by Alison Tyler
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Alison Tyler
Title Page
Introduction
Prologue: Behind Blue Eyes
Chapter One: Extracurricular Activities
Chapter Two: My Mistake
Chapter Three: Heart of Glass
Chapter Four: How I Became a Meat Eater
Chapter Five: Changing to Chanel
Chapter Six: Black Coffee in Bed
Chapter Seven: Goodbye and Good Luck
Chapter Eight: She’s Come Undone
Chapter Nine: Fix You
Chapter Ten: Black and Blue
Chapter Eleven: Reprieve?
Chapter Twelve: The Beginning
Chapter Thirteen: Precious
Chapter Fourteen: The Arrangement
Chapter Fifteen: The Offer
Chapter Sixteen: The Garage
Chapter Seventeen: Sunset Over Sunset
Chapter Eighteen: Alone
Chapter Nineteen: Need
Chapter Twenty: Secrets
Chapter Twenty-One: Consummation
Chapter Twenty-Two: Over the Knee
Chapter Twenty-Three: A No-Win Situation?
Chapter Twenty-Four: Show Me
Chapter Twenty-Five: Three-AM Wake-Up Call
Chapter Twenty-Six: Spank Me, Jack
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Small World
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Everybody Knows
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Kiss
Chapter Thirty: A Day of Firsts
Chapter Thirty-One: Love Is the Drug
Chapter Thirty-Two: Safe
Chapter Thirty-Three: Shine On, You Crazy Diamond
Chapter Thirty-Four: Cherry Red
Copyright
About the Book
‘I knew what I wanted – someone who wouldn’t laugh or scowl or turn away in disgust when I confessed my darkest fantasies. Someone who had a brush, and a belt, and a set of cuffs and was not afraid to use them.’
Based on the author’s real life experiences, this is a fictional account of a submissive and her quest for the perfect dominant. Dark Secret Love is a modern-day Story of O with a kinky fairy-tale twist.
About the Author
Called “a trollop with a laptop” by East Bay Express, “a literary siren” by Good Vibrations, and “the mistress of literary erotica” by Violet Blue, ALISON TYLER is naughty and she knows it.
Over the past two decades, Ms. Tyler has written more than twenty-five explicit novels, including Tiffany Twisted, Melt with You, and The ESP Affair. Her novels and short stories have been translated into Japanese, Dutch, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Greek. When not writing sultry short stories, she edits erotic anthologies, including Alison’s Wonderland, Naughty Fairy Tales from A to Z, Kiss My Ass, Cuffed, and Playing with Fire. She is also the author of several novellas including Cuffing Kate, Giving In, A Taste of Chi, and Those Girls.
Ms. Tyler is loyal to coffee (black), lipstick (red), and tequila (straight). She has tattoos, but no piercings; a wicked tongue, but a quick smile; and bittersweet memories, but no regrets. She believes it won’t rain if she doesn’t bring an umbrella, prefers hot and dry to cold and wet, and loves to spout her favorite motto: You can sleep when you’re dead. She chooses Led Zeppelin over the Beatles, the Cure over NIN, and the Stones over everyone. Yet although she appreciates good rock, she has a pitiful weakness for eighties hair bands.
In all things important, she remains faithful to her partner of seventeen years, but she still can’t choose just one perfume.
Also by Alison Tyler
Something About Workmen
Strictly Confidential
Learning to Love It
Tiffany Twisted: A Rouge Erotic Romance
With or Without You: A Rouge Erotic Romance
Sweet Thing: A Rouge Erotic Romance
Sticky Fingers: A Rouge Erotic Romance
Melt With You: A Rouge Erotic Romance
Rumours: A Rouge Erotic Romance
Introduction
Welcome to my world. Have a seat. Make yourself at home.
I’m about to tell you a story. To open my closet and expose my desires, my fantasies, my truth and my fiction—as well as my ass, clad in silky scarlet knickers. In 2006, I began this journey. “A sulphurous personal memoir of past sexual activities which put Belle de Jour’s timid exploits in the shade.” was how The Guardian described my words.
This is who I am and how I got here. I’ve changed the names. I’ve tweaked and redesigned, camouflaged and unraveled. This is meta-fiction, beta-fiction, masturbatory fiction. I’m there, but I’m hiding behind my long dark hair. I’m there, but I’ve got a different name. You can hear my words. You can feel my breath whispering against your neck. How much of my tale is real? As much as I was able to give.
I wish I could provide an atmosphere to accompany each chapter. I’m an excellent hostess. I’d pour you a drink. Make you comfortable on a sleek leather sofa or a leopard-print fainting couch. Light a fire, or open all the windows to let in the cool night air. Depending on the mood, you see, depending on the scene. The low lights. The scent of the candles. And the music? The Stones. The Cure. Roxy Music. Pink Floyd. Zeppelin.
I should be able to create the proper ambiance to accompany the story.
But I can’t, of course, and so I’m hoping the words will suffice. I’m hoping to paint the proper picture. I want you to know the way the cold wood felt under my bare feet. I want you to be able to trace a cut-crystal whiskey glass with your fingertips, to feel the sting of a slap and see the rising blush.
