q and a 1: living the slave life

First of several q & a posts…

My responses, of course, describe my normal slave life, not my life in my current illness and recovery…

Some questions I’ve answered before, but new followers are asking and interested. Still, there are some brand new questions as well, so I hope there’s something of interest for everyone.

What do most people misunderstand about the kind of submissive lifestyle you and Amanda live? (CVH)

That for D/s to work well day after day there has to be a base of normalcy to it. Amanda and I are women in a relationship, and while it’s alternative and extreme in its way, we must still live successfully together in the real world. Not every moment can be a BDSM moment.

While we live as mistress and slave, we still have to do the things everyone has to do: clean house, eat meals, take out trash, take care of the yard, do financial things, and live some life responsibly in public. Amanda needs/wants to work and develop her business. I have aspirations to be a writer. The two of us have to get along in a life together.

Yes, even in these ordinary doings, our life together is infused with my submission and her dominance of me. Every day, I wear the clothes she chooses for me. I’m almost always in a slave collar. More often than not, I wear high heels. My life is controlled by her, even in the day-to-day. But a lot of the time of our lives don’t involve overt or extreme dom-sub practices. Those happen, and I report them here, but to survive in such a life long-term, there has to be ordinary time as well.

During a typical day, what do you do? What’s your schedule? (deanne)

I wake at around five-thirty. Shower and prep (see my answer to a question below). I dress in the outfit Amanda has laid out for me.

I make coffee and stand for Amanda with a coffee tray outside the kitchen at 7:15. This is one of my service rituals. She may not come out of her bedroom for some time, but I stand there waiting.

Coffee and perhaps some morning conversation until about 8:00.

She then goes into her home office. I usually then go into a writing time. Mornings are my most creative time, and I try to align that with Amanda’s work time.

This much, until noon, is mostly the same each day.

Afternoons are different each day. She will emerge from her home office between noon and one. We may do lunch together or not, as she wishes. Sometimes she walks me outside on a leash.

I am a sex slave but have a few chores like a service slave. On Tuesdays, I scrub the kitchen floor. On Wednesdays, I tidy up around the house, run the vacuum. On Thursday I do our laundry.

In between chores I often spend reading or exercising or practicing my submissive etiquette. Around four-thirty, I repeat my routine of shower, hygiene, personal prep — a refresh.

Around five-thirty Amanda finishes her work day (although she will work sometimes in the evenings but on the couch with me). She leaves her office study, and I stand bearing a tray of wine and glasses for happy hour — out other ritual.

We then sit on the couch talking. We may grab something from the fridge for dinner.

Evenings, she may walk me around the neighborhood again. That often leads to her dominant use of me back at the house — strapping me into the wet bar, or, well, doing other things to me.

We don’t usually sleep together — separate bedrooms — but she will sometimes invites me into her bed.

Weekends are different, of course.

When someone comes to your front door, who answers? If on some day Amanda has you in a state of partial nudity, do you still answer the door? (JK)

Interesting question.

We rarely get people coming to our front door. Our house has a long driveway to the front road, so is set back and isn’t likely to be casually approached by sales people and the like. However, now that we are friendsies with neighbors, some of them are more likely to walk up and knock at the door (we welcome that).

Anyway, that said, to answer your question, during a typical day, I am most likely to answer the door. Amanda is working in her home office at the back of the house and shouldn’t be interrupted by such things.

It used to be that if I were, say, made to be topless on a particular day, and someone came to the door, I’d put on a wrap before answering. Now that our neighbors are in the know about me and they are the ones mostly likely to come to the front door, Amanda wishes me to answer the door in whatever state I am.

But again, this happens infrequently. Occasionally there is a postal delivery that has to be signed for. And now, a neighbor, perhaps. But it’s pretty rare.

One of Amanda’s diabolical wishes is that some day Jehovah’s Witnesses will come a-knocking. That would be interesting.

On a daily basis, what’s expected of you in terms of your appearance? Do you have a “beauty” routine? (jiselle)

It’s different for different types of slavery, but as a sex slave, I am required to be as attractive as I can manage to be at virtually every moment. I am always to be “presentable,” though Amanda enjoys putting it this way: “You have to look fuckable, Shae.” Either way, it means I always am to be clean and fragrant and, well, somehow “appealing.”

While my owners want me always to be lovely and presentable, they don’t want a slave who spends hours in front of a vanity. Somehow I am to make myself “beautiful” without taking any time to do it. More to the point —without them knowing when I’m doing it.

So, I have a routines for this. I go through these twice a day (most days), in the morning and then again late afternoon. I get up early in the morning, before Amanda awakens, usually around five-thirty. I shower, do my makeup and hair and and dress in about an hour or so. My afternoon refresh is a condensed half-hour version of the morning routine.

In our climate and altitude, I have to moisturize all the time. I use an SPF lotion by Cerave. I don’t wear much makeup during the days, but I apply a little mascara on my lashes, and maybe a touch of concealer. Amanda likes me in lipstick, so there’s that. My hair tends to take the most time. Every third day, this includes shaving myself (everywhere).

Some time-consuming parts of my toilette I do during afternoons when Amanda is working: washing my hair, doing my nails, and sometimes a careful pussy shave.

I don’t wear heavy perfume but I do spritz myself with a lighter fragrance — eau de toilette or eau fraiche. And I use a wide assortment of fragrances. I find that other people like the variety of scents on me.

Does it ever bother you to have to present yourself constantly as a sex object? (tess)

Well, no and yes.

If you’re a sex slave and are offended by being sexually objectified, then you need to find another line of work. D/s is my chosen lifestyle, and I have embraced my designated form of service as a sex slave, so I take it in stride that my life is about being presented sexually, and I accept the looks and stares and talk. In this, I actually enjoy being pleasure to others.

But, yes, the constant routine of preparing myself to appear attractive and appealing gets tiring. And while I “feel sexual” much of the time in my life, there are occasions when I’m not so inclined — but I must submit to it anyway, and do.

Amanda usually declares one day every few weeks as a “free” day for both of us, a day when I don’t have to present or prep. I can slack off and be a little more ragged. Which is lovely.

