escapades

Escapades: a New Sub in Montreal

Everything around me is pitch black. I can see nothing at all except for the two tiny pinprick points of light at my nose that let me breathe. I have to strain my eyes downward to their limits to see even that. After a few seconds I give up my efforts and give up control. I close my eyes and lower my head in surrender. I open all of my body's other senses to what is happening to me.

I am standing perfectly still in the back room of a very special shop, balanced on my little red high heels. The hem of my short black-and-white dress brushes the backs of my thighs. My Brazilian-cut black-and-white panties are riding up uncomfortably underneath. Black leather cuffs circle my wrists and ankles, binding my mind with a sensual reminder of restriction. Even more stirring is the leather collar studded with four silver D-rings buckled tightly around my slender throat, recalling the recent sensation of hands gripping me there, choking me, making me want it. Finally, there is the hood of thick, smooth, black material that covers my entire head, my curly brown hair, masking and blinding me. My breath is warm and moist on the inside of the fabric, but I know that from the outside I must appear completely faceless, breathless, stripped of all identity. I feel transformed into an object. I am shaped for the pleasure of the man who has left the room "just for a minute" to get something, I don't know what. I am waiting for him. Time stretches, expands. I listen intently but I can't make sense of the noises I hear: distant taps, directionless movements. Is there someone else in the room? I feel like I'm being watched in my helpless, frozen state. The sense of exposure charges my skin with prickly electricity. My body trembles in his power.

Every step I have taken so far has led me here. My heart is throbbing with anticipation. It is my first time, my first actual performance as a sub. I have no idea what is about to happen to me. And in this moment of what should be complete powerlessness, I feel so free I think I could do anything.

Mmm, yes, that's one place it could begin: blinded, collared, and practically vibrating with excitement in the hands of a skillful Dom. That was my first time consciously and deliberately "playing." But gentle reader, let me back up a bit. Because I didn't just walk into this scene from nowhere. As with a good strip-tease I was built up to that absolute submission over the course of a year, through a series of increasingly intense escapades in the vibrant city of Montreal. One by one I will drop my veils and share my stories with you, for your pleasure in reading and my pleasure in confession. They may be mild and not very revealing at first, but I promise that by the end you will see me fully exposed—or, as much as safety allows. I have altered the names and places to protect everyone involved. But the core events of the story are, as I like to say, true fantasy. Just what that means, dear reader, I humbly leave for you to judge.

Summer 2010

It all began with a wish sent out to the Universe and a visit to my dear friend and confidante, Amie. Eccentric, enthusiastic Amie. We've been friends since our college days and I've visited her in apartments all across the world, but since she moved to Montreal I've seen her there more often than anywhere else. Her place is my home away from home, somewhere I can explore from. During the day we see the sights, shop, eat at fancy (and not so fancy) restaurants, and do all the things that tourists do, but with the benefit of her local knowledge. Then at night and into the early morning, we talk. There, in the dark, I can get up the courage to say what's on my mind—or rather, my body. What my body wants. That's what happened the first time I visited her in Montreal. I just needed to tell someone. I'd been holding it in for so long.

"I don't want sex," I said, just to clear that up first. "But..."

My tongue stumbled against the solid blocks of silence I'd built around myself.

"I want sensation. I want certain things done to me, you know?"

She stayed quiet, letting me talk. I rushed ahead.

"I want to be hurt, to be used, and I want it pretty extreme. I just, I don't see the way. I don't know the path that connects me from here to there."

After a bit of thought, Amie gave me the advice that she always does when I reach one of my crossroads of confusion.

"It's your choice. Only you can decide what to do. Only you can decide how to feel about yourself."

My choice. As much as I wanted to be told what to do, she was right: I had to find my particular way of moving from longing to action. So after that visit ended, I began tentatively "sending messages to the Universe," or, doing things that let me express my dark secrets in safe, anonymous ways. I wrote out my masochistic fantasies and posted them online. I spent many a happy hour looking at corsets online with Amie over the phone. I even began to look up professional dungeons nearer to my home, marvelling at the themed rooms available. The hospital, the Victorian boudoir...the powerful women who could take me in hand and whip me...but oh, no! As much as I looked, I could never go to a place like that in reality. I was too shy, too asexual. I was still a virgin, how could I even contemplate going straight into kinky stuff like this? At the same time, I knew the truth. I wanted it. So I sent my messages and waited for the path to open up.

Now, I have to say that both Amie and I have uncanny luck. We often experience weird synchronicities, the kind of coincidences that make fact read like fiction. When we're together, the effect is doubled and sometimes very strange things can happen.

So, as it happened, the very day after I started looking up dungeons I went to visit Amie in Montreal again. It was early summer, and every tree, every flower seemed to be in bloom at once. All the terraces were crowded with people drinking, talking, shouting at sporting events, mingling French and English, German and Cantonese. It was hot and bustling, and everything was overhung with the threat of a big student protest that never quite materialized where we were. We sat out on Amie's seventh-floor balcony baking in the sun. When we got tired of doing that we went for walks, long rambling walks just anywhere.

