Switch - a full length bdsm erotic novel (15 page)

When I awoke the sun was too bright, shining through his thin curtains. I smelt cooking meat. For a moment, I thought it was me burning, set alight by the furious sun, a tool of an angry God removing the temptation of my flesh and withering me back to bone.

Then my brain normalised and I recognised the scent of bacon. I found Slave in his kitchen, busy cooking. He was wearing the clothes he’d met me in yesterday. When he saw me he dropped to his knees, almost knocking the handle of the frying pan and pouring hot oil over himself.

‘Sorry, mistress. I wasn’t sure what to do this morning. I thought about it a lot, whether I should stay in the lounge because you hadn’t given me permission to leave, but I thought that it was more important to think of your comfort first and prepare breakfast for you because I don’t think you ate anything last night. My own stomach is hurting and I’m feeling dizzy, and I realised you might be feeling the same.’ He looked as if he was going to raise his head to look at me, but instead he bent completely over so his forehead touched the lino. ‘I hope I didn’t do wrong. I’m fully aware that you told me to stay in the lounge until I’d managed to put my fist inside me. I didn’t do that. I managed to get four fingers inside me, I’m not sure how deep – I think the second knuckle. I know that isn’t what you told me to do, but I only stopped and came out here thinking of your comfort.’

‘Don’t start the morning by lying to me, slut.’ I glanced at the tray he’d prepared: a glass of orange juice; a cup presumably ready for the coffee he was brewing, and a mug with a tea bag. There was a small silver vase with a rose in it and a plate with a fresh croissant on it, a bowl of muesli and a small jug of milk. At the side was a selection of fruit that there wasn’t room on the tray for. The frying pan contained sausages as well as bacon; there was a carton of eggs out and a sliced brown loaf next to a stainless steel toaster that shone as if it was sitting on the shelf in Debenhams.

‘I think you’re being unfair, mistress. I’m not lying, I thought a long time about what you’d want me to do and decided that I should provide a breakfast for you as you’re my guest and my mistress.’

‘Don’t continue the morning by contradicting me.’ I picked up a banana off the side and passed it to him. ‘Show me how well your training is going. Put this up your arse.’

‘Now, mistress?’

I sighed. ‘Drive me home, slut.’

‘Sorry, mistress. Sorry. Please don’t punish me in this way. I didn’t mean to ask a question without permission. I’ll put the banana in now.’

For a few minutes I let him struggle around on the floor with his clothes and the fruit.

‘Drive me home. Now.’

‘The banana is quite soft. If you let me put it in the fridge it’ll get harder. I’m sure I’ll have more success.’

‘You have an order.’

‘I made muffins. They’re in the oven. There’ll be ready soon. I made blueberry and apricot and chocolate because I didn’t know which one you liked best.’ His voice was a mixture of pleading and stubbornness and resignation.

He was a child. I doubted he’d ask, but maybe what he really wanted was to be dressed in a nappy, given a bottle of milk, and tucked up safely in bed. Sometimes I did imagine him as a schoolboy and me as the dominating teacher caning his skinny little bottom.

‘Turn off the cooker and drive me home. It’s not a complicated order.’

He obeyed with reluctance; slumped shoulders, sly looks at me out of the corner of his eyes. I didn’t bother thinking of a different punishment. Losing me when we could have had the day together was surely enough.

We drove back in silence. A couple of times he opened his mouth, but he managed to restrain himself and not whine or protest like he had done on other occasions.

I’d formed a habit of ordering him to meet me and drop me in different parts of town. It gave me an aura of protection that he knew so little about me, and although he insisted otherwise, he liked the mystique, the puzzle, the fact that nothing would come easy to him, if it ever came at all.

On this day I got him to drop me off outside my lover’s house. I don’t know how that worked in reference to my aura of protection, I just knew at the time that was where I needed to be.

I dismissed Slave with silence and a wave of my hand as if I was brushing away a fly. When he’d driven out of sight I walked up the path of my master’s house and stood in front of the door. After somewhere between five minutes and an hour of waiting I sent my lover a text.

I am outside your house.

He replied almost instantly.

I know.

I brushed my fingers over the two words on the tiny screen and bit down on my lip. I texted back without thinking, my intentions forming with the black, blocky letters rather than thought out in my mind.