What do you miss about vanilla life? (Edward)

I find that what’s difficult in slavery isn’t so much obeying things I’m required to do but not having the freedom to just go and do something on my own. I miss the impulsiveness allowed in vanilla life.

Sometimes I feel I need to get away for a few hours. In corporate world this might be akin to a “mental health day.” Amanda understands this and will usually grant me the time away. But I need to ask, and she sometimes has other things she wishes me to do instead.

Once every so often she’s going to be away for the day, and she tells me that I can do whatever I want. “Just try to stay off your knees,” she needles. Nice.

Do you think you could go back to vanilla life if you had to? (Edward)

No. But one does anything if they have to. The one real scenario I am mindful of is some situation in which I might need to go to live with and care for my mother. In such a case I would have to leave my slave life completely and live vanilla.

Otherwise, besides the fact that my joy and fulfillment come from being a slave in a D/s lifestyle, there is the practical problem that I have been trained into a whole matrix of slave behaviors and responses that don’t fit vanilla life. My slave life has conditioned me to be sexual in particular ways, and it makes me more susceptible to dominance in random forms. I fear that in vanilla life this would likely be dangerous for me.

easy chair

She put me naked in the easy chair, the one fitted with eyehooks underneath, linked my leather shackles to heavy chains, and hooked the ends to the eyebolts below.

She calls them shackles, not wrist or ankle cuffs, perhaps intentionally to reduce me to the level of a creature — a horse with shackles, a mare hobbled and fettered, perhaps for breeding. Or maybe she just likes the harsh sound of the word — “shackles.”

These have become my shackles, as they’ve become a common a part of my life these days, this era of my malaise, as there’s not much she can do with her slave other than attach me to things.

She has taken to laying out my shackles with my clothing each day, carefully arranging them beside the skirt and top and shoes lengthwise along the bed bench, draped in place as if an invisible person was lying there wearing them. Even if my shackles are not used that day, they remind me of their potential of marrying me to furniture and walls and windows, literally making me a house wife. Most recently, she has taken to have me wear them to bed, though unattached to my bedposts and rendered as mere visual echoes of my past possibilities in being fucked. These shackles are as much a part of me now as are my wrists and ankles and lips and breasts.

There are a number of pairs of them. Two pair are fashion-forward — one a thin cuff of white leather, the other a fluff of orange fabric. She has me wear the white leather bands when we are out and about. One cuff alone might pass as a bracelet of a sort, especially if I am also wearing the matching white leather collar. But two wrist bands are tell-tale with their exposed D-rings, clocking me as a submissive-in-residence, and making me self-consciously apprehensive that she will actually hook me to the storefront window of Macy’s.

Two other pair of shackles are black leather — heavy-duty devices with locking clasps — one longish with leather running halfway up my arm. It always strikes me funny these cuffs are so thick and rugged and secure — no one wearing BDSM cuffs is never trying to get away. We put them on ourselves, just as we adorn ourselves with this kind of life. We are bound by our own submissive need.

Chained into the easy chair, my legs are together, angled, and my arms are free enough to read a book or drink a glass of wine — she has allowed, for now, a fair amount of slack in the chains. I cannot leave the chair but can move around in it. And she wants that, my movement, my adjusting myself, so she can hear the clank of the chains on the floor and be reminded that she owns a person.

She gives me my Kindle, settling herself on the couch with a magazine and a book for reading time. She flips through her magazine, occasionally looking over the pages, drinking in my naked body poured into its incarceration.

Yes, there is precious little she has been able to do with me during my time of being an invalid. I am a sex slave without the possibility of sex, and until lately without energy even to be slave-kept. It has made the noun “invalid” into an adjective meaning “not valid,” like a credit card that got declined.

However, in recent days I have felt gradually better and my energy has been crawling back. I am still contagious — unkissable, unlickable, unfuckable — but I am now less fragile. Given my semi-revived state, she has been re-introducing us to the house’s built-in bondages.

Friday night, she attached me to the entryway wall. It was not for a long time, as she is mindful of my still-reduced stamina, but she invited Patricia over for a drink, and the both stood for a time watching me bound to the wall while they sipped Viognier. Patricia said, finding her inner domme, “That’s a good place for her.”

Saturday for happy hour Amanda strapped me into the wet bar. It’s been a while since she’s had me bound there. She left me ungagged so to carry on a conversation with me, using my naked back as a bar counter for her wine glass. I wasn’t stretched out there for a long while, but just enough for her to detail for me how she wants to get me lactating and install breast pumps on the bartender side — fresh milk for lattes and White Russians.

I never know what she’s serious about.

We had both been reading for some time. Every time I swiped a Kindle page with my finger, it clanked my arm chain slightly.

I felt her eyes on me, her frequent glances above her magazine, her lust for my body and breasts. It felt good, a reminder of what I used to feel being a sex object, which is for me, submissive that I am, quietly enjoyable.

Her eyes had dropped town below my breasts to my waist and then lower — my upper thighs together forming a line leading to the the delta of my sex.

I felt her attentions. “You know,” I said, breaking our reading silence, “you could make me come for you.”

She gazed into my eyes without expression or words. She saw through my ploy of framing my self-pleasure in terms that might attract her. She is a voyeur par excellence, and watching, whether by herself or with a crowd of others, is her preeminent pleasure. I was bargaining, she well knew, not normally accepted by her from me, but for now she said nothing. These are different times.

“You wouldn’t need to touch me,” I continued, “you wouldn’t be exposed. You could just watch.”

“No,” she said. But she had thought about it for a moment.

“Yes, mistress.”

We went back to reading, but five minutes later she spoke again: “I could invite people over.”

I looked up at her. I shook my head: “I wasn’t thinking of selling tickets.”

She smiled and went back to reading.

Ten minutes later she got up and readjusted my chains. She pulled my legs over each padded arm and reconnected my chains tight so I could not move my legs or pull my thighs closed.

I was spread open.

Without a word, she pulled one of my arms to the side and back of my chair, affixing it to the eyebolt on the opposite side, again tightly. And she unlinked my right wrist from its chain completely.

This was happening.

She left the room a moment, returning with a padded footstool, which she placed in front of my chair, between my opened legs. She left again, this time returning with a pillar candle on a saucer, which she placed on the stool. She turned down the room lights, found matches in the kitchen, and lit the candle, which now now bathed my pussy in a flickering glow.

