I swallowed round the chopsticks the best I could before lisping my ‘yes’, shutting my eyes at the ridiculous sound I made.
‘I have punished you like this because you’ve been a silly little girl and this is how silly little girls get punished.’ If I was being my normal smart-arsed self I’d have said something then, or at the very least rolled my eyes at his use of the word ‘girl’. As it was, I lay there in shamed silence, trying not to dribble, my swollen tongue aching desperately in my mouth.
‘You are a silly little girl aren’t you?’
Oh no, I thought, please don’t do this. Being called a good girl, at a push, is something I felt worrying pangs of joy at by then, but this … I felt myself clamping my lips around the chopsticks and my protruding tongue in silent rebellion.
‘Slap yourself again.’
Even as I was forming thoughts of outrage my hand was moving to do his bidding. I thanked him.
‘Tell me.’
I sighed. Opened my mouth. Closed it. Tried again. Suddenly the chopsticks seemed to be in the way of my teeth when I tried to speak, in a way they weren’t a few seconds before.
The shame was audible even if the actual words weren’t, thanks to my immobilized tongue. ‘I’m a silly little girl.’
‘Silly little girls blow raspberries don’t they?’
I was whimpering acquiescence to everything he was saying, agreeing desperately to anything that would make this end because it hurt so much and felt so humiliating.
‘Can you blow a raspberry now?’
I was gabbling, my words incomprehensible for anything but a lisping tone of desperation. ‘No, no I can’t.’
‘Try,’ he hissed.
Come on, Sophie, this’ll soon be over. This has to be the worst it can get. With tears streaming down my face, I tried. Desperately, repeatedly, I blew air out of my mouth, huffing pathetically, my lips unpursed, unpursable, desperate for it to end, for my aching jaws to close.
And then of course it got worse.
‘Put a hand between your legs. What do you feel?’
I flushed. I knew what I was going to feel as, in spite of everything, I was achingly wet. The increasingly wet sound of the palm of my hand as I slapped myself had given it away by degrees, even without the glistening proof on my fingers.
‘Too shy to say? Press your fingers to that outstretched tongue of yours. Taste yourself. Tell me.’
I moved my hand to my aching mouth and transferred the taste of my body’s betrayal of my mind to my throbbing tongue. With gritted teeth I told him what he already knew. ‘I’m wet.’
‘What?’
In this second I loathed James even as I wanted to obey him. I wanted to best him with my submission. In my mind this was a competition and I could only win by not wussing out now. Delusional? Possibly. I blame it on the lack of blood to my tongue. Through gritted teeth, I bit out the words: ‘I’m wet.’
‘Good girl.’
My loathing dissipated and I felt a burst of pride, before a slight twinge of panic at how conditioned I was becoming.
‘Now make yourself come. Once I’ve heard you bring yourself off I’ll let you remove all the clamps.’
I honestly don’t know if it would have made it better or worse if I’d come easily at his treatment of me then. For what it’s worth, the pain in my tongue and the difficulties I had swallowing away the drool, paired with a deep-felt feeling of humiliation and remorse meant I was distracted and unable to come easily. By the time I begged him for my orgasm, my voice high-pitched and desperate and unintelligible, my body sore and aching, I felt like he had stripped me of everything. I was totally his, for better or worse, and I wouldn’t ever make an error like that again.
As I came back to earth, tentatively removing the clamps from my breasts and tongue and feeling the surging agony as blood began pulsing through them again, I felt exhausted, utterly spent and oddly upset. I wanted to speak to him, but I didn’t know what to say. I felt so ashamed – both at having disappointed him and having just done so many humiliating things at his bidding, at my own hand – that I couldn’t shrug the feeling off and converse normally. I felt more tongue-tied than I had with the sodding clamp on.
He was incongruously and yet reassuringly solicitous, asking me if I was OK, whether I needed to find some ice to help with my sore tongue. Ridiculously, his kindness made my eyes fill with tears again.
