by Jenna Barton
Paul was everything to Claire in many ways, her submission to him spanning the physical, mental, and emotional. It was close to being her personal spirituality. Even though I questioned it, seeing that kind of devotion and sensing how much of a locus it was for her made me feel incredibly alone.
“I didn’t think you were being judgy toward me.” She smiled at me serenely. “I thought you were judging yourself, Erin.”
“I’m not.” I needed to convince someone—Claire? Myself? Instead, I looked down at Claire’s notebook again, reading over the words under my fingers.
Do you remember the first time you felt a submissive need? Was it mental domination? Pain? A little of both? Restraint? Were words attached to the fantasy? If so, were they sensual, flirtatious, hard, demanding?
Take the time to recall the tiny seed of your submissive nature…
Submissive nature. Was it natural for me to be this way? And the two words I’d fixed to Walt, without his welcome or cause. Yes, Sir. Those were words meant for bedroom voices. And being like Claire in Paul’s presence? The notion of scurrying after Walt, hoping for his approval and attention left me cold. The possibility he could turn distant and high-handed about his supposed territory made a nerve behind my eyebrows flare with anger.
But I remembered him lying beside me before the spanking, watching me, the lazy smile, and his voice crossing the inches between us. “Got you.” And suddenly I felt very brave.
“Okay,” I said, sliding the notebook into my lap. “I’ll take a look.”
Claire left me on my front porch a few hours later, clutching her notebook and one of her new mugs. I realized, as I padded in silence from room to room, I had become accustomed to Walt’s presence. I missed him.
I rinsed the mug Claire gave me, probably more than it needed. Nearly eight hundred dollars for two custom pieces of underwear and now this notebook. Walt called himself a Top and after his surprise admission—it’s not a little thing, Erin. Not the way I want it to be with you—our first evening at Trattoria Stella, the topic of Dominance and submission had sat untouched. Since I had the opportunity to observe the difference, I’d started considering I might be a bottom, the complementary yin to his yang, no power, just play. But those yes, Sirs still echoed in my head.
Walt, minutes after we met.
Don’t call anyone that unless he’s earned it.
It was ridiculous and distracting, and every day those two words made me stare into those woods beyond my desk more than I cared to admit. Without any doubt, I wanted physical play. I wanted it to be attached to someone stronger, more willful and willing than me. I wanted to give provenance to someone else who could handle the task and adore me for it.
I wanted it to be Walt. All of it.
It…no, not it. Dominant. Sir.
I wanted Walt to be Sir. But there was an equal and opposite side to Sir, one I’d hardly considered.
Willing. Deferential. Yielding. Obedient.
Claire’s notebook sat, benign, under my bag and the thin cotton cardigan I’d been stupid enough to wear to Asheville in the middle of a June heat wave. This place always seemed to demand more exposure than I anticipated.
In this guide, I hope you’ll find your own path to recognizing and understanding your own submissive nature. Just as each human is different, this facet of you is unique to your own experience. For some of us, submission is completely in the mind, others find their place accepting physical sensation from another, many of us find a place between both mental and physical.
Sensory Exploration
I consider this journey one of the senses. Part of every section in this notebook will contain suggestions for sensory exploration of the topic I’ve written about. As with everything I’ve included here, it is merely a guidepost and completely optional.
Do you remember the first time you felt a submissive need? Was it domination? Pain? A little of both? Restraint? Were words attached to the fantasy? If so, were they sensual, flirtatious, hard, exacting?
Take the time to recall the tiny seed of your submissive nature. Write about it, meditate on it. If it asks you, explore your body with it.
I set the notebook aside and walked from room to room, directionless.
Walt beside me. Deep-ocean blue eyes and slow-falling lashes. His hand on my hip. Got you.
Sensory exploration? I sensed that my kitchen work turned the house humid, thanks to all the repeated washings I had given my new coffee mug.
Walt was on surprise duty at Poplar Branch, filling in for his assistant ranger, Sam, and watching over his forest for the evening instead of occupying a good portion of my sofa. With a dismissive sniff, I sloughed my wrinkled linen dress away from my damp skin.
