the experience of strangers, 16: tamed

It is the evening of the middle day, the twilight of the same morning he claimed me on kitchen marble.

I sit at his feet in his den.

He’s given me permission to wear clothes again, not that I dared request it, but simply his instruction. Per his order, I’ve put on this short skirt and simple checked blouse, tied above my waist. I’ve showered yet again, pulled my auburn hair back into a ponytail, and, as he wished, did not put on makeup, leaving me look freckled and fresh-scrubbed.

I am as he wants, perhaps a laughable pretense of virginity.

---

He left this afternoon. Left the house, and me. I don’t know if his leaving was staged or real, if he intentionally abandoned me for effect or if he had, as he claimed, an actual meeting for work at a hotel.

He may have been told by Amanda how feelings of abandonment affect me, how it feels like a man pulling out of my pussy, leaving me feeling vacated. Or maybe he just knows this, and wished to make me feel that way.

---

There are times when your dom goes away: Business, errands, get-togethers with friends — reminders that much of his life doesn’t include you. The slave life becomes so interior, and it’s a bit of a shock when he attends to exterior things. It’s the nature of D/s slavery that your dom is everything to you, while you are just one thing to him.

When he leaves for, say, an afternoon, there is the question of what you do with yourself. So much of your life is tethered to him that when that leash goes slack, you don’t know how to be.

One of my early experiences in this, early on with Master Michael when he had a business trip, was to exercise my freedom in his absence, to defy my basic requirements as his slave. He had forbidden me underwear and any sort of jeans or slacks, basic rules that have been maintained by my other owners throughout my life in slavery. This was in our first months together and there was a box in storage of my old things. During his absence I put on a bra again, panties, and luxuriated in their feeling.

But I soon didn’t feel good about doing that. This wasn’t a feeling of guilt so much as a feeling of lostness. If I am unsubmissive in his absence, what is this thing we are doing together? What’s the point of D/s if you’re just play-acting most of the time and go back to your normal life when he leaves the stage? I felt unmoored, aimless, and strangely unhappy.

When Master Michael returned, I confessed to him. He punished me, but I think he knew my greatest punishment was my own uncomfortable malaise in the aftermath of my actions.

Of course, in the years since, my owners many times have left me alone for periods of time. I’ve learned that for such stretches it’s actually rewarding to maintain yourself as the slave you are, as the slave he owns, and that it becomes a special pleasure to him, upon his return, to find you still in your submission where he left you.

---

He is reading a book, a military history.

I am sitting at his feet, my legs curled under my little skirt, and my hands folded in my lap.

In the events of today — my spanking, his unexpected slap, and his splayed-out fucking of me in the kitchen — he has overcome me. Made me docile, compliant. And, unusually, he has rendered me wordless.

---

After a long time, he speaks: “Stand in the corner. Face the wall.”

I immediately obey, now so puppy-eager to please, as if cutting nanoseconds off my response to his command gets me extra credit. I go to the corner he is pointing to and stand in it close enough that my nose touches the paneling.

I hear him pick up his book and turn a page, resuming his reading.

I wonder if this is somehow another punishment. In a way, it feels like a classroom discipline, juvenalizing me. But his tone, even in the few words he’s used, doesn’t suggest anger, and I don’t sense that from him. So, I don’t know what this is, why he has me here like this, standing in the corner.

Sometimes the point of something he does to you is that there’s no point. Maybe it’s simply a spur-of-the-moment whim, and he just feels like it.

He has me stand there for what seems a long time.

---

One of the things I’ve learned in my slave life is that submission is often idle, intentionally inactive. Time becomes negative space. Boredom is a dimension of your servitude.

Sometimes your inactivity is a kind of posing, a period in which you are looked at, sometimes nude, lusted for. I think sometimes it must be like being a model for art classes, posing nude for aspiring artists, and that after your initial self-consciousness, the minutes and hours must just feel endless. But when I’m in these situations of being observed (say as I’m displayed in the bay window back home), while I’m not “doing anything,” there is a lot going on sexually as others watch, and emotionally as I absorb their gazes.

Other times, you are being put on the shelf for a time. Your dom wants you present but not active. He wants to set you aside for a while, not have to do anything with you. In these spaces, you are intentionally rendered without a thing to do. You are utterly idle. And it can be incredibly boring.

I am blessed with a fertile imagination, and it helps that in these moments of inertia I can think of ideas and stories, indulging a kind of mental writing. Even so, these hours can be endless, becoming their own kind of time-bondage.

---

In the corner, I think about him.

He is cool to me, though not cold and I don’t sense any displeasure with me. He has a military bearing — though not overly strict, it’s stern. He’s clearly a very smart dom: despite my experience as a slave, he’s been a step ahead of me this whole time. He is aloof and unengaged with me, yet he is prosecuting my slavery intently, with (clearly) significant strategy.

And, earlier today, he squeezed himself into my head and my vagina, claiming me, deftly taming me, and making me want to please him all the more.

For all of this, I realize I still do not know who this man is.