When The Game Doesn't End

We had a fight at the grocery store. It was stupid, about something small, created by a stray look or a bruised feeling. Who even remembers what started it? (He probably does. He has a way of cataloging these types of things forever.) I rolled my eyes at him in the car, gave him a dismissive hand-wave in the parking lot, and walked away from him on the sidewalk when he tried to joke around with me in an attempt to get past it. We were having a plain-old spat, a boyfriend-girlfriend moment. There was nothing D/s to it. He wasn't my Owner. We were just like any other couple.

But maybe that was the problem?

Later we sat side-by-side on couch, my head on his shoulder, and gave our apologies. He was still a bit upset that I walked away from him and I was miffed that he thought about leaving me alone after that. On the whole, however, cooler heads prevailed.

I was wondering though: How far could power exchange creep into our lives? When he told me not to walk away from him and I did it anyway, I thought about how he could have ordered me not to do so if he was my Owner at that moment. If I knew that he was my Owner at that moment, I would not have walked away from him in the first place; my head would have been in an entirely different place. I thought about the reckless freedom I have over my actions and choices when I consider myself only his girlfriend and not his owned submissive. That freedom gets me in trouble because I don't know where the line is.

I have already recounted several instances when he caught me off guard with his springing dominance, times when he turned a innocent quip into an intense moment or took an unexpected opportunity to assert his ownership. Did I want D/s to bleed over into our vanilla lives more and more? Did I want there to be no surprises, to always know that he controlled me?

I took that quiet moment to ask him about it. "When we're in the bedroom and you tell me to look at you or something, I just do it because I'm trained to. But when we're in the car and I roll my eyes, I get confused when you tell me not to do that. I would never do that when we were in the bedroom because I know the rules there, but it seems like I don't know the rules outside the bedroom."

He nodded, encouraging me to continue to speak freely.

"It's like when you're playing football. When the ref blows the whistle to start the game, you know it's ok to tackle another player. When the ref blows the whistle again, you know the game is over and it would be inappropriate to tackle. But things aren't clear cut like that with us. I don't know whose rules we're playing under when we're not in the bedroom, and I think that causes some problems. We each think we have our own rules. We end up fighting about how we fight and it just gets worse."

He stared at me quietly for a moment. "What if the game doesn't end?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, what we do in the bedroom isn't just playing around, right?" I nodded. Everything was so intense, so real, that it couldn't just be a lark, something that we could leave behind. I still felt his dominance and his control long after we left the bedroom and I didn't consider it something we played at. "I think that your training could extend outside the bedroom. I think you need some more discipline and some more rules, so things like tonight don't happen."

I thought for a moment. What exactly was he proposing? I wasn't sure myself, but it seemed like a logical progression. The whiplash I was facing between D/s time and non-D/s time was too much. Would this solve that problem?

On the other hand, would it create a whole host of other problems? I didn't want to suffocate under the weight of his control and I certainly didn't want to invite a dictatorial authority into every area of my life. If his idea of extending our D/s dynamic meant micro-managing my life in a way that affected my job, I didn't think that we'd be long for this world. In the same vein, I didn't want him use his control to stifle all dissent from me in a way that would leave me dissatisfied and essentially disenfranchised within my own relationship.

"Is that something that you'd like?," he asked gently. I couldn't read his expression. I didn't know what he was thinking. I really didn't know what I was thinking. But at that moment, I wanted the heavy comfort of his control over me to eliminate all of the confusion.

"I think so. But I've never done anything like that before. I don't know what it would look like." I literally could not wrap my head around it. "Can we try and see what happens? Talk about it as things come up?"

"Of course we can. And you know how much I respect you. You know that I would never do anything that would hurt you or upset you," he said. "Now, take off your pants." I stood up and removed my jeans and socks. When I turned back to him, he patted his lap. He was going to punish me.

He laid me gently over his lap and started spanking me with his left hand. In his right hand, he held the front of my neck so that my back was arched and he could see my face. As he hit me, he asked me, "When I tell you to stop walking away from me, what do you do?"

"I stop."

"When I tell you to drop down to your knees, what do you do?"

"I do it."

"Do you walk away from me in anger?"

"No, Sir."

"Good girl," and he stood up, dragging me by the hair toward the bedroom. Halfway down the hallway, he stopped abruptly and sighed. "Oh, you are so lucky that I'm not wearing a belt today, you are so fucking lucky." We were standing near my closet and my eyes must have darted toward the door. His face lit up. "What belts do you have? Show them to me."

So I got out three belts. The first: a thin black Calvin Klein belt that I wear with pants for work. The second: a stiff, medium-width black belt with silver metal studs and rings on it. The third: a wide, heavy brown leather belt. He took them all from me and pushed me over the bed.

He started beating me with the thin belt, but he quickly threw it to the side. "Too light," he muttered. Then he went to work with the medium belt, but grew tired of the light smacks it made on my skin. "Too stiff," he grumbled. So, like we were acting out some perverted form of Goldilocks, he turned to the third belt. He had already warmed up, so there were no soft introductory hits. He started right in with the hard wallops. He moaned appreciatively at the hard thwack sound that the belt made and the way each blow made me jump in pain.

After the first few blows, he made me count to ten for him. He had warned me that he would start over if I didn't say the numbers loudly enough, so I made certain to shout them out clearly. I could make it to ten, but if he started over? I might just meltdown with the pain.

He was done with the ten and he rolled me over onto my back. I winced at the welts that I could already feel on my ass and my back, but he steadied me with his palm against my chest. "Stay," he whispered and I laid my head back, closed my eyes. I heard him pick up a different belt, then felt the sharp sting of the first thin belt whipping across my nipples. I opened my eyes in shock to see him grinning devilishly. He pinned my wrists with one hand and continued torturing my nipples with the belt in the other.

I squealed, louder, deeper with my head thrown back. Suddenly, he stopped and I could feel his mouth on my nipples. His tongue teased each in turn, gently, slowly. He laid the belt across my chest and reclined next to me.

"Kitten, I think we finally understand each other," he smiled. I nodded absently. I was afraid of what was ahead. Would my life change dramatically? Hadn't there been enough dramatic change already in the few short months I had known him?

But at the same time, he had already taken me so far and I had been safe and loved the entire time. Of course we could make this work if he was leading us. I would follow him, I would be his good girl and follow him.