Don't Break Her Rules

Walking in the rain by the embankment in London at Christmas, when the city's commuters have all gone home and deserted their glass and steel office buildings, they leave the square mile feeling like a ghost town. The only thing to comfort the passing traveler is the occasional homeless "Big issue" magazine seller braving the cold as unlike the many strangers who walk by you in silence, those magazine sellers by the Thames river have a reason to be nice, as they breathe warm air into their cupped hands to warm their gloved fingers in the biting cold. It's strange to say, but lost in London's architecture it can be a lonely and existentially daunting experience.

I remember I had just finished up ice skating at Broadgate, which is a gorgeous circular ice rink tucked in the heart of Liverpool street, and not wanting to go home to my horrible flatmates, I was stranded for the night, complete with Hello Kitty hoodie and my figure skating bag over my shoulder. I just needed some time alone.

So I didn't catch the tube home, and I walked for hours through London's medieval streets. I lost track of time. I walked all the way from Liverpool Street until I reached Monument and stood opposite pudding lane. It was a good time to think about Samuel Pepys' diary, the casualness and ferocity of that great fire of 1666 an ironic analogy to the one burning inside my head.

I had just finished that morning the final exams in my accounting and banking degree and I was, I guess, blowing off some steam walking through London, having been overwhelmed with studying for difficult exams for weeks.

Suddenly, like hitting a brick wall, the rigorous exam period was over, and unlike 24 hours ago when I had had my book wormish nose buried in economics textbooks, I now had nothing to do with the hours. Looming too on my mind was the fact that I was going to be spending Christmas day on my own, for the first time, this year.

If you're not English it's hard to understand the subtle nuances of life for English Londoner s who don't meet the bizarrely wonderful, parody lives that US films like Notting Hill and four weddings /the Hugh Grant illusion depict. And, why the depression cuts so profoundly deep for a young woman called Emily who, though I didn't realize it then, was already coming to the end of my road in the UK.

Maybe it's the fact that it's freezing, but not cold enough to turn the slush into beautiful white snow flakes. Maybe it's the way that rainy snow settles on the ripples in the Thames with nothing but the neon lights of the Tate Gallery shadowed across the river in the distance to remind you that people are partying everywhere, but you. Not you. You're on your own. Or the fact that when I look around on the tube, I feel like I'm the only white English face, a stranger in my own city. Whatever the case, this time of year in London, it gets dark at 4pm in the afternoon, and as always, people walk silently pass you in the street, even at Christmas. Even when you smile. So much for the spirit of Jesus.

London swells to over 14 million people during the day, but the isolation of it, and the way people don't communicate there can be so different to Brooklyn which is now home.

I've no plans on moving back across the pond anytime soon. The dullness of those grey skies and loneliness are indelibly etched into my memory. How strange it was, that for the first time in my adult life, in this historically lovely city that was where I completed my first degree, that the following events of the true life experience I am about to reveal should play out against this urban setting. What follows is the first time I've ever spoken let alone written about how I and David met.

My name is Emily. It was a cold winter night in 2010, at a late night Japanese noodle house called Wagamama, a short distance from the Tower of London where I ended up with my ice skate bag, nursing very sore legs from too many double salchows and too many sleepless nights studying, taking shelter from the cold at 11pm. Even starbucks in London closes at 8pm, so this was the only place round there, other than a Zizzi pizza joint to go. Among those quaint, old cobbled streets filled with the history of Ann Boleyn and the fortress like slits of the Bloody Tower nearby, in this unlikely dwelling, I ound my first real BDSM partner, David.

I will always remember the blue Bjork shirt he was wearing with a little radiohead mascot sewn onto the trim. He was reading a book, not on Kindle, but a torn, well fingered copy of one of John Keats poetry collections that I can't remember. Maybe it was Tennyson.

Eerily, there was hardly anyone in the café.

"Aren't you cold in that T-shirt? It's freezing outside!" I couldn't help but ask him smiling, as I sat down to eat at the canteen bench across.

"No, I'm fine," he replied looking up, a little geeky in cute round glasses. He seemed to do a double take at me. "I love how pink your nose has gone in the cold," he said smiling.

"It's the eternal ice skaters nose," I replied. "My skin is so pale in this weather."

Those were the 3 sentences I remember. Quickly we had struck up a pleasant conversation across the canteen benches in Wagamama, and even sooner he asked if he could join me on my bench, and move across, to which I was secretly thrilled. We were like 2 ships in the night. The last two people in the café.

