The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (3 page)

    One night a little while after our chastity party, Clark called me again, wanting to know when I was coming back to his house.

    “Things are kind of hectic right now,” I answered noncommittally, and walked the cordless phone into my back hallway. I visualized pitching it into the toilet, at the same time considering how to wrap up our conversation immediately.

    “Yeah, for me too. Plus I got dragged out to keep my friend company during her slow shift at the dungeon the other night,” Clark offered disjointedly.

    I wondered if she was a friend he’d previously deemed
ready
and had the graciousness to fool around with, and raised my middle finger to the phone in the bathroom mirror.

    “What do they do there?” I asked casually.

    “They do sessions, straight spankings and stuff, no sex. Don’t you know what a commercial dungeon is?” he asked.

    “I guess not,” I said, suddenly interested in what he was telling me.

    “Girls get paid to play with strangers. If they don’t have experience, they have to start out as submissives. It’s part of why most of the subs there aren’t any good to play with anymore — they’re all dommes in training, they’re not even into the sub sessions they do,” Clark snorted.

    I walked out to the front of my studio apartment and squatted down on the edge of my mattress. “What do these women look like?” I asked, squinting skeptically at what I was hearing.

    “All different kinds,” he said, “but mostly pretty average. Some of the dommes are pretty hot, but mostly they’re just normal-looking girls. Why?”

    “So you don’t have to look like a model to work there,” I mused, getting up to turn on my computer. “Do they have a Web site I could look at?”

    “Yeah, it’s www.dominionsm.com, but I’m telling you, you don’t want to work there,” Clark warned suddenly.

    “Why not?”

    “Because I’ve seen it ruin several perfectly good submissives. They get lots of clients ’cause they’re the real thing, and then all of a sudden they’re burnt out and won’t even play in their personal lives anymore!” he fumed.

    “I already have a job,” I said evasively, and decided not to point out that if he really thought I was so “perfectly good,” he shouldn’t have blue-balled me the day I went to his house. I thanked him for his advice and said good-bye.

    As I waited for my prehistoric desktop to go through its laborious connection process, I thought more seriously about the dungeon. I’d been half kidding myself when I asked Clark for the information on it.
Who,
I thought,
would hire a square-looking secretary to do any kind of sex-related work?
But his description made it sound different than I had at first imagined. If other women who didn’t look like movie stars made money at it, who’s to say I shouldn’t check it out?

    It seemed ideal, really. Instead of meeting someone from a personals ad or at some other gathering of faux vampires, fey Goths, or passive-aggressive suburbanites, I could meet a well-behaved pervert in a private, chaperoned, and safe place. I suspected that, by this point, I could enjoy being dominated by almost anyone who bathed and had a good attitude, especially since I wouldn’t have to be kissing or fucking him. It sounded almost too perfect, to think I would get to satisfy all my cravings without any pressure to decide or explain my further romantic interest in a person, or lack thereof.

    My jaw dropped as I scanned the Web site a few minutes later. Clark had been right. With the exception of a couple of the dominatrixes, all of the women pictured were, at best, averagely attractive. I’m no supermodel, but I was at least as cute as most of the women staring back at me from my computer screen. I felt the same rush of dazed excitement I’d had the first time I’d gambled in Reno, when I’d won a five-hundred-dollar jackpot on a slot machine that had just taken my last silver dollar. Within an hour of receiving my initial e-mail, the owner of the dungeon invited me in for an interview.
I have some experience as a submissive,
I’d written,
and I’m prompt and reliable.
Two weeks later I was seated in the plush, cherry-scented waiting room at the dungeon, waiting for my first client to arrive.

    

    

    
“HEY, HOW HEAVY
are you, Marnie?”

    Samantha had called out the question from the front desk. I’d been waiting awkwardly in the adjoining lounge area for about half an hour, not making any conversation with her or the other woman I was working with that first Saturday afternoon. Samantha was voluptuous and heavily made-up, and looked to be in her early thirties. Her fantastically large breasts pressed softly against the top seam of her latex bra. She wore matching latex shorts that showcased her textured thighs and broad hips. I wasn’t used to women with natural bodies revealing them outside of the locker room at the gym.

