The Scarlett Letters

by Jenny Nordbak

  I wasn’t working at the Dungeon again for a few days, so I was looking forward to getting home and experimenting with the toys that Raven had let me borrow. It was all I could do to stay focused on the job I was at and remind myself not to look up BDSM techniques on my work computer.

  That afternoon we had a meeting off-site in our downtown L.A. office, and I was in a good enough mood that I had volunteered to drive our on-site team of four up there. I was amused knowing that the implements were tucked safely in my trunk.

  If they only knew, I thought smugly.

  Rich rode shotgun and directed me to the parking entrance of the Bank of America building in downtown. I stopped at the attendant and rolled the window down.

  “We’re here for a meeting at our firm. We normally work at the jobsite, so I don’t have a parking permit.”

  “No problem, ma’am. I can give you a visitor pass. I just need to take a look in your trunk.”

  “In my trunk?” I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

  What kind of parking attendant searches my fucking trunk? This isn’t happening.

  I couldn’t see a way out, so I popped the trunk and stared straight ahead as he walked behind the car. He was back there for a few minutes and I was just imagining what he was seeing. Had this been covered in his training? What to do if a small white female attempts to enter with a medieval torture chamber in her trunk…? Surely he wouldn’t call me out for it?

  I played it cool as he came back to the window, but he made no attempt to hide his grin. He handed me a visitor hang tag, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “You have a nice day, ma’am.”

  “Will do,” I replied with a cocked eyebrow and a smile and drove into the parking structure, purposefully avoiding Rich’s quizzical glance.

  Back at the jobsite the next morning, I was full of initiative after an evening spent beating our living room couch senseless, much to Amelia’s amusement. I was a bad bitch just like Raven or any of those other girls. Surely I could handle a little traffic control in a job trailer.

  I got to the site early and did some furniture rearranging. I didn’t even try to be subtle. I moved my entire reception-sized desk directly in front of the door where before it had been tucked on the other side of the trailer. Walking straight past me was no longer an option. If someone came in the door and took more than two steps, they were going to stub their toes on my desk.

  I was pleased when Rich came in and did just that. He was close enough that I could smell the booze leaking from his pores. He glanced from where my desk had been and back, as though slowly processing why he had run into something, and said, “Doing a little feng shui?”

  “Just trying something new. Figure if they have to talk to me then they can’t just blow by me into your office.”

  “Whatever works,” he said and took his coffee and doughnuts back to his desk.

  For our first few visitors, my tactic was effective, but I knew that Vance would be the real test. I didn’t have to wait long.

  He came into the office a few hours later and I barely hid my glee at his confusion.

  “Something I can help you with, Vance?” I asked sweetly when he came to an abrupt halt in front of me.

  “Nope. Just here to talk to Rich.”

  I started to tell him that Rich was in a meeting in his office, but he was already making his way around my desk and had his hand on the door handle before I had the first few syllables out.

  Motherfucker.

  I sighed and wondered absently what Raven would do. And quickly decided that likely wasn’t a road I wanted to go down as it would probably involve the police being called. I would need to find a better way to assert myself.

  14. BUSTED WES

  One Saturday about a month in to my double life, I was sitting on the bed anxiously waiting for Wes to get dressed and leave so that I could get my Dungeon bag out of the closet and get to work. I didn’t dare pull it out while he was there in case he asked questions. As far as he was concerned, I didn’t have anything to do that day, so I tried to sit calmly on the bed and feign nonchalance when I was desperate to chuck his pants at him and push him out the door.

  When he finally left, I watched his car pull onto the street and then scrambled to get ready. I grabbed my bag from its hiding place and was just about to leave when I heard a buzzing from the bed. My phone was in my hand, so I realized Wes must’ve left his. I picked it up and glanced at the screen.

