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.
3
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.
I hit the jackpot. The low-paid, unglamorous jackpot, admittedly, but a jackpot nonetheless. The paper I did most of my work experience at offered me a job. My dad was horrified when I told him what the starting salary was – definitely not a graduate wage, much less a postgraduate wage – but living so far from the city meant I could afford to survive, as long as I didn’t worry too much about luxuries. Like heating. Or going out much. I didn’t care though. I was an actual working journalist, with a byline. One day on the way home I even saw someone on the train reading a page with my name in the middle of it. I was so giddy I nearly missed my stop. I couldn’t have been prouder if I was writing for a national newspaper. Plus restaurant reviews and theatre reviews meant I could still have a little taste of luxury every so often, even if because I was the newest I always got lumbered with the knuckle-gnawingly awful am dram.
The life of a junior reporter is a busy one. I was far from home and with very little opportunity for a social life, bar post-deadline drinks as we deconstructed how our stories had been subbed. My best friend from college, Ella, had found a job on a paper twenty miles away, so I saw her as much as possible, but with weekend jobs, evening jobs and everything else going on, I spent a lot of time alone.
But while switching on my little portable heater didn’t feel like a necessity, an internet connection did. It provided me a way to email and social network with friends from uni and my journalism course, keep in touch with my family, play games, and then, when I was feeling lonely and like I wanted to flirt with someone, gave me a space not only to chat to people who were similarly bored and looking to talk but also to discuss things that I’d never dare broach in person.
I genuinely think that the internet has, for all intents and purposes, changed the landscape of sexuality. No matter how perverse your kink, you can bet there is someone out there on the web who shares it. Unfortunately, there’s probably another three who actually think your kink is not perverted enough and given half a chance will tell you how the way they do it is more intense/sexier/just outright better than yours. Frustratingly enough, the most noticeable thing about dipping a toe into the BDSM subculture online is that there’s as much judging of each other from inside the ‘lifestyle’ – I promise that’s the last time I’m using that phrase as I think it sounds pretentious in the extreme – as there is from the outside.
That said, there are some lovely people out there, once you look past the slightly odder ones. I’ve had some amazing, sexy and intelligent conversations with people I’ve met on various sites, who’ve sparked my imagination, reassured me, even become good real-life friends.
You do have to wade through some crap though.
I joined my first smut site the year I started work. Apart from those interludes with Ryan, which kep
t me in wank fantasies for years afterwards, I hadn’t met anyone who’d interested me sexually at all, much less shown any obvious signs of being compatible with my burgeoning submissive tendencies. I was so focused on work and my day-to-day life that taking the effort to finding anyone felt too much like faff. That, paired with a penchant for literotica.com porn, which read as hot and yet very unreal to my ever-practical eyes, meant I figured my fantasies would stay just that. Over time I even wondered if perhaps I was romanticizing my experiences with Ryan. Could pain actually have brought me that much pleasure, or was I just looking back with rose-tinted glasses on a sexy time in my life?
Then, over a drink a friend told me about a site she’d stumbled across that was basically a chat and dating site for kinky people. The details she gave were vague – and heaven forfend I would ask her outright about it, thus betraying my interest – but there was enough info there that when I got home and did a bit of Googling I found my way to where I wanted to be.
Some people say that nowadays these kind of sites are full of fakes, cliques and people wanting you to pay them. I didn’t notice many pros but, fresh out of uni and on a trainee reporter’s wage, if someone was looking for someone to fleece it was never going to be me. It felt like a whole new world full of people who knew each other and were talking a language that I didn’t quite grasp, with many using an elaborate form of pronouns (always capitalized for the dominant, always lower case for the submissive no matter whether it was the start of a sentence or the word ‘I’), which I found ridiculous. I decided quickly that committing crimes against grammar was a hard limit for me.
The message boards were filled with people talking about events they’d been to, things they’d bought, stuff they’d done, some of which made me wet, some of which made me shudder. I read people discussing the art of shibari rope bondage, St Andrew’s crosses, needle play, ponygirls and a thousand other things that had never entered my world before. And for a while I lurked in a virtual corner, quiet and unsure, like the country mouse if he’d pitched up at the town mouse’s for the weekend to find him wearing rubber, holding a crop and hosting a play party. It was surreal and yet intoxicating. Could these people be for real, doing this stuff while holding down jobs, making sure they paid their council tax on time and all the other little complexities of life? It seemed a million miles away from my existence. I was intrigued.
The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story Page 4
