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by Clarice Clique

  Mistress Smith turned away from Mistress Vee, though, and focused all her attention on Dean in a way that stimulated him more than Mistress Vee’s hand did.

  ‘Bend over the chair.’ Mistress Smith put her hands on her hips.

  ‘Yes, mistress.’ Dean went to the chair and positioned himself over it.

  Not certain how he should be, he settled on his hands and feet on the floor with his middle barely supported by the seat of the chair. It was uncomfortable, but he guessed that was the point.

  He heard heels clacking and twisted his head to see Mistress Smith coming towards him. She picked up the rope. Dean wondered how he would cope being tied up like this. Then the end of the rope thrashed down on his rump. Dean screamed. Someone clapped.

  Mistress Smith laughed. ‘Remember the safeword, worm? You want to use it now and thank Mistress Smith for being so gentle with you?’

  Dean opened his mouth, hoping he could control his voice. He took three deep breaths before he spoke. ‘I don’t need the safeword, thank you very much, Mistress Smith.’

  ‘Your choice.’ There was clear anger in Mistress Smith’s voice.

  Dean hoped it was part of the act. The rope came down on his back. Again he screamed.

  ‘Safeword?’

  ‘I am fine, thank you, mistress.’ He closed his eyes tightly and pictured his mistress.

  Three more times Mistress Smith hit him and asked him if he wanted to use the safeword, three more times he managed to resist. Then she stopped asking him; it was blow after blow after blow. He stopped screaming. He wanted to think it was because he had got control of himself, that he was strong enough to take the beating, but he knew it was because his voice had gone hoarse, his throat was as raw as the flesh on his back. The only relief was when she hit a new bit of his flesh; the rope on his thigh, his upper arm, was a caress in comparison with the relentless assault on his back and bottom.

  ‘Let me have a go,’ Mistress Janet said. ‘You’re having all the fun. You’re supposed to be teaching us.’

  Dean supposed Mistress Smith passed the other lady the rope. Mistress Smith didn’t say anything that he heard in terms of tuition, but Mistress Janet got on with it anyway. He could tell an immediate difference in the rope; it seemed to just land on his skin rather than come down with any force.

  ‘This is making my arm ache,’ Mistress Janet said. ‘I’m going to try something else.’

  Dean heard the rope drop to the floor. Mistress Janet’s hand slapped against his bottom. Dean found his voice again and cried out. Skin on skin was as much of a shock as the rope had been.

  ‘I prefer this.’ Mistress Janet’s voice was a squeak of excitement. Her hand came down again, this time harder, on his bare skin.

  ‘My turn.’ Mistress Vee giggled.

  Dean attempted to brace himself for whatever would happen next. But he wasn’t ready. Mistress Janet continued to spank him and Mistress Vee took a hold of his hair and raised his head to look at her. She smiled as, with her other hand, she raised her dress revealing she was wearing no knickers. There was a neat triangle of hair over her sex, but Dean did not have time to think or observe. She thrust her pussy against his face, laughing.

  He reacted by thrusting his tongue into her with all the strength he had left. Her scent and taste were the same, entering his nose and mouth, both sharp and sweet.

  ‘You’re good at this.’ Mistress Vee patted his head. ‘You have been trained well.’

  Dean’s tongue moved with added lust and love at the idea that one day his mistress would teach him how to lick her out.

  ‘Let’s see how good he is.’ Mistress Smith’s voice.

  He was yanked away from Mistress Vee and rolled onto his back on the floor. His body was cramped and painful; he could feel every nodule of his spine pushed against the hard concrete. Mistress Smith lowered herself onto his face. She was wearing black knickers that she did not remove, but he felt the heat of her sex even more than he had with Mistress Vee. He licked his tongue across the material, probing to find her pleasure spots. The other two mistresses were playing with his cock.

  ‘He’s going to come soon,’ one of them said. He felt lost between Mistress Smith’s thighs and could no longer distinguish which voice belonged to which woman.

  ‘I’m going to ride him.’

