Triple Duty

by Douglas, Katie

  Once we all had our food, I saw Bex staring at her plate.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  “You’re not allergic to veg, are you?” Matt asked, and I knew he wasn’t serious but I tried not to laugh. Bex wasn’t looking in the mood for jokes. Us lads were used to bantering all the time. It was how we got through deployments and everything else life threw at us.

  I hoped she was resilient enough to deal with our way of doing things.

  My mind went back to her reaction when I’d told her about our BDSM dungeon. Maybe I should have lied and said it was a sewing room or a guitar room or something. I wasn’t much good at lying. None of us were, to be fair.

  Anyway, I supposed it gave her the chance to tell us if she was into stuff like that. But we could have talked about it on any other day of her life. Right now, all she needed to do was get settled. We were going to take care of her, whether or not that led to anything more between the four of us.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure if you all started eating straight away or what. I didn’t want to be rude and begin before you,” she said.

  I exchanged a look with Andy at the same moment Matt kicked me under the table. We all knew what we were seeing. More evidence that Bex was submissive. But I was a hundred per cent sure she had no idea, yet.

  “Dig in. Don’t be shy,” Matt said.

  “Thanks.” She flashed him a watery smile and stuck her fork into her beef.

  Good. Once she tried the food, there was no chance she could make up some bollocks excuse about not being hungry. That girl needed to eat. As a chef for RAF officers, I was exactly the right person to tempt her into eating properly again.

  After that first misunderstanding was straightened out, she ate steadily through her food until she had finished it all. I smiled with approval.

  “Dessert is lemon tart,” I told her, “Or as the brass call it, tarte au citron.”

  Matt kicked me again. “Watch your mouth, airman,” he warned me.

  “Fuck off.” I kicked him back. Technically, he outranked me and Andy, since he was a chief technician, now. Andy was a sergeant and I was still just a senior aircraftman, but none of us were proper officers. It was something we liked to tease each other about occasionally, usually after one or other of us had scored a payrise or promotion.

  Bex looked between us and I realised we’d been too boisterous again. I reined myself in and hoped she’d mellow over time.

  * * *

  Bex

  The clock in the hallway struck eleven, and I laid in bed thinking about the evening. Dinner had gone well. It turned out Ben was an excellent cook, something he seemed to love. Conversation had been easy amongst the three men, although I mostly remained silent.

  After dinner I had been at a loss of what to do with myself and so I retreated to my room. I had sat in silence, lost in thoughts about my future and memories of my past. It was still far too surreal to remember that I had buried Adam earlier today. In the two weeks since he died, I still hadn't come to terms with the fact that I was never going to see him again. It was too hard to think about.

  I got into bed at ten o'clock, which had seemed like a reasonable time. I had hoped that sleep would come quickly and drag me away into its oblivion where I wouldn't have to think about any of this anymore. By some cruel twist of fate, I couldn't drift off.

  I listened to the sounds of the three men coming upstairs laughing and joking, getting ready for bed, then finally closing their doors, and clicking the lights out. The activity gave way to more silence. The emptiness threatened to swallow me.

  My mind wandered. I started thinking about that room downstairs. It called to me for some reason. I had to know what was inside. Like most women, I had read Fifty Shades of Grey and later denied it. I suspected what was behind the door downstairs would make that playroom look tame. I had to know the darkest secret of the men I shared this house with.

  The clock struck midnight. A cacophony of snoring came from their rooms. Getting out of bed, trying to be as quiet as possible, my feet moved slowly across the floor. My hand reached out for the door handle and opened it.

  As if I was dreaming, I glided along the landing to the top of the stairs, then paused, listening, but nobody knew I was here. I began my descent, being unfamiliar with this house’s foibles, I stepped on a creaky stair. I froze. Listened. I still heard snoring so I knew they were still asleep. Keeping my feet to the edges of the stairs from now on, I made my way down to the hall. Moved across the tiled floor. There was a little light coming in from the glass window of the front door, and I used it to guide me to what I sought.

  Half expecting this door to be locked, I turned the handle. It opened with ease. I closed the door behind me and fumbled for a light switch. It was right beside the door and the light clicked on illuminating the mysterious room that had plagued my thoughts this evening.

  It wasn't red.

  The walls were very pale blue-grey and there was all sorts of furniture. There wasn’t a bed, which I’d expected. Honestly, it looked more like a gym than anything else. A gym with plenty of attachment hooks embedded into the walls near the apparatus. There was also a pine bookcase and a chest of respectable-looking wooden drawers.

  My eyes were taking in the titles on the bookshelf when I heard the door handle move behind me. I startled and turned around in time to see the door open and Ben standing in the doorway

  He was impassive at first. As time continued, and I didn't say anything to explain myself, he raised a single brow quizzically.

  “I was just looking,” I said defensively. My face was getting hot and I hoped he wouldn’t notice.

  “Weren't you threatening to leave the house over the existence of this room earlier?”

  I opened my mouth and it snapped shut, making me feel like a goldfish out of water, which I supposed I was.

