No Ordinary Love Story: Sequel to The Diary of a Submissive (19 page)

I know living in a clean and tidy house is a wonderful thing, but I have to say I am not a natural cleaner. Every so often I’ll have a blitz, if someone is visiting or if it reaches that tipping point where suddenly it feels like you couldn’t possibly live like this for a moment longer and must act immediately (see also: eyebrow growth – how is it I can go to bed looking vaguely OK and wake up looking like the mono-browed missing evolutionary link?). Adam, on the other hand, loved cleaning. The first thing he did when we moved in together, while I was alphabetising our DVD collection (don’t judge me) was to arrange our kitchen. A fun Saturday morning for him started with him scrubbing the bathroom till it gleamed while I bought the papers and made breakfast. He enjoyed it, seemed to get a lot of satisfaction from it, and it was one of the (many) reasons why I thanked my lucky stars I’d fallen in love with someone as wonderful as him.

Not today, though.

Today he just seemed keen to test me. He sat on the sofa and had me clean the living room around him. I dusted, polished and vacuumed, with him barely lifting his legs out of the way as necessary, the whole time aware that he was watching me and looking up my skirt as I bent over.

Still, if this was what he had in mind for his day of total control who was I to quibble?

When I was done he walked around, inspecting my work. It was a better job than I’d usually have done under my own steam, but he was meticulous – or possibly looking for excuses.

He found a patch of dust at the back of the DVD player, and wiped his hand across it to hold it up to me. My face wrinkled as I stared at the – frankly barely noticeable – grime on his fingertips. I grabbed my duster and leaned down to push my arm right into the TV cabinet to reach it, barely aware of myself harrumphing ‘for fuck’s sake’ under my breath.

He cleared the distance between us in seconds. He didn’t even look at me but just grabbed my arm as he walked past me, dragging me with him. I was barely aware of what was happening, he moved with such speed.

He opened a door in the corner of our living room to reveal our small storage cupboard. When we’d moved in we’d put empty boxes that needed disposing of in there as we’d unpacked and my first thought when he opened the door was, ‘Oh, he’s cleaned it out and taken all that stuff to the tip.’ Until he pushed me inside and down to the floor and closed the door, leaving me in the dark and mostly empty (there was a throw we used on the sofa when it was cold but that was it) cupboard.

It all happened so quickly that I was stunned for the first few minutes. I sat, cursing him under my breath (quieter than I had moments before), waiting to see what would happen next. What the fuck was he playing at? I felt furious more than anything else. I knew I’d agreed to the
terms of engagement but what the fuck was this? Part of me wanted to open the door, but several things stopped me – curiosity at what he was going to do, and pride that refused to let him see that he was bothering me or that this was upsetting me. I thought about opening the door, moving out and seeing what would happen but since I didn’t want to apologise and had no intention of safe-wording the only thing likely to happen would be that I’d get myself in more trouble. Bad plan.

I waited, as patiently as I was able (which wasn’t very).

The only light in the room came from under the door. I watched as it flickered at points, wondering if that was him walking past. I strained to hear if he was outside, and was unsure whether I would be relieved or nervous if he was. Through it all, though, I seethed. I felt proper, burning fury of the kind I had felt in D/s situations before, but never with Adam.

I don’t know how long I sat there, but over time I began to soften. I stopped feeling angry and began to feel anxious. I felt bad that I might have disappointed him or let him down, annoyed with myself that these seemingly simple orders had proven so challenging – confused, if I’m honest as to why they had felt so tough. I lay down and curled myself into a ball as I waited for him to come back.

Finally he opened the door and beckoned me out. I tried to get to my feet but he told me to stay on my hands and knees. I peeked at his face as he moved past me and tried to read his expression, but for the first time I really couldn’t.

I crawled behind him as he walked across the room. He stood by the entertainment unit that housed our TV,
games console and DVD player, then finally turned to look at me, unzipping his shorts as he did. I automatically opened my mouth but he grinned – a brief but reassuring return of my Adam – and shook his head.

He stroked himself while I watched. I’d seen him do this before, but whereas normally it felt acceptable to help him along, this time I knew I could only watch. It was an erotic kind of torture, especially as he began to move faster, getting ever closer to coming.

Finally he groaned and aimed his cock down. For a split second I thought he was aiming for another part of my body or outfit, but instead he came on the wooden floor.

He told me later that the look on my face at that moment was a picture of confusion and annoyance. I can’t imagine it got any better when he spoke to me – I literally had to restrain the urge to push him over.

‘This is why, when I say clean the room, everything has to be clean. Now lick it up.’

I looked up at him, trying to work out if he was serious or if this was some kind of head fuck. I knew him well enough by then that I could tell that he wasn’t messing with me, that he was unmoved by my pleading glances. I think he knew me well enough by then, though, to know that I wasn’t going to safe word my way out of it.

Slowly I bent down and licked at his cum, tentatively, but it just moved across the wooden surface away from me. Bloody laminate floors. I moved to try and catch it on my tongue, aware it was a ridiculous and surprisingly difficult quest. It took ages, and by the time I’d finished my eyes were teary with humiliation. I also felt like I’d disappointed him and let him down. It was a weird, unexpected
feeling that made me want to howl. It caught me off guard. He saw it for what it was, though.

As soon as he saw my face he picked me up off the floor and took me to the sofa. We sat down together, he held me in his arms and hugged me and I clung to him, in a way that afterwards I would feel a bit sheepish about but which at the time felt so desperately important. I needed the connection, I needed his warmth. I needed him.

His voice was calm, gentle. He told me I’d done well, that he was proud of me. He asked me if it was OK, if he had gone too far.

