Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (10 page)

Through it all, as I think they always understood, I did carry on loving them. It was just that they were of such a different generation that their rules seemed stricter, their curfews earlier and their ideas more outdated than those of any of my friends’ parents. Although I had long known that they were my adoptive parents, rather than my birth parents, I’ve never believed that was a deciding factor in our relationship; the related age gap that went with that situation seems to me to have been a more relevant concern. But, it may well have influenced the way that my grandparents thought of me and their responsibilities to bring me up as a decent girl who could be trusted to be safely in her bed each night rather than gallivanting around in clubs. Having willingly embraced the role of parents, could it be that they felt even more duty bound than ‘real’ parents to keep me safe?

Apart from the relatively harmless drinking, nothing happened on those club nights that would have worried my grandparents anyway if they had come along with me. But just on principle my nan worried incessantly about me being out with friends late at night. After endless rows that were getting us nowhere, my birth-mother and her husband got involved and actually tried to act as peacemakers. Her husband would
sometimes drive over from their home, 30 miles or so outside London, and stay the night in order that he could pick me up from the club in his car and see me home safely. I think it was my birth-mother’s attempt to help me, because she privately felt that my grandparents were just too strict about everything. But, having legally given me away to them in the adoption, she had no authority to control what I was or was not doing.

My case to be allowed to go out late was also helped by one particularly kind taxi-driver who would make a point of waiting for me and my best friend on club evenings. He refused other fares just to take us home and told us, ‘I’ve got a daughter of my own and I want to know that she gets home safely.’ He always undercharged us for the fare and had no ulterior motive of any kind for helping us: just a genuinely nice man.

For a while the compromises calmed down the situation between myself and my grandparents a little but the rows over my independence continued. Over the next 18 months, as I grew ever more determined to lead my own life, the arguments were scheduled to get worse – much, much worse.

CHAPTER 11

FIRST LOVE

F
rom my earliest teenage years, about the time I discovered that I could get really fun feelings in my ladybits if I wiggled my fingers in just the correct way, I grew more and more interested in all types of fetish imagery.

I think Madonna – the singer, not the religious icon – has a lot to answer for in turning a generation of young girls onto rubber, leather and conical bras. I was drawn to her music videos and to magazine images of her outfits. I found I was browsing through any newspaper stories that dealt with fetish items, whether they were on the fashion pages or from a sex story in the
News of the World.
It was clear that from this early age I was interested in such fetish material although I’ve never really thought to ask why. I’m not a reflective, self-analytical person in that way. I’m more the type who will think: ‘Well that worked for me… now what else can I find?’
My own fashion sense was limited to what I could afford, which was never much, but from about the age of 13, I seemed to always be the girl wearing the shortest, tightest skirts in any group. My dress sense may have been outrageous but I was still shy and retiring and despite the occasional sexual foray, I was soon approaching my fifteenth birthday relatively chaste and certainly with no regular boyfriend. I knew I wanted to explore some of the sexually exciting fetish imagery I enjoyed, but had no one with whom I could play. Then I met my first love and my sex life exploded in all sorts of fascinating new directions.

Tom was 6 ft 2ins tall, dark-haired and must have inherited some of his good looks from his attractive mother. He was from a distinctly middle-class family, living in a posher part of West London. I fancied him like crazy from the moment I saw him. With that overwhelming passion of young love, I immediately thought, ‘He’s tall, brown-haired, stocky but fit, a nice guy from a nice family. This is the man I will spend the rest of my life with.’

Tom was the first guy I really fancied, as opposed to the few other guys I had slept with, where sex had just sort of happened with little thought or desire on my part. I met him through a friend who was going out with his brother and then spent an afternoon after school with him and some friends in his bedroom. Nothing happened between us but I was really impressed with the fact that he had proper graffiti sprayed all over the white walls and that he and his friends were smoking ‘puff’. I think I had taken pills at clubs before but that was my introduction to any sort of drugs culture.

