The Pleasure Boy 24
The Graduate Student
I had planned to spend the summer after my graduation doing a lot of escort work, to build my bank account and take some pressure off my first year of grad school. When I told Mistress Monique that I was free for the summer, she fired back, "You have fluent Russian now, don't you? How would you like to visit Kazakhstan for a few weeks with a team of Quebec civil servants and consultants? Their job is to make a report on the procurement of uranium and some industrial metals from that country? They want a junior member who knows the region - knows at least what questions to ask - and can interpret for them. You might be perfect. Are you willing to meet with them and discuss the job?"
Trying not to let my excitement show, I agreed to do so. She arranged an appointment for me at an office suite in downtown Montreal - in the Place Ville-Marie complex, to be exact. I went, was duly interviewed, and promptly hired to join a team, with five other people, which called itself the CAZU group (from the four elements it was concerned with - copper aluminum, zinc and uranium. This was amazing good fortune for me. Not only would I make a lot of money very quickly over that summer, but there was every prospect of continuing work back home - with that same team, once its fact-finding tour was over. As I would continue to work with them through Allard Escorts, Mistress Monique had every reason to be delighted as well. Her investment in my training was paying off!
Finally, Prof. Sorkin was happy for me, though as my Mistress Natasha she was less so. While she would be deprived of my services, sexual and otherwise, over the summer, she would have a much more knowledgeable student when I came home. I'd get to visit the region I was studying. Instead of flying home with the rest of the team, I'd have a few weeks to bump around as a tourist in the region, taking iPhone pictures all the way, and would fly home from the fabled silk road city of Samarkand. In taking those photos, I avoided touristic shots found readily on the Web, but tried to start a specialized collection for my own studies of Central Asian industry and infrastructure.
When I got home and showed those pictures to Prof. Sorkin, she suggested (commanded really) that I put together an informal public picture show for her students and anyone else who might be interested. "You might build your talk," she said, "around the tragedy of the Central Asian peoples. In their time, they were masters of the steppes; now they are lucky to get ill-paying jobs with foreign mining interests. The 'Tatar yoke' on Russia was never as heavy as the Russian yoke on them now."
We gave that talk (or I did, with Prof. Sorkin's introduction). It was well received, and altered my reputation considerably. In her intro, Sorkin mentioned that it was my geisho qualification as an escort, not my academic connection to her, that had gotten me a gig with the mining team and sent me on that trip. Afterwards, people asked me about the link between escort work and sexual submission. "All professional escorts are geishi," I would tell them, "and all geishi get some escort training. Professional submissives get a lot of escort training because many of us are eventually hired as lifestyle assistants and companions."
Later, when word got out that I was serving my thesis advisor in that geisho role, people smiled knowingly. "She's training him in her field; and he's keeping her happy," they chuckled. "Makes perfect sense!"
My first few months of grad school were not much different from my last year as an undergraduate. I had by that time studied the general history of Russia and Central Asia pretty thoroughly. What remained was to dive more deeply into the current realities of the countries which now comprised that region - their muddled demographics, authoritarian politics, coveted resources, damaged ecology and, above all, their relationships with Russia, China, Europe, America, and other wealthy and technologically sophisticated foreigners who can supply the capital and know-how that they need if they are to develop and prosper. The details were different from place to place; but in each case, the central story was a forced sale of national resources and autonomy for needed investment capital and technology. Imperial intervention in each country's politics - intervention which did not shrink from violence - kept the price of resources down. In the process, local elites grew rich, while their peoples got little benefit, and felt they were being sold out. Of course, this made for unstable politics and proxy warfare between the great powers which, of course, had rival interests in the various factions and regimes.
After that trip to Kazakhstan, my escort work became more specialized and lucrative. Not just on Central Asia but across the board, I gained a reputation as a young academic with geisha training who could pull his weight on project teams when social facilitation was needed. I became more valuable as a group facilitator than as submissive arm candy, and Allard began to market me that way. Often on these assignments, I was still used as a submissive boy toy, especially by female team leaders (though often by males as well), but I was paid as a fellow-professional, not as a high-class boy toy.
In other respects, my life as a graduate student was not much different from life as an undergraduate, except for the decision of my Mistress that we should now come out of the closet with our relationship. We discussed the pros and cons of having me move in with her, and began to think about a formal contract as I'll describe below.
My graduate studies became more specialized than they had been. In particular, I found myself digging into the collapse of the Soviet Union in much greater detail, focusing on its aftermath, which was different in each of the countries that the Russians had colonized and controlled in Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kyrgizstan, Turkmenistan and the rest). Chinese and Western Capitalist aspirations in that area were also important now. In her research, Prof. Sorkin focused on tribal relationships in the current politics of Central Asia - forced into the framework of a modern (Westphalian) state system - first for Russian administrative convenience, but in whole geo-polititical world-system today. As Sorkin's research assistant, I got immersed in this stew and soon learned more about it than I really wanted to know - the fate of every graduate student, as I soon realized.
