The Session in Which My Master Taught Me to Obey

“Mmmff”—I swallowed the cry against my own teeth.

I was naked and yet I felt as if my skin were burning, as if I’d spent hours in the sun. The clamp on my right nipple pulled downward with the chain, and the left one, still free, throbbed in anticipation of its turn. It burned. It stung. And worst of all, I liked it.

“Yes, Master,” I answered, and my voice came out trembling.

Adrián noticed the tremor before I’d even finished the sentence. A spasm that had come to me on its own, without permission, ran through me from the nape of my neck to the backs of my knees. He sensed it the way a predator senses the slightest movement in its prey.

He came closer slowly. In a breath he had me at centimeters’ distance, so close I felt his breath on my forehead. He gripped my neck firmly, not too hard, just enough to force me to hold his gaze. With the thumb of his other hand he pushed my chin down.

“Open,” he murmured.

I obeyed with a whimper. He spat into my mouth. For an instant disgust rose in my throat, an old reaction, from the woman I’d been before him. Then I swallowed. I swallowed because he wanted me to, and because discovering that I wanted it too made me feel a new kind of vertigo.

He brought his mouth to my ear. His whisper was almost tender, which made it so much worse.

“Someday I’m going to leave you so beaten down you’ll beg me to stop. You’re going to say the word and hate yourself for saying it.”

Amber. That was the word. The one we’d agreed on that first afternoon, sitting in his kitchen like two civilized people, when I still didn’t know how far this was capable of going. Amber meant stop. I admit I came close that night, closer than I’d ever confess to him.

I’d be lying if I said his threat didn’t turn me on. Turn me on the way the woman he insisted on seeing beneath my disguise of a proper girl did, the one in blouses buttoned to the top and polite answers. He noticed it, of course he noticed it, because he lowered his hand and sank two fingers between my legs. He drew them out shining and brought them up to my face.

They tasted like him. Like the taste that had clung to my tongue the afternoon before, when he came in my mouth and ordered me not to swallow until he said so.

“What do I taste like?” he asked, serious.

“Like you, Master,” I answered, savoring his fingers.

He tugged the chain. The nipple stretched and a lightning bolt of pain shot across my chest.

“And if you taste like me, what are you?” He yanked his fingers out, slapped my cheek hard, and before the sting had finished spreading, shoved them back into my mouth.

I shuddered all over.

“A slut…” I said.

And that was exactly how I felt. At his mercy, split in two by something that bore no resemblance at all to the neat, predictable sex I had known until then. The way he dominated me was more mental than physical. In just two sessions he had managed to make me see myself through his eyes: a woman eager to be punished, hungry for his approval. I looked at him with a desire that embarrassed me. I wanted to thank him on my knees.

It hadn’t been like that from the beginning. The first afternoon I arrived with a knot in my stomach, convinced that as soon as things got serious I’d run. I sat on the edge of his sofa, knees together, and rattled off all my conditions, all my doubts. He listened to the end without interrupting, and when I finished he told me just one thing: that the only thing he asked of me was honesty, that I always tell him the truth about what my body was feeling. The rest would come on its own. And it did. It came faster than I would ever have admitted.

“A good slut?” he asked, amused.

I lowered my eyes to his briefs. It was the only thing he was wearing, and the taut fabric betrayed how much he was enjoying all of this. I bit my lip without thinking. He understood the gesture at once and laughed, stepping away a pace.

“First we’re going to take this off you. Then we’ll continue.”

***

He picked up the crop from the table. It was black leather, with a paddle-shaped tip, and I had learned to fear it and to wait for it with the same intensity. He brought it down on the nipple that still had the clamp on it. The crack came before the pain.

“Hold five,” he said.

At the first one I clenched my teeth. At the second my eyes filled with water. At the third I wanted to die, I swear I wanted to die, and the clamp began to slip until it hung from the edge, just like the other one. Adrián stayed there staring at me, motionless, drinking in my suffering like someone watching something beautiful. I think he was expecting to see me cry.

“Please…” I begged.