Ultimately, I’m simply a girl on a quest. And what I’m trying to discover, what I’m always working to uncover, is this:
Why do I need what I need? Why do I want what I want?
I ask those questions every day.
The soul of my story is as honest as my answers can possibly be.
My past is here. My youth is here. My Doms are here—with their attitude and their dark yearning for pain.
I’ve got this desire right now to confess. To spill my secrets. To share my cravings. I’m driven. I’m focused. The blue-purple prints of fatigue beneath my dark brown eyes are my badges of honor. That feeling of being used swallows me up, the soreness, the ache—those sensations consume me.
As I hope my words (and my world) will consume you.
XXX,
Alison Tyler
Prologue:
Behind Blue eyes
Some men just know.
I’ve been lucky enough to find those men several times in my life.
When I was eighteen, a senior in high school, I met Brock at a concert. I didn’t have to tell him anything. He saw me and gave me his number scrawled on a paper napkin. Call me, was all it said. I could barely wait until dawn the next day to dial the digits.
During our first kiss (moments into our first date), he bit my bottom lip so hard that when I ran my tongue over the indents, I could feel the echo of pain—that tiny spark. There are days I swear I still feel his lips on mine. He held my glossy dark ponytail firmly in his fist when he kissed me, pulling a little too tightly, telling me in that subtle way that he was in charge.
He was spanking me regularly by that weekend.
Some men just know.
Brock would come to my high school at lunchtime and take my panties off, sliding them into his pocket so that I was forced to spend the rest of the day bare under my skirt. He would slip me away on his Harley for twenty-minute quickies that always involved his belt, or his leather m
otorcycle gloves, or his open hand on my bare ass.
I’d spent my whole life being as good a girl as I possibly could, and Brock let me know it wasn’t enough. I could never be good enough. I would always fail in some unforeseen way, and he would be forced to punish me.
Because he knew.
On the night of our first date, as we walked through the darkness near my house, he stopped and pressed me up against the side of a parked car. “What’s your secret fantasy?” he murmured, so soft against my skin. “You can tell me, baby. You can tell me anything.”
My goal, my dream, my deepest desires have always rested in taking it. Lowering my head, gritting my teeth, and bearing the pain, the humiliation. But I couldn’t tell him that. I stared at him in the glow of the streetlight, and then looked down. Brock instantly tilted my face to his. “When I ask you a question,” he said, his voice more stern now, “I expect a response.”
A delicious chill ran through me.
I hadn’t needed to say a word.
Brock understood. He was on me in a heartbeat, and he never let up.
There were days I had to wear long-sleeved shirts to cover the evidence that I’d spent part of the weekend cuffed to his bed. There were days I couldn’t sit right in class, when I stared up at the board or tried to focus on the discussion but saw nothing, heard nothing.
He made me talk, eventually. I didn’t get away with coy glances, with wishful, wistful expressions. He tied me down and asked his questions, and he forced me to answer every single one.
Brock was more than a decade my senior, and he possessed a chiseled jaw and those ice-blue eyes from the famous Who song. He wouldn’t even have to speak to me, simply shoot me a look, and I would lower my head in silent submission, knowing that somehow, in some unexpected way, I’d failed him.
Because he wanted me to fail.
Of course, by failing, I won. When I misbehaved for him, he made all my fantasies come true. And it wasn’t long before I realized that high-school life and my world with Brock were parallel universes that didn’t have anything else in common—they were running side by side on twin tracks. I felt as if I were in a dream as I walked through the quad, watching the popular kids up on the wall, the jocks out by the basketball court, the stoners behind the gym. I faked everything from eight to three, not coming alive again until Brock picked me up on his Harley. I was smart enough to do well in class simply by going through the motions. But I no longer had a desire to fit in.
I think we are all hardwired for what we crave. When I’d gone on a few miserable dates with guys my age, I would invariably offer my wrists to them. To hold. To kiss. I didn’t even know why I was doing this. And the guys never figured out what I wanted. I can imagine their confusion now. What’s with this chick? But Brock did. He rarely held my hand. He gripped my wrist instead, letting me know what it would feel like to be bound to his bed, to be in his power. Letting me know ahead of time, before he made that fantasy come true.
We dated for the rest of my senior year. And then I went off to college in Los Angeles, knowing deep down that in spite of my good-girl persona, I was bad to the core. And hoping like hell that someone else would see through my faux exterior and understand.
Chapter One:
Extracurricular Activities
When I arrived at college, I felt like a virgin all over again. Brock was gone, and I doubted anyone could replace him. On a lark, I made out with the dorm stud the first weekend of school, but he wound up choosing a thin-lipped blonde sorority chicklet to date instead. I crushed on a black-denim-wearing artist type who managed to tie himself into my lunar cycles. He was a quiet pervert who fucked me only when I was on the rag.
To my dismay, college guys turned out to be high school guys with better access to fake IDs and beer. I had no interest in the nightly alcohol raids, the shaving cream fights, the drama. I floated around in a cloud of unspoken desires until I found my match off campus at the grocery store. Robert was thirty-four to my nineteen, and he was as kinky as Brock—but different. Brock had been tall and lean, strong but built for speed. Robert was big, studly, hugely muscled. At six-foot four, he towered over me. Undeniably handsome, he had women swarming him at the store. Every bored housewife asked him to choose her produce.