I wanted to kiss her but I couldn’t. I wanted her to put things in me but she wouldn’t.

“Eyes open, looking at me the whole time,” she said.

I bit my lip and nodded, knowing any spoken words would come out in a trembly rasp.

She sat up, lifting her legs off the floor and onto the couch, pulling them up toward her chest as her long dress draped over them. She reached for her wine, sipped, then nodded to me.

“You may begin…”

I was warm now and not from the room heat. She had cranked up the thermostat earlier, knowing I would be naked, but now that didn’t matter — my warmth was fueled by my desire and was melting me into a puddle.

My free hand found my abdomen and rested there a moment. I was almost afraid to touch myself, it had been so long. My fingers eased down to my mons, smooth and shaven. I opened two fingers into a V and slid them down further until they straddled the outer sides of my pussy, framing my labia. Even just this was almost too much, my blood flooding down there and heightening all sensation.

I closed my eyes, but she called me out: “You must look at me.”

Gazing into her eyes, my fingers squeezed my pussy lips, and I caught my breath. I felt my own ooze collecting there between, and I scooped some on my index finger and painted it along the top surface of my labia. My lips, usually puffy and rounded, now were longer and farther extended like thin mountain ridges reaching up to God.

As I coated them with own juices, they cooled in the air.

I took things slow, knowing I was already primed by weeks of deprivation and aware it might be a long time again. I wanted this to last. I kept my fingers on the outsides for now. That alone made me buzzy down there and made me want to squirm. However, my restraints were tight. My legs, draped over each chair rest, were locked down spread. My other arm was bent back taut.

She watched me — my masturbation in chains — without expression.

In time, I dared to slip my middle finger between my pussy lips, letting it lie in the delta of my goo.

This is when she decided to talk.

“Who was the last man inside you there?” she asked, her voice a hush. It’s a rhetorical question, for she well knows the answer. She said it, as she likes to sometimes, implying there’s a long list of men who have access, thus some confusion of who and when a man was last occupying my vagina.

“Master McKenna,” I said, choosing not to add the obvious “of course.” I spoke without stopping my self-touches, not wanting to pause my pleasure to talk. She didn’t want me to stop either, I was quite sure.

“Did he take you lying down or standing up?”

I looked at her through now-glazed eyes. So she was going to talk through this whole thing. About him.

The timing seemed appropriate, like the swell of a soundtrack keyed to the climax of a film, so I slipped my middle finger just inside my opening. It made me start, giving me a little shock, but I answered breathily, “Standing up.”

“He prefers you that way?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” My finger now slides long into my vagina, and though it is nothing like the fuller presence of his cock, it reminds me of him, as if my cunt has sensation memory. “He likes me against a wall,” I said.

“He pounds you there.”

None of this conversation is necessary. Every time I return from Master M’s, she debriefs me, having me recount everything in juicy detail, all of the sex, explicitly. She already knows everything. She already knows the answer to what she just asked.

“Yes,” I replied, acceding to her prompting, “he pounds me there against a wall.”

She said, “He likes the force of it, I imagine, the thrust into you.”

I nodded, my finger now sliding in and out of my very wet vagina.

“Do you like it too?” she asked — again something she know full well.

“It’s rough,” I said. “He’s heavy with me.”

“But do you like it?”

“He sometimes pounds the breath out of me.”

“Do you like it?”

I was not wanting to give her this, but soon enough I answered: “Yes, I like it.” I paused again, and then gave her all the words she wanted to hear: “Yes, I like it when he fucks me hard against the wall.”

For some time, she continued with the McKenna questions. I knew they were designed to intensify my feelings of sexual subjugation, to press buttons of my humiliation — which she knew would excite me deeply. And did.

So: “Does he enjoy you sucking his cock as much as you love cocksucking?”

I wanted to say she would need to ask him, but then I thought she probably already had. My finger continued inside me, pulling out on occasion to wet my swollen labia. “I think it’s a casual thing to him,” I managed to say, “not sex.” With anyone else, that would take many minutes more to unpack and explain, but she knew the shorthand.

She didn’t pursue that, but asked me another complicated question: “Do you like it when he fucks your ass?”

The questions notwithstanding, if this could last for hours, I would be a very happy girl and revel in the luxury of it. It didn’t take hours, of course, but I lost track of time, which is almost the same thing.

After awhile she got up from the couch, hiked up her midi skirt, and slipped off her panties underneath. She pulled her skirt up around her waist as she sat back down, with one leg propped up on the couch and the other on the floor, spreading her pussy to the open air.

The light was dim across our shared space, the candle illuminating my sex, but leaving her in shadow. Yet I could tell that her hand started playing her own symphony, that she was fondling herself in the flickers of my arousal.

We were just six feet apart, but now it felt even closer, intimate, women in our own glow of loving, as if my bare and oozing pussy was pressed and scissored flush against hers.

Now all talk of Master M was left behind, and there were no more rhetorical questions about his fucking of me. This was about us, no one else, just her with me bound by steel chains and submissive need and a slave’s dependent love.

I found her eyes again, our link to this, our sex together. My finger, which could never approximate his girth, now played the part of her tongue, flicking at my entrance, sliding along my crease. When my finger pressed in and popped inside me, it was as if it was her lips had plumped against me there and her wet tongue had burst inside me, exploring, as if there were depths of me she does not already possess.

There was time, and then more time, and my pussy swelled until it throbbed.

My eyes stayed open to her gaze, my sight linked to hers as if tethered. When her own arousal swelled, her eyes would close, and when they reopened from her swoon, my eyes were there for her.

Perhaps she, like me, imagined our other times — our bodies pressed close, our breasts full and ample rolling around each other, our drenched pussies kissing. But really there was something special about this, about not being flesh to flesh in bed. We were making love across the room.

There’s a moment when you know one of your inner waves will not subside, but keep gushing higher and higher into a massive tidal release. You wait for that, yet hold it off, anticipating.

It finally rolled through me. I opened my mouth but said nothing, my orgasm uttered as a silent O surrounded by the faintest of squeaks.

Though deep in her own swell, she watched as I soared.