Cool drinks, cool showers. If I stayed in the South much longer, I’d need to start monogramming everything and buy a deviled egg plate.
As I showered, I was hardly relieved and actually adding to my own frustration. Instead of rushing to finish, I lathered a bath mitt as I thought about the words in Claire’s notebook. Submissive. Willing. Obedient.
I soaped my legs, closed my eyes and let my mind run an old, familiar reel. The one I rarely allowed myself to think about. It was a fantasy. An indulgent one, and thoughts that made me wince over them as often as they turned me taut-limbed and aroused.
Yes, Sir.
Lips beside my ear whispering explicit instructions. The same lips brushing my forehead as a long, obviously masculine finger rested under my chin. My hands clenched behind my back. My head bowed. Face down and ass thrust high, waiting patiently. And I looked content, happy even. I was as soft and flouncy as the bed clothing around me. I could hear my own mind looping a cadence: for Sir…for Sir…for Sir…
A hand cracked across my bare skin, then a wisp of fur, then a springy cane. There was no discernible pattern: no start, no stop. I remained perfectly still and looked nearly euphoric. The man’s lips descended to my pinked flesh, kissing and soothing, patting and stroking. I saw the same mouth, smiling beside my ear again, whispering as the long, gloved finger stroked my cheek and then bounced lightly against the tip of my nose. He withdrew his hand from my face and slid it between the mattress and my torso, and I saw my own nipples pinched and pulled taut over and over.
My thighs shook, trembling from the heavier attention. A thin, sinister-looking silver chain configured in a lengthy Y and finished at each end with small clamps was placed before my face. My eyes opened, seemingly commanded to do so, and focused on him as I pressed my lips against the metal. My nipples, now dusky and hardened, were caught up in the little clamps. The final clamp disappeared between my legs and snugged behind my clitoris.
His mouth was beside my ear again, whispering something that made me beam rapturously. He kissed my forehead and was gone, returning his attention to the skin on my thighs and ass, now readied for his more stern attentions. Again there was no pattern to the march of items assaulting my now reddened skin. Paddles covered in leather were replaced with bits of soft suede, then stinging, nibbed plastic strings. Without warning, his hand dipped between my legs, pulling at the chain or dancing lightly over the slick layers of skin. The hardest blows fell on my upturned backside, now a vivid, purple-splotched red. Another increase in speed and intensity.
I was seduced by my own obvious bliss as he struck me again and again. Sweaty, lost within my own reactions to the sensory overload. The chain went cruelly taut as his fingers dipped deep inside me, collecting the wetness pooled there as a leather-clad thumb stroked at my pinched clitoris. The effort I had to exert to stay completely still, even though I appeared to be inhabiting another type of consciousness, was extreme.
He nudged at my knees with his own legs, opening me further, and began again, this time slapping my bare labia as his fingers plunged inside me.
He was directly behind me, his skin and muscle pressed tight against my reddened thighs. The coarse dark hair on his legs and groin tickled and tormented my heated skin as his erection pressed agai
nst one heated red cheek. The weight of him fell along my body, making me feel engulfed with his solid and imposing presence. Once again he whispered in my ear as he slid inside me. Without warning his lips moved, and I finally heard his voice, deep, masculine, and even in this moment, dripping with a sort of lightheartedness.
“Let me have it, girl,” he said, nuzzling his face against mine. Seeing me like this pleased him. “Come for me.”
I did. Hard.
His hands were on my hips, pulling me against him as I panted and moaned through several waves of intense orgasm that swelled and spilled over as I heard him groan with his own climax. I constricted around him, pulling him deeper into me and into his own release. His hand slid around the crease of my thigh, settling on my bare mound, his fingers stroking again at my clitoris. Suddenly, he gave the chain imprisoning my nipples a rough tug.
“Come again. Now.”
My body obeyed him and washed over into a deep wave, clenching from deep in my thighs and burning through my pelvis.
