The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (4 page)

    “We’re going to go for half an hour,” he told Samantha.

    “Why don’t you take her into the Dean Martin room?” She marked down our starting time in the ledger. “Don’t forget, Bill,” she turned to look at him, “you need to give her a good warm-up. She hasn’t been spanked in a while so start easy, okay?”

    “I gotcha,” Bill answered, and walked me down the hall to the Dean Martin room.

    After closing the door behind us, he sat down immediately on the long bench that ran along one wall and patted his right knee. “Okay, come on, young lady. Let’s go.”

    I hadn’t known what to expect, but I really hadn’t envisioned such an abrupt beginning. As I moved toward Bill from where I’d stood semi-frozen near the door, he reached out and grasped my left arm, tugging me quickly across his knees, steadying me with his other hand around my waist. I felt a little silly initially, staring down at the shag carpet, wondering if the porn-shop smell was coming from the candles on the shelves or some kind of disinfectant in the adjoining bathroom.

    “So you were late today, huh, for your first day of work?” Bill asked.

    “Well, I was out kind of late last night and hadn’t expected it to feel so early this morning when my alarm went off…”

    I decided on the spur of the moment to play along out of curiosity.
How can something this contrived possibly turn people on?
I wondered,
or is it me? Am I a wet blanket? Don’t even the women’s magazines and beer commercials now insist that role-playing is the latest sexy thing? Could I possibly be the squarest person who ever worked in a dungeon?

    Bill lifted my dress, revealing my black thong. Hillary had told me that something “sweet and sort of innocent-looking” would work best for an outer garment, and that thigh-highs, garter belt, and a G-string would be what all the guys were looking for underneath. Bill seemed only to be looking for the best place to bring his hand down. As his right palm landed on the fleshiest part of my right cheek, I gasped in surprise at how little pain I felt.

    “Ouch,” I offered anyway.

    “That’s what happens to young ladies who show up late for their first day of work!” he said, and spanked me again. Promptly switching into the mode Taylor and Samantha had warned me about, he began laying fast-paced, fairly hard swats on me nonstop.

    I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. I don’t know if the corniness of his smug admonition did it, or if it was the sheer absurdity of someone paying to slap my ass like this. I couldn’t have stayed in character at that point if I’d wanted to. The fact that Bill let my laughing go unremarked endeared him to me a good deal.

    “So, you live around here?” he asked, mid-swat. He paused a second for my answer.

    “No, actually I live a little north of here. What about you?”

    “I live about a half hour from here, near Marina del Rey. I drive up a lot, trying to keep the girls in line for Hillary,” he explained.

    “Do you have any cats or dogs at your house?” I asked, for no particular reason, and made a mental note to chat Bill’s ear off if we ever did a session that actually hurt. Since his spanking method made it hard to hear anything over the repeated sound of his palm meeting my flesh, he was forced to stop anytime he wanted to catch what I was saying.

    “I have a cat,” he said.

    “I have two, and they’re both pretty crazy. Is yours nutty, too?” And that was pretty much it. In between the small talk with harmless, quirky Bill, he spanked me. We talked about whether I would go back to school, if he liked his job, what had made me apply at the dungeon, and our cats.

    Before too long, there was an abrupt sound of loud static and then a woman’s voice could be heard saying “Knock! knock!” This was the house code for “time’s up.” I wasn’t sure yet how the intercom actually worked. Did I have to get up and press a button, or could they hear me if I simply answered back? I stuttered an “Okay” in the direction the voice had come from and removed myself slowly from Bill’s lap.

    “Well, that was just great, young lady. You certainly have a lovely bottom for spanking.” Bill beamed at me.

    “Thank you, and thank you for such a fun first session.”

    I felt a little awkward, not yet knowing the right way to end these things. Was I supposed to curtsy and leave, or what, exactly? Fortunately, Bill took the lead by asking for permission to hug me and then gave me a clumsy embrace before opening the door.

