Page 123 of Owned (Office Intrigue Duet 8)
And, yes, maybe I had some personal knowledge relating to Domination and submission. There for a while, I fancied myself a submissive, thought perhaps the lack of it in my life was the reason I’d never found true happiness. I mean, who wouldn’t question it? My brother always seemed content.
While I had never visited a club, didn’t really have the desire to, I had delved into the online sites and forums. In the beginning, it was a safe way to traverse, to learn, to explore. I met some interesting people, those who claimed they were Dominants, Sadists, even Primals. Others who were submissives with various fetishes. I’d spent months on one site, making some friends, reading their inner musings, even entertaining the idea of making the leap to the real world. I couldn’t count the number of munches—how the BDSM community referred to face-to-face social interactions—I’d been invited to. It was at the first and only one I went to that I met Jake.
I could still remember the day clearly. Walking into the room, it had felt surreal. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but the reality had been … not a letdown, but perhaps less exciting than what I’d thought it would be. Granted, it had been as they promised, an informal and safe opportunity to put faces with online personas, to interact face-to-face. To put it simply, the get-together had been the meet-and-greet they’d advertised it to be.
Jake and I had maintained contact afterward, opting for text messaging versus returning to the website. When he finally asked me out, I agreed without hesitation. One dinner turned into two, then three, then half a dozen. He took things slow, but I wasn’t sure why that was. By the seventh dinner, I’d grown tired of attempting to make polite conversation as we continued to get to know one another, and I told him as much. Again, I wasn’t sure what I’d expected out of the encounter, but it hadn’t been for Jake to take me back to my apartment and politely talk his way inside.
We had sex for the first time that night. There had been a little domination on his side, but again, I knew he’d been taking care with me. He treated me as though I was fragile, but the sex had been good, so I’d given him the benefit of the doubt. More sex, a little more domination. Firm words, a couple of commands. I kept waiting for more, but it never came, so once again, I told him what I wanted.
I should’ve realized at that point that he wasn’t a Dominant. He wanted to play the part, but it was like an ill-fitting suit. Just didn’t sit right on him. The same could be said for me making a go at being a submissive. In my mind, being a submissive was something far different than what I found it to be. I’d romanticized it, turned it into a fairy tale.
For the record, I still wanted that fairy tale, regardless of whether it made me a submissive or not.
I had genuinely liked Jake, and I thought perhaps we could explore the world of BDSM together. I was as clear as I could be about what I wanted, and he made efforts to meet my needs. Most failed, others I simply ignored. Roughly ten months in, I realized that, at some point, the roles had reversed. I had become the dominating partner, Jake the submissive. I had hated it. Immensely. And I suspected he had, too.
Whether we just hadn’t meshed or neither of us really knew what we wanted, it hadn’t mattered. Eventually we agreed that we were not going to make one another happy and had parted ways. Almost immediately, I returned to the website, desperate to find someone who could satisfy the needs that had been building over the year Jake and I were together. I went on two dates with two different men shortly after that. Neither had gone well. One guy had been ridiculously rude and demanding; the other could not stop saying the word pussy.
I gave up at that point, convinced it wasn’t for me. I’d romanticized the notion partly because of Ransom but mostly because I had relied on fictional storytelling as my basis. Hearing my brother talk about some of his encounters and reading about those happy-ever-afters with mind-blowing sex, I’d clearly set my expectations too high.
In my defense, it wasn’t like Ransom gave me the intimate details of his real-life rendezvous. We were close, sure. Not only was he my brother, he was my best friend, but there were still some things that were off-limits. However, I did enjoy hearing his thoughts on it. Not the gory details, but what he got out of a scene or an interaction with one of the many submissives he encountered.
