my punishment

I am cleaning Mistress Amanda’s shoes with my tongue.

I’m nude, on my knees, hands clasped behind my back, my thighs spread into a wide V. I lean forward, my ass in the air, my face inches from the ground. My tongue wipes across her black leather. I taste the veneer of dust.

This is my punishment, yet it’s not my punishment.

She sits, ignoring me, checking her phone and reading a document she pulled out of her briefcase.

I lick across the front of her shoe. There’s a bump, perhaps a crumble of dirt, that I work over. It finally dislodges. I take the dirt crumble into my mouth because I am not worthy of spitting it out. I serve even her dirt and dust, caring for it by taking it into my body.

I lean farther forward, my left breast pressing into the floor. I attend to the sides of her shoe. There are streaks of mud buried in the crevices between the leather and the sole. I dig into it with my tongue. My hair falls forward around my face. It covers my humiliation like a floor mop.

She scolds me for my hair falling, and I take one hand from behind my back, pull my tresses away from my face and around to one side. Normally, she loves my hair, loves seeing it flow and fall over my shoulders. She is now dispassionate with me. My tongue liquefies a clod of dirt between her sole and heel. It thickens in my mouth. I swallow and almost choke on the thick paste. I have to take a moment to replenish my saliva, get my mouth halfway clean again before resuming my shoe-shining.

I decide to go over her left shoe again before starting the right. I fear I am leaving streaks, and I need to mop up a second time over. I cannot bear to think of what would happen if I don’t do a perfect job.

For a moment, I wonder if it wouldn’t have been quicker and better if I had sinned against Master K instead. As Mistress had said, he would have strung me up and beaten me within an inch of my life, but then it would be over with hardly any time to think, just with the pain of striping and welts to endure later.

This, though, is an ordeal in my mind, making so much time to mentally process my subjugation. Mistress once said that it would be easy to punish me if that time ever came. “You think about everything so much, Shae. You torture yourself. I wouldn’t really have to.”

As if on cue, as my tongue works on her shoe, I am painfully aware of the symbolic meaning of everything I’m doing.

And that it is. I am agonizing over how Mistress is now cold to me. How I am a former businesswoman now tongue-bathing the high heels of another woman. How I as a woman who has reduced herself to the lowly status of a slave somehow achieves this further demotion. How Amanda will take this episode to work and share it with her colleagues, people I have met and worked alongside — and will work alongside again all too soon. How I will sometime endure the humiliation of facing them.

This, as she knows, is my real punishment.

Mistress tosses me a handkerchief. “Polish.” It shakes me out of my mental flagellation, my self-torture, if for only a moment.

I use the handkerchief to buff her left shoe to a light shine. There’s yet a spot. A normal person would spit on it and buff it out, a spit-shine, but I catch myself, knowing that spitting is the last thing I can afford to do right now, however well intended. I flatten my tongue against the spot, lick it away, then buff the area to get to a smooth appearance.

And now I start to bathe her right high heel with my tongue.

The dirt I am removing from her shoes is, in a way, the dirt that I created on my Very Bad Day. My evil stare sprayed her with a hiss of my dirt. Now I am taking it back by collecting it with my tongue from her shoes.

As I complete my work on her right shoe, I am aware of a basic irony. My lips pressed to the leather of her shoes could, in another context, be a kiss of worship. And I would do that in a heartbeat any moment of any day and night, because in fact I really do worship Amanda, both as mistress and lover. In fact, my slavery to her is precisely that — worship — which makes so many of my slave duties under her into acts of adoration. She likes that I call her goddess. It’s for fun, but only kind of. She really has become my goddess. Which makes my sin all the more regretful.

I finish the final rinse and buff her right high heel into a smooth shine. My tongue hurts, being rasped by the rough edges of the dirt and her soles. I have the taste of mud in my mouth. I know I have wet dirt smeared on my face.

Finished, I look up at Mistress. She has now put aside her work and looks down at me. She just looks at me sternly for a long time.

“Permission to speak?” I ask, daring to break this awful silence. My words tumble out thickly.

Mistress nods.

“I am so, so sorry for my attitude, my behavior, the way I stared at you. I was terribly wrong.”

“Yes, you were. You disappointed me, Shae. You really disappointed me. And frankly, I don’t know how to feel about you right now.” She stands up. “I have to go to the office.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I remain kneeling, naked, feeling coated in a cloud of dust and dirt and sin.
Mistress walks away. From the doorway, she stops, turns, and says, “Clean yourself up. And eat something. You must have pint of mud in your tummy.”

She leaves, but not before instructing me to tell everyone online about “where my mouth has been.”