The Professional: Master for Hire

Chapter One-3

They both laughed, but after she had gone Marcus found himself mulling over what she had said. It planted a seed which grew. He read assiduously in the voluminous literature of the subject, mostly stuff he found on web sites. He learned the terminology, the acronyms like ‘b**m’, the technical terms like ‘top’ and ‘bottom’, he learned about what increasingly to him seemed to be the unbridgeable gap between the world he had entered, and the so-called ‘vanilla’ world of those for whom ‘perversion’ was something to recoil from in distaste and disapproval, not something to be embraced and celebrated.

He read fiction, too. He devoured the classics of the literature such as Story of O and the Beauty books of A. N. Roquelaure, he read such works of Victorian pornography as Walter: My Secret Life, and even earlier works such as Fanny Hill, with its delightful description of birching. He thought that some of the blogs he read were probably fiction too, with their long, detailed descriptions of ecstatic torments received, sometimes surely more than any sane person could bear. He soon found out what he liked and didn’t like, and came to realise that within the world of domination and submission there were many mansions, each with their specialised activity. Some women needed bondage, others pain, while others again craved humiliation. Marcus was partial to many different activities, but not all. He thought that whereas the submissive required a certain formula, a particular combination of activity to satisfy their longings, a dominant might accommodate various preferences just so long as he felt able to make a connection. Sometimes it clicked with a woman, sometimes it didn’t. Just like in real life, he said to himself with a smile.

As soon as he knew he was serious about going professional, he made a number of rules for himself. He would never take more than five sessions a week. He was afraid of burn-out, and he thought it wasn’t fair to the clients if he didn’t keep himself fresh. After all, it wasn’t a full-time job. His career as an architectural journalist was going well these days, and he had no intention of giving it up just when all his years of hard work were paying off with some rewarding commissions. But if you were a writer, there were always times when work was slow to come, or when you needed to refresh yourself. And a completely different line of work was a good way to do that.

He also made it a rule that he would never take on a client for whom he felt no physical attraction. He thought it unfair to pretend he was attracted to a woman when he wasn’t; she would surely sense that he lacked desire. And while, since there was to be no f*****g or any kind of genital contact for his part, there would be no problem of his c**k letting him down when faced with an unattractive woman, he thought that honesty would, so far as possible, be one of his guiding principles. After all, he told himself, he supposed that the clients would not make a booking if they for their part found him unappealing.

There were certain things he had no taste for and would not participate in, whatever the demand. Water sports repelled him. Anything to do with cutting or needles he found distasteful, and he would always be careful to make this clear. He had no liking for blood, and although it might be that a particularly severe whipping could lead to the skin breaking in a minor way, he would never make this his aim. Other rules were formulated as things progressed. Early on, one client had told him of her desire to be whipped by him while her husband watched. Marcus felt this was getting into deep water. Who could tell what emotions might be aroused in the other man by such a scenario? He wasn’t prepared to risk an unpleasant scene if things got out of hand. Another early request was for photographs. He had no objection at all to taking pictures of his clients bound with ropes, or to photographing their red bottoms after a beating. Indeed, he rather enjoyed it, doing his best to make the pictures as aesthetically pleasing as possible. But when one client asked that he photograph her on her knees, her face pressed to the floor as he stood over her, he managed to satisfy her request, but ensured that his face wasn’t visible. He couldn’t take the risk his face would pop up on a porn site one day.

His first instinct had been to maintain anonymity, but he soon saw that this was impossible. His clients were vulnerable in many ways, not least to an unscrupulous man who might try to blackmail them. It was only fair that they should know who he really was, as a surety that he would not engage in anything disreputable. And he soon abandoned his original intention of hiring premises for the work. It would be too expensive and too inconvenient. Far better to work from home, and if they knew where he lived, well, that would give them additional security.

While he thought about the possibilities of taking paying clients, he continued to experiment. But after the frenzy of the first few months, things quietened down, to the point where he was seeing just two women, each on a regular but not frequent basis. Each of them interested him and excited him, but neither knew about the other, and he began to realise that if he was serious about going professional he would have to face up to the question of how this would affect his private life. Could he indeed still maintain a private life at all? With each of the women, Clare and Angela, he had a full relationship. That is to say, he played D/s games with them, but he also enjoyed full s*x with them, and, more to the point, there was an emotional investment. Not that he would have said he was in love with either. But he cared for them and did not want to hurt them. Already he was finding it difficult to maintain each in a separate sphere of his mind. How much harder that would be if he was expending his energies on other women too.

Clare, he knew, would be very jealous if she discovered the existence of another woman. Angela he was less sure about, but he didn’t feel like taking a chance. He thought it over for a month, and then one day he took the plunge, telling first Clare and then Angela that he could not see them any more. He thought it would be easier and kinder if he told them he had met someone else, but he felt like a louse all the same. Afterwards, when each had separately gone their tearful ways, he told himself that it was far better to have had such scenes now than to have them find out what he intended to do.

From that moment he knew he was hardening his heart. There was no other way of putting it. He had made a deliberate and conscious decision. It was something he had to try, something that would offer him great rewards, he felt, and he didn’t mean money. But that there would be a cost he also had come to realise. He just hoped he could deal with that. He refused to think about how long this might go on for. Maybe one day he would grow tired of it. Maybe one day he’d meet a nice girl and settle down and have babies. Or maybe what he was about to embark on would change him, make him into the sort of person who could never form a normal relationship, whose emotions had become so distorted that they simply could not offer love. It was a terrifying thought. But it didn’t make him reconsider. The excitement of what he was proposing was of such an intensity that it outweighed all other considerations.