Twenty Tones of Red (6 page)

She had meant to only share the story with her friends but soon everyone
in the year above and below was tapping and their ears and going through the motions of cleaning them with their finger whenever she passed. Even worse one of the most common expressions they used in the school in place of ‘excuse me’ or ‘I didn’t hear that’ was ‘come again’. This meant that whenever she was in class and somebody spoke quietly some joker would catch her eye then poke their finger into their ear and shout ‘sorry I didn’t quite catch that. Could you come again please?’

It provided some
of the most consistent hilarity of that year and later whenever she met her old school friends the Honolulu and ‘come again’ stories would inevitably re-emerge.

Her relationship with Simon went well and she found him wise and kind and sexy. So much so that just a few days after her sixteenth birthday she lost her virginity to him. It went well and she was glad she did it although by then her expectations had been raised and she had to admit that she had been expecting something a little bit more explosive. Looking back she realised that the key element that had been missing for her was the torture and torment and build up that was always present in BDSM. She was discovering that although she enjoyed it she simply found the majority of sex too quick. She liked to be caressed, restrained and tormented for at least an hour before the penetrative action began.

They had two more relatively happy years together although
eventually they did both become increasingly jealous and started to fight. He hated it when she went out with her girlfriends or was seen with other boys and she hated it when he went away to work and came back with stories of drunken nights in pubs and nightclubs. The relationship cooled. Looming at the back of her mind was the thought that she was soon to go to university. Although she liked him she knew she didn’t completely love him and some part of her knew that she would need to move on. She didn’t want to be one of the saddos who kept their boyfriend from home all the way through her student days. Somehow she knew that she needed to break free and look for something better.

The first term at university was a real eye-opener. Suddenly she had her own room in student accommodation and there were hundreds of handsome intelligent young men all around her. It would’ve been very easy to lose her head and chase after all of them, and lots of girls did, but she was determined to behave more calmly as befitted a young woman who had already had a three-year relationship with an older man.

She watched and flirted and bided her time and
after waiting three whole weeks found herself at a party snogging a devilishly handsome hairy creature from Sutton Coldfield called Howard. Her new boyfriend had thick dark hair, intense lupine eyes and a mono-brow that made him look very much like a wolf. His body was hairy too and after several passionate nights together she decided that in his case she liked it.

Howard was basically a hippy
and that limited their time together. She slowly worked out that she liked men with focus and purpose. Mostly she wanted their drive applied to her and then to their career and life in general. She never really knew what happened to her relationship with him but over time it just fizzled out. By the end of the summer term they were doing different things and socialising in different circles. They would still arrange to meet but increasingly this was at the end of an evening and only so they could spend the night together. They were both vaguely aware of drifting apart and neither seemed particularly bothered. In a sense it was one of the nicest and easiest endings they could have. They were still friends, they still liked each other and they still had a good time in bed. But they simply didn’t feel the need to be together very much and they didn’t have a lot more to say to each other. In the final few weeks of term with the long summer holidays looming they agreed to officially call it over. They did see each other again and they found that over the next twelve months if there were ever at the same nightclub or party they would inevitably end up going home together but this was just because it was easy and old habits died hard. The spark and the flame had flickered out long before.

The summer after she and Howard split up was her worst romantic droughts. She was on the lookout for a new exciting love and she found that the more she wanted it the more difficult it became to find. There was a perverse psychology to the situation and it was something she often discussed with her best girlfriends, Jackie and Sue. They all agreed that there was some kind of subliminal message of need that people could give off and knowing this she gave up. She convinced herself that it would be no bad thing to concentrate on her studies and her female friendships and decided that for the second year at least she wouldn’t have a boyfriend. Of course it was only a few weeks after she had accepted this decision that she met Andy.

H
e was to last for the next couple of years and their friendship was the easiest and closest she’d had. They met in the library, and it was the first relationship she had started without the confidence boosting effect of alcohol. He started talking to her in the queue and they very easily and naturally went for coffee. They were opposites and that seemed to work. While she was doing practical subjects like Information Technology and Business Studies he had chosen to study Film and Drama. This meant that he took her to all kinds of underground theatre and exposed her to a range of European and Japanese films that she would normally have avoided. Much of it was dull and difficult to understand but that only added a spark to their relationship. At the end of each viewing they would fiercely discuss the relative merits of the plays and films and usually managed to take the passion of the argument into bed. Things in the bedroom did eventually start to quieten though and she realised a little sadly that it was because of his inherent niceness and gentleness.