  ‘No, I found him. He’s mine. I’m going to take him.’

  He felt the weight of a person astride him, then the moistness, the tight moistness, as his cock slid into a woman for the first time in his life.

  ‘Don’t stop.’ That was Mistress Smith.

  He didn’t realise he had stopped. He flicked his tongue up and down as fast as he could. He thought of the unseen woman plunging up and down on his cock. He pictured his mistress, her nails scratching down his chest as she used him.

  The orgasm came like a punch in his stomach. Like he’d been sizing up someone for a fight for a long time and suddenly they’d made the first move and hit him.

  The women reacted with a strange mixture of laughter and anger which he couldn’t disentangle and make sense of.

  Giggles.

  ‘Fuck, he comes a lot.’

  ‘Did you have permission to come, you stupid slut?’

  Giggles.

  ‘Did I tell you you could come? Did I?’

  ‘This is fun.’

  ‘Just because you’re finished doesn’t mean we are. Do you understand that?’

  Yes. He understood that.

  Something was tied over his eyes, a pair of knickers – he didn’t know whose – were put in his mouth. He was flipped over onto his front. His body ached. The beating started again.

  He asked himself if he was happy. He wasn’t sure.

  He asked himself if he wanted this. Definitely.

  A new email popped up from Slave. I closed the chat I was having with someone calling himself Bikerboyz28, and would never find out whether he’d ever had sex with anyone on his Yamaha RD350LC. Yesterday I was learning about electric guitars, another day about light sabers, today motorbikes. If nothing else, I was building an impressive set of knowledge on boys’ favourite toys, which didn’t always seem to be girls.

  Slave had given me a detailed report of his encounter with the mistresses, but he never gave emotion. It was all Mistress Janet did this, Mistress Vee did that, and the occasional Mistress Smith said something. The man had lost his virginity from a task I gave him and I didn’t know whether to feel guilty or happy for him.

  I worried about the fact there had been three women when he was expecting one, that he went straight to their house rather than meeting in a public place, that they had used the safeword against him, turned it into a weapon, a matter of personal pride in breaking him. And he had taken everything in order to impress me.

  I replied to him asking for his feelings, his heart. I opened his email with trepidation.

  Dear Mistress,

  Thank you so much for emailing me. It makes me so happy to hear from you. I dream of making you as happy as you make me. If that is possible one day, I will be in heaven.

  You give me so many wonderful experiences. If you agree I would be very happy if I could call you Beatrice. When I saw how much Beatrice meant to Dante and the beautiful things he wrote about her, it made me think of you. You said I need to give you more emotion. You’ve shown me that you know me so much in the punishments you give me and the things you say to me that you probably already know this. I love you.

  I hope you don’t think that I am foolish for saying such a thing when I don’t even know your real name, what your job is or even how old you are, but love is the only word I can use to describe the way I feel when I’m with you.

  I’m sorry you didn’t like the report I gave you about my day with the mistresses. I tried to include everything like you’ve been training me. I don’t know how to tell you about my emotions. It was not something I was used to discussing before you took me on as your slave. I will try, though, as I have to obey
everything you tell me no matter how uncomfortable it makes me feel.

  I know that the woman had sex with me and I’ve lost my virginity, but I don’t feel any different. When I look in the mirror I can see the marks on my back, but it almost feels like it happened to someone else. I hope that makes sense.

  You ask me to give you every part of myself and not to hold anything back, so I will tell you this even though I’d rather not as I’m not sure what you’ll think of me. I hardly acknowledged it at the time, but when I thought about it later I realised that when Mistress Smith hit me for the first time I saw the face of my stepmother.

  Love from

  Your ever obedient slave

  I typed a reply immediately, ignoring the confession at the end and focusing on the thing that affected me most.

  Slave, you don’t know what love is. Use the word more carefully.

  Afterwards I reread his email and thought maybe I’d been too hasty in my response. What gave me the power to judge whether he loved me or not?

  He did.