  “I'm going back to bed,” was all I could manage. As I went towards the door where Ben stood, I half-expected him to stop me to demand an explanation to hold me accountable for my behaviour. Or was that just wishful thinking? God, everything in my head was such a mess.

  He let me go. I fled upstairs to the safety of the guest room, not even trying to be quiet this time. I closed the door behind me, putting the chair against the handle to prevent anyone from coming in and making me explain myself. My pulse pounded, my breath came in gulps that were nothing to do with the exertion of running up the stairs, and something inside me had awakened. Above everything else, one question swirled around my mind; how could they have that in the house? They seemed so normal.

  Chapter 3

  Bex

  I looked in the mirror. I was wearing the dress. It brushed the floor at the hem. A floor-length ballgown topped with floaty organza. The top part had a sweetheart neckline and spaghetti straps. Tiny lilies were embroidered into the bodice. My hair tumbled down toward my cleavage in elegant corkscrew curls. I felt like a princess.

  “Here’s your bouquet,” said my mum, and I startled when I saw her. She’d run off to Australia with a ballerina years ago. She passed me the flowers. Lilies of the valley, just like Princess Kate.

  “Thanks.”

  “My little girl’s getting married. I can’t believe it!”

  When I looked at her, she had a tear in her eye.

  “You ready, Bex?” someone called. I nodded. I’d never been so ready in my life. I stood up to take my last walk as an unmarried woman.

  Everything faded away and I was standing at Adam’s grave again, still wearing the white dress, sobbing uncontrollably.

  I awoke and the soul-rending pain lingered. With no one to comfort me, I sobbed silently into my pillow. I’d never felt so empty in my life.

  In the morning, breakfast was awkward. I didn't know if Ben has said anything to the other two. I was embarrassed that I had been caught showing my curiosity about something that outwardly bothered me. I was also trying hard to act normal but that weird dream had rattled me.

 
When I’d gotten my phone charged, I went online and typed in a four-letter word that terrified me and fascinated me in equal parts: BDSM.

  As I read through the search results, I came across some terms I’d already heard, such as dominant and submissive. There were also a seemingly endless amount of words I’d never come across, such as top and bottom. The descriptions of activities and identities confused me, too. For example, some people thought there was a difference between ageplayers and littles, but to me, they all seemed to want to do the same things. There were a lot of arguments in the comments of even the simplest articles and the Wikipedia talk page was... wow.

  The acronyms were the hardest to follow, however. No one even seemed to be able to agree on what “BDSM” stood for. Some people said it was Bondage, Dominance, Sadism and Masochism, while others thought the letters represented things they were more interested in.

  The complexity and the possibility for every little thing to have seemingly infinite different interpretations was the only thing I could one-hundred per-cent say I understood. Shouldn’t this all be straightforward? Some articles seemed to think there was nothing complicated about BDSM, but I suspected they were written by people who had been doing it so long they had forgotten what it was like to start learning about it all.

  I made a note of things I was interested in, and ones which I didn’t understand. My research took about two weeks by myself, during which I didn’t talk to Andy, Ben or Matt about what I was doing. It was a distraction, something so completely different to anything I’d done in my life with Adam that it didn’t make me cry, which was rare right now. The research became my sanctuary, a place of my own that had nothing to do with anyone else. I was learning about it, which didn’t mean I was interested in doing anything. Research wasn’t a crime.

  I might have avoided the lads for longer, but I’d been sitting at the kitchen table reading something called Submissive Guide on my phone when Matt came in.

  He glanced down at my screen. I tried to make it go dark but I pressed the volume button by mistake, so the screen stayed lit up.

  “Why are you reading about Shibari?” His tone was even and I wasn’t sure what sort of answer he was expecting.

  “Er...” I didn’t manage to say anything more because my brain decided now was a great moment to flee the scene and leave the rest of me to do the explaining.

  “What’s this?” He picked up my notepad and scanned it.

  I don’t think I had ever blushed so hard in my life before. My cheeks actually burned and my eyes were trying to water. This was too embarrassing. I wasn’t ready to talk about it. I couldn’t. Didn’t want to. Hadn’t decided how I felt about any of it. Arrgh!

  “Mine,” I mumbled, trying to snatch it back but failing.

  “It looks like a list. On one side, you have “bondage, anal training, and spanking.” On the other side, you’ve written, “Shibari, pet play, speech control, sensory play and Gorean.” What do these mean to you?”

  Reluctant to explain, I sucked both my lips in past my teeth at the same time. I wriggled on the chair and wished I wasn’t wearing a wooly jumper because it was far too hot and itchy.

  I wondered if he was going to spank me until I explained myself.

  “Becky, this is a list of things that are to do with BDSM. That part’s obvious. What I don’t understand is why?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” My voice was barely audible, even to my own ears. I scrunched up my eyes and waited for him to throw me over his knee and spank me, but he didn’t.

  Instead, Matt sighed and sat down opposite me.

  “Rebecca, look at me.”

  His voice was commanding but not forceful. With a lot of reluctance, I looked up at him.

  “What do you think will happen if we talk about this?”

