The Diary Of A Submissive: A True Story Read online

  SOPHIE MORGAN

  The Diary of a Submissive

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE DIARY OF A SUBMISSIVE

  Sophie Morgan is a journalist working in South East England. She lives with her boyfriend.

  Prologue

  You might have slipped outside to take a call on your phone when you first saw us, or, if you’re so inclined, have been finishing a crafty cigarette before heading back into the warmth of the bar. Either way, we draw your attention, standing in a gap between the buildings, across the street and along a little way from where you’re standing.

  Don’t get me wrong, that’s not to say I’m especially stunning, or that he is. We look like any other couple on a night out, neither unusually dressed nor especially loud, not even remarkable in our unremarkableness. But there’s an intensity, something brewing between us that stops you short, making you look in spite of the fact it’s bloody cold and you were actually getting ready to go back inside and rejoin your friends.

  His hand is clenched around my upper arm in a grip so visibly tight even from this distance that you wonder fleetingly if it’s going to bruise. He has pushed me up against the wall, his other hand tangled in my hair and holding me in place, so when I try and look away – for help? – I can’t.

  He isn’t particularly big or broad, in fact you’d probably describe him as nondescript if you were to bother describing him at all. But there’s something about him, something about us, that makes you wonder for a minute if everything is all right. I can’t take my eyes off him and the obvious depth of my awe means for a second you can’t either. You stare at him intently, trying to see what I see. And then he tugs on my hair, pulling my head closer to his in a sharp movement that makes you instinctively step a bit closer to intervene, before those stories in the papers about good Samaritans meeting sticky ends flood your brain and pull you up short.

  Closer now, you can hear him talking to me. Not the full sentences – you aren’t that close – but enough words for you to get a sense. For these are evocative words. Vicious words. Ugly words that make you think perhaps you really might have to step in at any moment if this escalates further.

  Slut. Whore.

  You look at my face, so close to his, and see fury glittering in my eyes. You don’t see me speak, because I don’t. I’m biting my lip, as if I’m restraining the urge to respond, but I remain silent. His hand tangles tighter in my hair, and I wince but otherwise I stand there, not passive exactly – you can feel the effort it is taking for me not to move as if it were a tangible thing – but certainly self-controlled, weathering the verbal onslaught.

  Then a pause. He is waiting for a response. You move closer. If someone asked you’d say it was to check I was all right, but in your heart you know that actually it’s curiosity, pure and simple. There is something feral, primal, about the dynamic between us that draws you closer even as it almost repulses you. Almost. You want to know how I am going to respond, what happens next. There is something dark and yet compelling about it that means while normally you’d be horrified, instead you’re intrigued.

  You watch me gulp. I run a tongue along my bottom lip to moisten it before trying to speak. I start a sentence, tail off, eyes flickering down to break from his gaze as I whisper my response.

  You can’t hear me. But you can hear him. ‘Louder.’

  I’m blushing now. There are tears in my eyes, but you can’t tell if they are of anguish or of fury.

  My voice is clearer, even loud on the night air. My tone is defiant yet the flush on my cheeks and running along the collarbone visible under my open jacket betrays an embarrassment I can’t hide.

  ‘I am a slut. I have been wet all evening thinking about you fucking me and I would be very grateful if we could go home now and do that. Please.’

  My defiance cracks by the last word, which comes out as a soft plea.

  He runs a finger idly along the edge of my shirt – low cut enough that there is a hint of cleavage, but not exactly slutty – and I shiver. He starts to speak and the tone of his voice makes you restrain the urge to shiver too.

  ‘That almost sounded like begging. Are you begging?’

  You see me start to nod, but I get pulled up short by his hand in my hair. Instead I swallow quickly, shut my eyes for a second and answer.

  ‘Yes.’ A pause, turning into lengthening silence. A breath which might almost be a quiet sigh. ‘Sir.’

  His finger is still running along the curve of my breasts as he speaks.

  ‘You look like you’d do pretty much anything right now to be able to come. Would you? Do anything?’

  I stay silent. My expression is wary, which surprises you bearing in mind the obvious desperation in my voice. You wonder what ‘anything’ has encompassed in the past, what it’s going to mean now.

  ‘Will you get down on your knees and suck my cock? Right here?’

  Neither of us speaks for long moments. He removes his hands from my hair, steps away a little. Waiting. The noise of a car door slamming a distance away makes me flinch, and I shift to glance nervously up and down the street. I see you. For a second we make eye contact, my gaze widening with shock and shame before I look back at him. He is smiling. Utterly still.

  I make a sound in the back of my throat, half whimper, half plea, and swallow hard, gesturing around vaguely. ‘Now? Wouldn’t you rather we –’

  His fingers press against my still-moving lips. He is smiling, almost indulgently. But his voice is firm. Imperious even.

  ‘Now.’

  I cast the quickest glance possible your way. You don’t know it, but in my head I’m playing a very adult version of a childish game – if I don’t look at you directly you’re not actually there to witness my humiliation, can’t see it because I can’t see you.

  I gesture nervously in your general direction. ‘But it’s still quite early, there are people walking –’

  ‘Now.’

