The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story (6 page)

I hit the jackpot. The low-paid, unglamorous jackpot, admittedly, but a jackpot nonetheless. The paper I did most of my work experience at offered me a job. My dad was horrified when I told him what the starting salary was – definitely not a graduate wage, much less a postgraduate wage – but living so far from the city meant I could afford to survive, as long as I didn’t worry too much about luxuries. Like heating. Or going out much. I didn’t care though. I was an actual working journalist, with a byline. One day on the way home I even saw someone on the train reading a page with my name in the middle of it. I was so giddy I nearly missed my stop. I couldn’t have been prouder if I was writing for a national newspaper. Plus restaurant reviews and theatre reviews meant I could still
have a little taste of luxury every so often, even if because I was the newest I always got lumbered with the knuckle-gnawingly awful am dram.

The life of a junior reporter is a busy one. I was far from home and with very little opportunity for a social life, bar post-deadline drinks as we deconstructed how our stories had been subbed. My best friend from college, Ella, had found a job on a paper twenty miles away, so I saw her as much as possible, but with weekend jobs, evening jobs and everything else going on, I spent a lot of time alone.

But while switching on my little portable heater didn’t feel like a necessity, an internet connection did. It provided me a way to email and social network with friends from uni and my journalism course, keep in touch with my family, play games, and then, when I was feeling lonely and like I wanted to flirt with someone, gave me a space not only to chat to people who were similarly bored and looking to talk but also to discuss things that I’d never dare broach in person.

I genuinely think that the internet has, for all intents and purposes, changed the landscape of sexuality. No matter how perverse your kink, you can bet there is someone out there on the web who shares it. Unfortunately, there’s probably another three who actually think your kink is not perverted enough and given half a chance will tell you how the way they do it is more intense/sexier/just outright better than yours. Frustratingly enough, the most noticeable thing about dipping a toe into the BDSM subculture online is that there’s as much judging of each other from inside the ‘lifestyle’ – I promise that’s the last time
I’m using that phrase as I think it sounds pretentious in the extreme – as there is from the outside.

That said, there are some lovely people out there, once you look past the slightly odder ones. I’ve had some amazing, sexy and intelligent conversations with people I’ve met on various sites, who’ve sparked my imagination, reassured me, even become good real-life friends.

You do have to wade through some crap though.

I joined my first smut site the year I started work. Apart from those interludes with Ryan, which kept me in wank fantasies for years afterwards, I hadn’t met anyone who’d interested me sexually at all, much less shown any obvious signs of being compatible with my burgeoning submissive tendencies. I was so focused on work and my day-to-day life that taking the effort to finding anyone felt too much like faff. That, paired with a penchant for
literotica.com
porn, which read as hot and yet very unreal to my ever-practical eyes, meant I figured my fantasies would stay just that. Over time I even wondered if perhaps I was romanticizing my experiences with Ryan. Could pain actually have brought me that much pleasure, or was I just looking back with rose-tinted glasses on a sexy time in my life?

Then, over a drink a friend told me about a site she’d stumbled across that was basically a chat and dating site for kinky people. The details she gave were vague – and heaven forfend I would ask her outright about it, thus betraying my interest – but there was enough info there that when I got home and did a bit of Googling I found my way to where I wanted to be.

Some people say that nowadays these kind of sites are
full of fakes, cliques and people wanting you to pay them. I didn’t notice many pros but, fresh out of uni and on a trainee reporter’s wage, if someone was looking for someone to fleece it was never going to be me. It felt like a whole new world full of people who knew each other and were talking a language that I didn’t quite grasp, with many using an elaborate form of pronouns (always capitalized for the dominant, always lower case for the submissive no matter whether it was the start of a sentence or the word ‘I’), which I found ridiculous. I decided quickly that committing crimes against grammar was a hard limit for me.

