The perfect Valentine's Day present... Every year, throughout the Western World, men wrack their brains for the perfect gift. Who wants to grab something off the supermarket shelf? The umpteenth box of chocolates, the corset from Victoria's Secret that your sweetheart might simply laugh at, the same roses as last year and the year before? Then what? Something that will show your caring love, your thoughtfulness in collecting and remembering the smallest hints, your patience in seeking--or better, creating--the object that will express the lasting nature of your love, your commitment over the years. And, of course, a gift that will be beautiful, a joy to gaze upon but also one that will show off, accentuate, emphasize her own beauty.

This year, I have that gift. The finishing touches are done, the object itself lies before me on the work table in my study, and nearby was the wrapper and the card. The perfect gift is not a one-sided gift. A Valentine's Day present has to unite the lovers, it's not from one to the other, it's from each to each, from us to us. And that is what is here, ready for the red and pink wrapper and the opalescent ribbon.

Emily already knows the content, but she will now see it all differently. Isn't that what art does? Allow us to see the familiar in a new way? To appreciate it, to contemplate it, even to adore it?

What is here, on this newly-edited DVD, is the fruit of a year of passion. Precisely a year, since it was only in mid-February of last year that we decided to make the leap from fantasy into reality. For the three years of our relationship before that, we gave each other Valentine's Day gifts of erotic tales, one from her and one from me. Each time the only "rule" was that we would find fantasies that would break the rules, pushing us a little further.

That very first Valentine's Day our mutual fantasies were been sweet and mild. Not knowing each other very well yet, we imagined, each for the other, making love together in holiday locations. I wrote for her a tale of falling into bed together in a luxurious hotel room in Paris after a day of sight-seeing and people watching. She wrote for me a story of making love on the beach, under a palm tree, in Martinique, one starry night. A playful, exciting twist to this gift to me was an earlier scene on the beach, where Emily, for the first time, went topless in public, while I watched--proud, jealous, disapproving, and aroused, all at once.

In the following months we returned often in thought and talk to these written day-dreams, retelling them to one another in bed while we made out before sex. We would embroider them with new details, sometimes spinning them out until we became too excited and too preoccupied with each other's body to talk. Gradually other people appeared on the margins of the imaginary scenes. A man might be taking a nocturnal walk and spy us as we made love, and we, knowing he was watching, kept on, unable to stop. Or the maid might suddenly appear in the hotel and catch us as we were in the throes of orgasm.

By the second Valentine's Day we became bolder in our stories, now daring to break into the sacredness of the romantic couple. In Emily's story for me, the two of us took pity on a hitchhiker, a college student caught in a rainstorm by a country road far from town. We let him throw his backpack in the trunk and as he rides along with us in the back seat of our little car, there is a real sexual tension between him and Emily. I sense it and invite him to come to our house, take a shower and get a good meal. When I find Emily making out with him later in the kitchen, I don't say a word and... The story ended abruptly, tantalizingly, letting me fill in the rest. My story for Emily was set in the women's locker room of our local gym, where she encounters a slightly older woman new to town. They begin talking as they undress after working out, each showers in an individual shower stall, and then the other woman asks Emily how the sauna works. Emily demonstrated using the switches to turn on the heat and the light and soon the two of them are reclining on the cedar benches in the semi-dark, sweating in companionable silence. Gradually the other woman begins to massage Emily's shoulders and my girlfriend wordlessly consents as her new friend's hands wander and explore her body before they begin to kiss.

These two stories sent us into a sexual frenzy that lasted--well, that still lasts to this day. For weeks we imagined these two scenes again and again, filling in the details, varying the sexual outcomes, modifying the appearance of the young man and the older woman. Now that we had incorporated other people into our fantasies the possibilities seemed endless, though we always included the precautionary words "not that we--or you or I-- would ever do that, but...". Most of all we discovered the delicious feeling of our loved one permitting, even encouraging, these dreams of forbidden pleasures. We, for one another, voyeur and exhibitionist, showing off and watching one another in our imagination. During that year the fantasies that we shared in bed became harder, more transgressive, darker. Already, in my second story for her, I was absent. She was having a sexual encounter with a stranger without me (though a woman), and I had supposed that she allowed herself for a moment to slip out of the range of her obvious straightness.

As our third Valentine's Day together approached, we were impatient and eager to know what the other would have invented. By then, we had been married for seven months and had moved to a large city from the small college town where we had met. We went to dinner in a very chic, small French restaurant, where the tables were crowded together with couples of all ages sharing wine by candlelight. Maybe it was Emily's tightly fitted, short black dress, maybe it was the mischievous, suspenseful look on her face, maybe the heady mix of all those pheromones released into the penumbra of "Chez Colette" by all those loving couples, maybe it was my own tension as I wondered whether Emily would like the story I had, in weeks of writing, crafted as my gift to her--no doubt, it was all of those things that explained why I was so aroused as I sat across from her.

