My Journey to Submission Pt. 03

Literotic asexstories – My Journey to Submission Pt. 03 by Antipater999,Antipater999
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I removed the first six parts of this series due to some fairly emotional negative feedback. Against my better judgment, I’ve decided to put them back in response to a lot of personal messages I’ve received. Once the first six are approved, I will continue the series until the end.

If you haven’t read these yet, you should know that the story is about a highly intelligent woman who manipulates her husband into a strict and harsh (or, as has been argued by my critics, abusive) femdom relationship in order to satisfy her ever-growing sadistic urges. If this type of story isn’t your cup of tea, I strongly discourage you from reading it.

**********

“No, I won’t marry you,” Ellen said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

She made this pronouncement just under a year after I’d put her in bondage for the first time. It was one of those warm spring evenings, so full of promise, that bless Washington every April, about the same time that the Japanese cherry trees blossom around the Tidal Basin. We’d had a terrific day on the Hill, gaining bipartisan support for a deal that we both wanted, and we were having a drink at the rooftop bar in Betsy’s, debating where we should go for dinner to celebrate our triumph.

“But I love you,” I protested. “And I know you love me. I love every minute we’re together, and I don’t want to lose the chance to be with you forever.” OK, this was a little over-the-top, but I meant every word. And it was not the first time I’d broached the topic of marriage. “Why won’t you marry me?” I asked.

***********

Why had I grown so eager to give up my longstanding commitment to bachelorhood?

For one thing, I really did care for her. I’ll skip the usual maudlin descriptions of how she made me feel, but the truth is, I’d never really loved a woman until Ellen came along. For another, we had what I considered the ideal relationship. Professionally and among friends, she was my equal, and I treated her with the respect that she deserved. But at home (for she’d long since given up her apartment and moved in with me), she was my submissive — sexually and in all other ways.

If, during those eight months, you’d snuck into our home on some random evening to spy on our “24/7 BDSM lifestyle,” you probably wouldn’t have found much out of the ordinary. Unless you counted the fact that Ellen would have always been walking around the house in the nude, except for her tasteful black leather collar (though not if we had guests, obviously).

There was no crawling around on all fours, no eating from dog dishes, no serving as a human toilet or footstool or ashtray, no sleeping in cages, no giving me blowjobs under the table while I ate. Almost none of the common tropes of the live-in sex slave genre.

(To be honest, I get exhausted even thinking about how a couple might observe what some call “high protocol” on a 24/7 basis. You know what a woman never does in a romance or erotic novel? Catches a cold. Spills coffee on her blouse. Interrupts a date for some bullshit at work. Gets in a shitty mood for no particular reason. And so on. You know what she does in real life? All of those things. So I think that it’s just common sense to make allowances.)

Ellen also had very few “domestic duties” per se. We were both too busy, and I was too rich, to bother with housekeeping or laundry, and we ate 90% of our meals in restaurants. For obvious reasons, she was responsible for keeping the dungeon clean and our toys hygienic, but the hardest part of that duty was washing soiled linens, and she just gave these to the maid with the rest of the laundry.

We did, however, have a few rituals, which we performed as often as we could.

When I got home in the evening, I’d go to the den and sit in my leather armchair. Ellen would follow after a few moments and kneel at my feet, tilting her head to expose her neck. I’d replace her “work collar” (a discreet platinum necklace that we’d designed together and had specially made) with her leather “home collar.” And if there was something she wanted to discuss or get my advice about, then she’d lay her head on my lap, and I’d stroke her hair while we talked.

In the mornings, whenever Ellen was feeling anxious (which was surprisingly often, given her high level of professionalism), she’d parade in front of me after getting ready for work and ask “How do I look?” or “Will you miss me?” or something similar. She knew that my answer to this would always be “You look lovely. Now bring me your hairbrush.” And when she did, I’d take her across my lap, hike up her skirt, and lay a dozen swats on her bottom. Not hard enough to bring tears and smear her makeup, but sufficient to give her a reminder of my presence throughout the morning.

And on weekends, she enjoyed showering me with attention. She always got up first to make breakfast, while I got washed and dressed. After we’d eaten, she’d ensure that my coffee mug remained full and hot, while I relaxed and read the Post or surfed the internet. And the last thing she did before getting ready for bed on Sunday evenings was to polish my shoes while kneeling at my feet.