As the Wagamama staff politely hassled us to finish up and pay the bill, dying to get home and clock off, I realized I had found a special gem in this place.

David was 23 and a newly graduated solicitor. Successful but also desperately unhappy. A geeky loner who, in his own socially acceptable kind of way, was meant to meet me that day in the cold slushy snow flurries by the Tower of London.

I don't believe in fate, but some encounters are just meant to be. We talked. We walked across tower bridge, under the Mayor of London's building and talked for hours. We both had no where to go, it was Friday, it just felt good to walk with him and he held my ice skating bag when I said my shoulder was hurting.

We exchanged phone numbers, taking 1 hour to say goodbye, which is always a good sign I think, before ending up at 3am driving to the West End in his completely ridiculous red Volkswagen beetle.

We ended up in a late night hotel bar near Piccadilly. Too much wine, and since I trusted what I met, and I trust myself, I invited him back to my dig. Probably a good thing anyway, since he was by that time way over the limit to drive back to his apartment in Clapham. I'd broken the cardinal rule of what every good girl is warned to never do, invite a stranger home. But it's hardly as though we jumped into bed!

So I invited David back to my student flat in the halls of residence at LSE, a man I had known like 5 hours. I think it was the fact he was an LSE grad himself, it was like old days for him.

Being honest though, it was the fact we had such an unusually natural rapport, 2 like-minded English people stranded, lost in different ways in this great though overcrowded city. We destined to be a conservative couple with a difference. It was as though David had a gift; he could pick up on my inner psyche. My need to be in charge and the dominant force in the home. From the outset, my dominant soul and his submissive, gentle demeanor just meshed together like a perfectly fitting lock and key.

From the time he insisted on getting out of his driver's seat and rushing round the car to open the door for me, despite the fact it was pouring with rain. He was so different to all the pseudo-intellectual jerks at LSE and outright football louts trashing around the West End after the theaters close. He was a breathe of fresh air, and yes, that night, he did sleep in my bedroom, on the floor at the foot of my bed, without any pillows, which he insisted.

I remember waking up the following Saturday morning, having slept until just before noon, opening my eyes and thinking with a slight hangover, "Shit, Emily, what the fuck! Did you just let a stranger sleep in your bedroom?!" I scrambled to the edge of my bed to find a little bag of almond croissants from Paul, which is a French patisserie which Londoners would know. I remember I'd told him how much I loved them somewhere in the hours of our conversation in the early hours, and he was so sweet, he'd gone out especially to buy them for me and even left a thank you note that read. "Thank you Emily for the night. All's fair in love and war!"

I must say I wondered if he had had a good night sleep on my carpeted, though hard floor, at the foot of my bed, but I innately trusted this man, and it was later on that day, that we spoke again and arranged to meet up for coffee.

It was the craziest start to the relationship.

We couldn't stop smiling when we saw each other that evening, and were desperate to get away from the Christmas crowds. After chatting for hours more, we ended up in the crypt of All Saint Church in Marylebone where after spilling our secrets like 2 best friends who hadn't seen each other for years, snogged in each other's arms like a passionate scene from Dr Zhivago. We spoke about everything. From yellow submarines to childhood experiences, to other really unique things, like the way that the News of the World had covered Max Moseley, that F1 racing boss's secret sadomasochistic femdom caning that stirred the country's secret gardens and grapevines. David had been a law student covering the case in the public gallery of Judge Eady's court for a special university project he did on libel law, which I found really unique.

David confided in me how submissive he was as we French kissed in that crypt. It was dark love. It was a beautiful submission on an emotional and non-verbal level which is hard for people who don't embrace BDSM to understand. David told me that whenever he was in my presence, he was "in subspace."

I could read in between the lines of his carefully chosen words, just how much he longed for a non-judgmental, loving but sadistic girlfriend and mistress, for so long. He needed a woman to worship the ground on which she walked; a lady who would feel as comfortable dominating him as she would cuddling him and catering to his intense need for maternal love and affection, but a woman sophisticated enough to know how to give both carrot and stick in the perfect dosages.

And in him, he was a friend for me amid the sea of loneliness whom I could share all of my darkest fantasies as an elegant, more complicated than I should be female, without fear of reprisal or embarrassment, or being mocked and mistreated for such simple pleasures. 2010 England was from my perspective, still very much a land where far from the open sexuality exhibitionism in Amsterdam or France - in England, shamefully, repression was still very much the order of the day. I haven't been back for several years, but I bet it still is.

