The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive (24 page)

    “So I’ll call you around eleven-thirty or twelve on Saturday night, once my wife’s asleep.”

    “Have you ever snuck out successfully before, Steve?” I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice.

    “Oh, yeah. I just have to be careful. I’m on probation with her as it is.” He looked sheepish.

    “Wow. So, is this gonna be an okay thing, or?”

    I knew it wasn’t my job to counsel people out of sessioning with me, but I have this weird thing about not wanting to mess up marriages. God knows enough of them go up in flames without my help. There’s just something about the idea of such a crushed hope — the euphoria and optimism people feel when they walk down the aisle — and then what an excruciating memory that must be when they’re meeting angrily in divorce court later on. I didn’t want any part of it.

    “I don’t know,” Steve went on. “I’m kind of hitting a bottom with this stuff. I think I’m a sex addict. It’s been like this for the last few years, but my compulsions seem to be coming to a head lately.”

    “Hm.” I thought for a minute. “I don’t mean to say that you should, but have you ever thought about checking out one of those Sex Addicts Anonymous types of meetings?” I realized it had to sound weird coming from me, but I liked Steve and I’d heard that those meetings helped people sometimes.

    “Oh, I’ve already got a meeting directory in my briefcase. I’ll be going in the next few days.”

    “What do you want to do, then?”

    I looked at the tightly-wound man sitting next to me on the over-stuffed love seat and wondered what the hell we were up to. I have to admit, I wanted to go on our little excursion now more than ever. I wanted to find out what it was like to hang out with a man who was having his own sexual hurricane. How long would it take us to blow through town and what would be left after we were done? I was so engrossed in the idea of this potential marathon of wrongness that it barely registered at first when he mentioned Mistress Barbarella in the same conversation.

    “…We might pick her up on the way; I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes…” Steve was saying.

    
Wait a minute. He wants someone else to join us?And a mistress at that?
I knew that a lot of pro dommes would frown upon the kind of liberty-taking. I liked to do in my sessions. For most of the women in this business, I was pretty sure that the line between professional BDSM and conventional types of sex was a rigid one. And even though I’d told Steve that I just wanted to watch at the swinger’s party, I had started to feel some curiosity about what it might be like to do a little mingling as well. I didn’t want some tight-assed, self-appointed authority figure coming in and setting up professional boundaries. I resolved to try to keep Steve sufficiently distracted that night so that he wouldn’t even remember to call her.

    “Anyway,” Steve continued, “I should get going so I’m home in time for dinner. I’ll call you Saturday.”

    He clapped a friendly hand on my knee and then used it for leverage to hoist himself up off the couch. Without a glance in my direction, he took off at a stiff march, not even giving me enough time to say a parting word.

    “Good-bye, Steve,” I said anyway.

    As I walked back to my hotel, I thought about how hard it must be for Steve, and for his wife. I knew what it was like to be him, to have compulsions that would not be ignored, compulsions that had nothing to do with the ability to truly love someone who didn’t share them. But I knew how I would feel if I were Mrs. Steve, too. I wouldn’t be able to help but feel betrayed, rejected by his need for the company and stimulation of other women, as if, whatever I was, it was simply not enough. Filled with conflicting emotions as I made my way through the midtown Manhattan crowds that late afternoon, I said a little prayer about Steve and his situation.

    
Please God, don’t let him get to one of those Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings before we have a chance to go through with our session Saturday night. Amen.

    

    

    “So I need to be on my way back to the hotel no later than four,” I said, getting into Steve’s car. It was almost two in the morning, and he had just picked me up. We were starting later than we’d expected, because his wife had taken longer to fall asleep than usual.

    “No problem. We’ll pick up Barbie. The party’s pretty close to where she is anyway.”

    Crap. It was too late; he’d already made official plans with Mistress Barbarella. Not knowing what else to do, I tried to prepare myself with some preliminary information.

    “What’s this Barbie like, anyway? I mean, is she gonna come in here and try to run everything, or…?”

