‘Not if you believe in it,’ Max said calmly, picking up the pen and handing it to me.
I took another look. ‘Can’t we do what we’re going to do without this?’
‘No,’ said Max. ‘There are some things that you can pick and choose, Sarah, but this isn’t one of them. If you don’t sign it we don’t take the next step.’
‘But no one is going to enforce this.’
‘They don’t have to. It’s for our benefit. If you don’t trust me enough to sign it, Sarah, that’s fine, but we don’t play without it.’
I read it again. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Never more so.’
I was torn between frustration, amusement, annoyance and apprehension. If I signed it, it was a sign that I took all this seriously and that we were moving forward. Surely after I’d come this far it was what I wanted.
‘It’s mad,’ I said.
‘Possibly.’
I agonized. When it came right down to it, I realized I was also afraid. Afraid of him? Of me? It was hard to be specific.
‘You have to trust me. I’ll look after you and I promise not to do anything to you that you can’t cope with. I promise …’
And he was right: if we wanted to move this on, then I had to trust him. Looking back, I have no idea why I believed him, but I did.
The contract was currently sitting on my office desk, all signed and sealed. Even as I’d added my signature there was still a part of me that thought it didn’t really count and that, when you got right down to it, it was all completely crazy. I knew full well that in reality no one could hold me to a contract like this if I didn’t want to comply with the conditions.
As I passed the pen over to Max, as if reading my mind, he looked across at me and said, ‘Sarah, this contract is only as meaningful as you make it. I want you to understand that for me this isn’t some kind of joke. Have you read the list of hard limits that I sent you?’
I had. Hard limits are areas of engagement between a Dominant and a submissive which are off-limits: no-go areas. Both subs and Doms can have them, list them, discuss them and expect their limits to be respected. Once again they were things I had read about before, but they had never related to me, or anyone or anything I’d actually been involved in. It was the last part of the bargain to be sealed before we could play:
No breath or underwater play
No animals, no children or minors
No electrical play
No scat
No suspension
No needles, blood or blades
Max asked me if there was anything I wanted to add before we both signed. I said I wanted to include no photographs and no video, and also reserve the right to add things to the list as I discovered more about the lifestyle. Max agreed, happy to accept that our contract was a work in progress, and watched while I added the clause.
Standing there now, blindfolded and alone, it occurred to me that that still left an awful lot of things that weren’t hard limits. An awful lot of things that Max could do to me and not break our contract.
‘I’m scared,’ I murmured.
‘I will keep you safe,’ Max said. ‘I promise.’
I swallowed hard, trying to quell my nerves. I was trembling.
The room was still and there was complete silence. Seconds ticked by. I was tempted to ask Max what was going to happen next. What he was playing at? What was he going to do to me? Hadn’t he said that he would tell me what he was going to do? Despite being desperate to say something, I was also painfully aware that less than half an hour earlier I’d signed up to the ‘not speaking unless spoken to while we were together’ thing and I’d already broken the rule once. This was going to be so much trickier than I had imagined. At forty plus I’d never willingly kept quiet about anything in years. I had an opinion and a wisecrack for every occasion.
It was so quiet now that I swear I could hear my heart beating. Where the hell was Max? My senses struggled to reach out from beyond the mask, struggling to track him down. Had he slipped away? Gone home? Had I blown it already with the whole Sir thing?
Finally, after what seemed like an age, I heard Max moving and sensed him circling around until he was standing behind me, so close that I could feel his breath on my neck. I shivered.
We were standing in my sitting room, and – if I had taken my mask off – I would have been able to see us both reflected in the mirror that hung above the fireplace. Being unable to see meant that I was totally focused on every sound and every sensation. That alone was heady stuff. Max stroked my cheek and I sighed with a mixture of relief and an intense abstract rush of desire.
‘There, not so bad, is it?’ Max said. I didn’t know what to say. It was much, much worse and much, much better than I’d imagined. My whole body felt as if it was awake and waiting, tingling, every molecule listening for whatever it was that was coming next. Excitement, expectation – it was hard to pin down exactly what it was that I was feeling.
Max’s fingers moved down across my shoulder to the zip of my dress. Very slowly he began to undo it. I felt my pulse quicken and swallowed hard to quell the heady mix of nerves and exhilaration. He pressed his lips into the curve of my neck, to my spine, sending wave after wave of tingling sensations through me.
He ran his fingers through my hair, tugging at it, toying with it, moving my head around. I wasn’t sure if he expected me to resist or go with it. I started to tremble, adrenaline coursing through my veins like champagne as his lips brushed my naked shoulders, breathing me in. I felt the zip working its way lower; Max was unhurried, his fingers deft and confident.
I realized I was holding my breath. We hadn’t kissed since we’d met, at least not in a sexual way – our lunch at the restaurant had ended with a handshake and the kind of peck on the cheek I’d give to a maiden aunt. Those kisses on my shoulders felt as if they were seared into my skin.
Doms didn’t kiss their subs on the mouth, he’d said. It had made sense then, but now? I was going to say it felt weird to be undressed by a man I hadn’t kissed but actually when you got right down to it the whole damned thing was weird.
‘Don’t try and rationalize it,’ Max had said, when I’d been trying to work out, and justify, why I wanted to do this. ‘You’ll drive yourself crazy. Just accept that this is what you like, and want, and that it is a part of your nature. This is what you need, Sarah. It’s not strange or weird; it’s just part of human sexuality. I can give you what you want.’
Easy for him to say. Although I was beginning to realize that he was right. I hadn’t felt so alive in years. I felt like a present being slowly and skilfully unwrapped by him. This was what I had written about for so many years; this was what I had dreamt about. Finally here I was. This was for real.
As Max’s fingers brushed my skin, I could almost see the sensations in my head, like pinpricks of light exploding in a sea of velvety darkness.
I shivered as the zipper slipped down another inch or two more, stunned by how long he was taking. How long was it since someone had taken the time to do this properly? My emotions seesawed back and forth. I wondered if Max was expecting me to call a halt. The safe words we had agreed on were: gold for ‘everything is OK’; silver for ‘please slow down’; lead for ‘stop, stop now’.
He was taking it oh-so-slowly, the slightest touch of his fingers, lips and tongue making me gasp.
Gold, silver, lead: I repeated the words over and over in my head. It would be so easy to stop this before it even began, but I didn’t want to stop – far from it. I wanted it so much. I had waited so long to play