Sarah K - The Secret Life of a Submissive

No one in erotica ever falls over unless they’re being swept off their feet and ravaged. They don’t get cramp, or the giggles, or trip over their pants while they’re trying to take them off. No one passes wind and flaps the covers, laughing furiously. Zips never get stuck, everyone always comes, and no one ever has a spotty bum. Humour and sex don’t mix in erotic fiction, or so my new editor reliably informed me.

‘Good erotic fiction should be like the best sex,’ she said during one of our telephone conversations. ‘A long, slow, satisfying build-up, hitting all the sweet spots, filling you with expectation, getting you more and more aroused, slowly bringing you closer and closer to the edge, making you gasp with pleasure, before finally taking you breathlessly to the grand finale. Erotic fiction should never let you down. Nobody in an erotic novel ever thought: let’s get this over and done with, X Factor ’s on at nine. Never, ever.’

The downside as a writer is that you need to have great sex in every chapter in lots of different, ever more exciting ways. In real life, not only is real sex not like that but also it doesn’t need a plot. I’d been married a long time, and sex had long since slipped from something you were doing all the time to something squeezed into the to-do list, between cleaning out the guinea pig and collecting the kids from football practice. And unlike when you’re writing about sex, during real sex you generally don’t need to stop halfway through a really good bit to take the dog to the vet or nip out to buy the ingredients for your child’s home economics bake-a-thon.

I hadn’t got an office, so I was writing my first erotic novel on the family computer in a corner of the sitting room, squirrelling it away after each session in a desktop file labelled ‘This year’s tax receipts’ and constantly reminding myself not to email it to my accountant. With a house full of teenagers the last thing I wanted was for them to read what I was writing, so I put an old-fashioned clothes horse around my desk, hung laundry all over it and told them it was to keep out the draught. My husband, although he knew what I was writing, never peeked. No one else in the family seemed to notice that the same towels and sheets hung there for weeks on end.

Halfway through the first book I stalled, stuttered and finally ran out of ideas. There were only so many ways our heroine could shed her clothes and gasp in breathless anticipation. Which was why Helen, Joan and I were all at Gabbie’s, eating for England. They had volunteered to help me out.

‘So it can be anything ?’ said Helen.

I nodded. ‘Anything at all that you’ve ever fantasized about. Anything that you’ve always wanted to do, if you could do it without getting caught, and without risking disease or hurting anyone.’

‘Or something we’ve already done,’ said Gabbie, looking pointedly at Joan.

I nodded. ‘I’m stuck,’ I said. ‘I really do need your help.’

‘How tragic is that,’ said Gabbie, laughing.

I was thinking they might come up with sex on a beach or in a sleeper train, or being ravished by a highwayman, but no: once they got going and were halfway through the Baileys, they were swapping real-life sexploits.

One had had sex on a cross-Channel ferry in the 1970s with a Frenchman she picked up in duty free, and when he told her that he wanted to see her again and asked for her name and telephone number, she lied through her eye teeth and told him her name was Freda and that she came from Margate.

Another had had a three-in-a-bed session with two builders who came to fix her parents’ roof when she had been home from college in her twenties. Another admitted to a drunken lesbian romp while on a painting holiday in Tuscany – as she said, it wasn’t something she particularly wanted to do again but she was glad she’d tried it. Which really did make it sound a bit like abseiling or hang-gliding – but she did add that it was incredibly refreshing to have sex with someone who actually knew where all your bits were.

I made notes – lots of notes.

‘Oh, and then I went out with this guy, after I split up with Keith. Do you remember Stuart?’ asked Gabbie. ‘Big, sort of gingery?’ She mimed tall with hair.

We all nodded.

‘He used to like to spank me.’

I stared at her. ‘And did you like it?’

Gabbie shrugged in a non-committal way. ‘It was OK, I suppose. I think he was hoping it would turn me on, but it didn’t. He kept saying that he’d really like to tie me up.’

‘Oh, we tried that,’ said Helen. ‘The kids were at my mum’s for the weekend. We did the whole thing: candlelit dinner, sexy underwear, silk scarf for a blindfold. Gav in this silk bathrobe I’d bought him for his birthday.’ Helen grinned. ‘God, I mean, he spent hours. It was fabulous. The only trouble was I wriggled so much that he couldn’t get the bloody knots undone when we’d finished and had to cut me off the bed with a pair of scissors. I’d got a blindfold on, so it wasn’t until he took it off I realized he’d used Molly’s skipping rope. God, she was livid.’

‘I blame Cosmopolitan ,’ said Gabbie, sucking chocolate out of her teeth.

‘I’ve always fancied doing that,’ I said, casually. ‘Being tied up.’

‘You should suggest it to Ray,’ said Joan. ‘Lots of men get off on that kind of thing. You know: helpless virgin, tied to a bed.’ She rolled her eyes and waved her hands, squealing, ‘Help, help,’ in a very passable impression of Penelope Pitstop.

What I didn’t tell them, and had never really admitted to myself until then, was that I’d fantasized about being tied up and spanked for years: not all the time, obviously, and it wasn’t my only sexual fantasy, but it was there, carefully hidden and tucked at the back of my mind, and it was something I constantly revisited. The idea was a huge turn-on and had been for as long as I could remember – certainly long before my thoughts had turned to sex.

When it came to playing cowboys and Indians as a child, I had been the one who always volunteered to be held captive and tied to a tree. Want someone to hold hostage or whip until they give up the whereabouts of the cowboy encampment? Oooooo, oooo, yes please, that’d be me.

As I got older the fantasies became more explicit, and eventually sexual, and evolved to being put over someone’s knee and soundly spanked, or being whipped with a riding crop, tied up or down, and made to do all sorts of interesting naughty things that my mother never told me about and certainly wouldn’t approve of. But in all that time I had always kept these thoughts to myself. There was a part of me that was afraid to admit how much the idea excited me.

‘Bob used to like me to tie him up,’ said Joan conversationally, ‘and thrash him with the cane on the feather duster. It wasn’t really my kind of thing but he liked it. I used to find the feather duster upstairs in the bathroom and think: Oh, here we go again. He bought me a French maid’s outfit the Christmas before we split …’

In my fantasies the someone who did those wonderful things to me was always a broad-shouldered, dashingly handsome Prince Charming, who was good-looking in a clean-cut preppy kind of a way, and who was totally in control. He didn’t say very much because, as is the way with fantasies, he always knew exactly what I wanted and when I wanted it, and was terribly good at giving it to me right on cue.

I’d be wearing high heels and I’d squeal in a girlie way, and after he had spanked me he would carry me over to a big four-poster bed and tie me down and blindfold me, before going to work with his knowing fingers and even more knowing tongue; then, when I was baying for more, he would make love to me, long and slow, until we both finally came. Visually it was a treat of rich colours, soft leather, huge four-poster beds, hairy chests and muscular torsos, and it was a fantasy that I kept on having, as I reworked the details.