She was beginning to realis
e that her craving for bondage and domination couldn’t be ignored. She could like men, she could find them attractive and start to admire them as people but they seemed to end up as friends or she found herself feeling the sort of love for them she felt for her brother. For some reason she needed what she called the ‘grrrrrr factor’ and that only came on when the men confessed to wanting to tease and dominate her.

She followed graduation with a summer working in a restaurant and then almost on a whim took up an offer to go to Italy and teach English and computer science. She arrived in Milan in mid September and found it completely unlike her expectations. She hadn’t been to Italy before and her only exposure had been photos and film clips of large families eating delicious pasta on trestle tables in the bright sunshine of an olive grove. The industrial north in winter was far from this vision. If anything the Po valley was colder than Manchester and most days an icy freezing fog lay across the city. She quickly learned that culturally too the northern regions saw themselves as far closer to the Swiss or the Germans than their countrymen in the south. There was a lot more finance and engineering than fruit groves and lazy afternoons in hammocks.

Nevertheless the job
was interesting and both her English and Italian colleagues were fun and friendly. She was teaching university students who were mostly her age and they were instantly welcoming and easy to work with. As soon as she’d bought some warm clothes and picked up enough of the language to survive in a shop and restaurant she found she settled down and loved her life. The term passed very quickly and before she knew it she was going home for Christmas with bags for of Italian delicacies and a large panettone cake for her mum and dad.

She did two more terms
and left Milan the following July. She had no lovers or boyfriends during that time. Plenty of Italian men approached her but she never found the chemistry was right. Most of them seemed to be too immature and too gentle and easy-going. One of the young mechanics who lived near them would follow her up the street on his moped shouting the words ‘English, Coca-Cola’ but she had to hide her face to cover her giggles and had no idea why he thought that shouting the name of a popular soft drink would turn a woman on.

Jackie
had started a job with a big law firm in London and she had a spare room in her flat. When she got back from Milan Siobhan took her offer to move in and found herself in London looking for a job. This was a boom time for graduates with business and IT knowledge. She had a good degree and her experience teaching abroad seem to impress interviewers. Within a few weeks she had the choice of three job offers and took one with a promising software company with rather trendy offices in Camden.

Farley S
ystems was a rapidly growing security and archiving company run by the dynamic if slightly barmy public school boy Peter Farley. Although she’d been initially hired on her technical expertise to work with the development team she was soon asked to accompany salespeople on their visits to big corporate clients and she found talking about technology and selling the benefits of their products far more interesting than sitting at a desk tapping out code. There seemed to be a sexual chemistry angle to these meetings that she found she really enjoyed. The company’s head of sales Keith, often made subtle little comments about how hot under the collar some of their prospective clients got when she wore certain skirts or blouses and she knew he was right. Most of the buyers were middle-aged men and Siobhan found she could have a massive impact on them with just a tiny bit of flirting. It seemed to work. She was offered a job in the sales team and within six months had been promoted to second in command. She was happy, reasonably paid and enjoying the start of her career. The next thing to happen was that she was going to meet the man who would change her life

Times were good. She had a good-sized room in a nice flat and a job that she loved. She was finding the world of corporate sales a lot more interesting than studying or writing code and considerably easier than teaching English to Italians. The majority of her time was spent giving presentations and pitches and most of that involved asking or answering questions. Yes, they occasionally lost some of their deals to competitors but mostly she won business – and that meant commission. She had a basic salary that was just enough to cover her rent and most of life’s essentials but soon she was also getting a percentage of her sales. She felt rich! Not actually rich, she still couldn’t afford to buy a property in London or drive a fancy car but she had savings growing in the bank and never had to worry about going out for a meal or buying a new dress or pair of shoes. Compared to scraping by on a student loan it was luxury.

             
There was one obvious thing missing from her life, but she was determined not to think about looking for a boyfriend because she was now convinced that even a whiff of desperation jinxed her. The idea of finding an exciting new lover was always lurking somewhere at the back of her mind, as was the awareness that she needed him to be able to satisfy her craving for domination. She didn’t want to have to beg, train or cajole her lovers in tying and teasing her anymore. She wanted a man who already had those desires and would just go ahead when she gave the permission. Most of all she wanted to engage with another imagination. It felt as if she’d been living inside her head for too long. She was tired with her own fantasies and she wanted to be part of somebody else’s. The answer was about to walk into her office and come and stand at the end of her desk.