  Melissa: You left the used condom on the floor last night and my dog ate it.…

  My stomach dropped. I held the phone with a trembling hand and tried to think of an innocent explanation for that sentence, but came up blank. It couldn’t have been much more damning. He was supposedly having beers with the guys the night before. Melissa was his ex-girlfriend.

  Well, fuck me. Didn’t see that one coming.

  My first impulse was to call him and rip him to shreds, but since I was holding his phone, that wasn’t an option. I took a deep breath and acknowledged that he was hardly the only guilty party in this relationship. Somehow, this seemed worse, though, more personal. I didn’t feel anything for my clients. Did that make it okay? Not really, I admitted reluctantly. It was an absurd situation. I was hiding from him that I was moonlighting as a Dominatrix, but was seething angry that he had slept with someone else. It made me feel inadequate and insecure in a way that I had never felt before—deeply betrayed. It hadn’t crossed my mind that he was unsatisfied with our sex life and felt the urge to cheat. I was stunned both at my arrogance and naivety.

  My thumb hovered over the unlock screen. When you see your partner unlock their phone hundreds of times, it’s hard not to become familiar with the combination. I didn’t ever want to be the jealous girlfriend who snooped, but I felt compelled to find out exactly what I was dealing with. I sighed and entered the code, opening the conversation with Melissa. I scrolled up quite a bit, took a deep breath, and started to read. The more little colored messages paraded across the screen, the less my reality made sense. I thought I knew just about everything there was to know about this man after a year together, but I didn’t at all. Turns out, my polite, vanilla boyfriend was a super freak. From one conversation, it was apparent that he liked to be peed on, kicked in the balls, and fantasized about being crushed by fat chicks.

  I was perplexed. Why hadn’t he told me any of this? For the same reason I hadn’t told him what I had been up to, I supposed: fear of rejection and judgment.

  Everything in our relationship seemed fine, and I suppose fine is exactly what it was. We had fun together and we encouraged each other, but if I was brutally honest with myself, we kept things superficial. There were clearly barriers up between us that I had never considered before. Not only had I not told him about the Dungeon, but I had never talked to him about my family struggles in the past. If our relationship was this superficial, was it worth saving in the face of such betrayal on both sides?

  I picked up my work bag and headed out to my car. I was so distracted that I barely noticed I had arrived at the Dungeon. I got dressed and plopped down on a chair next to the reception desk, hoping Lady Caterina would have some wisdom to share. She had seen some shit.

  “My boyfriend is cheating on me. And he’s kinky and didn’t tell me. And I haven’t told him I’m working here. Or that I’m kinky too.”

  Her forehead creased as her eyebrows shot higher and higher.

  “Well, that’s quite a mess, isn’t it? Do you want to break up with him?”

  “I feel like I don’t have a choice. He fucked some other chick and clearly neither of us thinks we can trust the other. But he’s my best friend and I’m not ready for the relationship to be over. I hate this.”

  “If you think the relationship is going to end, what do you have to lose by experimenting with something a little different? Why don’t you confess to what you’ve been up to, tell him you know what he’s been doing, and lay it all on the table? Try a poly, honest relationsh
ip and see what happens.”

  I sat back and considered what she was saying. Could I be in a relationship in which I shared my partner with other women? I apparently already am, I scoffed. Would it feel different if I gave him permission? If I was there to see it? I was surprised to discover that I wasn’t fundamentally opposed to the idea. Giving him permission to be with other women in some capacity would probably be just fine with him, but would he be okay with me continuing to see clients? What about when I wanted to be with other people? And then there was the giant elephant in the room: How do you take a vanilla relationship and turn it kinky?

  Only one way to find out.

  * * *

  I was waiting at Wes’s place when he got home from his lecture. I opened a bottle of wine and told him to have a seat in the living room.

  “I have your phone.”

  “Oh, awesome, I thought I had lost it!”

  “I read some of your messages. I know about Melissa.”

  I tried to keep the reproach from my voice. He started to stutter and looked scared. I imagined that he was trying to remember exactly what they had texted about and how much I knew. I couldn’t resist letting him suffer for just a second before cutting him off.

