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Domina (Chapter 2)

Craig Shaw

That night my impulses win out and I take a taxi to Lashes. I was barred from the club years ago but with its membership booming I can usually blend in with the crowd if I make it past the bouncers. I wear a sensory deprivation hood to hide my face and a leather neck collar with a hidden release spring. The gear identifies me as a submissive, and a woman behind me in line whacks my shoulder with a phony riding crop, its tip made of rubber, not fiberglass. I go to hands and knees and tilt the collar's eyehook toward my assailant. I hear a latch snap closed on the hook. Part of a "couple" now, I'll beat the bouncers for sure. A foot puts cautious pressure on my neck. "Keep your filthy snout to the ground, dog," my idiot "owner" says as the line shifts.
     I shuffle through the door on all fours, enduring kicks in the ass from my owner. Once inside, I stand up, unfasten the collar, stuff the hood in my pocket, and begin prowling the crowd for edge play. My owner runs to catch up, smacking my back with the pet leash. "Prostrate yourself for boot tribute, you fuck," she says. I turn for a look at her. A typical Lashes dominant--forty pounds overweight and ugly, using S&M as a dating substitute, failing as badly here as in the vanilla world, since any submissive could tell she'd be winded ten minutes into a session. She wears swashbuckler boots, a polyvinyl chloride miniskirt, elbow-length mesh gloves, all bought off the rack at Hurts & His, the city's S&M clothier.
     "Where's your police cap?" I say.
     "Questions? Ten cane strokes!"
     I point to her belt buckle. "Use that."
     "Orders? Ten more!"
     Her friends have caught up with her. They're real posers, don't even wear full outfits, just throwaway accessories like stiletto shoes and bustiers. I snatch the riding crop from my owner and hand the butt end back to her. Then I unzip my ass fly and bend over, hugging my knees for stability. A dozen tourists, holding bottled beers and mixed drinks, crowd around for a look. My owner still hasn't moved. I shout back, "Are you blind?"
     I'm risking being recognized staging a scene so close to the bouncers. I wait another ten seconds. The crop's butt end probes my asshole with all the force of a wet tampon. "Useless," I say, zipping up.
     "I'll tear him a new one," boasts a muscleman in the audience.
     "Really?" I lift my shirt to show him the scar where my left nipple was ripped off during an edge session. He throws up an arm and turns away; his girlfriend buckles as if kidney-punched.
     I hurry for the theme rooms, where the crowd is thickest. It's been over a year since I've visited Lashes, and in that time the club has tripled in square footage, taking over an adjoining payday-loan store and kickboxing studio. Originally for members only, it opened to the public two years ago, and now sells six-dollar drinks to voyeurs who watch mild, sexless S&M and think they're experiencing the underground. I was barred from Lashes as an "unsafe player," a submissive who wouldn't follow their cardinal rules, "No blood, no sex, no scat." I violated all three, convincing an amateur dominant to fistfuck me gloveless in the restroom, drawing a torrent of blood-laced diarrhea, as I hadn't yet learned to purge my bowels beforehand. That was the last straw; I'd been barred temporarily several times for allowing skin laceration during floggings. After the fistfuck my name and photograph went on Lashes' blacklist, along with famous kamikazes like Spout, who once had fifty penny nails pounded lengthwise into his skin, and Paddles, who had suffered four separate cardiac arrests during electrotorture sessions. Part of that company now, I had my name changed to Scab.
     The club's first theme room is dedicated to infantilism. Middle-aged men in diapers crawl in frantic circles, doms flogging their bare backs; one man straddles his dom's knees for a hairbrush spanking, whining "I didn't do nothin',"; another writes "I will not wet my underpants" repeatedly on a chalkboard. Most of these men are doctors, prosecutors, school principals. Several are exposed every time the club is raided, and the thrill of risking discovery only adds to their titillation. The closest thing to edge play in this room is a screaming, beanie-capped man undergoing retrograde orgasm--his urethra pinched shut with a cock ring so his semen is diverted back to his bladder--so I move on to the depersonalization room. Here naked, immobile subs play the part of footstools, hatstands, end tables, ashtrays. Sometimes a depersonalization dom will get bored enough stubbing out cigarettes on her sub's ass cheeks to engage in rough stuff with a newcomer. But there are only three doms in the room, and I recognize two of them; I had session with one in the old days, acting as her rug for eight hours until she refused to spread broken glass on my back or heat her boot soles on the stove burner. Next in line is the hospital room, tonight mostly devoted to men in stockades getting enemas, the surgery gurney standing empty. I've given up and am heading for the exit when a bouncer runs by, saying "Hot spot, hot spot" into his wrist mike. Sensing promise, I follow. In the "toilet boy" room, a skinny sub wearing a frilly maid suit swings his plunger in roundhouse swoops and howls at the ceiling tiles. Three bouncers converge on him, but he's deep into psycho space and fends them off for a full minute, baring his teeth and spewing drool. Finally one bouncer pins the sub's neck with the plunger stem and the other two hoist his legs. As they carry him out, I spot his dominant, sitting discouraged on one of the room's dozen toilets. She's not in costume, just leather pants and a sports bra. She looks amateur, but if she hit an experienced sub's hot spot, she must have some talent. As the other subs return to their toilet cleaning, I get on hands and knees before her, my nose an inch or two from the sudsy cement.