    I had developed an instant crush on her.

    Taylor was the physical opposite of Samantha — tall, not an ounce of fat on her, and, other than a little black eyeliner and some lipstick, her smooth pale skin appeared untouched by man-made improvements. She wore shiny red patent leather boots that flared out like a superhero’s when they got to the middle of her long, lean thighs. She must have had on some actual clothes as well, but all I remember from that first day is those amazing boots.

    “Um, I think I’m about a hundred and seven pounds right now; I’m not sure because I don’t have a scale at home,” I began to answer.

    “No, I mean how heavy of a
spanking
can you take?” Samantha laughed.

    “Oh! I think I can take a pretty heavy hand-spanking,” I said, feeling my face redden.

    “What time are you gonna come in, Bill?” I heard Samantha say. I looked at Taylor, sitting cross-legged in the opposite chair. She smiled back at me encouragingly.

    “Would you happen to know anything about the guy Samantha’s talking to? I’m a little nervous today and not sure what to expect,” I said.

    “Oh yeah, Bill. I’ve played with him before.” She paused. “I started as a sub but now I’m a switch,” she confided. “He’s just a very regular client who likes straight, over-the-knee hand spanking. He’s really good about respecting limits, but you have to remind him about giving a good warm-up. He spanks pretty hard.”

    “Marnie, I just got you your first session!” Samantha yelled.

    “Wow, that’s great!” I had actually started to feel a sense of panic well up in my chest, but I didn’t want Samantha or Taylor to know this. A man was coming to this place to see me, in order to cause me pain. Erotic pain theoretically, the kind I tended to fantasize about almost constantly, but my rational mind worried about the sound of it, regardless. “Is there anything I should know about him?” I called back.

    “Yeah, he’s a hard hand-spanker. But it’s not that bad — my ass always goes numb a few minutes into it,” Samantha assured me.

    
“Oo,
not mine!” Taylor said. “Mine just burns the whole time. But Samantha’s right, it’s not that bad. And he only sees girls for half an hour at a time.”

    “Well, is it gonna be tolerable or…?” I’d been craving a good spanking for so long now, but the way they were talking about Bill made me wonder if I wasn’t in over my head.

    “Look,” Samantha suddenly barked, “how do you expect to make it here if you can’t even handle a simple spanking?”

    “I
can
take a simple spanking!” I protested. “I just don’t know how to tell if your idea of heavy is the same as mine.” I wasn’t pleased with the insinuation that I might be a wimp.

    “Well, maybe we should show you,” Taylor said, and then looked at Samantha, shrugging. “Are you comfortable with that, Marnie? You know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do here…”

    Was she kidding me? Was I
comfortable
having one or two cute girls spank me just for the hell of it? I tried to contain my glee and pass myself off as coolly agreeable. “No, totally, that’s fine, I’m comfortable with it. If I know what to expect I’ll be able to know whether I can take it.”

    It sounded so pragmatic, I was sure neither of them could tell how turned-on I was. I don’t know if they would have been glad or put off by it; I just didn’t feel like risking any potential alienation on my first day.

    “Okay, come in here,” Samantha instructed. “I’ll show you what I think of as light, medium, and heavy swats, and you tell me what’s okay with you,” she said as she pulled me into one of her arms, bending me slightly at the waist so that my face was over her shoulder and my ass stuck out in front of her. “You ready?”

    Taylor joined us, standing behind Samantha so that she and I were nearly face to face. “Is this okay with you?” she stage-whispered.

    “Uh, yeah, this is definitely okay,” I said. “And yes, I’m ready.”

    “This is light,” Samantha informed me, and gave me a quick slap on the seat of the little sundress the owner had suggested I wear for my first shift. “This is medium,” she announced, and then spanked me slightly harder. “No, wait, this…” She spanked me again, harder this time. “…this is medium.”

    “Okay,” I agreed.