    If Bill’s had been the only appointment booked that afternoon for me, I might have felt discouraged. But after he walked me out to the front desk, another man headed back with me to where I’d just been. Hillary, who had relieved Samantha at the desk, told me his name was Robert. He was around my age, stood about a foot taller than me, and looked pretty well built under his button-down shirt and loose-fitting slacks. His thin lips split over slightly bucked teeth when he smiled to introduce himself, and it was hard to tell if his eyes were sad or if he was just really tired. He was somehow cuter than the sum of his parts might have suggested, and it made me nervous as we passed through the small kitchen area and what I thought of as the tool shed (an open closet space where most of the equipment hung or was stacked).

    The Dean Martin was the smallest room for sessioning in the house. Pictures of Dean Martin and his friends decorated the walls, and, in general, the room was decked out to feel like some fancy Rat Packer’s den. The spanking horse in the far corner — a piece of furniture that people could straddle or sit on for prime corporal punishment positions — made it harder to picture Frank and Dean sitting around with their cigars and brandy snifters, but otherwise the room was pretty straight-looking. As Robert politely motioned me into the only comfortable chair in the room — an under-stuffed armchair covered in some metallic-green vinyl — I noticed for the first time the magazine and hairbrush that lay atop the small table next to me.
WHAP!
exclaimed the headline of the publication.
“Women who administer punishment,”
read the type underneath. I felt the familiar flush of excitement that such materials always caused me; it was like a tiny space heater had been turned on in my stomach.

    Robert sat across from me on the narrow bondage table, smiling as he folded his hands together in front of him, and I hoped my involuntary reaction to the magazine didn’t show on my face. Even in this environment, it still caused me some embarrassment. What was business as usual for everyone else was still like winning the sexual lottery for me, and I felt somehow unsophisticated because of it.

    “Hillary tells me you’re new,” Robert finally addressed me.

    “Yeah, I just got out of my first session.”

    “Did you enjoy it?” I noticed he had a way of holding my gaze with his own while he smiled and talked, without it seeming like one of those cheesy
look into my eyes
maneuvers. Already I hoped this interview would end with us deciding to have a session.

    “It was fun,” I nodded. “Just some spanking, pretty simple and easy.”

    “Great. Can I ask you, do you prefer sessions like that or are you into other things too?”

    “Well, I like a lot of stuff, actually. Over-the-knee spanking
is
one of my favorite things. But I like nipple-clamps too, some bondage, maybe flogging. I mostly just want to play with someone I’m comfortable being around, and try whatever they’re into. The only thing I don’t really do is humiliation.”

    “That’s good. I’m not into that either, and I can’t really relate to subs who are. It’s not my thing.” It was the best thing he could have said about it, from my point of view, and I hoped even more for a trip upstairs to another play-room with him. “Why don’t I tell you a little bit about my own style?” he asked.

    I nodded for him to go on.

    “I consider myself a sensual sadist, meaning I only want to cause erotic pain to an extent that feels really good to the person I’m doing it with. I’m not into hurting anyone in a real way. I just like to use lots of different sensations, including pleasurable pain, to heighten my partner’s experience. Does that sound like something you’d like?”

    Did it ever. I couldn’t believe I was about to head into my second session of the day. And he said he wanted to go for a full hour, which meant a whopping eighty dollars for me. I could buy a week’s worth of groceries and have money left over for the gas bill with this hour of so-called work.

    Robert held the door open and then followed me back up to the front desk. He told Hillary that he wanted to have an hour-long session with me, with the option to extend if we both wanted to. Hillary told us that one of the big, plush rooms upstairs, known as the Lair, was open. It had a thick shag carpet like the Dean Martin, and was decorated in pretty much leopard-print everything. It was the most comfortable of the four rooms. Across the hall from the Dean Martin downstairs was the “Vault,” where floors, walls, and furniture were all made of cold stainless steel, and next to the “Lair” upstairs was a room called the Rock, for reasons I still don’t understand. It was a large space with black rubber floors and black leather everything else, including a faux-black-leather toilet seat in the bathroom.

