The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story (5 page)

‘Soph, it’s beautiful. Are you going to wear it tonight?’

It was a gift as surprising as it was stunning. Being a tomboy at heart it was not the kind of thing I would normally have chosen to wear and, if I was being honest, it seemed an unusually tender gift for him to give me.

But that was really by the by. As my fingers caressed the delicately finished edge I looked over at Catherine.

‘How could I not?’

With forty minutes before I was due to leave to meet him, though, there wasn’t much time for fussing. I picked a pair of tailored trousers which I knew flattered my arse, hopped in the shower and was back and ready to be laced up within twenty minutes.

The bodice was rigid and boned, with black ribbons running through eyelets down the back. Since there was no way I was going to be able to do it up myself, Catherine came in and, once I’d slipped it on and tried to adjust myself into it as much as possible, began the process of lacing me up. It was a very long process.

As her thankfully nimble fingers pulled the laces tight between each individual set of eyelets I felt my body – and my mindset – alter. My posture changed, my curves seemed to swell and contract into an hourglass figure unlike anything I could ever have imagined possible. My breathing became shallow, my movement was curtailed and my busy day, the hassles of the journey home, even the bitter-sweetness of the night ahead, all faded into
obscurity. All I could feel was nerve endings tingling, and a roaring sound in my head. My nipples, pressed tight into the boned panels, were taut and aching and suddenly hard-wired to my cunt. I could feel myself getting wet just standing in the thing, and momentarily rued the fact I had gone for trousers since the seam between my legs was only going to add to the distracting sensations.

There was no time to change though, even if I’d wanted to. Thankfully I’d sorted out my minimal make-up and hair beforehand, as Catherine had tied the laces off with an efficiency that meant my movement was seriously – and surprisingly – hampered. It had pulled me in and up in such a way that my breasts were spilling over the top of the bodice, pale and soft against the green. Suddenly I had a cleavage that was distracting to me, never mind anyone who was face-on to it. I made a mental note to throw on a jacket I could do up to the neck for the tube journey there.

As Catherine clasped my waist and turned me round to get the full view she unconsciously ran a gentle finger along the edge of the bodice above one of my breasts, only catching herself when I shivered slightly at the additional sensation. She blushed slightly and we both laughed.

‘Sorry, it’s the velvet. It’s screaming out to be stroked.’

By the end of the night it wasn’t the only thing doing that.

The journey to the restaurant was interesting. We met at Oxford Circus tube, and apart from a glance of appreciation as he saw me for the first time that was lustful enough to make me blush, Ryan didn’t make a comment
about my chosen outfit as we walked to the restaurant and got shown to our table. But as I tried to find a way to settle myself comfortably in the seat he bit back a smile. I realized that the corset wasn’t as innocuous as it first looked. It was a beautiful and yet fiendish form of restraint.

Dinner was lovely but eating too much wasn’t an option. As I excused myself for a loo trip he smiled at the way I moved, so different to my usual carefree, hundred-mile-an-hour dash through life. My movement was careful, slow, and I felt like a different person – more aware of my femininity, aware of every nerve ending, more submissive, more demure even – and that’s not something I’ve ever really been big on.

It was also, unexpectedly, making me feel ridiculously horny. Well, honestly, it was just an outfit – you weren’t seriously expecting me to say it changed my entire personality, were you? However, I was fast realizing this corset was a kind of subtle and totally unexpected bondage. Our dinner was one of the most sensual meals of my life, which is quite impressive for a small Italian with a student-friendly budget tucked behind Oxford Street. I spent the evening aroused and desperate to go home, my skin flushed and eyes sparkling in the candlelight.

We finally went back to mine. He stripped my trousers and knickers from me, tied my hands behind my back with the ribbon from the box, which I’d chucked on the floor in my haste earlier, and then we fucked. He sat on the stool and I rode him, grinding myself on to him until we were both gasping.

He pulled my breasts free from the constraints of the corset, but the respite was brief before he turned his teeth and fingers to my aching nipples. As I panted, my breathing shallow and constricted by the cruel beauty of the boning, he frigged my clit and sucked my breasts until I came, shuddering and whimpering in a hybrid of pleasure and pain.

