Bound to You (21 page)

‘So you like that, you little whore? Is that what you’ve been waiting for all your life? For a woman to come and take you the way you’ve been forced to take woman after woman? Is that what you’ve thought about every time you’ve been up in side them? About getting pounded yourself?’

I reached between his legs and grabbed his cock. It was rock hard. It was such an ego trip to be able to fulfil someone’s long-held fantasy like this.

‘Oh, Mistress,’ he pleaded, ‘If you touch me there, if you touch me like that I’m going to cum.’

‘No, you’re not.’ I took my hand off his cock and gave him a single, exacting spank. ‘You don’t cum until I say so,’ and instead began increasing the vigour of my strokes, digging my nails in to his backside to anchor myself as I worked him even harder.

As if in direct contravention of what I’d just said, Christopher started to tremble violently. Oh God, please don’t say it was too late already, that in ordering him not to climax I had somehow pushed him towards it?

‘I’m cumming, Mistress, I’m cumming, I’m cumming.’

How could that momentary tease of his cock have produced this? They could be such indulgent little pricks sometimes, these submissives.

Suddenly, alarmingly, Christopher burst into violent climax and cried out in pleasure, hauling himself up by the bedstead, pulling away from me and my strap-on, bucking, and shuddering and squirming as he did so. I’d never seen a man climax like this before. This was more like a full-body orgasm, more than a mere physical release.

When his orgasm was over, Christopher released his grip on the bed posts, sank down to his knees, and then rolled on to his back, utterly enervated. There were tears in his eyes. Of relief? Of despondency? I sensed no trauma. Still, he had an erection.
How
?

‘But Christopher, your cock is still hard!’ I exclaimed. I didn’t understand this.

He looked at me as if I’d just asked him why he wasn’t speaking Greek when he’d already told me he only spoke Russian.

‘Oh, but I didn’t cum like that, Mistress Jade. That was an anal orgasm.’

I turned swiftly to look at Sapphire. She had never warned me about
that.

With impeccably poor timing, or perhaps it was impeccably good timing, Sapphire’s BlackBerry cried out from the other room. It was unlike her to forget to put it on silent. It distracted the clients and made them feel as though we weren’t paying them enough attention. Ever the pro, she averted the faux pas by saying nothing and merely sweeping out of the room.

I turned to Christopher and began the usual post-coital pleasantries.

‘Would you like a shower, Christopher? There are fresh towels laid out in the bathroom. Or is there anything else you require?’

He looked at me intensely, gravely, even. He looked as though he had something serious to say. Uh oh. Had I done a bad job? Worse still – had I hurt him?

‘Was that OK?’ I hazarded.

‘Yes, Mistress. It was exquisite.’ He was nodding rapidly, his breath still shallow. ‘
You’re
exquisite. I have to see you again. Would you come visit me at my flat?’

‘Well, of course. Sapphire and I are always happy to do outcalls . . .’

‘Not Sapphire. Just you.’

Domming with Sapphire was never the same after that night with Jack and Christopher. The comments she had made about my lack of authority really stang, and I couldn’t help thinking she might be right that it was time I struck out on my own. I owed Sapphire a huge debt of gratitude, and always would. There was no way I would have been able to stay in London after I broke up with Christos without her, much less continue to pursue my dream of becoming a journalist. But it was time to fly solo with the sex work. Once the decision had been made and we discussed it, there was no tension in those final sessions. The intimacy of our curious friendship was changed, but it was time for us to part company.

I did feel a little guilty for stealing her client. Not that I exactly engineered it. A few days after that session, Sapphire forwarded me a thank-you email from the eloquent Titan himself. It came complete with an attached picture, a gratuitous thong-clad, bent-over-bed shot. But I only had eyes for his email address.

Christopher became my first regular. His working hours meant that finding time to dominate him could be tricky. Luckily, I have always been an early riser and he liked nothing better than a bit of morning strap-on sex. So every couple of weeks I would find myself boarding the tube at 5.30 a.m. with only a black belted mac covering my highly immodest underwear. With each visit my strap-on technique improved, and I also got better at remembering to transfer one of the £20 notes from the requisite white envelope into my purse before I tried to buy breakfast at the Pret round the corner afterwards.

