The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (2 page)

    
Could it really be this easy, after all this time?
When I handed Clark the piece of paper with my number on it, he took it with one hand and grasped my wrist softly with the other, circling the width with his thumb and middle fingers.

    “You’re pretty tiny,” he nodded, “but I definitely have something that’ll fit you.”

    I felt my face getting warm, but let my hand stay in his, until he dropped it gently and smiled his goodbye.

    

    

    On the drive over to Clark’s place a few days later, I felt distracted by thoughts of the upcoming meeting. It had taken exactly one phone conversation for me to decide to meet him at his house for the kind of kinky sex I’d been craving ever since things had gone south with T. As my little car chugged and wheezed along the freeway, I wondered what it would be like to feel Clark’s large hands around my waist instead of my wrist. Or maybe he’d start by holding my wrists above my head, pushing me face-first up against a wall, and using his other hand to spread my legs? Would he order me calmly to bend over some piece of furniture, like T had the first time we’d met, telling me softly to lift the skirt of my dress so he could look at me, touch me, remove my panties himself?

    A large sign registered in my peripheral vision and I realized with a start that I’d come close to missing the exit. Once I’d gotten off, I took an instantly critical stance of Clark’s hometown. It seemed to be one charmless duplex or apartment building after another, with desperately unattractive little stores and sprawling gas stations filling in the few gaps. One of Clark’s explanations for choosing it had been the low price of his condo, and the built-in privacy it offered for his “private dungeon.” By my estimations, he could also have saved whatever money he’d spent on equipment and just considered the drive over torture enough for whomever he played with.

    I pulled up in front of his place and leaned into the car’s air conditioning vents, hoping to chill my skin before subjecting it to the sweatiness of the air outside. It was hot that day, even back in civilization, so I knew it’d be a scorcher between my car and Clark’s front door. I flipped down the visor to take a look in the mirror. I was glad to see that all the time I’d spent on emphasizing my best features that morning hadn’t gone to waste — my eyes still looked wide and green, my lips a little plumper than their actual size, and my skin was nearly flawless with the light coat of foundation and powder. I imagined that my shaved, moisturized legs looked creamy white instead of ghostly pale under the short black dress I’d washed and dried the night before, and I felt pretty confident when I rang Clark’s doorbell.

    As the door swung open, I was treated to a smell not unlike the one I used to encounter when I’d worked at an animal hospital. Stepping into his front room, I realized that, rather than having done even the slightest bit of tidying up, Clark must surely have hired someone to come over and make a mess. I’m not saying that people need to do every last dish and straighten every magazine on the coffee table before I arrive. I do, however, think it’s normal new-sex-partner behavior to try and make your living quarters look like a place a person might want to sit or lie down in, and to rid it of any assertive smells that aren’t of the pleasant variety. Still, I remained stubbornly optimistic. Maybe the dungeon itself was where he’d concentrated all his cleaning skills.

    I took a deep breath and forced myself to exhale slowly, realizing suddenly that I was more nervous about what he might think of me once I was naked than what I thought of his messy front room. I looked to Clark for some sign of how this type of thing was supposed to proceed.

    “You want to go upstairs?” he asked. He had dressed casually in a dark blue polo shirt and faded jeans and seemed completely relaxed.

    
Thank God,
I thought. “Sure.” I forced a smile out of the nearly frozen muscles on my face.

    As he led me to the dungeon at the top of the stairs, I felt my fantasies disintegrate at the sight of it, this secret chamber that had been the subject of my daydreams over the last few days. It had been soundproofed, and the windows covered to protect the neighbors from freaky tableaux, but, rather than a dungeon, it felt to me like a closet. Someone’s big walk-in closet that had been cleared out except for some miscellaneous dusty stuff that nobody wanted and that the closet owner had been too lazy to take with him. I tried to think kinky sex but instead kept coming up with images of vacuum cleaners and Hefty bags.

    I walked over to a rack on one wall that held several whip-like objects and some leather cuffs of varying sizes. I was hoping to disguise the disappointment I felt with a noticeable interest in his equipment.