I tried to catch his eye for months, wearing special outfits to spark his interest. But it wasn’t until the school year ended and I moved off campus that he took notice. I was painting my apartment—a skyline in graffiti—and I came into the store late wearing paint-splattered cutoffs, smudges of blue paint on my cheekbones and my arms, and he couldn’t get enough. Here was the first man I’d ever met who liked a “sweet disorder in the dress” (if you know that Herrick poem), rather than neat and pristine. As soon as I walked into the store, he came forward. He had been in the middle of arranging fresh fruits, and while I watched, he pulled a knife from his pocket and cut open a peach. He didn’t offer me the piece; he fed it to me.
Within minutes, we were fucking in the service elevator at the grocery store, and later that night he arrived at my apartment to continue our games. Like Brock, he understood me from the start. There were no romantic whisperings. No cajoling or gentle touching. He lifted me up and held me against the wall, fucking me with a brutal intensity. I’m slightly built—five-foot four in flats—and he could move me however he chose. Bending me over the sofa, carrying me to the windows, spreading me out on the dining room table. We didn’t sleep until dawn. And for that whole summer, he came to my place when his shift was over, between midnight and three AM, and told me all of the things he wanted to do to me.
“I want to fuck you on top, on your side, up the ass …” His hands were huge and roamed over my body as if he’d owned me from the start. I was weak in his presence, needing him, craving his warmth. Finding safety in his size alone.
But then I went and did something unbelievably stupid—depriving me of any sexual pleasure for three lonely years.
Chapter Two:
My Mistake
My mistake’s name was Byron. I met him at a party for the newspaper where I interned during my freshman year at college. I had hit the ground running after landing in Southern California, hosting a late-night radio show on the college station (I won the spot with an essay, beating out four hundred other contestants), writing for the college paper, and interning at an alternative weekly. Although I wound up despising school, I loved Los Angeles from the moment I entered Hollywood, and I lived for my job. I’d worked on the paper in high school, had been writing since I could grip a pencil, but this was my first real name-on-the-masthead gig.
My poor editor didn’t know what to make of me. I was shy and quiet, but extremely proficient. I could jam out well past a hundred words a minute. At the time, there was no Internet, and staff writers either dropped off their stories on disk—big, flimsy floppy disks—or faxed them in. My main job was to key in the pieces that arrived by fax. But I also brewed coffee, made photocopies, ran errands.
That’s how I met Byron. He was a former frat-boy friend of the owners who would drop by from time to time to get lunch or shoot the shit. Eventually, he stopped striding past my desk on the way to my bosses’ offices and began hanging out to chat.
He was twenty-six when we met, but seemed older. He dressed in an artsy, European style and drove a crimson convertible. I asked him out once on a lark, to go to a screening with me, and he turned me down flat. He was no teacher. He didn’t date teens.
I didn’t pursue him heavily. I took no for an answer and continued to see Robert. Not to date him—we never went out—but to fuck him. And then came Halloween—in what would have been my sophomore year, had I been actually attending classes. The newspaper held an annual staff party in a revolving steakhouse restaurant on top of a local office building. Byron was there on a date, but he ended up flirting with me. I attended the party because I was staff, but I couldn’t buy drinks. Byron kept sliding over to me with vodkas in hand, and finally steered me back to the booth. He
sat me at his side, stroking my thigh under the table while his girlfriend stared daggers at me. I didn’t care. I wish I could say I did, but I didn’t.
It was an alcohol-drenched night, and the following day, Byron showed up at the office, pulling me aside to say, “You know, if you play with the big kids, you could get burned.”
“Is that what you are?” I asked. “Big kids?”
He didn’t intimidate me. I was used to Doms. He liked that I didn’t back down. We started dating, though not exclusively. Byron was always quick to tell me about the other women he was dating, although I kept quiet about my own activities, seeing no need to share. I met up with Robert after dates with Byron. I knew that the chemistry was better with my midnight-to-three man, but I was confused. I thought I was supposed to end up with someone like Byron, a man with prospects, with a solid education. With a goal greater than stacking perfectly proportioned fruit pyramids.
What did I know? I was only nineteen.
Chapter Three:
Heart of Glass
Byron made it clear to me that I was not his one and only. We were still free agents, able to see (and by “see” he meant “fuck”) other people without any of that nasty emotion called guilt. But I was his first choice for a date on Valentine’s Day, a time for lovers—he said this in a way that let me know I’d won some sort of prize in his book. Unfortunately, Byron was fighting off a cold. He took me out for an expensive dinner downtown and gave me an intricate violet lace corset from a fancy store. And then he drove me back to his place and passed out.
“You don’t have to stay,” were his last words before his head hit the pillow.
I called this chapter “Heart of Glass,” but I should have called it “Slut.” Say the word slowly with me. Wrap your tongue around it. Stretch it out sensuously. Sss-llll-uttt.