The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (25 page)

    “You tell us what’s okay, yes?”

    She stepped away as Steve came over with a gloved hand and a small bottle of lubricant. I nodded my head and waited. Steve slipped first one and then two lubed fingers inside me. I gasped and shut my eyes. It was all so sudden. One minute we’re making conversation in a clanky old elevator, the next minute I’m letting someone’s hand all up in my business in front of a small crowd of strangers. I turned to look for Barbie in an attempt to focus on something besides self-consciousness, and saw her taking a small paddle out of Steve’s bag.

    “We warm you up first, eh?” Barbie let out a short groan as she knelt beside me.

    First they wanted me to come, now they wanted me to submit to some actual S/M stuff, too? It was more “work” than I’d been expecting, but not unreasonable, really. And I had a gut feeling that Barbie would be good to me while I subbed to her. Steve was still massaging my insides when she moved behind me and directed him out of the way. As soon as he removed his fingers, she brought the small leather paddle to my ass, rubbing it in slow circles on each of my cheeks. The tickle of her gentle caresses with the paddle made me laugh.

    “Funny, eh? Is supposed to be punishment.”

    She feigned sternness, more for the benefit of the few people who stood around watching than for me. She started spanking me with the paddle, and I hid my face in the warm leather of the spanking bench in the hopes that I would appear to be taking this more seriously than I actually was. I don’t generally like to fake a scene. I don’t like the implication that it’s not authentic kink unless someone’s actually being hurt, and hence you better make it look that way if that’s not what’s really happening. But as Barbie continued to spank me a little harder, I couldn’t help but make noises to seem like it was really
punishment.
I thought it was what she wanted, and I wanted desperately by that point to give her something she wanted.

    When the paddling stopped, I turned to see Barbie pulling a leather harness out of Steve’s bag. As she pulled it on, I noticed that there was not an imperfect ripple or bulge anywhere on her body. Her tanned skin was smooth and tight over every curve, and even her heavy stomach looked like something out of a Vargas painting.

    As I turned back around to wait for her, a penis appeared several inches in front of my face. A warm hand took one of mine and placed it gently on the semi-erection.
What is the etiquette at a place like this?
The penis in my hand wasn’t a bad-looking one, but I wasn’t sure I liked the feeling of being some stranger’s drive-up teller at the hand-job bank. Just then, Barbie began rubbing something blunt and smooth between my legs.

    “I’m sorry, I need this back now,” I apologized to the man’s waist, and removed my hand. I figured I would need to be able to brace myself.

    “This is okay?” Barbie leaned forward and whispered in my ear. “It’s great,” I whispered back.

    Grunting quietly, Barbie entered me in one smooth, quick motion, with a nice-sized dildo she had covered in cold K-Y. I moaned, and she held my hips, beginning to thrust in and out, and on the fourth or fifth plunge, she flipped some switch that made the dildo begin to vibrate inside me.

    “Oh my
God,”
I breathed into the cool leather beneath my face, and began pushing back into her every time she shoved forward.

    Almost as abruptly as she’d entered me, Barbie pulled out and went to lean against the bondage table.

    “Sorry. I get tired so fast now,” she told me, trying to catch her breath.

    “That’s okay,” I said, and meant it. Much as I’d loved having her inside me, there was no way I could come in that position anyway. There was no point in working the poor girl to death.

    “Why don’t we have her sit back on one of the couches?” Steve said to Barbie, and helped me off the spanking horse.

    Barbie took a towel from Steve’s bag and draped it over the worn brown cushions of the nearest sofa. A naked woman was wrapped around the lap of a naked man at the far end of the couch, and they both turned to watch us. I slipped the first two fingers of my right hand into my mouth and then pressed them between my open legs. Barbie sat down next to me and took one of my nipples into her mouth. I leaned my head back and shut my eyes as she and I both worked away on my body. As I tried to concentrate, I could feel the urgency of the pulse beneath my fingers receding, and I tried to coax it back with thoughts of Barbie’s hand and paddle.
What if it takes me too long? What if Barbie gets tired, or Steve gets bored? Would he want me to fake an orgasm, to at least put on a show?
I had never faked an orgasm in my life, and had no desire to start doing so. Did that make me a bad worker?

