Table of Contents
Dominance and Submission Write Away, Sir The Complete BDSM Erotica Series
By Alexandra Noir Part 1: Writer’s Block
Part 2: Creative Juice
Part 3: Playing the Part
Part 4: Write Away, Sir
Part 6: Taking What’s His
Part 7: Coming Clean
Part 8: All things Come to She Who Kneels
Also by Alexandra Noir Menage BDSM Stories 2: An Arranged Marriage
BDSM Bedtime Stories 2: A Dom in Shining Armor
About Alexandra Noir
Copyright © 2019 by Kumquat Publishing
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
Kumquat Publishing
PO Box 350457
Westminster CO 80035-0457
Dominance and Submission
Write Away, Sir
The Complete BDSM Erotica Series
By Alexandra Noir
Part 1: Writer’s Block
He pulled out the whip-
Stephanie Granger pulled a face, deleted the sentence she had just written, and leaned back from her computer. She felt as though she wasn’t making sense of any of this. Maybe she just needed to try harder.
Putting her fingers back to the keys, she attempted to pick up where she’d left off.
He picked up the whip and carried it towards her.
"Do you know what this is?” he asked her.
Ugh. No. Something still felt wrong to her. She backspaced until the words had vanished from the page once more and rubbed her hands over her face. Reaching for her coffee, she let out a sigh and wondered what in the hell she was meant to do with this project, given that she felt like she had just been running up against brick wall after brick wall with this book.
Dreamer, her cat, jumped up on to her lamp and bopped his head against her chin. Normally, she would have moved him off her knee so she could focus on work, but it wasn’t like she was getting a hell of a lot done that day anyway. She rubbed her face against his fur and prayed that she would be able to get through this project before the deadline.
When she told people what she did – writing books for a living, ghostwriting for a big publishing company that plastered pretty faces on to her work and flogged them at conferences and stores – they always seemed shocked. Like they couldn’t believe that she would be degrading herself in that way. Haven’t you thought about writing anything of your own? they would always ask her, as though the notion had never crossed her mind before they had been kind enough to share it with her. And she would smile politely at their inference and change the subject because they didn’t seem to realize that she was doing this for the money, not because she had some great artistic need to write anything her editor assigned to her.
In fact, one of the reasons she had been so taken with her boyfriend when they had first met was because he seemed so utterly unbothered by her work. Even when she let him know that sometimes she even went as far as to write erotica, he seemed more amused and curious than anything else. Which was a hell of a relief, because she needed someone who could support her work, not spend his whole life trying to get her to go off and write some great novel of her own.
Jon, her boyfriend, worked in the creative industries too – well, in theory, at least. He was a booker for a major music venue, working with talented artists day in and day out, and he seemed to understand, like her, that sometimes the creatives needed someone to supplement the actual practicality into their lives. Of course, Stephanie was actually doing something creative with her time, while Jon spent most of his trying to wrangle in hopeless case musicians at his work, but still. He got it. He understood what it was like, and that was all that really mattered to her.
Besides, Jon was reliable. He was steady, he was nice, he was gentle, he had a good job and he wasn’t going to quit it to travel around the world on a whim any time soon – which was how a previous boyfriend had dumped her. She had dated around the city enough to know that sensible was a good place to start, especially as she got out of her twenties and started heading towards the unchartered territory of being a woman over thirty. She and Jon had moved in together after a couple of years, and she was almost certain she had made the right decision.
He had been out of work for a little while, after the usual venue he worked for had gone on hiatus to repair after a fire, and she was supporting the two of them for the time being. And that had been...yeah, it had been tough. It wasn’t just the money side of it, which was difficult enough, but the aspect of their relationship that saw him hanging around their apartment all the time. She had suggested, a couple of times, that he go out and look at getting another job, just to tide them over until his old one picked back up again, but he had always dismissed her.
"Why would I do that?” he remarked. "I’ve got some time off, I’m going to enjoy it. Actually do something with my life that isn’t work, you know?”
"Right," she replied, not in the mood to argue about it. But what he meant by “life that isn’t work” was sitting in front of the television for hours a day, streaming shows that he had watched when he was a kid and calling his favorite quotes through to her when she was trying to get work done. It wasn’t exactly the sexiest he had ever been to her, she had to admit. Seeing him hanging around the house all day every day, usually in his underwear, intermittently drinking beer whenever she wandered through to get herself another coffee or ask him to make a run to the store for more bread...yeah, she was starting to think that this was going to take a toll on things between them. A serious one.
