The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story (26 page)

I don’t know how long we sat there, but it was long enough for our breathing to slow. His hand on my hair was almost hypnotic and I was soothed as we sat quietly. Until he spoke again.

‘We still have to work on your posture. And your modes of address. Don’t we?’

Bugger. Where’s this coming from? How many times had I not called him sir in the last hour? And how bad had the slouching been? I pushed my shoulders back, closing the stable door after the horse has bolted? Possibly. But it couldn’t hurt could it?

He tweaked my nipple, bringing me out of my panic. ‘Don’t we?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes?’

Gah.

‘Yes, sir.’

He pulled me to my feet and freed my arms. I stretched a little, feeling happier and slightly more in control – for half a second, until he refastened them in front of me.

‘Bend over.’

My heart was pounding already as this posture was James’s preferred punishment stance.

Shit.

His voice was in my ear, It was harsh in a way that probably would have been less intimidating if I could see him, but that made me feel a jolt of genuine fear.

‘I won’t tell you again. Bend over.’

I trembled as I moved into position, but I didn’t think of disobeying. Was this progress or stupidity? I wasn’t entirely sure. He started hitting me, not with the crop but with something else. Something longer, with more give and which hurt so much that the air rushed out of my lungs with every strike in time with the swooshing noise of it cutting the air and connecting with my arse.

He hit one cheek, and then the other. There was no rhythm to it, nothing to count, no indication of how long it would last. I have no idea how many times he hit me, just that it hurt. It hurt so damn much. I’d never felt pain like it. Each strike hurt, and the feeling of the residual strikes was like a burning agony, layer upon layer of pain as he kept going. It made Charlotte’s punishment seem feather-light in comparison, and not knowing how long it would last made it feel impossible to bear.

Finally he stopped. His hand squeezed my arse and made me suck air in through my teeth.

‘Do you think you’ll remember now?’

My reply was garbled, desperate, quick. ‘Yes. Yes. Definitely.’

Quick and stupid. I realized the error as he moved away again.

‘Sorry. Sir. Yes, sir.’

He began again. The strikes were faster than I could process. Faster than I could endure. Each one cut across my arse leaving a line of agony. I was sure I was bleeding, I couldn’t imagine withstanding this amount of pain without it drawing blood.

I wanted to stop. But I didn’t want to disappoint him.
I didn’t want to use a safe word. I could withstand it. Not just out of stubborn bloody-minded pride, but because this was the most challenging thing we had ever done and I didn’t intend to fail it. But it hurt so much and I had no idea how long it would last and I just couldn’t cope. After the stresses and strains of the last few weeks at work, the humiliation and embarrassment of stripping earlier, the sensory deprivation that meant I couldn’t even look to him for reassurance, it was all too much.

I started to cry, snotty, guttural sobbing. I couldn’t stop myself. The noise sounded alien, shocking, even to my own ears. I sounded broken, desperate, wounded. He hit me a couple more times, and then I heard the clatter of whatever it was he was hitting me with landing on the floor. It had stopped. But I couldn’t. I cried as he undid my wrists and ankles, pulled the blindfold from my eyes, grabbed a blanket from somewhere I didn’t see. I cried as he led me to the sofa where he sat, patting his lap and encouraging me to curl up next to him and put my head on his thigh. I cried as he gently draped the blanket over my nakedness, making sure not to touch my arse as he did so. I cried until my throat was raw, until my sobs dissipated into snuffles and an occasional hiccup. I cried until I felt like I couldn’t cry any more. They were tears of catharsis, releasing a tension that I didn’t even know I was carrying. I felt broken down and rebuilt. They weren’t tears of upset, but I couldn’t stop them. So I cried, and through it all he just stroked my hair and waited.

And then I fell asleep.

I woke up in a puddle of my own drool. On his thigh. Classy. He must have thought I was a complete nut job, all things considered. In a split second everything that had come before flashed through my mind and I was horrified. I couldn’t remember the last time I had made such a complete twat of myself and I felt stupid, and embarrassed and tearful and sick. I wanted to fling on my clothes and run away and not ever look at him again, but doing that would have involved moving and that would have involved speaking and having him look at me. So I lay very still in the flickering light of the TV, which appeared to have been switched on at some point while I slept, trying to figure out what time it was and what on earth to do next.

