The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (8 page)

    
How dare he?
I raged inside.
How dare the author, how dare the publishers, how dare the world at large pretend that this is what makes women happy?
Just because it made
me
ache with longing didn’t mean it was realistic or right. Yet a smaller voice inside me did find some comfort amidst the indignity of this kind of propaganda. Mallory, too, had found it sexy I remembered, and, indeed, the fact of its publication in the first place proved to me that I must not be the only person in the world who felt this way. And there were now at least some options for the future — if I could somehow grow up pretty enough to be the object of a handsome kidnapper’s attention, I might be able to get the spanking and sex that I now thought about on a daily basis.

    Still un-abducted years later, I tried to get my first couple of boyfriends to help, but their attempts to humor me were always awkward and frustrating at best. None of my fantasies had involved being slapped like a horse getting the giddy-up signal while doing it doggy style, and I was still too uptight about my yearnings in the first place to go into any helpful detail about what would have worked. It was to their credit that all these guys were up for trying. But their failures merely served to accentuate my despair over ever getting what I wanted.

    Relief appeared one day during my junior year of college. I’d just gotten a university e-mail account, and had taken to visiting the computer science building after class each afternoon. I didn’t have a computer of my own, and the basement of the computer lab had a dozen or so antiquated machines set up for student use.

    One spring afternoon, I received an e-mail from a friend of a friend I’d never met, asking me if I’d ever been tied up. This type of thing was not as out of the blue as it sounds. At that time, I was a latecomer to a sputteringly social computer-geek community, that had loosely formed a few years earlier. The guys in the group, or geek boys, as we called them, were habitual in their random come-ons to newcomer women. Claiming the mantle of kink for oneself was a common enough ploy among them. It didn’t necessarily mean anything except that the person saying it wanted to be thought of as a sexual dynamo. Even knowing it was quite possibly an affectation, I answered my e-mailer with as much controlled enthusiasm as I could muster.
No, I haven’t been tied up,
I typed back,
but I’ve always wanted to be.

    
Meet me in the woods behind the computer lab in fifteen minutes
came the immediate reply. He had to be kidding — there were bugs out there. And though he may have been a friend of a friend, this was Santa Cruz, California, a town that had only recently shaken off the distinction of having the highest percentage of serial killers per capita. Still, the invitation was irresistible. Ten minutes into the waiting period, I headed toward the back door of the building, trying to develop an air of reserve to camouflage my blind hope.

    Minutes later, I stood before him in a little clearing he’d led me to. He sat on a fallen log, watching me with a smile in his eyes but nowhere else on his face. I had reflexively followed his first order and taken off my T-shirt and bra without comment.

    “Stand in front of that middle tree there, and lift your arms over your head,” his voice came again, low and confident.

    As I had walked out the back of the building to meet him, I had merely hoped for someone who didn’t gross me out physically. His name was Tim, and I had been extremely relieved by the first sight of his cute face and fit body. His brown hair was not quite thick enough anymore to grow as long and wild as he seemed to be aiming for, but it still framed his slightly dangerous-looking face in a flattering way. His skin was pale, more due to time spent indoors than as a result of his natural coloring, and his smooth white hands looked capable of anything I might desire.

    Immediately after lifting my arms, I heard a noise. My first thought was:
Is a deer going to freak out if he sees this?
I worried that what we were doing out in nature was somehow tantamount to a form of spiritual littering. I cut my eyes away from Tim and was alarmed to see a flash of color, chest-high, many yards away, moving in our direction through the foliage.

    “There’s someone coming,” I said in a panicked voice, and crossed my arms over my bare chest.

    “Stay exactly as you are,” Tim ordered, his tone polite yet insistent. I stared at him open-mouthed, and then raised my arms again uncertainly.

    “What if he sees me?”

    “Probably it’ll make his day. Don’t move.”