We knew that we would not read our fantasy stories there, in the restaurant. The other tables were too close, the candlelight was too dim, and most of all we were not in a position to rip off our clothes and show the effect of the tale, her aroused wetness, my excited hardness. But we had agreed that we would exchange the envelopes and then save them for reading later at home. After the waitress brought us each a glass of kir, Emily took from her small purse an elegant violet-tinted envelope that she handed to me. On it, in her best calligraphy, was written, "For my beloved Vincent, the story of a new beginning". Full of suspenseful anticipation and excited, I extended a plain white envelope on which I had written in my dark scrawl, "To my sweetheart Emily, a dream of lust shared". The couple at the table to my right had seen us exchange the envelopes and looked puzzled as we simply put them away in purse and pocket without opening them.

The young woman, in her mid-twenties--so ten years younger than we are
--looked at Emily, who explained that we had a custom of writing stories for each other on Valentine's Day.

"That's so sweet!" the young woman exclaimed, and then said to her boyfriend, "We should do that sometime, write nice romantic stories for one another."

Romantic, perhaps, but I'm sure that this young couple had no idea of the kind of stories Emily and I shared. Even I was not really expecting the dark, perverse turn that Emily had imagined for us in the story that I was then holding in my jacket pocket. Yes, a romantic story if you include gothic romance with its twists and turns, its fear, its pain and its cruelty. Only a couple of hours later I was going to open the envelope and discover how much further my beloved wife's erotic inventions had led her since the tale of the student hitchhiker.

We walked back from the restaurant to our apartment, going slowly because of the very high spike heels Emily had chosen. We stopped from time to time to kiss and snuggle, warming each other against the freezing February night and eager for the stories that we were about to read to one another. I was already feeling aroused, and during a kiss Emily, heedless of the people walking nearby, reached down between my legs to check my expectant member.

Sitting on the sofa with a bottle of Prosecco and two glasses on the coffee table, we resisted the simple temptation to tug off our clothes and make love right there. Instead, as we had done on the previous Valentine's Days, each of us was to read the story offered to her and to him. So I would read out loud Emily's words that she was giving me as a gift from deep in her mind, listening as the excitement and surprise would modulate my voice and sometimes stop me altogether for a moment as I felt the blood rushing to my face and to my member.

She suggested that she go first, giving voice to my tale, which was, in fact, not as innovative as it could have been. I had taken my story from the previous year and stretched it a bit, supposing that while I was away on a business trip Emily, who works downtown, had gone to a wine bar after a long day of work to get a bite to eat, finding it so dull to cook for one person. There, sitting at the counter with her salad and a glass of Viognier, she struck up a conversation with two German tourists, a man and a woman. Emily asked them how they found America and the Americans, and they answered that American were nice and friendly but really very puritanical and narrow-minded in so many ways. When Emily asked for an example, the German woman said that she and her partner enjoyed dating women. Their idea of a good evening was to hook up with a nice lady and share her. And then, curious as to how this would work, Emily walked with them to their hotel room next door.

Emily enjoyed my story, I'm sure. She let me verify her appreciation by slipping my right hand under her short dress to feel the moist front of her panties. The descriptions of the pussy-eating were the best part she said, and she reread to me a couple of sentences about Emily's tongue eagerly exploring the warm pink folds of her German friend's lips while the boyfriend watched enthusiastically. Still, from the expression on her face, I felt that my story fell somewhat below her expectations. Her eyes did not glow with the intensity that I knew to be their potential.

Now it was my turn to read Emily's gift to me. Her body tensed up and she leaned forward as I carefully tore open the violet envelope. My hands were shaking somewhat, because I sensed that something was coming, something that would be...that would be...challenging for me. What did she mean by "the story of a new beginning"? Perhaps I already knew, deep inside me. Her story from the year before had opened new and initially uncomfortable territory, the story of the hitchhiker with whom I willingly shared her in a threesome for a night. That story seemed to be educating me, preparing me to view as erotic something that until then would simply have been repulsive, unthinkable, horrifying, and saddening, all at the same time. And Emily's strategy had worked. The magic of her words, her descriptions and the contagious nature of her own desire had, in the past year, planted in my psyche the idea that sharing her with another man wrapped together pain and pleasure, jealousy and arousal, perversion and love.

I took the pages out of the envelope and unfolded them carefully. There were many more pages than in previous years. Then, postponing as long as I could the encounter with her fantasy, I poured each of us another glass of the Prosecco.

What I then read, out loud, with a wavering voice, remains to this day so vividly impressed that I don't see the words on the page but picture her as she did all the things she recounted.

It began by speaking directly to me: You remember the Saturday when we were in that book clearance center on Seventh Avenue? We saw all those picture books remaindered at ridiculous prices and we paged through them? There were books about barns, about cats, about classic cars and about pin-up models? Then there was the book about bondage and domination, in black and white. We looked at the people in collars and cuffs, with shackles and ball gags, in various settings, all dark and menacing looking... We laughed and said "Is this for real?" Then we put the book down and went to the movies.

