It’s a normal afternoon, about a week and a half ago, which means I’ve just been abruptly tackled onto the bed. Suspension hardware, my leash for the night, and the hanging sjambok rattle. This is how hospital corners die. Mistress is on top of me, her hand around my throat. “Do you feel choked?” she asks.
I answer affirmatively.
“Good,” she says. “That’s what I rolled. Now I get my checkbox.”
“Can I roll for defense?” I ask, with the oxygen I have.
“What?”
Let’s freeze frame, record scratch for a second here.
In her own words: “A normal spouse might be like, ‘It’s not like I wake up in the morning and plan how I’m going to screw up your life today.’ Well, I really do.”
Most mornings, Mistress wakes up and rolls a D6. Then she consults a sheet she made years ago. For each day of the week, there are options one through six. She goes to whatever day of the week it is, and the number she rolled. That option goes on her list for the day. Each of these options is some simple, desirable act of sadism tailored to, well, me. I think there’s one day that lacks an option six, and for every day, the number four is the same: slap Hannah in the face and roll again (a Leather family meme).
The dice game helps keep the lifestyle sadomasochism on a roll. It’s layered on top of any plans for the day (like the days we have scheduled each week for sex/scenes), the 8:15 AM wakeup maintenance spanking, events, and random bouts of inspiration. Often, there’s a small fee for things like permission to go to the bathroom or take a shower, usually just flashing, but sometimes including me slapping the exposed body part in question. A few times.
Unfreeze frame.
We negotiate (as much as a slave in an irrevocable consent dynamic can negotiate), with her hand still around my throat, an addendum to this system. I would also get to roll. If I rolled the same number as her, it’d cancel out.
I’m surprised the next day when she tells me to roll. “I was joking,” I say.
But it’s simple enough, the odds of canceling out are low enough, and the comedic value (especially within our broader framework) is high enough, we’ll try it out for a little bit, at least.
…
A Friday. We run through our normal morning routines, joined as I serve breakfast by a friend over for whip making lessons. They head upstairs while I clean up breakfast as usual. Mistress slips out when I alert her I’m ready for morning inspection, we complete the ritual, and I head out for the day to write and type up minutes and such elsewhere. (Friday is one of three days of the week I leave the house after morning inspection to give Mistress introvert time, which today she still has before I get back.) I return in time for Friday’s 4 PM spa time. Mistress chooses a little neck, shoulder, and upper back massage from the usual options. Not long after that, I serve dinner at 6 PM as usual and clean up the kitchen again.
Upstairs, I land in her office with her. She takes me to the bathroom, and, sensing the dice have come for me (I got surprise slapped pretty hard earlier, but that means there was another roll), my mind goes one particular direction. But she starts running a sink faucet, not the bathtub’s. My mind goes a different direction, but this path also ends when she plugs the sink. My mind goes back to option number one. It’s Friday. “You rolled a two,” I guess. A two on a Friday is one of the only options I have memorized, because it’s one of my favorites. Twenty-one years of mysterious respiratory issues led to chronic drowning nightmares led to daytime phobia led to prime fetish material.
“Yeah,” she says, to the two, bathtub implied, “but this’ll be faster.”
The sink fills. I think she sends me to get a washcloth for myself for after. She announces the warm water this time as a kindness. She shuts the faucet.
“I feel like this is, like, the worse version,” I say, her hand already tight in my hair. “What if I hit my head on the faucet?”
“Don’t do that,” she advises, and shoves my face under the water. “Small movements,” she advises while I run out of oxygen and start to jerk upright. She pulls me up. “See?” she says. “Then you don’t hit your head.”
She shoves me back under, immediately slamming my head into the bottom of the sink.
“Ow!” comes out reflexively under the water, which is a complete waste of the air in my lungs.
She pulls me up. “Now, what did you do that for?”
I make mildly disgruntled noises, water dripping off my bangs into the sink. My nose runs from the warm water, and my daily sunscreen has washed off my face, into the water, and into my eyes, now red and irritated. My normally waterboarding proof mascara is also, for some reason, running aesthetically. My forehead hurts, but we’ve clearly avoided another concussion or anything. She shoves me back under without any accidents this time. A few more times, and then she drains the sink while I try to wring out my bangs and swipe everything off my face.
“Come along,” she says.
“Where are we going?” I ask, following her.
“Kohl’s. I’m sending you in with my return.”
