The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story (17 page)

By the time Thomas had come once and Charlotte twice I was squirming with a desperate need to orgasm myself. All three of us were lying on the bed, Charlotte gently stroking my arm while I pressed a kiss to her stomach.

‘Would you like to come, Sophie?’

I opened an eye suspiciously. I knew where this was going, and what was really awful was by this point I had no compunction about it. I knew I would hump her leg if I had to.

‘Yes, please.’

Her smile was beautiful and her mouth curved when she leant down to kiss me softly. ‘Come on, Sophie, you can do better than that. I’ve heard you beg before remember. I know how well you do it.’

I flushed as both Thomas and Charlotte turned to look at me. Staring past them a little, I managed to ask them both – I wasn’t risking a breach of etiquette at this point in proceedings – in a stammering voice if they would please allow me to come.

Charlotte tutted. ‘Are you begging, Sophie?’

I sighed. ‘Yes, Charlotte, I’m begging you. Please let me come.’

Charlotte laughed at me. ‘I will, if you kiss my arse.’

I’m fairly sure my eyes widened in comedy fashion. ‘What?’

‘Kiss my arse. And then, actually, I think I’d like to feel your tongue running up between my arse cheeks. If you do that, I’ll let you come.’

I was agog. This was something I knew Thomas wasn’t
into, would never ask me to do. I’d never worried about doing it, it just wasn’t an option.

My body ached, I was so desperate to come. But her arse?

Suddenly, Thomas’s voice was loud in my ear. ‘I told you, she won’t do it. Get her to hump your leg instead.’

I felt a twinge of fury, feeling like a piece of meat, something they could discuss between themselves. Then Charlotte moved closer, kissing me softly on the lips, looking intently at my face.

‘Sophie, I could make you hump my leg. You know if I slapped you or picked up that cane again you’d be weeping and begging me to do whatever I wanted very quickly. Between us Thomas and I could hold you down, I could sit my arse on your face, I could force you. But I don’t want to force you. I want you to submit to me willingly. I want you to crawl up here and worship my arse, to do something you’ve never done before and something I’ve never had anyone do to me before. And while you do it Tom will make you come. I don’t want to punish you, but I do want your obedience. Yes, you’ve been obeying me because Thomas gave you to me –’ I wasn’t sure this was entirely true but didn’t want to interrupt her flow ‘–but I want you to do this for me. Just me. Now.’

The room was silent and still for a few seconds. I didn’t move, but I knew exactly what I was going to do, that I was going to obey her.

I crawled gently down her body and pressed a kiss to her lovely smooth arse. And then as Thomas pushed his
fingers deeply inside me I began licking and kissing her in perhaps the most intimate way possible. It was a humiliation I had never considered, but in that room, in that moment, she had convinced me. I submitted for her, not Thomas, to please her, and did so eagerly. She moaned in pleasure, reaching back to stroke my hair, and then I came, gasping and whimpering into her arse as the release juddered through me.

Once my mind-blowing orgasm had dissipated a little, a smiling Charlotte explained the bet that she and Thomas had made. Tom was adamant that she would not be able to get me to rim her and had told her that if she did she would get to fuck me with her newly acquired strap on. If she didn’t, then she would be severely punished, ending her turn as top. As we continued long into the night, a tangle of limbs and combinations and some of the sexiest experiences I’ve ever had, I was very thankful indeed at being inspired to submission.

I did still owe Charlotte some revenge for the whole leg-humping thing, though. On the other hand, she and Thomas both helped me move flat the following weekend, so she gets brownie points for that.

The move was both a long time coming and something that happened ridiculously quickly. I’d been at my paper for almost three years. The nature of regional journalism is very much that wages start low and don’t get too much better unless you can get promoted. There’s a straightforward process to go from trainee to senior reporter, and the next obvious step if you want to stay in the same company is to go for a specialism or move into management, the first rung of which is becoming a news editor.