Later, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I went back two days later, a Monday, and went through the bin looking for it. It wasn't there, and I thought that someone had bought it. I walked away, disappointed that I hadn't had the nerve to tell you we should have bought it "as a joke" when we first saw it. But then, in another bin, there it was! The dust cover was scratched and torn. Someone had picked it up and then put it down again. I took it to the cash register. My hands were shaking and I was really embarrassed when the cashier, an older woman, looked disapprovingly in my face as I handed her the five dollar bill. At work, I kept it in its bag in my bottom draw, then brought it home and put it in my dresser under my sweaters.

Usually we share everything, but I felt drawn to this book in a strange way, and ashamed that I took it so seriously. I was dying to look at the pictures and read the captions, but I waited for two days until you were at work late. Then, I took it out and sat at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and paged through it.

This was a different world. Was it heaven, or was it hell? Maybe they're the same, for some people. There were men and women in positions of power and subjection: men dominating women, women dominating women, women dominating men, men dominating men, and then, sometimes someone dominating two people at a time. All the pictures were in black and white, and the people were mostly in black leather or lycra or latex clothing, open, of course, to expose them. All the subs, men and women, looked intensely aroused. It was more variable for the dominating men and women, sometimes they looked stony-faced bored but sometimes also excited, almost ferocious. The places photographed were sometimes elaborate stone dungeons as if from a Disney movie, sometimes the interiors of abandoned factories, once the nave of a church, a couple of times public toilets. Most of the subs were young and athletic, and the doms were almost always older. The faces of the subs were often twisted into expressions that might have been pain but might also have been orgasm. Most of the photos showed the results of sex, rather than the act itself. There was a lot of semen splashed on faces, chests, backs, thighs, and hands, and dripping from orifices. There was also a lot of sweat, vaginal secretions, saliva, and sometimes urine.

My hands were trembling so much that I was afraid I would spill the wine on the book. I pushed the book aside and took the glass in both hands to take a drink. My hands were wet, my mouth dry. I was glad that you were out for the evening...

This story was not a fantasy! My hands were shaking too as I realized that this story was too realistic, came too close to home to be pure imagination. Emily had written a confession!

I looked up at her. Usually, when we exchange our tales, we are both smiling, in good humor, even though we are also excited. But Emily was looking embarrassed and watching my face a little anxiously. I went back to reading.

I went back to the bed room and undressed. Then I took my little black vibrator, the one you gave me for Christmas, back out to the kitchen, grabbing a towel from the bathroom on my way. I liked being naked and feeling the chill of the tiles against my warm feet. Sitting at the table, with a towel under my bottom, I spread my legs, sat back, held the vibrator in my right hand so that I could tease my clitoris while I used my left hand to turn the pages. It wasn’t long before I had my first orgasm, looking at a picture of a muscular man in black leather jeans holding a huge plug-in vibrator against the crotch of a much younger woman who was chained, naked, to a table. No need to retell the whole book for you, but I almost didn’t have time to get the book back in its hiding place and the soaked towel in the laundry before you came in. Just as I was putting it away, a business card fell from between the back pages. I was rushing, and I just left the card in the drawer until the following morning, when I looked at it while you were showering.

“Mr. K. Training for qualified subs. Manhattan only.”—that’s all it said, except for the URL of a web site.

Later that day, at work, I looked at the site. I expected something garish with lots of pictures, maybe even videos, but it was very austere. Black, white, gray design with a few paragraphs of text and a place to leave messages. There was also a place for “initiates” to log in. The text instructed those who wished training to leave a message, saying what their motivation and personal situation was. They would be given an address to send photographs if the message was found “promising”.

I shut the web site and closed my browser after checking for any cookies. Nothing new.

For days afterwards, I looked at the book whenever I had a chance, alone, and at night I thought what I would write if I ever dared. Finally, I wrote simply that I had seen the book, that I was a happily married woman in her late twenties, and that I had no experience of being a sub. I gave an e-mail address that I set up just to receive any message in return.

There was no message the next day. And for five days I kept checking. At last, almost a week later, I got a terse message directing me to upload ten photographs of myself, with my face showing. Half should be fully or partially clothed, and half should be nude. Since you have persuaded me to pose for you, I had no trouble sending the required photos. I added, however, a fresh one, that I shot myself, in front of the bathroom mirror, with my phone.

Three days later, I was told to meet Mr. K. at an upscale Italian restaurant in midtown. For an interview. I was to wear a black dress and heels—no underwear or hose. These instructions immediately made me wet. I was already a sub, in a way, even if not an official one yet. The clothing would have been difficult in the summer, but since it was still cold, I would wear an overcoat and slip it off once I was at the table.