I tensed and stretched against my restraints until it took me over and folded under itself. My shudders rattled my chains.

Through it all, my eyes remained fixed on her. She smiled at my come, pleased, yet her eyes were glazed by her own pleasure.

I stayed with her, my body now limp. She breathed harder, fighting the physical reflex to close her eyes. She writhed as she brought herself to climax.

She moaned, then screamed.

Again, there was time, and more time. We each floated back down. There were no words.

Presently she stood, smoothed her skirt back over her, and walked to me. Kneeling close, she placed two fingers to her lips, then to mine.

She reached down to free me from my eyehooks, my chains.

But I said, “Mistress, please leave me like this awhile.”

the feeling of being used

I’ve been thinking lately about my desire to “be used.”

It comes from the same place in me as my submissive need, but is different and deeper.

I obey Amanda on a daily basis, submissively performing a few chores each week, say “yes, mistress” to her commands, and serve her wishes as her slave. This is simply the D/s arrangement of our lives, how we live — my submissive need serving her dominant desire.

But sometimes it becomes something more. Like when Amanda fitted me with a waist tray for the BBQ party (here). Or when she puts me naked in the bay window. And times when Amanda calls me in to service her orally, then dismisses me when she is done. In each of these, the feeling for me is more than my being submissive — it’s the experience of being used.

It happens with others too. There are times Master McKenna has me suck his cock and it’s part of my submission to him, yet other times I suck his cock, and it feels different — it’s this thing of being used. Kevin, too: although in my reinvented life with him he is now more genteel, he has occasionally talked about “using my holes” and then gone about doing it. I submit to him that way, but the feeling is more than submission — it’s something else, something more, a feeling of being used.

On the other hand, standing topless in front of the trash men that day felt to me humiliating, but I experienced it more as my “normal” submissive duty in subservience to Amanda. I didn’t feel used, per se, though my embarrassment was deep.

Being used also does not seem to be especially related to intensity. It’s not just a heavier degree of being dominated. Kevin has in the past administered to me whippings that have left me gasping for air and dignity, but that experience as I felt it wasn’t the same as being used.

Confusing. Being used seems to be a reality separate from submission though emerging from it, yet not always occurring when and how we might think it might.

So what is this thing, “being used”?

It seems sometimes my being used is about being reduced to a function.

My wearing the waist tray at the BBQ party is a good example. Once strapped into the tray, I no longer was a person, even a slave person, and I became a tray. It was a novelty at first, and people talked to me initially as I walked around bearing their drinks. But after a while, I was just a serving tray, and they took drinks from “me the tray” without saying a word. I became merely functional.

A lot of the submissive life is objectifying, of course, and not all objectification carries this quality of feeling used. Maybe it transitions from “being submissive” to “being used” when it gets very specific and concrete — like being used as a tray or as a reading lamp or as a footstool.

This “functional use” can be sexual as well. In fact, that’s where I feel my deepest longings for it.

In the “old” days, when Kevin and Amanda and I were living together, fellatio was my “breakfast” under the kitchen table. (In fact — funny this — she would sometimes come into the kitchen, say “Good morning.” Kevin would grunt “Morning” back to her, and then a moment later, she’d hear a garbled “Good morning, mistress,” from me under the table with Kevin’s cock still in my mouth. She always laughed at that.)

Anyway… sometimes Kevin got up late, had to run, and had no time in the kitchen for “breakfast.” Instead, he took me to work with him in his truck so he could use my mouth. I was good at sucking cock without making a mess and he was good at safe driving while I was doing so. While my fellatios under the breakfast table were submissively objectifying in themselves, they felt to me part of my submissive life with him. It was only when he took me in his truck for my cock-sucking “function” that I really felt used. I’m not sure that’s a distinction that makes sense to others rationally, but it was profoundly distinctive to me emotionally.

“Being used” seems sometimes not to be about the thing itself, but about how the thing becomes my regular function, and how it forms the assumption by another that this is what I am made to do.

The feeling of being used, it seems to me, is also connected to the idea of something being unrequited — that is, one-sided, a use of me that doesn’t return anything to my submissive need.

This can surface in doing chores, but not in the usual way. One of my regular chores is to scrub the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. Normally, I am put in a short skirt for this and kept topless, so it’s sexualized, but it still is productive work, to my mind at least, and I enjoy it. But sometimes, after I’ve finished the floor and stand before Amanda proudly, my breasts coated in suds and my little skirt drenched, she will order me, “Now do it again.”

The point is that she knows the first time I did it I enjoyed the process of scrubbing the floor. It satisfies my sense of accomplishment in doing a submissive thing. But being made to do the floor a second time has no purpose and does not return to me the same sub satisfaction. This is a time when I feel used.

Always there’s a sexual version of this. Sometimes Amanda will shackle my hands behind my back, have me kneel before her, and spread her pussy for my attentions. With my lips and tongue, without use of my hands, I service her, wetly bringing her to orgasm. But this is unrequited: she doesn’t turn it around and say, “Now let me do you.” When she is done, she says, “You may go now.” In that, I am used.

Again, this is common to a lot of what happens in the submissive life. A slave is made to service her domme — of course. It’s part of the submissive life, for sure. But it’s not the first time or even the second that the feeling of being used comes in. It’s in the times after, as it becomes an assumption this is not a random event but is my regular function, that I am meant to provide her pleasure without expectation of receiving pleasure myself. I am used as a sex toy, her dildo with the latex tongue.

Being used feels to me to an experience of being consumed and being seen by others as consumable.

The bay window is proving to be that sort of thing. When Amanda poses me there, my thighs spread, I feel used in this consumable way — my sensation of others drinking in images of me and my sexuality and my sexual parts. They take me into themselves, take me home, take me into their fantasies, consuming me.

Recently I was struck by an image by Michael on his “Dionysian Experience” website. It was the realistic digital art he does so well, of Sienna, the submissive woman in his life. In this particular painting, Sienna lies naked on her back, thighs spread, pussy bare, atop a Thanksgiving table, food dishes arranged around her body. It’s literally an image of sexual consumption, and I commented to Michael I related to it so well, that I wanted to be her. (You can read my comment to his post and picture.)