I was on the edge of the word. I had it on the tip of my tongue, round and bright, ready to save me. I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to give him that victory, or rather I didn’t want to miss the other one: proving to him that I was worthy of being his. He must have read it on my face, because on the fifth stroke the clamp flew off and the chain rang against the wooden floor.

I bowed my head, gasping, with no strength left. He came toward me and grabbed my hair, forcing me to look up.

“I’m going to love the day you cry,” he said, and he said it like a promise of love.

He released me from the wooden frame where he had me secured and let me collapse. I fell to my knees, and without being asked I stayed there, kneeling, catching my breath. He walked over to the armchair. He didn’t sit. I followed him on all fours.

“Take them down for me.”

I obeyed. I pulled at the elastic of his briefs and his cock came free, hard, right at my face level. I licked my lips without hiding it.

“Don’t lick it,” he warned.

Something inside me deflated. He knew it. He was doing it on purpose.

He slapped my cheek with it, once, twice, three times, and then he rubbed it all over my face while I closed my eyes and breathed in his smell. He ran it slowly across my lips. Without meaning to, I stuck out the tip of my tongue.

The slap made my ears ring.

“What did I say?”

“I’m sorry, Master,” I said, my face burning.

He ran it over my mouth again, slowly, testing me.

“Open.”

I opened. He shoved it in with one thrust, all the way to the back, and when my throat protested he didn’t ease up.

“More. I don’t want you sucking me, slut. I want you to take it.”

I opened as wide as I could, until I felt my jaw might come loose, and he slid it in all the way, over and over, not so I’d enjoy it but to remind me whose mouth this was. It was his when he decided. Only when he decided.

He yanked it out and pushed my face away with a dismissive slap, like someone removing an empty plate.

***

“I love feet,” he said, finally sitting in the armchair. “Almost everyone who’s into this does. Doesn’t matter how you look at it.” He stretched out his legs. “Kiss them.”

I crawled over to him. I went to kiss the right one and, with the left, he set the sole against my head and pushed me toward the floor.

“Your feet belong to me now,” I said, getting ahead of him, because I knew what he wanted to hear.

“My feet belong to you about as much as you belong to yourself,” he corrected. “Kiss them again. Louder.”

“Yes, Master.”

I stuck out my tongue and started licking them, first one, then the other, unhurried, going over each toe, the instep, the heel. I felt the warm texture of his skin against my lips and the way he buried the other sole in my hair, setting the rhythm. There was nothing dignified about what I was doing, and yet I had never felt more whole. He kept me like that for a good while, until both our breathing steadied and the room fell silent again. When he got bored, he gently moved me away. I understood the session was over.

He gestured for me to sit in his lap. From the side table he picked up a jar of cream, dipped his fingers into it, and started rubbing it onto my sore nipples, with a care that contrasted with everything that had come before. I closed my eyes. That part, the one where his hands healed what he himself had punished, was what truly tied me to him.

“Holding up okay?” he asked.

I nodded and looked at him like a child.

“Yes, Master.”

“Outside the session you can call me whatever you want,” he said, smiling.

I shrugged. The truth was I didn’t want him any other way, even if the way he cared for me melted me.

“I’m still yours, Master.”

I saw him looking at my feet, bare on the wood.

“They’re pretty. They turn me on.”

I stood up and rested them on his thighs so he could see them up close.

“You can do whatever you want with them,” I offered.

He barely stroked them with the pads of his fingers and shook his head.

“Someday.” His laugh accompanied a glance that dropped to my cunt. “You smell really nice. Do you want to shower today, or can you hold out one more day?”

I shrugged again.

“I’ve got gym class at the university tomorrow. If I sweat, it’ll show, and I’d be embarrassed.”

“Then surprise me tomorrow when you come.”

The offer meant there would be another session the next day. I smiled, as happy as a schoolgirl who’s just been invited to something forbidden. That afternoon we hadn’t even gotten to fucking, and yet I was leaving more surrendered than ever, ready to give him even what I didn’t yet know I had.