I genuinely loved my paper, my patch and my newsroom. The people – both my colleagues and the people I talked to through the course of writing my stories – were, for the most part, interesting and good natured, and our news area was big enough that there was always something good going on. But the fact was it wasn’t just me who loved the dynamic of the newsroom. There were no specialisms available, and the news editor, deputy editor and editor had around forty years’ experience at the paper between them and weren’t going anywhere till it was time for retirement.

There was no chance of promotion, and while thinking about leaving made me sad, a couple of things made me decide it was time – firstly, the fact that my salary, even as a senior, made for a pretty frugal life once my student
loan, rent and bills were paid, and secondly, that I missed my family more and more. My parents came to visit whenever they could, filling my fridge and taking me out for lunches and clothes shopping when they did in a way that made me hug them even tighter and feel even more bereft when they went home. I popped home for a weekend every couple of months to see them and my brother, but suddenly it didn’t feel enough. Every time I saw them my parents seemed a little older – their hair flecked with a little more silver, always an anecdote about a trip to the doctors with a new ailment for one or other of them. I wanted to be closer, to see them more regularly, although I wasn’t planning a full return to the nest, as I was pretty sure that the novelty of me moving home would wear off sharpish once they had to live with me full time.

As there were no promotions available I did the next best thing for a journalist wanting to progress their career – I moved to a bigger patch and paper, where the money was slightly better and which, happily, was much closer to my parents. Of course, by the time I’d found somewhere to live the increase in pay had been eaten up, but my mum popped round a couple of times a week with portions of whatever new recipe she’d been trying ‘for the freezer’ or a cake, which helped me eke my money out (and her lemon cake made me friends in my new newsroom – there’s only so much cake one woman can eat, after all).

Apart from the return into my life of epic baked goods and Sunday roasts en famille, the main change brought about by my altered living situation was the amount of
time I spent with Thomas. Suddenly it was a few hours’ drive to get to his, and my shifts, the costs of petrol and his burgeoning relationship with Charlotte meant we didn’t have a lot of time to spend together setting the world to rights while watching DVD box sets in the way we had before. The change took quite some adjustment; it brought me up a little short. I’d enjoyed being with him, and the things we’d done together were fun and filthy milestones for me. But the fact was, I knew I wanted a proper, albeit improper, boyfriend, someone I could potentially live with, go on holiday with, marry, have kids with, all that good stuff. And while I was seeing Thomas every other weekend, having plenty of no-strings rude fun, there wasn’t really the impetus to be open to potential new relationships or suitors – it all felt like too much faff, not least because I am the most rubbish person I know when it comes to the rules of dating.

My move felt like a good time to end things. Not our friendship – never that, we had too much in common, had shared too much, and he was and remains one of the kindest-hearted people I know – but the sexual side of our relationship. It made sense. I was moving away, things were getting serious with him and Charlotte, and in our typical no-muss, no-fuss way we decided we should just stop the beneficial side of our friends with benefits relationship.

For me it felt timely. While we’d talked about threesomes for a while, I’d always been a bit wary because, let’s face it, sex is pretty much designed at its basest form to be a two-player game, and as such I feared threesomes were
ripe for making someone feel left out or overlooked. While the risks were, in my mind at least, reduced because I didn’t have the feelings of sexual jealousy that I might have had if it were my boyfriend who was doing filthy yet hot things to another woman right in front of me, the intensity of the threesome was still a bit discombobulating and while I’d enjoyed it, somehow it cemented in my mind the feeling that I was ready to move on from rude fun with someone I trusted to a fully fledged relationship. In addition, while I had by no means felt overlooked, even to my occasionally oblivious eyes the connection between Thomas and Charlotte was strong – it definitely felt the right time for me to take a step back.

Of course, just because it made sense didn’t mean that it didn’t ache a bit for a while. Moving home is fine and dandy, but you forget in your years away that everyone else has also moved along. What with that, taking a deliberate step away from relying on Tom as my support network and social circle, a new flat and a new job, it’s fair to say it took me a while to find my feet.