“Whose are you?” he asked as I submerged and rolled under again. When my answer wasn’t rapid enough, the chain yanked again. “Whose are you?”
“Yours, S—Sir,” I gasped.
“Whose?” His fingers flitted lightly at my still-tight clit as his voice slipped over my disoriented senses.
“Yours, Sir,” I said in a small, breathy voice. It wasn’t to his liking.
“Again.”
“Yours, Sir.” I repeated it with more focus through the shudders starting to take over my body.
“Good girl. One more time. Come for me again.”
A low whine escaped from my throat and I was lost, battered by flashing colors and the sound of his breath in my ear. I collected the last vestiges of energy in my chest and screamed, flinging my head back against his shoulder.
Suddenly the screaming in my head was replaced by the sound of flesh slipping against porcelain. Unable to discern the heavy rub of lost footing and useless clutching of my own hands on the wet tile from the last wave of the most intense orgasm I’d ever experienced, alone or otherwise, I managed to catch myself just before I toppled over. I leaned heavily against the cool ceramic, my breath coming in ragged and shallow snatches.
My skin chilled, an evening breeze drifting through the open window.
Reality crashed in, and I was mortified. I wasn’t even aware of what I was doing, and…the window. Open.
Oh my God. The realization of what I’d just done, the nature of the fantasy and my body’s almost cataclysmic reaction to it, overwhelmed me.
That was me.
That was no fantasy, it’s what I want and probably have for so long…Oh, the next door neighbors. Did they hear?
I am like that. I am.
I am a submissive.
I’d never felt so directionless and alone. Stiff, as though I really had borne the weight and sheer size of my fantasy Dominant, I leaned down to turn off the water and stepped from the shower. My trembling hands tucked a thick towel around me and wound another around my hair. As I dressed I avoided my own reflection in the mirror. I wasn’t sure who would be looking back at me.
Chapter Ten
“PUSH HARDER, BABYSUB.”
“I’m pushing as hard as I can, Madam.”
“Here, let me…just…Erin! Will you just let me do it?”
“Fine. I can’t breathe in this thing, you know. It’s too tight.”
“God, you are almost—no, come to think of it, you are as whiny as Walt. You two belong together.”
With a grunt, the hands on my backside shoved me forward. I managed to catch myself and sit without any damage to my ankles, wrists, or my attire. I lowered my eyes with the task of tamping down to rights the yards of black tulle I wore around my waist, but was impeded by my own breasts. Heaving breasts seemed like the right term, considering I was utterly out of breath, and they were spilling out of the corset I was bound into like some sort of theme park Scarlett O’Hara.
Lucy hopped in the driver’s side of her oversized SUV. With the grace of a gazelle, of course. She snorted, not gracefully.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s cute, how you’re sulking like that. You sure you aren’t into age play?”
“If I say yes can I take off this contraption?” I looked down again, fascinated with the flesh that overflowed past the black silk and satin binding, and poked dubiously at one of the mounds with my finger. Lucy watched with the sort of amused indulgence I’d usually associate as that given to children and the elderly.
“They’re supposed to do that. Why do you think they’re called ‘merry widows’?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, still poking at my own breast as if it were a fully risen ball of dough, expecting the entire architecture to deflate. “I can’t breathe.”
“I can’t breathe,” Lucy whined as she put her Range Rover into drive. “You’re not supposed to breathe. You’re supposed to go along quietly to Tate’s, stand there, wait for Wand—er, Walt, and look irresistible and stop making me want to strangle you.”
“I wasn’t aware you had an agenda.”
“God, you’re mouthy.” She turned from her driveway, too fast, and I slid into the door.
“I’m not afraid of you.” I was lying. Lucy scared me witless, especially without Claire to water down her nonstop sarcasm. Lucy slanted her head toward me, smiling.
“Of course you’re not, babysub. Of course you’re not.”
I settled into my seat as much as the ensemble she’d literally tied me into would allow. As we wound through the deep woods circling Lake Arden, I brought up and dismissed neutral topic after neutral topic. Every time I tried to open a line of conversation with Lucy, she introduced me to another new, naïve facet of my personality.