    I knew I was going to need some help.

    “Barbie, do you think — would you mind — there’s this one thing that helps me finish quickly, but I don’t want you to do it if you’re uncomfortable.”

    “Wonderful. Tell me.” Her drowsy eyes lit up and she leaned in toward me.

    “I just need you to massage my, um, G-spot while I touch myself. It’s hard for me to reach it with my own hand.”

    “Okay.” She stood up to grab some gloves and the Tube. Steve stretched out on the floor at her feet, staring intently “I never done this before. Where is this gee spot?” Her lips tickled my ear.

    “You just bend your fingers like this” — I took my free hand and curved the index and middle fingers together in a C-shape — “and then rub them on the inside wall that’s closest to you.”

    Barbie began feeling around inside me, searching my face expectantly for signs that she was in the right place.

    “Up a little more, please… yeah… like that, right — mm, right there exactly.”

    “Mmm, yesss,” Barbie echoed me with her own excitement.

    This time when I closed my eyes I was able to shut out everything except that feeling bringing me closer and closer to release. I forgot about the people at the other end of the couch, about Steve, about whatever I might or might not look like as I sat next to this gorgeous woman and tensed every muscle in my body before letting go. I held my breath as I felt it starting. I don’t really make any sound on the way up. but when it hits, my body jerks forward and then slams hard against whatever piece of furniture I’m sitting or lying on. As Mistress Barbarella rubbed my insides with delicate precision and I rubbed my outsides with a final furious roughness, I kept my eyes shut and began convulsing on the couch. It felt like it went on for half an hour. I kept thinking I was done and then my body hit another peak, like waves crashing too close together inside me. Finally we both sat back, breathing heavily, our respective wrists lying limply at our sides. I looked down and saw that Steve had come as well. After a couple of minutes, Barbie got up to hand him some paper towels.

    “We get cleaned up. You rest there until you ready, we wait for you.” Barbie came up to me and took my face in her hands. She kissed each of my cheeks, and then put her mouth close to my ear again. “Thank you. Now I have new skill.” She seemed genuinely pleased with herself and with me.

    As Steve and Barbie disappeared down the hall, I waited for the strength to come back to my limbs.

    

    

    Pulling up to my hotel a short while later, Steve reached a hand back toward me and when I grasped it, he pulled me forward so his lips could reach my palm. When he let me go, I clapped him warmly on the shoulder before turning to let myself out.

    “Good call, bringing Barbarella along!”

    He grinned at me. Barbie turned around to face me one last time.

    “I know we just met and it’s kind of rushing into things,” I told her, “but I already love you. You don’t need to say anything back,” I held up a hand, “I’m just saying I love you. If you want to say you’ll marry me of your own accord, that’s your business.”

    Barbie looked pleased. “You know, you much cooler than I thought you would be. Steve told me you a nice girl, but you nothing like what I expected.”

    I was still smiling when I got up to my room a few minutes later. I spoke to the ceiling before closing my eyes and slipping into a short but energizing sleep.

    
Way to go with keeping him out of those meetings. I mean seriously. Amen.

    

    

    
“I’M SORRY, MARNIE,
but I have to cancel our appointment for Wednesday. There’s a big meeting at work that day and I can’t get out of it.”

    It was the fourth such call in three days, and it finally dawned on me.
It’s the first week of April. It’s tax time.

    I don’t know what I’d been thinking when I’d booked this trip for New York. I guess I had been on such a roll on the east coast that it never occurred to me to think about the bigger picture. I’d booked five sessions before even leaving Los Angeles, and had expected to fill up the rest of my time easily after arriving. That’s how it always worked. Now I had only one appointment remaining. My cell phone had not beeped with anything but cancellations and apologies since I’d gotten here.