    Robert picked out some floggers, cuffs, and a candle, and got a few cubes of ice before leading me toward the front door, which opened out into a small, enclosed courtyard and to the stairs for the upper rooms. I wondered the same thing, walking up that staircase in front of Robert for the first time, that I would wonder every time I ascended with someone to the comfort and danger of the rooms above —
Does my ass look good moving this way?
I wanted every moment of every session to reinforce the new image I was forming of myself: sexy, glamorous, different from merely pretty girls. I wanted to come across like one of the va-va-voom broads from whatever decade it was where round hips were appreciated as the luxury they truly are.

    Up in the room, Robert had me sit on the leopard-print bench while he readied the space. He dimmed the lights and lit candles, then put on a CD of his own. Low, mellow-sounding techno music came through the speakers in each corner of the room. Robert grabbed a couple of maroon-colored towels from the adjoining private bathroom and spread one of them in the middle of the plush red carpet. He walked back over to me and, putting his hands on my upper arms, drew me up to face him.

    “Close your eyes,” he told me softly, and I did. “While you’re with me, you’re to address me as ‘Master.’ Is that understood?”

    “Yes, Master,” I answered, feeling once more swamped in hokeyness but trying to keep an open mind. I hoped this one affectation was merely a quirk and not representative of his general style.

    “That’s good,” he praised my response, stroking my shoulders. He paused to clasp my forearms with his warm hands. “I want you to kneel — I’ll help you down if you can’t do it alone with your eyes closed.”

    “Thank you, Master. That would be helpful.” I let him take my hands to guide me. Kneeling in front of him, I felt a hand cup each side of my head, softly stroking my hair in half circles. I prayed he wouldn’t let his thumbs fall forward to massage my temples. I hated it when anyone’s fingers got near my eyebrows. But there was no way he could know that, and his thumbs were about to rest on my painstakingly-secured arches when I jerked my head involuntarily away “I’m sorry, sir. I have a thing about having my face touched.”

    He pulled his hands out from my head abruptly “I’m sorry,” he began, but I interrupted him.

    “No, no, it’s okay. I just didn’t think to mention it beforehand. It’s not a big deal,” I assured him. I liked that he was sorry, though. I hadn’t wanted him to feel bad about it, but it was a good sign that it mattered to him to have done something I was uncomfortable with, even unintentionally.

    “Is it okay to touch your hair, or is that off-limits too?”

    “That’s okay, thank you. I like having my hair touched, actually. It relaxes me.” He went back to running his fingers over the surface of my hair, sometimes brushing it back a little from my face, but mostly just stroking the length of it the way my Aunt Sue used to do when I was little. I started to feel not exactly drowsy, but not entirely alert either.

    After what seemed like a couple of minutes, he walked away. I could hear him doing things, but with my eyes still closed I couldn’t make out what he was up to. It occurred to me how nice it was not to be worried about it. After the first time I’d met my former dominant partner, T, in person, all pauses and preparations were cause for anxiety, and justifiably so, most of the time.

    “I’d like you to get up now. You may open your eyes,” he told me.

    I did, and he offered a hand to help me up off the floor. Standing, I was about a head shorter than he. I watched his chest rise and fall as his fingers went to the straps of my dress and pushed them off my shoulders. Using the lowered straps as handles, he pulled the top part of my dress down to my waist, where it rested snugly over my hips. He reached around as if to hug me, found the clasp of my bra with his hands, and let my padded, pushup C cups fall to the floor between us.

    “Beautiful,” he murmured, taking my now-erect nipples between each thumb and forefinger. He squeezed them gently for a moment, then used the backs of his knuckles and the rest of his hands to caress the sides of my breasts.

    
“Mm,”
I said, when his fingertips moved to the curves underneath, back to the swelling on the sides, and up again to my nipples, this time pinching them harder. He let his hands drop to my waist, feeling my width there as if measuring, then slid his hands into the part of my dress that was still on. Gently he worked the material down over my hips, past my thighs, and held the dress for me to step out of when he reached my ankles. I stood in my shoes, thigh-high stockings, and a G-string, feeling somehow fully dressed. With the lowered lights and his compliments, I felt like my semi-nakedness was an outfit of its own that I’d put on.