Fast And Loose

My greedy eyes lapped up her gorgeous illustrations – line drawings of her kneeling, naked and in profile, at a man’s feet, sucking on him. Only the man’s lower portion was visible, the picture ending at Mia’s bowed head. She had drawn the remains of faint whip-marks on the portion of her buttocks presented to the viewer. Her hands were bound behind her back.

There were other pictures, too. One of her standing, her back to the viewer, before a huge and ornate front door, holding a cute little handbag. One of her standing naked in front of two stern and unyielding-looking characters – a suited man with a riding crop, and a woman of a Mrs Danvers cast, in housekeeperly black.

God, I had been so looking forward to the next update. I had my vibrator ready and everything.

And now this.

I kicked at the desk leg and pushed my computer chair back on its castors, frustrated in the extreme. Now I was going to have to use my imagination.

I cocked an ear, listening to the silent flat.

Jess and Mehra were both out, one at lunch with parents, the other at IKEA with boyfriend. I should be safe for another hour at least.

I eased my pyjama shorts down to mid-thigh, the feel of the leather on my bottom taking me back to another of Mia’s posts. The one where she sat on a high stool in a crowded bar, waiting for her first meeting with J. He had ordered no underwear and a skirt loose enough to make this skin contact with the stool top possible. She had sat there, worrying about getting the leather wet. She had been so worried that she had taken a pack of wipes with her, meaning to run one over the round red seat once she was off it. But in the end J made her lick it up. Right there, in front of everyone. I cringed, just as I had when I first read it, but at the same time I reached for my vibrator.

Later that night, after dinner and champagne in a restaurant that sounded a lot like Wystan Place, he had taken her to a hotel room and made her bend over the bed.

I switched on my vibrator and applied its smooth round head to my parted under lips.

After making sure she was bent to his total satisfaction, he had lifted her skirt and smacked her bottom, six times, hard enough to leave handprints.

Then she had moaned and begged for more, but he had refused her. Instead, he made her stay like that, bent over with her thighs spread, while he made a slew of business calls. The last call was to a friend, and he had spoken to this friend of Mia and how she was positioned just then.

I tried, as I rubbed my vibrator up and down and around my clit, to remember his exact words.

‘I’ve got a little slut up here with me – you’d like her. We’ve hardly spoken to each other and already she’s bent over the bed with a red bum and the juiciest pussy you ever saw. I’m making her wait, though. Maybe I won’t even fuck her tonight. What do you think?’

I thought of what must have gone through Mia’s head; the jumble of humiliation and outrage and frustration and sheer horniness.

He had laughed before speaking again. ‘Yeah, I might do that. She needs a bit of training first, though. Do you want to see her?’

And he had photographed her upturned bum, with its scalded red spots and her open lips below, for his friend to look at and pass judgement upon.

I gasped, feeling my pussy clench uselessly on nothing while warm sensation pulsed around my clit.

‘Ohhhh,’ I moaned, thinking of J and his friend. But in my imagination his friend looked a lot like Tom Crowley, and that spoiled the moment for me.

‘For God’s sake,’ I muttered, standing to pull my shorts back up before heading to the bathroom to wash the vibrator. I put my tongue out at my tousle-headed reflection in the mirror, thinking it was no wonder Crowley had never called me for a second go if this was my morning look.

But then I told myself that no amount of last night’s mascara or this morning’s dull skin would have influenced Crowley’s decision. He was a one-night merchant. That was common knowledge.

I sang a few lines of Britney’s ‘Womanizer’ into my vibrator mic, scowling at myself. I needn’t have given in to him so quickly, though. If I’d held out, we could have had a month of lovely flirtation. A month would have been my limit before the knickers came off, I reckoned. He was a bastard with a terrible reputation, but he was also an astonishingly attractive bastard with a terrible reputation. A girl could treat herself to a one-off, couldn’t she?

I dried the vibrator and went back to my bedroom, where I pulled out my little bag of tricks from the bedside drawer to replace the vibrator with its fellows. The bag of tricks was full of stuff I’d never used and probably never would. A satin blindfold, a silky bondage rope, a little heart-shaped leather paddle. What I needed to distract me from Tom Crowley was somebody I could use these things with. But I’d never summoned the nerve to bring it up with any of my past boyfriends, and I doubted that was going to change. Once I knew a man, the desire to surprise him with the information that I was actually a person who enjoyed being tied up and spanked faded away. How could I throw that into the carefully constructed and cherished image of me he’d built up? It would ruin everything. Unless – and it was a massive unless – he turned out to be into it himself, the sex would become awkward and…ugh. No. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Of course, I could always try it the other way around. Look for somebody who had a declared interest in the subject. It was easy these days, with sites like Fetlife and so on. But I’d register and spend fifty hours trying to write a personal profile, then end up deregistering because I couldn’t stand the embarrassment any more. If only cringing turned me on, I’d have had it made.

