Searching For Sicko Man

I’m sitting, some months later, in a Sunday-night pub in South London. Sugar Man’s playing on the radio. Nobody’s here except for me and the barman, and he’s skulking in the back and only ducking out occasionally on fake errands to see if I’m still there.

Met a false friend

On a lonely dusty road

Lost my heart

When I found it

It had turned to dead black coal

I’m barely awake. Sober, but barely awake. I clutch my pint like a lifeline. My eyes are open in fits and starts.

The barman comes back and pretends to be rearranging the glasses and says,

“Long weekend?” at me.

Well, I could tell him. Probably the best friend that I have right now came to my house last night. In one of her fanciest outfits, as per my instructions. A slinky black dress, high heels. She looked quite astonishingly sexy.

After she’d arrived, I wound my hand into her hair and dragged her bodily up two flights of stairs. I tied her wrists in front of her so tightly that they cut into the skin. I stuffed a red plastic ball-gag into her mouth and I tossed her over a chair and bound her there and hitched up her pretty black dress and yanked down her tights and pants so that the bare arse was exposed.

‘We’re going to play a game,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to give you three strokes with an implement. On the third stroke, you’re going to yell out a number between one and ten, depending on how much it hurts you, and the one that hurts the most is the one we’re going to use. If you don’t manage to yell a number out, we’re going to repeat the exercise until you do. And obviously, since you’re going to be a little muffled - if I don’t hear what you’re saying, we’re going to repeat the exercise until I do.’

She whimpered - and then nodded.

‘As an example,’ I said. ‘Hand.’

I turned and gave her one, two, three hard slaps with the palm of my hand.

She squealed, ‘Five.’

‘Paddle,’ I said, in quick succession. ‘Spatula. Spoon. Crop.’

As the crop struck her, she shrieked,

“Ten. Ten.”

And I knew we had a winner.

‘Twenty strokes,’ I told her after dinner, pushing her down onto all fours across my bedroom carpet. ‘All you have to do is stand twenty strokes, with your hands and feet exactly where they are. But every time you squirm away, every time your hands and feet shift, we’re going to add another five. If you move more than five times, I’m going to truss you up in place and we’ll go all the way to fifty. Understood?”

She shuddered - but nodded.

With the third stroke of the crop, she began to buck back and forth, moaning in pain - and the bucking grew more violent as the numbers ticked on.

But she stood it. All the way to twenty, she stood the worst I could give her, and she didn’t fucking move. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or proud of her.

I took her in my arms. Her breathing was ragged; she was shivering and close to tears. She pressed her face into the crook of my chest and squeezed her body close into mine, for the comfort of it.

“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s OK. You did it.”

I brushed back her hair. Her eyes gazed up into mine. And I slipped my fingers down into her crotch to feel the wetness there for myself.

“Do you need a break,” I asked her, “or are you good to continue?”

She blinked - and then she nodded.

“Good,” I said. “We’re going to try for thirty.”

And she closed her eyes and shook her head, vigorously, no, no - but she did as she was told, all the same.

And what fucks me up is not that I was capable of doing this to her, not that it made me hard, not even that I’m so screwed in the head that I couldn’t even fuck her afterwards-

-what fucks me up is how fantastic I feel, how elated, even now.

How I Forgot There Was A D in BDSM

“Well,” she said, “so what are you into?”

We both had pints in our hands; the bar was packed full with after-work drinkers. This being the very centre of London, five minutes from Oxford Circus, we could barely stand. Somebody’s elbow was poking into the small of my back.

I hesitated. And then leaned in, my lips grazing her ear, and I told her in a gentle whisper.

“You know. Rope. Whips. Gags. Blindfolds. The usual.”

And this time, straightening up, I saw her eyes widen for sure.

I explained my past to her. I talked about how hard I’d found it to mention this stuff to anybody. And she began to open up as well. That she’d always been a little bit interested - she’d seen Secretary, she’d read Fifty Shades, and she’d enjoyed them - but that she’d never acted upon it or come to terms with it. I was enchanted and sympathetic. And also, obviously, I had a jeans-tugging, denim-itching hard-on.

