Whip Smart: A Memoir (25 page)

“You okay?” Dylan asked me that evening as we watched a movie.

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Just tired. Long day with the perverts.” I flexed my hand and surreptitiously pinched the outside of my wrist, waiting for the movie to end and for him to leave so that I could scour WebMD.com, where everything always ended up being a symptom of cancer. There was so much I still hid; it must have often seemed to him that I’d pinched more than a nerve. I never lost my mobility, but I sure spent a lot of time gone numb.

Larry was too big to pick up and dunk in the toilet, as I would have liked, so I just made him crawl, kicking his ass, clad in a pair of huge pink panties, the whole way to the bathroom. This must have been our second or third session. When he was finally kneeling before the toilet, I stepped over him and hiked down my Levi’s.

“Are you thirsty, Larry? Did all that studying make you thirsty? I hope so. I would make you close your eyes, you little sicko, but I want you to see this.” Standing over the raised seat, I peed for a good long time, holding his gaze the whole while. Pulling up my jeans, I stepped over him again and planted myself behind him.

“Drink it.” He hesitated. “Drink it, you little fuck!” He leaned forward, but that was all. I grabbed a fistful of his hair and dunked his face in the yellow water. “How. Dare. You. Even. Speak. To. Me. This is what you get, you pathetic piece of dog shit, for thinking for a second that I would even want to be seen speaking to you in public, let alone go on a
date
with you!” I pulled his face out of the toilet gasping, water streaming down his chest.

“
Eww!
You are getting piss-water on my shoe! What are you going to do about it, pig? Huh? What are you going to do about that?”

“I dun-nun-nun-no, Mistress.” Larry’s sub voice was unrecognizable from his normal speaking voice. Like most of my clients, the change in persona he underwent in session was so thorough that everything from his facial expression in repose to the tone and manner of his speaking was transformed.

“Well, I have a fucking idea, Little Lara; why don’t you clean it off with your scummy little mouth?” He didn’t resist.

With Larry blindfolded and kneeling execution-style in the middle of the room, I finished the session whispering in his ear.

“Show me how you touch yourself at home, Larry; show me what you do when you think about me alone in between your Superman sheets after you’ve finished your homework. Show me how you diddle yourself every night so that I can tell the whole cheerleading squad and the football team and we can all laugh and point at you in hallways and call you Little Larry. That’s right, Lar, I’m gonna divulge to the whole goddamn student population precisely how small it actually is.”

He came into his own hand.

“Eat up, Larry, down the hatch.”

Afterward, I pulled my hair back in a bun, kicked off the heels, and donned a clean pair of latex gloves to wash the dildos in the sink while he showered.

“That was amazing!” he shouted through the steam.

“I’m glad,” I answered, peeling a condom off a black trunk as thick as my arm. I was surprised he didn’t split his lip trying to get his mouth around it.

“Do you ever switch?” he asked.

“Not often.”

“Why not? I bet you like to.”

I paused, deciding whether or not to let this pass. We weren’t in session anymore and I liked Larry, so I decided not to correct his presumptuousness.

“Have you any idea the types that come through here? They have no clue what they’re doing. I end up having to run the session myself, so why bother? I’d rather just top than top from the bottom.”

“Can’t blame you for that. So you don’t have anybody good that you see regularly?”

“Nope.”

“Shame.”

“Why? Have you got designs on me, Lar?” I laughed.

“Yes.”

Well. It was true that ever since my failed reentry into the straight job market, I had been experimenting increasingly often with submissive sessions, taking ones I never would have in my first years at the dungeon. This evolution had partly to do with ennui, sick as I was of seeing the same sorry twenty clients for almost three years, and partly the laziness that resulted of my boredom. Like my powerful, Armani-suited slaves, I had grown tired of my monopoly on executive power, which also meant doing all the work. Having sole responsibility for conducting my sessions, for injecting them with the imagination and enthusiasm that had made me so successful, had become burdensome. Passivity looked like vacation. But this was not enough to justify a dismissal of boundaries as stringent as mine had been. I had always had a lot of submissive fantasies, though not to the extremity of my clients; I dreamt more of being ravished than ravaged. But now, almost exclusively in my private fantasies, I had become the subjugated. On a few occasions, I had actually reversed scenes from my workdays and imagined myself in the position of my clients, though it was never they whom I envisioned dominating me, only a faceless male figure, a masculine phantom of myself. I would surmise that even the few sessions in which I had trusted the expertise of my dominant
enough to let go and successfully submit, it had been essentially an autoerotic experience. The conditions of my switch sessions always included being blindfolded, and the men were prohibited from all but the most rudimentary verbal interaction. To hear my pathetic, panting partner’s voice—the desire in it, let alone any trepidation or nervousness—was a certain mood killer. To experience pleasure in submission I had to be able to remain in my fantasy without the intrusion of their personality, without any reminder of the reality of our business arrangement. And I was not as disconcerted as you’d think, to witness in myself what I had judged my coworkers so harshly for. It seemed so separate, the way all things that I never spoke about did. It just
was
, not existing in the context of anything else.

“Well, what would you have us do in such a scene, Larry?”

“You mean what would I have you do? Or do to you?” He turned off the shower and pulled a fluffy white towel from where it hung over the shower stall door. Facing the vanity over the sink, I could see his silhouette as he dried himself, his hulking form obscured through the opaque glass behind me.

“I suppose that’s what I mean.”

“Well, I would say I’m best at doing what I enjoy having done to myself.”

I laughed, slightly relieved at the obvious improbability of such a scene.

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be drinking anybody’s pee in the near future. Sorry to disappoint.”