When I arrived, I was a little flustered to tell the woman at the podium that I was meeting someone named “Mr. K.” She didn’t look at all surprised, and led me to a table for two near the front window. I had taken extra time for lunch and had removed my hose and underwear in the lady’s room before leaving the building. There was a delicious feel to walking across the floor of the restaurant with my nipples rubbing against my dress. Although I had not planned to do so, I removed my overcoat immediately upon entering the room felt my breasts bouncing deliciously. Being right on display for anyone walking by disturbed me a little, since I felt guilty about having a lunch with a man without telling you. And, of course, anyone who looked carefully would see how I was dressed.

I waited for almost half an hour. Then he appeared: a tall, powerful, man with large shoulders, salt-and-pepper hair and a trim white beard. His dark gray chalk-stripe suit was expensive and impeccably tailored. He sat opposite me without smiling and without any small talk.

“How many partners have you had, altogether. How many men and how many women?”

I almost felt that I was in a gynecologist’s office. Thinking for a little while, I came up with six men and no women.

“You’re twenty-eight?” he said, incredulously. “You sound like a child. I can’t work with that.”

He ordered for us both, including a bottle of wine.

Emily poured some more Prosecco into my glass. “Don’t think too much about it until you’ve read the whole thing. Your story for me also involved me cheating on you, so I know it’s something that turns you on”.

In stories, I thought. But I didn’t say anything, except to thank her for the wine, and then I read some more.

He asked me about my husband, about our sex life—how often, what positions—and found it dull. No anal, no threesomes, no experience of sex clubs, only a little porn.

“No wonder you came to me. You’re desperate. You’re one of the millions leading lives of quiet desperation. But my project is not meant to be an erotic emergency room for the sexually challenged. I can train people when they reach a plateau and need to be pushed beyond.”

Between the time I bought the book and now, I had spent weeks thinking about this moment and expected much more. Men hit on me all the time. I’m attractive. How could he push away a willing woman half his age?

As if he read my mind, he added, “And you’re flat-chested. Not very interesting as a body. Need to do something about that. Piercings or tattoos. Something.”

“No one ever called me that, ‘flat-chested’. That’s ridiculous!”

“No one ever told you the truth, sweetheart.”

I realized that he was doing it already, putting me in my place, my place as a sub. I was insulted, but oddly stimulated.

We ate making small talk. When we parted, in front of the restaurant, he told me he’d be back in touch. It took two weeks.

When the message came, I just cried. Running to the toilet in the office, I shut myself in a stall. My friend Lynn heard me and tried to comfort me. I just said that it was my period, bad PMS.

Mr. K. rejected me. He said that my body lacked visual appeal and that I was sexually inexperienced to a “pathological degree” . I should write back to him when I had “addressed these problems”.

For a few days I just did nothing except sulk. You remember when I was in that bad mood? Finally I decided that it was up to me. This was a challenge and I needed to take the initiative. He had given me enough to go on. I needed to do something to my body and I needed experience, more partners.

It’s easy to find web sites about body modification. I did not want to have bigger breasts, but a tattoo or a piercing was something I could consider. In a week I became an expert on both—at least as much an expert as you can be from just reading.

I stopped reading. Now it all fit! The way Emily, out of the blue, said she wanted to get her nipples pierced. She said that two of the women at work had just done it and that they loved it. I went with her to the piercing salon. Seeing a burly man with tattooed arms push a need through my wife’s nipples, which he had carefully swabbed with alcohol beforehand, was hard to take. But I liked the way they looked, later, with the studs. And then I bought some gold rings with little pearls for our anniversary. Now I knew why she wanted the piercing...unless, of course, she had just taken real events from our life over the past year and woven a complete fabrication around them. Did the piercings come first, and then the idea for “Mr. K.”?

Seeing me pause to think, Emily said, “Let’s leave the rest for another day. Don’t think too much. Don’t talk. Just fuck me.”

She lunged forward and unzipped my fly, liberating my erect member, which shot up as soon as she pulled back the elastic of my briefs. This story, it was playing with my mind—real? imaginary? It was a torment and an inebriating aphrodisiac together. Emily knows me well enough to find exactly those things that will drive me wild, and at this moment, with her mouth on my cock, I didn’t care about reality, illusion, fiction, reality...

Soon we had our clothes off and she was on top of me, and I was (literally) seeing stars, as I climaxed harder than I had ever done before. She collapsed on top of me, and we passed out. Only later in the night did we wake up and stumble into bed.

The next morning I had to rush to get to the airport for a trip to Boston that would keep me overnight, so I didn’t get to have the talk I wanted about whether or not her story was a true confession or just a really edgy fabrication that wove pieces of our real life into a fantasy. Emily gave me a big kiss and said that she couldn’t wait to have me back. We couldn’t Skype that evening because her company was making a presentation for out of town buyers.

While I was away I thought a lot—a lot!—about the story, and I realized that it had to be a fiction, but one that was so artfully contrived that it was meant to fool me. Emily had taken a year’s worth of sexy things from our actual life, and had created the story of “Mr.

K.” to fit them into a narrative. And there was no denying that it was the hottest, most daring story either of us had created. I masturbated several times during my trip, without even watching any of the adult videos on offer in my hotel room.

