The mask took me by surprise. Peter had not told me that he had planned for me to wear it. Or that he even had it. Until he slipped it from his jacket pocket.
Black leather, with an elasticated strap. Not just plain leather. Small, steel studs decorating the outside edges, and forming letters in large capitals across it. He made sure I saw before he raised it to my face. Two words. An invitation. "FUCK ME".
This is my "Confession" about what happened while I wore the mask. It follows my previous "Confessions", which provide the background, and recount my indiscretions, although they did not quite describe just how far Peter has gone in punishing me subsequently.
I wrote this some time later, having had comments asking me to reveal more of how things played out in our marriage. Thank you to those who asked the question. I can only ask that you read on with the kind of open mind that seeks to understand, and not to judge too harshly, either Peter or myself.
**********
"When will you be back?" our youngest asked.
"I'm not sure," I said. "But we'll come to Gran's for lunch and bring you home afterwards."
Date night. The children's once a month stay over at my mother's, while Peter and I had our extra special couple time, during which he punished me for straying. This was, in fact, our anniversary date night. A year since he had checked the family tracking phone-app that I had so rapidly forgotten all about. A year since he had seen that instead of being at home, while he was at his business conference, I was in a hotel near Heathrow.
In that year, things had healed between us. I had told him everything, about Heathrow, and about the one other time that I had let another man, a gardener of all people, fuck me. We had stayed together, for the children, and because we loved each other, in spite of what I had allowed to happen. He had imposed his terms. I had accepted them. Once a month, tied face down over the bed, or the sofa, or the kitchen table. My butt warmed. Punished for my having sinned.
By then my other punishment had healed as well. The tattoo my husband had insisted on. Another four letter word, "SLUT". Inked in letters two inches high on my right buttock cheek. Deserved, of course. I was just grateful that our marriage had survived. It had mutated into something different, but at least it was still intact. We were still a loving couple, and our family was still a loving family for our boys.
"Can't you pick us up after the concert?" This my our older son, backing up his younger brother.
"We're staying in London, sweetie," I said. "Daddy's arranged a nice hotel for us to stay in after."
"I wish we could come too," he said.
"When you're older," I promised him.
"Anyway, the concert will be boring," our younger son piped in again. "I hate classic music!"
"Classical," I corrected him. "And I used to hate it too. It's for older people."
"You're not old," he said. "Gran's old. You're not even forty. She's nearly seventy."
The BBC Promenade concerts in the Royal Albert Hall, an annual event, right through each summer. The programme for our concert was Mozart and Wagner. I was particularly looking forward to the Mozart. His music is so much lighter. Wagner can be very dark.
"You can think about the club during the second half," Peter had joked. The Wagner would indeed serve as a dark, orchestral prelude to even darker happenings later on that night.
The club was Peter's idea. Other people watching as he meted out my monthly punishment. Technically a swinger's club, in Aldgate. With a bar, a dance floor, playrooms and a mock dungeon. The website showed the rooms, without guests of course, but with models, one of them mounted on the horse that Peter planned to strap me to. Padded leather on a wooden frame, not the living, breathing animal.
My loving, gentle husband had called me over while I was preparing a casserole for the following night's dinner. Chicken and avocado.
"I've something to show you," he had said. "I think we should go there after the concert."
His lap-top screen now showed the shot of the model on the dungeon's leather horse as the main photo. Her butt was to the camera. I had stared at it, over his shoulder, trying to control my heart rate and my breathing, not wanting him to sense my apprehension. My stomach had suddenly felt hollow. I had had to control my voice as well, as I answered his suggestion.
"Interesting," I had said, keeping my response to a minimum. "Is that what you would like to do to me?"
"Anniversary punishment," he said. "What do you think?"
Bodies do their thing, regardless of whatever amount of will power you try to exert over them. My heart was racing. My stomach churning. Something else as well. Involuntary. A gentle throbbing. My clit.
"Do you planto fuck me there as well?" I heard myself asking.
"Or watch," he had said.
The Mozart had been wonderful, effervescent, playful, but not as distracting as I had hoped. All the way through I kept wondering just what Peter had planned for me for later. Especially whether he would fuck me after he had punished me. Those two words that he had used might have been no more than a tease. "Or watch," was all that he had said. Watch what? Watch someone else? Fucking me? Was that what he had planned?
