Implacable
On Dominance, Submission, and Chilli Peppers
It’s been a proper conversation of the sort that grownups have in expensive restaurants, encompassing history, and politics, and stories we’ve never shared before about our separate, earlier lives. I’d be happy for it to go on all evening, to sit opposite him at the dining table of our dimly-lit, rented city centre apartment, and gradually find out everything. For the time being, this conversation feels like the reason we’re here. I’m enjoying his voice, recognising the privilege this time together represents, not thinking about what might come later, upstairs in the equally dark-lit bedroom, with its menacing steel girders erupting from the floor and curving into invisibility as they extend to the ceiling.
He reaches for my hand, the first time he’s touched me in at least twenty minutes. Instantly, my submissive self awakens — if he wants something other than conversation from me now, I want to provide it. He never takes us anywhere I don’t want to travel to with him.
“I’ve not caned your hands for some time” he muses, tracing a finger across my palm, “or tawsed them, either”. This is true. My breath is quickening, because his hands are on me, and because dinner feels suddenly long ago, and because the idea of any sort of punishment, from him, never fails to be a welcome one. He pulls me gently to my feet and I offer no resistance. He tells me that he has enjoyed our conversation but that I will always need to be punished, and that it will always be his right to punish me. “Did you think I had forgotten?” he asks. Of course, I hadn’t. But I always worry he might have tired of this game, though I know I never shall.
He leads me up the long flight of stairs, and tells me to go into the second bedroom to select lingerie to wear. “Choose well” he advises me, with a threat in his voice that delights me further, quickens my breath a little more. I pick up a hot-pink set with deep purple details, which I pair with sheer white stockings. He has brushed his teeth while I’ve been taking off my dinner dress, and has disappeared into the master bedroom. I can’t see the bed from where I stand, and wonder if he might be waiting for me there.
My stocking-clad feet slide on the shiny wooden floor as I walk the corridor into the suite. The bed emerges — crisp white sheets against the dark walls of the room. I still can’t see him. The room is L-shaped; I turn through 90 degrees to my right, and gasp.
He could be a Vettriano painting. Not a Singing Butler — nothing so family-friendly — but one of the later works, all shadows and menace and anonymous men with dark clothes and powerful postures. The lamplight is behind him, and he’s seated, relaxed, in the room’s only armchair, as though enjoying a cigar at a gentlemen’s club on Pall Mall. There’s no cigar. Just him, legs apart, an indolent king at rest, lounging on a throne after the business of the day is done, with only pleasure lying ahead.
My heart seems to skip. I have posed for him hundreds of times, kneeling on beds, bent over chair backs, standing tiptoe facing fireplaces. I’ve worn outfits chosen by him, or selected by me to appeal to his tastes, and I have delighted in offering myself up to him, again and again, as a visual feast. But I’d never expected him to pose for me. If I live to a hundred years old, I shall never forget this vision. My heart appears to be beating between my legs rather than in my chest. And the word that enters my mind is not ‘handsome’ though he is, or even ‘dominant’ though he has never looked more so. The word is devastating, and I am paralysed. Only my eyes still seem to be working normally, trying to feed this vision of him into the polaroid film of my memory, to be held and cherished forever.
He tells me to come to him, and to kneel between his feet. I can think of nothing I would rather do. He tells me to look up, and I meet his eyes. The implacability in his face at this moment is as arresting as the beauty of his features — I wonder whether anyone else ever sees it? I hope not. The rest of the world meets a man who is unfailingly kind, who tries not to be seen as a figure of authority, who repeatedly invites people to call him by his first name. It is my privilege to meet this private version of him, and to know him well.
“Look up further, at the ceiling” he continues, and I do. He reaches down the side of the armchair, and my leather collar is in his hands. He buckles it around my neck, a great deal more roughly than is necessary, delighting me further. I can feel that we are headed in a direction that I shall love, with a version of him that I’m addicted to.
My face is temptingly close to his crotch, and I’m glad he’s noticed. He unzips his trousers, and I take his cock into my mouth, delighted as always by how he tastes. The angle is imperfect and I sense that I’m not doing my best-ever job of pleasuring him, but kneeling here between his legs is an incomparable pleasure for me. In my fantasies, I visit this place regularly, it being one of my very favourites.
It is over before I am ready. He kisses my forehead, as though delivering a benediction, and draws me to my feet, telling me to sit on the edge of the bed before gently directing me downward so that I’m lying on my back. With one hand on each my knees, he presses them outwards until my outer thighs meet the counterpane on each side. “There’s a butchers’ term for this” he informs me, gravely. “You’re being spatchcocked”. His face is no longer merely implacable. There’s cruelty in it too, and I can see he has a plan. It thrills me.
