“I want to watch you make my wife your slave!”

Well, sure, I thought. An ad in iambic pentameter, no less. I’ll be right over.

Personals can be fascinating. After scanning them for a while, a reasonably knowledgeable reader develops a keenly-honed sense of whether an ad was posted by a clueless wannabe, pathetically exercising fantasy dreams behind the anonymity of a keyboard, or a sincere, often lonely, occasionally desperate individual. Some personals are transparent frauds, like those put up by men masquerading as women in an attempt to attract wank-off e-mail. Others don’t ring quite true in a more subtle fashion. This isn’t cynicism; it’s discernment.

Nevertheless, I’m always looking for people who share, or think they might like to share, my particular kink. Sometimes I find people with compatible interests who just want to correspond. A much smaller number are willing to at least consider the possibility of a real-time meeting. It’s a much more complex winnowing process than merely finding a needle in a haystack, which is the metaphoric equivalent of an initial cyber-contact; that’s often the easy part. The hard part is matching up well with another person’s likes and dislikes, tastes and preferences, levels and limits, yin and yang.

In the kinky world of erotic power exchange, slavery is not what vanilla people conjure up as a vision of the ante bellum South. For those who enjoy erotic dominance and submission in an adult, responsible way, slavery is a voluntary, usually temporary, condition within the carefully bounded realm of fantasy-brought-to-life.

Beyond its provocative headline, this personal’s content conveyed statistics but no substantive insights. It read more like a swinger ad than anything else, listing ages (early forties), heights, weights, and hair and eye colors. There was no hard information regarding what the poster really had in mind, but as one of my favorite fairy-tale characters might have said, “Before you meet the handsome prince you’ve got to kiss a lot of toads.” After mulling it over for a couple of days I decided I was willing to invest some time in trying to find out who and what was lurking behind this intriguing ad.

I wrote an honest response and sent it off to the poster, who called himself Sam. While I’m cautious enough to not give my last name when writing to a total stranger, I always, to the extent that I reveal myself, tell the truth. My ultimate goal is to eventually meet compatible kindred spirits in the flesh, so to speak, so there’s no point in wasting time, mine or anyone else’s, by hiding behind an electronic facade. I told him my age, some other physical parameters, and a bit about my scene experience, which was pretty extensive for a guy in his late thirties, and I made it clear that I was happy in my long-term relationship and was corresponding with my submissive’s knowledge.

In the days when personal ads appeared in magazines and snail-mail was the only way to communicate the pace was much slower. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet I got a reply to my message after just a few hours, and Sam’s response was a mixed bag of good and not-so-good news. My age was no problem, he said. They had, he admitted, some limited swinging experience, and this was a yellow flag to me. To a swinger, the phrase head game means a blow-job contest, and sex is the cake, the reason for people getting together. Dominance and submission is a head game of a different sort, and the play is psychological at least as much as physical; it’s a game in which the mind, the most powerful sex organ, is the most significant factor. For most of the D/s people I knew, sex was the frosting on the cake, not the cake itself, and quite often sex, depending on one’s definition of it, wasn’t even part of the game.

But, Sam’s message continued, they wanted to explore his wife’s submissiveness and didn’t know how to go about it. They’d experimented a couple of times with spanking, and she’d liked being on the receiving end. What he said he wanted was to watch another man take control of his wife and have her serve that man sexually.

Well, that’s what he wants, I mused. I wonder what she wants. Men often confuse sexual willingness with submissiveness, especially when it’s a willingness to take on sexual partners outside of a committed relationship, and a few mild swats on the ass are a lot different from serious BDSM play. Her purported willingness to spread her legs might be nothing more than a desire for variety or an indication that he wasn’t paying her enough of the right kind of attention. I also got the distinct impression, both from what he wrote and the way he phrased it, that he was more interested in indulging his own voyeuristic streak than in learning anything about the dynamics of erotic power exchange.

I replied again, extending the dialogue and probing to either validate or alleviate my concerns. In his next message, Sam told me that his wife, Ellie, had been reading all the correspondence between us and that was sufficient for her to be comfortable with what we were discussing. They understood the points I was making, he wrote, and they were sincerely interested in arranging a D/s-oriented session of the kind I had described.

At the bottom of his message was a note from his wife.

Dear Sir,

I appreciate your concern over whether this is something I really want to do. Please believe me when I say I’m convinced from what you’ve written that you know what you’re doing and I’m anxious to submit myself to your control. I acknowledge that you’ll punish me if I fail to obey your commands, and I think I’m ready for that. I’ll try my best to satisfy you in any and every way you desire, and I’m confident you’ll make this a mutually pleasurable experience. I hope the attached image whets your dominant and sexual appetites for our meeting.