Almost a year had passed between the time when, informally, I first became submissive and sexual with Prof. Sorkin and our first steps toward my formal collaring. In that time, her skills as a Domme and her understanding of the D/s relationship and lifestyle had advanced tremendously. Her only real limitation in that regard, as I've already mentioned, was a chilliness of temperament which, I knew, would turn many people off, though some submissives would find it attractive. For myself, I was ambivalent on this subject, as I recall describing to my mother when she asked me how we were doing: "I'm a little afraid of my Mistress," I told her. "Both as a teacher and as a Domme, she's a complete perfectionist - with me, but also with herself. Her research and mine have to be impeccable. As her student and assistant she holds me to a very high standard, and her displeasure when I fall short is harder to bear than the beatings she no longer hesitates to give me."
"On one hand, I find her perfectionism appealing, and advantageous for both of us. I appreciate the training I'm getting from her, and it makes her an apt pupil in learning the skills of Dominance from me. But this same quality also puts me off. With her, there is a constant effort to be perfect, and thus a constant performance. This makes it hard to engage with her authentically, as a flawed and needy person like the rest of us."
"That's a trap for many Dominants," my mother answered. "We are supposed to be in charge - on top of every last detail. Our subs want to trust us, rely on us, respect us; and, of course, it is our duty to keep them safe. But they also want to love us. In a role of command, keeping the right balance of love and respect is never easy."
Collared to a Mistress as I now was, I could scarcely help comparing my relationship with Natasha to my parents' relationship, or to the relationship of Lotte and Mitch. Thinking along those lines, I felt there was a depth to the bonding of those lovely couples that Natasha and I would never match. The concepts of obedience and service were the same for us, but it was clear to me that I would never be to my Mistress what my Dad to my Domme mother. Nor would she be to me what my Mom was to my Dad, her submissive husband.
Partly, the difference was a matter of time. Both my parents and Mitch and Lotte had had time to grow together, while Natasha and I were still brand new. But it was more than that. It was not just that we lacked experience as a couple; there was a transactional quality to our bond which I did not see between my parents, or between Mitch and Lotte. Natasha and I were contracting to assist and teach each other for limited purposes and for a limited time. As a couple, we lacked the permanence and open-ended commitment that a good marriage calls for and implies.
In fact, collared to Mistress/Professor Natasha Sorkin, I was much more like a long-term escort than a husband. This was how we'd both wanted it; in drafting our contract, neither of us was looking to get married. Yet what we had together, good as it was for both of us on its own terms, failed to afford the intimacy I wanted - and that Natasha, as an orphan growing up in Soviet Russia - had learned to live without.
Now that I was officially her graduate student, Natasha decided, it was time to take our relationship out of the closet. That did not mean we'd be conspicuous about it. It only meant that I'd move in with her, set in motion the process of negotiating, signing and registering a formal D/s contract, and wear her collar when under her control. In practice that meant that I would always wear my collar at home and when we were together, on campus or elsewhere. When I not with Natasha - for my escort gigs, in particular - it was left to my discretion, with the understanding that I would wear the collar, to show that I belonged to someone, unless I had some reason not to.
In this connection, I explained to Natasha that as a geisho, I was different from most of the other subs she would encounter. At least in certain areas, most subs want to be relieved of their responsibility for private decision making. They want clear instructions from a wise and benevolent Dominant that they need only strive to obey. With other subs, she would need to be aware of this desire for trustworthy authority. With me, what she needed to understand was that I wanted that sort of authority from her as my thesis advisor, but not as my Domme - and certainly not as my dominant-in-training. As a geisho sub, I had been trained to take personal responsibility for my day-to-day choice of obedience - and thus to disobey when that was needful.
At the start of our relationship, when my submission was just between the two of us, I had discussed contracts and collars with Natasha as an eventual possibility. Now, under Guild rules (that my mother had instituted in connection with the mentoring function) I could not publicly serve Natasha as a professional sub without a formal contract between us - drafted or approved by a jointly agreed mentor, and registered at the Guild, with its Office of Lifestyle Relationships. When I reminded my Mistress of this requirement, she objected, "Explain it again," she said, "Why do we need a formal contract for our private relationship?" So I explained again that a Guild D/s contract was like a marriage contract, giving public recognition and protection to the private relationship. Especially in cases like ours, where the D/s relationship is complicated by large areas of autonomy, a written contract up front - which can always be modified by mutual agreement - can save a lot of misunderstanding later. Also, she had to accept that for a public relationship as her submissive, the contract was obligatory for me as a Guild professional. I could not remain a Guildsman in good standing without one.
Once Natasha had conceded that a contract was necessary, I wrote up the terms that had evolved informally between us into notes that a mentor could use in drafting the document we'd sign:
