The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (5 page)

    “I’d like you to lie down on the towel there, on your back, face up,” Robert spoke softly.

    “Yes, Master,” I said, and let myself down onto the towel. “Close your eyes,” Robert said, and I heard his shoes scuffing the carpet away from me again.

    A moment later he was back and I heard a match being struck against its box. I jerked involuntarily, and hoped he hadn’t seen; burning is one kind of pain that I’m not interested in. I knew he wasn’t going to burn me — the match was for a candle I could already smell since he’d lit it — but not being able to see gave me an irrational sense of personal flammability.

    “I’m scared right now,” I blurted out. “I’m kind of afraid of fire.”

    “I didn’t know that,” he said without judgement. “Would you rather not do this part?”

    “No, it’s okay. I like candle wax. I just felt afraid for a second. Thanks for being nice about it,” I said, calm again.

    “You’re welcome,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

    I was aware of the effect my openness had on men, especially perverts — they generally found it endearing and thought I was cute. I very much wanted Robert, and any other good clients, to find me so. More than the validation of it, I was still preoccupied with how bizarre and exciting it was to know that money was virtually piling up outside the door for every minute I spent enjoying myself.

    “You ready?” Robert asked me quietly.

    “Yes, Master,” I answered. Through my closed lids I could make out a brightness that hovered above my midsection. As it moved toward my face, I grabbed my thumbs in clenched fists and held my breath. As the first drop of liquid warmth landed close to, but not exactly on, my right nipple, I made a small noise of surprise. My hands opened flat and I laughed softly when it registered that the wax hadn’t hurt at all, had in fact felt more like a kiss than anything.

    Robert was holding the candle almost as high as his own chin, standing above me, so that the wax had time enough to cool on the way down.

    “You liked that?” he teased me, and I nodded, still smiling.

    I waited for the next drop to fall, and cried out when a tiny stream of ice water fell onto my left breast instead. I hadn’t realized he’d been holding and melting an ice cube in his other hand.

    “Oh my God, that’s so cold,” I said, shivering.

    An instant later three more drops of wax, this time carrying a tiny sting of heat, splashed onto the same area where the water had fallen. He lowered the candle further and spilled another small puddle onto my stomach, taking away the chill completely. “Thank you,” I said, “that feels nice.”

    “My pleasure,” Robert said, and poured the melted-ice water onto the triangle of my G-string.

    I gasped, then laughed, and heard Robert laugh quietly as well. I willed my body to remain still as the different sensations began raining down on my skin more rapidly. Warm on my upper thigh, icy on the delicate skin covering the tops of my feet, hot and cold simultaneously between my legs, this time lower than where the first droplets had fallen. I didn’t realize how loudly I was breathing until I heard a muffled noise and realized it was Robert talking to me.

    “I’m sorry, Master, I didn’t hear you,” I said.

    “I was just murmuring in pleasure over the way your skin turns a lovely shade of pink with just the slightest stimulation. It makes me curious to see what color it would turn if you were across my lap, receiving a different kind of stimulation,” he told me.

    “Hm,” I said, feeling shy and a little embarrassed, as I always did, about how excited the idea of it made me.

    I have spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out what’s up with this spanking fetish I have — where it comes from, what about it exactly is such a turn-on, why I identify being spanked as a good feeling instead of a neutral or unpleasant one. I really have no idea. The only clear thing to me is that the thought of it can create a feeling inside me as if all the blood in my body is suddenly being drained from every extremity and redirected straight to my sexual center.

    “KNOCK! KNOCK!” Hillary boomed over the intercom. Robert snapped his head toward the wall where the screech came from, and yelled back.

    “EXTEND!”

    He looked back at me, post-declaration, and raised an eyebrow to confirm my agreement.

    I smiled up at him, still barely believing that this was happening to me. It was a heady feeling to be with someone who had more authority with the boss than it seemed other clients did. I knew Hillary would have buzzed back to confirm with me if this hadn’t been the case.