  “It’s okay. I’m not angry. Or I was, but I’ve thought about it and calmed down. I don’t have any room to talk because I’ve been keeping secrets too. I haven’t been sleeping with someone else, but I’ve been working as a Dominatrix at a dungeon for about a month and I didn’t know how to tell you or if you would be okay with it, so I hid it from you.”

  I almost laughed as I watched the disbelief, confusion, and shock work their way across his face. I handed him a glass of wine. I knew he was about to start asking questions, but I needed to get the rest of the speech I had been rehearsing out before I lost my nerve.

  “So we’re both liars. And we’re both into some freakier shit than we’ve been willing to admit to each other. Here’s my proposition: We start with a clean slate and, going forward, we’re completely honest with each other. On top of that, I think we should try being in an open relationship. I think we need to talk about exactly what that means, but I’m willing to give it a try if you are.”

  He was.

  Wes found it thrilling that his girlfriend was secretly a Dominatrix and he didn’t know it. He didn’t seem at all bothered about me playing with clients, and was positively ecstatic at the prospect of me bringing some of my new friends home to play with us. I pulled up the Web site, and we drank our wine and looked through the pictures and profiles of my coworkers. When he initially commented on how attractive Raven was, I felt the automatic flare of the green dragon of jealousy stir within me, but it was just that—a trained response. When I really examined my feelings, I found I wasn’t jealous at all. In fact, I agreed with him. It was a revelation to realize that just because he found someone else attractive didn’t mean he found me any less so. It isn’t a zero-sum game. I would come to learn that in most cases, particularly for men, attraction to a new woman is a passing whim that generally fades once they have experienced her or get to know her better. The emotional connection between us was unshaken by these guest stars.

  15. SLAVE WES

  A decision had been made. I was in a polyamorous, kinky relationship. Now I just had to figure out what that really meant.

  We had preliminarily agreed that our main rule would simply be no sex with other people. In other words, his penis wouldn’t enter any foreign vaginas and I wouldn’t have any foreign penises in mine. We would keep something sacred to our relationship. We would later need to clarify that my big black cock was exempt from that rule and could fuck whomever I pleased, but we were novices and didn’t know where the road would take us yet. Our other rules were absolute honesty and no judgment. I needed a week to plan, but the following weekend, we had decided we would play together as Mistress and slave for the first time.

  I had spent the week nervously gathering advice from the girls at work in the hopes that I could channel their badassery and blow Wes’s mind right out of the gates. Once we had opened up to each other, I came to learn that he was into a plethora of fetishes. It rounded out to basically CBT, smothering, and anything disgusting: stinky feet in his face, golden showers, sweaty armpits, dirty socks, and farting in his face. He didn’t know whether he liked any kind of corporal punishment, but was open to experimentation. It was a big jump to go from thinking he was uninterested in kink to imagining him doing any of those things. Next, I would make the jump to doing them to him. I supposed I had to start somewhere.

  On the agreed-upon day, he was supposed to arrive at 5 p.m. From the moment he walked in the door we would be Mistress and slave so that we didn’t need to try to flip from “normal” to BDSM. I worked at the Dungeon in the morning, but convinced Caterina to let me leave a little early so that I could be ready. All of the girls knew that today was my big day and wished me luck, calling out last-minute suggestions as I ran out the door.

  Raven followed me out and left me with this parting advice: “Remember, you’re the Mistress. That means you can’t make a mistake. If you fuck something up, it was on purpose.”

  She slapped my ass encouragingly as I got in the car. Amelia was waiting when I got home to help me prep.

  I was already dressed from work, but wanted to have my rope and implements laid out and candles lit before he got there. I wasn’t sure the candles I had at home would work properly for wax play, so I needed to test them the way Raven had taught me.

