The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (6 page)

    I’d gone to a local shop on Melrose called Retail Slut after work one night. I’d been sure that I felt the judgmental eyes of the two young salesgirls, sizing me up as clearly more
retail
than believable
slut.
No thanks to their skeptical expressions, I’d still decided on a couple of dresses that could have passed for nudity if I’d had leopard-print skin, and then picked up my first adult lipstick from the MAC store in the Beverly Center. The last lipstick I’d owned had been some frosty pink business that I was sure would get me laid my senior year in high school, and that I had promptly tossed in the garbage when graduation day had come and gone, my virginity still intact.

    After I was finished changing, I went back up front to stash my purse and clothes in the employee closet. Hillary was gone and a lanky, short-haired brunette was in her place behind the front desk. Taylor was in one of the lobby chairs, lacing up another pair of beautiful black thigh-high boots.

    “Hey, Marnie.” Taylor looked up and smiled at me. “This is Vanessa, another domme who works here,” she nodded toward the woman at the desk.

    “Nice to meet you,” we said at the same time, and then laughed politely.

    I gave Vanessa and Taylor an awkward wave as I moved into the television room. I still didn’t know what to make of the other women on staff here. What did the subs and dommes generally think of each other, and did they all feel as uncomfortable as I did about competing for clients’ business?

    Plopping down in one of the comfy chairs in front of the television, I picked up a magazine instead of the remote control.
Whips and Chains,
it announced in bold red letters across the top. A pretty young blonde woman graced the cover in full fetish gear — black leather corset, lacy blue-and-black bra and panties, fishnet stockings and impossibly high spiked heels. Her hands were on her hips as she stared, unsmiling, directly into the camera.
A Slave’s Punishment!, Hardcore S/M Pictorials!, Hundreds of Domina Listings!
barked the headlines on the cover. I flipped to the back and was surprised to see a half-page, full-color ad for the Dominion. Seeing it was an added thrill for me; it made me wonder how many other publications, small or large, were running ads for our dungeon rooms and showing staffers’ pictures.

    Then another advertisement caught my eye, this one a little smaller and in black and white, for what looked like a commercial dungeon similar to ours. Suddenly I realized we might not have a corner on the market, and I felt a stab of insecurity about the prospects of there being enough clients to go around. Maybe my first shift had been a fluke. Maybe there would never be enough money to support me full time after all, no matter how long I gave it.

    “How many places like this are there?” I walked back into the lobby and held the open magazine out in front of me.

    “What kind of places?” Vanessa looked up from a book with lined pages and some kind of inked entries.

    “Like this one.”

    “Darling, there aren’t any other places like ours!” she winked.

    “There’s an ad right here for one,” I pointed at the troubling text for the other place I’d just discovered. “And what about all these other people?” I tapped the varying announcements that were lined up in neat columns on the page opposite the Dominion’s ad. There were quite a number of listings for Mistress-This and Goddess-That, covering the Los Angeles and Orange County areas.

    
“That,”
Vanessa pointed a sharp red fingernail at the other dungeon’s ad, “is not a place like ours. It’s a shit hole where the pimp-owner makes mistresses take their clothes off in session and tries to shortchange everybody’s pay whenever he thinks they’re too stoned to notice.”

    “Oh,” I said.

    “Those others,” Vanessa took the magazine gently from my hands. “Let’s see—” She scanned the page and flipped to another one. “Some of these women are escorts pretending to be pro dommes, and some are real dommes who work independently. You can pretty much tell by what they say in their ads. Look.” She pointed again. “This one says she’s into sensual domination, allows full-body worship, some massage. That’s a dead giveaway she’s a hooker.
Full-body
means he can go down on her, and
massage
means she’ll jerk him off at the end. Can you picture a real dominant woman doing any of that?”

    I didn’t know what to say. T had wanted me to go down on him all the time, and had loved touching me to try and make me come. I looked at Vanessa with raised eyebrows and a shrug.

    “But this one here—” She pointed to another ad. “—this one is a real domme. That’s Mistress Catherine. She works downtown, has her own great space, and has been around for a long time.”