“If we did do this,” she said, one beer later, and her eyes were shining, “I could back out at any time and you wouldn’t be annoyed.”

“Of course,” I said, and meant it.

She sipped at her drink.

“No anal,” she added. “And no urination, and no defecation.”

I’m more than a little proud that I managed to conceal my complete and utter shock at this ultimatum - allowing me to maintain my composure long enough to decide whether I should cheerfully reassure her that I had no intention of doing any of these things to her, or pretend to be disappointed (implying that I was exactly that kind of thrillingly liberated dominant for whom absolutely nothing was out of bounds).

I went with the first one, and we had a good laugh about it.

Then I squinted at her, poker-player style.

“How about a collar?” I suggested.

Her mouth fell a little open.

“Uhhh,” she said, awkwardly, “maybe we should just keep it simple, to start with?”

I shrank back into my figurative shell. My penis made a similar motion.

“Yes,” I said, nodding vigorously. “Yes, that makes sense. Keep it simple. Of course.”

We arranged our first session for that Saturday. That left, however, an entire five days of unbroken 9-to-5 contact for things to go wrong. Some things did.

“I don’t understand gags,” she said to me, at one point, smoking a cigarette outside the office doors.

I gave her a baffled look.

“It’s to stop you from making any noise,” I explained.

“Yes,” she said, “but I’m not going to make any noise. So it doesn’t really seem necessary.”

“It’s,” I said, waving my hands in the air, “you know. A power thing, a control thing. The fact that I can stop you from crying out. In the same sort of way that the bondage stops you from moving.”

“Oh,” she said, in a voice that implied she very much didn’t understand.

I felt sick, to my stomach; I felt like a sicko.

“Now, listen,” she said. “I don’t want to see any nervousness from you. Is that understood?”

“Er, OK,” I replied, suddenly feeling incredibly nervous indeed.

“Just remember,” she said, “until we get into your house, I’m still in charge. All right?”

“You do know where the clitoris is, don’t you?” she said.

“I want a poem,” she said.

“What?”

“If I’m going to come on Saturday,” she said, “I want a poem from you. About what you’re going to do to me.”

I was aware that there was a game being very consciously played here, and that I was failing miserably to assert myself in the dominant role against her. Unfortunately, being inflamed with a craven and quite pathetically desperate lust to indulge my lifelong fantasy, I was willing to go along with whatever she wanted. (Besides which, I couldn’t really think of an answer that would give me the upper hand in this game. My move: “I’m not going to write you a fucking poem.” Her move: “I’m not going to let you tie me up and abuse me.” Checkmate in two.)

So, in the end, deeply hungover, I wrote it. A sort of e.e. cummings tribute, pun intended.

i'd begin with your wrists,

soft scarf or silk tie,

wound round, tugged taut-

pinning back the elbows

until even wriggling becomes hard.

lead you to the place,

black drawn across your eyes

something hard between your teeth-

see nothing, say nothing, do nothing

but moan, and struggle.

The hard seat of a chair pressing against your tits

your wrists loosened, re-pinioned, your legs spread

your arse upwards, exposed.

slap you raw, shivering with each thwack

harder, no more, more

let you loose, unveil your eyes, tell you to strip.

not too fast.

draw rope round your tits

shape them, tease them, pinch them

decide you've seen enough.

lay you down in fresh duvet

one arm to either side of the headboard

legs drawn out, star-shaped, yanked tight

silence and darkness

and from out of the darkness something cold against your nipple

or something soft and ticklish

or something hard,

working up your throat to your lips

down over your belly

to your cunt

and around and exploring

and you squirm

and you writhe

and you drool

and I press my lips to your cunt and I tongue

and you strain against your bonds

upwards, curving

excited

your fingers gripping rope

silence and darkness

you're alone here and fucking ready to cum

but silence and darkness

you could scream

ropes loosen

you're led to your feet

stumbling a halter around your waist

back down the stairs

helpless

wrists raised

tight cable-ties yanked into the flesh

a torrent of freezing water to make you shriek

and the blindfold lifts and the water warms

and I look into your eyes and clasp your hair

and let my cock rise into your cunt and lean you up against the wall of the shower