By 8 a.m. I had earned half a week’s wage and was free to work on the increasing number of freelance articles I was now getting commissioned to write, following my most recent, and very successful internship. I’d saved the day helping to pull together a new feature article just hours from going to press when it turned out our lead piece had already run in another magazine. Even so, most of the work I was doing was unpaid. Would I ever be able to give up domming entirely and make a living out of journalism?

Though actually, I wasn’t ready to give up on the domming just yet. As well as my bank balance, sex work had transformed my libido. I thought back to the days of my anorexia when I was as asexual as a tablecloth. Every so often I would have sex just to test whether the desire had returned and find, disappointingly, that the most pleasurable bit was the post-coital cuddling. Later, Christos had rekindled the flame of my desire and I had always adored sex with him. But it was domming that had truly stoked my sexual imagination. I had never felt better about my body, my mind, and how the two coalesced. I had come into my sexual power.

Sometimes I would get on the tube and find myself packed against some old lech preparing to creepily press himself up against me. I would angle my elbow just so, and if the driver pulled on the brakes too sharply at Stockwell, well, I always had the excuse of accidental impact. Drunken men on the night bus got a withering stare and a stiletto-stamped foot if they tried it on with me. From time to time, when I was feeling particularly imperious, I would catch some pinstriped, professional gent lingering his gaze on me just that little bit too long – and I would know immediately he was but a slave-in-waiting. Some days I was so confident in my domme powers that, given the right set of circumstances and prop-concealing lighting, I believed that 90 per cent of men could be persuaded to submit to me.

The only real problem I had with sex work now that I was my own boss was that it troubled my socialist conscience. My vast hourly sum was completely unjust when compared with the minimum hourly wage. I thought about my hard-grafting Labour family, imagined my ancestors turning in their graves at the fact I had become such a fearless free-marketeer. Of course, I justified it with the fact I was still not being paid for my actual career. But still, it troubled me. And so I came up with the concept of charitable domination, whereby, every couple of months or so I would get my clients to donate to various charities and emergency appeals in the wake of flood, famine and civil war. On occasion I also chose anti-trafficking charities, which I supported myself. I was painfully aware that my sex-worker status was one of luxury and choice, a rare thing in a global industry full of individuals who were far less lucky than me. I remembered the character of Belle, the prostitute in
Gone With the Wind
, who is far more giving than the heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, and smiled at the tart-with-a-heart stereotype. I hoped my own Maid Marion act was , however paltry, at least one way of helping out those a lot less fortunate than myself.

Although I was a lucky sex worker, I wasn’t a lucky journalist, and I still didn’t have a job. I had set myself a deadline of 30 April. If I hadn’t found a full-time paying position by then, I decided, I had to seriously reconsider my career choice. And domming was not to be a permanent alternative option.

One thing that had become apparent now that I was domming alone was that boundaries were getting more fluid. When I first started working with Sapphire I had come up with the slogan ‘we sell boundaries not services’. What I meant was that it was safer for a client to get his kicks with us than with an extra-marital affair or a play partner. We knew where the emotional lines were when it came to BDSM, and we never crossed them. In some instances though, it was clear both you and the client wanted to cross a boundary – the boundary dividing a professional relationship and a real friendship, for example. Eventually, some of my regulars became dear friends, people that, to this day, I could call upon for anything from help putting a bookcase together to their opinion on a new personal relationship. But only once they weren’t clients any more. I learnt this the hard way when Christopher and I found ourselves in a grievous misunderstanding.

One Sunday at the beginning of April, Christopher texted me to ask if I was in London. ‘Sure. Do you want to meet up?’ I replied. I was surprised that he hadn’t travelled back to Hastings, where his wife and children lived, for the weekend. ‘Would you mind coming round? It’s just, I don’t know what to do. My wife has found out that I’m into domination and she’s devastated. Wants a divorce and sole custody of the children.’

