Geoffrey's Rules (6 page)

Geoffrey seemed to read my mind. “Your safeword is ‘Java’. You may use it anytime, including in public.” The evenness of his tone seemed to take the edge off the fear and dial the heat up even further. Now I found that the prospect of Geoffrey telling me to take off my panties in public had a strange attraction. “Does that make sense?”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a pause, then he said, “This is when you thank me for disciplining you, Chloe.”

I blushed, somehow furious both at myself and at him, but also, of course, incredibly aroused. I looked down again at his lap, then back into his eyes. “Thank you, sir, for disciplining me.”

He raised me up and hugged me. I tensed against him for an instant, not knowing what my place was, but the hug was the genuine article, as if a new facet of Geoffrey King were coming through: not vanilla, but perhaps something closer to it than anything I had seen of him yet.

“Thank you, sir,” I whispered against his shoulder.

“Thank you, sweet girl,” he said. “I hope…” He seemed to stop himself. Then he began again, “I hope we have the chance to do this often.”

“Me too, sir,” I said.

The incident at the café had taken place on Tuesday; our lunch and my first spanking was on Wednesday. That meant that I had Thursday and Friday to get through, following Geoffrey’s rules, if I wanted to be fully taken in hand Saturday afternoon.

I heated canned soup for dinner Wednesday night in a haze, after Geoffrey had dropped me off at my apartment with a long kiss and another hug inside his Lexus and a final “You were a very good girl, Chloe.” We had talked about the Red Sox on the drive from his house. He had been six years old in 1986 and claimed that he had been scarred for life, and that as a child of the 90’s, I simply couldn’t understand.

I am already someone who lives very much inside her own head, in the worlds I cannot help create in there—and whose creation has gotten me through many a dark day. People who read a lot tend to be like that, I suppose, but those who decide that they have to make a career out of it probably have it worse. The thought of what would happen in Geoffrey’s house Saturday afternoon threw me into my imagination more thoroughly than I could have anticipated.

The hardest thing about the next three days, from that Wednesday night to Saturday morning, was emerging from the world of my fantasies enough to carry on daily living: eating, going to class—thankfully I only had one of those, my modernism seminar on Thursday afternoon. Even sleeping, that night—and then also the succeeding ones—proved very difficult, not because I was worrying, but because I didn’t want to stop thinking about Geoffrey, and every time I began to drift off, I awoke with a guilty start, thinking, obscurely, that I was being ungrateful to my master by dozing instead of obeying him.

Thus, the second hardest thing as I thought about the erotic events of the near future—seeing Geoffrey’s cock for the first time, hearing him tell me what to do, having him position me, feeling him inside me, hearing him say “good girl” as he had his way—was following rule four, the one about self-pleasuring. When lying in bed that night, not sleeping, it was a constant struggle. I tried putting my hands underneath my backside, but of course that made me think of him spanking me, and that in turn made me think of him forcing me to that incredible orgasm. I hugged my arms across my chest, but they brushed against my nipples. I put my hands behind my head, but I knew that to be the classic submissive pose, which made the lewd feeling between my thighs worse and made me tense the muscles there to seek release as I imagined Geoffrey ordering me into that pose. Also, my arms started to fall asleep.

Finally, I found a pose with my arms crossed over my stomach and my left hand holding my right wrist to keep it from drifting that seemed to make things a little easier. The pose didn’t stop the fantasies, but it made it possible to think about them without feeling anxious that I was going to break the rule.

The next morning, as I drank coffee and prepared for my seminar, the beginnings of the broader effects of the rules upon me took me by surprise and made me think more and more seriously about Geoffrey’s words with regard to my life and my future. Already my thoughts seemed to me more productive. Also, I didn’t seem to have the same urge to read erotica—instead I read the books I should have been reading and looked in them for any sign that my erotic interests could have some intersection with my academic ones.

