Read the previous episodes of “Slave by Degrees”.


The twenty minutes or so after her admission of sexual interest in him, of implicit submission to his outrageous demand that she book a room for him to physical and sexually abuse her in, those twenty minutes were like a surrealist episode within some over-the-top magical realist novel, topped off with a heavy dose of amphetamines. She was simultaneously unmanageably jittery, emotionally agitated and intensely nervy, so that she became very clumsy, her thoughts and movements all disordered, while at the same time the world had taken on the qualities of an intense dream— one which could not decide whether it was going to be a nightmare, an erotic fever-dream, or an anxiety attack.

Everything went by in a blur, all tinged with crippling embarrassment, uncertainty, and continuous silly errors and failures on her part— misspeaking, dropping things, forgetting things; having to go back to the concierge desk twice— once as she had left her purse, then because she had omitted to take the key— these just the most obvious of her many failures.

It was impossible to think straight. She was about to whore herself for a job. She was about to strip naked for an old man, be ’tested’ on her non-existent oral sex skills. She was about to get a job she had been dreaming about and working for for months, one which might rescue her from despair. She was about to become a confirmed slut, lose all her self-respect. She was about to cheat on her husband. She was about to betray all her feminist principles.

I am going to offer myself up to be beaten until I cannot control my tears.

I know it’s wrong, but I am going to let him do it to me. Let him control me, let him have me. And once he has done this to me, he will be in control of me; I know it. He knows what he is doing; I am about to— already have— lost all my bearings, all my moorings. He will be the only certainty left in my life; everything else, everything, will have been damaged, broken, ruined, in just a few hours. I won’t be able to tell anyone about this, no-one at all. He’ll have so much power over me; I’ll need him so much more than he will need me; I’ll be so weak, and he’ll abuse me more, and it will make me weaker still.

Tears were close at all times, constant small skirmishes to manage her heart, her throat, her hands, as her body kept trying to act out the darting, directionless but intense energies which were making her quiver and tremble, visibly, she was sure.

He did not help her once; just left her to get on with it. Neither, it had to be said, did he display either impatience or irritation. Rather, despite his perfectly maintained calm— he had ordered a coffee, and had taken an iPad from his briefcase, was reading and making notes in a leisurely fashion— when he did notice her, his expression was mild and tolerant; if anything he was amused, but not cruelly so— and in fact this was her rescue; when, appalled at her own stupidity when she realised about the room key (a simple mistake which at another time she would hardly have acknowledged as anything at all— but feeling then as if every little thing was registering with him, and must give him a disgust of her), when the only way she could keep herself from crying was to emit a ridiculous, bimbo giggle, complete with little girl submissive shimmy (like nothing she’d ever done before), directly and publicly acknowledging her uselessness, her inability to cope, her distress, begging openly for empathy by laughing at herself, when he had smiled at her (just enough to count, no more or less), smiled instead of the feared well-deserved sneer, it was as if balm had been spread; her tensions relaxed, her tears did not spill, warmth spread in her belly, and she smiled at him, shy and grateful, even as a voice in her head told her;

Another submission; another defeat; you are asking him to control you, to downgrade his expectations of you; advertising your weakness around him.

And was answered by a surprising, unlooked-for realisation;

I want to be weak around him. It makes me feel free; let off the hook; I want him to know he should look at my tits, my legs, just as much as he wants. Want him to know he can touch me, grab me, spank me, put … put his cock in me, that I’ll let him— that I’ll help him; god I want that. I do!

These thoughts— these utterly unsuspected feelings, coming from deep inside her, with such clarity and certainty, shocked and destabilised her further, but somehow, after what seemed like an eternity of failings and inefficiencies, she had collected her purse and her room key and was realising she needed to face the reality of going to a hotel room with a strange man, when he spoke;

“You go along, pretty. I’ll give you a few minutes. You’ll want to have removed your underwear. I am rather fussy about lingerie, so it’s best to be naked under your clothes for me, unless you are wearing something I have approved.”

“But before you go, I want to remind you; this is your choice. And, honestly, it’s a very bad choice. It may seem that your career is on the rocks because you hitched your wagon to my work, but you are wrong. In fact, you have made yourself unignorable; because you will prove to have been the first of many. Others— mostly men of course— are taking my work seriously, and I am aware of four or five books in preparation which will add a great deal of context and breadth to the brutal hatchet job I was forced to do, in order to break through.”

“I am not the lifeline you need. And becoming my sexy assistant is obviously not a good career move.”

“If, when I come along to the room in a little while— I must finish my notes on this paper first— if you are not there, I will be pleased for you; although I will myself certainly be disappointed. I am looking forward to your tits, and to making you cry, to having you naked, on your knees in front of me, and to spurting come into that pretty little mouth of yours.”

“We shall see, then, what you are made of, Alicia. In case you do make the right decision, and I don’t see you again, I should thank you for your thesis. It’s a decent bit of work.”

And he reached out his hand for her to shake. Of course, her purse was on the wrong shoulder, and she had to do an awkward little shuffle to have her hand meet his, and then she found herself doing a stupid little bob, as if she was curtsying to the English Queen or something, and blushing, but still, he did not laugh at her, but instead smiled with her, accepting her as who she was at that moment, without judgement, it seemed to her, and it dawned on her that he was a genius— not in his work (for he was clearly a brute force there, rather than a magical intelligence).

No, his genius was with her, for his smile was exactly what was needed to help her ignore his advice, which on top of being obviously good advice, was also, she felt certain, sincere. But his smile was sincere, too, and she would not take his advice, because she wanted more of his smile. Wanted to be a sweet and sexually attractive thing for him, wanted to hear him call her ‘pretty’ again, wanting that feeling in her belly when he smiled at her like she had wanted nothing else since … since, well, since she had wanted this interview.

