The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (23 page)

    “So.” W touched Al and me lightly as she moved from one of us to the other and back again. “What shall we do with Marnie today, Al?”

    He shrugged and grinned, true to W’s description of a man who had no clue. She took him by the hand anyway and pulled him close to me, then placed his same hand on my breast. Al gave a tentative squeeze, and then brought his other hand up to my body.

    “She has soft skin, Mistress,” he murmured to W.

    “Mm, yes, she does.”

    As Al caressed my front and W caressed his back, I hoped my downward gaze made me look thoughtfully submissive rather than like a person with a staring problem. I could not take my eyes off of Al’s huge — even at half-mast — cock. The thought of what it must feel like to have something that size inside of me was even more distracting than the mere sight of it.

    I tended to associate the right kind of pain during sex with increased pleasure, not because of the whole S/M thing, but because of how I had lost my virginity. What had happened was this: after settling on a good candidate when I was twenty, I drank three wine coolers in preparation, stretched out on his bed, and could not for the life of me take him in. It literally felt like he was pushing on something that didn’t have an opening, no matter how much lubrication and finger action he used ahead of time. Finally, after a solid two weeks of repeated attempts, I suggested we try it with me on top. Ignore my
ows,
I told him, and don’t stop unless I say
stop.
It never technically quit hurting even once he was inside, but it felt so good, too, that it was all I wanted to do for the next six months straight. From that perspective, looking at Al’s potential made me feel like I thought a rock climber would looking at Mt. Everest.

    “Why don’t we tie Marnie to the table?” W suggested, interrupting my not-quite nostalgic reverie.

    “Sounds great!” He put a hand on my arm to lead me there.

    “May I take my boots off so I can climb up more easily?” I asked, sure that I would otherwise fall off the stool W had brought over to help me up.

    “Yes, you may, and then just get in whatever position is most comfortable for you.”

    After I stretched out flat on my back, W put cuffs on my wrists, while Al put them on my ankles, and then W used short pieces of rope to tie each cuff to the eyehooks on the sides of the table. She worked slowly, and I tried to help kill time by making suggestions, like adjusting one of the cuffs on my feet.

    “Now — what shall we do with helpless, beautiful Marnie?” W put a finger up to her mouth thoughtfully.

    The gesture made me laugh, and then W and Al laughed too. “How about you, Marnie? Why don’t we make it your job to come up with something?” W teased.

    “Um, okay. Can I ask what my choices are?”

    “Let’s say whatever you want — those are the choices.” W ran her hand lightly over my stomach.

    I tried to look thoughtful for the next minute or so, even though my head kept repeating the same thing over and over —
sex with Al sex with Al sex with Al.
I was afraid to say it out loud because I didn’t think it was an option. The world of independent kinksters might not be as rigid as the Dominion, but there’s a big difference between not caring whether I got naked and touched myself versus being okay with flat-out prostitution.
Plus, I thought, wouldn’t Al himself have gone to see a regular escort if regular sex was what he was after?

    “You look confused,” W prompted. Her voice was kind and patient.

    “I feel like the one thing that’s coming to mind is — I don’t know — inappropriate or something,” I finally blurted.

    “Well,
now
you definitely have to tell us,” she laughed. Al waited expectantly by the foot of the bondage bed. “It’s not like—” I began, but W cut me off.

    “No disclaimers. In a perfect world where you could do whatever you wanted right now, what would it be?”

    I looked at Al’s cute face and avoided dropping my gaze to below his waist. I turned my eyes back to W and sighed nervously.

    “I’m just curious what it would feel like to have someone as big as Al inside me,” I said in a rush.

    “Great!” W answered immediately, her tone no different than if I had just suggested a game of Parcheesi. “Hop on up, Al, and I’ll get the condoms.”