My voice sounded crackly as I tried to speak, my mouth dry after having been forcibly held open for so long. ‘I’ll be fine, thank you.’ I knew I would be, but I also knew this lesson would stay in my mind for a long time, and that I would never look at chopsticks in quite the same way again.
‘Good girl.’
I swallowed quietly and with a plaintiveness I couldn’t quite shake said, ‘I am sorry, you know.’
His voice was warm, comforting. ‘I know. And if you want I can give you another assignment to make it up to me.’
Even before he’d finished the sentence I was agreeing with him, asking for my chance to make amends. He directed me back to my bag, this time to the front outside pocket – I was fast realizing I should have paid more attention to what exactly was in my luggage – where there was a small drawstring bag which he told me to pull open. I took out a small vibrator, a butt plug and a sachet of lube.
As I looked at the collection of items on the edge of my bed my heart started pounding again, not sure after everything that had come before that I could endure anything more that night. He told me he wanted me to plug my own arse, and push the vibrator high into myself and write a new assignment, but instead of telling him what I fantasized about us doing when we were reunited he wanted me to explain how I felt during every humiliating moment of the punishment I had just endured, all while desperate to come. I was not to orgasm until I’d finished and emailed the piece to him to read. It needed to be at least 2,000 words long – unless I came before I’d finished, in which case it needed to be an extra 1,000 words for each ‘accident’. And if he didn’t have it at some point in the few short hours before I was due to finish up and return home to see him, he would punish me again, in person, maybe with the tongue clamp as he knew now how much I hated it and was actually amused at the idea of seeing me try to speak round it while he caned me.
My mouth was dry as I stared with trepidation at the butt plug, which was significantly thicker than anything else I’d had in my arse. My voice wavered. ‘It’s almost 1am.’
I imagined his smile. ‘I know. I should go to bed, I need to get up early for work. I suggest you get started.’
I shoved myself full and, aching all over, sat myself at the little desk in the anonymous hotel room. I wrote for hours, desperate to explain myself, to apologize, to please him. The responsibility weighed heavily on me, and finally, by the time I finished writing something that I was pleased with, I ended up with just a few hours’ sleep before my final day on site.
I felt a fair amount of trepidation on the journey home. I had been adamant, from the beginning, that I wasn’t into having a relationship where any day-to-day girlfriend/boyfriend stuff was tinged by D/s, where if I did something to upset him in regular life he could bring about retribution through pain or humiliation. I didn’t think that was what the previous night had been, but I felt unsure; it was definitely closer to the line than I had hoped. He hadn’t replied to or even acknowledged my email. I couldn’t help worrying that perhaps I had crossed a line. Or he had. I just couldn’t see how things could go back to their relatively easy-going norm.
And then I got off my train, wheeled my errant bag across the concourse while trying to keep hold of the handbag slipping off my shoulder, and shoved a ticket at the man at the barrier. I tried to figure out how I would get home and whether I should ring James when I did. Then suddenly, he was in front of me, smiling. He folded me into a hug and then kissed me thoroughly, until both of us were looking wistful and in need of a private corner. He took my hand in one of his and the handle of m
y wheelie case in the other and started leading me out of the station. Suddenly my oppressive nervousness about coming home had dissipated and all I felt was joy to have him there, to be with him. Well, that and the usual amount of lust …
15
The lust between us was definitely ongoing. I’d experienced the honeymoon phase of several relationships, and with Thomas there had been a real sense of enjoying ticking a selection of different experiences off the list, but with James the sexual tension was something different. It was always there. In part, I had no doubt, that was because I found him unutterably attractive, but somehow the D/s element of our relationship tinged everything else; everything was potent with possibilities. It was fun, and – even more so than any ordinary sexual pairing – gave me a feeling of a shared secret; that we had these special moments between us that no one else could know about or impinge on.