The message boards were filled with people talking about events they’d been to, things they’d bought, stuff they’d done, some of which made me wet, some of which made me shudder. I read people discussing the art of shibari rope bondage, St Andrew’s crosses, needle play, ponygirls and a thousand other things that had never entered my world before. And for a while I lurked in a virtual corner, quiet and unsure, like the country mouse if he’d pitched up at the town mouse’s for the weekend to find him wearing rubber, holding a crop and hosting a play party. It was surreal and yet intoxicating. Could these people be for real, doing this stuff while holding down jobs, making sure they paid their council tax on time and all the other little complexities of life? It seemed a million miles away from my existence. I was intrigued.

Having set up my account and put in some brief details about who I was and why I was on the site (I went for a vague ‘dipping a toe’ message, a generic picture with no distinguishing features and a brief note to say that I was
looking for friends or possibly even an online relationship although I didn’t see myself meeting anyone in real life any time soon), I started getting messages in my inbox every time I logged in. When people could see you were live on the site they’d message you straight away, often it appeared without reading your profile or taking time to bother with quaint concepts like punctuation.

–
RU
feeling horny filthy bitch? Do U want to kneel before you’re master?

– No, because you talk in text speak and don’t know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ and I’m enough of a grammar fascist that on that basis I don’t think I could submit to you, sorry.

– I think I have use of a slut such as you. Present yourself at my house in Bournemouth to see if you meet my requirements.

– Firstly, I don’t like Bournemouth. Secondly, do you really want someone you know nothing about to meet you at your house? Honestly? Cause if so you’re a bit bonkers and I think I’d best pass. Thanks anyway.

– Are U online now? Do you want to talk dirty?

– Erm, yes I am. But no, not so much. Thank you.

Don’t get me wrong, there were intelligent, articulate, interesting people to meet, but overall the overwhelming majority were disappointingly a bit mad or full on. Yes, I liked the idea of someone spanking me, even fantasized about it going further and letting them hurt me more. But, well, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to make sure they’re not a nutter first.

I got the odd email which I replied to rather than just auto-deleting, but overall it was all a bit disappointing.

And then I started chatting to Mark.

We first started talking because I bookmarked him. I’d read his profile, found him interesting, but it was late and I wasn’t sure whether I should mail so I bookmarked him, meaning to mail him later. I didn’t think anything more of it.

Well, not until he mailed me, saying:
Favouriting me is lovely. But what’s the point if you’re too shy to say hello?

I was mortified, having not realized the site software showed someone people who had expressed interest in them that way. The first few messages we sent were me apologizing for being a technotard, and him reassuring me. Well, that and laughing at the depth of my horror. And then we started talking generally. He was a techie type. Interesting. Articulate. We chatted slowly, not about kink initially, but over time things developed.

We were going quite slowly. Well, very slowly actually. While I liked Mark I was wary about meeting someone from the web without knowing them well enough to know I felt safe with them. Especially with this. I’m cynical and guarded in relationships at the best of times, even before you factor in the Dominant/submissive dynamic. But that didn’t stop us having stupid amounts of fun online and on the phone. He had a filthy mind and a sexy voice and our chats often degenerated into phone sex with both of us reaching satisfaction while we chatted about what we could do to each other if we were in the same room together. But I had been deliberately aloof. I felt a bit uncomfortable at the thought of sending him pictures of me naked – even if there was a way of taking them that
didn’t make me look slightly deformed or like a secretary photocopying her breasts after too many lunchtime G&Ts, which, let’s face it, with a camera phone with no timer and normal length arms isn’t as easy as you’d hope. So ours was very much a meeting of smutty, kinky minds using words to weave various erotic scenarios round each other.

We never met. We lived relatively close to each other, but the timing was never right and, as often happens, connections forged intensely online flare and then die quickly, although not before he sent me a set of Ben Wa balls to wear during a long council election shift. I started work at 7am, meeting the head of the council to cover him casting his vote, worked through the day and then sat through the count after the polls closed, all with them inside me. It was a ridiculously safe council, with no upsets or changes of leadership, but I was excited through the whole process, albeit probably not for the reasons my colleagues imagined.

