The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (12 page)

    “I know I told you I couldn’t see you for a little while after tonight. God, I don’t want to hurt you—”

    “It’s okay… what?”

    I thought he meant to reassure me that it wasn’t anything personal, the fact that he wouldn’t be able to afford to see me for a little while. I was just about to say that I didn’t care, that we didn’t have to see each other at the dungeon anymore, that I wanted to take things slow but that I didn’t want to have to wait to be in his hands again until he had more money in them, when he blurted out his own declaration of love.

    “I adore my wife, she’s the most understanding, loving, supportive person in the world; she’s my whole life. We’ve been on vacation here this week, and she has no idea that I’m into this stuff. I’m sorry, Joan. I couldn’t have imagined having these feelings for anyone but my wife, before I met you. It’s so confusing. But I can’t leave her. We’re going back home to Canada tomorrow.”

    I didn’t have to fake a thoughtful silence, as it turned out. I could not for the life of me think of what to say. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d realized that someone as cute and decent as he was would have been able to get married by his age if he’d ever wanted to. And I certainly knew that many men came to places like the Dominion
because
they were married, not in spite of it. They were with women they loved, but like me, had needs they hadn’t been able to fulfill any place else. Still, I’d certainly hoped. I’d hoped that the way Phil looked at me meant something as sweet and open as it felt, not something that would make another woman cry if she found out about it.

    “I thought you might be. Married, I mean. I guess I didn’t ask earlier because it would’ve killed it for me,” I finally managed to say quietly.

    “I understand,” he nodded, lowering his eyes. “I don’t blame you. I don’t like me very much for it either.”

    “No, I mean it would’ve had that effect early on, but now it’s kind of too late. In every way, I guess,” I said, and laughed dryly.

    I already felt how I felt. And it didn’t matter. He was leaving tomorrow, married or not.
I am not going to start crying in Bob’s Big Boy.

    As we waited for the check, I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t a bad thing — that objectively speaking, it was, in fact, wonderful that I’d been able to feel this way at all. And that, in all likelihood, we had nothing in common outside of the dungeon anyway, which might have been a more disheartening discovery than his marriage and Canadian citizenship, if we’d had the chance to date.
We barely know each other. I’m not in love with him. Nothing is different about my life than it was before I met him a few days ago, and I wasn’t crying then.

    I checked the rearview mirror three times after I pulled into the street, watching him turn north, back toward the hotel where his wife was waiting. It was only when I saw my face in the bathroom mirror a few minutes later that the knot in my stomach untied itself, shaking loose in great heaving sobs.

    

    

    
“I KNOW YOU
know this, but I have to say it anyway. You should never have met him outside of here alone.”

    
I shouldn’t have met him, period,
I thought to myself.
The whole thing’s ruined for me now.

    “It’s a safety thing, Marnie,” Hillary continued. “I’m not mad at you about it.”

    No one else had come in yet for the afternoon shift, so we had the reception area to ourselves.

    “It’s not that,” I shook my head miserably.

    I’d e-mailed her about Phil a couple of days earlier in a semi-panic. I’d thought I was a pretty resilient person, but I had only felt worse since the last night I’d seen Phil. My note had been more of a plea for help than a confession.
How do I get it to go back to the way it was before, when I hadn’t known what I was missing?

    Hillary sighed loudly, but spoke gently. “You just — you can’t really let your heart get too involved here.”

    “I know, and I don’t normally feel like this with clients, even when it’s really fun. I don’t know what happened.”

    Hillary was quiet for a few seconds. “You’re gonna feel that way about other people, Marnie.” She sounded like she was just realizing what my problem was. “You know that, right?”

    I looked at the desk between us and shrugged. I’d been searching on and off for so long. How could something this random and unusual happen again any time soon?

    Hillary laughed softly. “You have to believe me. I did this for
years.
He’s just the first client you’ve felt this way about. He’s not the last, and he’s not
the one,
okay?”

    I said nothing, just listened.