“Do you…are you going to do, or, um…”
“That’s adorable, really. The stuttery, no-confidence newb thing is hot.”
“Lucy, why don’t you like me?”
She glanced at me again, her brows furrowing. “What? Don’t like you?”
“You seem to not like me very much.”
“I like you. You’re in my car, aren’t you?”
“Glad I passed your car test,” I said, snatching at the poof of tulle threatening to spread to her seat. Once my skirt was under control, I turned a syrupy-sweet smile on her. “Okay, you like me. So who are you planning on beating tonight, Lucy?”
“Why? Want to see if my dance card’s full?” She grinned at me, wagging her eyebrows.
“No, I was feigning interest.”
The Range Rover glided to a stop and Lucy turned to me, laughing. “Okay, truce.”
“Exc—are you sure?” I shifted, as much as I could, to face her.
“Yes, yes, of course.” She waved her hand across the expanse between us. “This is me. I’m not cuddly. I give people a hard time. You might have heard your Sir refer to me as Lucifer a time or two? He didn’t make that up merely to amuse people.”
“No, Walt always calls you Lucy when he says something about you.” I turned back to the road as we drove forward. “And he’s not—I don’t know if he’s my Sir.”
“No? You two fuck enough. Are you sure?”
“How do you know—?”
“Hey, you two have to decide what kind of relationship you’re having.” She directed another look my way. “So. What kind is it?”
“I thought Walt and I were deciding this.”
“Wanda would never do or say anything without you asking. He’s too polite to just throw you over his shoulder and turn caveman on you.”
“Oh.”
She chuckled. The sound was too ominous for comfort. “Okay, then. So you’re one of those.”
“Those?”
“You want him to be a caveman.” The woman actually snorted as she laughed. “Oh damn, are you in trouble, Wanda.”
“Trouble? Why?” I gaped at her.
“Because Walt’s favorite game is Ugg fetch woman.” She
laughed harder. I didn’t join her. “Oh, lighten up, Erin. You two need to stop thinking so much and just do some depraved shit and then go pick out some kitchen curtains or something domestic like that, and go back for more of the depraved shit. Make it all normal and about what you both want. But stop being polite and get dirty. It’s the only way you’ll get past this reasonable, nice…thing.” She said nice with the same distaste she probably turned toward fast food and scratch and dent sales. The vehicle pitched again, almost sending me into Lucy’s lap. “Heads up, babysub. We’re here.”
After passing a pair of lantern-topped stone pillars, Lucy stopped to key a series of numbers into a security monitor. Two wide, wrought-iron gates pulled apart smoothly, revealing a short drive that disappeared into a cluster of tall evergreens. As we wound through the landscape, the elevation rose slightly with each turn, offering views of spotted granite boulders nestled among more of the same long-limbed evergreens, deep patches of moss under bushes covered in bright white and pink flowers, and broad-trunked hardwood trees.
It was nature perfected, like a forest assembled for enchanted sprites and fairies instead of plodding, indifferent humans. I pushed myself forward in my seat, angling for a glimpse of the treetops overhead.
“Impressive,” Lucy said. I nodded, wordless. “I’ve been coming up to Tate’s for at least twelve years. Never stops blowing my mind, something like this place existing for one family.”
“This is his? Just his?”
“Yep.” Lucy swung the Range Rover through a deep turn, revealing a trio of long, pitched rooflines spiked with a matching number of chimney stacks. “All Tate’s. It was his great-grandparents’, maybe great-great.” She shook her head with a wry smile. “Not sure. Turn of the last century, anyway. Sugar. Texas, Louisiana, and Haiti. Maybe the Grenadines too, somewhere else in the Caribbean? This was their summer cottage.”
More than once Walt had hinted at Lucy’s estranged family with words like “debutante” and “old money.” And she was still impressed, after twelve years of visits. “A summer house? I can’t imagine.”
“Who could, coming to a lake house like this? Well, Tate, maybe.”