“Ah, that type doesn’t change.” Adam started for the doors. “Serena requires two. See where you are at the end of the weekend and don’t push too hard. Let her come to you. I bet she will.”
Deke wished he was half as certain. He followed the guys in, ready to start this particular op.
* * * *
Maddie breathed in as Serena Dean-Miles proved she had some serious upper-body strength as she pulled on the corset. “Does it have to be so tight?”
“Oh, you’ll love how pretty it is,” Serena assured her. “And most of the time I’ve found that when I begin the evening in a corset, I rarely end in one.”
“You change?” She hoped so because she could barely breathe in this sucker.
“Well, if by change you mean end up naked, then yes.” Serena tied off the back of the corset. “There you go. I went easy on you.”
Maddie rose to her feet, trying to get used to the sensation of being caged in a corset. “This is why they do the corset thing, isn’t it? It’s so we’re so uncomfortable, we would rather be naked than in this thing.”
“I wouldn’t put it past some sneaky Dom to come up with that plan.” Serena had walked her through the club while the guys had been outside talking. She’d given her a brief history of the place and then brought her down to the locker room to try on what she called “proper fet wear.”
“Proper fet wear,” it seemed, included a lot of uncomfortable-looking costumes. She’d been given the choice of a PVC body suit with all the wrong cutouts or a selection of corsets. Serena had explained that they kept the small wardrobe of new fet wear for visitors who weren’t prepared for the club’s rules. No street clothes were allowed in the dungeon when the club was open.
The club wouldn’t open for a couple of hours, but she was supposed to start getting used to playing the role she needed to play.
The role of Deke’s submissive.
Had she thought about this at all? Or was she running on pure instinct? It wasn’t the way she usually worked. She was logical. She didn’t leap without looking. And then she only leapt after making a very thorough study of what she was leaping into, including a decision matrix that weighed the pros and cons of leaping at all.
Yet she’d dove right into this stupid lake. She’d taken the plunge without a second thought.
What’s your Dom’s name?
Deke. His name is Deke and we’ve been friends for a long time, but D/s really took our relationship to another level.
Why? Why had she said that? Why couldn’t she have come up with some other name? Some completely falsified construct that allowed her room to maneuver?
“It gets easier,” Serena assured her. “You get used to it, and there are some things you’ll even come to love about corsets.”
“Like what?”
“It changes your posture for one thing. Feel how straight your back is. I like the sensation. I spend all day hunched over a computer and when I put on a corset, I get to become someone else.”
“You get to pretend?” Maddie had friends who cosplayed a lot. She could understand the concept, though she’d never particularly wanted to dress up herself.
“Not pretend, exactly,” Serena mused. “I put that wrong. You would think a writer would be careful with words. No. It’s not pretending, not at the core. Sure, playing out scenes can be fun. You pretend to be the nurse and your husbands are doctors who need some special time. Or it can be fun to be the virginal villager who gets pillaged hard.”
Maddie couldn’t help but snort at the thought. “I don’t see myself doing that.”
“You never know what ends up floating your boat. Or long boat, in the Viking scenario,” Serena replied. “You get two kids in and suddenly it’s freeing to be Helga with the braids and the intact hymen. But I digress. What I was trying to say is that the pretending isn’t about leaving yourself behind. It’s about finding parts of yourself that don’t get attention. I write all day. I write about romance and sex, and there’s still a part of me that needs both romance and sex. I write words, and words don’t fulfill our physical needs. It can be easy to get stuck inside your head and forget you have other parts that need tending.”
“That’s what a vibrator is for.” A vibrator didn’t care that she worked late and knew more science than it did. She’d found men often took offense.
Serena’s lips quirked up. “Oh, baby girl. I used to be you. Okay. Let’s try something. I want you to close your eyes and take a deep breath. I’m going to take your hand and you follow me. I won’t let you trip.”
But she tripped so easily, and she often did it with her eyes open. “Why?”
“Because I want to show you something,” Serena explained. “Come on. I promise I won’t let anything bad happen, but it will work better if you don’t open your eyes until I tell you to.”
“I don’t see how this is supposed to help me with training…” The other woman’s eyes had narrowed, proving she absolutely wasn’t one of those submissive outside the bedroom types. And she was a brilliant author who actually lived the lifestyle. “Sorry. I’m not used to being out of control.”
She closed her eyes and felt Serena’s hand take hers.
“I understand the need for control. It’s precisely why a lot of powerful women enjoy submitting when it comes to sex.” Serena moved slowly, guiding her only she knew where. “Although you’ll find the right Dom tends to quietly top you outside the bedroom as well.”
“Why would you want that?”
“Oh, for things we can’t do for ourselves,” Serena said. “It would be great if we were all completely perfect when it came to balance, but most women find it hard to ever put themselves first. I used to work all day. I mean from the minute I got up to right before bed I would have my computer on. Shortly after we got together Adam started making dinner at night and he asked if I wouldn’t mind not bringing the computer to the table. I said yes, of course. And then we would watch a movie and Jake would rub my feet, and that’s not conducive to working. Slowly but surely I found myself working normal hours and enjoying my time off. And weirdly I became more productive.”
“They trained you not to work after dinner was served,” Maddie surmised. “Well, I don’t have anything to do, so work is kind of comforting.”
“Only until you know what real comfort is.” Serena stopped. “Now I want you to think about yourself. Think about how you look, how you present yourself to the world. Think about how you dress and how you want others to see you. Think about the secret you, the Madeline you only share with your lovers, and I don’t mean the kind that require batteries. Even if you haven’t had one in a while, think about a time when you enjoyed someone in bed. It could be a man or a woman. It could be more than one, just a simple time when the world melted away and nothing mattered but how your body felt.”
Electric. Young. So filled with potential. Nothing had mattered when Deke kissed her. Her brain went on the fritz the minute he put his hands on her, and while she was with him, she could let go of all her worries and cares and simply be. She’d been able to breathe in those moments, able to float when she so often felt anchored to the ground.