The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story (19 page)

As the days passed I found myself thinking of the glint in his eye before he said something funny, the way his lips curved when he smiled and pondering exactly what it would be like to sleep with him. Danger, Will Robinson. Meeting him again was crazy. Foolish. Likely to end in embarrassment at best and hurt at worst. I should deliver his coat to his office, in a parcel so no one could see why I had it. I wasn’t going to ever see him again. I wasn’t going to mail him any more. I wasn’t going to agree to meet him for dinner in a gorgeous restaurant in central London.

And I certainly wasn’t going to be going home from said dinner without any knickers, having taken them off and given them to him in a crazy show of bravado shortly before dessert.

Best laid plans and all that.

I know the knickers thing is mind-boggling; if it helps, it broke my brain too. And I really didn’t anticipate it. In fact I’d deliberately worn comfy non-date undies, so adamant was I that, despite my occasional daydreams of time spent together hanging out at home, reading the paper, ending up ankle deep in discarded Sunday supplements in rooms straight from an Ikea catalogue, absolutely nothing was going to happen. It was absolutely not going to lead to anything. I was giving him his coat back, we’d have a perfectly nice dinner, and then I’d go home and – since I wasn’t holding his coat effectively to ransom any more – he’d never contact me again. And for most of the evening it didn’t seem like it would be an issue.

I arrived late – a crisis at work from a late-developing story conspiring with train trauma – to find him sitting at the bar. He stood formally to greet me and seeing him again made my heart beat faster. His eyes shone with good humour and, despite my fears about the awkwardness of the drunken kiss and my abrupt escape, I instantly felt comfortable with him once more. Which is probably just as well, bearing in mind everything that happened afterwards.

He was understanding about my tardiness, brushing aside my stammered apologies as we were shown to our table and seated. Over the next few hours we ate a leisurely meal, dragging it out in a way that, if it had been anything other than a grim January Monday, would have seen our waiting staff dropping hints that we get the bill or adjourn back to the bar.

We talked about films, the media, argued about whether a recent run of derogatory headlines relating to the Home Secretary were unnecessary (him) or newsworthy (me, unsurprisingly). It was fun, mentally challenging and filled with laughter. From the outside it would have looked like a proper date. Certainly someone passing our table might have noticed my face reddening at times, flushed as if I’d had a little too much wine. But they had no way of knowing that I was only drinking sparkling water and instead was squirming because James was mocking me for the tone of my feature – so much for the saccharine sweet tone going over his head – and for stealing his coat.

He was solicitous throughout dinner, the same James I had gotten to know through our textual chats, but he was
also an undeniable, tangible force in the room, drawing attention from men and women alike. I could understand it – hell, with him sat in front of me, it was all I could do to string a sentence together at times, but it made me grumpy too, and underlined more than ever that he really was not my sort.

The mantra ‘not my sort’ was running through my head on a loop by the time coffee had been served, which meant I wasn’t as sharp as perhaps I could have been when he leaned back in his chair, dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, set it down neatly on the table and told me I should give him a present before I left him that evening, to make up for keeping his coat for so long. The atmosphere had shifted imperceptibly; his smile was still as charming and as warm, but now there was something else lurking beneath the surface. I pressed my hands together to hide the slight tremble in them and feigned insouciance as I asked what exactly he had in mind, praying to the overdraft gods that whatever it was wouldn’t leave me having to pull overtime to make the rent.

That’s when he said, ‘Your knickers.’
Good, well that’s not going to cost me anyth … — Wait. What?

It took every ounce of effort to not flinch slightly. Pride? Probably. A stubborn need to prove I wouldn’t be fazed by any challenge? Definitely. He waited silently for my response. I shifted in my seat.

With what I thought was a remarkably calm voice and straight face under the circumstances I asked him if he had considered going to a specialist shop and buying women’s
undies of his own there. He let out a bark of laughter, his teeth white in the candlelight and shook his head.

‘You know I don’t want them for that. I want
your
knickers. Right now.’