Certainly I have never wanted Bob like this. Not ever. Not imaginably.

And then the follow-up thought, unbidden, nearly felled her, as her knees lost all tension;

My marriage is over. That’s it. Gone. All over bar the shouting, as they say.

The walk to the room, the lobby, the lift, the corridor (the wrong corridor on the wrong floor, steps retraced)— all of it, was more of the hallucinatory dream.

Only he was in focus.

Have I fallen in love with him?

It would be such a neat explanation, such a useful excuse for what she was about to do. But he had told her he required her honesty, and again, if nothing else made sense, that did.

No. It’s not love, not in any romantic sense at least.

Is it lust then? Fascination?

Sex is certainly part of it; heaven knows Bob and I are not exactly meeting either of our needs that way right now, but it’s not like I’m desperate for sex with a sixty three year old who wants to spank me and fuck my mouth— doesn’t sound as if I’ll get my needs met that way either. So it’s fascination; a sick fascination at that. Definitely not something to build a career on. He’s right about that, too.

At which point, she had arrived at the room, and was overtaken by the urgency of preparing herself. Immediately, there was no space for thinking, just coping; coping with her dither and indecision over everything, and a growing silly panic on top of all that— did she need to redo her makeup, brush her hair more, or leave it tousled; should she shower? Was showering the most stupid idea ever?

The idea of him arriving while she was in the middle of the business of removing her bra was ridiculously stressful, and somehow she managed to get her arm twisted into a shoulder strap and then wrench at it, desperate, and rip it, and was in fact on her knees, crying, her blouse half off, the torn bra in her hands, when the door opened, and she looked up at him, despairing;

“I … I can’t do this … I’m sorry … I … I really wanted to … to be perfect for … for you …”

She dissolved into hiccuppy tears and loud sobs, on her knees, her breasts out, her mascara running, her shoulders slumped.

He let her cry for a little while, and she calmed a little, was going to try and pull herself together, apologise again, grovel, hating herself, when he spoke, saving her again;

“My dear, that is perhaps the most sexually interesting position you could have devised. Your tits are even better than I had imagined, and your vulnerable deshabillé is both charming and intensely arousing. No, don’t move!”

For she had begun to scramble herself into some other position (she knew not what, had no plan, but could not bear to feel so vulnerable). Now she froze, feeling twice as exposed as before, the nakedness of her breasts in his presence, her skirt rucked up so high (her panties already in her purse), all an impossibility, her heart racing.

She was dimly aware that he was removing his jacket, and then his tall, rangy form, surprisingly sprightly, was advancing as she trembled, all sexual thrill evaporated from her.

His hands on her; assured, unhesitating, powerful, bony and immediately controlling, changed everything.

The dreamtime fell away; she was jolted back to hard and brutal reality as he caught her arms, just above the elbow, and lifted them, all unresisting, high and back, without the slightest apparent concern that he was hurting her, so that she had to scrabble herself backward on her knees, squeaking softly, weakly, or have her shoulders wrenched, so that quickly she was kneeling upright, back against the wall, both wrists caught in a bony pinion grip by his left hand, his right busy at his trousers, and then, shocking and immediate, she had a cock in her mouth for the first time in nearly a decade, and all hallucinatory feeling was gone, all jitteriness crushed, all darting thoughts silenced.

She was a half-naked, helpless slut, being face-fucked, his cock already making her gag, without him seeming to care, and there was no time for anything but breathing, surviving, not fucking this up.

She desperately wished her hands were free, but they were immobilised; she desperately wished she could speak, to beg him to give her some small respite, but her throat was full of him; she desperately wished that she could resist, but found herself instead consumed, possessed, utterly obsessed with the need to serve him, to give him what he wanted, not to fail at this as she had failed at everything else for the past half hour (for the past half year, for her whole life…).

The reality was that her cooperation was hardly relevant; he controlled her almost completely, moving her according to his needs without any hesitancy or apparent effort, so that she was left with a simple but fully absorbing task of not being hurt more than necessary, while pleasing him; his control was not cruel, not intentionally painful, but it was ruthless and uncompromising; any movement which did not suit him was forcefully and immediately corrected, and the strange thing was that being controlled like this was comforting; the pain at her wrists balanced by a deep relief at being held so powerfully, so completely, so effectively; even the way his cock filled her throat somehow welcome; even as her chest heaved, she was trying to make swallowing motions, to help him fill her, occupy more of her, invade her.

Leesha face-fucked Leesha face-fucked

Her only freedoms were the one she took to open her jaws as wide as possible, the other to discover ways to let the gagging convulsion which racked her move her as they would, without discomforting him (she quickly learned that resisting anything resulted in everything getting worse; that she must, if she could, just go with it); with the business of finding a space every now and then for an in-breath, until, after some interminable lifetime of being fucked, fucked hard in the mouth, of brute physical violation, tears almost spurting from her eyes at each thrust, the bodily panic response to that, scrabbling to do all she could to give herself to him, his pace at last increased and his noises increased and she was shockingly, appallingly flooded with hot, sour, sticky come, which immediately got in her airways and was forced up the back of her nose so that for a few tens of seconds she felt she might actually die, so desperate was she for air.

When he let her go, she collapsed, a puppet with cut strings, gasping and still occasionally choking, hiccuping and retching, mind empty, apart from the repeating, agonising phrase and the terrible pain in her heart which accompanied it;

I’ve been raped. Everything is ruined. I’m ruined.


Read the next part of Slave by Degrees.