The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (7 page)

    “Mmm,” I said, letting my neck roll slightly back as his hands relaxed me.

    “Why don’t you take this off while I get set up?” he fingered the spaghetti straps of my dress. I slid out of the clingy sheath and waited silently while he tied pieces of rope onto four of the hooks, spaced approximately the distance between my own arms and legs. He patted the table and I sat down, scooting into the middle where he’d indicated.

    “Lie down, Marnie,” he said.

    “Would you like me face-down or face-up, sir?” I asked. It felt a little weird to address a kid his age as sir, but youngster didn’t seem right either.

    “Face-up is good to start with.” He smiled again, and I stretched out on my back as he began placing the cuffs on my ankles.

    “Sir, I forgot to ask — is it okay if we say
mercy
is the safe word? I know it’s not likely that I’ll need to use it, but—”

    “Sure, that’s fine.
Mercy
it is. Are these good?” he asked, tugging on an ankle and a wrist cuff with each hand.

    “They’re fine, thank you, very comfortable,” I answered, thinking how I’d wished all my working life for a career where lying down was part of the job description.

    I closed my eyes as his fingers spread more warmth over my calves, the tops of my thighs, my ribs, my breasts. He ran his fingertips like feathers down the sides of my abdomen, then swirled them in light circles under my arms. I opened my eyes to look at him, to see whether he seemed to care that I wasn’t giggling. He didn’t look mad as I watched him pondering where to try and tickle me next, his gaze traveling the length of my body.

    He poked the first three fingers on each hand into either side of my ribs then. That kind of touch had indeed felt like tickling to me in other situations, but this time it felt only like a jab. A jab that turned me on for no reason I could understand, and I surprised us both by moaning and lifting my upper body closer to his hands.

    “You liked that?” Daniel asked, trying to sound flirtatious, but unable to totally conceal his confusion at my reaction.

    “I guess so,” I said uncertainly. “I don’t know why, though — it kind of hurt,” I finished.

    “In a good way, or…?” Daniel asked, and it did seem to matter to him at the time.

    I didn’t know how to answer him. I wasn’t sure I wanted to encourage more of the same. I knew it wasn’t considered very safe to receive any kind of pain to areas of the body that weren’t well-padded in fat. Rib cages are generally off limits.

    “Um,” I began, not sure how I was going to finish, and was interrupted by some more poking, this time not quite as hard, although still enough to hurt. Again I arched my back and breathed heavily through my mouth as his fingertips prodded bone and skin.

    “I’m sorry,” I gasped, “I don’t know why I’m having this reaction.”

    In my confusion, I was afraid that, somehow, my being turned on would be an actual letdown for a person who was looking solely for the types of screams and giggling that normally accompany a tickling experience.

    “Nothing to be sorry about,” Daniel grunted, and climbed up on the bed to straddle my hips.

    The cool leather of the tops of his shoes rested on my outer thighs as his fingers went back to tormenting my torso. He was smiling above me now, and something in his expression unnerved me. His sizable and very hard erection pressed into my pubic bone at the same time as his poking became more intense and unfocused.

    “Um, uh,” I was having a hard time translating the sensations and my response to them, but I had begun to feel worried about what we were doing. “Um, mercy!” I suddenly yelled, having finally felt a jab that was only painful instead of a blurry pleasure.

    Daniel stopped his strange tickling technique and let his hands massage the places on my body that now felt red and tender.

    “Mm,” I said, pushing my body up into his hands, using that movement as a chance to clandestinely tug at my wrists and ankles, to get a sense of how helpless I really was. It felt like I could probably pull my wrists through the soft fur inside the cuffs if I needed to, but the ankles didn’t seem to be budging. As I sunk flat again onto the bed, Daniel’s hand caressed its way down between my legs. It felt good, but I knew it wasn’t something we were allowed to do.

    “I’m sorry,” I said with true regret, “but we’re not allowed to be touched down there.”