That task turned out not to be as difficult as I had thought it would be. Indeed, it was almost distressing how much BDSM there was in every text I read. The best and worst was Joyce’s
Ulysses
, which we would be discussing that afternoon, because of how unbearably turned on I got thinking about what an anal devotee Joyce himself must have been to put anal sex at the very climax (in more ways than one, I thought) of the arguable masterwork of modernist fiction, and then to include what was clearly a masturbation scene for Molly Bloom, recently fucked in the ass, as the cadenza.

When I realized that I had found the connection in a text I just happened to be preparing to discuss that day, my thoughts turned to the rest of modernism, to see if that was just a coincidence. There was the incredible importance of Sade to French modernism. And there was
Story of O
, for goodness’ sake, which I had always thought of as the ultimate domestic-discipline novel, though of course the vast majority of domestic-discipline readers would never in a million years agree. And all that was before we even got to the Germans. As an experiment, I put my copy of Murnau’s
Nosferatu
in my laptop and watched the first few scenes. The core BDSM nature of vampires instantly became clear to me in a way that made me feel stupid for never having recognized it before. I skipped to the final scene and found that I had to adopt what I had begun to think of as my “rule four pose” as I watched the vampire at work on the sweet young wife.

I had known this stuff was there, of course, theoretically. But until Geoffrey had commanded me to begin to consider its relation to my work, I had managed to keep that knowledge from the part of my brain that was running my fledgling academic career. Suddenly I found that the enthusiasm I had for the idea of graduate school in comparative literature when I had set out upon its path was back. I didn’t want to stop taking notes—BDSM notes, to be sure, but that didn’t bother me because my new master had shown me that could be a good and productive thing—on the reading. I wanted to keep fighting to find the answers to the questions that now, in this wonderful new context, had a vitality they hadn’t had two days before.

Above all, the one central question Geoffrey had more or less asked me hung in my brain: What did BDSM have to do with the power literature has over me?

Thursday morning, before I left my apartment for my seminar, I emailed him.

Good morning, sir. Thank you so much for spanking me yesterday and for teaching me your rules. Last night was very difficult, but I managed to recite the rules, and although thinking about you and your rules made it hard, I kept rule number four!

This morning I’ve been following your suggestion as I prepared for my Modernism seminar this afternoon, and I have to thank you, even more, for taking me in hand and making your suggestion. Suddenly, I’m seeing things I didn’t see before—ways to think and talk about literature that make more sense to me than the, well, vanilla way I was looking at it before.

I looked at what I had written so far, and there was something else I wanted to write, but even thinking about writing it made me blush. I took a deep breath, and continued.

Sir, I can’t wait until you possess me fully and teach me how to please you.

Then there was one final thing that took even more courage.

Respectfully,

Your Chloe

The second person possessive pronoun had never been anywhere near as meaningful to me as it was then.

In the seminar itself, I felt like a different person from who I had been the week before, and every week previous to that (it was nearly the end of the spring semester, at that point, so the seminar had been meeting for almost three months already). I had been almost entirely silent up until then, feeling like I understood the material, more or less, but also that the discussions led by Professor Whitlock (my adviser, though I had had very little contact with her) and shaped by my fellow students were completely uninteresting to me. Specifically, the way Professor Whitlock discussed gender seemed to me entirely defensible on theoretical grounds, but at the same time to have absolutely no connection to my experience of trying figure out what it meant to be a woman.

Now, feeling strangely empowered by the experience of having been spanked by a dominant man and made to feel feminine as I lay across his lap, of having rules made about the ownership of my—yes—cunt and about who was allowed to touch it, I spoke up in the discussion. Moreover, I spoke up to challenge the way the discussion was being framed.

I was extremely annoyed that a fellow student—John Harrow, as privileged a humanities grad student as you could ever find, though I certainly shouldn’t talk—had decided he would pontificate on the subject of Joyce and anal sex, and about how degrading it was and what a misogynist it proved Joyce to be.

Ironically, I realized later, I interrupted him.