Rituals of this nature took just a few minutes a day. But they went a long way to strengthening our relationship generally, as well as our Dom/sub dynamic.

Like any vanilla couple, we had to navigate the myriad issues that naturally arise when two people decide to live together. But a huge advantage of our BDSM relationship was that there was never any reason to argue. Ellen placed herself entirely in my hands. Whenever we disagreed about something, I was always considered right by default, and this worked out perfectly well for both of us, so long as she could trust me to treat her fairly.

Which I did.

Of course, we continued to explore our mutual sexual desires. We’d schedule an evening or a weekend afternoon to spend in the dungeon, and we also found ourselves heading there on the spur of the moment. All in all, we slept nearly as often in the sandalwood canopy bed downstairs as we did in the master bedroom.

I won’t provide graphic descriptions of our BDSM sessions from this time. I’d hate to risk embarrassing Ellen, on the off-chance that some clever reader were correctly to guess her true identity. Suffice it to say that I took full advantage of her consent to “do any damned thing with her that I pleased.” And, based on her mewling and begging and screaming (How thankful I was for my investment into professional-grade soundproofing!), she seemed unlikely to withdraw her consent anytime soon.

But our sessions were always about pursuing mutual pleasure, never about anger, or as punishment for transgressions committed outside the boundaries of our D/s dynamic. And I always lavished Ellen with aftercare when we finished — holding her close, paying attention to her feelings and needs, giving her treats. To this day, I remain astonished by her ability to consume an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie at one sitting.

On the nights when we slept in our own bed, I also made love to her fairly often. For one thing, I wanted to show her that I loved her and cared for her deeply outside of our D/s dynamic. For another, she was so beautiful that it was nearly impossible for me to keep my hands off her.

***********

“Why won’t you marry me?” I repeated.

She’d gone silent, as though she were working out how to say something that had been on her mind for a long time. She stirred her drink for a while, avoiding my eyes.

I tried one more time. “Ellen?”

Finally, she answered, “Because I have too much self-respect.”

“Of course you do,” I said. “And I love your for it.”

“I know,” she said, after another pause. “But as a girlfriend, I can turn a blind eye to things that as a wife I could never allow. Right now, I can walk away if I think it’s too much. But as a wife, that could get tricky. And I’m not going to put myself in a position to be humiliated all over town.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

“Are you serious right now?” she retorted, incredulous. “Do you really think I don’t know about the other women?” Her voice was uncomfortably loud.

Oh, fuck me.

So, it turned out that she’d known all along that I had not entirely given up my old habit of attracting new submissive partners online. Why hadn’t I? Especially given everything that I just wrote about how perfect my relationship with Ellen was? To be honest, I don’t really know. Old dogs not learning new tricks. Leopards not changing their spots. Whatever the appropriate metaphor is.

I’d cut way back, of course.

For one thing, there was the problem of “when.” My relationship with Ellen dominated my free time, and it took a herculean scheduling effort to free up a few hours for a session with someone else. Not to mention the time required to attract, screen and seduce potential partners.

For another, there was the problem of “where.” The bed in a typical hotel room has no frame, and I’d learned from embarrassing personal experience that the other furniture is usually flimsy, and that you can’t rely on any of the bars or poles to support a woman’s weight, especially when she struggles. So a proper BDSM session in a hotel room was a challenge. In the end, I usually just brought the women home. This presented its own problem, namely how to clean up afterwards, so that Ellen didn’t find out.

In any event, with a lot of effort I overcame all these obstacles, and I managed to get in a session with another woman every other month or so.

“I’m really glad you’re good at your job,” Ellen continued, “because you’d make a shitty criminal, with all the traces you leave around. I found a used condom under the bed last week, for fuck’s sake.”

Now it was my turn to stir my drink and avoid her eyes.

She let me stew in the embarrassment at being caught for a few moments, then continued. “Look, I get that you’re not made for one woman,” she said. “It’s hardwired into you, probably on the same wires that make you such a sadistic bastard.” She smiled at her own joke. “And I accept it, I really do. To be honest, my panties even get a little moist when I picture you doing it with another woman. But what I won’t accept is dishonesty.”

“Why haven’t you said anything about this before?”

“I was hoping you’d just lose interest on your own,” she answered. “And, let’s face it, things are pretty terrific otherwise, so why rock the boat? But there’s a difference between not rocking the boat and taking the boat over a cliff. Or waterfall, or whatever. But in any case, I won’t marry you.”