Whatever else, his planning was faultless. Right down to the dress I had changed into at our hotel, for the concert, and what I wore beneath it.
"Dress code for the club is sexy," he explained. "See-through, cut outs, lingerie, leather. And you need a reasonably respectable dress for the concert. I thought, lingerie under a dress you can remove for the club, would work."
So, I was in the jet black lingerie he had laid out for me, open cup bra, that supported but left my nipples bare, suspender belt, sheer stockings, no g-string, all worn beneath an electric blue, satin, spaghetti strap dress, that skimmed the bottom edge of the three inch width of double thickness stocking tops, and that was moulded to my breasts and allowed my nipple stubs to define its contours.
The way that I was dressed was maybe just that bit risqué, for the Royal Albert Hall, but not outrageous. I got looks, but not disapproval. I was apprehensive, about the club that would come later, but I also sensed that same familiar throbbing. My cunt, bare and exposed beneath the satin, with thoughts of its own, anticipating what would ensue. My clit, just as independent, alert and eager. My vagina, already secreting fluid to lubricate and ready me for ease of penetration, even thought, while listening to Mozart, my legs were firmly crossed.
Then the second half, of the two composer concert. The deep strains of Wagner underscored the changed nature of our relationship, the more recent, darker side. Our marriage was somehow still secured by love, but also by Peter's newfound dominance, my submission. His hand moved to my lap to express the former, his, our love for one another. It progressed beneath my dress as Wagner's portentous composition filled the concert hall, fingers and palm on bare thigh flesh above my stocking line, nudging my cunt. His cunt. The cunt of a slut, that he had reclaimed.
**********
I was still wearing the dress. Not my coat. We had checked that into the club's cloakroom. Another couple were paying at the reception desk. In their twenties, a decade younger than we were. Both good looking. Both blonde. Her hair long and straight. His, buzz cut short. She slipped off her coat. Leather straps and buckles connected at steel rings. A body harness. Nothing else. Bare breasts and pubis. Neat nipple stubs contrasted with erotically protruding labia.
If that exemplified the dress code in the club, I would be fine in just my lingerie. Except Peter was putting that mask in place, the one that I described right at the start. The leather mask with metal studs around the edges, and the two words formed across the eyes, that said so clearly, "FUCK ME". The last thing that I saw was the slender, leather-strapped blonde looking me in the eye, amusement all too evident.
He had planned for everything, or else he rapidly figured out how best to deal with an elasticated strap and my then, tumbling, longer than shoulder length hair. He gathered my hair with one hand, eased it from beneath the strap, and let it fall. The strap would be invisible. A simple move, executed as if he had practiced it in his head.
We have five senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. Robbed of the first, you are quite literally blind. You cannot see the space that you are in, the entrances and exits, the people who are around you, the floor, the furniture, which way to walk, the obstacles. These are suddenly unknown. You are frozen. Even your sense of balance disappears.
The mask in place, I felt immediately disoriented. Almost lightheaded. I reached for Peter's arm to steady myself, but did not find it. I felt a rising panic. I took a hesitant step towards where I knew my husband was, where he had to be, felt his hands on my bare arms, and took a breath, an inhalation of relief.
I read somewhere, sometime ago, that chimpanzees grin and laugh when they are frightened, not from happiness or relaxed contentedness. The mask denying me of the security of sight, I was almost laughing, chimp style, hoping that the couple who had seen my husband put the mask on me, the receptionist, the cloakroom girl and the guys on the door, would take my grin to be amusement. The reality was my laughing was from unadulterated fear.
Peter had planned for me to walk into the club unable to see anyone or anything, in the 'fuck me' mask that he had slipped in place so smoothly, not just any club, a swinger's club, where 'fuck me' would be taken seriously. He planned to strap me to that horse, and use whatever he had brought with him to punish me, while others watched, and then, or so he had said in showing me the website, instead of fucking me, as he would do at home, he might decide to watch.
He moved closer. His hands left my arms and went around me, upper and lower back, drawing me into him. I looked up, blindly, and his lips met mine. A kiss between a husband and a wife can convey how much they love each other, can reassure, can comfort. I needed all of that.
"Trust me," he whispered.