    “No, no, Barbie’s really cool,” Steve waved a hand at me. “I’ve known her forever; she was actually the first professional domme I ever saw for sessions. She’s this little blond Byelorussian powerhouse.”

    “Hmm…”

    “Don’t worry, I told her about you. I told her you’re more of a regular person than a passive slave-girl type. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

    I pictured a blond Paulina Poriskova folding herself haughtily into the car, motioning me into the back seat matter-of-factly.
She’ll probably turn the whole goddamn night into the Barbie show.

    “Now,” Steve said as he pulled into a curb in front of a brick building a few minutes later, “I’m afraid I need to ask you to get into the back seat.”

    
Exactly,
I thought crossly, and waited to roll my eyes until I was out of the car. Steve sensed something anyway.

    “Sorry It’s just that she’s pretty pregnant and needs the room,” he said as I climbed in behind him.

    Did he just say
pregnant?
I was momentarily speechless. It’s not like I’d never been around pregnant ladies before, and I’d even known a couple of dommes who’d done sessions right up until their last week before delivery. It’s more that it threw off my whole cranky idea about her. Of
course
she should have the front seat, for starters.

    A minute later, a hugely pregnant blond woman with remarkably plump lips and with a handsome young man at her side came up to the front passenger door.

    “Okay. I see you in couple of hours,” she said to her companion, in her thick and almost lazy-sounding Byelorussian drawl.

    The blond boy, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, smiled at us and waved as we pulled away.

    “He’s very upset,” Barbie sighed as she pulled the seatbelt over her large belly. Her cell phone rang, and she cursed as she fumbled to pull it out of the bag she’d just set on the floor.

    “Hello. No! You quit bothering me. I work now. I’m home in couple of hours, I told you.”

    She snapped the phone shut angrily. Her voice sounded like a drowning person struggling to make it to the surface. There was a lot of fight in it, but it was sluggish somehow, too. She turned to me, and I saw for the first time the softness of her face, even as there was something unyielding underneath. Steve had said she was in her mid-twenties, and she’d been doing this for a living since she was seventeen.

    “Sorry about that.” Her tongue wrestled with the “th” sound, making it almost its own syllable. “My boyfriend doesn’t want me to, but I wanted me to come out with you tonight. I been cooped up so long…”

    “That’s okay,” I said, and was about to introduce myself when her phone rang again.

    “Shit!” She spat the word at the little device in her hand, and then opened and snapped it shut without talking to whoever was on the line.

    “Now wait, now that’s not cool—” Steve jumped in.

    “No, I don’t care, he’s being an asshole.” Barbie threw the phone at her bag.

    “He’s the father of your baby! If he’s upset, maybe we should go back,” Steve tried again.

    I found myself transfixed by the sound of Barbie’s furious-yet-sleepy voice and Steve’s attempt to argue for family values as we were on our way to a kinky sex party.

    “I don’t care. He’s being a child. He knows I work now!” Barbie shouted half-heartedly. The phone rang yet again, and she cursed once more, but laughed this time as well.

    “Barbie, you have to answer it and calm him down. You gotta make an effort to respect his feelings if it’s going to work out. You’re a family now,” Steve counseled earnestly.

    She sighed loudly and groaned as she bent over to retrieve the phone. Pointing out to her boyfriend that it was Steve who had insisted she answer his call, she half shamed, half soothed him into finally believing that the two of us had no plans to whisk her permanently away from him.

    “My God!” she said after she hung up, sounding exhausted.

    I thought about how much I liked the sound of her voice already, and knew I’d have called back several times myself, even if only to hear her shouting at me. I felt for her boyfriend, having to spend any time away from her.

    “You smell really nice by the way,” I blurted. “And I’m Marnie.”

    “Thank you,” she turned to smile at me. “Really, I smell good? I was worried that I smell like dungeon, like sessions I just came from,” she laughed shortly.

    “No, seriously. You smell like a clean flower.”

    Barbie laughed again and looked at Steve, who reached over and patted her leg affectionately. She turned back to face me.

    “So what you like to do at party tonight?”

    “I don’t know. Maybe just watch?” I shrugged.