“What if I changed?” I asked.

This question made her laugh out loud. “Can you name one thing you’ve ever done to give me the slightest hope that you can change?”

I thought for a minute, but of course, I couldn’t. “I suppose that’s fair,” I conceded. “But is there something that I could do to give you some hope? Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it. I’m serious about wanting to marry you, you know.”

She looked at me. Then, she started tapping her fingers rapidly on the table, which I recognized from my many negotiations with her as a “tell” that she was about to make her final offer. She did.

“If another woman is going to share my bed, then I want to know about it,” she said firmly. “I want to be there. To watch sometimes. To participate even. And I want to have some say over who we do it with. In fact, I’ll even procure the women for you. I’m sure I couldn’t do any worse than that Goth skank you’ve got shacked up at the Marriott right now.”

What the fuck? Is there anything she doesn’t know?

“But the dishonesty stops now,” she concluded. “If you can agree to that, and if you really think you can make it stick, then I’ll marry you. Otherwise, don’t ask me again.”

I had to admit, what she was offering was extremely attractive. So I readily agreed, and we went ring shopping that weekend. Since neither of us had much in the way of family, there was no point to a big wedding. We simply got married in a private ceremony a few months later. Mike McCleary and his wife, Jennifer, served as witnesses, and that was that.

***********

You could read nothing but BDSM erotica for the rest of your life and never find a description of a fantasy slave wife who could hold a candle to my flesh-and-blood Ellen.

True to her word, she enticed some amazing women into our life. Surprisingly, I’d never tried a threesome before, and I found the experience revelatory. Again, I won’t go into the gory details. But the sense of control mixed with intimacy, which I felt when Ellen lapped up my sperm from the pussy of another woman, or when she and the other fellated me simultaneously, then shared my cum in a long kiss, was on an entirely new level from anything I’d known before.

Some couples find bringing other women into their marriage to be an emotional minefield, but we never had any problems with it. Mainly, this was because Ellen understood that for me, the experience was a purely sexual thrill, and that there was never a threat that I would fall in love or seek to exclude her in any way. More precisely, she saw that my focus during our threesomes always remained entirely on her — how the experience affected her, what it showed about her love for me, and so forth.

Also, Ellen was much more discerning in her selection of women than I’d ever been. We never found ourselves in crazy town, as I had with some of the doozies (including the “Goth skank”) who’d responded to my profiles. Sure, with Ellen organizing my sex life, I had fewer partners than I had before I met her. But my experiences were an order of magnitude more gratifying. And as Ellen’s bisexuality blossomed, she began to bring us women to whom she felt genuine attraction, and this often led to deep affection among the three of us.

When she found a woman that excited us both, we’d not only invite her to sessions in our dungeon, but also take her on exotic vacations, or even shack up with her for a while as a throuple. One thing I hadn’t considered was that when Ellen met a potential partner on our behalf, she could establish trust much more easily than I, as a man, ever could. Best of all, I never had to worry about when to meet, where to meet, how the relationship should go, or anything else. Ellen took care of everything.

And, of course, when it was “just” the two of us, things were exactly as I described earlier. In other words, perfect.

To sum up: The first two years of our marriage were utter bliss. Ellen was the ideal BDSM submissive wife — sex-slave, lover, friend, and partner-in-crime, all in one. I loved and respected her more than I can say. She was gorgeous beyond description. She was intensely sexual, and her kinks and fetishes matched mine perfectly. She provided me with more sexual variety than any man could ever wish for. I had no fantasy that she was unwilling to fulfill, and she came up a lot of her own that I would never have dreamt of without her.

***********

So why did I do it? Why did I fuck it all up by continuing to seek out women on the side?

In the time since Ellen first tied me to the wooden post in the basement, I spent many hours down there, bound in the darkness, alone with my thoughts. So, I had plenty of time to ponder this question. Here’s what I eventually came up with:

The most obvious answer (and the one that my wife would have most readily agreed with) was that I was the stupidest piece of shit that ever lived. And that’s true, I suppose. But it doesn’t really explain anything.