    “The trick is to be able to keep a hold of yourself even when it’s great,” she went on. “Hell, especially when it’s great. You don’t know it now, but, in a way, you’re lucky that guy left. Otherwise, you might’ve ended up seeing him for free.”

    Hillary’s warning surprised me. How could she have known that I’d been about to tell Phil I’d happily be his nonprofessional submissive right before he’d dropped the Canadian husband bomb? What if he hadn’t dropped it? Did I have to forfeit a personal life if I wanted to keep doing this professionally?

    “If two people end up liking each other in a serious way, are they never supposed to see each other without money being involved?”

    “Marnie, Marnie, Marnie,” she sighed. “Yes. Sometimes people who meet in session do end up falling for each other, and it becomes a more personal relationship. Between you and me, that’s how I met my own master.”

    Hillary had told me that she was still submissive in her personal life, back when I’d interviewed for the job, but I was surprised to hear that she’d met her current boyfriend through work so long ago.

    “But he had seen me for
years
in session. He was more protective about my taking his money than I was. You gotta understand — lots of guys out there aren’t the same way. They see you getting attached, they’ll use it to their advantage. This is our
livelihood.
You wouldn’t ask him to stop accepting his paycheck just because he likes
you,
would you?”

    I thought about what she said. I had definitely worried at times that it meant something insincere or sleazy about me that I liked making money this way. Hillary made it sound like a matter of self-care, not greed.

    “Vanessa will watch out for you today, won’t you?” she called out, as Vanessa came through the front door with her session clothes in one hand and cup of coffee in the other.

    “What’s the matter, Marnie, dear?” She sounded half asleep.

    “Nothing, I’m fine.” I waved a hand at her. “Thanks for talking to me, Hillary. I feel better.”

    “Good.” Hillary pushed her stool back from the table. “I gotta get going, I just came by to do the books.”

    And I did feel better, really. Hillary had made me feel like my fresh heartache over Phil was almost an ancient tradition, like a kinky rookie’s rite of passage into a more grounded, and exciting, relationship with this job. It sparked visions of a future self, happily absorbed in a pleasurable web of safely-defined connections with clients, and the growing bank account to go with it.

    When the phone rang a short while later, Vanessa’s heels clicked loudly through the back hall and kitchen as she ran up to answer it.

    “A man’s coming in to spank you in half an hour,” she told me cheerfully after hanging up.

    
Good,
I thought.
And no matter how much fun he is, I’m going to keep a hold of myself, just like Hillary said.

    “It’s not you, I’m sorry sir, I just… I’m sad about something else right now, I’m sorry.”

    I had started weeping quietly about twenty minutes into our half-hour session. The British client named Tom looked worried. He’d been using a leather paddle on me, not hard at all, as we had acted out his fantasy of stern-professor-punishes-tardy-college-student.

    “No, no, it’s not a problem for me,” he said. “I’m just concerned about
you.”

    I tried to think of how to explain it without going into detail. Before I’d met Phil, this would have been a dream session for me. We were doing stuff I liked to do; it was easy on my body because he wasn’t into causing real pain; and the man himself had that cute, freckly, English type of face that collapsed into pure sweetness when he smiled — which he’d done during our interview when I’d told him that it would be my first real role-playing session. I didn’t count the few minutes of pretending that I’d done with Bill on my first day.

    “Why don’t you have a seat, then, and we’ll talk for a minute.”

    He motioned to the leopard-print bench, the same one I’d been on with Phil a couple of nights before.
It just doesn’t feel right to be in here with someone else.

    “I like you, and I think this is really fun,” I wept. It was finally too ridiculous for me then, and I started to laugh. I caught the nervous look on his face and shook my head. “Sorry, this is just kind of weird for me.”

    “Not at all,” he patted my shoulder. “It’s okay with me if you want to continue, and it’s okay with me if you don’t.”

