Bound to You (16 page)

‘Did you find everything you were looking for today?’ she asked him, as she ran through the garments, her eyes fixed indifferently on the till.

‘Yes, thank you.’ He was clearly jittery. In her capacity as oblivious sales assistant, she was effectively being used as a free vanilla girl. ‘If only the men of the Six Swiss Exchange could see him now!’ I whispered to Sapphire. Sapphire giggled with satisfaction. ‘And women!’ she replied.

Xavier turned around to drink in the image of us laughing at him.

‘Sir?’ the sales assistant required his credit card. He blushed. In a fluster he dropped his wallet. Sapphire texted him my remark. His phone, which Sapphire had sunk deep into his pocket as we left the changing room, now vibrated too close to his cock cage, causing an involuntary rattle. The assistant looked at him, startled.

‘Fuck,’ I bit into my scarf to stop myself from laughing and chanced a look at Sapphire. She was staring right at him and licking her painted lips. Xavier read the text message then slid the phone back in his pocket. Sapphire texted him again. I didn’t know what this time. Again, the phone vibrated audibly against his cock cage. Was he stupid or something? He’d slid it right back in there? Or was he just a glutton for public humiliation? Again, the assistant looked at him, this time with increasing suspicion, her mouth souring down at the corners slightly.

‘He’d better do it, or he’s going to be in big fucking trouble with me,’ Sapphire murmured. Suddenly Xavier addressed the assistant. ‘Do you think those knickers are the right size?’

The assistant stared at him warily. I sensed a hint of scorn. She flicked back her long dark hair over her shoulder. ‘Well, it depends who the knickers are for, sir.’

‘Right,’ Xavier replied weakly, his dimples hardening like rock literally petrified.

‘Are they for one of your friends over there?’ She gestured towards us. Oh God. I think I knew what Sapphire had texted him now.

‘No, no,’ he breathed, then gulped again, looked at the floor, then her face, then over again to us, his eyes imploring us simultaneously to end and to prolong his humiliation. Then finally he plucked up the courage. ‘They’re for me, Mistress.’ The sales assistant stilled her hand on the bag she was packing. Sapphire and I held our breath. Then the cashier laughed. ‘Very funny!’ she said.

Oh God, that was even worse – she didn’t believe him! The pleasure of a genuine vanilla reaction had been scuppered, and Xavier looked utterly crestfallen. He took the bag from her lilac-nailed hands and, with his head down, beat a retreat back to us.

Afterwards, Xavier took us for a restorative cocktail in a bar in Covent Garden where the inky blue light bathed drinkers with an incriminating glow. Sapphire informed Xavier that after successfully purchasing the underwear for us, he now had her permission to release himself from the cage and gave him the combination code. ‘Go and do what you need to do and report back here in two minutes.’ Xavier bolted to the bathroom. Ten minutes later he still wasn’t back.

‘Do you think he’s done a runner?’ I asked her.

‘No idea,’ Sapphire replied, frowning as she sipped on her cocktail. Then a message on her BlackBerry flashed up. ‘Sorry, Mistresses, but I’m having some trouble back here.’

Sapphire rolled her eyes and patted her chignon, as if she were a pre-Raphaelite martyr. ‘Let’s go help him.’

In the disabled toilet, Xavier was desperately but very unsuccessfully trying to bring himself to climax, his dark blue pants shackling his ankles, the cock cage carelessly tossed onto the floor.

‘I’ve been locked up for so long I can’t seem to cum,’ he explained, his face blank in desolation.

Sapphire cooed at him sardonically.

‘Nature can be very cruel sometimes,’ he said to her forlornly.

‘Well, what do you expect?’ I replied. ‘Nature’s female.’

The next morning, Xavier emailed Sapphire to say thank you very much for our time but our services weren’t quite what he was looking for. ‘But we gave him everything he asked for! And more!’ I cried. ‘Do you think it was the sales assistant not believing him that spoilt it?’

Sapphire shrugged. ‘Who knows? I think he’s spent so many years wanking over that scenario that the reality couldn’t possibly live up to the fantasy.’