These days, in this new neighborhood wokeness about me, I feel I’m on that Thanksgiving table, naked and pussy-spread, a creamy side dish available for consumption. Now that they know about me as submissive and slave, they see me in this sense of one who is used, aware now that I am meant to be consumed, used up. They may not understand why, and they may pity me in some sense, but they also enjoy the scandal of me, wondering if it is proper to use me to dip their drumstick. So to speak…

“Being used” as such, whether in reality or by metaphor of the “Thanksgiving spread,” is disgraceful, of course, but for me also desirable — and perhaps desirable because of its very disgrace.

It isn’t all the time. In fact, I prefer most of my days to live in simple leashed submission to Amanda. But there are times when I wish for this other “gear” of the submissive life, this deeper experience of being used.

I wish for it and yet don’t. It’s the aspect of the D/s life that still scares me — not in terms of physical danger but in its psychological depth. I could get lost in it. Being used is something I desire, then dread… then desire again.

For all of this speculation, there remains this question I cannot answer: why do I desire being used, and sometimes desire it so wantonly?

another update

I trust everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving Day, hopefully with family, friends, and maybe with your submissive or dominant Others.

I hate to belabor my medical condition, but just to report that I am doing better, thank god, having to sleep less and finding myself with more stamina. I’m still far from normal — “normal” being a word not usually applied to me anyway — but in any case, I have a ways to go in my recovery.

Amanda has been taking me on walks again. This is part of the fall-winter season when we have cold days alternating with spring-like days in the sixties. She doesn’t take me out in the cold, but she’ll walk me on the leash along the front road on the days that are more warmish.

For now, there’s no toplessness even on the warmer days, even though Amanda has determined the neighbors will deal with it without protest and with pleasure. For now, they seem to like seeing me on a leash, and come out to chat when we’re walking around. We’ll see how friendly they are when I’m topless.

It’s still hard for me to muster energy for writing, so my posts are slowed down. My apologies.

When I was first diagnosed with mono, Amanda advised me that the hard part for me will come after the first month when I start to emerge from it, yet am not well yet. “With that,” she said, “will come your sexual drive, but not yet with the energy to do anything sexual.” (I don’t assume Amanda knows this herself but got it from the doctor.)

Well, I am in that moment right now. My desire is roaring back, I have fantasies galore, and am eagerly willing to be anyone’s slut-fuck. But I don’t have the stamina to do any of that. Apparently, even submissive sex takes a lot of energy.

Amanda is debating whether to give me a special dispensation to masturbate.

There’s also the matter of my being contagious. Mono is a virus spread through body fluids, which includes sexual transmission. It’s the Epstein-Barr virus. (I’ve learned that actually a lot of people have this virus in them but it never activates nor presents symptoms.)

The point is that the activated virus remains contagious for a long time, though it is believed to be mostly diminished after three months from inception. The thought is that I contracted it about a month before it was diagnosed, and so by January, I should be “safe” for others again.

Tomorrow, Blake is coming over to install the dog run and the slate pathway.

Always something to look forward to…

Blake and the dog run

It was warmer today, in the sixties, one of those days pretending to be fall but with the unmistakable scent of winter. Yet it was warm enough to justify me being outside, warm enough to make Amanda’s little scene in the back yard possible.

Blake arrived around one-thirty, as scheduled, but I was napping and missed the conversation he and Amanda had in the kitchen. At two, she roused me and laid out my outfit, then ushered Blake into the back yard while I got ready.

I have written about Blake before. He is some ten years younger than me, and looks even younger. With short, dark hair, he’s attractively tall and wiry, with strength that’s more sinewy than muscled. He hasn’t attended college, so I’ve learned, but has been seemingly successful in forming his own carpentry business, and is intuitively smart about matters pertaining to his work.

Blake is quiet and reserved and so is a bit of a puzzle to decipher. Perhaps that’s what makes him attractive to me. I am drawn to “interior” men, like mystery novels.

In the past, I have wondered about how he sees me. (For those new to my blog, Blake is the architect of Amanda’s house-bondage “stations” — the entryway wall, the wet bar, and the easy chair. He has done “bondage room” construction for other lifestyle people as well, but he doesn’t seem to be in the lifestyle himself.) While we’ve had previous encounters (here and here), and these have involved a limited intimacy, we aren’t really “friends” in any way. He knows what I am, a slave in the lifestyle, but I don’t know how he relates — if he enjoys the thought of me being a slave or judges me for it.

He and Amanda were on the lawn by the tree when I emerged onto the patio. Her look for me was a retro green-plaid skirt, flared and hemmed just above the knee. On top, she had me wearing just my cream-colored cardigan, button-down, shaping my breasts. While Amanda’s dressing me is an everyday thing, this outfit felt more like a presentation, perhaps because I’d been lounging in Pjs for weeks, or maybe just because it was Blake out there. Again, I wondered how he saw me, and I imagined it was either as a debutante or perhaps as a MILF. Or maybe just as a sorry slave.

They were talking about the installation of the dog run. “I’d like slate tiles,” Amanda was saying, “following the path of the cable. I want to have her out here in high heels and watch her step from tile to tile along the run.” So, it was clear to Blake this was for me not for a dog we might have been planning to adopt. I suppose Blake knew this when Amanda first called him, but I found myself blushing nonetheless.

The tie-out cable itself was not much of a job, except for where to attach the end opposite the tree. Originally, Amanda thought the terminus would be the aspen sapling on the east edge of the property, but Blake didn’t think that was secure enough.

While they were talking, Amanda called me to her and unbuttoned my cardigan. She undid me all the way down, leaving just the two bottom ones to keep my sweater closed at my waist while leaving it open above. Standing in front of me, Amanda coaxed out my breasts into the open air, my sweater panels falling away to each side. It was Amanda’s plan to keep me both warm and yet topless.

“There, that’s better,” Amanda said, stepping away. I felt the sun warming my breasts. I felt Blake’s eyes warming them too. I remember times ago he would look away, diverting his eyes, perhaps thinking he had no right to partake of me. Now he looks, maybe having learned it is my place to absorb stares of lust and longing.

The continued their discussion, and Blake suggested connecting the cable to the house itself, above the patio. “You can have her,” he said, “on the dog run right through the patio.” I knew Amanda was enjoying him speaking of me in the third person.

