Sarah K - The Secret Life of a Submissive

I’d never told anyone about wanting to be spanked or whipped or tied down, because I was pretty much convinced that I was alone in thinking those kinds of things and finding a sexual charge in them. I assumed that they were definitely too weird to talk about, and certainly way too weird to do anything about. Yet here were my best friends talking about exactly that. Maybe what I wanted wasn’t that unusual after all.

As I’d been taking notes, I was the only one who hadn’t had a drink, and I drove home thinking through what the girls had told me. Looking in through the sitting-room window, I could see Ray slumped on the sofa watching TV in his tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. We’d been together for a long time; we had kids, dogs and a home together. Things weren’t great between us. Money was tight, and while I was working every hour I could to try to keep our noses above water (he had been made redundant in a departmental rationalization and was now back at college, retraining), he refused to help by even thinking about a part-time job or helping round the house. As far as he was concerned, all that, and the children, were my responsibility, whether he was working or not. I was tired in lots of ways.

If you asked him, Ray would tell you with some pride that he was an old-fashioned man – a man who liked his wife at home. A proper family was what he called it. He’d probably have had a heart attack if I’d mentioned the whole tying-up thing. He was, and still is, a very practical man, a careful man; for him romance, luxury and adventurous sex were things other people had and I’d always felt he rather despised them.

As I unlocked the front door I thought about what Gabbie had said about sharing my fantasies with him, and realized with a growing certainty that it was probably too late.

Ray didn’t even look away from the TV as I slipped off my coat. ‘How did it go?’ he asked.

‘Oh, OK. I just want to get some of these notes down before I forget them,’ I said.

He nodded, eyes still firmly fixed on the TV screen. With a sigh, I walked over to the computer, turned it on and got to work.

Over the next few weeks in every spare moment I worked on my first erotic novel. I reworked my friends’ adventures and wove in all the things that turned me on. And more and more I had a sense of escaping into a fantasy world where anything was possible. I started to write all those things that had fuelled my fantasies for so long – and it was heady stuff. Most of them revolved around a tall, dark, handsome older man, who took control, and understood the heroine and what she needed and wanted, and gave them without question – with unconditional love and understanding. He was my Prince Charming, the alpha man of my fantasies.

I wondered, as I wrote, if that was what I thought I’d seen in Ray when I first met him. He was fifteen years older than me; I’d been working in a hotel for the summer when he asked me out. I’d seen him as capable, strong and silent. Things that at eighteen I had naively taken as positive qualities had, over the years, revealed themselves to be altogether less positive, and traits that probably a woman of his own age would have instantly recognized. He was stubborn and uncommunicative, and had, I suspected, chosen a much younger wife so that he could try to mould her into the woman he wanted. We got along fine until I wanted to grow up and have a life of my own.

Although I hadn’t anticipated it, writing erotica was the perfect escape from the realities of a crumbling marriage. All those things that I’d never told anyone before, all those things I had longed to explore, finally had a place and a purpose.

I also spent a lot of time doing research on the internet, which up until that point I’d mostly used to buy shoes and books. Not altogether sure what I’d find, I was nervous, excited, sometimes shocked and sometimes delighted. The internet opened up a whole new world. I rapidly discovered that far from my being alone in my fantasies there was a whole sub-culture out there that I had known nothing about, and lots and lots of people who felt the same as I did. I wasn’t so much relieved as stunned. And even better was that I found I had a name: I was a submissive.

In my fantasies, at least, I was a submissive – the one who gets spanked and tied up and gets all the attention. Submissive . I certainly didn’t see myself as submissive in real life, but sexually I could see that it was a good fit.

Having sold my first attempt at writing female erotica, I wrote more – a lot more. The stuff that had fuelled my fantasies for years was suddenly fuelling my fiction and my finances; and having finally found a home for all those things I’d been dreaming about since my teens felt good. Having an outlet for my innermost thoughts helped paper over the cracks in my increasingly unhappy marriage, and I was having the best sex of my life, albeit on the page.

Over the next five years I wrote twelve novels and countless short stories. The books and short stories always involved some degree of bondage and submission, and other sexual shenanigans that can be loosely described as S&M (sadism and masochism) and BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism), but in all that time, as I was writing about it and fantasizing about it, I never once tried any of it – not one single glorious black-leather, high-heeled, handcuffed moment of it. And Ray never read my books. Not one, ever.

Books, as Ray was eager to point out to anyone who would listen, were not his thing – and eventually, neither was I.

Finally the cracks just got too big and we separated. We were divorced within a year. It took me a while to get myself together, but after a few months I started, very tentatively, to date again. Fresh out of a long-term relationship, I wasn’t altogether sure exactly how or where to begin. So after a few false starts I turned to the place where a lot of us begin again: internet dating websites.

I think we’re often drawn to various incarnations of the devil we know – a type – and, having been married a long time, I certainly was. The men I dated after leaving Ray all seemed to have been cut from the same cloth. I was obviously doing something wrong. The men were all steady and practical, and I was still having married sex; I was just having it with new men.

Then along came Henry, my first attempt at trying to combine what passes for normal with some of the things I’d been fantasizing about.

After two glasses of house red and a light supper on our first weekend away together, I asked Henry if he’d ever thought about spanking anyone. You know – for fun. His eyes widened and his face took on an expression similar to the one I’d last seen on the face of a woman I’d offered a bacon butty, seconds before discovering she was a hard-line vegan.

Henry visibly stiffened and said, all outrage and horror, ‘Good Lord, certainly not! What on earth do you think I am – some kind of a pervert?’

Well, yes, hopefully.

‘Don’t you have any fantasies?’ I pressed, emboldened by strong drink and a nasty sinking feeling. The relationship had been pretty much doomed since lunchtime, when we’d been about to go Dutch on an uninspiring quiche and green salad when Henry had pointed out that actually I’d had a cappuccino and a sweet.

‘Of course I have fantasies,’ he said, ‘but mostly they involve world peace and captaining the English cricket team during a one-day test at Headingley.’

Buddhists, what can I tell you?

So how did he feel about underwear? What sort of thing did he like? I asked, giving it one last shot and my voice dropping to a seductive purr.

‘I haven’t given it a lot of thought, to be perfectly honest.’ He paused and then said, ‘Something from Marks, probably.’ I watched him slipping a bread roll into his pocket in case he got a bit peckish later. It wasn’t the answer I’d hoped for, to be honest.