…
We’re talking, in her office. Abruptly, she says, “You’re a dumb slut and no one likes you.”
“That’s fair,” I say.
“Do I get my verbal humiliation checkbox?”
“Sure.”
“Whore.”
…
There are plenty of days I don’t even remember the rolls for, lost to hosting a writing event or teaching a class or going to my quarterly psychiatrist appointment or having my mom over for our Saturday dinner.
One day, I get slapped, and evidently the second roll was for kneeling on rice.
“Didn’t we like, just do that?” I ask. I swear it’s been less than a week, and most of the options don’t repeat.
“Maybe,” she shrugs.
For reasons I’ve already forgotten, things aren’t looking good for this second checkbox. It’s getting late and we’ve already retired upstairs away from the rice for the night, or something. “Could we do it tomorrow?” I propose. “Just—put it off instead of skipping and rolling again?” I like my odds on this one, because I like the rice enough, it’s probably better than whatever she might roll tomorrow.
She agrees.
The next day, conveniently in the kitchen this time, she takes a little scoop of rice from the big container in the kitchen pantry—normally, I use rice for cooking—and scatters it on the floor. “No cutting board this time,” she says.
The last time we did the rice, she poured it onto a cutting board and put the cutting board on the kitchen floor. The cutting board makes perfect sense and is basically required when one does this activity in a carpeted room—in our bedroom, in her office, like we’ve done plenty of times. But I pointed out that it gets clumsy and redundant on top of the already hardwood kitchen floor.
I get my clothes out of the way, which mostly involves pulling my uniform leggings down. My skirt is short enough to stay, and the top of my boots is just low enough, and over my socks. They’re still on because I’ve just gotten home from the store. She found me in the kitchen putting away groceries after the Wednesday grocery run (another day I go out). My better (ironic) trick is when I’m wearing my knee compression sleeves and get those out of the way just as fast.
I kneel on the rice. Not my standardized kneeling position, but upright without sitting on my heels. I stay there a few minutes, the rice really starting to dig in, while she pulls my hair and mocks me joyfully. One of the cats unhelpfully starts swatting at some stray rice. Then Mistress tells me to get up. I do. I flick off the rice indented into my skin. I pull up my leggings. She leaves.
I sweep up the rice and toss it.
…
I’m led into her office, and I notice the candle burning immediately, though we both play coy for a minute. It’s not one of our actual wax play pitcher candles, but an old devotional candle of the kind you get at the grocery store. She picks it up and walks towards me, holding the red candle ominously near my chest. “I rolled heat,” she says.
“Okay, this is violating every big wax play rule.”
“Why?”
“Candle is still lit. And I’m still dressed. Skirt is down range.” Okay, that’s not a wax play rule, but my uniform skirt isn’t made anymore, and I only own three copies of it total, an aspect of my uniform we had to compromise with the universe on.
“I figured this was better than branding you with a fork again.”
“Yeah.”
About a year ago, another time she rolled for heat, she found me deep cleaning in the kitchen on a Wednesday, and heated a fork over the stove. “Give me your arm,” she said, and I did. The burn, not meant to be much, blistered, peeled, and took two weeks to heal, and even now, there’s a faint white scar of the four fork tines, almost indistinguishable from scalpel play scars.
But I loved that.
Now, Mistress says, “Fine; take your skirt and whatever off, then.”
I take off the skirt, and my shirt and bra.
She tilts the candle towards my chest, then straightens it and blows out the flame. She tilts the candle a little more, and hot wax drips the inch or two onto my chest. I gasp a little. She tilts the candle again and the rest of the melted wax drips onto a second spot, solidifying pink. She sets the candle aside, admires her work for a minute, and then peels it off me.
…
Another night, having failed my roll for defense again, in another bathroom, minutes after hopping off a Leather Leadership Conference Board meeting Zoom. Mistress scans the bathroom counter and makes disgruntled noises of her own.
I decide to make a risky move and guess again. “Looking for soap?” That was my other guess the night with the sink.
“Yeah.”
All that’s on the counter is the liquid kind. “I think it’s just the bar in the shower—“
But Mistress digs up the unopened versions of the same soap from a cabinet. “This’ll be good. I’ve been wanting a bar for me in the shower downstairs.” She opens the little box. Turns the sink on warm again and starts lathering it up, emphasizing the importance of this step out loud. She holds up the bar and I open my mouth. She puts it in and I bite down. My TMJ is quickly protesting, my sore jaw trembling clickily, more than any sensory issues. It’s a big bar, not one of the little bars I make largely for this purpose, or one of the soap sticks I infuse with ginger oil for figging.