Neither of us could have cared less about anything other than the precious little fire of masochism we had unlocked by this chance encounter. Powerful and inspiring in its energy, in me David has found the right girl.

I was an anarchist at heart.

And, in return, we agreed we would keep all our secret desires in confidence.

A wild and wayward soul, at 21, I was already kinky enough to have skipped the Ann Summer's rampant rabbit trend, and all the boring "carnal knowledge" lark, in favor of dark sadistic tendencies which I shall yet reveal. I already had acquired my own proud armory of vintage school canes that were seriously underused.

We arranged that he would again sleep on the floor of my bedroom that night, and call me "Miss" from now on.

From the first time I arbitrarily slapped David across his face, hard, for not saying "Miss" Emily when speaking to me after he came out of my ensuite bathroom wearing just his boxers, and he turned the other cheek; to the time on the third night I ordered him to his knees, humiliatingly smirking while enjoying his submissive responses, it was a friendship that we both valued as much as we recognized this kind of connection was rare.

He openly consented, and enjoyed my emotional power over him. Even when ordered to gingerly kiss, lick and clean between the toes of my unwashed feet in the middle of the afternoon, which I'm sure must have reeked given the fact I'd been skating for hours earlier that morning.

Watching David meekly obey me, I was learning a lot about the delicacies of submission. The naturalness of our initial encounter was flourishing. Within a short period of time, I had given David what was his first adult, bare bottom spanking across my knee, with my hair brush. It was fun, but painful for him.

I was wearing my normal casual clothes. It was given as a punishment for being late in traffic to pick me up for our date. So he went to dinner with a burned red backside, squirming opposite me in the restaurant as he knew how turned on his discomfort made me as a true smiling sadist.

Considering we had not had full sex yet, it's amazing to think looking back about how the closeness of these sadomasochistic experiences seamlessly interwove with our strangely vanilla dating. But human sexuality is a complex element, and as I remember him laid there over my knee, trousers down around his ankles inside my bedroom, as he hilariously hoped my roommates wouldn't hear, when I couldn't have given a toss who heard, I was already making my mark on his submissive heart.

On that first occasion I made sure I tanned his bare bottom sore. Alternating from cheek to cheek, laying the full power of the back of my wooden hair brush onto his hot bottom as he cringed with pain. He cried.

I was turned on by the experience, and his real tears. He didn't get off my knee until he was truly sorry for being late. We started to do this on a regular basis even creating a set of rules which if he broke, it would mean a non-merciful over the knee bare bottom spanking to tears.

I think it's a cool way for couples to manage submissive responsibilities, if the guy is anything like David. I quickly had a little maid in training. David was doing all my household choirs, ironing, tidying my room, even handwashing my expensive, dirty lingerie. I made him tongue wash all of my smelly thongs, and drink the water on which they soaked. He particularly relished cleaning my porcelain toilet bowl, and was extremely red faced when I eventually joked after meeting his older sister several weeks later, how thanks to David I must have the cleanest loo in LSE halls!

So I hope readers, this is a beginning. I'm happy to share many stories of the wonderful, heady relationship that followed in further glimpses. Real anecdotes about the humiliations I inflicted on David and the extent to which my new boyfriend turned into my full time personal slave in what became a 24/7 power exchange that worked!

David, a compellingly intelligent lawyer by day, turned into my fawning little bitch boy. A good sub for Miss Emily, under my thumb behind closed doors. He lapped up my punishments with great affection, and even when I took this in the direction of forced-bi and eventual cuckolding, none of my demands proved too low for my friend, who though not together anymore now I've left the city of London, I remain in touch with.

Maybe if the folks at literotica approve my submission, I'll send him in a link to say thank you as its his birthday coming up, and this might rekindle some memories from that Tower of London first meeting. The content gets darker and darker I assure you if you'd care for me to write further about how our S&M relationship evolved. You'll have to forgive any spelling errors and grammatical mistakes I will no doubt make and may have made. I'm an economist not an editor.

I'll leave the rest of you waiting in baited breathe for the next instalment of how I enjoyed molding David into the used little doormat he craved to be. I believe one of my school canes, anal sex and a very humiliating enema take center stage in the next encounter.

Sincerely, Ms. Emily.