When we finally had another evening together, two days later, I was eager to continue reading. Emily put on a short lacy nightie with a tiny thong and sat next to me on the sofa, watching my face and also watching lower down for my reaction.

Remember when I announced one morning that I thought it would be great to get my nipples pierced? You looked really shocked. You tried to talk me out of it, mentioned the pain, the dangers of infection that you had heard about—but nothing worked, and you finally agreed to come with me. Of course, it meant not playing with my nipples for that month, but the really nice thing was that you liked the way they looked, and I was so touched when you bought me the gold rings. The feeling is just incredible! On top of everything else that was going on in my life, the feeling of the rings under my bra as I walked around was just a constant reminder of sex.

Having sex with strangers—cheating on you—was much harder. It’s one thing to want to be dominated but another to flirt openly with someone in a bar, let him hit on me, and then let him know that I’m completely available and “sexually active.” The counter-intuitive thing is that it was easier when I kept my wedding ring on. The men knew that I was only looking for something quick, nothing long-term. So it made it safer, more convenient for them.

This set my heart pounding, the idea of Emily letting herself get picked up and fucked! Almost impossible to imagine, not at all her style, but something that figured in a lot of our bedtime fantasies. It reminded me of seeing guys hitting on her in parties, not deterred by her wedding band, and of the way she laughed as she told them “no”. Of course I didn’t hear the banter, since this always happened when I was on the opposite side of the room, but it left me excited.

I stopped reading and told her what a great story idea this was and said that we should try it as a game.

“A game? What do you mean, baby? Me going out and hooking up with random guys?”

“No, not really, silly! But say I could let you go into a bar a few minutes before me, and you could let someone buy you a drink and hit on you and look you over and ask if you’d like to go somewhere more intimate, and then I would come in and you’d explain to your new friend that it would have to be some other time.”

“Hot! Yes, yes, let’s play that game!”

“Yes, you could wear something really low cut and tight.”

By now it was clear that we weren’t going to be able to read any more that night.

Emily said, “Right now, I want you to fuck me in the ass. Only in the ass.”

That was another thing that was new in the previous year, anal sex. Also Emily’s idea, from a magazine article that she showed me. At first I thought that it was a little gay, but the article in the women’s magazine said that in absolute numbers, anal sex was practiced much more among heterosexuals.

We managed to get into bed and then we kissed and fucked, face to face, missionary anal.

All the next day I was really eager to get back to the story and to see how Emily imagined her experiment in hook-up sex.

The dozen or so men who fucked me or I went down on are all blurred together. The first one stands out most, of course, the way all first-times do. It was like being single again, except that I wasn’t looking for someone to date, for someone to see again. So actually the ones I chose were all pretty obnoxious, men who would put me off if I had to talk with them—loud, pushy, not overly smart, not “sensitive”, not even particularly good-looking. I just went for the ones who looked really eager but also self-confident enough so that they wouldn’t freak out and go soft. A couple of them wanted a buddy to be involved, and that was OK with me as long as we could do it quickly and right there. The stalls of public toilets are fine for the basics. Remember, I didn’t start out doing this to get off. It happened a few times, but mostly I would only come later, thinking about it, usually making love with you. Guilt can be an aphrodisiac, and having you inside me while I thought about one of two of my recent hook-ups gave married sex a real edge. The hardest thing of all, during this period, was not sharing with you. I would come home and my immediate instinct was to say, “The dude I just sucked had a tattoo on his foreskin!” or “I actually got fucked by a guy while his wife was finishing her wine and signing the credit-card receipt!” And I didn’t like telling you that I was at the gym or working late when I wasn’t.

By the time that I had done my dozen, had gotten my piercings, and got used to anal sex thanks to your patient help, I was ready to get back in touch with Mr. K.

It was amazing to see how Emily found a place for everything from the previous year—things that we had done together in bed found their way into her fantasy about Mr. K.

I wrote Mr. K. a long, long message detailing all I had done to move out of the uninteresting and undeveloped category to which he had scornfully relegated me. I sent pictures of me with my nipple rings and a detailed list of my anonymous encounters with men. I mentioned that I was now very much into anal sex and wanted more than ever to experience what it was like to be a sub.

Mr. K.’s replay came faster than I dared to hope. As usual, it was very terse: It gave me address, time, and date, only a few days away. Fortunately, it was for an evening when you would be making your presentation in Cincinnati. He added, “This is just probationary. Think of it as an interview. You have not yet been accepted.”

I was anxious, of course, but optimistic. I would do anything to make this happen. Several times a week I had been taking out the book and looking through it, often just before we made love, to put myself in the mood.