  You are transfixed watching the battling emotions flit across my face. Embarrassment. Desperation. Anger. Resignation. Several times I open my mouth to speak, think better of it and remain silent. Through it all he just stands there. Watching me intently. As intently as you are.

  Finally, face crimson, I bend at the knees and drop down to the wet cobblestones in front of him. My head is bowed. My hair falls in front of my face and makes it hard to tell, but you think you can see tears glistening on my cheeks in the light of the street lamp.

  For a few seconds I just kneel there, unmoving. Then you watch me take a deep, steadying breath. I square my shoulders, look up and reach for him. But as my shaking hands make contact with his belt buckle, he stops me, patting me softly on the head the way you would a loyal pet.

  ‘Good girl. I know how difficult that was. Now get up and let’s go home and finish there. It’s a bit cold for playing outside tonight.’

  His grip is solicitous as he helps me to my feet. We walk past you, arm in arm. He smiles. Nods. You half nod back before you catch yourself and wonder what on earth you’re doing. I am looking studiously at the ground, my head down.

  You can see I am sha
king. But what you can’t see is how aroused this whole experience has made me. How hard my nipples are in the confines of my bra. How my trembling is as much from the adrenaline high of everything that has just played out in front of you as it is from the cold and humiliation. How I thrive on this. How it completes me in a way I can’t fully explain. How I hate it yet love it. Yearn for it. Crave it.

  You can’t see any of that. All you can see is a trembling woman with dirty knees, walking away on wobbly legs.

  This is my story.

  1

  The first thing to say is that I am not a pervert. Well, no more than anyone else. If you came to my flat you would be more struck by the piles of washing up in the sink than my dungeon – not least because the cost of living in the city is such that I’m lucky to have been able to find somewhere with a living room which I could rent alone within my budget. Let’s just say a dungeon wasn’t really an option.

  So, to address some of those pesky stereotypes, I am neither a doormat nor a simpleton. I don’t yearn to spend my day baking while someone hunts and gathers for me and I keep the home fires burning, which is just as well as apart from a decent Sunday roast I’m a bit of a crap cook. I also don’t look like Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary. Alas.

  I just happen to be, at points when the urge takes me and I have someone I trust to play with, a submissive. Not that you’d know that if you met me. It’s just one facet of my personality, one of the plethora of character elements that make me, well, me – coexisting with my love of strawberries, compulsion to continue arguing stubbornly even when I know I’m wrong and tendency to heap scorn on 99 per cent of television programmes and yet become obsessive about the other 1 per cent to a level that frightens even me.

  I work as a journalist on a regional newspaper. I love my job, and – not that it should really need to be said – being submissive doesn’t impact on my work. Frankly, if it did I’d get lumbered with tea making and picture stories about infant-school book weeks, which really is a fate worse than death. Also, newsrooms are bantery places. It’s a dog-eat-dog world and you need to give as good as you get. I do.

  I consider myself a feminist. I’m certainly independent. Capable. In control. To some that might seem incongruous with the choices I make sexually, the things that get me off. For a while it seemed jarring to me. In fact, sometimes it still does, but I’ve come to the conclusion that there are more important things to worry about. I’m a grown woman of usually sound mind. If I want to relinquish my personal control to someone I trust so that they can lead us somewhere which proves thrilling and hot for both of us, then as long as I’m not doing it somewhere where I’m frightening small children or animals I think that’s my right. I take responsibility for my actions and choices.

  It has taken a while for me to get to this stage though. I would, if the word hadn’t been appropriated by reality television and turned into something that sounds both nausea-inducing and in need of a soft-rock video montage, go so far as to say it’s been a bit of a journey, which is really how this book came about. This isn’t a manifesto or a ‘how-to’ book, although I like to think if you’re into this kind of thing and wanting to explore you might get some ideas. It’s just what happened to me, how I discovered and explored this side of myself, my experiences, my thoughts. Ask another sub their thoughts and what being submissive means to them and you’ll get a whole other book.

  Looking back on it now my submissive tendencies started young, although I wouldn’t have called them that then. I just knew there were certain things that made me tingle, that I would find myself thinking about wistfully without ever really being able to put my finger on why.

  Of course I was oblivious to all of that as a kid – mostly I was just going about my business growing up in a nice middle-class home in the Home Counties. I hate to bust myths here, but there’s no deep-seated trauma in my past or anything missing in my formative years that has exacerbated my love of filth now. I have no daddy issues, there was no angst in my home life, and my childhood was – happily for me but probably not that exciting for book writing purposes – a happy, loving and simple one. I was, and remain, very lucky indeed with my family – we are all quite different to each other, but the bond of love and a shared sense of the absurd sticks us together through thick and thin, and I feel genuinely blessed to have them all.

  I grew up in a nice house with my mum, my dad and my brother.

  My mum, an accountant before she had me, devoted her life to bringing up my brother and me, and is very much the heart of our family. She spent a lot of time with us, nurturing us into little people whether that involved helping us with homework or flinging herself around the garden with us. She didn’t believe in sitting on the sidelines; if we were going roller skating she was going roller skating with us. Her other passion was doing DIY in every room of the house in rotational turn, the home improvement equivalent of repainting the Forth Bridge, albeit with Laura Ashley wallpaper.

