Chapter Two

Looking back, it’s clear that Roland had an idea of where all this was leading. I don’t say he had everything planned down to the last detail. He didn’t know me well enough at the start to be sure of how I would respond. But he had a good idea of what he had in mind for me. I, of course, had no such idea. At the beginning, I was simply pleased to have found a man I liked and respected, and who was incredibly good at sex. I don’t think I had been particularly unlucky in that department. I don’t think my lovers were unusually insensitive or clumsy. Most of them meant well. The problem is that, most of the time, I felt sex with them was insipid. It just didn’t really engage me. It didn’t stir me. Whereas with Roland, right from the very beginning, one look or one touch from him and I could feel my cunt twitch with desire.

He wasn’t an experienced Dom or Master or anything like that. I subsequently learned that he’d had a few girlfriends he’d experimented with, a little spanking, some tying up, a bit of control like what he’d done in the restaurant with me. But there had been nothing organised. He told me he’d thought a lot about it, and he had read widely too, and he’d decided that he wanted to find a submissive. But he knew he would have to learn on the job, as it were. Fortunately, I was so ignorant about such matters I wasn’t in a position to find fault with his efforts even if I had wanted to. We learned together, but he was always the one who took the initiative.

A few days after the first spanking, he gave me a book to read. It wasThe Story of O, by Pauline Réage. I read it almost at a single sitting. The measured pace of its spare, elegant prose was hypnotic. I found myself transported into a world in which at last my own fantasies did not seem out of place. I loved the ritualistic nature of the things that are done to O. I was fascinated by such details as the front-fastening bras she was obliged to wear, or the fact that she must never sit with her legs crossed. I thrilled to the arbitrary cruelties inflicted on her; the beatings by men she does not know or cannot even see. Most of all I identified with her deep, all-consuming desire to please her Master, even to the point of being given away by him to the sadistic Sir Stephen.

In bed, while he slowly stroked my naked body, Roland cross-questioned me about my responses.

“Is that what you want from me?” I asked. “You want me to be like her?”<