Although Terry/Theresa, like many men, enjoyed being made to dress in women’s clothing I knew that he did not consider himself to be gay or bisexual and that he had no desire whatsoever for any sexual contact with other males. On this day I had another slave strapped down and helpless in the next room and so I began teasing Theresa that I was going to make him/her do new and dreadfully humiliating things. She looked more and more nervous but I told her she had a clear choice: do everything I demanded ‘however humiliating, however demeaning’ or leave the dungeon and never return. I was gambling on the fact that she was so addicted to our sessions that she would go along with anything rather than face her ultimate fear of being banished forever.
So I led Theresa into the next room where the other slave was already bound naked and blindfolded to my bondage bench. In my most authoritative voice, I ordered Theresa to kneel between my other sub’s legs. ‘Now, lick his balls,’ I commanded. There was a delicious moment of silence and stillness as my words sank in. I knew that Terry, a married man who thought of himself as totally heterosexual, was struggling to come to terms with this new bisexual role I had demanded of Theresa. The thought was strangely sexually arousing for me because it was a true test of how much power I now had over this man. Could I overcome his own ingrained sexual programming to do something he truly did not want to do? It was doubly exciting because I knew that his passive and unwilling ‘partner’ in this game was also strictly heterosexual and would not want to have a man’s tongue anywhere near his genitalia. The problem for him was that he was in no position whatsoever to object.
Needless to say, Theresa duly leaned forward and started licking; the fear of displeasing me was greater than her fear of performing an overtly homosexual act. The initial, tentative few licks soon developed, on my explicit instructions, into performing full-blown oral sex and I found that I was getting really excited as, for the first time, I watched two men together. I could see that both guys were getting a kick out of what was happening, even though it was the last thing that either of them really wanted. Neither of the men liked it and yet their bodies were betraying them with clear signs of sexual arousal. It was a new and exciting experience for both of them and that made it hugely exciting for me. I was enjoying it because they were not enjoying it; my excitement stemmed from the power trip of making two men do things they didn’t want to do. I was the puppet-master pulling all their strings. Could that perhaps be the mark of a true dominatrix?
As it transpired, the session was a great success. We were all excited by trying something new and the two guys both clearly got off on it. Even better for me, the fact that they had been excited blew both of their minds as they calmed down at the end of the afternoon. What more could a good Mistress ask for?
Such power trips at that early stage of my career sum up what has since become my ethos in all of my sessions. I get a thrill if I know that the person isn’t enjoying what I am making them do, but is still getting a kick out of it. It doesn’t have to be true in every session because we are all so different from one another, but I still get a buzz from pushing limits and showing my clients things that they never believed they would be able to accept.
The sexual kicks I was experiencing from dominating men in this way made me even more determined to develop my skills as a dominatrix and to build up my business. My own sexual tastes weren’t something that I could talk about with anyone; I don’t think any of the girls I was friends with would have understood the thrill I was getting. Their own sex lives seemed so tame in comparison to mine. The whole concept of domination and submission was something that was barely talked about at that time and I was sure that the games I was playing were different from anything my friends might have experienced. It was just not something I could discuss.
I was also in a gentle, vanilla relationship with my then boyfriend; just straight sex with none of the domme games I was playing at work. It was creating a kind of split personality for me because I was getting all kinds of frolicky fun which I liked – but none of it was on offer at home. Even at the time I recognised that I was doing what a lot of my clients do now: compartmentalising different parts of my life and not allowing what happens in one segment to affect the other. Even more surprisingly, and although I didn’t know it at the time, I would eventually go on to get caught up in a second, extremely vanilla relationship as well: all despite my recognising early on that my sexual desires were being neglected in my private life. The fun I was finding at work reinforced that feeling every day. I underwent a remarkable transformation with a month or two of having opened my dungeon for business: I was far happier, more content and less stressed than I had been in my previous ‘straight’ employment with the film company. I’d even lost a lot of weight that I’d piled on when dragging myself off to a job I hated each day. I knew I was looking good – and most men seemed to agree.
There was a huge contrast between the type of ‘A/B’ demographic men I was meeting each day – the movers and the shakers whose characters always seemed to have more than one dimension – and the far more simplistic guy I was living with at home. That may be one of the reasons why I devoted so much of my time and energy to building up the business. I was greatly enjoying my work and I was attracting people who seemed to share my tastes. I wanted to learn everything I could learn and cater for everything that interested me, and ignore the stuff that I didn’t. I love rubber and found that I was drawing people into rubber sessions because that was one of my special interests.
Ultimately I believe that the reason I was successful is that to me this is not a job; I have never felt that this is a job. It’s true that there are a few aspects that are like any other job: yes I have to keep accounts and I have to do paperwork, but I never feel the way that I did in any of the ‘straight’ jobs I’ve ever been involved in. In those situations there were times when I looked at the clock and thought: ‘Oh God, is that the time, I have to get to work now.’