When I got to know the family better I learned that his parents had split and that since then his mother had rather lost control of her sons. It was odd because I remember thinking that they were from a middle-class background, in a posh house, and were spraying graffiti on their walls and using drugs whereas I was poor and from a council estate but would never had dreamt of behaving like that.

The afternoon we met up, everyone was chatting, although as usual I was the quiet one of the group. Before then I had never seen the Monty Python film
Life of Brian,
but one of Tom’s friends put on the video and I found it utterly hilarious. Perhaps fuelled by the ‘puff’ we were all smoking I was in pain from laughing so much and I was getting on really well with Tom’s friend, which didn’t go down too well with him. The next time I saw him he left me in no doubt that, although he was again with a group of friends, I was the one in whom he was interested. I’m sure we must have had our first kiss that night, although I can remember very little about the evening because the guys took us to a pub and got me completely and utterly drunk. They were buying me gin and I just couldn’t handle spirits like that. It was mortifying to go home with Tom and to have his mother find me pissed out of my mind. There was no way I could go home in that state and so she let me stay the night. It was my first night in my new boyfriend’s house but any idea of naughty games was out of the question. I actually spent the entire night throwing up in their toilet and being looked after by his mother. By morning I just wanted to die.

It’s an ill wind, however, that blows nobody good and there was to be a happy outcome from my out-of-character night
of drunken behaviour. Tom’s mum had telephoned my grandmother to explain that I wasn’t really well enough to go home and that she was happy for me to stay in their spare bedroom. The next morning she drove me home and met my nan who was impressed by the fact she had a car and was totally reassured that I had been safe for the night. They swapped telephone numbers and Tom’s mum said I would always be welcome to stay over at their house in the future. I was deeply ashamed and embarrassed by what had happened but it did mean that forever after that I could tell my grandparents I was staying at Tom’s house and they believed me every time.

So Tom became my first love and we started exclusively dating each other. He went to the local all boys’ school and I was at the girls’ equivalent, so we took to travelling home on the bus together several nights a week and then mostly just hanging out in his room. I fancied him from the start and we started having sex almost immediately. The first time with him was in his own bed at his house while his mum was out at work. His grandmother lived with the family and she was in the house at the time but, luckily for us, was a bit deaf. For the first time I really enjoyed the sex and it became important and fun for me. From then onwards there was no holding us back.

I would see Tom several times a week and at weekends, sometimes staying the night and sometimes not. I had no worries about getting pregnant because I had been prescribed the pill a year earlier, not as a contraceptive, but as a treatment for my acne. It was a really effective acne cure and I ended up being prescribed three-monthly contraceptive injections for the same reason. They stopped my periods completely as well
as removing the fear of an unwanted baby. With that freedom, a boy I really fancied and a bed where we could have plenty of privacy, I became something of a sex maniac. I could hardly keep my hands off of Tom’s body and I was usually the instigator when we were going to have sex; my sex drive seemed to be extremely high because I liked him so much. As far as I can remember I did have orgasms through masturbation before I met Tom, but certainly not with any other men. Now I found I could come if I rode on top of him, although no other position worked in the same way for me. As a result I was always trying to arouse him so that I could, literally, jump on top of him in bed. It was a long time later that I realised that he was not the best-endowed man on the block, but in my relative innocence size truly didn’t matter to me at that age. He was large enough to make me happy.

Even though I was the one doing the jumping, Tom enjoyed the sex just as much as I did. He was younger than me and I was also his first regular girlfriend. He always claimed that he wasn’t a virgin when he met me but I think he was lying; I certainly told a few white lies of my own, assuring him that I had only ever had sex with one man before. I thought the truth of several different partners, including the two men who shared my virginity between them, might be too much for him to take. Given the regularity of our sex it’s not surprising that we started to explore our own desires more and more and I was soon leading Tom into sexual areas that had always interested me.