It was never like their sex life had been off-the-charts amazing anyway. Which Stephanie had always put down to just being a matter of time. You didn’t come right out of the gate and turn out amazing, did you? That was just something that happened in romance novels; it didn’t go down like that in real life. Or go down at all, really, without strong encouragement from her, when it came to Jon and his bedroom antics. She had convinced herself that things would get better as they got to know each other, and they sort of had, but not enough to render their sex life anywhere near explosively good. She figured that she had to choose between reliable and incredible, and she had chosen the former. Which was fine. For now.
But with him around the house constantly, she had found herself less and less interested in him. There was nothing less sexy, she had discovered, than having your partner around all day every day. She couldn’t get any time apart from him, so how was she meant to nurture a frisky fantasy into being? She was having a hard time believing that he felt anything for her these days anyway, but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that they were spending far too much time around each other, and it was making everything that much harder.
Including her work. She had been assigned an erotica novel, which was totally in her ballpark for the most part – when Cameron had sent her the spec, she had glanced over it and agreed to it at once. With just her income to support them, they needed whatever they could get. Besides, sex was easy. To write, at least.
But then she had forced herself to sit down and actually start writing the book, and she had found herself crashing up against a brick wall. It was BDSM-themed, with a dominant man and a submissive woman, and even with a detailed outline, she was struggling to come up with anything that she thought made sense. She didn’t want it to come across as springing from the pen of someone who had no idea what they were doing, but the
truth was, she didn’t have a clue.
It wasn’t that that side of sex had never piqued her interest before. It was just that she had been way too nervous to actually bring it up to any of her partners. What was she meant to do, just get down on her knees and tell them that she liked to be spanked? She didn’t even know if she was into that, but her understanding of BDSM came entirely from whatever cheap, base-level stuff had filtered into the mainstream. Yes, there was something pleasing to her about the thought of having control taken away, but perhaps that was just because she had been thrust into a position where she had no choice but to embody that control at all times just to keep the household in order. Could she make someone pay her bills and do her taxes for her? Yeah, that would get her off these days, she was pretty sure...
She would have just called Cameron and told him that she couldn’t finish this project and that he should hand it off to someone else, but she needed the money for this book. And so, she soldiered on, trying to convince her imaginary reader that she actually had a clue what she was talking about. She had done a little research, trying to find some examples of similar literature online, but everything she had come across had pretty much been badly-written trash churned out by someone with their dick obviously in their other hand.
But she knew that Cameron wasn’t going to take a turning down for an answer. One of the reasons he was such a good editor was because he worked his ass off and expected everyone he hired to do the same thing. Which made him something of a nightmare to work for, but in the best possible way.
Stephanie had met Cameron when she had been fresh out of a creative writing major at college and searching for a job that wouldn’t have her scanning cans at the checkout of a major supermarket. She had seen a lot of the people she’d studied alongside for years taken in by similar fates, and she understood why – working for a degree in something as nebulous as creative writing was always going to be a long shot, and they had all known that. The last three years, for a lot of people, had been nothing more than a chance for them to indulge their passions for the last time before the real world came a-calling and they had to give up on writing and do something practical with their lives.
But Stephanie was determined to try. Even just for six months, to see if she could do it – she had a decent amount of savings from the time she’d spent serving ice cream to spoiled summer kids between classes, enough to live on for a while. And she started putting in applications everywhere she could, hoping with every fiber of her being that something was going to come up to give her the excuse to keep dreaming a little while longer.
When she had slid in an application to the publishing house that Cameron worked for, she had known it was a long shot. They were looking for someone to take over a long-term ghostwriting role, and it would involve a wide variety of topics and stories and novels for her to write. When she had received an email inviting her to come in so they could meet with her, she had assumed it was some kind of mistake, but had put on her best skirt and cleanest shirt and gone out anyway.
"Good to meet you, Stephanie," Cameron had greeted her, shaking her hand firmly. He was a little older than her, maybe in his early thirties, with dark reddish-brown hair and eyes that were almost the same color. He wore a smart suit, and he smelled like leather and old books. She liked him at once.
