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.