Humiliation is a coat of many colors. Crimson shame can mix with sunshine desire to create peach-flesh passion. One can feel exposed and diminished at the same time as feeling wanted and wanting. I remember in that moment I couldn’t help but wonder what this might have been if Blake and I had met in more ordinary circumstances.

I knew Amanda was suddenly imagining me leashed to the dog run while on the patio, perhaps serving drinks at a party while leashed above. To her the possibilities were, no doubt, delicious.

It had already been determined that the cable would be retractable, and could be hidden in its coil on the opposite side of the tree, out of sight. But Amanda, though she loved the patio idea, now struggled with the slate path being parallel (and redundant) to the brick pathway already in place from the patio to the far end of the yard. “Redundant,” she said. It wasn’t feng shui enough for her.

She spoke her concerns, and Blake had no immediate solution.

I stood, of course, in topless silence. Blake and Amanda were standing side by side, looking across the lawn to the patio. By chance, I was standing opposite them, in the path of their gazes. Amanda may have been focused on the patio but Blake wasn’t.

The sun felt good on my naked breasts, I must say, its rays coating them like warm butter. My nipple rings glinted in the sunlight. My blushed embarrassment notwithstanding, it was lovely to be outside and feel like a woman again.

Amanda asked Blake how much work it would take to create the tile path beyond the tree and out to the rise of the hill on the east.

“I can do it,” he said, “but it’s a bigger job then. You might want your landscaper to do it.”

Amanda nodded. “It occurs to me our neighbors might like the path coming into their yard. They walk over here all the time — this back way. The tiles would make it easier for Patricia, especially… And that way the path could curve to the side. It would look better that way.”

“Then again,” Blake said, “The holidays are down time for me. I have an open schedule until January. ”

I wondered if he felt the job might mean more exposure to, well, my exposure. I also wondered if, for me, the possible outcomes would be me in the presence of Blake versus me in the presence of a landscaping crew.

In my mind I was voting for Blake when Amanda said, “Deal.”

That solved, Amanda had one more thing to do. She instructed Blake to stand on the patio. At the tree, she attached a leash to the back of my collar. “Visualize the path we follow,” she told him.

Her instruction was to walk slowly in an arc to where Blake was standing. “Like a processional at a wedding,” she said to me.

“Is that a proposal?” I asked.

She laughed.

I walked, leashed from behind, as instructed — taking a step with one foot, then bringing my other even with it, then reversing the order.

It was later I realized this was entirely unnecessary. She just wanted me to step this way to give Blake the visual — my halting steps bringing me to full stops with every stride, sending ripples through my breasts each time. His pleasure, my humiliation.

Though in a way I didn’t mind.

pajamas

She has started to dress me again, which means, of course, the opposite.

Since the mono diagnosis, I have lived in PJs. This has been a special dispensation from Amanda. Since I have slept about half of every daytime as well as at night, it has been senseless for Amanda to try to maintain her daily outfit selections for me, as I would simply be taking them off anyway for my frequent stints in bed.

There’s also been a need for me to be kept warm, which makes the general rule of no pants, skirts and dresses only, an invitation for chills. My usual nightwear of thin, short chemises wouldn’t do during mono time. Consequently, Amanda has allowed me to wear cotton PJs, actual cotton tops and pajama bottoms that cover my legs and other parts to keep me warm.

Traditional pajamas are such a novelty in my life that I actually don’t own any. So Amanda bought several sets for me, which have been cycled through the wash every few days.

She tried to find PJs that had a D/s or BDSM theme — and they exist — but she for some reason declined to buy them. Perhaps it was just hard for her to put her slave girl clinging to the edge of life into a pajama top that says, “Flip over to spank me.”

Readers will remember that I have written longingly for the feel of soft fabric in the form of a bra hugging my breasts and plush panties to cradle my pussy. My owners and keepers have not allowed this, and I have lived without bra or panties for a number of years.

PJs during this brief time are really different, soft and warm and protecting. But most of this time I haven’t had energy or lucidity to enjoy my cotton nirvana. In my condition it’s been lost on me. And, besides, PJs are not the same as a cozy bra.

Some readers, especially some men I’m aware of, will be relieved that during this time I still have not worn a bra or panties, that my “streak” of being so deprived has continued.

The “PJ era” seems to be over. I have been doing better, and we’re past the time of worrying about chills.

Amanda is dressing me again.

Today she has me in a burnt orange midi skirt and a simple white button-down blouse, sort of retro. It’s actually a little dressy, which is nice. I think Amanda thinks it’s time for me to feel better about myself.

I was standing, per ritual, with the coffee tray this morning, and as Amanda poured her mug, she looked at me approvingly. But she had me set the tray down and stand before her.

Amanda unbuttoned my blouse, leaving just two buttons at my waist. She opened the panels of my blouse and coaxed my breasts out.

“Now you’re dressed,” she said.

words about myself: bitch

Given my previous post, while we’re on the topic, I might as well go into it: how do I feel about being called a bitch?

It’s actually a complex word in usage, one with many connotations and the strange ability to mean the opposite of itself. I’ve overheard it used of women in business — “She’s a bitch that makes it all work” — which is disparaging and admiring in the same moment. Used of me, “bitch” can be a term of degradation and endearment all at once: “Shae is my special bitch.”

However, Master McKenna has not called me his bitch, perhaps because he is respectful of women in his workplaces. Despite my being his slave, I am doing clerical work for him, and perhaps I technically fall into that category of “employee.” Or maybe with me he just hasn’t gotten into domination language yet.

Amanda has called me bitch only occasionally, in casual endearment. On occasion it has been as a pointed effort to put me in my proper place when I get uppity: “Just remember you’re still my bitch,” she says.

I wonder if she will use it more often with me now — now that she’s going to leash me in the back yard to a dog run. If so, I can handle her calling me bitch. I just pray she doesn’t put me in a pink poodle tutu and rename me “Fluffy.”

We all know that a female dog is referred to as a “bitch.” But I didn’t realize that a male dog is simply called a “dog.” In other words, we bitches don’t even get our own species. We are a subset.

For all kinds of females, it seems, life sucks.