I am going to stay here for maybe an hour longer, then I’ll go home.

The reply was longer coming this time.

Good.

I swallowed hard. Was it good that I was here, or good that I’d said I was going home rather than becoming his very personal stalker?

I stared at the word as if it was the answer to all the uncertainties in the universe.

Quarter of an hour later, another text arrived.

I appreciate your cakes and letters.

I smiled and, for the first time since I arrived, noticed how sweetly the air was scented with flowers and cut grass and hope.

Chapter Ten - Boss

I sat in the office, important files, urgent paperwork piled up around me, the air filled with the soft tapping of memos and meeting plans being typed out. On my computer I had all the relevant files open for my work, but they were all in the background of my mind. I read through an email from Slave.

Dear Mistress Beatrice,

I cannot tell you enough times how happy and blessed I feel to be in your realm. I am constantly glorified by your presence. No one in my whole life has had the effect that you have on me. I know you’ve told me that I don’t know what love is –

Did anyone know what love was? Did anyone truly want to know what a rank, filthy, destructive thing love was?

– 
and that I should never contradict you, but if what I feel for you isn’t love, I have no idea what it is.

A desperate psychological need to fill the black hollow of childhood.

Probably best described by that “cover all darkness and pretend it’s pretty” word:
love
.

He kneels down in a public place; lies prostrate at my feet, the tip of my shoe on his neck, his face pressed into mud; squeezes his balls in response to a single word command; rolls naked in stinging nettles; likes to pretend that in a world of billions of people, I am special; all that should give him the right to use whichever four-letter word he wanted.

You have shone a light on my life and shown me how grey it was before you. I despair of all the time I wasted before I knew you, and that if we never met I would never have experienced all the great art and literature you have ordered me to study. I’m enjoying listening to Liz Phair a lot.

Liz Phair? Why had I ordered him to listen to Liz Phair? I barely knew who she was, or what her music sounded like.

The track
Flower
is particularly hard to hear, though. I’ve managed not to touch myself since you forbid me that until I get my fist up my bottom, but when I hear that song I get so hard and my body becomes sensitive. I never realised music could have that effect on you.

Flower
. I understood now. My lover and I had fucked hard and fast to that song once. Impulsive and immediate when it came on the stereo. A glass had broken – I’d dropped it, or he’d swept it off the table. I only remembered the purity of the sound as the glass shattered, the glittering, dancing light, like diamonds, and, later, the bright red flash of blood on the sole of my feet when I accidentally walked over it. My lover inside me, my body swallowing him. He exploded a second before the song finished. I had a breathless high that lasted for an eternity. But it was only two minutes. Two minutes when we understood and knew each other perfectly and the world was right in its wrongness.

I wonder how you know me so well that you tell me things I am going to adore when I have no knowledge of them. You are so wise and clever. I don’t know if you appreciate how amazing and unique you are. There really is no one else like you.

He had to say these things; he needed to believe I was extraordinary, that our relationship was once-in-a-lifetime special to justify his overwhelming desire to obey and be dominated. In his Christian, structured mind, dressing up in women’s underwear was more acceptable if it was for love rather than pure kink.

I tasted blood in my mouth. I was biting down on my lip. A thought was creeping into my mind that I could hardly bear to register: all the things I was applying to Slave, was that how it was with my lover?

I swallowed hard and focused entirely on Slave’s email.

I found a master like you instructed. I met him online and he invited me over that very night. He had such a posh flat, it was unbelievable. He was an older gentleman but as soon as he saw me he said I was too old for him; he preferred younger men. He said I could clean his toilet, which I did although it was already spotless. Then he came in to the bathroom and told me that although I was too old for him to fuck, I could give him a blowjob. I did this. It felt rather strange when he came in my mouth. I imagined you were there, laughing at me. Then the man told me to go home. I don’t think I’ll see him again.

your blessed slave

I reread this last passage several times, smiling. The detached, unemotional way he had of describing sex was almost enough to make me forget the traitorous thought I’d had about my relationship with my lover.

I’d told Slave that he had to tell me everything, give me all of himself, but still he wrote emails like this. Could it really be that the intimacy and boundary-breaking act of performing oral sex on another man was nothing more than “rather strange” to him?