I shall never tire of having him do new things to me. He licks my pussy, and then a burning sensation surges through my clitoris. I try to move my knees together, to wrap my body protectively around the part that hurts, but he holds me down. My mind catches up with my body’s response, and I realise that he’s bitten me. My clitoris is throbbing, feeling suddenly twice its normal size, and there is time for me to feel a little amused. “I don’t like receiving oral sex” I’d told him, six years before, at a time I hadn’t dared to expect it to ever be relevant to our encounters. “You must be the only woman in the world who feels that way” he’d replied, looking entertained, “why don’t you like it?” I’d never tried to explain before. “The dynamic just feels wrong” I’d said. “I don’t want to feel like I’m in charge. I like giving oral sex, not the other way around.”
He remembered my words, and now he is showing me that though he’s eating my pussy, I am very much not in charge. Quite the opposite — I’m frozen in place, experiencing a sensation so intense that my body’s instinct is to try to escape it. He has remained, as though inevitably, in control, and is giving every indication of enjoying himself. He moves one hand between my legs, and slides his thumb into my pussy while he moves his fingers over my newly-sensitised clit. After only a few seconds, I discover that the inside of my pussy is burning now too. Chilli. He’d finely chopped a jalapeño pepper for the dinner we’d prepared together earlier, and the residue has remained on his fingers. I try to squirm away from him but it is impossible. However much it hurts, as the burning of the chilli oil inside me intensifies, I want him to be in control, even when it’s uncomfortable for me. Especially then.
He has done it on purpose. My clitoris is now burning from two different sources, the bite, and the chilli, but the pressure of his fingers is dragging me closer and closer to an orgasm. I cover my mouth as I come, trying to be quiet, but sitting half-way up involuntarily as my abdominal muscles contract. He pushes me back onto the bed. “If you don’t stay down, I will turn you over and flay you with the single-tail whip” he tells me, calmly, and I believe him. I love it when he threatens me, even as I hope to avoid the single-tail. “If I tied you down, it would be the ropes holding you in place” he breathes into my ear, “but I want it to be my will that holds you there”. So do I. I try harder to stay still, but as I orgasm again, I scream, and my upper body lifts off the bed again. He doesn’t whip me, and I appreciate his mercy as much as I enjoy my fear of him.
Instead of reaching for the whip, he places one of his knees onto my right thigh, pushing it down further into the bed, before doing the same on the other side of my body. My legs are now being stretched to the limit of their flexibility, and are protesting as his weight bears down on me, and as my burning pussy is opened to its maximum. The pain is exquisite, as is the feeling of being pinned like this, by a man I have no desire to escape. He kisses me deeply and bites my lower lip, so my mouth briefly flares with a pain to rival the burning in my pussy. Then, he flips me onto my front, apparently effortlessly, and I briefly fear the single-tail. But he’s instantly on top of me, covering my body entirely with his own, and is whispering into my ear again. “You’re so fragile” he tells me, “so delicate. And I want to hurt you anyway.” It is the most perfect compliment. Generally, I feel neither delicate nor fragile, with my endless ambitions, and my 6ft frame. But tonight, he has made me feel small, just as he’s made me see him as all-powerful, by hurting me and by making me only want more.
He gives me six swift strokes across my ass with the birch I’d bought him the year before, and almost before the pain from the welts reaches my consciousness, he enters me, grinding me into the bed as he fucks me face down, an act not only of penetration, but of conquest. I know he enjoys the heat from the welts he’s raised across my bottom as he fucks me, and I enjoy his pleasure. My orgasm is blessedly muffled by the fact my face is being pressed into the duvet, but he laughs as he feels my pussy spasming around his cock, as though trying to eject him from my body, a thing I never, ever want.
I love his laugh, and love the knowledge of pleasing him, but I won’t be satisfied until he’s come too. This time, as I take his cock in my mouth, he rolls onto his back, arms spread across the pillows. He doesn’t always give me feedback as I suck his cock, but this time he narrates for me, telling me when something I try feels especially good. It thrills me — however many encounters we enjoy, I doubt I’ll ever love anything more than this, hearing him telling me that I’ve done well. “Good girl” he murmurs, one hand in my hair and one around my collar, and then suddenly his jizz is fountaining into my mouth, and the pleasure of it is almost enough to make me climax again.
He gathers me into his arms, hoists one of his legs over both of mine so that we’re fully entwined, and I rest my face against his chest, enjoying the gradual slowing of his heartbeat as we lie together, our bodies beginning to cool. It seems to happen in only a moment — the hand which was stroking my hair back from my face suddenly stills, and his exhalations slow down and become more even.
He has achieved sleep instantly, as though switched off at the mains. I entwine my hand with his, inhale his scent, listen to his breathing. I glance up at his face, always hungry to hold his image more perfectly in my mind. In sleep, his face no longer holds any implacability or cruelty — he looks again like the other man I know, the one who invites people to use his first name at every opportunity . He’ll wake up again before long, because I can’t reach the light switches without disentangling my limbs from his, and I’m unwilling to do that. So I remain, arms encircling him, hoping that I have given him reminders of the evening to match the brilliance of the ones with which he has furnished me. Hoping that if I stay still, he will remain asleep, so I can hold him long enough for my arms to retain their memory of him, once he has to leave. I never dare to quite believe in next time, but these recollections will nourish my hopes, in the weeks to come.