His House of Submission

His cock was a nice one, firm and substantial, if not quite in proportion with his godlike body. My knuckles grazed against the root of it, feeling it rub back and forth, the rubber soaked and slippery now.

He plunged and plunged and I felt my buttocks tense and my spine arch and oh, yes.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said it out loud, again and again and, just as I crested the high point and tipped back down the other side of the wave, I said, ‘Thank you, Sir.’

And then I turned my head away and considered smacking myself in the face. Why on earth had I said that out loud?

But Will didn’t question it, simply banged away all the more until his own orgasm ripped through his body – really, I could feel the ripping – and then collapsed on top of me.

I always liked this moment, the hammering of twin hearts and the gathering of breath. Somehow this was a better payoff than the preceding orgasms.

‘You came, didn’t you?’ panted Will, rolling off eventually.

‘You heard me, didn’t you? Of course I did. Of course.’ I stroked his close-cropped hair. Beneath it, his scalp felt hot.

‘Just … you’re a bit of a strange fruit, aren’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What you said. When you came.’

I turned my face away.

‘Don’t make fun of me.’

‘I’m not. Sarah, honestly, I’m not. Look at me. Talk to me.’

I dared a glance from beneath low-slung eyelids. He didn’t look jokey or mocking. I opened them wider.

‘You and him,’ Will said. ‘You’d probably get on.’

‘Him? Jasper Jay?’

I couldn’t refer to my employer by anything but his full name. We weren’t on first-name terms yet. Indeed, we weren’t on any terms. We had never met.

‘Yeah. Jasper Almighty Jay.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘He’s all right. He pays me.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Didn’t he interview you?’

‘No. It was a woman, his secretary or PA or something. He was in France, filming. Well, he still is. Anyway, why did you say that we’d get on?’

‘That thing you said. It was a bit kinky.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Shut up apologising, you daft ha’p’orth. Absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of kink. It was quite a turn-on, as it goes.’

I exhaled gratefully. I hadn’t made such a prize exhibition of myself after all. Though I could still see, in the corner of my mind, a little mental film reel of Will down at the local pub regaling his mates with the story.

‘Thanks. So?’

‘So. Jasper Jay and you might have a little something in common.’

‘What do you mean? He’s into …?’

‘Get your kit back on,’ whispered Will, ‘or not, as you choose, and I’ll show you.’

I couldn’t really be bothered with all the jeans and bra palaver, so I borrowed a threadbare towelling robe of Will’s and followed my half-dressed lover out of the bedroom.

‘He hired you to catalogue his collections,’ said Will, creeping barefoot down the back stairs. ‘But I wonder if he meant you to see this one.’

‘A collection?’ I whispered. Why was I whispering? Why were we creeping? It all felt deeply illicit.

We tiptoed past the library, with its vast collection of first editions, some of which I’d managed to list. Past the drawing room and the morning room and all the other rooms, chock-full of antiques and artefacts. Up the main stairs to the first floor bedrooms, past my little bolthole and into …

‘Oh, I don’t think we should go into his room.’

‘Why not? He isn’t here. He’ll never know. Here, have a swig.’

He passed me the bottle of expensive red wine, but I was too wary of spilling it, and besides, my mind was occupied with taking in the huge four-poster bed and the dark oak furnishings and the gigantic chest that took up at least a fifth of the large room’s space.

Will took a key from his jeans back pocket and fitted it into the chest’s lock.

‘This is his private stuff,’ I agonised. ‘I don’t think we should.’

Too late, though, because the lid was raised and I stared down into an abyss of deviance.

‘God,’ I whispered, lowering myself to my knees and peering inside. It was all so neatly compartmentalised, boxes within boxes, but some of the contents were in long fabric bags. For instance, the whips. And canes. And riding crops.

‘Is this what you’re into?’ asked Will, opening one of the boxes and showing me a selection of cuffs – leather, metal, fur-lined, velcro, you name it.

‘This is … I mean. Wow. It’s a collection. Does he just collect the stuff or does he use it?’

I opened another box, my curiosity overwhelming my caution now, and found a selection of first-edition titles, some of which – like The Story of O – were familiar to me, others not so well known.

‘The Harem of the Flagellants,’ I read, my finger hovering over a cheaply but sturdily bound Victorian tome. I shivered.

It was one thing to fantasise about these things, but quite another to see them in real life. I felt a strange kind of fear, as if I had skimmed a surface and been dragged underneath it. Now I was here in the underworld, could I get out again?

Will hadn’t answered my question, so I asked it again.

‘Does any of this stuff get used?’