    “I’d like for you to have an orgasm,” Steve looked at me in the rearview mirror.

    “Yes, great!” Barbie clapped her hands.

    I wondered when Steve had changed his mind about just using me to get through the door, but didn’t hold the change against him. I just wasn’t sure how effective I’d be in an unfamiliar setting.

    “That sounds nice and all, but what happens if I get performance anxiety or something?” I’d never had an audience larger than two or three people.

    “No, no. No pressure! We help you.” Barbie looked at me reassuringly, and Steve nodded.

    
Jesus,
I thought.
Am I really about to get paid three hundred dollars an hour for letting a woman as gorgeous as Barbie help me come?
Settling into the faded leather of Steve’s backseat, I smiled at the beautiful skyscrapers and ugly mountains of sidewalk trash outside my window, and had the random thought that this particular night alone would make up entirely for having been a virgin until the age of twenty.

    

    

    “You girls okay to wait here while I park?” Steve stopped the car just inside a parking garage.

    “Yes. You park and come back.”

    Barbie opened the passenger door and heaved her belly around to face the outside. I got out and followed her to the sidewalk. Steve caught up to us, and we hurried down the street toward an unmarked building. I surprised myself by getting a sudden case of nerves. Sometimes even normal parties made me a little shy. What if my small-talk abilities deserted me entirely in the face of a bunch of strangers all nuding out around me at once? Would casual sex on a massive scale be any less awkward than casual conversation sometimes was?

    “I don’t want to be clingy,” I said, “but I’d like to stick with you guys at this thing.”

    “Of course you stay with us. We not here to socialize.”

    Barbie sounded cross, but not with me. It was like she was already preparing to fend off anyone who tried to invade, like a mother lion ready to swat away ill-mannered hyenas. She was several years younger than I, but she reminded me of what it was like when I’d been in third grade and some older, confident teenage girls from the neighborhood used to take me to matinées. It was like having all the protection of being with an adult, but none of the potential for getting in trouble. I half wondered if Barbie was going to grab my hand at some point. I made sure to walk within her reach.

    

    

    “Put your clothes in here with ours, Marnie.”

    Steve held open a small locker. We were in the bathroom area of the large apartment where the party was being held. We’d passed two rooms with clusters of naked people scattered throughout on our way in. There was a washer and dryer outside the shower where the three of us stood, and I could feel steam settling on my bare stomach as I pushed my jeans and sweater into the already full cubby hole. Someone must have rinsed off right before we got there.

    Steve was naked except for some leather contraption he’d fastened around himself for the purpose of maintaining his erection. I’d stripped down to a simple black pair of thigh-highs and heels, and Barbie had changed into a tiny leather bikini that barely covered her swollen breasts and the small triangle of blond beneath her bulging stomach.

    “Ohhh, how pretty!”

    She smiled and took one of my nipples between her thumb and forefinger. Her fingers were cool on my skin, and she smiled down at my breasts like they were personal friends of hers.

    “Thank you.”

    I stared down at the manicured nails caressing my hardened nipples. I was afraid that if she looked directly into my eyes right then, she would see that they’d spun around in my head and come up dopey red hearts.

    “Okay, let’s go — we gotta get Marnie home before she turns into a pumpkin.”

    Steve steered us abruptly toward a small room near the front door. There was a raised bondage table about the size of a single bed, a spanking horse, and a couple of small couches. A party of three was busy on one of the couches. I couldn’t decide whether it was impolite to look or uptight of me to look away.

    Although the lighting was dim, I felt a pang of insecurity as I surveyed the little orgies going on around me. Most of the men were average-looking, but many of the women were thin in that New York way, as if they haven’t hit puberty yet except for a growth spurt. I’m not an overweight person, but I’m much curvier than a fourth grader. I sucked my stomach in tighter as Steve motioned me over to the spanking horse. I climbed aboard and made myself comfortable. There were places to rest my hands and feet on either side, and my body sank into the soft leather padding as Barbie started caressing my back while Steve fiddled with some stuff in his bag.