“Well, not that necessarily,” he replied, stepping out of the shower with the towel wrapped around his waist. “I know how to respect limits. What I meant was the general tone of my sessions. I like the psychological aspect to it. The physical, too, of course, but I’d like to get in your head.”

Our eyes met in the mirror, and I couldn’t help smiling.

“I don’t know if I could let you in there, Lar, even if I wanted to.”

“You’d be surprised, Jus; dommes usually make the best subs. Why do you think I’m so fun to abuse?”

“Oh, so now you’re a dom?”

“Most of the time. This is just to balance it out.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’d hate to lose you as a domme; you’re fantastic. But I get this sense about you. And I think we both know you can’t do both with one person; there’s no such thing as a real switch session; either you’re on top or you’re on the bottom.”

I could taste the soap still on Larry’s fingers when he shoved them down my throat. Saliva ran from the corners of my mouth as my throat lurched around his fingers, my whole body convulsing with the gag. As it sank toward his knee, Larry pushed my forehead up with his free hand, looking down at me like a hardheaded dog, his tone firm and patient.

“Look at me, Justine. Right here.” He pointed toward his own eyes. “I want you to look me in the eyes while I do this to you.” He tapped his fingers in the back of my mouth again, prodding my uvula and instigating another short round of gagging. “I know how easy it is to just go to another place, to leave your body while I humiliate it, but I’m not going to let you do that. I want you to feel every minute of it. I want you to think about this, my fingers in your mouth, when you are fucking your boyfriend. I want you to think about me when you are kicking the shit out of some guy later today.”

An ugly sound came from my throat. As it echoed around the cavernous room, I heard how animal it sounded. The involuntary voices of our bodies are so strange to us, who are used to controlling them, calculating the way that others hear us. The guttural cries that came from me were painful in their betrayal of the facility with which I manipulated language and how expertly I enlisted its power to disguise this bestial truth. It was excruciating to be exposed in this way. And also freeing.

Though reflexive tears already wet my face, I felt the sudden urge to cry. It was not an urge of pure grief, and the grief in it was not that of my predicament there, with that man’s hand in my mouth, but of other bondage, which abhorred the naked humanness in my submission, its discomposure. The pain I felt was mingled with gratitude. Maybe because I was incapable of freeing myself from the bindings of power, of self-control, without help.

To me, desirelessness had always meant power. The people I have been most instinctually attracted to are those who are unavailable to me; their power is irresistible. The arousal I felt as a dominant was not sexual but psychological: my submissives desired me, and without any desire myself, I enjoyed the freedom to refuse them. It was in this freedom that I entertained the possibility of a greater power, of mine as an agent in my own life, a person without need of faith in anything but myself.

When the session was over, we each showered and then sat on the leather bondage table to talk dogs. I felt more at ease and warmhearted toward Larry than any other client of mine. In fact, it was through my sessions with him that I began to develop an unprecedented empathy for my own submissives. After dominant sessions, I was often exhausted, peeved, and anxious to get them out and put my sweatpants back on; I resented their dewy gratitude and lingering, their chatty amicability. Preferable, most days, were the ones so consumed with shame, with the immediate emotional hangover, that they fled without showering or ever meeting my eyes.

After a session with Larry, the peace of our induced intimacy was a warm place to be, and I was not anxious to leave it. Having survived something, I felt lighter and strangely hopeful. In defying my own boundaries, I nurtured a hope for the illusory nature of other limits and in my own ability to set and break them.

“UGH.” AUTUMN SLUMPED BACK
against the sofa, the book sliding from her hands onto the floor. “I’m cooked. Stick in a fork in me, my love, because I’m done.”

“Oh, stop,” I said, looking up from my carton of Chinese food. “School is easy.
Life
is hard.” I ceremoniously lifted a piece of broccoli with my chopsticks and stuffed it in my mouth.

Autumn snorted. “School is easy for
you,
smarty-pants, but thanks for dropping some knowledge on me—that was deep.”

I rolled my eyes and put my bowl on the coffee table. “Give me the book.”

“It’s killing me, Melissa. It’s like breathing sawdust.”

“See, that’s very creative—just use that in your paper!” I laughed and took the slim volume from her. “
The Metamorphosis
? This is a classic!”

She raised her eyebrows and mouthed,
Nerd
.

“You just have to get used to the language—it’s old.” I smiled at the book. “I’ve written papers of my own about this story.”

“Great! Can I borrow them?”

“Let me see what you’ve got so far,” I told her.

Autumn was midway to finishing her bachelor’s at Long Island University and was considering switching focus from criminal psychology to nursing. I was of no use when it came to her science homework but regularly helped her out with English, which she hated. Working on her papers thrilled me, more so than working on my own ever had. I’d had to scale back my editing after she was gently accused of plagiarism by a professor.

I disappeared into the work—plucking at sentences, scanning the pages of familiar books—the way I sometimes disappeared into sessions, but without any hangover that followed, no shame or disgust, only a sated wearines. I missed the way I could disappear into that kind of work; I’d forgotten how easy it was, how fast time flew when I was engrossed. I still read a lot but found it increasingly difficult to focus on anything for long. Gone were the days when I could read for five, ten, eight hours at a stretch. Downtime in the dungeon I spent perusing the newspaper or magazines or wandering around online, killing hours in the vortex of Friendster—the soon-to-be-obsolete precursor to Facebook.

Autumn flipped through the television channels while I sat with her computer on my lap.

“What are you doing this weekend?” she asked absently.

“Black & Blue Ball is this weekend.”

“You going?”