Bound to You

by Nichi Hodgson

  Greg had a honed, footballer’s body and some nondescript tribal tattoo at the base of his back. ‘A filthy little tramp stamp!’ Sapphire pronounced. Generally speaking, I loved tattoos on men, but this was tasteless. It made me feel disdainful towards him, and I harnessed that feeling as I gave him a really good spanking, cupping my palm slightly as Sapphire had showed me, to produce the requisite noise.

  Caning was more difficult. It required absolute precision and meticulous care. If you struck too low, it would mark them across the tops of the thighs and sting unpleasantly. If you struck too high you could damage their kidneys, although that really was a worst-case scenario. Sapphire didn’t let me cane this time, but she talked me through what she was doing as she was doing it. For many of the clients, the sound of the cane whooshing through the air was what turned them on; it heightened the anticipation of being struck. Sapphire would strut about and whip it about their ears first to wind them up.

  ‘The thing about domination is that most of the clients don’t want marking because they have partners to take into consideration,’ Sapphire explained, placing one consummate hand on Greg’s backside and taking a few practice strokes with the other. ‘But caning is a bit different – it’s all about marking. You are aiming to produce half a dozen neat stripes across the backside. A lingering reminder in the days to come, of his deviance.’

  After Greg had been caned, he asked if he could quickly go back over my knee. ‘Just for a final ten, Mistress.’ I surpressed a smile, but was happy to oblige. I needed the practice, didn’t I? So back over Greg went. Only this time, when I got to the third stroke, he slid his hand down my navy stocking clad leg and clutched at my ankle, and then ran his fingers back up again.

  Before I’d even had a chance to strike him for it, Sapphire swooped on him immediately. ‘WHO gave you permission to manhandle my prefect like that?’

  Sapphire was fanatical about boundaries and had always told me that I could end a session right then and there if a client overstepped the mark.

  ‘No one, Mistress.’ Greg smirked into the carpet and wriggled about over my knee. He was such a cheeky bastard but his good looks and charm made it funny rather than sleazy. Even Sapphire was trying not to laugh.

  ‘Right! Up with you!’ Greg clutched at his burning backside, boxer shorts around his ankles, tie and shirt askew, grinning up at Sapphire like an extra from Gossip Girl. ‘Bend over the horse. You’ve earned four strokes with your own belt.’ And just like that she whipped it out of the loopholes of his makeshift short trousers.

  Being hit with your own belt was particularly humiliating; it implied that you weren’t worthy of being hit with one of Mistress’s implements. Suddenly I had a flashback to that time when Christos had accidentally caught me across the backside with his. I smiled. Greg interpreted the smile as a sign of something else.

  ‘Mistress Jade, would you like to be hit with the belt?’ ventured Greg.

  ‘No. She would not,’ growled Sapphire, grabbing him by the scruff of his neck and pulling him towards her.

  ‘But Mistress Sapphire, something tells me Mistress Jade needs a small punishment, too.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Sapphire suspiciously. ‘What’s she done?’ She let go of him, pushed him back.

  ‘Looked provocative in her uniform. Look at the way her tits protrude out of the top!’

  Sapphire scoffed. Then she sidled right back up to Greg and asked seductively, ‘What sort of punishment were you thinking, Greg, for Mistress Jade? A ten-strokes-across-my-knee sort of punishment?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ he replied, rather too eagerly, rearranging his cock. She smiled indulgently at him, reaching out her arm to pull me towards her. Shit, was she actually going to do it? I felt my bottom tighten in anticipation of being spanked. I’d never been spanked. How hard was Sapphire planning on hitting me? Was I going to be able to take it? At the last moment she brought her arm swiftly back towards Greg instead, and grabbed him by the balls. Greg let out an excited whimper.

  ‘You’ll get to kiss her plump little ass before I get to spank it. Neither of which is ever going to happen. Mistress Jade does not get spanked.’

  ‘So do I get punished again for my insolence, Headmistress?’

  Whatever the outcome, it was a win-win for Greg.

  For many of the clients, domination was a much more conflicted experience. Some of them were deeply ashamed of their submissive desires, desires which they had often carried around for years without confessing them to anyone, let alone enacting them. Sapphire and I worked hard to explore their fantasies with them in an accepting and compassionate way – providing, of course, that what they wanted to experience wasn’t going to result in any actual harm.

  One day a hirsute, twenty-something builder turned up at our door. He was quite short, stockily built with a beautiful cleft chin. He had with him a bag full of chiffon and lace and needed, he told us, to be transformed into Victoria, a need he’d harboured since he was barely a teenager. Victoria was a little girl who deserved a thorough hair-brushing – and by that he meant two hundred strokes on his backside, rather than a girly grooming session.

  Victoria liked to wear old-school bloomers under her pale pink petticoats and even had an adorable black wig neatly arranged with Hello Kitty hairclips. There was something about Victoria that was impossibly sweet, and Sapphire and I just wanted to cuddle him, dressed as he was like a nursery rhyme.