It’s ironic now, but when I first met James, I really didn’t like him, although if I’m honest, at that stage I really didn’t like anyone. Despite the fact I’d ostensibly moved ‘home’, I found myself confused by how much I missed Thomas and I was in a bit of an odd funk. We chatted as much as ever, and he was the supportive friend he’d always been. He was chatty, open about his own life – clearly happy with Charlotte, who had begun spending weekends with him in the way I had previously. But it hurt. I was annoyed
with him, confused as to whether I should be annoyed with him, annoyed with myself for not knowing if it was right to be annoyed with him, and having constant flashbacks to the things we had done together. It left me feeling both aroused and furious, simultaneously. My brain was always working, trying to understand it. I was exhausted.

I was also mostly a hermit, disinterested in seeing people, going out or making small talk that suggested I was interested in anything other than my misery. Unfortunately, when your job is that of a journalist there are times you get pushed out of the office to do those things, whether you want to or not – and trust me, at that point I really didn’t. Despite the new job, bigger patch and increased responsibility, apathy was impacting my work life for the first time, which of course just made me feel worse. However, even in the depths of the doldrums, my new force-of-nature news editor was not going to let me stew too long. Having reminded me several times about an interview I had scheduled for a forthcoming article, in the end she shoved my coat, bag and umbrella into my hands and corralled me towards the door. I was too apathetic to demur, which, I guess, means I only have myself to blame.

He kept me waiting, the man I was to interview. I sat for more than half an hour, seething, in the reception of his posh office building. It was all chrome and glass and minimalist flower arrangements, which looked like bunches of twigs picked up from the side of the road but undoubtedly cost more than I made in a week. By the time he finally did deign to appear I was already glaring a bit. Except it wasn’t him I was glaring at. He’d sent someone
down to get me and take me up to his office. Not unusual behaviour, admittedly, but by that time it was just another thing to add to the list of reasons he was, seemingly without effort, pissing me off. If the apologetic glances sent my way by the preppy-looking assistant who accompanied me up in the lift were anything to go by, it wasn’t an unusual occurrence.

James was, and indeed is, a stockbroker, and against my better judgement I had been sent out to interview him for a feature on the new fluffy ethical financier sorts apparently so prevalent in the post-credit crunch world. I expected an alfalfa-sprout-eating, sandal-wearing hippy stockbroker – maybe in a suit made of hemp or something. What I got was the kind of person who I’d eye up in a bar in a slightly wistful way, secure in the knowledge that he’d be too busy dating pert-bottomed women called Pippa to look twice at me, my glass of red and my bag of crisps. He certainly didn’t look like the sort that would sully his fingers with cheese-and-onion dust. In fact, as I risked a quick glance at his chest, I’d have bet money there were chiselled pecs under there, belying the fact he wasn’t a snack food sort in the least.

His handshake was firm and while he apologized for keeping me waiting his tone didn’t sound sorry. To be fair, by the time the interview had finished I was wishing he’d left me down in reception. If this was meant to be a colour piece, a fairly non-controversial feature, clearly no one had sent him the memo letting him know that. Getting a straight answer out of him about anything was difficult; he clarified and re-clarified his points until basically he
had sucked anything in the way of controversy or even interest out of them, and the more I shifted my line of questioning to try and get him to open up, the more closed he got. It was frustrating as hell.

In the end, after more than an hour, I gave up. I had enough to file my copy but I knew that I hadn’t got a killer quote, something to lift the piece. This just made me grumpier, and when we were done I slapped my notebook shut and threw it into the depths of my handbag with a little more viciousness than really necessary. That was the point he asked me out to dinner.

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. ‘Sorry?’ And then I laughed again at his look of confusion that my first instinct hadn’t been just to agree, possibly with associated swooning.

‘I asked if you wanted to go out for dinner. Or maybe drinks, I understand journalists are partial to a jar or two.’

My irritation with him rose, even while I gaped at him. ‘Why do you want to go for a drink with me? And why would I want to go out for a drink with you? You couldn’t bring yourself to answer a single question straightforwardly. How on earth do you get through casual date small talk?’