    “Want to see what some of them feel like?” His voice was casual and low behind me.

    I turned to face him. “Sure,” I said again, feeling hopeful and self-conscious at the same time. I let him steer me to the opposite side of the room, where some kind of homemade, padded bondage rack had been placed up against the wall. He pulled gently on my hips, positioning me in a slightly bent-over shape.

    “Okay, we’re gonna start with a warm-up.” Clark began flogging me lightly with a multistranded whip I hadn’t seen or heard him pick up.

    His strokes came within a few seconds of each other, and I heard more than felt them; over the thick cotton of my short dress, the leather strands might as well have been landing on someone else’s ass for how much impact they were having on me.

    Clark stopped for a moment and stepped up behind me.

    “Is this okay?” he asked softly, lifting up my dress and tucking the back of it into the waistband of my underwear. I nodded twice and felt myself start to breathe heavier — his nearness and the warmth of his fingers as they grazed my skin were a bit more like what I’d had in mind.

    Still, I continued to have to strain to feel any of the strokes as Clark went through a buggy whip, riding crop, and a couple of small paddles. I wondered why he was going so easy — he knew I had some experience. Was I supposed to ask him to do it harder? Or would that be impolite? I didn’t know. With T, I’d generally been out of breath and halfway to needing a break five minutes into any of our encounters. I was trying to conjure the right way to phrase a question when I felt Clark’s hands in the waistband of my panties again, this time taking my dress back down and smoothing it over my ass.

    “That’ll do for now,” he informed me cheerfully, and patted me gently on the shoulder, ushering me casually back out the dungeon door. He suggested I make myself comfortable in the guest bedroom directly across the hall while he went to make a quick phone call.

    “Sorry, it’s my brother’s birthday today and I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss him, with the time difference in Minnesota,” he explained about ten minutes later. “How you feeling?” he asked, smiling brightly at me.

    “I’m okay,” I lied. I noticed that something in Clark’s manner suggested that this had not been just a temporary break in the activities. I sat up straighter and tried to keep my voice steady as increasing frustration took hold. “Did I say something, or has something happened that I’m not aware of, ’cause I kind of thought…” I looked at him for a clue to what was going on.

    “You know what, kiddo, I don’t think we’re going to do this today. I sense that you’re not ready.” He sounded like a coach informing an injured player of the sad news that he’d be on the bench for the rest of the season.

    “But, uh…” I struggled to make sense of what I was hearing. “I thought that’s what you invited me over here for?” I was sure at first that this was some misunderstanding.
He thinks I’m not ready, I know I am, surely we can clear this up.

    “I like to feel a connection to the subs I play with. Has it occurred to you that maybe I’d like to feel more between us than just sex? That maybe I’d feel used if we messed around before that connection was established?” He thumped his chest with an open hand.

    For half a second, it almost made sense, what he was saying. And then I wondered,
hadn’t he known when he invited me that we weren’t connected yet? And if a connection was absolutely necessary, wouldn’t it have made more sense to attempt to establish it outside of such a sexually charged place as his personal dungeon?

    I sat motionless on his bed then, staring at the textured white wall directly across from me. I wasn’t sure what he expected of me now, or what I felt like doing anymore. Leaving in a huff seemed too revealing — hard to argue that there is enough of a connection if you’re prepared to bail just because someone won’t put out when you want him to. Staying seemed the opposite of anything desirable; the only tolerable activity that I could think of right then was the obliteration of consciousness brought about by nasty sexual acts. I couldn’t fathom what I should do next.

    “So, what is it you want from me then, if that’s not why you talked me into coming over here?” I finally blurted out.

    We had gone through a whole ritual of his supplying references, discussing the things I absolutely didn’t want to do, and me telling a trusted friend where I was going and when I’d be back. We could have had a more dangerous time meeting up at the local Starbucks, for my money.

    Clark chuckled. “Why don’t you lie back on the bed and I’ll show you?”