"You too," she replied. He led her through to his office, which was decorated with modern décor undercut by the sheer number of books scattered around the place. She couldn’t help but smile. She didn’t trust anyone who didn’t have dozens of books around them whenever they could, and his office reminded her of her bedroom.
"So, I enjoyed the samples you sent along to me," he explained, sitting down behind his desk and getting straight to business. "Little scrappy around the edges, but nothing a solid editor couldn’t help you figure out, you know?”
"Right," she agreed, nodding. He had a low voice, a sure one, like he was confident about everything coming out of his mouth.
"And we need someone to start right away," he continued. "We have a novel that needs finishing up – our last writer had to go back home to take care of some family business, didn’t have time to tell us much about it, so we just let him go. I can draw you up a contract for the rest of the book, if you want, and we can see how we work together?”
"Yeah, of course, that sounds great," she blurted out at once. She couldn’t believe this was happening. Her first job, actually writing for money!
She had impressed him with her first submission, and things had just slowly improved from there. He gave her more and more projects to work with, pushing her harder and harder with work that was more out-there, bolder and brasher than anything she’d done before. They had several pen-names that the various ghostwriters created, and she became the main driving force behind Alana Blake, their erotic and romantic creator. Sometimes, she would giggle when she saw Alana (played by a beautiful, mysterious actress from across the city) posing for her author photos, knowing that she had been the one who was truly behind all the books.
And normally, she did well with everything he threw at her. She started to get the hang of the tropes and the games and what was expected from her as part of this work, the character types that people responded to and the panting, gasping sex that readers wanted. But this last assignment...yeah, this was something else, even for her. She knew that her work raised a lot of eyebrows at the best of times, but this had been one of those tales that she knew she would have to keep firmly to herself.
BDSM just wasn’t something she knew enough about to write a convincing story around. When it came to romance and sex, she felt as though she could synthesize enough reality together from what she’d been through in her actual life and everything she had seen in movies and TV shows. But this was asking a lot from her, a lot of new shit that she wasn’t sure she would be able to sell. Alana Blake had taken a turn into the hot-and-heavy world of dominance and submission, and Stephanie had to find a way to follow her there.
But, as she sat there in front of her computer, typing and deleting sentences over and over again, she felt like she was slamming her head up against a brick wall. How was she meant to do this? Go out to the living room, where her boyfriend was sitting in his underwear with a box of cereal as a snack, and tell him that he needed to dominate her for research? The thought almost made her giggle. He couldn’t take control of himself right now, let alone her.
And maybe she should have been happy about that, because surely any man who wanted to control her was going to find himself frustrated. She didn’t take direction very well, except when it came from Cameron and it had to do directly with her job.
She decided to close the laptop for now and take a nap. That was what she needed – she had been working since she rolled out of bed this morning, and she needed to let her brain rest a while so she could actually function for the rest of the day.
"Hey, babe," Jon called to her as she made her way through the living room of their small apartment. When it had just been her in this place for the better part of the day, it had seemed a whole lot bigger.
"Hey," she replied, and he glanced up at her, pausing the show he was watching on the screen before him.
"You okay?" he asked, furrowing his brow. He had been with her long enough to be able to sense when there was something going on with her, and normally she would have just come out and told him the truth – that she was struggling with a project and couldn’t find a way to make the pieces fit together on the page. But, this time, she shook her head and gestured to the bedroom.
"I think I just need to take a nap," she replied, and she made her way out of the room. Throwing herself down in bed, she pulled the covers over her head and pouted into the darkness beneath. She knew she was being childish, but she was frustrated, pissed at herself for not being able to get a handle on what she wanted to do or how the hell to write this story.
Or maybe it was a different kind of frustration. Even the thought o
f domination and submission had done something to her. Nothing that she wanted to go into in real life, of course – well, probably not, at least – but enough that maybe she could use that interest to ride the wave into finishing this damn project already.
She reached into the drawer next to the bed and pulled out a small box that lay within. Jon probably thought it was just where she kept her jewelry or tampons or whatever else girls hid to themselves, but inside was a small collection of the sex toys she had gathered over the years. She grabbed a slim, sleek, silver bullet vibe she had picked up for herself after a particularly bad break-up and slipped it down between her thighs. Closing her eyes, she tried to pick up where she had left off in her head.
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