Dungeon Femme Fatales

There was something about working at a dungeon, something that made you feel you knew these women you folded towels beside in the Siren room, or compared notes with about a shared client, or, especially, the ones you actually sessioned with in those dark and otherworldly rooms upstairs. It was easy to forget you didn’t know what most of these coworkers were like when they went grocery shopping, or to the bar for a drink on a Friday night; or when they were curled up in bed alone, maybe savoring their own space, maybe longing for warm arms around them.

You saw these women only here, in this secret, shadowy space where fantasies came to life, and whether it was their fantasy or a client’s…well, that didn’t ultimately seem to matter too much.

Sometimes my sessions with other women felt almost achingly sincere, but other times, I got to witness actresses pulling off grand illusions. For instance, my first quadruple session: four girls, one blond-haired client visiting from Germany, an overeager, overgrown schoolboy in a suit, who wanted to touch us all and see us touch each other.

The client, Lars, had little to say about his desired scenario beyond proclaiming, “You are all my slaves now,” so Elizabeth—the only switch, while the rest of us were lowly submissives—became our unspoken leader. As soon as we were in the Athena room, with its electric candles and leopard-spotted carpet and mirrors reflecting our image from every angle, Lars reached for the fastenings on Elizabeth’s plum-colored corset. She wagged her finger at him, laughing in a high, breathy way befitting a classic movie star. Maybe it was just the shared name and the dark, glossy hair, but she was starting to remind me of a young Elizabeth Taylor. “No, no, you silly boy,” she said like she was nailing her screen test—and at the same time, deftly maneuvering his hands away.

Lars had plenty of other girls to choose from. He turned his blond, blue-eyed gaze on Belle, a submissive who was actually over ten years older than the rest of us, though I was sure Lars never guessed. Belle was both naturally beautiful, and worked as a nurse at a plastic surgeon’s office when she wasn’t getting spanked and tickled at the dungeon. She could take care of herself, and she brushed Lars’s hands away like Elizabeth had, unlacing her corset on her own to reveal perfectly sculpted breasts. Meanwhile the other submissive, blonde college student Delia, and I took off our tops before Lars could do it for us.

I was the in-between, a few years older than Delia and Elizabeth, but hiding my age behind wide eyes and a naivete I wasn’t quite faking. If I had been alone with Lars, I would have been naked already—aside from my G-string, which had to stay on at all times according to dungeon rules. I would have stood with my bare flesh in goose bumps, my own nerve endings betraying me, drawing me toward Lars’s eager fingers. I would have accepted his touch over every inch of me, welcomed it, even, not caring what he pulled out of me with his grasping gaze, his nails grazing like claws.

But I didn’t want the other women to see that part of me, and by watching them, I began to learn, gradually, how to protect myself.   

Now, for instance, as I placed my corset on the bed, Lars’s palm slipped across the curve of my naked waist, down into my tiny pink skirt to find the string of my underwear. He laughed—a cackle, really—as his fingers twitched against my bare flesh.

“Lars, dear,” Elizabeth called, still in that 1950s-movie-goddess voice, “come help me pick out the right paddle. These girls need to be punished.” All she needed was a slinky silver gown and a cigarette rather than a BDSM toy in her hand, and she’d be the perfect femme fatale.

“Of course!” Lars, easily distracted, followed Elizabeth to the bag of toys she’d left leaning against the St. Andrew’s cross. Our client ended up with a riding crop rather than a paddle; I wasn’t sure he knew the difference. “Yes, we must punish them,” he said in his refined German accent, waving the crop like a baton, a manic conductor with no rhythm. It felt like the opening of a very cheesy porn movie, as Lars and Elizabeth guided the three of us—me with my brown hair and small frame, Delia with her pale curves and big, innocent-looking blue eyes, and tall, dark, elegant Belle—to stand in a circle. All of us topless, of course. Then Lars whacked the riding crop against the side of my thigh, and the long handle—the part that wasn’t supposed to touch you, the part that could invade the skin and leave scars—connected with my flesh. I yelped, mostly for show, but Elizabeth might not have realized that.

