonorable and shameful, indeed emasculating, for a knight to ride in a cart, a conveyance used by peasants and prisoners. Lancelot was willing to endure this permanent emasculation, never to be seen the same again by his friends and rivals, to save his lady; nevertheless, Guinevere punishes him when she learns that he hesitated momentarily when getting into the cart, refusing to even look at him. In other words, Lancelot willingly emasculates himself for Guinevere, yet she still punishes him for not being eager enough to emasculate himself for her. Even after she finally forgives him, she continues to cruelly exercise her power over him by ordering him to perform poorly at a jousting tournament. He obediently allows himself to be unhorsed to by his opponent to please her. Guinevere controls him as if he were her puppet, imposing upon him humiliation after humiliation.

Other scholars, of course, had written about the influence of medieval courtly love on the subsequent literature of sadomasochism – indeed showing a direct line between The Knight of the Cart and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. However, I intended to go much further, analyzing many other texts (and even plays and movies, eventually), over the centuries, up to and including the rich contemporary body of male masochistic fiction found on social media sites such as Reddit and on on-line fiction sites such as Literotica, Fictionmania and Nifty Archive, that had become so prevalent in recent years.

It is important to note that courtly love relationships were essentially love triangles involving the submissive knight, the lady and the lady’s husband, a man of superior social status to the knight. They were really variations of another type of love triangle relationship featuring male masochism, namely the cuckolding relationship. The connection between these two types of love triangles began to take serious shape in my mind that evening as, while working on my book, I kept picturing Brooke in the arms and in the bed of other men— men stronger, better endowed, more successful, more worthy than I.

Shamefully, I found myself beginning to rub my cock through the panties I was wearing under my jeans, as I envisioned Brooke being taken by a superior man. Something I realized that could very well be happening that night even as I was imagining it.

My thoughts were exceedingly distressing. And yet intensely erotic.