  I sighed. Losing my own virginity had been less life-changing than his experience. I couldn’t even remember it clearly. A party. Drunk. Someone’s parents’ double bed. I’d even told my next boyfriend I was still a virgin, not deliberately misleading, but just because my teenage self refused to believe something that was supposed to be so important could be lost so inconsequentially.

  And it was true. In the ways that mattered I was a virgin until I met my lover. The actual act could be so disappointing, damp and limp. It meant nothing to me. Even Joe, who was physically remarkable, existed for me as a mental footnote in the time I was separated from my real lover. I was scared, but there was an important part of me that never doubted I would be reunited with the man I was meant to be with.

  When Slave told me he was a virgin, I guessed he was the same as I’d been, waiting for the experience that would open the sexual world up for him, reveal to him what it was really all about. But I think also that I knew. I always knew the reason. That was why I hadn’t asked the question.

  I phoned him now.

  ‘Hello, Beatrice. May I call you Beatrice? I’m sorry, mistress. Please forgive me for asking a question without obtaining permission. I’m a stupid, cock-loving slut and I’m squeezing my balls right now.’

  ‘Stop squeezing. Tell me why, slave, in a sexually promiscuous time and country, you have reached your 30s without losing your virginity?’

  ‘I’m a Christian, mistress.’

  My stomach ached as if all my memories were stored deep in my intestines. All those lectures in school, all those long Sundays at church, trying desperately to be a good girl, but always having a sense that I could never be good enough.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ I said.

  ‘I go to church most Sundays. I go to prayer evenings and Bible studies during the week and sometimes I lead the youth group.’

  ‘When you’re not too busy being whipped by strange women?’

  He gave a little cough. ‘It’s a different part of my life, mistress. I don’t think they overlap.’

  ‘You can’t compartmentalise like that. That is not how anything works. Everything leaks, spills over. Life is not neat.’ Like me, so long escaped from organised religion and here I am, fraught with a sense of sin at corrupting a good Christian man. If there was a God, this was just the sort of thing he’d do: throw a virgin slave in my path and see what I’d do.

  ‘With all respect, mistress, I know you are wise in so many ways, but in this way I think I know what I’m doing in my own life. They’re separate …’

  I put the phone down on him.

  There were times when he talked to me as I fell asleep. His voice could be soothing, unassuming. Then there were times I found out he was living a dual Christian life and reminding me of things I wanted to forget.

  He gave me too many reasons to dump him; he never let me reward him. Whatever and whyever I was doing this mistress thing, I should have moved on from him by now, found an easier, trustworthy sub.

  But for some reason I did still trust him.

  I got ready for bed, taking a book I’d picked up off Amazon with me, The Mistress Handbook. I flicked through the pages. I hadn’t ever needed to read a sub handbook, I hadn’t ever needed to think about how to obey my lover. But this slave had used the L-word and gifted me with his secret thoughts, I had to try my best, my master would expect it.

  Chapter Nine - Bottom

  The main thing, the only thing, which resonated with me from the things I researched about being a dominatrix was that a mistress could do whatever she wanted, wear what she wanted, say what she wanted. All that she had to do was feel confident in herself and retain control of her sometimes unruly slave.

  Apparently some male subs got off on being naughty then getting disciplined. I wondered if the one who had attached himself to me was like that. But no, his mistakes came from carelessness rather than purpose. Unless it was subconscious. He said he felt no guilt for what he was doing, that his play with mistresses did not infringe on his Church life. The Christian part of him could be rebelling, though, doing things wrong to try and be rejected so that his darker desires would be left unrequited and he could return to being what he seemed; a good Christian soldier, an upright citizen in a socially responsible job.

  He told me I wasn’t like any other mistress he’d encountered online in the perfection I demanded. His slips were in things like asking a question without obtaining permission first, revealing something in one of his online chatrooms about his relationship with me, looking into my face, generally annoying me with a smug comment.

  He had done all the punishments I’d given him. He’d emailed me photos of his long trip up to John O’Groats, him naked on the beach, the writing in the sand: “I AM A COCK-LOVING SLUT”. He’d danced in the middle of the town centre. He’d rolled around in nettles. He’d drunk a cold cup of tea with his own spunk replacing milk.