    Robert helped me up and gently dried me off where the ice water had left me damp. His hand, covered in the towel, pressed into my wet G-string several times, blotting as much of the water as possible from the darkened material.

    “Your hand is warm,” I said into his shoulder as I leaned against him for support.

    “Let’s see what else of yours it can warm up.”

    I let Robert take my hand and lead me to the leopard-skin bench that was pushed up against one of the walls. It was long enough that I could get across his lap, which I did promptly, resting my arms on it in front of me with the length of my legs and feet resting on the other side of him. It was a comfortable way to spend an extended period of time. I rested my head in the space between my arms as Robert started to slap my cheeks softly to warm me up.

    Soon, Robert began to increase the tempo and intensity of his spanking. He had a great technique. He knew exactly the right spot where the sensations of a thud and a sting came together to produce a satisfying jolt between my legs. Somewhere in the middle of the fleshiest part of each cheek was an area that felt internally connected to both my G-spot and my clitoris. I couldn’t tell you the mechanics of any of it; I’m just saying that a genuinely good spanking, even a hard one, never registers as real pain for me.

    When my partner knows what he or she is doing, it causes a sensation unlike either pleasure or pain, yet somehow indivisible from each.

    I could not tell how much time was passing, but after a long stretch where the only sounds were Robert’s hands landing on me and my satisfied moans, he began slowing the pace, alternating between rubbing and spanking me. After a little while, I felt his hand falling harder and harder on my skin, instead of the backing off and the rubbing that had been going on a minute before. I began to squirm, thinking I might be reaching some sort of threshold, and I felt his other hand tighten around my waist to hold me still. This sent shock waves of even greater excitement through my body, making the burning in my cheeks momentarily more tolerable.

    
“Please,”
I begged finally, unable to recall my safe word in that moment, but not really wanting to use it anyway.

    I didn’t want him to stop entirely, which he would have done if I’d given the safe-word signal, but I didn’t think I could take an indefinite amount of this kind of intensity either. Reflexively, I tried to rotate my hips on his lap, and again he gripped me tighter, preventing me from moving at all this time. Increasing the pace and sting just a fraction more, he held me against his body for another full minute. This time, his clasp caused something new to happen. Something akin to pleasure began to radiate outwards from the pit of my stomach up into my chest and down into the throbbing between my legs. I gasped into the cool leather of the bench beneath me, begging him one last time, but not for anything I could put my finger on.

    He stopped, finally, and I stayed immobilized across his knees even when he no longer had such a firm hold of me. Both of his hands went to my ass, sometimes rubbing with his palms, sometimes running his fingertips over especially tender areas. I stifled the fuck-drunk urge to blurt out that I loved him.

    
“Jesus!”
I finally breathed, as Robert helped me up to stand unsteadily in front of him.

    “That was great,” he said, and began rubbing my bare shoulders. “Would you like to lie down for a minute?”

    “Yes, thank you,” I said. He joined me, fully clothed, on the towels still laid out beneath us. He inched closer to me, until we were shoulder to shoulder staring at the ceiling like it was a star-filled sky.

    “You don’t have to tell me, but I’m curious where you got the name Marnie.”

    “Are you sure you want to know? It might freak you out…” I hesitated.

    “Now I definitely want to hear it. And I’m not that easy to freak out, for the record.”

    “Okay. I’m not comfortable with the whole fake name thing in the first place, and I definitely didn’t feel like choosing something cute or forced — sexy or whatever.”

    “I can understand that, after knowing you a couple of hours now,” Robert said, turning his head a little.

    “Right,” I paused. “So the only thing that came to mind for me was a fake name that someone else had used a long time ago. Marnie K. Reeves was the alias that Patricia Krenwinkel used when she got arrested for the Manson murders.” I took a breath. “Plus, I don’t know, something about that girl that always made me a little sad. I mean, it was horrible what they did. But she got called ugly a lot during the trial, and it seemed unnecessarily mean. It’s not like her looks were what killed those people.”