After the initial reaction to the humiliation of it all I calmed a little. He grabbed the throw from the cupboard and wrapped it round me, pressing a soft kiss to my lips before disappearing to make two mugs of tea.

As I drank the tea I began to feel slightly less bereft. I’d had intense D/s experiences before – more humiliating things, definitely more painful things – that had affected me much less. We quietly talked it through, what we had found hot, what I had found difficult, and why.

Bearing in mind how articulate I can be about some elements of my mindset, on this one I was a bit stumped. I’ve been treated impersonally before, I’ve been hurt before, I’ve been humiliated in other, similar ways. I don’t know if it was the fact this had happened within our home environment that made it feel somehow more intense; I don’t know if it was being shut in the cupboard – it’s definitely possible. In hindsight I wonder if it was the sense of being properly punished for a misdemeanour, rather than it being ‘play’ punishment, that pushed me over the edge.

Whatever it was, slowly I began to feel more myself
again. We drank our tea, and I had a restorative chocolate Hobnob (I think the sugar helped lift my mood too – that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it) and as we cuddled on the sofa my mindset shifted once more.

We still had a whole afternoon set aside for smutty fun, and while by, unspoken agreement, Adam’s time in control had come to an end I was still feeling frisky and wanted to show my appreciation of him, his kindness and understanding. So I set about doing so in the filthiest ways possible. I lay in his lap licking and sucking him gently while we watched the rugby, enjoying half-teasing, half-worshipping him for the entirety of the game. Then I asked, of my own volition and with way less of an angry expression, if he would let me suck him until he came, touching myself while I did so. Then I gave him the filthiest kind of show, the kind of thing that made me blush but always made his eyes darken with lust.

It was stuff that in a different context was humiliating, that I would have felt prickly over if he’d made me do it. But I wanted to do it by choice. It made me wet to do it for him, to see how hard it made him.

My humiliations had felt almost too much to bear, but doing the same things voluntarily felt OK.

I know, I’m a contrary woman. Some kinksters would undoubtedly say that my behaviour was a poor show on the submissive front, and maybe it was. But between us we discovered our limits and figured, without a shadow of a doubt, that 24/7 type control wasn’t for us. Although, as Adam admitted while we were brushing our teeth that night, that wasn’t a bad thing.

‘Some days, Soph, it’s all I can do to sort myself out
through the day, much less micromanaging you. It just didn’t feel natural to me. I want an equal partner that submits, not a slave that obeys. Giving you real punishments didn’t excite me the way other play did. It just made me feel like a bit of a dick.’

I laughed as I gargled.

‘I know that probably bars me from the Dom club, but then I never really read the rules of entry, and would have probably ignored them anyway. It’s like the Groucho Marx quote – “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” ’

I sighed with relief. Thank fuck. He kissed me on the ear.

‘Shall we just keep doing what works for us? That means you can mock me without wondering if I’ll get all po-faced and make you apologise for a lack of respect. We can do D/s stuff, or normal stuff. Or just watch telly and eat toast. That’s pretty much my idea of an ideal relationship.’

He was right. And it saved us from having to sort out a blimmin’ sex contract.

I am not a bratty sort, although I suppose bratty sorts would probably say that too. At times, though, I can be somewhat … exuberant, shall we say. Cheeky even. With Adam it was fine, for the most part, because our relationship was based on a D/s dynamic that wasn’t po-faced. He was secure in his dominance of me without me having to call him Lord Farquhar Master of All, curtsey or refer to myself in the third person. The dynamic between us ebbed and flowed depending on what we were doing, where we were and who was around. Sometimes the banter between us got very impudent, and even silly. In the right mood, if he remembered, later he might exercise mock retribution for my ‘misdemeanour’, but as he loved to tell me, he didn’t need a reason to ‘punish’ me: when the time came and if he felt the urge he would just hurt me because we both enjoyed it. That was all the justification he needed.

He wasn’t wrong.

There was no sense of me being ‘punished’ for being me. Mostly he let me get away with any minor mocking, seeing it as a sign of affection, which is what it was, and was generally tolerant of my smart mouth, which even my submissive tendencies can’t keep in line.

Well, mostly tolerant.

I will admit I’d been mocking him more than usual,
although if you asked me I’d be hard-pressed to tell you why. I was in an especially good mood, which probably exacerbated it as when I’m happy I tend to be quite irreverent. It was in the aftermath of a particularly heavy scene we had done a few days before, which was playing on my mind – in the positive, flashbacks-popping-in-your-head-to-make-you-flush-with-arousal-and-shame-while-waiting-for-the-kettle-to-boil sort of way. Perhaps it subconsciously inspired me to rebel a little more than usual as a way of reasserting my equilibrium in the face of my memories of lying on the kitchen floor naked, bruised and covered in his spunk. Mostly, though, it was because we had company in the form of some old university friends of mine who came to visit for the weekend and who were blissfully ignorant of what we got up to in the bedroom.

So I pushed. Whenever my university friends get together the mocking and sarcasm flows, and it was easy to get caught up in it. And it was funny to see his eyes narrow as he looked at me as everyone laughed, his eyes saying, ‘If they weren’t here you’d be bent over the sofa right now being made to feel very sorry for what you just said,’ as mine sparkled back at him pretty much saying, ‘I know, but they are. Ha!’

In hindsight, I pushed too far. It didn’t feel it at the time, though. As we made dinner – dim sum from the Chinese supermarket, followed by stir-fried beef with ginger and spring onions, washed down with cold beer – the banter continued. I saw his eyes narrow at the cheekiest of my comments, but knew that he could do nothing about it. It really made me smile, and the humour in his
replies and the way his tactile tendencies continued unabated left me fairly sure he was taking it in good spirits. And to be fair, he did – his smile was indulgent, his eyes twinkling.