    Rational thought tried to force its way into my mind, but the jolts of electric excitement traveling the length of my upstretched body refused to be overridden.
Don’t move.
No matter who came around that corner, I knew I would remain still. I could not mess up the opportunity to hear Tim say more things like that to me.

    Holding my breath, I heard more clearly the sound of crackling leaves and the whoosh of movement through the stillness outside our little circle. When a clear outline of a blue T-shirt bobbed into view a few feet from where I stood, I clenched my eyes shut and waited for catastrophe. Over the roaring of blood in my ears, I heard twigs snapping directly in front of me, and opened my eyes to see who was about to make a citizen’s arrest for this public lewdness.

    “You were very good. That pleased me a great deal,” Tim said, running his long index fingers from the hollow of my throat out to the tips of each nipple. The jogger had passed us by without incident; whether he’d seen us or not, I’d never know. Goose bumps shivered their way to the surface of my entire body in the warmth of that spring afternoon.

    “Turn around,” he ordered softly. Keeping my hands raised, I swiveled until my back was toward him.

    “Bend over. You may put your arms down now.”

    “Thank you,” I said sincerely. My arms had been starting to ache. I leaned forward with my hands at my sides, and studied the close-up view of the ground in front of me. I’d heard there were wolf spiders in these parts, and was nervous about pitching face-first into a nest of sharp fangs and eight hairy legs.

    Tim stood close behind me, his crotch pressed lightly against the seat of my jeans. I took deep, sometimes shuddering breaths as the pads of his fingers brushed coolness across both of my shoulder blades, thumbs meeting on my spine to guide his palms down the back of my rib cage. His fingertips curled into the waistband of my jeans and gave a slight tug.

    “I’d like you to pull these down so I can further examine you.” I hadn’t shaved recently, as I hadn’t foreseen any nudity in my immediate future.

    “I… feel like… I’m not ready for that today,” I stuttered.

    Tim was quiet for a moment. “That’s fine, but next time I expect you to be ready to do everything I tell you to do. Understood?”

    I nodded, relieved. After allowing me to stand up again and get dressed, he hugged me quickly, but made no mention of when next time might be.

    It happened four days later. I had begun shaving my legs daily in order to be ready for our next meeting. Each afternoon when my classes were done, I made my way into the basement of the computer lab. It wasn’t until the end of the week, Friday afternoon, that Tim’s e-mail came through. He wrote that I had ten minutes to meet him at the edge of the woods, and if I got there after he did, I’d be punished for lateness.

    I headed quickly to the woods. As I got within sight of our little meeting place, I saw Tim already waiting, and anxious confusion set in.

    
I know it hasn’t been ten minutes, so I can’t be late. Will he be mad at me anyway?

    He wasn’t smiling as I got closer, but he didn’t look angry either. It was something else.

    
Ah, this is a game — he planned to beat me here all along.
The idea aroused me.

    He had me walk ahead of him, and although we were on a visible dirt trail, he still gave me directions about where to turn. His voice steered me back into the small clearing from the other day, and again he took a seat on the large log that rested like a bench on the pine needles and scattered leaves.

    “Take off all of your clothes.”

    I stood in front of him, nerves and joy combining inside me to generate a grin that I tried to suppress, fearing it would make me look silly. I removed my clothes as quickly and gracefully as I could.

    “Now. We had an agreement that you wouldn’t keep me waiting. And yet you did. Do you know what that means?” Tim’s eyes teased me when I looked up from my neatly folded pile of clothes.

    “Not exactly.” I hesitated, although I hoped that I did.

    “It means I have to punish you. Do you agree to that?”

    “If… well… yes, okay,” I finished nervously. I couldn’t shake the paranoia that there was something irredeemably wrong in admitting out loud that I was into this stuff, even to someone else who clearly shared my interests.

    “Come over here.” He reached out and pulled me closer by my hips. We faced each other, he on the log, me not much taller even as I stood. His hands closed around my wrists, and I didn’t know if it was my veins or his fingers that thumped a pulse through the surface of my skin. “I’m going to spank you now,” he said softly, and I started to hyperventilate a little. “Hey” He let go of my wrists and squeezed my upper arms gently. “Are you okay with this?”