  My dad runs his own business and is the most hard-working man I know, a provider through and through who ensured our childhoods were filled with whatever new bike or gadget we wanted (thankfully mum was around to ensure such goodies were bestowed in sensible fashion lest we get too unbearable), opportunities for travel and a wonderful home life. Funny and clever, he has a sense of adventure that I think I inherited, along with an independence of spirit and unapologetic sense of ‘this is who I am’ that he encouraged in his children, having occasionally clashed with his own parents’ views of what he should do in life, as opposed to what he wanted to do.

  My broher is in lots of ways the polar opposite to me. Where I am generally fairly quiet and more comfortable around a few close friends, he is the life and soul of the party, the one whose energy lifts up the room, who gets things done. Despite our differences he is the person I would call first at 3am if I was in trouble, not least because he is practically nocturnal. I feel incredibly lucky that this man, who is likely to be alongside me in life for longer than anyone else, is someone so amazing – although, hilariously and despite this ringing endorsement, give us three days together in the family homestead over a Christmas holiday and we will have reverted to our teenage selves, bickering over who’s spending too long in the bathroom (usually him).

  Our comfortable semi was also shared with a menagerie of animals, ranging from Goldie the Goldfish – don’t judge, I was three when I named him – to Cheesy the hamster and Barry the dog – named during my ‘why shouldn’t dogs have human names?’ phase (a question answered fairly quickly when my poor dad was running round the park bellowing ‘Barry!’ in a way that undoubtedly perturbed other dog walkers). I’ve always loved animals and one of my strongest childhood memories is of burying a dead bird I found in the garden expressly against the wishes of my mum who, understandably, was concerned about hygiene issues. When she discovered I had not only gone against her wishes by picking up said bird to move it to its final resting place but was presiding over a burial service attended by my brother and our next door neighbours’ children – in for a penny in for a pound – I was sent to my room in disgrace. Usually for me such a punishment, despite being my parents’ main tactic for misbehaviour – no corporal punishment in our house – was no punishment at all. My room was one of my favourite places to be as it was filled with the books I spent all my pocket money on and I spent happy hours sat on the window ledge reading and watching the world go by. But in this instance I felt the injustice was too much to bear. I wrote an outraged letter to David Bellamy telling him about the oppressive anti-conservationist regime I was forced to live under, where dead birds were cast aside by uncaring adults. He never replied, which is probably for the best because I fear if he had he might have told me to listen to my mum, which would only have made me more irate. The fact that this is the closest I can think of to a clash with my mother while growing up is testament to the fact I was never a natural rebel. I went quietly about doing my thing, but I wasn’t busy testing boundaries, mostly be
cause I was allowed to do pretty much everything I wanted to do, and otherwise wasn’t bothered about arguing in principle. That, admittedly, did change as I got older.

  My interest in writing started young – I remember writing and illustrating stories in little A5 booklets tied with treasury tags. My stories were usually based around children’s TV shows, books and films I enjoyed. The standard of my writing was considerably better than my drawing, although at that point that really wasn’t saying much. I dabbled in art at an early age, having seen something on the news about some precocious child somewhere whose art was selling for thousands. Sadly, when I knocked up a couple of coloured pencil and felt tip mixed-media works my mum was pleased to accept the first picture I gave her, and even stooped to giving me 50p for a second original. But when I upped my price to a tenner – I felt this was reasonable under the circumstances – she gave me a firm but kind ‘no’, scuppering any further plans for a life in the arts and returning me to producing my mini books and comics. Given half a chance I would pull myself, my friends and family into the worlds of Narnia, Middle Earth or, slightly closer to home but somewhat more obscurely, having discovered it via cable TV, the city of Newcastle as depicted in Jossy’s Giants, a TV show about a school football team.

  My love of Jossy’s Giants and football in general came very much from a tomboyish streak a mile wide. I was – and still am – quite a way from the girlie stereotype. I have a pathological dislike of pink and never developed a love for make-up, expensive clothes or fashionable shoes – to this day put me in a pair of heels and I walk not unlike Bambi trying to get across the ice, although what I don’t spend on shoes I more than make up for with nail varnish and handbags. Growing up I definitely didn’t have much interest in worrying about boys, a fact which, ironically, meant I had lots of male friends at school as I’d quite happily play football with them in the lunch hour and didn’t bother with anything much like small talk. If you asked me my favourite things when I was ten, I’d have said reading, roller skating, riding my bike and climbing the tree at the end of our garden, which gave me a view of the nearby allotments – a source of endless fascination for reasons that seemed very important at the time. The tree was my private place – my sister had no interest in the inevitable scrapes and dirt borne of making the initial jump up, even with my cunningly engineered skipping rope pulley system, which provided a boost to the first climbable branch. I was quite a solitary child in lots of ways, very comfortable on my own, reading or daydreaming, which is probably a bit unsurprising bearing in mind the picture I’ve just painted of myself as a bit of an antisocial bint.