  Why was I worrying about his subconscious desires? It was supposed to be easy.

  On my bedside cabinet The Mistress Handbook had been replaced with Dante’s Divine Comedy. I permitted Slave to call me Beatrice. According to Wikipedia Dante may have only met his Beatrice twice and from that she became his lifelong muse. Did Slave know what courtly love was? The idolisation of an unknowable woman.

  There was no mysterious subconscious at work in my orders to Slave: read the classics, memorise poetry, recite Shakespeare to me. Go to art galleries, be creative, stop following football, watch BBC4 instead. In the car with him, when we’d only met a couple of times, I asked, ‘Have you ever had any fantasies about being the dom?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so, mistress.’

  ‘You’ve never wanted to do anything like spank a woman?’

  ‘No, mistress. I’ve never had any thoughts like that. The idea of spanking someone does nothing for me.’

  ‘But if you were going to dom a woman, what would you do? Pretend you’re my master now, what would you say to me?’

  A sideway glance. ‘Oh mistress, I couldn’t do that.’ Giggles. Then an attempt at a serious expression and a stern voice. ‘You will suck my cock now.’

  I laughed.

  He laughed.

  That night when I gave him permission to phone me, he said, ‘Mistress, I’ve been thinking about what you said in the car earlier. If you wanted me to be your dom then I would consider it an honour and I would practise and learn so I could be a good master to you and please you.’

  Half asleep, I replied, ‘You’ll never be my master.’

  He continued in the hushed, confessional tone of voice he often used. ‘After being with you I look at myself in the mirror and I realise I’m a wimp. I’m pathetic. I wish I could be the man you want rather than a sissy slut.’

  ‘You are what you are. You get to spend time with a woman you say you love. Don’t be ashamed, be happy.’

  At the darkest, blackest moments with my master I never wished either of
us to be different than we were. That was freedom. That was love.

  I didn’t know what the thing between Slave and I was.

  He was a distraction, to stop myself ringing and texting my lover. And as such he worked relatively well, but I needed something else to help me go cold turkey.

  Every morning I got up early and baked cakes. While they were in the oven I wrote a letter. Then I bundled the cakes and letter together and posted it to my lover.

  It’d started a few weeks ago when I was replaying the conversation with my lover where I mentioned rock cakes inexplicably. I pulled out my grandmother’s old recipe book and started baking. My logic was that my lover knew I didn’t like cooking, but he would see I was doing it for him, the same way I did everything for him. More than that, there was the sensuality of kneading dough, pressing my fingers into a mixture that would touch my lover’s lips, be swallowed down his throat and be ingested into his stomach and become a part of his body. I caressed cherries over my nipples, played apricots over my clit, kissed each and every sultana, before dropping the ingredients into the bowl. I would be part of his energy, his skin, his blood; I would be inside him.

  That is if he ate the things I sent him. But nothing was returned. Even if he didn’t read my letters, or eat my cakes, there would be a moment when he saw them and thought of me. There would be the seconds between picking up the parcel and dumping it in the bin when he was touching paper I’d touched.

  If it was romantic to write to my lover and send him homemade cakes every day then it didn’t suit us. If it was obsessional and wrong then it was us. The only difference I could see between romance and madness, though, was that in romance the recipient wanted to be obsessed over. But how could you know until you’d tried? Everything was a gamble, everything was luck.

  It was a Saturday. After posting my lover’s parcel, I vaguely considered going into the office. But I didn’t need work now I had a slave. I phoned him and ordered him to drive down to meet me. An hour and a half later he texted me to say he’d arrived. I switched off the cookery show on the television and started to get ready. First, a long leisurely bath, scented candles, masses of bubbles, a small glass of wine. Next lunch; brie melted over tomato chutney on toast, another glass of wine. Then getting dressed, hair and light make-up. I was in a good mood so, for Slave’s benefit, I matched my jeans and vest top with a pair of heels; black leather with bright red stilettos.