No Ordinary Love Story: Sequel to The Diary of a Submissive
Read No Ordinary Love Story: Sequel to The Diary of a Submissive Online
Authors: Sophie Morgan
For F, with all my love and thanks
I was late. I spend a lot of my life late, or if not actually late then in fear of being so. I’m a journalist, and workwise while it’s an occupational hazard there’s nothing less forgivable (OK, except maybe phone hacking, but I’m a local newspaper journalist so that’s not the kind of thing we get up to, whatever you might see in the soaps). In my non-work life I find lateness annoying in myself and in others. Wherever possible I’ll pitch up five minutes early and loiter just to minimise the risk of being late. I know I probably look a bit like a stalker, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
No chance to do that this time, though. When I got to the bar my friends, Thomas and Charlotte, had already commandeered a booth and were waving at me like lunatics to get me to come over. Charlotte was even wearing an elf hat, which is not as odd as it sounds as it was four days before Christmas. The festive spirit had completely passed me by, though, partly because work was bedlam and partly because I was still licking my wounds over the longest break-up ever. The only reason I’d agreed to come for drinks was because I couldn’t cope with their lecturing if I declined. Plus, the bar was close to my office and Charlotte had assured me there would be lots of people – enough I hoped for me to be able to slip away unnoticed after a quick drink and some mingling to show willing and
shut them up. Except as I walked over to the bar I realised that there was only one other person in the booth with them. I’d been ambushed.
My first thought, testament to how he was still not really ever out of my mind, was that it was James, my ex, even though rationally I knew Thomas wasn’t ever going to be sharing drinks, small talk and mini cheesy biscuits with him. I wasn’t actually sure I wanted to share drinks with him either. The man with his back to me turned round, confirming what I knew, and then the annoyance began to burn in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t have told you who I was angry at – myself? Them? Him? I’d spent a lot of time angry lately. It was unlike me and I was beginning to bore myself with it. It was also exhausting, another reason I would have been happier sitting at home watching cooking shows on TV and not speaking to anyone.
No chance of that tonight, though. I’d been completely stitched up by my so-called friends. Charlotte hesitated for a moment before she hugged me, able to see my rage, but Thomas showed no such fear. He launched himself at me and enveloped me in a massive bear hug that almost made me overbalance.
‘Soph! You made it. We didn’t think you were going to come, it’s not like you to be late.’
I slipped out of his arms and began unbuttoning my coat. ‘Yeah, work was a pain and the tube was packed.’ I had no intention of apologising for my lateness. I bit back a wry smile, remembering an occasion when, upon turning up at Thomas’s twenty-three minutes late due to traffic
trouble, he hit me twenty-three times with a crop. It felt like a long time ago, a different life. Things really had changed, although the memory still inspired a surge of affection which went some way to easing my fury.
The-man-who-wasn’t-James had stood up as I arrived and was waiting for me to come closer to the table. As I leaned in to put my coat on the pile he put his hand out.
‘Hello, Sophie. I’m Adam. It’s lovely to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you.’ Dark hair, brown eyes, glasses. Strong handshake, nice hands – I notice these things; it’s a side effect of my extra-curricular love of spanking. I had to give them credit for knowing my tastes well. Shame they didn’t know me well enough to know I had no interest in any kind of relationship with anyone for the foreseeable future.
‘Have you really?’ I smiled at him, not entirely sure it was reaching my eyes. ‘Because I’ve heard nothing at all about you.’ I glanced over at Charlotte, who looked discomfited. The silence lengthened, and for a moment I let it hang there, before sighing, plonking myself down on the cushioned bench and picking up the menu. I hate confrontations and bad atmospheres, I always have. I could play nice; all I had to do was get through the next hour or so and cry off with an early work start. My eyes caught mulled wine on the menu and I smiled to myself. I could get a little bit into the festive spirit at least. ‘So what’s everyone drinking? I’ll get them.’
I know I sound a bit churlish, and I know it wasn’t poor Adam’s fault. The fact is, and I appreciate this sounds all
Mills & Boon, I’d had my heart broken not long before. Not on purpose – people who break your heart on purpose are the worst kind of bastards after all, and if I’d found myself in love with a bastard it’d have been much easier to disentangle my life, pull myself together and move on. But James had managed to pretty much settle his way into my life, both as a boyfriend and as a dominant foil to my submissive tendencies. Then he ended things abruptly and it had left me feeling uncharacteristically adrift.
Not that things had ended completely, not in a way I had been able to start moving on from yet. If I was to describe this in a TV-style ‘previously on Sophie’s life’ segment then the admittedly HBO-friendly summary is as follows: Boy meets girl, boy dominates girl, girl gets off on the pain and degradation and falls for boy, boy becomes guilt-ridden at how he’s dominating the girl he’s decided he’s in love with, girl points out she enjoys the domination. You’d imagine the next step would be boy coming to terms with the two sides of his nature and thanking his lucky stars he had found a girl that complemented him so well but, alas, that hadn’t happened. After weeks of text messages – flurries of affection and emotional chat which made the silence immediately afterwards ever more distressing – I’d decided it was time to stop, for my own sanity. I asked one last time if anything could work between us and, taking his silence as a pretty strong answer, I changed my phone number and set a filter on my email account that automatically forwarded any messages he sent me to the trash. Hell, after the first week or two I stopped checking three times a day in case there
had
been any automatically deleted messages. That was progress, right?
I was trying, slowly, to move on. But it hurt. And I felt stupid. So stupid. So for now I was happy to be on my own. If nothing else it meant as few people as possible got wind of my idiocy.
I knew now more than ever that my love of sexual submission was something that I definitely wanted as part of any relationship – only part, admittedly, but for me a lack of that basic compatibility was a deal-breaker. But having realised that, and then being let down by James so badly when he turned out to be a bit emotionally stunted, I’d decided that it was time to take a step back for a bit. Because while sexual compatibility was an important aspect of the kind of relationship I wanted, it was part of a bigger whole – I wanted someone caring, clever, funny, who put up with my obsession with TV (and the associated stacks of DVD box sets), loved their job enough that they didn’t get annoyed at how hard I worked at mine, and had similar ideas on life in the long term, i.e. one day getting married and having kids.
I know. I want the moon on a bloody stick. And the thing is, finding a bloke who ticked a lot of those boxes (not ALL of them, I’m not that unreasonable), was a dominant and who wanted a woman like me, well that’s the equivalent of winning the relationship lottery. And right now, after my disappointment with James, I didn’t even want to buy a ticket and then suffer the disappointment. Not least because I was hardly ankle deep in dominant sorts – if there was such a thing as kinky radar then I most definitely didn’t have it, and even with my
sexual proclivities I drew the line at randomly asking guys if they’d like to hurt me. Let’s face it, the sort of guys that would say yes were probably the kind you should be crossing the street to avoid anyway. I’d used online D/s sites before, to chat to folk and make friends, but I wasn’t ready to start the time-consuming and occasionally soul-destroying search for a date on them yet – even though one of my best friends, and ex-dom, Thomas had found his current squeeze by doing just that.