Chapter 12

After that visit, I became Margaret's creature. At twenty-five years old, I became a lady of pleasure, and what I willingly endured at Margaret's hands was a very special pleasure indeed. I now knew S&M not as icing on Sarah's cake, nor the reluctantly craved punishment for my inadequacies and conscience, but as the stuff that saved me, redeemed and made me feel alive again. Tori and David really had been too Vanilla, because under Margaret's harsher regime, I flourished.

However, I was not permitted to remain a lady of leisure. Margaret quickly introduced me to a regime of strict training. First I learned to dress how she liked her femme to dress, and oddly I found that I very much liked it too, and quite apart from pleasing her I began to dress like that all the time. I discovered that the couture dresses and tailored suits she favoured looked fabulous on my figure. I could certainly afford them, and my delight in wearing her choices, and wearing them well, made us both happy. Beneath the tailored cloth, black lace, silk stockings, and old-fashioned suspenders all entered my wardrobe, occasionally as gifts from Margaret, more often as my gifts to her. Makeup too, which as a feminist I had almost entirely renounced, Margaret took a delight in delicately and with surprising skill applying to my face, darkening my eyes, reddening my lips, helping me to become the version, the vision of womanhood her desires dictated, and I was her willing living sculpture.

To dress or undress me became a crucial part of our lovemaking. I loved the building anticipation, the slow ceremony of removal, the gradual baring of flesh to the caress of fingers, or lips, or tools of discipline, because after my breakthrough, our lovemaking took on a much broader palette. There were still the times when only the hardest core would do. When the black dog of depression dragged me down, as it still did occasionally, then Margaret relished stringing me up in the punishment shed and taking me to the limit of my endurance, and sometimes a little further, until I found redemption on the outer edge. On other days, we would giggle, kiss and embrace, feed each other titbits, and feel each other up like a couple of naughty schoolgirls.

We still met by appointment, but it was almost every week now, and I didn't always have to go to the University Arms first, though I still returned there afterwards. I had no information at all about any other relationships she might be running concurrently, but I suspected that I was not the only one in thrall to her, whether professionally or personally. Oddly, I felt gratitude, not jealousy, gratitude that she could find so much time for me, and she had finally given me some kind of life-focus. It might not last, I knew that, I tried to be always prepared for sudden rejection, but it was far more satisfying than my interlude with Tori, and had that connection to Sarah, whom I still missed and loved as much as ever.

When we met, it was with the excited anticipation of the familiar but unknown, of the quest for mutual pleasure. Would I satisfy her? Would I please her? Would she discipline me for some slip or slight, real or imagined? Would she leave me on the brink, whining with need and incomplete until I had abased myself sufficiently? Actually, I never left there without the sense of release that had amazed me from the first, and had now become now become infinitely more fulfilling.

With Margaret's authorization I kept up my fitness regime, jogging, going to the gym, toning my body for Margaret to enjoy. I spent hours dressing for her, pampering myself until I was the fragrant femme who could make her smile indulgently when I arrived on her doorstep. She was so clever; she knew that boredom was my worst foe, and would undermine our relationship if it were allowed to flourish.

She insisted on educating me academically too, and her teaching was in another league to my previous studies. I was given reading lists and sent to lectures at various London colleges and learned societies. Literature and the law were her main choices, and I began to revel in the reawakening of my mind, long numbed by over-indulgence, self-pity and drugs. She tested me regularly to make sure I maintained progress during time apart, and woe and betide if my memory failed or I fumbled an answer. I accepted praise and punishment with equal pleasure. My visits were no longer measured in hours and fees paid. I didn't sleep with her at night, but I would stay all day, all evening, only returning to the hotel very late, when we were both replete. We never went out, so the fence around her property, and the woods and fields through which we would sometimes ramble or go wooding, circumscribed our world, but that autumn Margaret and her small universe were exactly what I needed.