"I will strike you ten times. You will keep count."
I'm keeping today relatively informal as our sessions go. We're not playing dress up and I'm not bothering to dim the lights or set up any candles. Hannah is wearing a pair of handcuffs, but I'm not going to be doing any fancy rope work. She's on her hands and knees on the bed, arse in the air, completely naked apart from a couple of nipple clamps. I'm holding the end of the chain for those clamps, but I'm still very much in my work clothes. I have a common-or-garden paddle in my other hand.
I raise the implement and wait.
And wait.
"Oh," says Hannah innocently. "You want me to say the number before you hit me, or afterwards?"
"Before, obviously," I say. That's how we always do it.
"Because as the saying goes, you should always strike first..."
"Counting first, please," I say, trying to keep my cool.
"One," she says.
I bring the paddle down on her backside, not strongly, but enough to let her know we've started. I raise my arm again. Again there is a silence where there ought not to be.
"Oh, sorry, me again!" says Hannah. "Two."
This time I hit her just a little bit harder.
"Two," she says after another pause.
I sigh internally, but ignore the miscount and spank her again.
"Two," she repeats.
So it's going to be like this. Hannah is in brat mode. She's decided that her fun tonight lies not in the delicate art of total submission, but in messing her dom around as much as possible. She's about ten seconds away from shouting nonsense numbers like 'pi' or 'the square root of minus one'. She goes in cycles with this behaviour. I have various methods for dealing with it.
The obvious one is just to hit her harder. Tell her off and extend and intensify the punishment. That may be what she wants. It's telling, for example, that she's repeating numbers rather than skipping over them. She may just be in the mood for an extra intense session. Or maybe she'll jump straight to 'ten' all of a sudden and then start an argument about how many 'twos' she'd actually said.
Hannah treats everything as a game. It's not always clear whether the rules tonight are intended to be zero-sum. I could choose not to reward this behaviour. I could make her go and stand in the corner. I've played the strict schoolmaster before. It's a valid move. It is not a particularly fascinating way to spend an evening but it does send the message that 'you're spoiling things for both of us.'
I could count myself. We have a ball-gag and, if you've been paying attention, you'll already suspect that it's not Hannah's favourite of our special toys. I can shut her up and then do whatever I want to her.
It's too early for her to be playing up this way. Despite what she might think, I have in fact got something relatively special planned. Every few months Hannah and I sit down and have a good old dom-to-sub natter about how the sessions are going and what new things we want to try. I don't do everything she mentions immediately, nor do I meet each and every one of her requests. Still, I try to take everything under advisement.
One item on her list is hair-pulling. Not during sex, but as its own erotic and masochistic activity. Honestly, I've been avoiding it because it makes me uneasy. It would obviously be ridiculous of me, as a long-term dominant, to say I'd never hit a woman, but you know what I mean. Grabbing a fistful of hair similarly seems a bit too Neanderthal.
But I think I've found an ethical approach, one that works for me. I'm going to combine pulling with combing. I've pulled out a selection of combs and brushes and I'll start with simple grooming, leading into light teasing and twisting and finally reaching a crescendo at whatever suitable level we discover she can take. A slow-burning, incredibly sensuous evening of ever-increasing intensity.
Or, given Hannah's obvious impatience tonight, a dead boring waste of time of everyone's time.
That idea goes into the bin. I'll have to wing the rest of tonight.
"Two?" Hannah says again and I realize that I've been too lost in thought. I spank her again just to keep things moving along.
"Two," she repeats immediately after I make contact with her deliciously shaped bottom.
"Fine, that's it!" I say making a snap decision. "Get dressed."
"Wait!" she says, craning her neck around. "Are you calling the session off? I was just fooling around..."
I smile secretly at her alarm. I've got the tone just right that she thinks I'm genuinely pissed. Which, yeah, I am. We're nowhere near done though.
"Get dressed," I tell her again. Then I remember the handcuffs. "Actually, no," I say. "Wait there."
I go over to Hannah's side of the wardrobe and pull out the first dress I can find, a loose-fitting summery number. It'll do even though it's February. I grab a pair of her white socks from the drawer. She curls one leg backwards and then the other as I fit the socks.
"Stand," I order, then I drop the dress over her head. Her arms are still handcuffed behind her and that makes it impossible to zip it all the way up. I do my best with it. I throw a pair of flat shoes at her feet and she slips them on.
"The car," I tell her. She doesn't reply with snark which is good. I've hooked her into wanting to find out what happens next. I'm still working on that bit.
She goes downstairs while I put my own trainers on. I grab a backup dress from the wardrobe in case things get dirty and a towel from the airing cupboard. I stuff them both in a sports bag then pull a couple of bottles of mineral water from the fridge. I find her standing next to our Citroen. I open her car door and support her as she goes through the rigmarole of getting in without being able to use her arms.