Once I had my dungeon I realised that I was having the time of my life doing what I was doing. It is still the same today: I love work and if I spend more than a week away from my office I start to miss it and want to get back. Ultimately, no matter what job you do, you have to enjoy it for the sake of your happiness and mental stability.
I was developing other new skills as well, skills which have stood me in good stead ever since. I was learning to filter out those guys whose needs were not compatible with the games I wanted to play. They are few and far between but there are some domination games from which I get no kick whatsoever. The men who want to be ‘adult babies’ are a case in point. I have nothing against them wanting to revert to babyhood but I always turn down such requests. I’ve no interest in babies – adult or otherwise. I tell them that there are plenty of other Mistresses out there on the internet who will be delighted to look after their needs. It’s just not for me.
One man many years ago begged and insisted that he wanted to try watersports. The ability to piss for England being one of my many talents, I was happy to oblige. I duly tied him up and gave him the treatment he requested, at which point he went nuts, shouting and screaming and demanding to be set free. He stomped away angry that I had provided the very service he had begged to receive. As the Americans say: ‘Go figure.’ In fact, most of my clients adore being peed on. The gleaming, stainless-steel toilet box in the corner of my dungeon gets well used to dispense my special brand of ‘house champagne’ and I have long-mastered the art of dripping it, drop by drop from a syringe, into a bound slave’s mouth so that he can swallow slowly without choking… unless I want him to, of course.
Remarkably few men or women clients through the years have been a problem. Very occasionally the odd guy may be seeking services I don’t want to offer. They may mistakenly believe that I run an adult massage service or that I am offering the chance for them to have sexual contact with me. I usually pick this up in the initial vetting process by phone or email and I’m always very honest: ‘Sorry, I think that
I am not quite the one you are looking for.’ Even more rarely people slip through the net and come in for a session where I think, ‘Oh that really didn’t work at all, for either of us.’ Then I’ll simply say: ‘I don’t think our sessions are compatible; I’m sure you will find another Mistress out there.’ Most clients, however, soon became regulars. I’d even say that anyone who comes to see me eventually becomes a regular, if they can. The desire always seems to be there; it depends on how far away they live and how often they can slip away from their normal lives to visit my premises.
With the exception of the lack of romance and my preferred sex at home, things were going well in my life. I was happy in my work, my reputation was growing, the clients kept on coming, the money kept rolling in and I was indulging my passions for ever-more innovative and exciting BDSM equipment for my little dungeon. For a couple of years I still kept my eye open for another ‘normal’ job that might lead to a ‘normal’ career. I had applied to join a journalism course and had the vague idea that a job as a reporter, or a press officer, might be interesting, but the only available start date was a year ahead. By then, another year had passed and it had become harder to give up my established life and my business. I had financial commitments and overheads that a trainee journalist’s salary would never have covered. The time never seemed quite right for me to jump ship and start all over again. The truth is, I didn’t really want to, I was enjoying my life, there were no problems on the horizon and I was quite proud of myself.
As they say, however: ‘Pride comes before a fall.’
I don’t know it then, but dark clouds were already looming large on my horizon. I was about to lose those I loved most in the world and my secret life would soon be secret no more: my life was about to implode.
CHAPTER 22
AN ANNUS HORRIBILIS
As Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest famously noted: ‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’ In which case, I’m surely one of the more careless individuals around.
I’ve managed to lose, in the relationship sense, my birthmother, to never experience the love of a real father, and then to lose both adoptive parents when one died shortly after the other. To top it all, the death of my beloved grandfather was rapidly followed by splitting with Frank, my partner, and my best female friend – an inevitable consequence of discovering that they were not only shagging one another but also that he’d got her pregnant and offered to marry her. I think it is fair to say that this particular interlude was not the best time of my life!
Darkness descended on me in 2001 when my grandfather, the man I had always called ‘Dad’ and the only father figure I had ever known, was admitted to hospital. His chronic breathing problems had worsened but I and the rest of the family were confident that he would be treated and sent home, reinvigorated, for a new lease of life. That confidence was shaken when my grandmother went to visit and said she’d found dirt everywhere in his ward supposedly dedicated to the treatment of breathing disorders. ‘There’s dust on the floor and on almost every surface you touch,’ she told me. ‘How’s he going to survive in there?’ Dad had been in and out of hospital before, although he always preferred to have his essential steroid treatment from his local doctor at home. A return to hospital scared him, on the grounds that ‘once you go in there, you don’t come out’.
In the event, it was not my grandmother’s dust and dirt discovery that finished Granddad off, but an unrelated bug which he encountered during his enforced hospital stay. He had already been weak when he went in; then a bug which caused stomach cramps and diarrhoea accelerated his death. In his last days, my nan and other members of the family were taking it in turns to sit by his bedside and I wanted to be there as well. I had a sort of premonition that I would be with him when he died. Because of my particular line of late-night work it was easy for me to be there in the early hours when everyone else needed to sleep. That meant that there was perhaps a certain inevitability that I was there at the last. I was in mid-sentence, chatting away to him, when he suddenly took one big, gasping breath, as though he was going to sit up, and then died.