My fingers hovered over the keyboard, but how to reply to him? Was I supposed to reward him for finding a man to meet so quickly after I gave him the order (I think I’d told him last Friday and today was Tuesday), or should I punish him because he had failed in his given task of finding a man to fuck him in the arse?

I thought about my relationship with Slave more than anything else. My relationship with my lover was beyond thinking; it was the beat of my heart, the electric message of every nerve, the movement of food through my bowels, blood and guts and mess, the ugly miracle of everything working underneath the human skin. My lover was all that was necessary for my life.

Slave was different. I gave him tasks I didn’t expect him to complete, but experienced a strange thrill if he did, and an inexplicable sense of disappointment, sometimes real anger, if he failed.

I viewed it in practical terms, a perfect symbiotic balance. I gave him the dominance he wanted; he gave me the distraction I needed. Simple. When it was over, I would go back to my master, tell him everything, show him I’d experienced other sex and was certain I still wanted him, then my life would be as it should again. After his time with me, Slave would be well trained in obedience and would find a mistress to love and cherish him. The two of us were helping each other to our separate happy endings.

A low voice interrupted my thoughts. ‘I can’t keep track of you.’

I turned my head just a fraction to look at Joe and gave him a half smile, waiting to see where this conversation would go.

‘I noticed you stopped working weekends. Now you’ve stopped working at work.’ He kept his voice quiet and leant over my desk, picking up the file on the top of my heap. To anyone else we looked as if we were having a normal conversation. ‘You flirt with me. We have mad, crazy sex. You more or less stop talking to me. You kiss me in the middle of the street. You act as if we’re just normal work colleagues.’

‘You’re wrong. I never stopped talking to you.’ I widened my smile.

‘You’re not like any other girl I’ve ever known.’

‘So everyone keeps telling me. Although I am far more woman than girl.’ A blatant lie. I belonged curled up in a foetal position on my lover’s lap, making myself as tiny as possible while he stroked comforting fingers through my hair.

‘You are all woman and so much more.’

‘And I’m sure you are all man, whatever that means.’ I gave him a wink. ‘So how are things with you? Did you have fun running up and down hills in the Lake District at the weekend?’

‘It was Yorkshire. But it doesn’t matter, I didn’t make it. On Friday I was experimenting with raw chillies. It was something that a friend advised me, how a chemical in the chillies can help with …’

‘Bored.’ I surprised myself by the rudeness of my voice cutting through his.

Joe smiled and shook his head at me. I saw something flash in his eyes that I recognised. With his sculptured masculine physique, was he just the same as slim little Slave, yearning to be a naughty boy being disciplined by a strong, confident woman?

I scratched one finger down the leg of his trousers, over his thigh and curving around to finish by pressing down on the sensitive place behind his knee. ‘Tell me what happened, then, just skip the boring part and go straight to the action.’

‘I managed to get raw chilli over my cock and it burnt so much I didn’t feel up to driving up to Yorkshire. Was that interesting enough for you?’

I laughed, loud enough that a few people looked around. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be a big, tough iron man? And you get taken out by a tiny little bit of fruit?’

‘You need to have chilli rubbed over your delicate parts before you have the right to tease me, see if you’re still laughing then.’ Joe’s whole face beamed with delight at the idea.

‘I don’t think I’d be laughing, but I suspect I might enjoy it.’ I looked at his whole body from his feet up to his eyes. ‘And the fact you didn’t like it is one of many reasons why us having sex was a one-off.’

He stared back at me, slightly defiant, obviously desirous. He parted his lips to speak, but I shook my head and waved him away. He backed away from me, making me feel like I was either a dangerous bitch or the most regal of queens.

I turned back to my computer and knew what I needed to write.

Slut, you’ve disappointed me yet again. You know you belong to me, but you break the trust between us and take stupid risks with your person. I warned you when you met the mistresses that you should meet in a safe place first. Why the fuck did you ignore me and go straight to a man’s flat after only the briefest meeting online?

Do not dare to reply to me with any of your pathetic whining excuses. You will buy the hottest bottle of chilli oil you can find, you will drink a capful of it and then pour another capful on to your hands and rub it over your genitals and anus.

