Reading your partner

You are the only person in the room who can see what is happening. She is the only person who can feel it. Everything good about topping comes from closing that gap, and almost all of it is done by watching rather than by asking.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

There is an information problem at the heart of this. She can feel every detail of what is happening and cannot see any of it. You can see the skin, the marks and the whole shape of her body and cannot feel a thing. The craft of topping is trading those halves back and forth without stopping every ninety seconds to hold a meeting about it, and most of that trade happens without words.

Why the face is nearly useless

In most positions you cannot see it. Even when you can, the face is the part of the body people manage: we spend our whole lives arranging our expressions for other people, and someone who has waited years for this evening and is terrified of spoiling it will arrange hers beautifully. The extremities are honest. Nobody is thinking about their feet.

What to actually watch

Breathing

The most useful signal there is, and it is the sound rather than the words. A settled person breathes deeply and lets the breath go out on the stroke, and the sound of it lengthens as the session goes on. That long outward breath is the noise of someone who has arrived.

The bad ones are held breath, which means bracing, and quick shallow breathing high in the chest, which is the beginning of panic. The alarm is a sudden change: a slow, even rhythm going sharp after one particular stroke means that stroke did something the others did not.

Muscle tension

Look at the buttocks and the back of the thighs. Between strokes they should soften. If they stay hard, she is bracing continuously, which means you are ahead of her, and impact into clenched muscle hurts worse and bruises deeper than impact into relaxed muscle.

Clenching before the stroke rather than after it is the same message in a louder voice. Go back to your hand for a few minutes.

Feet

My favourite tell and the one I would teach first. Toes gripping the carpet, feet rolling inward, one heel lifting, feet shuffling for a better base. All of that is a body preparing to get away from something.

Feet that have gone still and slightly turned out belong to someone who has stopped defending herself. Feet that were still and have started moving again are the earliest warning you will get, usually a minute or two before anything else changes.

Hands

Fists, white knuckles, a handful of duvet twisted tight. A grip that loosens over the first ten minutes is a good sign, and a grip that tightens and stays tight is not.

A hand coming back to cover is a full stop, whatever her mouth is saying. It is a reflex, it is not a decision, and it is the most reliable single signal on this page.

Skin

The one thing only you can see. Even pink, then red, then deeper red across the whole area is the normal progression. What should stop you: white patches inside a red area, mottled purple arriving early, any hard raised lump, any broken surface, and cane lines stacking on top of each other.

Look at the skin between strokes rather than at the end of the session, and put your hand flat on it now and then. Heat tells you things colour does not.

Weight

A braced person holds herself up. A settled person hands her weight over to the bed or your leg, and you feel that moment before you see it.

What it looks like when someone goes into headspace

The change into headspace is unmistakable once you have seen it twice and hard to describe before that. What changes is the quality rather than the volume.

• Replies get slower. There is a lag before an answer that was not there ten minutes ago.
• Language shrinks to single words, and the voice drops in pitch and gets quieter.
• The body goes heavy and pliable. She can be moved rather than moving herself.
• Reactions to individual strokes get smaller, and her tolerance appears to go up.

This is a good state and most of what people are there for. It also has a consequence that new tops miss entirely: as she goes further in, her ability to assess her own condition and report it falls away.

She will say yes to things, mean it completely, and be unable to tell you on Tuesday why she said it. Which means your monitoring has to increase at precisely the point where hers stops working. That is the actual reason experienced tops stop earlier than inexperienced ones.

Struggling and hiding it

This is the section that matters. People mask, and they mask for good reasons: not wanting to disappoint someone, having waited years for this evening, feeling guilty about the trouble somebody has gone to, or simply being in a state where forming a sentence is more effort than staying quiet.

The signs are specific.

• Going very still and very quiet. New tops read this as bliss and it is sometimes freezing. The way to tell them apart is the muscle: blissful is loose, frozen is rigid.
• Answers arriving too fast and too brightly. A cheerful instant "green" that comes back before you have finished the question was not consulted with anybody.
• A count that stays perfect while everything else has changed. Counting goes automatic, and it will carry on long after the person doing it has stopped being present. More on that at counting and ritual.
• Breath held between strokes rather than released after them.
• Hips creeping gradually out of position, or repeated small readjustments that always drift the same way.
• Sudden chatter or laughter at an odd moment. Talking is sometimes a way of putting distance between yourself and what is happening.

None of these is proof. All of them are worth a pause, a hand on her back, and a question.

How to ask

"Are you all right" is close to worthless. It has one socially correct answer, everyone gives it, and it is out of the mouth before the brain is involved.

Ask something with a real answer in it. Where did that one land. How many was that. Which of the last three was worst. Tell me what you can feel now. A question that requires composing a sentence tests two things at once: what she thinks, and whether she can still assemble words, which is often the more useful of the two.

The traffic light system is worth having because "colour?" is short enough to use without breaking anything, and because it gives a trained answer rather than a polite one. Amber is the part people forget to use. See safe words.

Whatever the answer, note how it arrived as well as what it was. Slow, quiet and short is fine and probably means headspace. Slurred, absent or three seconds late means slow down. Fast and bright means ask again in a different way.

Checking without wrecking the mood

New tops worry that checking in ruins the atmosphere. Done clumsily it does. Done properly it becomes part of the scene and nobody notices it.

Check during a natural pause rather than interrupting a rhythm, keep a hand flat on her back while you do it so the scene does not evaporate, and keep it to a few words. Start the habit in the warm-up, so that by the time it matters it is simply a thing that happens rather than a sign something is wrong.

You have to know her normal

Every one of these signals is relative to a person. Some people are noisy and always have been. Some go silent from the first minute and are perfectly content. What you are watching for is change from her baseline, which is why the first few sessions with anyone new are partly a data-gathering exercise and should be conservative for that reason alone.

Ask afterwards, too. "You went quiet around the twenty minute mark, what was going on there" is one of the most useful sentences available, and it works best the next day rather than while she is still full of endorphins and fond of everybody.