    “Now here’s how Bill spanks,” she warned, and delivered a satisfying amount of sting to the apple of my right cheek.

    “Can you do that again?” I asked, “I just want to make sure I understand.”

    “Sure,” she said, all business, and spanked me again. When she let me up, I started laughing.

    “No offense, but I can’t believe you guys had me worried over
that.”

    “Yeah, but with Bill it’s not like what I just did. It’s more like a machine gun, right, Taylor? No warm-up, no rhythmic pace with breaks and build-up, just
bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!”
she smacked her hands together hard several times.

    “That’s all right. If you’re sure you hit me as hard as he will, I’ll be fine. You said he’s a nice guy and everything…”

    “Yeah, he’s okay. He’ll even come in for a session if he knows one of us is in trouble with rent or something. He’s just kind of geeky, that’s all. He’s the sort of guy who wouldn’t mind if Taylor or I walked into your session. He’s like family around here. He just,” she thought for a moment, “he just thinks of himself as our disciplinarian. He really believes he’s
helping
you, straightening you out and stuff.”

    “Well, I don’t know how much straightening will result from it, but he’ll definitely be helping me if he shows up,” I said.

    I wasn’t thinking only of the physical release either. I just felt much better knowing that my very first professional session would be with someone who seemed to be thought of as a kind of house mascot. And even if hand-spankings were about the safest kind of SM activity a person could engage in, it was good to know that things weren’t likely to get out of control. One of my biggest worries had been that I might get hurt in the wrong way at this job.

    As if reading my mind, Taylor looked at me with real concern and said, “If anything ever starts to happen in a session that you’re not comfortable with, you can end it immediately if you want. We’re all here to back each other up.”

    “Thanks,” I said, nodding, although I had a hard time understanding how that would work. If all went well, there would be other sessions where I’d be alone in a room with a man, perhaps bound, but certainly at a physical disadvantage no matter what. “If that should ever happen, how would I, you know, ever get out if I needed to?”

    “There’s an intercom in every room if you need to call for help,” Samantha explained.

    I didn’t want to risk being called a coward now, after establishing that I was, at least, not a lightweight, but I still had to ask. “What if I’m, you know, tied up, or have a gag in my mouth?”

    They looked quickly at each other. Samantha shrugged. “It really boils down to the fact that if you ever get even a tiny bit of a weird vibe from someone, or if something in your gut tells you not to do the session, you shouldn’t do it.”

    Since these women were still strangers to me, I didn’t just take their word for it that Bill was harmless. I decided to use my pre-session interview with him to practice my vibe-getting skills.

    “Is there anything we should talk about before we start?” I asked Bill as we sat facing each other in the lounge. We’d been ushered there after his arrival and now the door was shut. Whether someone booked a session with a specific woman or came in and picked someone working the shift, the two of them were supposed to talk for no-less than a couple of minutes and no more than a few before starting their session.

    “I’m told you can take a pretty good spanking. Is it true?” Bill asked. He looked an awful lot like R. Crumb, minus the hat.

    “That’s right. And you’re mostly into hand-spanking?” I asked.

    He nodded. “I heard you came in late today, and I know Hillary wouldn’t want you making a habit of it.” Hillary was the blonde, buxom, semi-mother-figure who’d hired me. She owned and ran the dungeon, the actual name of which was “The Dominion,” after having worked there as a submissive and dominatrix herself for years.

    “You should know that she comes to me regularly with any disciplinary problems she has with staff.” Bill looked pleased with himself and was apparently trying to impress me with his sternness.

    I kept a straight face just barely. Did people really believe this shit or was it actually a campy joke on their part? I had some curiosity myself about certain kinds of role-playing that seemed exciting, but to be talking in normal conversation and then have someone act like he’s really taking me in hand and I’m really going to let him?

    I had no talent for pretending to believe myself in need of guidance or punishment. Well, truth be told, I had no talent for pretending much of anything. I’d failed Beginning Drama my freshman year of high school. Lucky for me, Bill’s own theatrics were enough to satisfy him. He got up and I followed him out to the front desk.