    I perked up a little at that — maybe this was just some kind of mind game, a test, and he’d be launching into the more enjoyable stuff if I passed? Feeling tentatively hopeful, I eased my way into a flat position on the bed and stared at the cottage-cheese ceiling while Clark picked up one of my hands and then the other, lightly stroking each finger. It did feel kind of nice. It didn’t turn me on at all, but it was relaxing, like part of a professional massage or something.

    “Okay, now it’s your turn,” his perky voice interrupted my semi-nap and I opened my eyes halfway.

    “Hmm?”

    “Now you do me. Here, I’ll teach you.”

    I sat up, stone-faced, and let him show me what he wanted me to do.
I guess this could be considered some kind of sadistic foreplay if I were a glass-is-half-full type of person,
I thought, more perplexed than ever. As Clark stretched out on the bed, I began to do to his fingers what he’d been doing to mine a few moments before. A couple of minutes into the literal hand job, Clark fell fast asleep.

    Dropping his hand in stunned silence, I lay down again, getting as many inches away from him as I could while still being on the same bed. His throaty snores felt like little sonic slaps to my face. I couldn’t seem to help but take it personally.

    I mulled it over, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
Let’s see… he invited me here to have kinky sex… I showed up groomed, dressed nicely, and in a willing and eager mood… he showed me his homemade dungeon… and now he’s asleep instead of perversioning me.
It seemed like some vital piece of information was missing, but I couldn’t locate it no matter how many times I ran over the afternoon’s events in my mind.

    I sat up again, accepting at last that he simply wasn’t going to go back to flogging me or doing anything else I’d fantasized about. I gritted my teeth against the sound of his sleepy cuddling noises when he stirred next to me.

    “How you doing, sweet thing?”

    I bristled at the endearment and mumbled that I was fine, excusing myself to use the bathroom.

    It seems like whenever I’m angry outside of my own home, I find myself locked alone in a bathroom. I think my penchant for sitting on a closed toilet lid and hashing over the shortcomings of others developed in my childhood, when the bathroom was the only room in the house where I could be alone and unquestioned. There was something that soothed me about returning there, even in a strange place. Behind the locked door, seated eye level with the sink, I could let my face fall into the rich scowl I’d been holding back with great effort for the last half hour.

    “Hey, you hungry for pizza?” Clark called from the bedroom next door.

    “Yeah, that sounds great,” I yelled back. I was actually famished by that point. I hadn’t eaten a big lunch because I hadn’t wanted to have a bloated stomach the first time he saw me naked. Yeah, I was fucking hungry for pizza. I ran my hands under the faucet just to make some kind of bathroom noise and then stepped back into the hall. Clark was leaning against the frame in the doorway to the guest room, waiting.

    “You want to drive down there with me or stay here and nap?”

    “You know what? I am still kind of tired. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just lie down for a little while until you get back.”

    As soon as I heard Clark’s garage door close I surprised myself by starting to cry. As I lay back down on the guest bed, warm tears tickling my hairline, I worried that this fiasco was a sign that I just wasn’t going to get to have good kinky sex ever again. I could not for the life of me understand why, but there was no mistaking that it didn’t seem to be working out for me. I thought briefly of leaving while Clark was at the pizza place, but the prospect felt somehow even more humiliating than what had already gone down. Or not gone down, to be exact. Why should I have to scurry off like some criminal on the run?
He
was the one who’d been an asshole, not me.

    When Clark returned home with two greasy circles of cheese and meat, I had a couple of slices before saying a fake-friendly goodbye. He said he’d call me, and I bit back the urge to spit
why?

    In the weeks following, I tried to go with the idea suggested by a friend, that possibly the universe was simply sparing me from getting involved with someone who wasn’t right for me. Maybe everything happens for a reason and for the best, ultimately, and so there was nothing to be upset about. But something about that theory struck me as fishy. I knew so many people who were having sex with partners who weren’t right for them. I was the last person who would have invited the powers that be to intervene and save me from the same fate.
Who asked YOU to help?
I felt like yelling at the sky.