Just as I pressed the “send” button, my boss appeared in front of me.

‘Could you come to my office.’ It wasn’t a question.

I clicked out of my email and followed Marcus’s long strides to his office. He opened the door for me in a manner that was more like herding me in than courteous. He closed the blinds and then went to sit behind his desk. I remained standing.

‘Do you enjoy your job?’ Marcus stared for a moment into my eyes, then his gaze travelled down and stopped at my breasts.

Such blatant behaviour was uncustomary for him, and unnerving for me. In all the time I’d worked for Marcus, he’d treated both men and women as genderless creatures who were only interesting to him in a strictly professional way.

‘Sometimes.’ I looked at Marcus in the same manner he was looking at me.

Other women in the office giggled about him being a silver fox. Probably he was. We are, after all, only what other people say we are, aren’t we? I was more interested in the power he had, sitting behind that desk, and the lecherous smile on his face that made him look like a different man to the one I thought I knew.

‘In these austere times you must be glad to have such a good position.’

His tongue lingered over the word “position”. Or maybe it was just my sexually charged mind transforming an employment word into images of sweaty, naked bodies twisting around each other at painful angles in an attempt to experience the whole
Kama Sutra
. Women and men constantly searching for the next thrill, something that bit more exciting, however much it hurt, whatever the cost.

‘What do you have to say?’

My attention jerked back to Marcus. My mind wandered too much lately. No. My thoughts were always the same. Sex. Pain. Sex. Pain. My lover.

‘You have nothing to say.’ He nodded slowly; judge, jury, prosecutor all in one body, but it hadn’t yet been stated what I was being accused of. ‘That seems unusual for you. Even today I’ve seen you talking away to Joe as if neither of you had any work to do.’

So that was what it was about. What it’s always about. Uncontrolled passion. Recklessness. The yearning to be alive. The eternal fight against our essential loneliness. Joe’s body pressed against mine, the hungry hardness of his cock, the welcoming moistness of my cunt.

How did Marcus know, though? And how much did he really know? Was he guessing? Marcus was an astute businessman – did his negotiation skills translate to a Jedi ability to know about office sex?

I gazed into Marcus’s eyes. He looked away. That surprised me. Shouldn’t I be the one to show shame? I hadn’t worked out what my role was supposed to be yet.

‘I’m sure you don’t have any problem with my performance.’ My words were stilted, an uncertain tone undercutting the attempted confidence of my words.

Marcus still didn’t look at me. He opened a drawer in his desk, pulled something out, and held it out for me to take. I forced myself to walk over to him and take it. It was only when the object was in my hand that my conscious brain acknowledged what my gut had known instantly; the knickers I’d lost that day in the office with Joe had been found. I’d forgotten about them. How had I forgotten about them?

I swallowed hard. ‘Why are you giving these to me?’

‘There’s nothing unusual about returning a lost item to their owner.’ There was something guilty and furtive about his manner, something that I couldn’t quite single out, but it seemed more than natural embarrassment.

‘These could be anyone’s.’ I intended to drop them back onto his desk, but the idea of my underwear being kept in his drawer made it impossible for me to let go of the flimsy piece of material.

‘Are you aware there are security cameras throughout this office?’

I tilted my head to the side. Was he bluffing? Were there cameras? I’d never noticed. I’d never looked. ‘I don’t believe anyone could have such a sad life that they’d need to fill the lonely hours up by watching people doing boring, mundane office work day in, day out.’

‘They are security cameras, for monitoring those times when mundane office work isn’t what is going on, my dear.’

Pain shot through the core of my body.
My dear
. Those words belonged on the tongue of my lover, not emerging from Marcus’s mouth. What had happened to my life? Everything so wrong and misplaced.

I still wasn’t certain what I needed to do, what I was expected to say. I was adrenaline-frozen in place, waiting for the trigger of whether to run or fight. Or cry. If I was going to be disciplined, shouldn’t there be another person present to verify what was said? Perhaps there was one of these mysterious security cameras in Marcus’s office? I couldn’t think clearly. I needed to talk to my union rep. I needed someone to speak for me, to transform the blurred fears of my mind into clean, official words typed up in formal files.