The shopping trip may have been something of a failed experiment, but we had come away with our fee, free underwear and some amusing anecdotes. We wished Xavier well in his fruitless quest for fantasy fulfilment. Sometimes, whatever you gave them, it still wasn’t enough. If we couldn’t satisfy Xavier, who could?

Besides being a source of amusing stories, fixing our finances and occasionally turning us on, domming also provided us with genuine friendship. I realised that for the first time since Christos and I had split, I had stopped feeling quite as lonely.

Sapphire was friends with another couple of girls that worked as mistresses in a for-hire dungeon about fifteen minutes away. Angela and Violet had met at university in the female wrestling squad. After graduating and moving to London together, they’d soon discovered that they could wrestle men for money and get paid a lot more for it. After that, domination was a natural progression. Angela was a valkyrical blonde, slim, tall and impossibly haughty. Violet was smaller with a rangier frame and chaotic black hair that made her look beautiful and slightly crazed.

Sometimes we would all meet for lunch and end up shocking the restaurant staff when our competitive Mistresses storytime got out of hand. There was a healthy rivalry between us, and we would often try to outdo one another with tales of the most debauched thing we’d done to a client that week, or the nicest gift we had received. But there was also a special camaraderie between us. On occasion, we would even ‘loan’ our slaves out to one another.

‘Oh God, I’ve got American David again tomorrow afternoon. He’s currently going through a knickerless face-sitting phase, but I’ve had an argument with Tony about it.’ (Tony was Angela’s boyfriend). ‘He said it made him really uncomfortable. One of you lot wouldn’t take him for fifteen minutes at the end, would you?’

Sapphire and I remained silent. We never did anything that constituted ‘intimate body worship’ as the advert jargon ran.

Violet shrugged. ‘Send him to me. I don’t have anyone to care what I do! But you have to do me a favour too – lend me your maid one day this week?’

Angela actually had a man who paid to clean her house. That was one kind of slave we could never get enough of punishing.

Violet suddenly had another thought about the face-sitting obsessive. ‘He doesn’t lick without asking though, does he?’

Angela laughed. ‘He doesn’t try it with me. Depends how strict you are, Violet! I don’t know where you draw your boundaries!’

We may all have had different boundaries, but what we all agreed on was a single, exacting standard of safety. Sometimes Sapphire and I would perform outcalls, visiting one of the clients at their home or at a hotel, in which case we would ask one of the other dommes to be our security call. This basically involved us giving them the address of where we were going, with instructions to phone us twenty minutes after the session ended. If they called us three times without us responding, they were to call the police.

It was for the same concern about safety that I declined Sapphire’s offer to train me in medical play. She told me that she had on occasion practised urethral play – ‘you basically stick something long and fine down the end of their cock’ or covered their scrotums with needles until their genitals looked like a pincushion – but it made me shudder and I had absolutely no interest in practising it. I drew the line at using the violet wand, an electric shock-box that plugged into the mains and pulsed out a mild current which you could then direct to whichever part of the client’s anatomy you had dominating designs on. You could shock yourself with it if you grabbed the end without the correct fixture mounted, something I had done several times, even under Sapphire’s guidance. I was risk averse, and the violet wand was both as sadistic, and as masochistic, as I got.

In the week before Christmas, Sapphire and I were booked up to three or four times a day. I made more money in that week than in the whole of the previous two months put together.

‘It’s just because everybody wants to get a bit of pleasurable masochism in before the miserable masochism of enforced family-time begins!’ Sapphire would joke. But I knew she had a point.

It was now that awful maudlin point in the year when Christmas is aching for New Year, and New Year knows it’s going to disappoint Christmas. Christmas was hard enough with half my family on the other side of the world, but this year was my first for several without Christos and I missed him terribly. I struggled through the compulsory jollity, resenting it all. Everything served to remind me that this time last year I was deeply in love with the only man I thought I could marry. But after a tearful Christmas Day, I steeled myself. Christos and I were over for good reason, and I had a life to be lived – and it was an exciting one, at that.

Fortunately, business had slowed but not stopped completely. The clients that came to us at this time tended to be melancholic and lonely, single men for whom the holiday stretched out in an empty waste of solo drinking sessions and hastily declined invitations to share homemade mince pies and carol-singing with their colleagues’ children. I could empathise all too easily.