    I wanted to tell him the truth — that I wished he could just come back another day. I knew this ache I was feeling would pass. I knew now that it was simply something Phil had made me more aware of — my craving to feel controlled and cared about at the same time — not something that was specific to Phil, and Phil alone. But I was afraid to tell Tom any of it. I worried he would think I was desperate to find a replacement for Phil and that I might glom onto him like a drowning person. Never mind that his fantasy hadn’t included playing the role of a therapist.

    Suddenly our time was up, saving me from both an explanation and a decision. Still, I felt horrible, like I had ripped him off somehow, cheated him of those last few minutes of fantasy fulfillment that might have put a spring in his step for the rest of the week, for all I knew. Since the money he’d plunked down wasn’t all mine, I didn’t feel like I had the authority to offer part of it back to him. With his polite British murmuring and handshaking on the way out, it was hard for me to tell whether he was disappointed or merely perplexed. Worried now that I was bad for business, I tried to talk to Vanessa about it. When I couldn’t get a word out before breaking down, she jumped up from her chair at the desk and grabbed my shoulders.

    “What happened, Marnie?
Samantha, stop that man!”
she yelled into the television room.

    I heard the pages of a magazine flapping together as Samantha, who must have come in while I was upstairs, darted out from the television room to find out what was going on.

    “No, no!” I said quickly, “it’s not him, he was great.”
That’s all he needs. First his session devolves into a nervous breakdown scenario — not a common fetish — and then he gets jumped by two angry dommes on his way out.

    “What’s the matter, then?” Vanessa looked concerned.

    It all came spilling out of me: what had happened with Phil; how I’d thought it would take my mind off him to come in and work today; how playing with Tom had only made it unexpectedly worse. What chance did I have of succeeding in this business if I couldn’t master the most basic principle of sex work — faking it? Vanessa and Samantha listened with worried faces until I finished, and then erupted in a flurry of attempted solutions.

    “Come sit down over here,” Vanessa commanded briskly, and pulled me to one of the softer chairs in the lobby. “We’ll get you something to drink.”

    She dashed into the other room and came back with a small cotton blanket. As she bundled me up, Samantha came striding toward me with a hot cup of black coffee from the kitchen.

    “Oh, thank you,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t drink coffee.”

    “That’s okay, honey!” Samantha said quickly, as if she feared it might set me off again. She put the cup down on the front desk and came back to hover near Vanessa, who was still fussing slightly with the blanket.

    “There!” Vanessa said uncertainly, as if she hoped, but didn’t quite believe, that it would hold me together.

    I half entertained the idea of pretending I wasn’t warm enough, just to get her to spend another couple of minutes smoothing soft fabric around my shoulders and tucking corners underneath me. I’d never seen two people act so tenderly in the middle of such social discomfort, and the unexpected sweetness of it got me choked up all over again. I’d had no idea how badly I wanted people just to be nice to me. The realization of it — first with Phil, and then Samantha and Vanessa — tore me open in ways that felt simultaneously wonderful and excruciating.

    “Oh God, she’s inconsolable!” Vanessa yelped. She turned to Samantha, eyes wide and pleading.
“Help her!”

    I started to try and reassure them that what I was feeling wasn’t exactly bad, but before I could get a word out, Samantha grabbed my head and pulled my face into her substantial bosom.

    “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she purred awkwardly, holding my head with one hand and stroking the back of my hair with the other. Although I couldn’t stand the feel of anything touching my face, even anything as beautiful as Samantha’s chest, it would have felt selfish, somehow, to pull myself away. They were trying so hard to make me feel better, these two leather-clad women whose primary business was clamps, paddles, and humiliation scenes. My urge to comfort them for their failure to comfort me calmed me down, and, after another minute of quietly inhaling Samantha’s cleavage, I was released and allowed to sit back in my chair without further molestation.

    “Why don’t you just go home for the day, sweetheart? I’ll let Hillary know. And,” Vanessa walked quickly into the kitchen to check the schedule, “another sub is coming on shift in half an hour. We’ll be fine.”