  “She said to let some melted wax pool and then pour it on my inner thigh to make sure it isn’t too hot,” I explained to Amelia while we waited for it to melt. “I don’t know what it’s made of and different waxes apparently burn at different temperatures.”

  “What kind did she say to use?” Amelia asked.

  I smirked.

  “She said the Jesus candles that you can buy at the drugstore work the best … the ones in glass jars with religious icons on the side. I think she just likes being sacrilegious. Claims to be attracted to Jesus.”

  “She’s fucking nuts.”

  “That she is.” I laughed.

  “Okay, there’s wax melted. Pour it on your thigh,” she said, offering the candle to me.

  “You do it! I’m scared!” I squeaked out, offering my bare thigh and looking away.

  She dumped the melted wax, and it landed with a splat on my bare skin. It stung, but didn’t burn too badly, so we decided these candles would do. Amelia went to work lighting the rest around the room while I laid out rope, clothespins, and a crop that I had borrowed from Storm.

  I was zipping up my boots as the bedroom door opened unexpectedly and in waltzed Wes. He grinned and asked, “Ready for me?”

  I looked down at my watch: 4:47. He was early and I wasn’t ready. Amelia wasn’t supposed to still be in the room when he got here, and I had intended to be in control of the situation from step one. Had he done this on purpose to piss me off, or was he just too excited to wait? He leaned in to kiss me in greeting and I knew I needed to do something quickly to get us back on track. I turned my head, offering him my cheek instead of my lips.

  “You haven’t earned a kiss yet, slave.”

  The words sounded awkwardly forced to me, but he smiled in surprise. He stepped back and looked me up and down, admiring the leather minidress I had borrowed from Raven. He had never seen me look like this and seemed to approve of the change. Amelia handed me a bottle of water and hurried out the door. She winked at me as she closed it behind her.

  Here we go.

  “Strip naked and kneel.”

  He obeyed and I circled him slowly, getting my thoughts in order as I quickly chugged the bottle of water. I chose a length of rope and took one of his wrists. I managed to make cuffs for both arms and bound them together. It wasn’t pretty, but it would hold. I secured his wrists by pulling the rope over the open closet door, so he was now standing spread-eagle against it. His goofy look of expectation made me
feel stupid and insecure. I could be in character with my clients because they were strangers, but it felt so unnatural with him.

  I took the bag of wooden clothespins and held it up in front of him.

  “I told you to arrive at five. You were thirteen minutes early, so you’re getting thirteen clothespins as punishment.”

  “Okay.” He laughed skeptically.

  I couldn’t handle his facial expressions anymore. I didn’t have a blindfold, so I pulled a pillowcase over his head. He may have still been able to see through it a bit, but it was mostly for me anyway. Now he was anonymous and I could get into my element. I mused that it also meant he could imagine me as whomever he pleased. I think a healthy imagination in the bedroom is a good thing.

  I clipped the first clothespin on to the tip of his right nipple and he flinched and tried to pull away.

  “Ow, shit! Are you sure you’re doing that right?”

  I wasn’t.

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said calmly and kept attaching clothespins to him in a line down both sides of his chest and upper thighs, pinching tiny bits of skin between them. He was squirming but otherwise cooperating. I had one left, and considered where to put it for a moment before clipping it to the very edge of one of his balls. He liked CBT, right?

  His breath hissed between his teeth, but he didn’t protest.

  “Now it’s time for your punishment,” I said quietly, trailing the crop down the inside of one of his legs.

  “What? I thought the clothespins were the punishment.”

  “They have to come off somehow.…”

  I whacked the first one I had applied to his nipple with the tip of the crop, and it popped off and hit the floor at our feet.

  “Jesus! Fuck!” he screamed.

  I worked my way down the rows of pins. Sometimes I hit them off first try. Other times I missed the one I was aiming for and hit a different one, failing to knock either one off. A few times I missed altogether and smacked him with the crop. I just kept thinking of Raven’s parting words.