But it was impossible not to be cheered by the countless Christmas gifts we received from clients: perfume, chocolates, Kurt Geiger shoes, thoughtfully selected books we’d mentioned we wanted to read, leather boots and jackets. Admittedly, my vegetarianism struggled with the leather but then the animal was already dead, right? It would have been a waste of a good hide, I decided.

‘A good hide for a good hiding!’ Sapphire reassured me.

We were also cheered by the number of party invites we received. One night just before New Year’s Eve, Sapphire and I found ourselves at the office with nothing to do after a client had cancelled on us last-minute.

‘We’ve got three options,’ Sapphire informed me. ‘So there’s that cocktail party in Green Park that Roger invited us to, but I’m not sure how we pretend we know him, and besides, it will be full of old men.’

‘Young people! I want young people, please!’ I pulled a mock pout.

Sapphire nodded knowingly. ‘Hell, yes. Hmm, well, there’s drinks in Camden with my friend Rosie. Doesn’t she work in TV or something, you knew some of her friends, don’t you remember? Or we could go and hang out with Violet and Co. somewhere up in East London. She’s having a party in that monstrous dilapidated townhouse she shares with about fifteen other people. Knowing Violet, it’ll also be full of her male dom exes from across the global fetish scene, so be prepared for your sweet-looking little self to be accosted, Nichi! You know that, outside of work, she’s obsessed with being dominated herself, right?’

I nodded. Whenever we had lunch with Violet she would talk as much about her ‘Masters’ as her clients, of how they would tie her to the bed, force her to suck them off and slap her face, bottom and breasts when she didn’t comply. It might have sounded alarming if it wasn’t for the very obvious pleasure that possessed her face as she told us about her latest conquering. Intriguingly, the more domming she did professionally, the more she herself wanted to be dominated. That interested me a lot, and I wondered if it was only a matter of time before I became similarly ‘wired’.

‘That’s fine,’ I laughed. ‘I think I have a few ways of pulling a wayward man into line these days!’

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s not a “kink” party, and it’s not that Violet is only friends with sex workers. But that just makes the conversation all the more fun when you start revealing details about what you do, right?’

Violet’s townhouse was a lot harder to find than either Sapphire or I had bargained for. It took us a full twenty minutes, shivering up and down the same murky streets, before we chanced upon it, taking a left when we presumed it could only have been a right. The fact that both of us were wearing our domming shoes with needle-thin stiletto heels, made the quest that little bit harder. ‘Usually I never wore shoes I couldn’t run in – that was the feminist compromise I had made with myself over high heels. I just loved them too much to forsake them completely.’ – but my KG stilettos were the only suitable shoes I had with me to wear with a black lace minidress.

Violet’s house was indeed bizarre. She and her cohorts paid a security company to let them occupy the house, and in return, got an affordable London rent. For some reason, though, there was no handle on the outside of the door. We had to ring Violet on her mobile to get her to let us in. ‘Look up into the security camera so we can check it’s you!’ she trilled.

Sapphire was short-tempered after our odyssey in heels. ‘Violet, who do you think you’re talking to, you know it’s me and Jade, who else would ever have access to THIS number? Now let us in, I need a drink!’

‘You don’t drink!’

Violet dared to wind up Sapphire in a way I never would have done.

‘Exactly!’ replied Sapphire and hung up.

Two minutes later and there was Violet, barefoot in a tight red dress and sheer sequinned leggings, ushering us across the threshold. She had the right wild hair and art-school style to pull off the outfit and made it look more quirky than cabaret.

‘You understand now why I’m good in dungeon spaces, having to work this fortress entry system every day!’ she joked. ‘Lovely to see you, ladies, happy Missed-it-mass!’

We followed her along a high-ceilinged corridor, the walls of which were hung with exquisite collages and paintings of Indian goddesses. ‘My friend Sebastian did them. Aren’t they beautiful?’

I stopped in front of one particularly gory-looking image. It depicted an Indian deity I didn’t recognise, her standing leg mounted on a copulating couple, head in her hand, and some kind of bodily fluid spurting out of her decapitated neck. I winced and thought back to the, by comparison, very tame statue of Kali we had on the office mantelpiece. ‘There’s a goddess more violent than Kali?’ I exclaimed.