The wife is enjoying herself over dinner, looking at her instagram feed or twitter feed or something. Her mind is only half on her food. My mind is fully on her food, because most of my dinner derives from her food and has yet to arrive on my plate. I'm hungry, but she probably had a big business lunch. I've had a busy day shopping. I bought the hand tied sausages she was going on about, which are going to taste just like ordinary sausages. The fact that some big fat hairy butcher's assistant mauled them with his bare hands while twisting them into bundles of eight doesn't do anything for me. But she thinks it's funny; hand tied sausages for the slave.
We are having one of her favourites; the pork chop and sausage combo. She has a pork chop and I have a sausage - the hand tied sausage. She has control of the vegetables; boiled potatoes and steamed broccoli in a dish beside her plate. She peels whatever number of potatoes she wants and then I can take her peelings, the skins of the potatoes, from her side plate. Same with the broccoli, she cuts off the little stalks. She is finicky like that, a fussy eater. After she cuts off the stalks and puts them on her side plate I ask nicely if I might have some broccoli and she kindly says, after a pause, 'you may', with a little arch of her eyebrow that lets me know she might just as easily say 'you may not.' She likes to keep me on the edge in more ways than one.
At this stage I have a good idea of how much vegetables she will take. Cooking a double portion so that I get the leftovers doesn't work. I had to give up on that trick a long time ago. Now, after the meal, she supervises me to make sure I dump all the leftovers into the food bin. Then, if there is too much going into the bin, I am punished for wasting good food. So I don't try that on anymore.
My single hand tied sausage looks lonely on the plate as it waits for its garnish of potato skins and broccoli stalks. She has advised me in the past that I should realise that I am really getting the better of the deal because all the good of the potato is in the skins. No doubt some study or other will shortly find that all the good of the broccoli is in the stalks. Meanwhile she decides to include me in on whatever is amusing her.
She turns the phone towards me across the table, laughing. "You've got to see this," she says, "they loved it."
It's a close-up of me eating my dinner out of the dog bowl a few nights previously. She must have fitted a tiny camera down in the corner under the cupboards that day before she came up to let me out of my T-bar bondage. The picture is at floor level; a close up of me from across the dog bowl in front of me.
If I knew there was a camera on me from that angle I'd have tried to look a bit more dignified about it. There is my face all twisted like a snarling dog as I try to gnaw into the big raw broccoli stalk without using my hands to control it. There are lumps of rancid yoghurt stuck around my mouth and on the tip of my nose, criss-crossed with blurry black dots of the fruit flies buzzing around the dinner and crawling on me. The caption under the still says; Lord of the Flies?
"We've got four hundred likes," she adds. She flicks on to two similar twitter photos or whatever and shows me. Their captions read 'A side order of flies?' and 'Did I order French flies.' How original. I need to be careful here and not make a sarcastic comment. I don't want to spoil this business partners/ business buddies moment. We're a team. We're making it happen. I'm suffering for the team; high five.
"They are witty indeed," is the best I can muster. She gives me a bit of a funny look, but lets it go. She's too full of the success of her latest podcast in her 'Making the Slave Suffer' series to pull me up on it.
"They liked the other view too," she says. "They thought your period pole was a flag pole. She showed me two stills of the other view. It was taken from the camera near the kitchen ceiling. I know about that one, it is always there, always monitoring and recording my activities in the kitchen when she is at her office. The still views were of me from behind with the great big pole sticking up out of my bare ass and my red dress slid down and crumpled up against the back of my head over the dog bowl. She'd had me painfully wave that pole over and back a few times by waggling my ass for the camera.
I might have guessed she was doing a podcast. One of the captions said Apollo 18? Another said Dark side of the Moon? Fair enough, in the photo my ass looked a bit like the moon; pale and big and round, with the pole sticking up out of what might be politely called a crater in the centre of it. "They want us to put a flag on the end of it next time. We might make a game of it; the Flagpole Challenge: Guess what crater of the moon we've colonised with the flagpole. Colon-ised geddit?" My, we are in great form tonight.