    “That’s true,” Robert nodded, and I was relieved that anything I’d said had made sense to him.

    “I guess she stuck in my head because I knew what it was like to get called ugly a lot at that age.” I shrugged.

    “Now that I don’t believe.” He shook his head.

    “Hold it.” I put up my hand to shush him; I hadn’t been trying to play the I’m-ugly-game, fishing for compliments. “Let’s just say it was before I
blossomed.”

    He laughed, and then turned to me, rising up on one elbow. “Don’t take this the wrong way…” he began, and I braced myself.

    “There’s something about you that’s different. You don’t have that hard look that a lot of women have in this business.”

    “Well, it
is
my first day,” I joked, relaxing. “Give me a minute.”

    “That’s what I mean,” he chuckled. “You’re sort of more of a real person, in some ways. I don’t know…”

    Naturally, I liked the idea that I was special, but I cringed at the pro-sub-with-a-heart-of-gold cliché. I felt like there was probably a reason a lot of women were guarded and hard in this or any sex-related business. I wasn’t sure that it was smart to put value on any praise that set me apart from them. I had a murky sense of how it made me vulnerable, not better, no matter what a client might say.

    Robert helped me clean the equipment we’d used. We blew out the candles together. As we walked back down to the front desk where he could settle up and I could get signed out, I thought about what an amazing day it had been. Two acceptable men, all that money, and more sexual release than I had felt in years in just a few hours’ time. I didn’t know if I could stand to wait a whole week before I came back.

    

    

    
THESE ARE SLAVE’S
wages,
I grumbled to myself without irony.

    It was my first Monday back at my job after my afternoon at the Dominion.
Fifteen bucks an hour to wear sweat-inducing polyester pantsuits and stand watch over a cold, metal desk that reeks of inactivity.
It was only eight-thirty in the morning, and already I felt like a caged animal. A
guilty
caged animal. I had an absurdly easy job, and it was an almost obscene lack of gratitude that I now felt for it. I worked for a funny, nice man who didn’t even need a secretary, but had wanted one just to keep up appearances. He was a vice president at a nonprofit that provided a variety of services for the blind. I was required to answer about four phone calls on a busy day, and type a letter about once a week. Up to this point, it had been the cushiest, best-paying job I’d ever had.

    But it was also true after that first Saturday shift that I could make a lot more doing a lot less. I could not undo what I now knew about kinky sex work; could not make myself return to my previous state of contentment. Wrong or right, I would never again view my desk job as anything other than the wrong kind of pain in my ass. I had to find a way to work as a professional submissive full time. The world did not need one more cranky secretary, of that I was certain.

    I spent that Monday calculating and re-calculating how many hours of sessions I’d need a week to cover my monthly budget. It seemed to me that I might be able to make the transition to full time at the dungeon pretty quickly, but, to be sure, I quizzed Hillary the next Saturday before we opened.

    “Generally, Marnie, it takes about six months for girls to build up enough regulars to make a pretty steady living at this,” she told me.

    Six
months?
I didn’t feel like I could last another six
days
at the office. “Wow. Isn’t there anything I could do to speed up the process a little?”

    “Well, you could certainly get more sessions if you were here more often, but it’s still a matter of the clients getting to know you, people finding out that you’re available. It takes a little time to get established, that’s all.” The phone rang and she reached for the receiver.

    “Dominion, how may I help you?” After listening for a moment, Hillary responded by naming everyone on shift at the time, noting who was submissive, who was dominant, and who switched, doing both. After another minute, she thanked the caller and hung up.

    “That’s a guy who’s coming in for a sub right there. See, you’re already on your way!”

    As on the previous Saturday, I was the only submissive on shift when I got there, and I liked it that way. I went to the Dean Martin to change into one of my new dresses.