    As the still-silent Al climbed onto the table and positioned himself between my legs, W returned with a couple of Trojans and a tube of K-Y. I wondered how he really felt about it. I know it’s not easy for guys to turn down sex, even if they really want to. I’m not saying I could think of any reason why he wouldn’t want to do it with me, just that I didn’t like the idea of how quickly he was in a position where he might have felt pressured into it. As he hovered over me and tore open one of the condoms, I caught his eye.

    “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”

    “Are you kidding?” Al chuckled.

    As I lay there, looking at W while she watched us, I felt like I could not have loved two people more even after knowing them for years, never mind the short time it had actually been. Al felt even better than I would have imagined, and there was something about having W there — sometimes standing back and sometimes stroking Al’s smooth back or my hair — that made me feel even more penetrated by her than by him.

    “You’re like Mr. Rourke,” I said to her dreamily, thinking of the eighties television show
Fantasy Island,
“only much, much cuter, no hard feelings to Ricardo Montalban.”

    W threw back her head and laughed, and I realized how dopey I probably sounded. I didn’t ask about my own orgasm in this session, partly because I was still worn out from the previous three and partly because I don’t really need or even like to come during intercourse. For me, orgasms and the friction of fucking are two distinct and equally enjoyable pleasures. I know it’s not that way for a lot of women, but to me it’s like loving two different foods. I never get tired of the taste of bacon or Haagen Daaz chocolate ice cream, but I don’t miss one when I’m having the other.

    And Al was great at fucking. Not to give less-endowed guys a complex, because if I were hot for someone they could have an acorn down there for all I care, but for someone who
did
have a cock, he was skilled at using it. He lasted the perfect amount of time, around ten minutes I guessed, and he teased me mercilessly by going slow and almost stopping for the first several minutes, then moving fast and hard inside me until he finished with a loud moan and collapsed on top of me. Fortunately he was considerate enough to lift himself back onto his elbows after only a couple of seconds, allowing my lungs to inflate fully again.

    “That was fantastic!” W sounded proud of all three of us.

    Al pulled his clothes on while W untied me, but I stayed where I was, totally spent even though I hadn’t actually moved a muscle.

    Al came to kiss me on the cheek before heading to the front door with W.

    “Hope to see you again,” he said.

    I hoped so, too, although I felt like I would need to tell him that I wasn’t really an escort and couldn’t guarantee I’d want to fuck again. We would have to see how it went. I didn’t want to automatically feel like that was my job, now.
But you did just have sex with someone who gave you money, so what makes you “not an escort?”
I wondered if the fact that I had initiated it instead of negotiated for it made any difference. One of the first things I said to people when I told them what I did for a living was
I don’t have actual sex with the clients or anything,
and it always seemed to set people at ease after the initial shock. Most everyone in my life already knew what I did, and I doubted any of them would want me to issue an addendum on the subject. But what about any new friends I made, or if at some point, I did end up wanting to date again? I didn’t want to lie, either.

    
But why should I have to,
I suddenly wondered? I didn’t even agree with the stigma attached to prostitutes, whether they walked the streets or worked for Heidi Fleiss. I didn’t particularly like the conditions that led to and surrounded prostitution on a large scale, but I knew the people who made a living that way weren’t a different species of human. Why was it so important to differentiate myself from them in the first place?

    I was watchful for any sign that having sex in a session had fundamentally changed me in some way. I didn’t want to wake up in some kind of shame spiral, finding out too late that I had violated an unexpected psychological or emotional boundary I hadn’t been aware of before. In fact, it never happened. I didn’t know whether this meant that what I did with Al couldn’t be so easily catalogued, or whether I was perhaps already as messed up as I was ever going to get, and maybe that carried a weird sort of untouchability of its own. All I knew for sure at the end of that trip was that New York was still magic for me.

    

    

    
“HI, MARNIE. LISTEN,
it’s Steve. I wanted to ask you out on a date for Saturday while you’re here; a professional date. There’s a party that I’d like to pay you to attend with me. Call me when you get in.”