With small tremors still reverberating through my limbs I sank to the floor and finished him off with my mouth, looking through my by-now wild hair into his eyes, watching him stare greedily at the anachronism of Merchant Ivory purity and slutty debauchedness I presented kneeling at his feet. As he tangled his hands into my hair and fucked my mouth for the final few thrusts I sucked him deep, drinking him eagerly.

We said goodbye the next day. We were both exhausted, sated and my body was covered with bruises, not only on my arse but also around my breasts and torso from Catherine’s enthusiastic tightening of the corset and the harsh boning beneath it. The brush that had started it all (and with which I received my hardest punishment to date at the end of that last night) went back to the States with Ryan as part of his leaving present.

I’ve never met him again, although I often think about him. I wonder about looking him up on one of the plethora of social networking sites but then I think, ‘well, he hasn’t looked for me’, and wonder if it’s best to leave things be. I know this sounds like hippyish crap, but I do believe we meet people for a reason. Looking back on it now, what Ryan and I did together was relatively tame.
But it was my first taste of playing with someone who was a dominant foil to my submissiveness, who didn’t judge me for what turned me on and let me see fully the depths of what did the same for him. I’ll always feel gratitude for that, and smile at the fun we had together.

He also left me the corset, which I will concede is proof that some outfits can be fun. I still have it. I even wear it sometimes, although it is so tainted with memories of that night, even all these years later, that just slipping it on and beginning to get tightened up into it sees my juices begin to pool between my legs, my nipples harden and my breath catch.

The rest of my degree passed quickly. I realized once he’d gone that my feelings for Ryan were deeper than I had admitted even to myself. Feeling forlorn at the loss, plus grappling with pesky finals and a dissertation, left me the definition of all work and no play.

Even when I did find people who might tempt me away from my self-imposed exile, our interludes were veritably vanilla and attempts to try and make them otherwise ended in disaster. I asked one partner (Graham, Geography) to spank me while we were shagging and saw him look at me in horror before – if you’ll forgive the pun – giving me a few half-arsed slaps and then resuming what he’d been doing before. He never called again.

Another time, when I asked another prospective date (Ian, Maths) in what I hoped was a coquettish fashion whether he fantasized about doing anything particularly kinky, he blushed slightly and told me he quite fancied
having sex with me while he wore my clothes. I think I managed to keep my face from betraying any horror – goodness knows I have enough proclivities of my own for it to be churlish to respond negatively to anyone else’s – but I didn’t end up seeing him again, funnily enough.

It’s fair to say I missed Ryan a lot. Although I did find it easier sitting on the wooden chairs of the lecture hall after he’d gone.

The end of my university life passed by in a flurry of deadlines – essays, work for the university paper, and then far too quickly and yet oh-so-inevitably, the avalanche of exams. I crammed desperately, focusing on the next exam, memorizing facts and figures, reading and rereading texts and then regurgitating them on endless blank sheets of A4 in, I hoped, a semblance of sense before moving on to the next subject to rinse and repeat. Three weeks after finals had finished I pretty much forgot everything I had ever learned, and while this would have horrified my parents, I didn’t mind so much. The most important thing university taught me, I think, was confidence. Not necessarily confidence in myself over all things – who’d want to be that kind of ego on legs anyway? But more a sense that I could cope with anything life threw at me with a fairly calm head and a sense of humour. My next task was to find my place in the world. I knew I wanted it to involve writing, but I was realistic. People worked for years to try and become novelists, and since I had the attention span of plankton and the longest thing I’d managed to write was a dissertation I decided the first thing to do was get a job.

I moved back with my parents shortly after graduation and gave my CV to temp agencies for admin and
typing jobs (a handy side effect of writing as much as I had through university was that I could type really fast). A recruitment consultant showed me how to use a foot-operated Dictaphone machine and tested how fast I could type things played back on it. When the results pinged back at 75 words a minute even with my clunky two-fingered typing she was thrilled, and over a period of months began sending me out to various places to work, typing, filing and generally being a professional office minion, all the while saving money as I figured out my next move.