A somewhat better answer was that I liked the thrill of the hunt more than the act of sex itself, and that my arrangement with Ellen deprived me of that thrill. Another possibility was that what really turned me on was the very act of cheating. The transgression, in and of itself, brought sexual gratification, in the same way that small boys get a thrill out of doing something naughty, regardless of what it is. Still another (and the one most likely to be favored by BDSM aficionados) was that Ellen had been “topping from the bottom” by putting herself in charge of arranging our threesomes and other aspects of our sex life, and that my cheating on her was a kind of visceral response to that.

Any of these answers, or some combination of them, or something completely different, could have been correct, I suppose.

But sometime, much later in submission, I had a sudden revelation, one that I was hesitant even to credit at first.

***********

It was a Saturday afternoon in March.

A random Washingtonian walking across Kalorama Park on that day might have wondered why an obviously well-to-do, middle-aged man was wandering around in the cold rain like a blithering idiot, inspecting all the low-hanging branches of the trees around the park’s perimeter. The answer was that Ellen had instructed me to make a new switch for her to use on my buttocks.

The task was harder than you’d think.

I needed to find a branch that was long and straight enough, but also strong and flexible, because there would be hell to pay if it broke in her hand during use. It had to be thick, so as to produce sufficiently intense pain, but not so thick as to become “thuddy.” Ellen much preferred to inflict the searing agony of a “stingy” instrument, marking my flesh with fiery red welts that nearly — but not quite — broke the skin.

A careful reader will recall that Ellen had once said, “Only one of us is an avowed sadist, and it’s not me.” Well, it turned out that she’d been completely wrong about that. I’m not saying she lied. People change, or at least they uncover aspects of their personality they never suspected were there. In Ellen’s case, this turned out to be a very nasty sadistic streak, which often manifested itself in acts of surprising (even to me) cruelty.

Not that I’m in a position to be judgmental.

As I walked around the park, my dread at the anguish that awaited me grew in my mind. So too did my humiliation at being ordered to create the instrument of my own suffering. I looked around every few seconds, desperately hoping that no one I knew would appear and ask me what I was doing out in the rain.

Finally, I stripped a suitable branch from a young maple tree and hurried home along the blessedly empty sidewalks. Once I’d taken off my wet clothes and put my collar back on, I got to work on the switch, whittling away the twigs and knots, peeling off the bark, sanding it smooth, rubbing olive oil along its length. The whole process took about an hour — one more hour for me to wallow in dread and humiliation.

I brought the new switch to Ellen for inspection. I noticed that she was wearing her spike-heeled boots instead of her usual slippers, which I knew to be a sign that my punishment was to be particularly severe. She didn’t bother to look up at me, but merely took the instrument from my hand for a few seconds. “This is acceptable,” was all she said. She handed it back, and I understood that I was dismissed to carry out her further instructions.

I went to the dungeon and placed my creation on the table. Then I selected several items and took them to the wooden horse, where I’d been instructed to prepare myself for punishment. The steps for this were a bit tricky and had to be done in the proper order.

On one side of the horse, there was a chain connecting the two legs, near the bottom. In the center of this chain, I hung an open padlock, the key to which I’d left on the table. I then went to the other side of the horse and put fur-lined leather cuffs on my wrists and ankles. I spread my legs and connected my ankle cuffs to rings on the horse’s legs. Then I pulled a soft, quilted black hood over my head and tightened it around my neck with a drawstring. Over the hood, I donned a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and I flicked the “on” switch.

Then, completely blind and deaf, I bent as far as I could over the horse’s padding, straining to reach dangling padlock. I barely caught the lock with my fingertips, but with a bit of effort I managed to manipulate it through the rings on my wrist cuffs.

Click. I was immobilized and helpless, alone in blackness and silence.

The effects of a couple of hours of sensory deprivation are different for everyone. Those I experienced that day were fairly typical for me.

First, the reality of my vulnerability set in. Ellen was at home to supervise me, so she had not left me any way to free myself in case of emergency. I was completely at her mercy. Should she decide to leave me — for the rest of the day, overnight, forever — there would be nothing I could do but wait and suffer and quite literally go insane. By this time, however, she had trained me to breathe slowly and deeply, and to focus on my trust in her, until this initial wave of panic subsided.

After a while, my brain began to rebel against the unnatural lack of stimuli. I struggled against my cuffs, not trying to free myself, but trying to feel something — anything — in my limbs. To reassure myself that I, a flesh and blood human being, actually existed. I rubbed my tongue around the inside of my mouth, biting it from time to time. But these limited tactile sensations were not nearly enough to compensate for the loss of my sight and hearing, and I soon gave up.