Over the next few months I chatted to various other people online. Some I was tempted to meet, others I’d have actively crossed the street to avoid if they’d appeared in front of me. I shared some amazing fantasies, got an idea of what I found erotic – and what I most definitely didn’t – but still ended up too nervous to actually do anything in person, to take that final step.

For all that there are people that moan about the internet being full of fantasists who want to hide behind their computer screen and not try anything out in real life, for me it was a great place to start – somewhere which felt safe and gave me a chance to explore some of
my fantasies and think through some of my feelings in an utterly secure, non-judgemental environment. But eventually thinking about or talking about being hurt or humiliated was going to be pushed into the background for something more hands on. And finally I met a three-dimensional, real-life man I felt comfortable enough to start exploring with in person.

I met Thomas in a queue. I know, it sounds ridiculous and oh–so-British, but it was a very long queue and we were in it for a very long time. And if you could ever call a queue serendipitous then in hindsight that’s what it was, because when I first met him I thought he was an arse and if I’d had anywhere to escape to I would have wandered off and not spoken to him again, which with everything that’s happened since would have been a real shame.

Ella and I had met at a cinema somewhere in between us to go to a one-off screening of
His Girl Friday
, journalism geeks to the end. We were chatting, waiting to go into the film, and he interrupted. He was alone and obviously bored and I remember thinking he was rude, arrogant and clearly thought a bit much of himself, although my irritation was tempered in slightly fickle fashion by my finding him attractive. After pre- and post-film chat – and a surprising amount of laughter – I had developed a grudging liking for him and when he suggested we go for coffee in the slightly pretentious cafe attached to the cinema afterwards Ella and I agreed, happy he wasn’t an axe murderer and would be bearable company for a while – after that, who cared anyway?

Ironically enough, after a while I found I cared. He took our email addresses when he left, and we ended up
having round robin email chats about films, current affairs and general life. He was funny, intelligent and had just come out of a long-term relationship. His ex had got custody of most of their friends and he seemed a little lonely. Sitting in my flat alone of a night sometimes I imagined him doing the same. The difference seemed to be that he wasn’t as comfortable with his own company as me. Where I closed my door – and put the chain on immediately as per my dad’s pleas – feeling as though I had come back to my sanctum where I could throw on PJs and just enjoy the peace, it seemed that he perhaps didn’t feel quite the same. Ella and I met up with him a couple of times for drinks, dinner and cinema trips, but with Ella and I both working weekend shifts and Ella living considerably further away from him than I did, eventually we started meeting for cheap midweek films, just the two of us. He was a thoughtful person; he asked a lot of questions about me and remembered the answers, and I found myself confiding in him about my life. My instinct when something funny or interesting happened at work became to email or text him. We might have become friends out of a shared loneliness, but the more we got to know each other the more we had in common. I liked having a male friend who was straightforward and honest. This translated as bluntness sometimes, leaving me spluttering out my tea a couple of times when he was discussing women he fancied and how he was angling to ask them out, but I admired how articulate he was, and he made me laugh like few people I’d ever met. We quoted from the same films,
liked the same bands, and soon I was spending a lot of time at his.

Why his, you ask? Well, winter had come. I earned enough to just about manage life in a tiny flat alone, but the lack of central heating became an issue very quickly. One weekend when he sent me a text asking me what I was doing and I told him I was hanging out in Starbucks to keep warm he suggested I just come round to his and stay in his spare room for the night. So I did. The next weekend I was working, but the weekend after that he suggested it again. I popped round on Saturday afternoon and left the next day after cooking Sunday lunch – thanks, Mum, your roast potato recipe does wonders. It was comfortable, lazy, fun. We walked his dog, I brought my laptop and hooked it up to his Wi-Fi so we could play co-op computer games, and we watched DVD box sets and films aplenty, all in the warmth. Simple pleasures, but it was wonderful and, as Christmas came and went and spring blossomed, I found myself going round to his more and more often, despite the weather no longer being an issue. Ella would come down too if she was free, but if she wasn’t then we’d happily hang out alone.