Me being the one on top was our regular sexual position and it seemed only natural to pin his arms back against the bed as I rode him. It excited me enormously and he certainly didn’t
object. Then, because I was always the one taking the lead, I tied his hands to the bedhead. Since we both had started out wearing our school uniforms before various items were discarded as superfluous to requirements, it seemed only natural to use both our school ties as my very first pieces of bondage equipment. In time I got hold of some rope and I did try tying him up properly to the bed; looking back now I can see what a terrible bondage job I did, but we both enjoyed it at the time. I think that Tom was a little like a rabbit caught in the headlights: fascinated by what was rushing towards him and unable to move away. From there we graduated onto other domination experiments, always with me in charge of proceedings. One evening I brought some ice into the bedroom, blindfolded him and started rubbing it over his sensitive parts. He was going crazy underneath me, half enjoying the experience and half hating it. I just thought it was so interesting that he could still feel horny and excited despite the discomfort I was causing. It was perhaps the first time that I realised that I hugely enjoyed having power over another helpless human being. It’s a power I’ve enjoyed ever since; a power to be used responsibly and, at times, tempered by kindness but it is a highly addictive feeling I love to this day. I suspected even then that I was a step ahead of my peers in my sexual activities but never felt guilty about it. They probably weren’t tying their boyfriends to the bed but to me it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

As time went by, Tom and I grew bolder in arranging for me to stay the night in his bed. As far as my grandparents were concerned, Tom’s mum was happy for me to stay over at her
house in the spare room; as far as Tom’s mother was concerned I was leaving most evenings to go home. The truth was that we were busily deceiving both of them. At the end of the evening I would say goodbye to Tom’s family and he would then offer to walk me to the nearby bus stop. We knew that while we were out the whole family would go off to bed, making it easy for him to sneak me back into the house and upstairs to his bedroom. They were having work done to the house and so for a long while there was scaffolding around the building. That made it even easier for me to shimmy up the scaffold poles after I had supposedly left to go home and climb back in through the bedroom window. In the morning, I would simply leave by the same route whilst everyone was getting up and then a few minutes later turn up at the door to ‘visit’ Tom again. ‘Morning, sleep well? Good to see you.’

In the end of course, I got caught out. I was so tired one morning that I let Tom go off to school on his own whilst I stayed put in his bed. I thought I had locked the door but his mother caught me out. It didn’t go down too well to find me asleep in her son’s bed, but the relationship had lasted for so long by then that she hardly made any fuss. The love affair with Tom had led to a temporary truce in my fights with my grandparents. But 18 months down the line, as with many first loves, cracks were starting to appear in our relationship. The end was nigh and the end of one relationship was to rekindle all of the problems in the relationship with my own family.

The real war of independence was about to break out at home, and it was not going to end well.

CHAPTER 12

GOING OFF THE RAILS

I
knew Tom was lying when he told me he’d had a quiet weekend at home. I’d already heard that he and his mates had been to a local club and, in a way which was starting to typify our friendship, he hadn’t wanted to take me along. He always said that having me with him on a night out meant that he couldn’t ‘relax’ in the same way as if he was on his own. As far as I knew, Tom was not being unfaithful to me but a clear pattern was emerging. It seemed that I was good enough for him to use for sex during the week but at the weekends he wanted to go clubbing with his mates – a routine that usually involved varying degrees of drug-taking. I felt hurt and rejected. As I rather crudely put it to one of my friends: ‘I’m alright for fucking but not to be seen on his arm.’ We were going out together less and less and, although our sex life remained strong, we were obviously nearing the end. Having
caught him out in one blatant lie I was happy to go along with a girlfriend when she suggested our own Saturday night out at my old haunt of the Hammersmith Palais. Earlier in my teens I had been ‘Miss Goody Two-shoes’ when it came to men and late-night clubs. This time I was in the mood to be naughty.