Yours,

Ellie

Well, that seems plain enough, I thought, and then I double-clicked to open the attachment and the shit hit the fan. Sam and I had started discussing Ellie’s costuming for the scene; she has a blonde wig, he’d informed me, and he especially enjoyed seeing her dressed as a sleazy slut. As Ellie’s image appeared on my monitor, I saw an undeniably attractive body, but, despite the wig, I knew instantly that I was looking at a nude picture of my neighbor up the block.

After the shock wave passed and my head stopped spinning, I tried to analyze the situation rationally. The image she’d sent was the first time I’d ever seen my neighbor show more skin than wearing a conservative one-piece bathing suit, much less naked. Objectively, as I already knew, her face was pleasant-looking but not really pretty. Her body, though, now that I had the opportunity to see it, showed that she’d kept herself in good shape, slim but with nice curves in all the right places. I couldn’t recall having had any fantasies involving her, but, now that the possibility had arisen, the idea of playing with her wasn’t totally repugnant either. The more I thought about it, the more the idea of going ahead with the scene Sam and I had been discussing became a turn-on. Embarrassment or verbal humiliation is exciting to a lot of submissives, I told myself; let’s find out if Ellie’s in that category.

I received that message on a Tuesday, and I made a reservation at a local Embassy Suites for Saturday evening. Then I sent a response to Sam with very specific instructions for both him and Ellie, including complete sexual abstinence for her from the moment they read my reply.

Late Saturday afternoon I shaved, showered, dressed, and drove to the hotel. I checked in and went upstairs, then wrote my suite number on a slip of paper and put it in an envelope with Ellie’s name on the outside. I took the envelope down to the front desk, then went back upstairs to wait.

The rooms in the hotel faced into an enclosed atrium. I pushed the window curtain partly aside and watched as Ellie approached the front desk and obtained the envelope I’d prepared a half-hour earlier. She opened it, glanced inside briefly, and turned toward the elevators with Sam trailing along behind her. I opened the room’s outer door, leaving it slightly ajar so they could enter, and went into the other half of the suite, closing the bedroom door to invisibly await their arrival.

When I heard the outer door being closed, bolted, and chained, I gave them another full minute to assume their respective positions. Then I opened the bedroom door and looked around. Sam was sitting in an armchair; his eyes opened wide in a double-take of startled recognition, and as he opened his mouth to speak I quickly raised a finger to my lips in the universal signal for silence. He shook his head in shocked disbelief, then shrugged and nodded in silent acceptance.

Ellie was standing exactly as I’d ordered. I’d told them to leave the blonde wig at home, and her dark hair swirled around the back of her head. Her arms were straight out in front of her at shoulder height, hands flat against the door into the suite, and she was leaning slightly forward to put the weight of her upper body on her hands. Her feet were spread apart, and the back hem of her skirt was tucked into the waistband.

I took my time, savoring the moment and anticipating the shock I was about to deliver. My eyes scanned slowly up from her spike-heeled ankle boots, past shapely bare calves and smoothly-muscled thighs to the equally-bare, firmly-rounded globes of her ass. From her tan lines, it appeared that Ellie sunbathed wearing only a thong.

I strode soundlessly up behind her and reached my right hand around her body. Her blouse, as instructed, was unbuttoned to the waist; also as instructed, she was not wearing a bra. I slipped my hand inside the blouse and cupped her warm, conical left breast, and a soft gasp escaped her lips as my palm slid over her already-erect nipple. I slid a fingertip all around the puffy areola and her breathing got deeper when I flicked a nail against the stiff little nubbin at its tip. She stood quietly, having been told not to move except as directed and to speak only when asked a question or otherwise given permission.

I brought my other hand up to lightly stroke her ass cheeks, feeling and enjoying the heat radiating from her soft skin. Then I slid that hand down her crack and between her legs to explore her lower lips. She was already more than moist; her juices were practically dripping down her legs, and she let out a low moan when I slipped a finger up through her pussy and bumped it against her swollen clitoris. I took her nipple gently between my thumb and forefinger, then bent my head down and whispered into her ear.

“When did you start shaving your pussy, Ellie?”

I felt the shocked reaction ripple through her. Despite my emailed instructions, she started to turn, but I’d expected her to move when she recognized my voice. I pinched her nipple, hard, and kept my hand still as she tried to pull away. Then she froze in place, her hands still on the door and the tension between my fingers and her slightly-twisted torso pulling her nipple out from her breast.

“M ... M ... Michael, is that you?” Her voice was querulous, and I could feel her shaking from the combination of sudden uncertainty and embarrassment.