‘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.
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