I started to lose touch with reality. I could have been anywhere, or nowhere. I struggled to stay connected to my consciousness.

I focused on the only reality I knew: that of my impending punishment. And as I did so, my dread slowly morphed into outright terror. Not because I didn’t know what was to come, but because I did. I wouldn’t hear or see Ellen enter the dungeon and pick up the thin maple switch. I wouldn’t sense her standing behind me, no doubt smiling in cruel amusement at my ridiculous, exposed body, as she prepared to use it on me.

My only warning that she was ready to begin the session would be the fire of the wood striking my skin for the first time.

Ellen had learned to be diabolically cruel in her application of pain. She always hit me completely at random — sometimes harder, sometimes softer; sometimes a single blow at a time, sometime several in rapid succession. This meant that I never had any way to predict when or how the next blow would come and to prepare myself mentally. A long pause without a strike might mean that she was finished, but it might just as easily prove to be merely a pause before another, fiercer round of blows. She never told me in advance how many stripes I was to receive, so counting was irrelevant.

When she was in one her more sadistic moods (as she appeared to be that day), the only thing I could be sure of was that she would stop only when she was convinced that I would break under any further punishment.

I don’t know how long Ellen left me alone to wait for her. Half an hour? An hour? Three hours? It doesn’t really matter, because to a person under sensory deprivation, time loses any meaning. With nothing whatsoever to grasp onto as a reference, hours seem like minutes, and vice-versa.

But in the end, the moment arrived when my waiting ended, and my suffering began. My world of blackness and silence was obliterated by the excruciating sting of the first blow of the switch. She’d hit me very hard, and it felt as though she might have already broken my skin. After a few seconds, the sting dulled to an intense burning sensation across my buttocks, as my first stripe was etched onto my skin. The next blow came just seconds later, then the third, then the fourth. Then many, many more.

Long after there was no more virgin flesh left on my buttocks or thighs, my wife continued to beat me, adding welts upon welts upon welts. By then, I must have been groaning in agony, but I could not hear myself. The only stimulus that Ellen allowed to enter my consciousness was pain.

Extreme, gut-wrenching pain.

The randomness of the beating combined with the lack of any other stimuli to distort reality. I felt myself float in and out of my body, the way people often talk about doing in books about near-death experiences. My mind wandered to all kinds of strange places — childhood memories, fragments of tastes or smells, snatches of music that I’d forgotten — and I began to see and understand things with a most extraordinary clarity.

It was during one of these interludes that I had my great revelation.

I’d wanted Ellen to catch me cheating.

Wait, what? Why?

Because I knew that if she did, then she would do to me exactly what she ended up doing. And deep down inside, I wanted her to do it. Needed her to do it.

The analogy that I use to explain this is that I was living my life like some bandit in an old western movie — on the run from the law, hiding behind thick barricades of self-deception. My so-called sexual dominance was nothing more than a defense against my own deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. But subconsciously, I could sense those feelings closing in, and I knew that my defenses would ultimately crumble, just as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid knew that they couldn’t hold out forever against the entire Bolivian army.

I thought that I wanted was, like Butch and Sundance, to go out and meet my fate in a blaze of glory, a six-gun in each hand. But what I really needed, even if I couldn’t see it for myself, was to surrender.

Surrender to Ellen.

***********

Ellen figured out that I was still cheating on her in all the usual ways. Texts sent to the wrong phone number, hotel charges showing up on our joint bank statement, that kind of thing. The details aren’t important. A Freudian might theorize that I’d left her the clues on purpose, subconsciously hoping that she’d find them. Who knows?

I’ll also elide all but the conclusion of our huge blow-up, when she finally confronted me with the incontrovertible evidence that she’d collected. My lame denials. My grudging confession. My even lamer pleas for understanding and forgiveness. It’s all too horrific to recount.

In all my time as a sexual dominant, I never came across an aphrodisiac anywhere near as powerful as female tears. The more a woman cried as I made her writhe in agony and degradation, the harder my cock would become.

But the tears that Ellen shed that night tore my heart from my chest.

Ellen’s “fantasy” pain in the context of BDSM gave us pleasure that we both craved. But her “real life” pain was unbearable to me. And the thought that I was the one who had caused it was even more so. My actions were vile. Despicable. Unforgivable (although, of course, I begged shamelessly for the forgiveness that I would never have shown her, had our places been reversed).