‘Are you awake?’

His voice was solicitous, neither laughing nor seemingly concerned about the fact he’d invited a nutter into his home, and that this nutter had then jiggled about in unalluring fashion and nearly choked to death on his cock, before having a kind of panic attack and then passing out on his leg in a tidal wave of dribble.

The urge to feign sleep was strong but I figured he must have had his suspicions since he’d asked about ten seconds after I woke up. This probably meant I had been snoring on top of everything else. God, I could never see this man again.

My voice was quiet. ‘No.’

He laughed and the vibrations of it make me jiggle slightly on his leg.

He stroked my hair and I felt warmed by the connection.

‘ “No, sir.” Surely?’

Fuck. I went to sit up, desperate to set things straight before he started up again with whatever the hell that was. In my haste I managed to bash my arse with my foot and it hurt so much I whimpered. I began apologizing, saying ‘sir’ every other word, desperate, giddy, horrified, looking into his face with pleading eyes for reassurance.

He stopped me with a single finger to my mouth. He was smiling, kind.

‘Shhhhhhh. It’s OK. It’s OK. We’re done for now. And you did very well. Really well.’

He kissed me and adjusted the blanket so it covered us both better.

I think that was the moment when I started to fall in love with him.

From that point James and I settled into the typical first flushes of an almost-relationship. By unspoken agreement we didn’t define it, perhaps because subconsciously we felt that to do so might make the magic dissipate like early-morning mist, but we had a lot of fun. We spoke every day, either by phone or email, texting at odd little moments when that didn’t feel enough. We saw lots of films, walked by the river, spent hours talking over wine and cheese in a subterranean wine bar and generally did the sort of things that would be at home in the depiction of a burgeoning relationship in a chick flick. Except for the bit at the end where we’d go back to one or other of our homes and fuck and suck and bite and play until we were both exhausted and I was bruised and whimpering.

Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t joined at the hip. I visited Ella and Thomas, nipped home for my dad’s birthday weekend, and had a couple of shifts that involved Saturdays or Sundays at my desk. But while I was busily telling my subconscious this didn’t count as a new relationship yet, I thought of James throughout the day like a love-struck teenager, to the point where my first instinct when it came to talking about my day or sharing something great that had happened was to ring or text him. For six weeks we were almost permanently connected, always
just a few moments from speaking. And then I had to go away for work.

Hot on the heels of The-Big-Project-that-by-some-miracle-had-not-turned-into-a-catastrophe, I was asked to go and spend a week visiting another part of the company I work for, based in a different part of the country, to help them launch something similar. In typical journalistic fashion it meant long days and late nights, all of which meant I didn’t get to speak with James anywhere near as much as I had in the past few weeks. I missed him – not just for the smut, although my days were so packed that I found his absence made me especially wistful when I lay in bed at night and my mind finally had time to wander. But life was so busy that I didn’t get to speak to him much, and I certainly didn’t get a chance to write down my explicit fantasy of what we’d do the first night we were reunited that I’d promised to email to him while I was away. Frankly, hunched over my laptop at a hot desk ten hours a day meant by the time I got back to the hotel room – invariably after a few glasses of red and some war stories and gossip with colleagues about friends of friends from the incestuous world of journalism – I just wasn’t in the mindset to write anything sexy. And by the final night of my stay I figured it was enough that I’d be seeing him shortly and we could get reacquainted in person, particularly since, having asked about it a couple of times on the phone and by text, he hadn’t mentioned it since.

He rang not long after I’d got in from the pub. Freshly showered, I was curled up in bed with
Newsnight
on low when his name flashed up on my phone. I answered with
a smile in my voice, which dimmed slightly when I heard his tone. While he answered my questions about how his day had gone, told me his cats’ latest escapades, and asked politely about my launch, he was brusque in a way that left me feeling vaguely uneasy.

I soon found out why.