Peter Farley, the emotional and temperamental owner of the company, decided to get a small team of management consultants to help plan the next stage of their commercial development.
One of the key components would be an efficiency study and an audit of the software they used and the licenses they held. As IT experts they had spent all their efforts on developing products for customers and their own internal systems were a total mess. One day she was rushing round the office grabbing things she needed to take to a presentation when she looked up and saw a man surveying her with undisguised interest. Unlike the rest of his team he wasn’t wearing a suit and there was something cool if slightly arrogant about him. He had on a pair of black cargo pants with a key chain from his belt to his front pocket. When she caught his eye he smiled at her and jangled the chain. It was quite brazen and he did it with a courage and confidence she found immediately attractive. Her eyes zoomed to the metal links running through his fingers and she felt herself flush with blood. It was a message. It had to be. It was a signal telling her that he knew she was interested in BDSM. But how could he have guessed? Quickly pulling her gaze away she snatched up her laptop bag and ran out. The split second of connection stayed with her and the next day she found her eyes continually leaving her screen and watching the visitor as he moved around the office briefing his staff.

Physically he wasn’t her usual type, he wasn’t classically tall dark and handsome in the way most of her previous lovers had been. His hair was more brown than black and his face a little squarer than the classic ovals she usually preferred. Even worse was the fact that he
worked with computers and although she herself had studied Information Technology she’d never before found any of her fellow students or co-workers attractive. Most of them were, for the want of a better term, geeks, but this man was definitely different.

As she di
scretely studied him she identified a second factor that made him even more alluring. She couldn’t help but notice noticing that he was treated like some kind of god by his fellow consultants. There was even a female systems analyst who adored him in such an obvious way that she seemed to spend most of the time he was explaining something gazing at him through slightly glazed eyes and laughing eagerly at anything she thought might have been a joke.

By su
btly quizzing her colleagues Siobhan managed to find out that his name was David but for a while their paths didn’t cross. Occasionally he went to the small kitchen area to make himself a coffee but she decided it would be far too obvious to go and put the kettle on while he was there. She was playing it slowly and cautiously and allowing time to make certain of her feelings. Despite his good looks and his charisma she kept reminding herself that he was essentially a geek and she had always vowed never to socialise with a man who loved technology.

She was soon to get the opportunity to work with him face-to-face.
As the most tech savvy member of the sales team she’d been warned that she would have to supply him with the details of the software installed on her team’s computers and a list of the licence agreements for each application. The invitation came for a thirty minute meeting to discuss the audit and she immediately found herself planning what she was going to wear. For some reason she was convinced he wanted to tie and dominate her and the idea set her pulse racing and her mind working overtime. That night she found herself fantasising about him and she imagined a scene where he stripped her then pushed her to her knees and forced her to suck him. They were wild outrageous scenes and while she was enjoying them she also wondered how she had got the impression that bondage interested him.

S
he replayed the scenes of him moving around the office and analysed her memories for any hints that he was kinky. She finally remembered getting a glimpse of a T-shirt he’d been wearing under a waistcoat. She’d only been able to see the top of it but when the lady’s face came back into her memory the image clicked into place and she remembered who it was. It was a very beautiful Bettie Page the 1950s glamour and bondage model. That was enough. He was definitely giving off the signals and he hadn’t made any attempt to hide his attraction and fascination with her.

The day of their meeting arrived and despite her best intentions to play it cool she found herself wearing what she considered to be her sexiest blouse and skirt. She brushed her hair and touched up her make-up three times that morning then found herself sitting with him in the meeting room. He was charming but professional and had a nice voice that she found quite mesmerising. She ended up listening to the tone and depth of his sentences rather than concentrating on the unbelievably tedious business of software licensing. Once again he started to finger the links on his key chain and as he did so she found her heart beat racing and chest and stomach tightened as if being tickled by gentle fingers. Before she knew it the meeting was over and as he went to open the door for her he met her gaze and said something that she found incredibly sexy. “Now you will take this seriously won’t you? I hate having to get strict with people.”

S
he nodded and made all the right noises then quickly hurried back to her desk and analysed the meeting. Although he’d said that he
hated
getting strict with people, the way he’d been looking at her indicated exactly the opposite. Or did it? Perhaps she was still totally mis-reading the signs. Without knowing it she made a plan to test him and deliberately avoided doing the work that he’d set her. She simply couldn’t resist the temptation to find out what would happen if he had to get strict.

Sure enough just a week and a half later he approached her in the kitchen and asked her firmly but politely why she hadn’t submitted any of the audit information to him. Whilst very self-consciously flicking her long red hair behind her ear she fluttered her eyelashes and told him that it had been an incredibly busy week
for the sales team and had just slipped her mind. She found herself apologising and then finishing her explanation with the sentence. “I know it sounds bad. You might think me very naughty.” She was amazed she’d done it. She’d somehow introduced the concept of naughtiness into a routine business conversation. Luckily it was a signal he immediately picked up on. “Yes. That was very bad. You’d better get things sorted out or I’m going to have to get strict with you.” He said it with a smile in a professional manner but she was now convinced that they were both playing the same game.