The address led me to a construction site downtown. As I got out of the taxi, I was sure there was a mistake, that the number was wrong. Then, looking around, I saw that on the chain-link fence was a yellow sign that had a big black “K” . It was a corporate logo. Apparently Mr. K. owned the property under construction. There was a light on in a temporary building near a gate in the chain-link fence. I knocked on the door of this trailer, and asked for “Mr. K.” The man gave me some boots to put on and a hard hat, and told me to follow a path marked with sheets of paper printed with arrows and stapled to the wooden construction railings. The building had lamps here and there, but he gave me a flashlight as well. The arrows led down rough concrete stairs. I kept going down and down.

From basement to subbasement, and then down again, to a sub-subbasement. A basement for subs. A basement for debasement. A sub looking for a base. The baseness of my desires. A debased substitute for love.

There was no one around. Finally, I was in the lowest level, where found a plywood door that was locked from the inside. I knocked, and there was Mr. K., wearing construction overalls, not his Armani suit.

From the cold, wet construction site outside, I walked into a medium-sized room that was actually warm and dry. There were some electric heaters and there was carpeting over the cement floor, but the lighting was just some bulbs in metal housings dangling from wires, making some spots very bright and others shadowy. There was the acrid smell of fresh concrete, and lots of pipes and valves. It was certainly not a romantic, medieval dungeon, but it was very subterranean. I realized that I could scream as loud as possible and no one would hear me. Now that I was inside the door, all the “normal” rules of society were gone. Mr. K. could do anything he wanted with me. I had read somewhere about BDSM having rules and safe words and so forth, but so far Mr. K. and I had no agreements whatsoever. I was here, entirely delivered over to him, ready for anything. It was scary but it was wonderfully exciting.

Already in the room was another man dressed like Mr. K. and a girl, about ten years younger than I and completely different from me in style. The opposite, in fact. Her chestnut hair was shoulder-length on one side of her head, but on the other it was buzzed, almost shaved. She had a ring in her right nostril and a stud in her upper lip . She was wearing a big black raincoat so I couldn’t see her body at first.

This was my first physical experience of being dominated. Mr. K. told me to strip. I pulled off my clothes, awkwardly, as the three others watched. When I was naked, the girl said, “Not bad!”Mr. K. slapped her, hard. “You’ll speak when I tell you to.”

The girl whimpered a little. The other man smiled, but said nothing. Mr. K. told me to take a collar and cuffs out of a plastic bag that was on the floor, ones that fit me. There were a bunch of black leather collars and cuffs. I fumbled for a while, naked, while the others watched, until I got ones that fit my neck, my wrists, and my ankles, but I had trouble putting them on. Then I felt the sting as the little whip hit my butt.

“Stupid amateur. Why do I bother with them, these straight married women who can’t make up their minds?” He turned to the girl and said, “Help her.”

The girl, later I found that her name—her name here—was Blue (I have no idea why), helped me put on the accoutrements. Then he pulled Blue’s coat off. She was naked now, and already had cuffs and collar on, but naked is a relative term. Her body was so decorated with tattoos and piercings that it seemed she was meant to be this way, that clothes would just get in the way. Colorful tattoos covered her back, down across her cheeks to the back of her legs as well as her chest, both arms, her belly, her thighs, and the front of her feet. Her nipples were pierced, like mine, but also her clitoris, her navel, and her labia.

Mr. K. called me “Piece” or “Peace”—I’m not sure which or why. Maybe because I was a piece of ass to him. He told me to attach Blue’s cuffs. When that was done, he did something that for me was a turning point. He made me squat over an old plastic paint bucket and pee, while they watched. It was humiliating, I was red in the face, and it took me a while before I could do more than a few drops. Once my urine was flowing into the pail, though, I felt an incredible, unexpected euphoria. If I could do this and overcome my shame, couldn’t I do anything?

Then the men took off their overalls. Both were very, very muscular. The other man, called Twenty-Seven, was not as big as Mr. K., but his chest and arms were powerful. Both had one pierced nipple and tattoos on their arms and chests. They were wearing tight black leather jeans.

The two men took Blue and me and pushed us together. They pulled my hands around her back and cuffed them together, locking me in an embrace, and did the same with hers. They fastened our ankles together. There was no way we could stay balanced upright, so they picked us up and laid us on the carpet, bound together, face to face, breast to breast, thigh to thigh. They didn’t tell us what to do. Mr. K. put on music with some sound system I hadn’t noticed. It was loud and vibrating and had a driving techno beat with a man’s voice chanting simple repeated phrases like “tie me down”, “fuck me up”, “make me come”, “lick it now,” etc. It was hypnotic. Blue was underneath me and I could smell her perfume, sweat, and spicy warm wet pussy. My breasts were rubbing against her fuller ones, and there was no way for our mouths not to touch. I had never really kissed a girl before. Only quick pecks on the lips. But now my tongue was in her mouth, feeling the new sensation of a pierced tongue against mine. She kissed me eagerly, greedily—it was obvious that she was deeply into girls, maybe even a lesbian. Our saliva was flowing into each other and over our chins and cheeks. The sensation of being pushed against her warm, soft, sweaty skin from head to ankle was weird, new, and intoxicating. I was deliberately now rubbing my stiff nipples against hers. There were tiny clinks when our nipple jewelry touched. I lost all restraint and shyness. I was great to be bond to her but I wished I could get at all parts of her body. I loved her smell and suddenly I wanted to lick her armpits and taste more of her sweat. I wanted to lick my way to her nipples and suck and then kiss my way down to her navel, kissing all over her inked skin, tracing the patterns with my tongue, and then I wanted to suck her navel studs between my lips. Of course I knew where I would go, if I could—right between her thighs to her soaked pussy.