I find that there are people at the edge of Mistress’s and Master’s worlds, privy to watching my slavery from the side, who at some point wish to partake in the experience of dominating me. They do not have permission to do so, of course, except they can to some extent enjoy my degradation through words.

So I’ve had men say to me, “Are you being a good little bitch?”

As if putting me at the level of a female dog is not enough, they add the word “little,” making their degradation of me more trivial and diminutive. By prefacing their slur with the word “good,” they make it an impossible question to answer. I may say no, meaning I am not a female dog, but then it sounds as if I am saying I’m not being good.

Of course, I nod in the affirmative and say, “Yes I am, sir,” the only proper response a submissive can tender.

It is part of my submissive duty to take verbal degradation slung at me, and so I absorb derogatory terms passively. It’s what a slave does, regardless of whether the person has the right to call me something.

Sometimes this is in side comments to my mistress or master — for example, someone saying to Master McKenna, “How’s your slave-slut working out?” Although directed at him, it is stated in front of me, that person pushing himself into my slavery via verbal humiliation. Master McKenna doesn’t always tolerate this — it depends on what level of connection the person has with him. On one occasion he reprimanded the man who called me “slave-slut,” saying, “You know, Bill, you don’t get to call her that.”

When Master said that, my heart soared, and I was ready then and there to give myself to him body and soul — ironically, all the more desirous of being his special bitch.

As I’ve written before, words affect me more when I know they are in some way true of me. The “female dog” meaning of the word “bitch” is obviously not literal to me nor even its more common vanilla-world usage — “a tough, difficult female boss.”

However, the word also implies a woman who is “kept and used sexually,” which is true of me. A female dog is often used by male dogs in the neighborhood, quite indiscriminately. There’s that image and connotation, thank you very much.

So when I am called “bitch” in front of others, I am being so identified. It is true I am kept, and it is also true of me that I am used sexually by others. People do not know to what extent that is, but they imagine.

I stand passively and absorb it, being called a bitch, fully aware of all the possible meanings, feeling I am drenched in people’s assumptions, and accepting this is how I am now known to the people in the room.

the dog run

Over the weekend I was beginning to find a bit more energy, finally. Amanda took me out in the car, and we stopped to sit in a park. I couldn’t yet manage a walk of any length, but it was sweet to be out. I’m still not back to my perky self, but somewhat less lethargic.

Amanda, noticing this, feels comfortable talking with me about a newfangled idea she has. Quite simply, she says, she wishes to install in the back yard a steel cable between trees and a slate path in the grass — a dog run.

“But we don’t have a dog,” I say.

She smiles wickedly at me.

“Oh,” I say, figuring it out. My mind is a little slower these days.

Apparently this little fantasy of hers has been brewing for some time. She goes into details: “I’d want the dog run to be outside my home office, so I can watch you while I’m working.” Amanda pauses, sips her coffee, pleased with herself.

She speaks of the hardware, how Blake has informed her it could be a wire on a retracting wheel, sort of like a retractable leash. It would be attached to the tree on the east side. “The wire wouldn’t always have to be extended — it’s a bit unsightly — but in a jiff I could pull it out and attach it to the side of the house.”

I could care less about the hardware: “You’ve talked to Blake about this.” It’s not a question, but a somewhat surprised observation. Innocent, hunky Blake has all along been the architect of my enslavements — the wet bar, most notably.

“I would have you leashed to the dog run,” Amanda says, “wrists shackled behind your back. Topless, of course, in a skirt and heels. You would be lovely.”

“I would just stand there? Nothing to do?”

“Well, you could walk back and forth. The slate would give you a footpath, something hard to support your heels.”

“That’s thoughtful of you.”

Amanda smiles at me. “Now that sounds more like your old self.”

“You mean snarky?”

Amanda nods and looks at me for a while. My mono has been hard on her too — she hasn’t had her toy to play with.

“Walking back and forth,” I say with intended sarcasm, “well, that sounds exciting.”

“I imagine some neighbors would stop by and talk with you. John and Patricia, of course. For that matter, I could put you out there for a neighborhood tea time.”

“Nice,” I say. Despite my apparent skepticism, I like being washed in Amanda’s dominance once again. It feels good to be imagined as a submissive object. Mine is a feigned reluctance, and she knows it.

“In the summer,” Amanda goes on, “you’ll have the shade of the tree. Although my most fun image is of you leashed to the dog run while it’s raining — seeing you getting drenched.”

The way she talks, it sounds more like a fantasy than a reality. Or at least wishful thinking. Amanda has a lot of ideas she doesn’t follow through on. She loses interest on things. For a time I assume it’s just that — Amanda’s little imagining of me, her current dominant fancy. And I like that during my hiatus from “active duty” she is thinking of me like that, erotically.

I play along: “You could put out a dog dish and a water bowl as well — just to complete the visual effect.”

“Yes!” she exclaims, “perfect! And maybe the bowls could have ‘Bitch’ printed on the sides.”

“We don’t have to get carried away.”

“Well you are my bitch.”

I smile and nod. “I am.”

Then the fantasy comes to a screeching halt and reality sets in: “Blake is going to install it this Friday,” she tells me.

“For real?”

“Yes, of course.”

“But it’s winter. And I’m not well enough for you to keep me out there like that.”

“Sure, you’ll need to recover fully. But Blake can put it in now for when we need it later… Winter, yes, and I won’t have you out there in the cold. Of course not. But we often have warm days in the middle of winter.”

I say nothing but look at her through squinty eyes.

“On Friday,” she says, “I’ll need you to model for when Blake installs it. Height and length. Figure out the path. Maybe you’ll feel up to it. Hopefully it will be warm enough then for you to be out there. We’ll see.”

I don’t dare ask what “modeling” for Blake will actually look like.

cookie on a plate

I’ve been feeling somewhat better the past few days, but that’s just relatively speaking — I am far from being well. Still, it’s encouraging.

Amanda admits she’s not a good caretaker, and she doesn’t dote on me. But yesterday after I took a long nap in the afternoon, she came into my bedroom with a cookie on a plate. She said, “I didn’t make it, of course, but I opened the package all by myself.” I laughed. You could never find two women in the same house so totally helpless in the kitchen.