My grandmother was at home asleep when it happened and my grandmother believed that a figure had suddenly appeared in the doorway of her bedroom. ‘Johnny, is that you?’ she had asked, before realising that there was nobody there. When she told me about it later I realised that the time she thought she saw her mysterious visitor coincided precisely with the time that her husband died. I had lost one of the foundation rocks of my world. My granddad’s death affected me deeply and it soon became apparent that my grandmother was also unwell. I tried to help as best I could with the funeral arrangements and all of the chaos that descends on one’s life after bereavement, but other troubles were fast approaching: I suspected that I was about to lose both my partner and my closest girlfriend as well.
For some time I’d recognised that my long-term partner had been acting oddly. Our relationship had never been strong, had always been based on convenience rather than deep love and passion. Now, just a few weeks after Granddad’s death, it was falling apart at the seams. For years I had wanted to walk away from him, but had never been able to shake off his powerful hold over my life. I’d been terrified that my grandparents and the rest of the family might somehow hear about my secret life. My partner had never been slow to exploit my concerns and was forever warning that he would tell everyone about me if I were ever to leave him. He knew very well that I still felt guilty when I looked at my grandparents and was desperate for them never to learn the whole truth about me. I remember one occasion when we had a row and he got in his car and said he was going to tell my nan that I was a prostitute. I was distraught and raced after him and saw him pull up outside of my grandparents’ house. I feared the worst when my man opened the door, but the arsehole was merely teaching me a lesson. ‘Hi Nan, how are you,’ he said, before walking away, leaving her puzzled by his sudden concern. Once you succumb to threats there is no easy way out, and so I had stayed in the relationship far longer than I should have done.
If I am brutally honest with myself, however, I have to recognise that there was also a different kind of fear operating to tie me into the relationship. I was worried about being lonely. He was a horrible man but if you say to me, ‘Why did you stay with him?’ the answer is that it was stupidity, the ignorance of youth and sometimes the feeling that ‘better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’. I just did not think anybody else would be interested in me. I worried that any people I would want to date would not want to date me because of my lifestyle choices. I could never quite introduce the subject of what I did to any new potential partner because… well… I just couldn’t do that. You have to remember that, even though this was less than two decades ago, there was a different moral compass; a very different world.
The crazy thing was that despite threatening me often to keep me by his side, I now suspected that he was the one who wanted to go. I knew he’d always fancied my closest girlfriend and now I suspected they were having an affair. My friend was short, fat, peroxide-blonde and uglier and older than me. She was also married but had told me often that she was unhappy and wanted to find somebody new. She claimed her husband was a violent man with a drinking problem, and so I realised that my partner, for all his many faults, must, for her, have seemed a very good catch. Although I was still grieving for my granddad, I knew that I had to confront them.
‘Look, I know there’s something between you,’ I said. ‘Just be honest and tell me and we’ll sort it out.’
‘No, no,’ they insisted. ‘You’re not yourself, there’s something wrong with you; you’re just being paranoid.’
Despite their vehement and repeated denials, I could see that they were abnormally friendly. All of the signs were there. She was often at my house anyway, but now I realised how often they were together and alone whilst I was working, helping to pay his bills. As far as
I was concerned, I felt that I had always been out of his league anyway, but I could see what was happening and that both of them were lying to my face, telling me that I was paranoid and trying to make me think I was going mad and having some kind of breakdown. When I asked them again, he got really aggressive and she started shouting her mouth off at me. In the middle of my grief, they actually had me thinking, ‘Am I actually that paranoid? Is it me; am I imagining things?’ Deep down, however, I knew that wasn’t true.
Things came to a head when she asked me to write a reference for a new flat in order that she could leave her husband. Despite my suspicions I helped her out but then she was sketchy and evasive about to where exactly she was moving. The next thing was that Frank offered to help her move because she didn’t have a car. That’s just what he was supposedly doing one night when he stayed out late into the evening. I just thought, ‘Well, where the fuck is he? He hasn’t come home and I’ve no idea where she’s living.’ So I got in my car and I took in a few streets, just following my nose as though some sort of instinct was directing me. Just a half-a-mile away I found Frank’s car parked outside of a block of flats.
They must have seen me draw up and park in the street because she and Frank suddenly appeared in the doorway together.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ I cried. ‘What are you doing here?’ I was upset, angry and in no mood to be pissed around any longer. There was an angry confrontation on the doorstep with him getting mad, her getting mad and me demanding some answers. Eventually, she let me into the house and dropped the bombshell I had never expected: ‘I’m pregnant… with Frank’s baby… we’re going to get married.’
Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story Page 17