Eagerly I leaned into his caress. I brushed myself against his engorged cock. It felt like a challenge. Maybe I could make him break the rules. How hard could it be? I was an instant away from the long, tumbling descent towards orgasm. I wanted him to take me there. I wanted to take him with me.
I arched my back. I pressed down onto his lap, brushing myself against his fingertips, seeking his caress, gasping as he stroked my clitoris, riding the great waves that threatened to drown me. I groaned, feeling the first ripples – which was exactly the moment Max stopped.
I howled in protest.
Max laughed and let me slide gently onto the floor.
‘I said not yet,’ he said, in answer to my indignation and frustration.
‘Not yet?’ I gasped, ragged, hot and desperate.
‘It’s your own fault. You can’t stick to the rules. No talking. And here, with me, I’m the Dom and things happen according to my timetable, not yours.’
‘Are you planning to punish me some more, Sir?’ I said, thinking about how much I’d enjoyed my punishment up until now.
‘Possibly. By stopping now and going home if you can’t be quiet.’ He knelt down beside me and unlocked my handcuffs, gently massaging each wrist in turn before taking off my mask. I blinked in the light and peered up at him. His eyes were alight with mischief and delight. I suspected mine were ringed with mascara.
‘How are you feeling? Are you OK?’
‘Yes, Sir,’ I said. He was right: it was getting easier.
‘Good. Would you like to touch yourself?’
My eyes widened. No, I would not.
‘Well, would you?’ he repeated.
I’d never admitted to anyone that I masturbated. Not that it had ever come up much in conversation. God, what if he asked me to do it in front of him? I said nothing but my face obviously gave me away.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ he said. ‘From now on I forbid you to masturbate unless I give you express permission.’
I bristled. ‘Are you serious?’
‘You are going to be such a pleasure to train,’ said Max, laughing. ‘I’m making a note of every time you break the rules, you know. And you will pay for every last one you break.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Yes, really. And that, in case you hadn’t noticed, is another one.’
He helped me to my feet, and as he did he kneaded the tender muscles of my backside, making me wince and momentarily forget the warm, dull, throbbing ache between my legs. Finally he removed the nipple clamps, which made me yelp with pain and then gasp as the blood flooded back into the sensitive flesh. Then he rubbed them, which I thought was a kindness until I realized that actually it made the discomfort much, much worse.
‘While we’re playing I want you to keep your eyes down and your hands behind your back, as a sign of humility and submission. And now I’d like a cup of tea. Earl Grey. Black.’
I stared at him. My legs were jelly, my whole body was tingling, I’d been a nanosecond from orgasm and the man wanted tea?
‘Be careful,’ he said. Obviously the disbelief showed on my face. ‘Remember, humility and submission. Do you have lemon?’
I managed not to swear. Frustrated and annoyed, I teetered into the kitchen and made Max a pot of tea, on a tray with a bone-china cup and saucer, retrieved from a box of nonsense that hadn’t seen the light of day for years. I was being sarcastic. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything.
‘Very nice,’ he said, as I slid the tray onto a little table alongside the sofa.
‘I’m fresh out of doilies,’ I said.
‘Next time,’ he said, pouring himself a cup. ‘And by the way that’s another two for the punishment list. Sir and no speaking, remember? When you’re not otherwise occupied I would like you to kneel beside me.’
‘Kneel?’
He nodded. ‘Assuming you want to continue with your training? Or have you changed your mind?’
I could hear from his tone that he was serious. I knelt.
‘Would you like to hear about how I got into BDSM?’ he asked, setting the cup and saucer back on the side table.
What I wanted was for him to finish what he had started, but I could hardly say that, so instead I said, ‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Is the right answer,’ he said.
‘Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.’
Marquis de Sade
‘I was probably twenty, maybe twenty-one, and my company had sent me to work in one of their European offices,’ said Max. ‘I was green as grass. Anyway, I started seeing this girl, Eva. A mate of mine set me up with her; she was a bit older than me, but not much, twenty-three, twenty-four. Really tiny, attractive.’ Max smiled.
‘Eva was nothing like any of the girls I‘d gone out with before. She liked a drink, and dancing – and she loved sex. I’d come from a small town in the south-east, where nice girls just didn’t, so that was one big difference. I couldn’t believe my luck.
‘We’d meet up after work – she’d got a little flat near the railway station. We’d do the usual stuff: there were a couple of bars, nightclubs, we’d have a few beers, go dancing, drinking, go back to her place.
‘Her flat was on the top floor above a row of shops; it was one big room with a shower and toilet off the stairs, all the usual stuff, but the first thing you noticed when you went in was a huge carved four-poster bed.
‘God knows where it came from or how old it was. Eva told me it had been there when she moved in. The only way her landlord would have been able to get it downstairs would have been to saw it into pieces, so she told him to leave it. We used to camp out on it, use it as a sofa, as a picnic table, somewhere to watch TV from. Sex, fun, music …
‘Her flat was above a delicatessen. She was so foreign.’
‘And exciting?’ I said.
Max nodded. ‘Total culture shock. Anyway, we’d been seeing each other for a couple of months. My best mate, Charlie, was dating Eva’s best friend, Greta. We’d all got the weekend off and we’d been planning to do something all together, but at the last minute Greta got called in to work and Charlie said he didn’t want to play gooseberry, so there was just Eva and me.
‘When I met her at the bus stop she said that there was somewhere she wanted to take me. I didn’t really mind where we went as long as I was with her and we ended up back at her place.’
Max smiled. ‘She was built like a boy, with short, spiky, white-blonde hair, long skinny legs and the biggest greenest eyes you’ve ever seen. And she was dynamite between the sheets. She was the most uninhibited person I’d ever met – not that I had been out with that many in my short romantic career. Eva was always