The next week she did submit all the necessary information and was disappointed to realise that they no longer had any reason to communicate. Several dull days past and then on the Friday evening both teams of workers ended up going to the pub together. At first she played hard to get, sitting as far away from his team as possible and pointedly ignoring him. She did keep checking the signals though and couldn’t help noticing that his eyes were often seeking her out across the room. They all drank as much as they could as quickly as they could. The music, shouting and joking all got louder and louder and hour by hour things seemed to get messier and sloppier and more out of focus.

At around ten people who lived out of town started standi
ng and putting their jackets on. One exit triggered another and the group around the table quickly thinned. Looking up from a sip of her wine his smiling face filled her vision and she realised that she was now sitting next to him. There were only three of them left and her best work friend Jenny was at the bar buying drinks. They must have exchanged a few short pleasantries and then he reminded her that she’d been late with her information and told her that he considered that to be very naughty behaviour.

“Yes, I’m sure I should be spanked for it.”
She couldn’t believe she’d said it, of course it was the wine talking and she felt herself blush the moment the words had come out of her mouth. Even worse at that exact moment her friend arrived back at the table and bent over to put the glasses down. While the three of them sat sipping their drinks she noticed that Jenny had started to study the two of them. Pretty soon her friend concluded that there was a kind of sexual tension between them and stood and made her excuses to leave. As all good girlfriends should, she touched her on the shoulder before she left. “You going to be okay Siobhan?”

It was a simple questions l
oaded with undertones. It meant; ‘are we clear about what’s going on here? I’m leaving you with a man you’ve only known a few weeks. Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know how you’re going to get home? Have you got money for a taxi?’ It was full of caring and concern. Good old Jen.

She
turned, met her younger friend’s eye and gave her clear assurance that everything was okay with a tiny flash of the eyebrows. This was one girl telling another that she had very much made up her mind and knew exactly what she was doing.

The
rest was ridiculously quick and easy. When they’d finished their drinks and she had ascertained that he had no flatmates she invited herself back to his place.

They started snogging as soon as they’d got through the door. It was the real drunken passionate version of the scenes from the Hollywood films. He pressed her against the wall and they started pulling each other’s clothes off. The attraction was so real and so immediate that they ended up falling half naked onto his futon and having quick and urgent sex then drifting into a doze in each other’s arms.

It was the next morning when they’d had a cup of coffee and a piece of toast that she brought the subject up again.
“The thing is…as you pointed out. I was really naughty about the software audit and I still haven’t been punished.” She was amazed how quickly the idea got him aroused. From where she was lying in the crook of his arm she could see him thickening and stiffening. He sat up and his hand rose to squeeze her right breast. “Yes. You’re right. You were due a spanking weren’t you?”

She nodded then used her most
coquettish voice. “Yes but I’m a real wriggler and a total coward. I really need holding in place.”

He needed no fur
ther invitation and while she giggled and let out pathetically coy pleas for mercy he manhandled her across his lap. Her body weight pushed his erection down and she felt his hardness pressing against her belly. He managed to pull both her arms up to her shoulder blades and pinned them there with one hand. There was a moment of delicious anticipation then the blows came raining down onto her backside. She squirmed with delight, an intense heat soon burning between her legs to match the blush that was growing on her buttocks.

Eventually after a good forty
or fifty smacks he stopped and rested and she found herself torn between two options. His own excitement was undeniable and hers an urgent heat in her loins. Although she wanted him to fuck her again she also wanted the game to last a little longer. Turning her head and looking at him as sexily as she could she addressed him in a husky playful voice. “I’m so fidgety perhaps I should be restrained before my next punishment.”

He took the hint and
slid from under her to move to the chest of drawers. She was delighted when he produced four neatly bundled coils of rope and watched him approach with eager seductive eyes. “Are you really going to tie me with all that?” Her play-acting was ridiculous but it was helping to keep the situation light whilst moving things along.

The next thing she knew he had moved her to the chair by his desk and bent her over it. Work
ing quickly and expertly he slipped loops around each of her wrists and quickly bound her arms to the legs. He repeated the process with her ankles and she found herself completely immobile with her long red hair cascading over the seat. The position left her backside delightfully exposed and he wasted no time in caressing the tops of her thighs and the gentle curves of her buttocks.