On the Sunday of that visit, we were out walking, poking into antiques shops and browsing in street markets as we went, when we passed a very odd-looking door set into an otherwise unremarkable red brick row-house. The door was a vivid violet-blue, and the lintel was painted with stars and moons. A sign above the door proclaimed the building to be a gallery. Since we were feeling curious and Amie likes stars, we went over.

Inside, however, there was no gallery. Instead, we found the strangest stairway I have ever seen. As far as I could see, there wasn't even a ground floor, only a long, tall shaft filled with an open metal-work stairway leading up four storeys. There was a small landing and a closed door on each floor, presumably leading into the building. There were no windows or overhead lights, just sconce lights set into the walls that shone with an eerie ultra-violet glow, dousing the hallway in blue. Strangest of all, the walls were embedded with objects sunken into the plaster like the fossils of a long-lost pop culture. Doll parts mingled with rubber duckies. Paintings of bizarre creatures with antlered heads and tendrils for limbs wove among the broken toys. It looked like some kind of avant-garde art gallery. Given the entrance, I was keen to see what the exhibit would be like. We went up one flight of stairs, but the door to the shop on the second level was locked.

"I guess it's closed. Should we go up to the next level?" I asked.

"I don't know, dude," Amie said in doubtful tones. There was a strange feeling in the air.

Still, we went a little further. On the third-floor landing the door was also closed. But there we were met by a three-coloured cat sitting halfway up the stairs to the last level. It was white with black and orange patches, like the figurines in Japanese restaurants. As the cat crouched and stared at us calmly, the scene went from strange to dreamlike. The animal seemed to have complete and utter possession of the hallway. I wanted to go all the way up, but I didn't want to pass it. I ventured up a step, and then another, as if seeking permission.

"I'm going up," I said, as much to the cat as Amie.

Just then, the cat rose and stepped by me. It went down to Amie and sat at her feet. It seemed perfectly content to just stay there beside her. I looked down at the two of them framed between the metal steps looking back up at me.

"I'll be right back!" I told them. Then, hitching up the long, flowing skirt of my summery dress, I nervously climbed up the last flight to the fourth floor, where the last door stood wide open.

On my first glance into the room, I could barely see a thing. A window was open, letting in a pool of dazzling white afternoon sunlight. After the dimness of the stairway, the light left me blinking and dazed. I turned my eyes from the glare and looked at the wall on my left. Hanging there was a very strange mask worked in leather straps. It seemed to be half-animal, half-man. It could be a work of art. This could be the gallery. But something was wrong. The mask looked decidedly practical: not a fantasy piece, but something that could be worn. And there were no other exhibits in the room that I could see, just the harsh spotlight of the sun spilling down on a wide, pale wooden table, and shapes on the walls, long thin shapes like...were they whips?

I was so transfixed with wondering confusion that I jumped when a woman suddenly appeared from a door right in front of me that I hadn't quite seen.

"Are you looking for somebody?" she asked in French-accented English.

"Ah, no, I'm not," I stammered as I stared at her. She had on a very tight, short, low-cut leopard-print dress and stood with her arms crossed, plumping up her ample breasts. "Um, I thought this was an art gallery...?" I asked weakly.

She laughed at me, light and sharp.

"Oh no, darling! This is a dungeon."

I wonder if my shock showed on my face the way it ran through my body. I trembled with the force of panic, the force of desire. I turned to look around again. Now that she mentioned it, I saw that the table had metal shackles at each corner. My stomach flipped as if I were falling and my mind went completely blank. My voice, too, fell to a whisper.

"oh my god. this is so cool!"

The moment the words left my lips, I knew it was a dumb thing to say. But I was so stunned to find that I'd walked into exactly what I most wanted that I could barely process it all.

"And you didn't come here to meet anyone?" The woman inquired again, giving me an arch look.

All of a sudden, reality came crashing back in. Here I was, standing in front of this experienced woman in a dungeon, blushing and stammering like an idiot. I was positive that my deepest desires must be showing in every line of my shaking little body. I was an obvious sub and an obvious noob. All my shyness, my unreadyness, and my self-doubts came rushing back in over me, along with my sense of social propriety.

"Oh no, really, I just thought it was an art gallery!" I blurted, laughing.

My habitual silence muzzled me. I couldn't say how I wanted to look around. I couldn't say I had been looking for a dungeon just days before, looking for someone to bind me and whip me. But somehow I had to signal my desire. So as I turned to go, I caught my skirt in my hands, swished it tight around my hips, my butt, and said in promising tones,

"But now I know you're here, just in case..."

And with that, I fled.

Only when I got down and out did I realize just how excited I was. I was breathing fast, my heart was racing. And yes, I was wet. I was humiliated that I had just walked into a dungeon and lost my ability to think or speak like a rational person. But I was excited, in every sense of the world. Amie had to take me for a lemonade and a sit-down in a bohemian café to calm me down. We talked over what had happened in hushed, laughing, amazed tones. We both knew, even then, that it was a small event that symbolized something bigger, something significant about how far I was willing to go. For me, it was my reply from the universe. It was my path. I had taken my first tiny step towards submission. And I wouldn't have to take many more before...well, we'll come to that!