We weren’t talking, but I knew we were thinking the same things. The way we were bound together gave us enough wiggle space so that I could put my left knee and thigh between her thighs, and this way she could rub her clitoris against my thigh just as I was doing. The sensation sent waves of shock and pleasure through my whole body. It was the first time that I was masturbating myself against another woman’s body—against anyone’s body! This was a totally new kind of sex and in those moments I understood what the concept of paradise means, what paradise feels like, tastes like, smells like. Those moments altered me utterly, and Blue became my new goddess, a new holy Eucharist. The words from church now made sense, the words were made flesh: eat of me, drink of me.

Now we were each bucking our hips, pushing and shoving our thighs against our clits and clits against thighs. Feeling her swollen clit against my slippery lubricated skin was electric! She was so swollen that it felt like the head of a cock. When we started to come, I was just carried away in a cloud of throbbing, pulsing, and flowing. I had never squirted before, but now my body just released a flood of juice only Blue, who was already soaking herself. I don’t know how long this lasted, but after a while the men unfastened us. Only later did I wonder what they had been doing all that time. Were they masturbating? Or were they doing something with each other? Anyway, they were naked now and had huge red erections.

Mr. K. grabbed me, pushed me onto a mattress and then I felt his cock pushing into my ass. I cried, and he said “Shut up, stupid cunt!” I wanted to be with Blue, or else I wanted to leave. No one ever treated me like that before. He was pushing so far into me—I didn’t believe that there could be such a big cock or that anyone could push so deep into my intestines. I started to reach back with my right hand to rub myself but he pushed my hand away. “I decide if you can come or not!” The tears were flowing down my face, I looked up and saw Blue being banged the same way by the other man.

“Now say ‘Fuck me, Master.’”

At first I didn’t answer. Even though I had promised to myself that I would do everything right, anything to be accepted, I now resisted. I could hardly speak anyway, I was just gasping.

“Say it! Say ‘Fuck me, Master. Fuck me in the ass. Please.’”

I began to speak, or chant. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster: “Fuck me, Master. Ass-fuck me Master. Ass-fuck me Master. Ass-fuck me Master.”

He reached around and started fingering my clit. He played with me, his big fingers squeezing and then releasing it. I was about to start coming…and then he stopped! I was bucking back against him, he was panting, and I could hear his balls slapping against my cheeks. Then, suddenly, he bellowed, stiffened, and came.

For a moment I could just here Blue and the other man panting, and then Mr. K. pulled out and pushed me over onto my back on the mattress.

Now I could see Blue and the other man as he pulled out of her ass, pulled off his condom, and masturbated so that he came on her tattooed chest and breasts. I wanted to touch myself but was afraid to do it without permission. I said, “Can I touch myself?” He looked at me with contempt, and said, “Frig yourself. Go on.”

I fingered myself frantically and had a huge orgasm, wailing, the tears streaming down my face.

After that, there’s kind of a blur until I found myself out on the street again, getting a taxi. The driver asked if I was in trouble, if I needed to go to a hospital, but I just told him to drive me home.



The idea of Emily with another woman was one of my number one fantasies, as she knew well. But we both knew that she would never actually cross the line. She had various reasons for this: fear of approaching a woman and being rejected, fear that she would not actually be able to go through with it, when faced with the actual physical reality, and the contrary fear that she would find it too wonderful and would become “addicted” to women. So this bondage fantasy with another woman, combined with the rough sex with a nameless man, set my crotch to pulsing. I needed to make love with Emily, but she had other ideas in mind. She told me she wanted to see the effect of her story on me. She asked me to unzip and pull out my engorged penis so that she could witness what her words had wrought. Then, instead of making love, she wanted to watch me stroke myself until I came. Up until then, I had never let her see me masturbate. Sure, I would now and then give myself a couple of strokes before pushing myself into her delicious pussy, but masturbation was not a spectacle we had enjoyed. But now she reached her fingers into her own wet pussy and fingered herself as we watched each other. This novel sight combined with the images from her story quickly pushed us both over the edge. Fortunately our sofa has stain-guard.

That was all the reading we could handle for that evening, and we went to bed. Thinking that we’d now make love, I rolled over and pulled her to me, her round, tight ass against my half-hard cock. But Emily, uncharacteristically, said, “No, let’s save it. Let’s wait until tomorrow when we read some more. That way, we’ll be wild with hunger...” It all felt very perverse, but in keeping with the unbelievable story that she was having me read.