At any moment the atmosphere between us could shift a little, and then suddenly things would change. We’d be curled on the sofa, watching TV, when he would lean over and tickle me. I’d poke him in the ribs to stop him, and then suddenly he would have my wrists held in his hand. We’d lie there, continuing to watch the show, his hand firmly holding both of mine, tightening imperceptibly when I shifted to move them and silently, playfully tested him to see if he would let me go. Then suddenly he would get up and disappear from the room, returning with rope to twist around my wrists, tying them firmly but not uncomfortably in front of me for the duration of our time on the sofa. It was an odd dynamic, blurring the lines between sexuality and those quiet moments of a relationship where you’re just enjoying hanging out, being together doing random things, but I found it intoxicating. We would lie there, in companionable quietness, reading the papers or whatever, with a small nod to the less conventional element of our relationship. These little moments made the air heavy with anticipation; with my hands bound, I might lean forward slightly awkwardly to pick up my tea, which thrilled James – he loved seeing me working round the difficulties he put in my path, even while he came up with ever more fiendish ways to challenge me further – or his hand might slide into my top or stroke my shoulder as I sat there in my restraints. The blurring of the line between the two contexts – sex and ‘normal’ life – made for an intriguing blend, though: at any moment things could change, and even simple things, like me lying on the floor in front of the TV while he sat on the sofa, suddenly became weighted with a strange kind of double meaning. Watching Question Time had never been so fun.
As the weeks passed we got more into the rhythm of life together. We weren’t together all the time – both of our jobs were very busy and involved a lot of out-of-hours meetings and socializing – but we met at least one night in the week and at some point on the weekends when I wasn’t working. Things were easy going, fun; the D/s element of what we were doing ebbed and flowed a little bit, but in a good, reassuring way. Some nights we’d curl up in bed and chat, or he’d rub my back if I’d spent a long time the car and was feeling achy. The duality of it felt really right. Of course that means that when suddenly the ground beneath your feet shifts again, things feel even more intense …
Barring the tongue-clamping debacle, I’d say I’m usually pretty good with deadlines. As a journalist it’s drummed into you. You don’t miss a deadline. Ever. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. A deadline is a deadline is a deadline. That’s it. No matter what pressure you’re under or how close to the wire you get, the adrenaline kicks in and you make sure you make it. Because there’s no sliding scale. You either hit or you don’t. And if you don’t then it’s game over, whether you’ve missed the boat by a millimetre or a mile.
But that’s when I’m trying to finish a page lead, or put some breaking copy on one of our websites. Sometimes, with the best will in the world, other deadlines seem almost unreachable.
I was crying. Tears had run down my face in rivulets and splashed on to my naked breasts, tiny drips which did nothing to cool the flush across my chest, which signalled both arousal and embarrassment. In a small corner of my mind I was worried there might be a little snot too, but since my hands were cuffed behind me there was no surreptitious way to brush it away even if was there. Suddenly, as he moved, any similarities between me and the woman from the Blair Witch Project seemed the least of my worries. James’s hand tangled viciously in my hair, pulling my head so I was forced to look him in the eye, see his dominance reflected back at my submission.
It was breathtaking, terrifying, and did nothing to help me regain the shattered vestiges of my equilibrium.
My breath was coming fast in little sobs that I was trying my best to swallow. I bit my lip, staring past his ear into the middle distance, trying to pull myself together, trying to process the conflicting sensations and emotions flickering through me. Pain. Fear. Excitement.
James’s voice, so close to me that his breath kissed my face, actually made me jump.
‘Do you understand?’
I went to nod, realized that his hand was clamped so tightly into my hair that it would hurt, and instead forced the words through parched and trembling lips.
‘Yes, sir.’
Calling him ‘sir’ was something that came much more easily by then, to the extent I’d even caught myself mentally referring to him that way. He’d made me call him ‘Master’ a couple of times, although that chafed. That night I would have called him Grand Vizier Smorgasbord of the Planet Zarg if I thought it would help. But it wouldn’t. This was a new level of dominance, requiring a new level of submission, and while the pooling of my juice under me proved that I was enjoying stepping up to the plate, I was more on the back foot than ever before. This was affecting me more than the tongue clamping, or the increasingly intense evenings we’d had together since my return from that trip, in between the fun stuff, the trips to the cinema and the pub and cooking together. It was liberating, terrifying, challenging.