No, she doesn’t dote on me, and she’s not one to make the chicken noodle soup, but she’s been super nonetheless.

It’s been obvious she cannot expect me to perform my slavery to her these days, and she hasn’t required anything of me. Her greater challenge is making me feel I have some value even without being able to do anything submissive.

My adage that a slave “is not what you do but what you are” is being tested. Apparently, doing submissive things is the outward evidence of what you are.

But Amanda has been present with me more often during this time, sometimes taking her work from her home office and doing it in the living room where I’m dozing on the couch. Being in the room with me is pretty much the most anyone can really do, other than the occasional cookie on a plate. It’s such a little thing, and yet it means a lot to me.

So we do a lot of talking these days, seeing that I’m really not useful for much of anything else. We sit across from each other on the couch as usual, but without the usual drippy anticipation of what she could do to me at any moment.

But the conversation is good, even if it isn’t accompanied by my servitude.

Master McKenna stopped by this morning. He said he had business to discuss with Amanda, and, yes, they talked for a while in her office, but I suspect he could have accomplished the same by phone. He came to see me, which was lovely.

I apologized to him for my absence, and he said it was fine, that the only important thing is for me to get better. Then he added with a straight face but twinkly eyes, “Of course you’ll be making up for it in January.”

“I’ll be eager and willing to do so, sir.”

words about myself: “a submissive”

I am making a distinction between the idea of being submissive and being “a submissive.” This may be a distinction only a writer cares about, the difference between an adjective and a noun, but I’ll play it out here anyway.

In the memories of my journey, I am unclear exactly when I began to be aware of my submissive nature. I know now the signs of it when I was a girl, and other inclinations when I was a little older, and certain fantasies I had as a teenager — but at the time I had no vocabulary for this nor was I self-aware I was different.

As a young woman of eighteen and into my twenties, I was still naive about my submissiveness, although I found myself unusually warmed by an occasional stray image of a woman collared and stilettoed. I might then have been vaguely aware I was drawn to “something about that,” but yet far from knowing what was within me.

I think it must have been when I was twenty-four or so when I might have first entertained the thought my sexuality was oriented a certain way toward submissive experience. I don’t remember there being a particular trigger for that. I was not a virgin but still modest and restrained in my sexual life, and yet perhaps the rare sexual experiences I had, coupled with my fantasy life, served to rouse me, a least a little, to what I was.

There’s another reason I may have pushed this to the back of my mind. I grew up, as you all know, in a conservative religious church and home. One of its firm teachings was the second-tier status of women. Men were leaders, women helped. Women were taught to be submissive to men.

As I left for college and began to shed my fundamentalist indoctrination, this was one of those mindsets I left behind. In fact, while I was never political or outspoken, I privately advocated then for some version of feminism, as I still do.

And so the submissiveness within me was confusing. I didn’t want to acknowledge anything that dragged me back into the mysogeny I had left, the iron-handed imposition of female submission. Yet I had these submissive feelings and fantasies that I started to be more conscious of.

Of course, these are different things assuming the same name. But back then they felt the same. For a time, as I see myself in the rear-view mirror, I think I suppressed my submissive awareness for this reason. Ironic that overcoming my childhood repression became itself a repression of what I was.

I don’t remember a specific moment, as this kind of growing self-awareness has few signposts. It’s like floating along a slow-moving river without specific landmarks to note your progress. But it seems to me that around the time I was twenty-six or so I was finally accepting myself as being submissive. “Submissive” the adjective.

Twenty-six was the age at which I actively and consciously decided to rebel. My father had died several years earlier, and while that rocked my world emotionally — losing him was hard for me — he was also a symbol of my childhood morality and repression. Several years later, I decided I needed to move on.

“Rebellion” for me was by most standards tame and mild. It had nothing consciously to do with my submissiveness. But it was my effort to become more adventurous personally and sexually. That led me into a relationship with a man, an artist, which was sexual and daring. Among other things, he took me to visit a BDSM club.

It was a short-lived relationship. Artist-types are my Kryptonite, and I fall for them every time. He was not what he seemed to be, although most of us aren’t, so I don’t blame him for not living up to the pedestal I’d placed him on. We broke up after a while, and that was that.

However, the casual experiences we had at BDSM clubs stuck with me. Mind you, he and I never did anything there. We observed. For him it was a kinky view through a kaleidoscope. For me it was a awe-provoking revelation: I saw submissive women collared and bound, and I saw myself in them — “I’ll have what they’re having.”

I then was acknowledging that mine was a submissive sexuality. “Submissive” the adjective.

I was submissive, so I thought then, in parts of my life, parts of my sexual nature. It was an element of me but not all of me. In fact, for a while I fought hard against the notion that for me “submissive” was more than just an adjective but also a noun.

This is where I feel I need to pause and offer a bit of a disclaimer. I think most submissives are submissive “in part.” There are many degrees of submissiveness and they’re all good. Many live fairly normal, vanilla lives, and indulge their submissiveness (as an adjective) on the side. Some live the life of it, yet it’s a part of them. We all do this differently. For me, it went beyond that, but in no way do I suggest that “submissive” as an adjective is limited or lacking. In some ways, I wish that were true of me once again.

“Submissive” the adjective is a characteristic, like being a redhead or feisty or introverted or slender. It is an aspect of you, something that’s “a part” of you, yet not all of you. Not what you are. It’s descriptive not prescriptive.

“Submissive” the noun is all of you. It’s not just what you “do” sometimes on the side. It’s what you are even after you leave the BDSM club. It’s what you wake up into. It’s what is in you even as you do the ironing.

This was the dawning realization I came to on a fateful day in 2014. I’ve written about this here, my experience, ironically, in a church.

I won’t re-tell that but to say it was a wrestling math within myself. The notion that “this submissive thing” was not just an interesting sideline but my whole being was difficult to face. It felt like a life sentence. It was something I wanted not to be true. It was not the story I’d written for myself. Yet, I could not deny the depth and pervasive submissiveness within. It was all of me.

This was the point when I accepted that I was “a submissive,” that my whole identity was wrapped up in my submissive nature. This was the point when I acknowledged this is “who I am.” This was the point I committed myself to living the submissive life full-time.

This was when, for me, the adjective became a noun.