She coaxed the riding crop out of his hands and tapped Lars’s rear end with it over his suit pants. “We have to warm them up first, silly,” she said and led me to the spanking bench, where I climbed up without daring to look back and see how Lars reacted to having his own bottom smacked. Elizabeth nestled the crop on the floor between the bench and the wall—or maybe she was hiding it?—and started giving me the lightest spanking I’d ever received in my life. Her hands were feather-whispers; compared to Lars’s, her fingers were achingly soft. Part of me wanted to tell her I could take it harder, but the rest of me accepted her pats for what they were: a tenderness, a kindness. An embrace in disguise.

That tame spanking, however, wasn’t enough to keep Lars’s attention. “My slaves are so beautiful,” he said, and I saw him reach for Delia’s breast out of the corner of my eye. He leaned down as if to whisper in her ear, but his mouth drew dangerously close to her nipple. “Wouldn’t you like me to kiss—”

So quickly I wasn’t sure how it had happened, Elizabeth was by Lars’s side, running her hands over his shoulders and stage-whispering into his ear: “Don’t you want to watch our beautiful slaves pleasure each other?” She beckoned me toward her from where I knelt on the spanking bench, and managed to guide Lars away from Delia at the same time. I cringed at the idea of “pleasuring” anyone, especially with an audience, but I knew what Elizabeth was thinking: better us touching each other than Lars’s hands all over us.

Which was how I found myself, a few minutes later, standing and facing Belle—or rather, facing her long, slender neck, since she was taller than me—with our palms on each other’s breasts. I could see our reflections in the mirror, two sets of curves entwined with one another, and as always, I had to blink and look again to make sure the image was real. My heart beat its familiar medley of elation and fear: the giddy disbelief that I was actually here, a submissive, a sex worker, leaping off the tightrope of respectability I’d wobbled along throughout my twenties. The worry that I was an imposter, not beautiful, sophisticated, strong enough to belong among these women. That I was abandoning that tightrope only to fall, humiliated, to the earth. My mind raced, wondering whether I should move my hands or not, whether my breasts would be half as perky as Belle’s in ten years, what my coworker might possibly be thinking…

“My slaves, come crawl to me. I want you to worship me now!” Lars and his lascivious voice were approaching again, when Belle threw her head back and moaned so loudly I almost leapt away in alarm. “Oh, master,” she said in the perfect porn-star tone, “Lily’s hands feel so good. Please, please just let us keep touching each other.”

I nearly let out a laugh so big and unsexy, I had to half bite my tongue off to keep it from escaping. And just like that, my nerves escaped too. I copied Belle’s moan, and then she moaned louder, arching her back further, thrusting those perky breasts right in my face. Her fingers tapped the sides of my torso, spelling out a secret, intimate Morse code, and pretty soon it felt like a contest to see who could make the other crack first.

We were professionals, though, so neither of us burst out laughing.

And all along Elizabeth—the real professional in this situation—was deftly maneuvering Lars away from us, keeping him occupied with one paddle after another, then prying them away from him when it became clear he couldn’t use any of them correctly. She made it all seem easy, like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, controlling men and empires with her acting skills.

After it was over, after we all had our fifty-dollar tips in hand and were back in the Siren room folding towels, I chose not to think about what that session would have been like with just me and Lars. But I knew all the same: it would have been his twitchy fingers on my breasts, maybe slipping down my belly to grab my pussy the way Bondage Stan so often did. It would have been his mouth opening just inches from my nipples, so close that he could hardly help it if his tongue happened to flick out and lick one. That riding crop would have landed on my rear end over and over, the handle leaving clumsy stripes across my flesh, instead of the implement lying harmlessly in the corner where Elizabeth had tucked it.

I knew because those things happened plenty of other times, with other clients. These invasions I allowed, these darker parts of my fantasy-turned-reality, transforming me in ways I couldn’t yet understand.

But when I was with my fellow dungeon workers, these women I looked up to as if they were goddesses, or stars on a silver screen, I had a different experience. A safer kind of magic. A different genre of movie, one that might never make it to theaters, where the femme fatale always came out untouched, never punished for her presumption or her power, that wily, wild woman always landing on top.