You can imagine the dreams I had that night—frustrated, excited, filled with her fantastic story...

We came back to our reading the next day--I was full of suspense about the way her story would end. I could think of little else. This time, knowing full well how we were going to react, Emily put on a nightgown and I was wearing yoga pants. We sat barefoot on the sofa, and I began to read.

When Mr. K. summoned me to breakfast at the Plaza, I spent so much time with my hair and choosing what to wear (I settled, finally, for a dark suit with slim pants) that I was almost late. I knew that being late was not an option, not with Mr. K. He greeted me, as usual, without a smile. And then, over coffee, gave me “good news and bad news”. The good news was that he would accept me. But the bad news was the condition. My husband had not only to give his consent, in writing, but had to “be involved”.

I sat there for a while in silence, trying to take this all in. You would never consent, I was sure. And then what did it mean to “be involved”? That’s what I asked him about, and he just said “I’ll decide on that, when the occasion arises.”

I asked what I could do. Maybe there was some alternative? Something extra I could do instead of telling you and seeing my marriage fall apart?

“Look, the idea of you spending a few hours a week in training, expanding your sexual horizons, liberating yourself, and then going back to your sweet little “monogamous” marriage—what a farce!—is enough to make me want to puke. If you’re not serious, Emily, don’t waste my time.”

It was the first time, I think, that he had ever called me by my name. Usually it was just “you”.

He paid and left.

In the following week, I was very depressed. You noticed, and I said that work was not going well and that I didn’t want to talk about it. It was as if I were angry with you, because you were standing in the way with Mr. K. But it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t even know that you were in the way of anything.

That week, in my reading, I came across a quote from Anaïs Nin: “It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” I really loved it, but it was a reminder of my problem. It wasn’t your problem. I didn’t have the courage even to speak to you. So I did something that for me was pushing myself to a new place. I copied the quote and went to the same place where I had gotten my nipples pierced. I asked if they could tattoo the quote on me. The woman I spoke with said that it was a little long. They could do it, but it would take a lot of skin or would have to be really small letters. I decided just to do the second part. We decided to put it on my right side, starting even with my nipples and running down in a column to my hip.

the day came when

the risk it took

to stay tight

inside the bud

was more painful

than the risk

it took to

blossom

I made an appointment for Sunday, and asked you to come with me, but I didn’t tell you what my tattoo would be. You only saw it as the letters were being inked in black in that fine cursive script, and you had no idea what it was about.

And now it’s time to tell you.

That was how her story ended! An ending without an ending. What did it mean? When I finished reading, Emily pulled off her nightgown, leaving on only her white thong, which was visibly drenched. She was trembling, and I realized that it wasn’t only from sexual excitement. She seemed scared, and she was pale.

She said, “Vincent, I want you to trace my tattoo with your fingers and to say the words out loud.”

Nervously, I reached forward and traced the letters, feeling the smoothness of the skin, which was all healed now, leaving only the lovely lines. As I read the words, Emily recited them along with me, from memory. They were imprinted on her mind even more permanently than on her skin.

“What it means, Vincent, is that the story I wrote for you is a true story. Mr. K. really exists. I really did all those things, including the hook-ups with insignificant guys in bars. I can’t imagine not going through with living for at least a year as a sub. And you have to help me. Mr. K. demands of me that you be involved. I know you’ll be in shock, now, for a while, but please, tomorrow, say yes. And right now, please push me onto the floor and fuck me. If you’re angry at me, fuck me like you’re angry, but just fuck me.”

Angry is not the word for what I was. She was right, I was in shock. And it was a sexual shock. It was like watching a film, some dark, pornographic film, and then finding that you’re not watching any more, you’re in it. And because I was in it, deep into this dark world where neither one of us was really in control, where we were each already aroused profoundly by some fantasy that had possessed us and now incapable of claiming innocence, I wanted to possess her body, at least, since her mind was now possessed by someone else.

I drove my stiff cock deep into her asshole, bypassing her sweet pussy, and just pushing my way in. She groaned and then cried out loud—not worrying about the neighbors—Fuck my ass! FUCK! FUCK! She was fingering her snatch frantically, and it didn’t take long before she was bucking back against me as I thrust forward, finally exploring with a huge load of cum. We collapsed on the carpet in our sweat. After a few dazed minutes she said, “Lick it out of me.”

I moved around so that I could get my face between her legs and licked up the stream of white goo dripping from her sphincter. Then we kissed passionately and shared the cum.

That was the evening when I said yes. Yes to everything, to Mr. K., to her hooking up when she felt like it, to me “getting involved.”

Now, a year later, I am holding the result in my hand, the video of that year when I watched Emily turned into the addict she now is, addicted to the sensations that Mr. K. has trained her to expect and to seek, and that he has trained me to adore. As I slip the disc into the pink and red wrapper, I can feel my cock stiffen with anticipation. In a moment I will get the Champagne from the fridge and go out into the living room to find Emily.