  I scrunched my eyes up again, because it was the only way I could answer him. “You’ll dive into doing it all. And I don’t know if I want to.”

  “Listen, I can see you’re doing some sort of research, but here’s something I think you might have missed. BDSM has two fundamental aspects that are the most important things about it. Without them, none of the rest can happen.”

  “I thought there were three.” I frowned in confusion and waited for him to explain, but instead, he answered me with a question.

  “What do you think they are?”

  “S-sex, service and protocol.”

  “That’s way up there above the two most basic things that all BDSM needs. Consent and communication. Without consent, BDSM is not happening. And without communication, people can’t have enough information to do anything at all. Communication happens first, and throughout, and after anything to do with BDSM. It has to be open, honest, and the people involved have to be able to communicate at the same level as each other. As equals.”

  That was nothing like what I’d read in books and even the online articles I’d read had focused far more on the shiny activities and roles than on how those would work between two real people. Or more. Actually, what Matt was saying sounded sort of mundane and boring.

  “And consent has to be based on that open, honest communication. No one can just walk up to you, decide you are a submissive, and try to dominate you. No communication has taken place. So, in that situation, there’s no consent. Likewise, no one should punish you for breaking a rule if you didn’t have a frank discussion about rules and set them together in the first place. It’s incoherent nonsense, otherwise.”

  “And what about the things on my list? Do I need to know and understand every single one of them?”

  Matt smiled and shook his head. “No. Not immediately. Look, BDSM is an enormous topic—and it’s always growing, too. And if you decide you’re into it, you’ll be constantly learning new things for the rest of your life. For example, I don’t know a lot about pet play,” he glanced down at my list as he said it. “But I have done enough Shibari to know it’s not my thing.”

  “Why not? It looked pretty in the image search I did.” One photo I’d seen was of an elegantly-tied woman entangled in what had to be miles of rope, all suspended from the ceiling so she looked like a tree had grown around her body.

  “Yeah but it takes hours to achieve those beautiful, artistic creations with ropework, and to be entirely honest, I don’t have the patience. But Ben does. The other thing you should know about Shibari is, as the submissive or bottom, you wouldn’t actually be able to see the finished piece because you’d be in it.”

  “So what does the bottom get out of that?” I hoped I’d used the right word. I was still a little fuzzy on the difference between a bottom and a submissive.

  “They get to know what it feels like to be ensconced in that much rope and suspended in position, with no say in how long they’re left like that or what their top does with them while they’re tied up.”

  “What if they need to scratch their nose or go to the toilet?” I asked. It was the sort of thing I’d want to do if someone had spent hours tying me up.

  “They can’t.”

  I took a moment to digest this. “I think there’s a lot of things I like the idea of but maybe wouldn’t like in reality.”

  Matt nodded.

  “Me, too. And that’s just fine. No one in our house would ever coerce you into doing anything without your complete and full agreement over what you were doing and how to end it.”

  “I thought you just said the bottom didn’t have any control over things.”

  “Not in the way you would expect. But you still have to consent. Have you come across the phrase “the submissive holds all the power” in your reading?”

  I nodded, remembering it from Fifty Shades of Grey. It seemed to imply BDSM was a bit pointless. An act.

  “It’s an over-simplification that’s not actually true. What the phrase means is that the submissive has “ultimate power” over any scene because they can safeword. It’s supposed to reassure inexperienced submissives, but if you take it at its face value, it�
��s a misunderstanding of the nature of consent. Both partners share power equally in that sense, because the submissive isn’t the only one who has to consent, and the submissive isn’t the only one who can safeword. Both partners can make everything stop and withdraw their consent at any point if they don’t feel comfortable.”

  “But when would a dominant ever need to revoke their consent?” I couldn’t think of any examples of this. The idea seemed ridiculous.

  “What about when the submissive asked the dominant to keep whipping them but the dominant could see signs that the submissive’s skin was getting damaged, and didn’t feel comfortable to inflict any more pain? Or if the submissive begged the dominant to do something really extreme, like suspension bondage with shark hooks embedded in their skin—a fad a couple of years ago—and the dominant really didn’t want to do it? Would you expect them to continue?”

  I shook my head. It made sense that the dominant could veto things, too.

  “Okay, so consent and communication are important. But what else do I need to know?”

  Matt smiled and shook his head again. “There’s no one way of doing this. No absolute way of doing BDSM. As long as everyone consents in the first place and understands what they are consenting to, that is. You don’t need to learn a list of things to submit, you just have to be willing to obey and listen, and willing to let us guide you and correct you when you go wrong. No two dominants do things the same way as each other—with the exception of specific techniques; for example, there are not many different ways to deliver an enema.”

  My eyes widened as I realised he was talking about a tube going up someone’s ass with liquid in it. The idea filled me with dread.

  “I don’t ever want you to give me an enema,” I said quietly.

  “That’s fine. I don’t ever want to give you one. Which brings us onto limits. There are hard limits—like enemas—and soft limits, which are things you’re uncertain about but might try when you’re pushed by your dominant at the right moment. And your limits might change as time goes on. Mine have.”