    I had two more full days and nights left. And I was getting grouchier by the minute from being cooped up in my hotel room with nothing to do. I realized it was really the first truly free time I’d had in the city since I started coming. I was usually so busy with sessions that I saw only the inside of my hotel, the various session rooms, and whatever was visible from cab windows. My final appointment was scheduled for the next evening, so catching an earlier flight back to L.A. wasn’t going to work.
Fuck it,
I thought.
I’m going to go and be one more tourist in Times Square tonight.

    As I set out from my hotel, I remembered that New York was actually having what amounted to a heat wave for that time of year. I’d been inside with the air conditioning for so many hours straight, I hadn’t even thought about the weather in days. By the time I got to where I was going, I felt overdressed in my tank top and jeans. I also felt unexpectedly cheered up. What might have annoyed me in the summer time — overcrowded sidewalks full of warm, damp bodies bumping up against my bare arms — provided me instead with a contact high.

    I scanned the faces of everyone I passed. The crowds were mixed in a way I never saw much of in most parts of L.A. Dark skin, lighter skin, all kinds of skin, and all of it slightly shiny like mine, from the effort of moving at a steady clip in the humidity that had come with the warmth of that week. There was a sensual beauty to every face I saw that night, and when too-young men and old guys alike smiled at me or murmured joking come-ons as I passed, I couldn’t help but smile back at each of them as I kept moving. I had no destination in mind. Maybe I’d just walk around until I was tired enough to go back to the hotel. Or maybe — Wait
a minute, is that…?

    “Todd Bridges?” I finished the thought out loud.

    The man I thought was Todd was walking past me on the sidewalk. There were people in between us, though, and I was surprised when his head turned. I hadn’t thought there was any chance that he’d hear me. He looked warily in my direction:
another fan, smile politely, don’t slow down.
I understood. After his childhood years on the sitcom
Diff’rent Strokes
and then his very public struggles with drugs and the law in the early 1990s, he probably got recognized a lot on the street. I raised a hand and smiled politely back. I wasn’t sure that he would remember me, anyway.

    “Oh my GOD!” he yelled, and broke away from the man he’d been walking with. He zigzagged his way through the people between us, and lifted me off my feet in a hug when he reached me.

    “Oh my God!” he said again, “Joan, baby, I can’t believe it! What are you doing here?!” His friend, a cute Italian-looking guy about my height, came over to us and smiled in bewilderment. “Dude, this is my
buddy,
I haven’t seen her in
years,
I can’t
believe
it! We were in rehab together in Los Angeles! Oh my
God!”
he exclaimed again, and picked me up a second time.

    “Okay, okay,” I said, laughing, as he let me back down to the sidewalk.

    I was not only relieved that he remembered me, but gratified by his enthusiastic welcome. Suddenly it felt like a vacation instead of a failed business trip.

    “So what are you doing here, how’ve you been, do you live here now, what’s goin’
on?”
Todd spoke rapidly and then put a hand on his friend’s shoulder before I could answer. “This is my friend Mike. Mike, this is Joan. We met in rehab in L.A.!” And then he gave me an exaggerated once-over, walking a complete circle around me.
“Damn,
you look
good,
girl.”

    “Thanks,” I said. “I guess the last time you saw me, I looked pretty different.” We both laughed, and his friend raised an eyebrow.

    “This girl used to be as bald as me!” Todd rubbed a hand over his shaved skull.

    “No way, really?” Mike seemed to find the news impressive.

    “I’d always wanted to see what it felt like, and since I wasn’t working at the time or trying to date anybody, it seemed like the only chance I might ever get,” I explained.

    Not only had I shaved my head in rehab, but I’d put on a fast thirty pounds as well, only a few of which I technically needed. I took to wearing oversized T-shirts and a pair of my dad’s sweat-pants, and got mistaken in the hospital elevator one day for a thirteen-year-old boy. It was no wonder Todd was still looking at me with a certain amount of shock. I had long brown hair now, real makeup on my face, and a pushup bra underneath my clingy white tank top. He, however, looked just as cute as I’d remembered him.

    “Listen, it was nice to meet you, but I told Jeanie I’d be home by ten.” Mike reached out to shake my hand and turned back to Todd.