    
She must have started when she was twelve, then,
I thought to myself, eyeing the youthful face of the woman in the ad. It would be months before I would find out that “a long time” in this business meant anything over two years.

    Vanessa handed the magazine back to me and I found the page where the ads started and skimmed through them. I was relieved to find no other “dungeons” per se, but was curious about something else now. “I don’t see any ads for submissive women working on their own.”

    “Of course you don’t,” Vanessa sniffed.

    “There aren’t any pro subs working independently, Marnie,” Taylor spoke up, finished with her boots.

    “Why not?”

    “It’d be much too dangerous for a submissive! How could a girl protect herself if she were meeting strangers out on her own like that?” Vanessa frowned at me.

    “But don’t people like Catherine meet strangers on their own?”

    “That’s different. They’re in
charge
of the sessions they do. A poor sub girl would be totally at the mercy of God knows what kinds of psychos!”

    On the surface, her argument seemed logical to me, but then I thought,
how could it be any more dangerous than working here?
It seemed to me that, either way, I would end up alone in a room with a man I didn’t know who wanted to hurt me in one way or another. I mean, I guessed there was something to be said for having a bunch of potential crime-scene witnesses around, but my gut sense already told me that most men who sought out these kinds of sessions weren’t interested in genuinely harming anyone.

    As I wondered about sharing these conclusions with Vanessa and Taylor, the loud sound of someone’s arrival at the front door put an end to the discussion. After checking his bona fides over the intercom, Vanessa buzzed in a tall, broad-shouldered, darkly good-looking fellow who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

    “Hello,” he said, his eyes shifting between the three of us. Vanessa immediately took charge.

    “Hello, and what can we do for you?” her tone was formal, but her smile was slightly warmer.

    “Well,” the young man said, clasping his hands together, “I was hoping to see about a tickling session today.”

    “Okay? So tell us, are you looking for a submissive or a mistress?” Vanessa fixed him with a prying gaze.

    “A submissive, hopefully,” he answered politely.

    “Well, our Marnie is a submissive, hopefully,” Vanessa smirked playfully over at me, and I caught the man’s gaze for a moment before looking away. He had a huge, delighted grin on his face. I had been standing between the desk and where Taylor sat while we’d all been talking. I wasn’t sure if he’d been looking past me at her.

    “What’s your name, please?” Vanessa asked.

    “Daniel.”

    “Marnie, would you like to take Daniel to the Dean Martin for an interview?”

    I felt my neck and face start to color.
What if he
wasn’t
smiling at me, and now Vanessa’s put him on the spot?

    “Um, would you like to…?” I looked at Daniel, trying for an expression that conveyed a polite and non-pushy openness, to cut down on any awkwardness in case he wanted to back out.

    “I’d love to,” he grinned more broadly, and this time, for sure, he was looking directly at me.

    “I feel like I should tell you up front,” I said as soon as he’d closed the door behind us, “that I’m not really a ticklish person, nor would I be very good at faking it.” I hoped he wouldn’t be irritated that I’d wasted his time by doing the interview.

    “Really?” he smiled at me, unfazed. “I could’ve sworn you looked like someone who’d be a lot of fun to tickle.”

    “Well, thank you,” I said, not even sure why I took this as a compliment, “and I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you that I really wouldn’t be. You seem nice, for what it’s worth. I wish I
were
the type of person who’d be good for you.” I shrugged apologetically.

    “That’s sweet,” Daniel said, seemingly unmoved by the discouraging news. “But honestly, I’d like to do this anyway. You’re
very
cute. I’d like to session with you, please,” he finished. I felt my face growing warm again.

    “Thank you—”

    “Oh my God, I can’t believe you’re blushing,” he laughed. “I haven’t seen anyone blush in years. How cute is
that?”
he said, embarrassing me and fondling my ego at the same time. I tried to will my skin back to its natural color, and began again.

    “I worry that I’d disappoint you, is all.”