    “I’m… it’s just…” I couldn’t seem to breathe deeply enough. “I think I’m a little nervous. I’ve never done this before.”

    “It’s okay,” he said, now smiling. “I’ll take it easy.”

    But I wasn’t afraid that it would hurt too much or that he would go too hard. I was afraid of what I would sound like, look like, act like, once I was doing the thing that made me the most excited of anything else I could imagine.

    “Come over to this side, and lay across my lap,” Tim guided me to the right of him. He held my waist as I folded myself over him. “You can hold onto my legs if you want.”

    I held onto him for balance, and for proof that this was really happening, not another of my daydreams. When he ran a hand over the curves of my cheeks, letting the edge of his thumb trail down the split between them, I dropped my shoulders and let my chin rest on the side of his knee.

    “Are you ready?” His left hand gripped my rib cage firmly.

    “Yes,” I said, aiming for more of a purr but hearing what sounded like a croak as my voice box wrestled fear and euphoria.

    I think it’d be most accurate to say that Tim gave me my first “patting” that day, rather than anything that technically resembled a spanking. His pace and the weight of his hand as he let it fall were careful and soft, just as he’d promised.

    
How does a person get a guy to break a promise like that?
I worried silently. Maybe next time I’d have a chance to convey my sturdiness and he’d kick things up a notch.

    After about five minutes, he helped me to my feet and offered another stiff embrace. “I expect an e-mail from you tonight, detailing your thoughts and reactions to what we’ve done so far,” he instructed, before walking me silently back to the Computer Science building.

    I sat down to write him immediately, grateful for the chance to tell someone, anyone, how exciting it had been, and how much more I was ready for. I told him how I’d had these fantasies for as far back as I could remember, and that I’d never felt as excited with anyone before as I had with him. I liked regular sex a lot, but it had never left me so uncomfortably, perpetually aroused as that afternoon with Tim had. I wrote that I couldn’t wait to learn more about what it meant to be a submissive and masochist — as he’d told me I was, in an e-mail sent right after our first meeting in the woods. And I thanked him for being so much fun, and so nice to me.

    I received his reply after my last class on Monday. He was going to have to cool things down for a while, he said, take a break, as his girlfriend was having a hard time with their open relationship all of a sudden. He was sorry, but he loved her and wanted to make it work between them.

    After the initial shock, I decided that none of it was true. I was convinced that he was reacting solely to my eagerness — that I’d liked it too much, wanted more of it too badly for him not to feel like I’d stolen the thrill of the chase away from him or something. I realized too late that his instruction to be open with him about my reactions was actually a call for e-mail porn — not the outpouring of raw hope I’d sent off to him in fevered anticipation.

    The next day, I burned every piece of kinky literature and spanking porn that I owned. I’d told one friend about my trips to the woods; when she asked for an update later that week, I claimed to have lost interest in him. It would be five years before I’d try anything like it again.

    Through no fault of Tim’s, school went downhill for me from there. I took a pre-existing self-destructive streak and ran with it, until my love for pot and all things pill-shaped had morphed into a run-of-the-mill heroin habit by the time I was twenty-five. When my parents offered to pay for a hospital stay late one summer afternoon, I figured what the hell. I was dying of boredom, among other things, and rehab sounded like an interesting diversion to me.

    When I was a little over a year sober, I found myself not much more entertained than I had been back in my heroin daze. Firmly rooted in a $5.15 an hour job selling newspapers and magazines on a corner near my apartment, I thought if this was what the counselors had meant by a new freedom and a new happiness, I’d like to see about getting my old shitty depression back. In a seemingly unrelated incident around the time I was reaching my breaking point, my housemate at the time inherited a Stone Age computer from a friend. I had a twang of nostalgia for all the cute, non-kinky computer geeks I’d messed around with after Tim, and promptly splurged on an Internet account.