Ruth is cleaning her strap-ons at the reception desk when the man in the footie pajamas eases through her door. He looks up at the bell attached to the doorjamb, waits for it to stop tinkling; he pulls the door shut slowly, tries to close the latch without setting the bell to jingling again. It makes noise anyway, and he winces.
"Sorry, Mistress," he says once the bell is quiet again.
Ruth puts sets her strap-on aside and looks him over. The newcomer would be about six-four if someone beat some posture into him, with a gut more fast food than spirits. Mid forties, maybe fifty. The aforementioned footie pajamas are lime green and covered in fuzz--someone needs to learn how to use dryer sheets. Wile E. Coyote slippers cover his feet. Wild tufts of orange hair curl around and into his oversized ears. He completes his look with a hot pink backpack, to which he has stapled an autographed photo of Kelly Clarkston.
"What are you apologizing for?"
"Making noise, Mistress. The bell?"
"It's supposed to make noise."
"Sorry, Mistress."
Jesus Tittyfuckin' Christ, one of them.
"Have I beaten you before?"
"No, Mistress."
"Then I'm not your Mistress."
"Sorry, ma'am."
Ruth sighs. "What can I do for you?"
"What can I do for you, ma'am?"
She hands him a menu from the desk. "Did you want to negotiate a scene?"
The man takes the menu. His nails look like he colored them with Crayola markers. Pale bare skin rings one of his left fingers. She wonders if the missus at home knows that he's here.
"Ma'am?" he says after a long minute of looking at the menu. She stares until he licks his lips and continues. "What's CBT?"
"Cock and ball torture."
"Oh. Is that where you do bad things to my wiener?"
Ruth has a sudden craving for a cigarette. Days like this make Ruth wish she'd taken her mother's advice and become an anesthesiologist instead of a pro-domme. "Yeah."
"Oh." He looks back to the menu, runs his fat finger down the columns. His lips move as he reads each option silently. "Okay. I want some flogging, some CBT, and some..." He hands over a sheet of paper. It looks to be part of a Wikipedia article. "Some shibari. That's Japanese for ropes. If that's okay, ma'am?"
She tells him it is and takes him back to the dungeon room. His name is Ashley. He fills in the consent forms without a peep, nods his way through her explanations of what flies and what won't. When she's finished he hands over his backpack. "I brought my favorite toys," he says and giggles like a girl half his height.
Ruth goes to work on him with a flogger for a while. He's liberal with Thank You, Mistresses, but at least he's not apologizing for everything. Five minutes in he makes his first request.
"Mistress, can you get the orange from my pack?"
There are two ways she sees this going--three if he wants to pay extra for the food fetish. Chances are that orange is going in a sock or up his ass. Men always seem to want something up their asses in her profession. So Ashley surprises her when he begs her to slice the orange in half instead.
"Okay, what did you want the orange for, bitch?"
"Oo, Mistress, please squeeze the juices into my eyeballs!"
"What the fuck? Really?"
"Oh please, Mistress, please drip the acid secretions of your citric cunt in my eye pussies!"
Huh. Why does this shit always happen on her days here? Valorie--sorry, "Domina Phantasia"--gets all the cute boys and girls who just want a hair-pulling-assfucking on her walk-in shifts. "That's be a hundred fifty extra."
"Anything! Please?"
Ruth shrugs and squeezes the orange halves into Ashley's eyes. Ashley jerks and howls, eyes squeezed shut against most of the downpour. "Oh yeah! Fuck you, Florida, fuck you!"
He's going to need a minute so Ruth takes a seat in the nearby bondage swing. Drool and juice runs down Ashley's cheeks and chin, gluing fuzzy orange clumps to his face. She wonders if any call centers in the area have openings.
"Thank you, Mistress. I'm sorry I closed my eyes."
"That's okay." She doesn't want to ask, but curiosity and this month's mobile bill get the better of her. "Any other requests?"
"The CDs. They're in the side zipper."
She digs through the pink backpack and takes the discs out: Don Knotts Sings the Christmas Hits and The Fountainhead as read by Leonard Nimoy.
"The duct tape too," Ashley says. "Now pull my nipples through the holes in the CDs and use the duct tape to keep them there."
"Um," says Ruth, "that'll be ninety bucks."