I was confused. This was James – befuddled-at-a-kiss, posh, urbane James. What was he saying? He waited, clearly enjoying the confusion as it flashed across my face, but not doing anything to ease it.

Suddenly it clicked. Ha. After I kissed him and then leapt in the cab he felt all embarrassed at being on the back foot. So now he was playing a joke on me, trying to put
me
on the back foot. I’d never let him know how close he’d been to getting me. But two could play at this game.

I took a slow sip of water and leaned forward in my chair, politely and sweetly inquiring as to how this would work. As I’d met him from work and I find skirts impractical at the best of times, I was wearing trousers. Would I be permitted to go to the bathroom to remove my knickers and then give them to him later? He looked scandalized – of course I would, he wouldn’t want to cause a scene in public.

He watched me intently as we discussed it, his smile getting wider until he was practically laughing at me outright. Growing tired of playing along, I couldn’t stop myself from asking exactly what he found so funny.

He gestured at me. ‘You’re delightful. Your chin is up and your voice is casual. But your body gives you away.’

In spite of myself I felt my chin rising even further as I replied, trying for a calmness of tone that felt just a
fingertip out of reach – although I hoped he didn’t know me well enough to be able to pick up on that too.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

He touched me, skin against skin, and it felt like an electric shock surging through my body. His finger brushed the top of my hand as he spoke, stroking me in a way that felt oddly hypnotic, making my pulse race and my breaths get shallower as I tried to focus on what he was saying. In the tiny part of my brain that wasn’t thinking about how surreal it was to be discussing the practicalities of giving my knickers to a man I’d met twice before and still wasn’t sure I even liked, I wondered what pleasure he could wring from my body, when with one finger he was already driving me to a kind of distraction.

‘You’re focusing hard on controlling your voice, your words. But your cheeks are flushed, and look at your hand –’ at that he tapped gently on the top of it ‘– suddenly clutching at the edge of the table for support.’ I blinked and looked down to see my fingers gripping the dark wood. I felt like my hand belonged to someone else, seeing myself as he saw me, knowing he was right, and blushing even harder. So much for remaining in control. Bugger. I unfurled my fingers and left my hand resting gently on the table, aiming for a casualness we both knew I wasn’t feeling. I swallowed hard, fighting to regain a sense of equilibrium.

‘I really don’t know what you mean.’

He smiled again, almost indulgently, the way you would at an entertaining and yet naive child. ‘I think you do. Perhaps you don’t. But you’re bright, you’ll figure it out in the end.’ And then he patted my hand one last time.

‘Shall we get the bill?’ I leaned down to pick up my handbag, and he looked at me, long and hard. His voice was quiet, firm, and spoke to a part of me that had been pretty quiet since the move.

‘Go to the bathroom.’

My legs felt like they belonged to someone else, and I was halfway across the room before I could comprehend what I was doing. I’d clearly gone mad.
Fuck him
, I thought to myself as I stood in the bathroom, shoving my knickers into my bag. If he wanted to play this game I bet I could shock him more than he shocked me. As I walked back on to the restaurant floor I wasn’t entirely sure I was right though.

I came back from the toilet to find he had paid the bill and retrieved my coat, and was standing by the door looking out into the night. I walked the full length of the restaurant to join him, the seam of my trousers pressing against my slit with every step, creating a delicious friction that exacerbated my increasing arousal in the light of this slightly surreal turn.

As he helped me into my coat, he pressed a seemingly solicitous hand to the small of my back under my jacket to usher me out of the restaurant. Only I knew that he was actually sliding a finger under my waistband to see whether I’d obeyed his order. His murmur of pleasure when he realized made me blush. Damnit.

He walked me to the cab rank, where we were to go our separate ways. Shortly before we got to the taxi at the front of the queue he grabbed my wrist, pulling me around. Pressing my back into the wall with his body, he
anchored one hand in my hair and kissed me deeply, pillaging my mouth. His other hand was still around my wrist, pulling my hand down to feel his erection under his jacket. I felt shy, embarrassed – long beyond the age of snogging and copping a feel in public in this way – but I couldn’t resist running my hand along the front of his trousers, feeling him grow.

He ended the kiss and we moved apart, both of us breathing heavily. I was dumbstruck; any attempt to play it cool was a distant memory. He was looking at me expectantly, but for the life of me I couldn’t work out what he wanted me to say. I wasn’t actually sure I could form words. Eventually he smiled and held out his hand.

‘I believe you have something for me.’

I closed my eyes for a second to try and mask my embarrassment at having momentarily forgotten all about his stupid joke, having become so caught up in the kisses.

‘My knickers? You really want them? Really?’

His smile made my stomach flip. ‘I do. Really. I think you owe me.’

I turned slightly, hiding my bag from public view to pull out my neatly folded pants. Of course I’d folded them, balling them up just seemed so uncouth somehow. I passed my knickers to him, focusing completely on ensuring my hand didn’t shake, dreading he was going to unfurl them, sniff them, goodness knows what. He smiled, thanked me and put them in his pocket. I let out the trembling breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, and as I did so he brushed one last kiss across my now-swollen lips and leant to whisper in my ear.

‘We’re going to see each other soon. You’re going to come and collect these, from my place, and we’re going to continue that kiss –’ he stared at my mouth ‘– and go further.’

I’d have argued, at the very least mocked him for his ego, but as I got into the taxi, knowing how aroused I was, knowing if he’d suggested it I’d have been going home with him even then, I just couldn’t begin to form the lie. I was confused, aroused, torn between what my heart, my head and – frankly – my cunt were saying. And then my phone pinged.

Are you free tomorrow night?

I wasn’t, I was supposed to be covering a book launch. However, I knew I’d be calling in favours – and no doubt signing up for weekend shifts for weeks to come – to ensure I was available for whatever he had in mind. Lust wins.

I have a tendency to overthink. It’s something that developed when I was a child – I was always the precocious kid who would be told one simple thing which would then spin round in their brain until it was transformed into something completely different. My mum often repeats the story of the day, aged around ten, when we had a lesson about global warming at school and by the time I had ruminated on it for the afternoon I had come to the conclusion that we needed urgently to make a boat so we, the dog, our neighbours and Mrs Johnson, my class teacher, could all be safe when the tidal wave came. I actually drew the ten-year-old equivalent of blueprints and gave them to my mum so she could go to B&Q to start preparing, although my wonderful mum – used to these surreal conversations – showed me a picture of a cross channel ferry and told me Dad had already built it and had it waiting at the harbour for any eventuality.

Sadly these flights of fancy have not abated with age. In fact, if anything, they’ve got worse, or better if I’m trying to spin it in a ‘thinking through all angles’, overachieving sort of way. It never feels like that at 3am though, when everyone else in the world is asleep, every creak of the house sounds like something falling over, and something simple suddenly becomes more complicated.

I’d worked it all through in my mind, over and over, like an erotic ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book, complete with endings with varying degrees of satisfaction. My favourite was the one where James was secretly a dominant, but felt awkward bringing it up, and was thus sending me lots of subtle hints that he was into the same kind of thing I was, ranging from grabbing my hand to demanding my knickers – that
had
to be a sign, surely? Whether he meant for it to be or not we had fallen into the dominant and submissive roles, right? Unless I’d misread the signs, thrown myself into my fantasy world and thus assumed it matched his, and he was sitting at home wondering what on earth to do with a pair of M&S high leg pants and how to disentangle himself from the clearly loopy woman who’d pushed them into his palm. God, what WOULD he do with the pants? Would he give them back to me? Would he wash them first? Or did he have someone else to wash them? Oh god, which was worse? By the time I’d extrapolated a scenario whereby he posted my pants back to me, at the office, to be opened by our editorial assistant because he hadn’t marked the envelope ‘Private and Confidential’, I was almost frantic, blushing by proxy at the hideousness of it.

All I could do was to meet him, go to his house and see what happened – all the while trying to keep my head, not get my hopes up, and without doing anything so hideous I’d need to hide under the duvet for months to get over it. Simple.