     "Ma'am, this shitstain presents itself for service, ma'am," I say.
     "Yeah? You going to wack out on me too?"
     "Ma'am, not in this lifetime, ma'am."
     She sighs. "I don't know. I should just go home. All I did was play-pierce his bellybutton."
     "Ma'am, may this shitstain offer its opinion, ma'am?"
     "I don't care."
     "Ma'am, a dominant isn't responsible if a submissive not worth the name lacks the discipline for instruction. Before offering itself for correction the submissive should develop the mental and physical faculties to withstand it. One who fails this requirement deserves the consequences of any trigger it leaves unguarded, ma'am."
     "Yeah? What's your trigger?"
     "Ma'am, you'd be more likely to cure cancer, all due respect, ma'am."
     "Really. What makes you so tough?"
     "Sixteen split canes, ma'am. Six detached whip handles. Two blown cattle prods."
     I hear the toilet creak as she stands. "Fine. Clean it, prick. With your tongue."
     I take a tether from my pocket. "Ma'am, this shitstain has an offensive habit of breathing audibly during instruction. Would you fasten this to its neck to correct it?"
     She ties it good and tight, ratcheting it up a few notches at my hand signal. I'm dizzy in thirty seconds and my limbs go floppy soon after. Now I just have to convince her to give me a hard flogging. That's about as far as anyone at Lashes will go, but it might let me sleep tonight, assuming she accidentally breaks the skin. Each room has a selection of whipping equipment and I urge her to "correct this shitstain's sloppy work habits" with it as I take my tongue to the toilet bowl. She monitors my progress, barking commands, pushing my face into the pisswater; soon she spots a feces streak I've missed and goes to the wall rack to choose weapons. She separates my knees with a spreader bar and starts flogging my bare feet with a rattan cane. That's heavier than I expected for a Lashes patron; it takes me nowhere, but at least I can feel it. She doesn't make me play counting games, like requesting each cane stroke to prove I'm not unconscious, and she hasn't bothered giving me a "safeword," which sissy subs use to cut short a session that gets too intense. She bares my ass--I hear a quick gasp at the scarring--and starts caning the bottoms of my buttocks, then turns the cane upright to spank my perineum. I might get somewhere with this girl. She's at the right stage, just discovering this thing in her, still disgusted enough by it to go overboard. I can't decide whether to fake pain sounds or stay quiet; a sub's silence can rankle an experienced dominant into exceeding her limits, but with this girl, I sense the more she thinks she's hurting me, the more she'll want to. I let out a yell as she starts caning the soft skin where my thighs and calves meet. The cane does sting nicely there; I don't have to entirely fake it. "Shut it," she says, taking a harder swipe. Good cane pain follows, waves of it, two or three jolts for each stroke, as if she's whipping me triple speed. The skin there's likely to split if she continues so I boost the volume on my outcries. "Shut," stroke, "it," stroke, "shitstain," stroke. She's landing a blow every few seconds now; footsteps and murmurs tell me a ragged crowd has gathered. Flogging for an audience is bound to excite her, though if she's like most newcomers, she'll wake up racked with self-hatred later. "Please stop it!" I scream. "Please shut it!" she replies, landing a blow across my shoulder blades. No, the legs again, bitch, you were near laceration. She's having fun now, making stripe marks up and down my back, but I can tell she won't lose control enough to cut me, and the cane strokes have lost even their small appeal, reduced to a nagging, achy itch. I stand up and face her; she halts a cane stroke in midair and the thin rattan stalk snaps whiplike. I look down. The backs of my knees are crosshatched white and red, but the skin is intact. The amateur has worked up a sweat, her breath rocks her body; she stares past the still-clenched cane and right through my reddened skin into a future of suicide attempts, subterfuge and, probably, her first orgasms. A bouncer monitoring the flogging appears to have recognized me and his wrist-mike alert has summoned two colleagues. They walk me away, one explaining, "some kamikaze who used to do fucked-up scenes in here." I'll be back on the blacklist, so no Lashes visits for a while; there are a half-dozen other clubs in the city now, but they're even tamer, and I don't need them anyway, I have my domina, we're still together, that therapist cunt's lies can't touch us, I'll clear all that up tomorrow, at session; I'll do whatever I need to make us right again; I'll offer my whole body up to her like never before. That's the thought that stays with me as the bouncers shove me out the door, the back door, I notice, which leads to a wet alley, in which they encircle me, one saying, "You like hits?" He gives me one, a short backhand punch in the mouth, followed by his colleagues, a kidney shot, an ear clout, a head butt, through ringing ears I hear, "Think a guy with scars like that's going to call the cops?" None of the rest of it reaches me, though it lasts five or ten minutes and leaves me immobilized on my back in dumped keg suds and ashtray trash; I'm already in tomorrow, in session, in oblivion.

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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