"Please, Mistress, anything!"
It takes a little work getting to his nipples because the zipper on his footie pajamas runs down his back.
"Now draw a star on both CDs with the glue stick and then splash some glitter on there."
She has a feeling he's fucking with her at this point, but his card is on file so what the hell.
"Praise God, yes! The Head and Shoulders, hurry!"
Ruth pulls the dandruff shampoo out of the pack. His scalp looks like it could use some Head and Shoulders, but she doubts that's what he has in mind. Shaving? She winces when he begs her to drizzle the shampoo on his "teensy and weensies." His phrase, sure as fuck not hers.
Her second oldest brother tried this once in the shower. He should have known it was a bad idea from the outset because the suggestion came from Donnie, her mother's live-in sub. It was also Donnie who got her youngest older brother to douche himself with a half bottle of Old Spice cologne. Well, that's the way Ruth remembers it, at least. Ruth's mother, MzTemptress29 on a bevy of fetish groups and sites, got her jollies on having reasons to punish her subs. The disruption of her household and children were common themes.
Ashley's dick has taken on a bright pink glow. She knows it's just a matter of time before his foreskin begins to chafe and peel in tiny white strips like a day old sunburn. No extra charge for this one.
"Now spank me! Spank me and tell me I'm a ba-aa-ad yak!"
Ruth smacks his right butt cheek. "You're a bad yak!"
"No, Mistress, I'm a ba-aa-ad yak!"
"Bitch, you're a ba-aa-ad yak!"
"Oh I'm sorry, Mistress, I'm sorry for being a ba-aa-ad yak!"
This fucker had better tip.
"Now, in my pack," Ashley says. His pimpled ass radiates heat. The footie pajamas are down around his ankles and his hands are still bound to his thighs. "There are some LEGOs in there."
Ruth looks to the clock and sees they've been at it a little over forty minutes. Special requests make the time go by, at least. She digs around and finds a Ziploc baggie full of off-brand building blocks. Most of the pieces are either hot pink or chocolate brown. She really doesn't want to hazard a guess at this point. "And why should I let you have these, bitch?"
"My hands, Mistress? Please free my hands."
She does, and Ashley opens the bag of blocks. He pours them on the dungeon floor and sifts through the mess, places similar blocks in different piles, then goes to work. Whatever he's using them for it's sure as hell not an official design. He constructs a series of boxes around his dehydrated, flaking penis, connected with longer pieces. In a few minutes he's completed his own homemade gates of hell made entirely out of imitation dollar store LEGOs. He looks to Ruth for her approval.
"Do you think I want to look at that pathetic thing?"
He squeals and bends over, ass in the air. Ruth was just being honest. She knows what comes next, and saunters back out to the front desk. The sky blue strap-on, since she was polishing it when he came in. Sometimes the Universe gives you a hint.
Back in the dungeon, Ruth steps into a set of adjustable straps and pulls a condom over the plastic dick. Ashley is on his belly when she turns back around, humping at the groove in the dungeon floor that leads water to the drain. His LEGO gates of hell remains intact, but The Fountainhead looks to have slipped off his nipple. She's not going to bring it up unless he does first.
"Oo," Ashley says when he sees the strap-on, "that's what my wiener looks like when I wrap rubber bands around it and slam it in the dishwasher door!"
"Well there's no dishwasher here so we'll have to improvise."
"Thank you, Mistress!"
"Get on your knees."
She waits for him to clamber back off the ground and listens to the breath rattle in his lungs. Pine green snot drips from Ashley's nose; she can hear the congestion in his sinuses every time he inhales. Ruth has seven different kinds of shampoo and four different kinds of bodywash at home and will be using all of them tonight. "Now, what--"
She hears the bell from the other room and looks to the clock. Still another 45 minutes before Valorie comes in for the evening shift. "Stay here," Ruth says. "Don't touch anything, especially yourself."
"With pleasure, Mistress!" Ashley says and twists the LEGOs around his dick. He sucks in a wet breath, falls over on his side, gets up and does it again. Ruth shakes her head.
A cute boy in his mid-twenties stands at the reception desk, dressed in a Domino's uniform with a pizza under one arm. This fantasy again? Some men watch too much porn. Can't they think up something more creative than the delivery boy?