The main thing was that my wife thought the whole thing a great success; lots of likes, lots of shares. If she's happy, I'm happy. I'm becoming a movie star in my own little way. In fact sometimes when I'm out doing the shopping I see people looking at me a bit that way.
It's like they presume they know me more than just somebody they see on the street. A snigger, a knowing look, a wink, a quick whisper to their companion while nodding their head in my direction. I can guess what they are saying; 'it's your man, you know, the slave guy from the podcasts.' No doubt the media stars get this all the time. Nobody's asked me for my autograph yet though. What would I sign it if they did? Slaveman Dan: how's that sound? Or Dan, the slaveman: more of a ring to it.
The shopping trip this morning was the usual mix of business and mortification. She makes me wear my shopping outfit. On top I wear a simple white tee-shirt, fairly tight and thin - a bit gay. I have black stretchy pants, a bit like what the male ice skaters wear in the figure skating competitions; tight and snug at the top and more normal down below the knee. They pull up tight into the crotch and around the cheeks of my bum. She had her alterations lady sew a little elasticated pouch into the front, stretched across like a flap. The flap is black and matches the pants. When I pull on the pants I have to position my dick and balls into the flap. If my cock behaves itself all is well. Everything looks normal, just a slight manly bulge in front. But when I get an erection, my hard-on points skywards, and pulls the flap up with it, pointing it like a tent. The golden rule with these pants is; don't get an erection in public.
Before she goes to work on a shopping morning my methodical wife always tugs at my balls, pulling the flap upwards to check the goods are properly positioned and will display if the worst comes to the worst. She'll tell me not to make a disgrace of myself while I am outside. 'I don't want the police phoning me up telling me you have been arrested for indecent behaviour in a public place,' is her usual parting shot as she heads off in her big car to her big office, at her big IT company, with her big salary.
To complete the shopping outfit I have a leather dog collar around my neck with one or those circular brass tags hanging off it, like you see on real dogs. It has my wife's phone number on one side along with the word 'text.' That's for if I get lost. Ha, ha. The other side just says 'Dan,' which is frankly, fucking insulting because Dan is my name. It gets me every time when I put the collar on as I get dressed for shopping. It takes me down, which is what she wants. It should be a nice adventure, getting to go out and wander down the main street, see what's going on, see other people going about their business. But what do they see? They see a grown adult who is being kept as a pet, labelled as a pet, and treated as a pet. So they treat me like a pet too.
I'm not a total pet, obviously. I have debit card, even if it has her name on it. I don't know the PIN but I can use it for purchases of up to 30 euro contactless. It can be embarrassing if I accidentally go over 30 euro limit. I have to leave back some stuff and redo the whole thing. I leave the receipts on her desk for her to check after I come in from doing the grocery shopping. She has an account at the butcher, the delicatessen and the green grocer so I don't have to use the card there. They all seem to know my status, including most of the checkout staff in the local supermarket.
They must be subscribing to the podcast. In the supermarket, the checkout person might say, 'Been a good boy then, Dan?' as I'm packing my groceries into the wheelie trolley. I'm supposed to say, 'woof, woof' back to them because they seen me do that regularly when I'm being put through humiliating doggie stuff on the podcast. Not just eating out of the dog bowl; even more humiliating stuff.
That's the trouble with living in a small commuter town. Not that everybody knows everybody, but enough know enough so that you do meet people you know regularly, especially those few of us who live there all the time and don't rush off to big jobs in the city every day. Me tugging my little shopping trolley along the street heading to the local supermarket is a common enough sight.
When this 'who's a good boy, then' stuff first started I didn't chose to go along with it. I just ignored the question. That was until a cheeky brat of an eighteen year old cashier refused to accept my debit card until I responded appropriately. A Mexican stand-off followed. I had my pride back then. I was blocking the other people in the queue. Stalemate; until the brat picked up the phone and said she would call the police and report me for attempted shoplifting.