    “I understand that. Consider me fairly warned. If it works, it works, and if not, no harm done. I really just want to be alone with you, now. I’m not even sure I care about the tickling part. Unless you’re just not interested in playing with me at all?”

    He looked at me with his cute young face, wide brown eyes pretending to fear rejection. Even knowing it was some kind of a game, I didn’t have it in me to blow him off. It was the guy-like-him-finding-me-so-cute part that killed me. I’d wanted guys like him to find me cute since puberty had wrecked me at age thirteen. Even after I’d started looking good again as an adult, living in L.A. had made it almost irrelevant. The standards of beauty here were such that any woman without a tan, fake boobs, and a twenty-two inch waist was rendered all but invisible.

    “No, I am. I mean, yes I would,” I stuttered. “Be interested in a session with you.”

    I couldn’t help thinking how strange it was that I’d be getting paid to be touched by someone who might have ignored me for free if we’d been out at a club. It wouldn’t be the last time, by a long shot, that I would have the sensation of having been deposited into someone else’s body, someone else’s life. Sometimes I had to check the mirror to make sure that, in fact, I wasn’t having some kind of “Freaky Friday” experience. Was there some really gorgeous woman somewhere who was now getting used to feeling average in a super-square life?

    “Do you know if the Lair is open right now?” Daniel asked me.

    “I think all the rooms were open, at least when we came back here five minutes ago.”

    “Great. Let’s go grab it before anyone else does!” he smiled, but I thought for the first time that I saw something resembling nervousness. That relaxed me a little bit, to be able to see him as vulnerable too, in his apparent hope that it would go well.

    By the time I reached Vanessa, one of Taylor’s regulars had already come in and they’d gone up to the Lair for a two-hour session. I broke the news to Daniel when he joined me in the front — he’d taken a detour to the clients’ restroom before making his way back to the lobby.

    “The Rock Room is open, though,” I told him, “and it’s somewhat similar to the Lair, I think?” I looked to Vanessa for verification.

    “Yes, darling, it’s quite lovely, I think you’ll find it more than sufficient,” she smiled at both of us.

    “Do we need anything else before we go up?” I asked Daniel.

    “Hm. What about some cuffs? Are you comfortable with that?”

    “Sure.” I led him back to the tool shed where we found two pairs of leather cuffs lined with fake fur for my wrists and ankles, and Daniel picked up a couple of pieces of rope as well.

    I hadn’t really gotten a good look at the Rock Room before then. Hillary had asked one of the other subs to show me all the rooms on the day I’d interviewed, but there hadn’t been any time to explore. As I stepped into the all-black room with Daniel, I had to leave the door open just to find the light switch. All the windows were covered. I couldn’t see past the end of my nose if I moved more than a few inches from where the light streamed into the doorway from the little sunroof in the hall. When I found the switch, it was already on. This was apparently as bright as the Rock Room was going to get.

    As I made my way across the room, I heard what sounded like a door lock being engaged, even though we were supposed to leave everything unlocked here. I turned back to Daniel as he followed me into the center of the rectangular room, and then thought better of saying anything. What difference did it make, anyway? It’s not like an unlocked door was magically easier for me to get to if things went awry in a session, and the doorknob turned from the inside even when locked to the outside. I didn’t want to risk blowing the mood with him by seeming critical.

    “So, which do you like?” Daniel motioned with either hand to the two bondage beds in the room. One had been manufactured to look like an old-fashioned stretching rack. It took up nearly one-half of the far side of the room, and wasn’t as wide as the other bed, which filled the large nook next to the bathroom closer to where we stood. I pointed to the nearer one and went over to set the cuffs down.

    The bed was all black leather, with a black-lacquered wooden frame, and several metal eyehooks had been screwed in at equal intervals around the perimeter. Daniel approached me from behind and then his hands were on my shoulders, massaging warmth into my chilled skin. All the rooms seemed to be kept at the same icy temperature. I guessed it was to help the dominatrixes keep cool as they cracked whips and kicked crotches in latex catsuits. I wondered if I should invest in a little space heater for my own sessions.