So I was stuck with virtual kink. I trawled the net for sites that chimed with my tastes, and had to wade through a lot of unappealing material in my travels. The amount of surprised-looking blondes in red ball gags! Seemingly lots of people were all about that, but it wasn’t for me. I was looking for a particular aesthetic to go with my kink – no lurid intimate close-ups, no skulls and tattoos. I was looking for corsets, seamed stockings, ribbons and slender-handled riding crops.

Luckily, there was plenty of that, and nobody did it better than Mia Culpa.

I think what drew me in was that she started from the same point as me – curious inexperience. Her first posts were all about her fantasies, flashes of erotic fiction that chimed with my own yearnings. I would never know her, and I wasn’t one to comment on blog posts, but in a funny way I felt she was a kind of soulmate.

Her fantasies were wonderfully extravagant, often based on a pretty lingerie set or toy she’d seen in one of the luxe sex boutiques, and I began to look forward to my late-evening browse of her blog. She posted every day – sometimes with a story, sometimes with an opinion, sometimes with one of her drawings.

Then, one day, she posted an announcement. She had made the decision to seek that experience we both longed for. I didn’t know how to feel about this. On the one hand, I admired her courage, and I was desperate to read her accounts of this new stage in her life. On the other, I felt a little bit sad, almost betrayed, that she was moving on from my stationary position. I was the bridesmaid, watching the bride leave the reception, with only my bouquet to cling to.

I soon forgot my disappointment when she started posting the most riveting series of updates about her experiences in the D/s dating pool. They were funny, then despairing, then hopeful – then she met J.

That was when her blog switched from first to third person. The significance of it wasn’t lost on me. It meant it was serious. Sometimes I could imagine that J was writing it himself. It pulled me in deeper at the same time as it distanced me from her. Gone was the breathless intimacy of her virtual voice in my ear. Now I read about a fully-fledged submissive, giving all agency – even down to the pronoun she used – to her master.

I lived that deviant education by her side. I was there for her first spanking, the first time he tied her up, the first time she put on latex. All those firsts, and I had yet to break my duck.

And now, six months later, she was about to obey J’s command that she take her place at an exclusive ‘training school’ for submissives and the blog had disappeared!

I typed in the address again, hoping for a resurrection, but those foreboding words filled the screen once more.

I had to face it. Mia Culpa was no more.

Of course, I couldn’t just leave it like that.

Over the course of the next two hours, I clicked around between her online friends. A good many of them had posted updates about her sudden disappearance, but not one seemed to be in real-life contact with her. ‘Mia is M.I.A.’ was the upshot, with dozens of commenters lamenting her loss, but none having any news of her.

Many expressed fears for her safety. Did anyone know anything about this Academy? Where was it? Had anyone been there?

Everybody had drawn a blank.

I, at least, had a little bit of knowledge they didn’t, though, because it had become clear to me, over the course of time, that Mia lived in the same city as me – or at least somewhere near it.

I worked it out from little details about local bars and restaurants, or beauty spots, or shops, or even the weather. The bar where she met J – the one with the leather-topped stools – was Rum & Rose Petals. The restaurant where he made her touch herself under the table was Wystan Place. She’d had sex bent over the bonnet of his car at the viewing point on Golbury Hill.

Wherever Mia was, she was likely to be somewhere within a few miles of me.

The thought took me over to the window.

Was The Academy near here too? If she didn’t have to pack a passport, at least it had to be in this country. In fact, if I remembered correctly, J had mentioned that she’d be surprised how close to home it was.

My flat overlooked a church, and as I watched people mill about the porch, I wondered if any of them had been to The Academy. Or knew someone who had. Or had the kind of skills they taught.

Conjecture was useless.

I switched off the computer, got dressed and went to meet Tilda at the Arts Shed for our pre-arranged lunch and film date. Mia had decided, for her own reasons, to pull the plug on her blog. She was entitled to do so. And that was all there was to it.

Of course, my overdeveloped sense of intrigue was never going to let me leave it at that.

When I wasn’t working, or messing about with my fellow subeditors, or trying to avoid Tom Crowley, the disappearance of Mia Culpa impinged on my thoughts with relentless force. I looked at her blog site every evening, and every evening the message was the same. The conspiracy theories on her friends’ blogs blossomed and multiplied, with one poster even suggesting she might have been murdered.

It was possible. Anything was possible.