Oh God. Poor guy. I grimaced. Desperation seeped out of each electronic character. How could I say anything but yes? That evening, dressed in jeans, knee-high boots and a fitted checked shirt, I turned up at Christopher’s flat. His eyes were practically swollen shut with a day and a night’s worth of sobbing, yet he was still genial, and immediately offered me a drink. All he had was champagne. ‘That’s a barrister-who-lives-alone’s fridge for you,’ he joked sardonically.

As Christopher hunted for champagne flutes, I went to sit down in the living room, and tried hard not to drink in the idyllic photos of him and his Monica Bellucci-alike wife on their engagement; him and his wife at a ski lodge in the Alps for New Year; him and his wife holidaying on a yacht in Capri with his three catalogue-cute children, all wind-whipped hair and blithe smiles.

‘How are you?’ I asked him when he finally came and sat down with our drinks.

‘Oh, you know I didn’t really want to go there. But I just . . . well, who else can I talk to about it?’

Over the course of the next half hour he described a torturous evening where his wife had found his collection of anal toys and confronted him about them. At first she had been convinced he’d been having an affair, ‘which would actually have been more palatable to her’, and that he’d been using the toys on another woman. ‘But when I explained to her that it was just my kink, she told me I made her feel sick, that she didn’t want me near the children any more.’

‘Well, it’s probably more the shock of her finding out that she didn’t know you as well as she thought she did that upset her, rather than what she actually found out.’

I didn’t really believe what I was saying, but I had to try and offer him some comfort, some hope. I didn’t want to compound his sense of shame. If only he’d been able to tell his wife in the first place.

‘Would you dominate me, Jade? It would make me feel better.’

I hesitated. I wasn’t keen on using domination as a kind of emotional therapy for someone so clearly distressed. In fact, it had always been one of the rules. Don’t dominate someone if you think they run the risk of harming themselves with it.

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea, Christopher?’ I asked him. ‘Do you think you’re in the right head space for this?’

‘Oh, I think so. A bit of self-abasement couldn’t possibly make me feel emptier than I already do.’

‘You’d better lose some clothes, then,’ I ordered him, snapping into character. We would start, I decided, but I would scrutinise his every slight response as we played, and if I had even the smallest suspicion he was not OK, I was going to stop.

Once Christopher had stripped to his briefs, male briefs for once, I ordered him to bend over the bed and began hand-spanking him. He was very quiet. After a minute or two I asked him if he was OK. ‘Yes,’ he replied simply. Then he stood up. ‘But you’re right. I’m not really in the head space for it.’

Phew. Thank God he’d had the self-awareness to recognise that. I gave him a hug. ‘Let’s go back next door, and just have a drink, yes?’ He nodded and smiled. I could see that he too was relieved.

Settled on the couch, Christopher began talking about his marital problems again. For nearly two hours I sat and listened and nodded my head sympathetically as he traced back through every detail of detachment and discord he’d experienced with his wife. And then the wife before. And then the wife before that. Eventually he was analysing his relationship with his mother. ‘You know, she was just so hard to please. She never told us she loved us or that she was proud of us and I only remember her kissing me once. When I broke my leg. I was six.’

Listening to Christopher made me feel terribly sorry for him but I also felt uncomfortable. I was effectively playing the role of counsellor here, and I wasn’t qualified to do so.

‘How do you think I can win her back, Jade?’

Oh God. How the hell could I answer that?

‘I think you have to wait for her to come to you now. And take some time for yourself.’ It was awful, generic advice but surely he couldn’t come to any harm if he followed it. This was exhausting. I had to get him on to something else. Finally, he changed the topic.

‘So what are you going to do about the domming when a handsome man threatens to ride off into the sunset with you?’

I laughed. ‘Like that’s going to happen! I don’t think I’m the type to be kidnapped!’

‘You’re not dating anyone then? No one in mind?’

‘No, no,’ I replied. ‘Although . . .’ I wasn’t going to tell Christopher about Sebastian. I knew he wasn’t due back from Cape Town for another month. And yet, three months since I’d met him, I still couldn’t shake him from my daily fantasies.