His voice was charming. ‘Good. Well, since we’ve not been counting up to this point, I think we’ll assume that I’ve given you twenty smacks so far. Does that sound reasonable?’
I agreed quickly, eagerly, having no idea how many times he’d hit me but thinking this sounded like a suitably high number. There shouldn’t be too much more to endure; I didn’t think he’d ever punished me so extensively before so –
‘If we count on to a hundred, I think that’ll be fair.’
At his words I started trembling again, harder than I had at any point so far. What the fuck was it with him and the round number one hundred?
It had started with, I thought, a relatively playful spanking. He had me strip and sit on the high-backed chair, spreading my legs wide in the cool seat so he could secure an ankle to each chair leg, leaving me open wide to his gaze – and his hand. He had a definite gleam in his eye when he produced the handcuffs, pulled my hands behind the chair and secured me into place. But it wasn’t until he disappeared off to the kitchen and came back with a wooden spoon and two clothes pegs that the alarm bells started ringing fully, and by then there wasn’t a huge amount I could do other than struggle ineffectually against the chair.
He played with my breasts to start with, running his hands over and around them. His touch was soothing, lulling me into a feeling of security. He lightly pinched my nipples, watching them harden, my body basking in his attention. Then he put his mouth around my nipple, lapping at it and suckling deep until I closed my eyes in bliss at the sensation.
I should have known better. Almost as soon as I relaxed into his ministrations, he changed, grazing my nipple with his teeth, getting harsher, biting, until I cried out. My moans of pain didn’t stop him though, and both my breasts were wet with his saliva and red with marks from biting and vicious suckling by the time he put the pegs on. My breasts were sore by then and since the pegs were household-style robust wooden clothes pegs, they hurt as the springs snapped back into place, making for a whole new layer of agony. I clenched and unclenched my hands in the cuffs, trying to become acclimatized
to the pain, blushing at how intently he stared at my breasts, bouncing with the movement of the deep breaths I was pushing through my nose as I tried to withstand the sensations.
I was so intent on dealing with the tight hot pain in my nipples, which was fast becoming the centre of my world, that I forgot about the spoon until he slapped one of my breasts with it. He’d slapped my breasts with his hands before but this, particularly after the biting and suckling, really hurt. The layers of pain were running one on top of another, like conflicting currents, like waves rushing in my head. In that moment my entire world was focused only on that noise – and the pain in my nipples.
Up until the point he smacked me hard between the legs with the wooden spoon.
I screamed. I couldn’t stop myself. The silence after my voice pierced the room felt as loud as actual noise. Everything was still, my eyes were filled with tears and it was all silent for a moment bar the sound of my rasping breathing. He didn’t ask me if I was all right. He just looked at me very intently, staring into my eyes, while I – undoubtedly – glared back at him, my mind furious at not only him for inflicting this agony but at the part of myself that actually, despite it all, craved it. After a few seconds he must have seen what he needed to see, as the air changed and he moved.
As he shifted closer, I closed my eyes, unable to bear watching the second strike. Of course all that meant was that I wasn’t ready for it. The sound of the impact seemed to echo around the room and the pain felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. In the back of my mind a panicked voice was whimpering, ‘I can’t take this,’ but before I could do anything to stop it (or stop him, even – I was closer to doing that than I had ever been before) the third crack connected and I was gasping through the pain and my tears again. Every fibre of my being was focused on the man in front of me and trying to ride the waves of pain he was inflicting.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but normally after a few strokes of whatever implement I am on the receiving end of my body can start to adjust to the pain, embrace it. It still hurts, of course it does, but something alters in my head and the pain starts to bring with it a delicious pleasure. But as James kept up the relentless spanking rhythm of the wooden spoon, it only hurt, and then hurt more. I shifted against my bound ankles, desperate to close my legs against the onslaught but unable to do so. All I could do was endure, cling on and hope it would get better, that it wouldn’t be the thing I couldn’t cope with, that I would have to call a halt to, disappointing him and myself. I really wasn’t sure I could get through it, even endure it, never mind enjoying it. But he had a different opinion.
The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story Page 22