and your moaning's muffled

and your bound wrists slip over my head as I pound you

and pound you

and cum

and once we're done you begin to think it might be over with

you don't know whether you're relieved or disappointed

but I pin you back up and spank your cheeks

and wash you, and once the shower's done I towel you off

and tie your waist again and lead you back to the bed

knot a rope twice, tie it down across your belly, pinching into your cunt and back between your arse-cheeks

the knot thrumming and tingling between the lips every time you shift

and tie you down and leave you to play alone in the darkness

and you're exhausted and aching

and i bind your ankles together and lie with you, surrounding you

and afterwards, i untie you

It wasn’t a terrible poem, in the end, but there can be no doubt whatsoever that I had - to my lasting shame - fallen headlong into the trap that must surely await so many callow young wannabe doms. I'd failed to play the game. I'd fucked up big-time.

I’d forgotten to actually be dominant.

Of Human Bondage

Every day in the office, Suzanne and I would email each other.

Stupid nonsense, mostly - songs or interesting articles or funny videos. Just another way of surviving another day of our lives wasted in the thankless world of advertising.

Today, on Monday morning - both of us still not quite recovered from the searing, knock-out punch of our hangovers from the house party on Saturday night - she emailed me something different.

I still can’t get over what you told me on Saturday night.

I responded with something witty, like,

Oh?

She typed back quickly, expressionless from across the desk.

I don’t think I’ll ever look at you the same way.

I dropped it. I was a little embarrassed, but I trusted her enough to believe that she wasn’t going to spread it around the office.

The day moved on. I wrote more copy. More superlative lies about crappy outlets, crappy services, and crappy products. Or, as I’d have the people of the UK believe, achingly trendy hair salons, fabulous deluxe facials, and top-notch LED dog collars.

And then she pushed me again. I could sense her glancing at me from across the desk.

I can’t believe you like to tie girls up.

I tilted my head slightly and stared at the words. This girl was mischievous, no doubt about it. She liked winding me up. Fuck, she liked winding everyone up. If we didn’t have a history - the most insignificant and chaste of histories, but still - I probably wouldn’t have taken the bait.

Why? I asked. Is that something you’re interested in as well?

She did a double-take. I saw her frown. And then she began to type again, more furiously.

I don’t know what I’m interested in, she said. I don’t know if I’d enjoy it. I mean, I've never really thought about it until now, but Tom, when you said that to me, my eyes widened. And the time we kissed, you were saying all of these things about me - that you liked me, that you thought I was really pretty - and they were great. But they didn’t make my eyes fucking widen.

I think my own eyes would have widened just a bit myself, if I hadn’t spent the past depressing decade of my life quietly and with self-loathing concealing my reactions to the things that really turned me on.

So I wrote,

Do you think you’d like to find out if you enjoy it?

She looked nervous now. She was staring fixedly into her screen. She wrote back,

What do you mean?

Her coyness was genuinely beginning to annoy me. I typed it out without thinking. Never mind that it was a bad idea. Never mind that she was in a relationship, and my colleague, and we’d already done far more than we should have.

Would you be interested in doing these things. With me.

A long pause. She stared at her screen for a few moments longer. She breathed heavily outwards. I could see the excitement - and the fear - glinting in her eyes.

She typed,

I can’t breathe.

And then she began to fucking hyperventilate.

I don’t think I’d ever had a comparably compulsive effect on a woman before. Truth be told, I’m not sure I’d had any compulsive effect on a woman before, aside from possibly compulsive pity.

The sight of it was quite incredibly sexy, aside from the fact that she had now placed her hands palm-down on the desk and was breathing so loud and fast that our colleagues were putting their hands on her back and asking her frantically what was wrong.

She shook her head vigorously, told them she’d eaten a bad sandwich, and we agreed to meet for a drink after work.