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.
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