    The voice mail had beeped on my phone as soon as I landed at JFK, for my third working visit. I’d met Steve on the last trip. He had called to ask me to join him and his regular mistress for a session in which they would both dominate me. He said he was normally submissive, and he sounded nice. W had vouched for his mistress, C, so I figured I would be in good hands even if it was Steve’s first time switching.

    It turned out that I was in great hands. C had been dreamy — sexy as hell, throaty voice I could listen to all day, and a perfect mixture of reassuring kindness and good-humored cruelty. Steve, however, had been another matter altogether.

    “He’s a really great guy. He just gets a little excited sometimes,” C told me as we changed together before the session. “He has his special leather pants and everything, and wants to be addressed as Master Steve today,” she rolled her eyes. but it was obvious that she found Steve cute above and beyond his slight goofiness.

    Cute turned into cause for ending things early when Steve’s enthusiasm propelled him to reach back and grab C awkwardly by her hips, as she entered him from behind with a strap-on. A little more than halfway into our session, Steve had asked to be penetrated. But where C had expected the sweet submissive she knew and liked, Steve had instead given her a virtual mechanical bull ride, bucking so hard he lifted her off the ground. It seemed like the indignity of it was made even worse for C by the fact that I was there to witness it. I tried to reassure her that none of his oafishness had rubbed off on her in my eyes, but she was furious with him. He sent me an e-mail a few days later, begging me to explain what he’d done wrong, and how he could get back into C’s good graces. The poor bastard truly hadn’t understood why she’d refused to speak to him after the session. I had never met anyone before who was both that earnest and that much of a buffoon at the same time, and it had made me like Steve more than a little. We had not spoken since he’d written to thank me for helping straighten things out with C. I returned his call from the cab on the way to my hotel.

    “So what kind of party are we talking about?”

    “A swingers’ party.”

    I cleared my throat. “What… would we do at a… swingers’ party?”

    I’d never been to one, and it sounded like a possible adventure. At the same time, I didn’t know whether he meant to imply that he would be swinging me around or what.

    
“You
don’t have to do anything; I just need someone to go with me — single men can’t get in alone.”

    “So you plan to do whatever it is you want to do, and I’m just there to get you in the door? We’re not talking about me, you know, having sex or anything?”

    “Right.”

    “What time Saturday night?”

    “Uh, it depends on when I can sneak out of my house. The party’s starting pretty late. I’ll probably pick you up around eleven-thirty or so.”

    “You’ve gotta sneak out? So that means there’s a chance this might not happen at all, then?” I had grave doubts about Steve’s ability to commit an act of stealth with any success whatsoever.

    “It’ll happen,” Steve said, and, to his credit, he didn’t even sound defensive. “I just have to wait for my wife to fall asleep. I’ll tell you what, though. I’ll bring you an hour’s worth of your fee for a deposit. That way if anything goes wrong, you’ll at least not have wasted your time waiting around, and you can keep the money no matter what.”

    It sounded rather ideal by that point. I’d make some kind of money regardless, and if I actually worked that night it would be the easiest job I’d ever had, watching people mess around with each other.

    I agreed to meet Steve the next day at a coffee shop next door to W’s place after a session. When I first saw his tall frame, brown hair, and babyish face, I smiled and raised my hand. He looked away as if he hadn’t recognized me. The whole front of the coffee place was open like a sidewalk cafe, with a few tables in a row between the street and where I sat just inside. As I watched, puzzled, Steve began to walk back and forth in front of the row of tables with his back stiff and his eyes straight ahead. He looked like one of those fake ducks that moves from one side of a shooting gallery to the other. Suddenly he turned sideways and scooted through two tables to make his way over to me. Plopping down next to me, he took a wad of cash from his pants pocket and jabbed it in my direction. He would not put it directly in my hand.

    “What — am I supposed to let you set it down before I pick it up?”

    I said it gently, but felt like I was getting ready to smack him. Not in a mean way — more like you would cuff a vending machine that was malfunctioning. Abruptly, he shoved the folded bills into my front jeans pocket without saying a word. I gave him a polite smile and waited.