    “Okay, sorry,” Daniel said, and pulled his hand away reluctantly. “I gotta do
something
with them,” he joked lamely. He pressed his hips more firmly into mine as he went back to thrusting his fingers into my sides.

    
“Ouch!”
I said, squirming underneath him, aroused once more without understanding why.

    He slid his hand back down between my legs.

    I almost said nothing. By this point, despite my bewildered enjoyment of his odd assault on my ribs, it was nice to take a break anyway. “I’m sorry, sir, I really can’t do that. I could get in trouble.”

    I felt instinctively that it was better to blame the house, to stay on friendly terms with him.

    
“Aw,”
he said, screwing his face up to mimic pronounced concern. He kept his hand in place on top of my G-string and rubbed me more vigorously then. “I’m not really touching you, I’m just checking to see if you’re wet or not.” He grinned at me but without humor now, his face only inches above my own.

    How to explain…

    Under other circumstances, I would have loved for someone as cute as him to touch me like that. But his bitchy disregard made him grotesque in that moment, and sent me into a flat-out rage. I jerked on my cuffs and pulled my hips away from the center of the table where his hand was on me.

    “You have to stop now,” I said tightly, no longer even attempting to sound conciliatory about the refusal.

    It seemed to work at first — until the removal of his hand from my crotch turned into the placement of that same hand around my throat. He grasped firmly without squeezing, and it had the strangest externally soothing effect on me. I went completely limp, and searched his face for what, if anything, I should most be afraid of.

    “I told you, I was just checking,” he said through gritted teeth.

    We stared at each other for a minute, and I could tell then that all he wanted was for me to be soft again. It didn’t even bother me in that moment to have to placate him, instead of telling him off. It felt like the only practical thing to do, and I was relieved to have such a clear idea of how to help myself.

    “Okay,” I said and fixed an open expression on my face as I continued to look into his eyes. “I just got scared,” I told him, the truth of which allowed me to say it with real sincerity. He seemed to snap out of something, then.

    “I don’t want you to be scared,” he said, and sounded like he meant it. He took his hand away and sat back on his heels.

    Suddenly, I felt this weird sadness between us. It had been sweet such a short time ago, and then — this. I could tell from the look on his face that he felt shitty about what he’d just done.
As well he should,
I thought, but felt my anger slipping into pained confusion. I had clearly been turned on. He thought that meant I wanted to be touched. How many times would he have heard or read that women into dominance and submission had fantasies of being “forced” to submit to pleasure without responsibility? How does a person on either side even begin to translate those reckless images into a responsible reality?

    “KNOCK! KNOCK!” Daniel jumped off the bed completely at the sound of Hillary’s voice.

    “Thank you,” I said to the intercom, and watched Daniel closely as he began untying me without comment. He rubbed my left wrist after pulling it free, then seemingly thought better of handling me any further. After releasing the last cuff on my ankle, he turned back to me on his way to the door and waved stiffly.

    “Well, take care.”

    “You, too,” I answered lamely, and waited to get up until he’d closed the door behind him.

    I exhaled loudly at the ceiling, feeling the adrenaline I’d had to ignore when he’d still been with me. I felt something else then as well, something that made me even more uncomfortable than what had just happened with Daniel.
It’s just a reflex, it doesn’t mean anything about anything,
I told myself emphatically. But I really had no idea what it might or might not mean — that even in the midst of my fury at Daniel, my body had still been aroused by being restrained and touched without permission.

    After gathering up the equipment and wiping down the table with alcohol and paper towels, I opened the door to head back downstairs, and then closed it again.
What am I going to say to them about it? Should I even say
anything? I flashed on what Vanessa had said about pro subs not being able to work independently, and worried that she or Hillary might decide I couldn’t handle working here, either.
I should keep quiet. There’s nothing anyone can do about it, anyway.

    I didn’t get any other sessions that shift, and spent the remaining few hours watching television and trying to make sense of the day.