She makes fun of me for drooling suds on myself, “Pathetically,” and when maybe two minutes later, she takes the bar from me and tells me to spit into the sink, I do, and it somehow ends up in my hair. I rinse my mouth out a few times and try to get the soap out of my hair and off my face while she watches with amusement.
She sticks the bar into its open little box. “Stick this in the bathroom when you go downstairs, slavegirl.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
…
Yesterday, Tuesday, she comes into my office while I’m reading. “Do you want to be slapped?” she asks.
There are worse things, and training to stay still’s made it easier, but I shake my head.
“Then roll for defense,” she says.
The die isn’t handy. For a second time, the first where we’re not just testing it, I ask my smart watch to roll for me. It rolls a two. I know the slap is a four, so no go.
But Mistress says, “I’ll let you roll the actual die, since this keeps giving you twos.” Both of us got twos on our digital test rolls, and now I’ve gotten a two again, so we’re not so sure this trick actually works. She immediately leaves and returns with the red D6 from her office. I roll. Four. Bingo. “Huh,” she says. “Roll again, then.”
We determined (that time she was still choking me) that in the case of a four, we both roll twice. Telling me to roll twice is always a giveaway for a four. I matched the four, so it cancels out. (We eventually determine that the order of my rolls doesn’t matter: when I roll a three to her four and then a four to her three at the breakfast table on a day I’m already limping around, I make the case that I could’ve simply rolled two dice and gotten both to begin with.) I don’t actually know what number and activity I’m rolling against most of the time. If she really wanted to rig or overrule the game, there’s nothing I could do about it, anyway.
Now I roll to see if I can do it again. I don’t cancel out the other one. Spanking, apparently.
Mistress rolls her eyes, though. “You’re probably happy about that one.”
I am.
She leads me through my office doorway into the bedroom proper, and sits on the foot of the bed. She pulls my leggings and underwear down and flips my skirt up and puts me over her lap, spanking me with her hand for a few minutes. The stinging is pleasant, and my watch alarm to start dinner goes off in the middle of it, but I still make it in time.
Later—I’ve cleaned up the kitchen, prepped coffee, and written for a bit. My 8:35 PM alarm goes off reminding me to get ready for evening inspection. I do the first step, making Mistress her evening cup of tea, and bring it upstairs to her office.
There’s a nightlight outside her office that’s an indicator of whether I can come in or not. If it’s off, she’s in do not disturb mode. If it’s on, I can enter and exit freely, if I’m passing through for something like the shared printer and don’t make eye contact and distract her. (Sometimes, she’ll choose to engage me, which means the exit ritual—me asking if there’s anything else I can do to be of service, asking for permission to leave in the proper format, and curtsying, is on.) If the light is on, and I need her attention, I’m to press the wall mounted button that’ll buzz the pager on her desk, a relic from our old pager slave bell system that’s mostly been replaced with the smart watches. Then she’ll, presumably, wave me in, and say something to me first, allowing me to speak, per the speak when spoken to rule, without me having to use our hand signal for permission.
Tonight, though, a familiar pattern plays out where I see the nightlight on and kind of hover in the office doorway for a second until she just notices me, and beckons me in. I set the tea slightly to the side on her desk, with my right hand since I’m on her right side. She tells me about what she’s coding and how, which I rarely understand. I have no real use for the tool she’s gushing about. “Well, what do you need?” she asks.
“Snuggles?”
“Yeah; it can’t help you with that.”
“It’s never snuggles,” I mock pout.
“Aww. Poor baby.”
I notice the red D6 on her desk. “Roll for snuggles?” I propose, more theoretically than anything.
But, “Okay,” she says, and places it closer to me.
“What am I rolling for?” I ask uncertainly.
“If you roll a three, you get snuggles,” she decides.
I roll. Three. Today is my lucky day.
True to her word, announcing the results, she takes me to the bedroom, and we lie on the bed. She curls around me tightly. Crush my soul back into my body. We talk a little more. I was in the middle of something, though. “May I be late, please, Mistress?” I ask. For evening inspection at 9 PM.
“I guess so.”
“Thank you, Mistress.” Required, but real.
So we stay like that for a few happy minutes.
She trails kisses along my shoulder. “I love you.”
And, however the dice land, I know she does.
Service Slave Secrets 