He crawled. A federal judge. A man who held people’s freedom in his hands. Crawling across concrete while candlelight threw shadows on the walls.
I hated men. I hated everything about them, their audacity, their entitlement, their hands, their voices, the way they moved through the world like it was built for them and the rest of us were just furniture. But in this room, thefurniturehad a throne and the men had a floor. And I charged them for every second they spent on it.
He reached my feet. Stopped. Waited.
“You’re breathing my oxygen, Timothy. That’s a hundred dollars.”
Phone out. $100. Didn’t even hesitate.
“Now. You’re going to receive your punishment for last session’s infractions. And you’re going to pay me for each strike because it is not free to have me exert my energy on someone as unworthy as you. Fifty dollars per. Understood?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Turn around. Hands on the floor.”
He turned around and got into position. A whole federal judge with his palms flat on cold concrete and his bare ass in the air, waiting for a woman half his age to spank him like a misbehaving child.
I picked up the leather paddle and swung. The crack echoed through the dungeon and he gasped—they never screamed on the first one.
“That’s fifty.”
Again. Harder. “A hundred.”
Again. “A hundred fifty.”
By the fifth strike his breathing was ragged and his skin was red and I was more awake than I’d been all day. Every swing pulled something out of me—not anger exactly, but something older, something that lived in the basement of who I was and only came upstairs when I had a paddle in my hand and a man beneath me.
That was ten total—five hundred in strikes, plus the thousand at the door, plus the two hundred for wasting my time, the three hundred for the emotional damage of looking at his barely-there dick, and the hundred for breathing.
Twenty-one hundred. And we weren’t done.
“Stand up.”
He stood up slowly, wincing the whole way.
“You did adequate.” Highest compliment I ever gave. “But adequate is not excellence and I only accept excellence in my space. CashApp me another four hundred as a reminder to do better next time.”
$400.
Twenty-five hundred dollars. Forty-five minutes.
“Get dressed and get out.” I watched him scramble for his clothes with his eyes still glued to the floor where they belonged. “And Timothy? If you ever speak to me again without me telling you to, I will double the fee. Are we clear?”
“Yes, Mistress. Crystal clear.”
“Apologize for making me look at that little dick one more time on your way out.”
“I’m sorry, Mistress. Deeply sorry.”
“Mm-hmm. Go.”
He dressed and left the way they always did, no eye contact on the way out, no small talk. They came, they paid, they crawled, they left. And I sat on my throne and looked at the money in my bank account felt nothing.
Almost nothing.
Because the power only lasted as long as the session did. The second that door closed and I was alone with the candles flickering and the silence pressing in, the aliveness faded. And what replaced it was the same thing that was there before he walked in. That heavy, hollow, restless nothing that followed me everywhere.
I checked my phone. It was 6:15. The recital was at seven.