  But as eager as he was to share his seven-year-old girl style with us, he was also clearly deeply troubled by his predilection. He lived in fear of his friends finding out about his kink and asked us if we thought he were ‘normal’, a question we heard on an alarmingly regular basis. ‘Honey, no such thing!’ Sapphire would reassure him, but that didn’t seem to be the answer he was looking for.

  Public humiliation was one of the trickier kinds of domination to pull off. Sapphire had one client, Xavier, an incredibly charming and impeccably groomed Swiss financier with a mop of dark-blond hair and the light hazel eyes. He also had a luscious French accent and the most inviting dimples I’d ever seen on a client.

  Xavier came to London on business every couple of months. He was obsessed with buying women’s knickers, which he liked to wear to multi-million-pound deal-making meetings. He loved to fantasise about how shocked his colleagues would be if they found out, and how humiliated this would make him feel. Mostly, he told us, he fantasised about telling them that his Mistresses had ‘made’ him do it, that he was our sissy slave, and he wrote Sapphire long, exquisitely constructed emails in which he would detail his servitude to us and general abuse suffered at our hands.

  One day he asked if we might accompany him on a shopping trip to a lingerie store. Being paid to chaperone someone, especially an affable good-looking guy, around a shop seemed too good to be true. But it was a little more complicated than that. What Xavier actually wanted was to be forced to try on and then buy women’s underwear.

  Together, the three of us browsed the store. Despite his chic appearance, Xavier had really quite tarty taste in underwear, and Sapphire and I spent a good ten minutes tutting and steering him away from the tiny bordello-style scarlet thongs he gravitated towards. After a few more minutes of ‘correctional’ styling, Xavier had settled on several pairs of knickers in an array of styles and colour-ways. He was desperate to try them on over the top of his own midnight blue, microfibre boxer briefs. We knew he was wearing these because Sapphire had demanded he send a picture when he was getting dressed this morning. Back in Geneva he played water polo and trained hard to maintain his six-pack; his scantily clad body was a joy to behold.

  The first hurdle was getting him into the changing room. As you’ve probably noticed, men aren’t generally allowed in the women’s, and sales assistants are trained to prevent coupling among the coat hangers. We tried a few tactics, claiming that we needed a ‘man’s opinion’ (which amused us greatly – as if we were the approval-seekers), then, that he was just bringing us different siz
es, both of which were foiled. Finally, we managed to sneak him in when the sales assistant’s head was turned.

  Squeezing us all into a tiny boutique ladies’ changing room was like piling two wayward monkeys into a phone box with a skittish springbok. We clawed and wrenched at his clothes, fondled his heaving, hairless chest, sporadically sshing at one another through stifled giggles and matching scarlet manicures. When Sapphire clamped her hand over Xavier’s mouth to prevent him from complaining and demanded he put on a saucy panty parade for us NOW, Xavier was clearly in some of kind submissive paradise. His chocolate-pot eyes pleaded with the pair of us to push the game even further.

  Hang on a minute. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. The bulge beneath his briefs looked too boxy to be merely his penis. ‘That’s not just his hard-on, surely?’

  Sapphire smiled and patted his thigh in approval.

  ‘Oh, he’s such a diligent little slave, I’d completely forgotten about that!’

  Sapphire peeled back Xavier’s briefs to reveal what looked like a grated metal cage around his cock. It prevented him from getting an erection and from masturbating, and had a combination code lock set into it. At Sapphire’s touch I could see him start to strain within it. But the cock cage was forbidding. There was no room for manoeuvre.

  ‘Do you need any help in there?’ came a voice from outside the cubicle.

  ‘No, thank you!’ Sapphire chimed back as if she didn’t have a nearly naked slave in a chastity belt hidden behind the curtain. I laughed again, this time in panic.

  ‘Relax!’ said Sapphire. ‘She’s hardly going to waste police time reporting a couple of giggling girls with their hands on a silly man’s trussed-up junk, is she?’

  When she put it like that, I supposed not.

  ‘Now, Xavier, since we’re running out of time, choose the pair of knickers you think Mistress Jade and I would most like to wear.’

  Xavier groped desperately towards the dressing room chair and selected some violet silk Brazilian-style briefs. They had a full bottom, then small but not shoestring sides, and were designed for wearing under low-rise jeans. Sapphire had steered him towards them.

  ‘Excellent. You’re going to buy us each a pair, plus a matching bra. Then we’ll all be knicker-sisters!’

  Xavier gulped and nodded as if he were a teenage boy we’d just accosted for a threesome on his way home from swimming practice. Sapphire and I slunk out from behind the curtain and waited for him by the tills.

  Xavier already had our measurements noted down in his phone. He selected the underwear and approached the till. He was sweating, his dimples tightening as he tried to affect a polite smile for the pending interaction.

  He looked over to us. Sapphire arched her eyebrows and turned her head slightly to the right. It was a signal but for what, I didn’t know. Xavier went up to the sales assistant, a pretty young Asian woman, and offered up the two bras and three pairs of knickers.

  ‘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 t
ogether, 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!’