“Fine, he’s a misogynist,” I said, letting the annoyance shape my tone. Heads turned; the sound of my voice was an unusual phenomenon in that room; the sound of it raised in any kind of passion was unprecedented. I glanced at Professor Whitlock, who wore a look of concern—as she always seemed to do when a female student appeared to be getting excited about something to do with gender. It was as if as an older feminist critic, she wanted to make sure we upstarts didn’t give cause for men to call us histrionic. There was a touching compassion in there, of course, but it was also patronizing, and I was suddenly sick of it.

“But that doesn’t mean that Molly doesn’t get off on being fucked in the ass.”

Gasps and titters.

“But the sex doesn’t leave any room for her agency, does it?” replied the asshole, triumphantly.

“Well, it wouldn’t, would it?” I shot back. “It’s his stream of consciousness.”

“Indeed,” said Professor Whitlock. “That’s the problem, right?” She looked at both of us, almost prissily, to kiss and make up intellectually.

“And Joyce solves it with her stream of consciousness at the end,” I continued.

“That’s not a solution,” sneered John. “Fine, everybody loves Molly’s monologue. ‘Yes’ is everyone’s favorite word. But that doesn’t change the fact that Leopold has degraded her. Maybe it means she can persevere despite that—”

“What if the novel is tighter than most people give it credit for?” I said, really digging in my heels and not even noticing the irony of using the word “tight”. “What if the final monologue is
about
being fucked in the ass?”

“As written by a misogynist,” Professor Whitlock cut in, unwilling to brook my treachery further.

“So, it’s false-consciousness if I say that
I
feel that way about getting fucked in the ass?”

Silence.

“This doesn’t seem to be going in a productive direction,” Professor Whitlock said icily.

After the seminar, I asked her if I could meet with her the next day to discuss a project. She looked at me a little sharply, as if in reprimand for what she considered an outburst, and said that that would be fine. Then she said, “Chloe, there’s an argument to be made that all consciousness is false-consciousness, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to ourselves to direct our practices along ethical lines.”

I felt my face burn. “Um,” I replied. “This is kind of what I’d like to talk about tomorrow.”

“Very well,” she said.

I felt drained. Part of me felt like I had won a victory over myself and over John Harrow and even over Professor Whitlock. Another part felt that I had made it much clearer—much too clear, even—that there was no room for a voice like mine at that table.

Leaving the seminar room, I saw on my phone that there was an email from Geoffrey waiting in my inbox. The blush that had begun to fade returned five times hotter, and I elected to wait until I could get back into the privacy of my room before I opened the email.

Dear, sweet, naughty girl,

I hope you don’t take it amiss that I call you naughty despite how good you say you were last night—an account I do not doubt for a moment! I think we both know, however, that a girl like you can be good while remaining, at heart, forever naughty.

After the stress of the seminar and the hours of being without him—always so hard at the start of something new and wonderful—these words, simple as they were, seemed like a ray of light piercing deep into my soul. I had been naughty all along; I would always be naughty. Geoffrey King had seen it, and now I was at last going to get what I truly deserved.

I’m very glad you found my suggestion helpful, and I can’t wait to talk about this new direction with you.

Other things I can’t wait for, in no particular order: your sweet mouth around my cock; having you tied to a chair, naked; pulling down your panties and seeing that you’ve shaved for me.

Fondly,

Geoffrey

If I had thought my face was hot earlier, I had, I realized now, been lying to myself. This was what it felt like to blush: thinking about having just been commanded to shave my pussy, thinking about carrying out the command, and realizing that the shame itself was unbearably arousing—to say nothing of the other images. I had never touched a man’s penis with my mouth. In fact, I had managed to avoid it with the two guys I had slept with, not really because I had been averse but because I had wanted to be told to do it, and those guys weren’t like that; and the image of being tied to the chair was straight out of one of my darkest fantasies, as well as the videos I watched when I was feeling entirely irredeemable.