    Had I really been in danger, or had I overreacted? And if there had been a real threat, and I had been turned on even in the midst of it, I couldn’t help but wonder if my response made me more of a danger to myself than any man could ever be. I knew I had been really pissed off, not some porno-queen version of sexed-up helpless victim, but I still understood so little about my kinky urges. It felt impossible to tell whether they came from the part of me that just loved having good sexual encounters, or if there was a darker drive being stimulated, a drive I did not romanticize or wish to nurture.

    As I was getting ready for bed later that night, something odd caught my eye in the mirror. I thought for a moment that perhaps some kind of dye had rubbed off on me at the dungeon. I looked more closely, and saw fingertip-sized spots of black, as well as robin’s-egg blue, dotted along the length of my rib cage. I patted the bruises gingerly to see whether they hurt or only looked bad, and then dropped my hands nervously. Pressing them, I’d felt myself on the bed again with Daniel and had that familiar mixture of resentment and confused arousal. I knew I hadn’t felt that way at all with Robert or Bill the Saturday before. What we’d done together had felt
normal
to me. I didn’t know what other word to use for it. I knew also that these feelings I was having now mimicked pretty closely the way I’d felt throughout the entire relationship I’d had with T. I wondered which experience of S/M was the exception, and which was the rule.

    

    

    
CLIENTS OFTEN ASKED
about the first time I realized I had a fixation on both spanking and erotic dominance and submission. The truth is, unlike some other kinksters, I could not remember a “first time” or a defining moment that flipped an internal switch for me. As far as I know, I always felt like I do now. What
did
stand out was the first time I understood that this feeling I got in my stomach around kinky stuff was connected to sex.

    At age fourteen, I decided to try something I’d read about in Judy Blume books, despite the popular rumor at the time that masturbation either made you a lesbian or proved you already were one. One night during my eighth-grade year, an image formed seemingly out of nowhere in my mind’s eye as I pressed and stroked underneath my bedcovers.

    I saw the boy I had a crush on spanking me.

    Whatever blood had not already migrated underneath my right hand rushed hotly to my face and neck in the pitch-darkness of my bedroom. Humiliated, I forced the picture out of my mind. A minute later, as I’d been trying to think of this same boy kissing me, the spanking scene re-invaded. And this time, I noted something besides my embarrassment — the image of being over this boy’s knee accomplished a kind of excitement that made the work of my fingers nearly irrelevant. I fought it off a second time, now worried I was beyond the bounds of extreme mental illness, never mind lesbianism. But I did not take my hand out from beneath my covers. When I saw myself a third time, ass in the air over Willie’s lap, I gave up. I let the image have its way with me, shutting my eyes tight against whatever it might mean.

    Afraid of a recurrence, I lived in frustrated self-abstinence for the next few years. A girl named Mallory helped break my dry spell at age sixteen, passing around a bodice-ripper she’d picked up at the local drug store.

    “This is so sexy! Oh my God, you guys have to read it,” she’d announced in the girls’ bathroom, holding the book out to my friend at thigh level, as if it were an incendiary device that might detonate at a higher altitude.

    “What’s it about?” I asked. I was heavily into both Stephen King and true crime by then, and hesitated to take my mind off the distraction of terror and bloody death for a mere Danielle Steele rip-off. At sixteen I had bad skin, worse hair, a tragically misguided sense of fashion, and — needless to say — my virginity. By that point, I needed something more than raven-haired beauties and throbbing manhoods to keep suicide off the top of my to-do list.

    “Just read it,” Mallory growled quietly, waving us away as she disappeared into the halls.

    I not only read it, I tore through it. A sexy Arab prince kidnaps a beautiful young woman and brings her to his luxury tent in the desert. When he’s not at work in his sandy kingdom, he’s banging the hell out of her in a way that makes her forget, at least during the banging, that she’s mad at him. He tries to win her over with good sex and witty repartee, but she insists on trying to escape anyway. When she brandishes a pair of sewing scissors — after all he’s done for her — it’s the final straw. He knocks them from her hand and pulls her over his knee. By the time he’s done spanking her, they both know she’s in love with him.