I grew sick with self-loathing, as she recounted the heartache that she had suffered as a result of my repeated betrayals.

In the end, she threatened to leave me. Well, she didn’t really threaten. She simply stated, in a voice completely bereft of emotion, that it was her intention to do so. The thought of losing her left me in a moral panic. And through my waves of guilt- and fear-induced nausea, one thought became crystal clear in my mind:

I’ll agree to anything — anything — to keep our marriage alive.

“There is no marriage to keep alive,” she retorted coldly, when I voiced this thought. “At its heart, a marriage is simply an expression of trust between two people. And between us, there is no trust left. None. Because you destroyed it.”

“Then let me build it back up again,” I pleaded. “I’ll agree to whatever it takes for you to keep me in line. You can make me text you every hour on the hour. Put some kind of tracking app on my phone. We can hire someone to follow me around and report to you, for Christ’s sake. I don’t know. There must be something.”

She looked at me, her eyes still red with anger and grief, and she was silent for what seemed an eternity. Then, her fingers started tapping the table, and I knew that her final offer was coming.

“You always talk about empathy,” she said. “How important it is to be in tune with your submissives’ feelings. But I see now that that’s just a load of horse manure. It turns out that you care fuck all about how I feel.” Her words cut deep, but I listened closely, desperate to hear some glimmer of hope. “Well, if you want me to trust you, then you’re going to have to learn empathy for real. You’re going to feel what I’ve been feeling.”

That didn’t sound too bad. “Alright,” I agreed, “what do you want me to do?”

She looked me directly in the eyes and spoke very firmly. “If you want me to stay with you, then you must submit to me. Completely.”

Holy shit. I didn’t see that coming.

“What do you mean?” I asked, incredulous.

She laughed bitterly. “You’re the expert on dominance and submission. You tell me.”

“Sure, sorry,” I replied. “Of course, I understand the concept. But I mean, how do you see it working out for us? Do you want it to be our new lifestyle? Twenty-four seven? Or just, you know, during playtime? And for how long –a month, a year, forever, what?”

“I haven’t decided yet. But the point is, I will be the one to decide. About everything.” She said this definitively, then continued, “If we’ve learned one thing during our marriage, it’s that left on your own, you make shitty life choices. So I’m pretty sure that any decisions I make will be better than whatever you’d come up with. But even if they’re not, I don’t care anymore. I’m done.”

She reached behind her neck, undid her leather collar, and handed it to me. “Here, this is yours. You’re not my dominant anymore. Right now, you’re not anything to me. If you want to be something, then you may ask to be my submissive, and for me to be your Mistress. But that’s your only option. Otherwise, I’m leaving. Those are my conditions. Take them or leave them.”

I looked at her, and I was overwhelmed with guilt. How could I have treated her so badly, when she had given me so much for so long? And also, utter, complete love. The depth that my feelings for her had reached over the years astonished me. And now, the thought of waking up to a day when Ellen was not my wife — when I was nothing to her — was excruciating.

But to live my life as a submissive? To let a female control me? To accept any humiliation that she might want to inflict on me? Even Ellen? How could I agree to that?

I don’t know how long we sat in silence, as my gut roiled with these thoughts. I really felt as if I were going to lose the contents of my stomach, but I didn’t dare run off to the toilet. She looked at me for a while in silence, her face utterly devoid of emotion. Then she made to stand up. It was time to decide.

“Alright,” I said.

“Alright, what?” she demanded.

“Alright, I accept your conditions,” I said. She said nothing, just looked at me and waited for me to continue. Then I said the words. “I ask you to take me as your submissive. I ask you to be my Mistress.”

She paused before answering. “OK,” she decided. “I’m willing to give it a try if you are. But for how long, depends entirely on you. I’ll show you a path to follow if you want to rebuild the trust that you destroyed. And I’ll walk it beside you. But if you deviate in any way, then I’ll leave — no warning, no questions asked. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mistress.” It was the first time I used the phrase. And so, I’d submitted myself to Ellen.

But had I really? Or did I still think subconsciously that my so-called submission was temporary, and that soon the world would be set right with Ellen again under my thumb?

In any event, that’s all the backstory needed to understand how I found myself bound in my own dungeon and subject to the whims of my capricious wife. The time has come to relate what happened next.