Returning to my childhood home – with all the associated roast dinners and fussing that entailed – was a wonderful feeling, but by Christmas I knew that I needed to be making plans to move out. I’d become accustomed to my independence and despite the comfortable routine I’d fallen back into, I missed having my own space, eating cereal for dinner at 10pm if I fancied it, or having a bath at 3am if I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Around about the same time I began to find my temporary job was feeling distressingly permanent. I didn’t mind the work, but there was a point where I worried it was just a matter of time before my brain would start seeping out from between my ears. It was repetitious, often dull, and at one particular office where I’d been asked to transcribe a letter that could only really be described as word-babble I found myself almost despairing. There had to be more than this. I needed to figure out what I was going to do and start doing it soon – and since my vows to start writing a novel had been scuppered by commuting, internet
gaming and trips to the cinema it needed to be something achievable sooner rather than later.

I went to my local paper. I had a long and really helpful conversation with the news editor there about what life was like as a hack. Looking back without the wide-eyed optimism of youth, I realize now she was mostly warning me of the terrible pay, long hours and interminable council meetings. But then she suggested I go out on a job with the paper’s photographer, come back and write it up. I stopped long enough to borrow a notebook before I was trotting down to the photographer’s car.

No one has ever taken a primary school harvest festival picture story as seriously as I did that day. I wrote down the names and ages of all the children – it sounds simple but is akin to herding cats while keeping track of them all. I asked the slightly nonplussed headmistress probably a dozen questions, some of which seemed to actively confuse her. I was Woodward. I was Bernstein. I was both of them at once, albeit with a particular interest in tinned goods. As we walked back to the car Jim, the photographer, was grinning at me.

‘You really enjoyed that, didn’t you?’

I nodded, feeling a bit sheepish and hideously uncool.

‘You did a good job. Nice one.’

I was pretty much floating on air as I got back to the office and prepared what was undoubtedly the most overwritten piece about a harvest festival ever. The news editor nodded at me when I handed it to her.

‘That’s fine. Nothing else we need there.’ Later I’d learn that newsrooms weren’t places for effusive praise, but
even a seemingly understated reaction –
fine? Just fine? What about the bit where I got the headmistress to talk about the most unusual thing that the children had brought in for the harvest boxes?
– couldn’t dampen my enthusiasm. I’d written for school and university magazines and papers, but that wasn’t the same. This was. It came through my parents’ front door and everything. I was hooked. I was going to become a journalist. As soon as I figured out exactly how you did that.

Seven months later I moved out again, permanently. I’d done my research on respected postgrad journalism courses around the country, been horrified at the prices of courses in my immediate vicinity and come to the conclusion that a college around four hours’ drive from my parents was the best option – it was almost a fifth of the price of nearby courses and as such with my savings and a bit of weekend work I’d be more than able to survive while I studied. My parents drove me to my new flat in convoy, with my most treasured belongings literally stuffed into every corner of the cars. They took me to the supermarket once we’d unloaded to buy me shopping to last well into the first term, and my mum insisted on a cafe lunch, seeming genuinely worried I wouldn’t be eating, and – once my dad had checked the security of all the windows and doors, and had a mooch round outside to try and get a look at whether my neighbours looked suitably undodgy – they left me to unpack. I was living on my own for the first time, and I loved it.

The year flew by. Every week made me more sure I had
chosen the right course of action. I loved the challenge of interviewing people, the creativity of writing and even the more dry elements of the course – law and endless lessons about how councils worked – suddenly seemed fascinating, acting as a key to the door of my potential dream job. Our class had people from all over the county, ranging from those wanting to become broadcast journalists to a guy whose dream job was to be the football correspondent for Tranmere Rovers. We all wanted to be there though, and settled in as a fairly cohesive group, albeit tempered with a kind of friendly competitiveness which made for occasionally hilarious drunken chats about how particular assignments had gone. As suggested by our lecturer, we had all secured as much work experience as possible through the year, in the vague hope that it would lead to paid work as soon as we finished.