Normally our silences were easy but as the static on the line echoed in my ear and I waited for him to say something, I couldn’t think of anything to fill the void. It was obvious from the fact he’d rung that he wanted to talk about something specific, but waiting for him to begin was excruciating. In the long seconds I waited I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, knowing how important a part of my life he had become in such a short period of time, and wondering how I would cope with the grief at the loss of this undefined relationship, if that was what he was gearing up to. Although how could he end it? We hadn’t even properly decided what it was yet, damn it.

Finally he spoke. ‘Do you have anything you want to tell me?’

My mind froze up for a second and suddenly I felt guilt-ridden. I know, it’s ridiculous. I’d done nothing wrong that I could think of, but I still felt worried. What did he think I had to tell him? What had I done? I was one of the most boring people I knew – the closest thing to a secret I had was the D/s aspect of my life, and he knew all about that. My heart was racing but I had no idea what I was supposed to say and the knowledge of my ignorance made me feel completely powerless – and not in the way that would normally make my pulse race.

‘Well?’ I didn’t think his voice in my ear could get even more irritable, but it most definitely had.

I took a deep breath and went to speak but, honestly, I had nothing. I let the breath out and tried to at least sound calm. ‘Like what? Is everything OK?’

Seconds ticked by. ‘Do you think everything’s OK, Sophie?’

Shit. What did he mean by everything? Everything in the world? Everything in our non-relationshipy relationship? Everything we’d talked about today? I needed clues, something so I didn’t feel this bloody tentative. ‘I think so. Why? Do you not? Has something happened?’

His response was quick. ‘No, Sophie, nothing’s happened, which is rather my point.’

I like to think that on a normal day, when my head wasn’t fuzzy with a couple of glasses of wine and rising concern over him using my name twice in quick succession – one thing I’d learned with James was that this was a sign of impending trouble – I’d have got it then. Of course on this occasion I didn’t, which was my eventual downfall.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you think I mean, Sophie?’ Three Sophies. This was bad. And I still had no clue.

I tried to tamp down the sound of my frustration, as I knew that would just makes things worse, but it was touch and go. I bit the words out – this kind of powerlessness makes me want to kick things. ‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.’

He sighed, and I felt a pang at annoying him, in spite of
the fact he was fast annoying me to the point I wished I’d just not picked up the phone when he rang and told him later I was asleep. ‘What was the one thing you were supposed to do this week, Sophie?’

Oh. Bugger. He hadn’t forgotten. Of course not.

‘The email, of course, the email. I’m sorry I haven’t got round to it, it’s just work’s been so mad, the net connection at the hotel’s rubbish, I’ve not been feeling especially sexy and, well, I’m just so tired every night …’ I tailed off. My voice sounded whiny even to me.

His voice was so quiet that I had to put a finger to my other ear to block out the world to hear it. ‘I asked you to do one thing Sophie. Have you done it?’

Suddenly I had a lump in my throat and an odd ache in my heart and I wished with every fibre of my being that I had a different answer for him. And this wasn’t playing, wasn’t fun. It was about me feeling bad for having let him down, for – perhaps – having inadvertently hurt him by not doing something to prove I’d been thinking of him while I’d been away, and for not obeying him in the way I should have. It was odd. On one level it felt like an irrational feeling, but it was definitely a deeply felt one.

My voice was quiet. ‘No. I haven’t. I’m sorry.’

There was no noise on the line but static, and as I listened to it the feeling of guilt at letting him down weighed on me.

‘I put something into the side pocket of your overnight bag. Go and get it.’

I don’t know what I was expecting when I opened the brown paper bag, but my trepidation dissipated when
I pulled out four pairs of chopsticks not unlike those you’d get at your local Chinese takeaway.

‘So what have you got?’

I couldn’t hide the bemusement in my voice. ‘Chopsticks. Enough for a party, actually.’

He chuckled and for a moment he was my James and even though he was pissed off I felt a little less worried. And then he was back to business. ‘You’ll need three pairs, and the rubber bands.’

Rubber bands? I dug them out of the bottom of the bag. Hmmm.