For about a year, I had a happy play relationship with a woman, who we shall call Gladys even though that is not her name. She had a long term girlfriend, so our relationship was strictly d/s related play, and it worked well. It was with her that I had my first real experience of BDSM, and I thought of her as a kind of mentor. We had been discussing for a while a fantasy of mine which involved being ‘given’ to a man for an evening. One evening, I went over to her house and was blindfolded the moment I walked through the door. I was led into the living room, where she asked me how I was and generally made me feel comfortable. Then she told me that there was someone else in the room. She told me to go over to him and try to work out what he looked like by touch. She then told me that she was going to ‘give’ me to him for the evening, and that if I accepted I should kiss his feet before removing the blindfold. I knew that I would be safe, that she knew this bloke, that she would stay with me all night and that I could back out at any time because we had already discussed all of that stuff, so I did it. Phil (again not his real name) and I had a great evening together, and decided to meet up independently to play again.
A couple of weeks later, Gladys started arguing with her girlfriend over me, and we stopped seeing each other. However, I carried on talking to Phil. One day, he sent me a message saying that he had hurt his back and couldn’t move, so I offered to go round and give him a hand and check he was OK. He told me that he really appreciated that and it made him see that I was a decent person, and he began to trust me. We got closer, though remained as friends who played, nothing more. He began to confide in me about his life, the fact that he had cheated on his vanilla wife with a sub girl and his wife had found out, divorced him and tried to stop his kids from seeing him. He told me that he often contemplated suicide, but that I helped him to deal with that. I know that at that point I should have got help, but I couldn’t tell anyone about him – for one, he was older than me, and secondly, people would ask how we met and I couldn’t tell them. I tried to talk to Gladys about it, but he specifically asked me not to. The moment that he found out that I had tried to talk to her, he mysteriously had a falling out with her – he assured me that it was nothing to do with me, but asked me to stop talking to her out of respect for him. I wasn’t happy about it, but I did it. There was a part of me at this point that felt that if I didn’t do what he needed, he would decide to top himself and I would hold myself responsible.
We go closer, everything was fine. He was very protective of me, but it was always in a nice way. He called me ‘his’. Every Saturday, we would go out for a walk together, and it was then that we tended to talk about our lives. I discovered that he had a very shady past, and came from a family of East End gangsters who set themselves up in the wake of the Cray twins. He told me about how, when he was younger, someone had said something against his Mum and he had gone to their home with a knife – they ended up in hospital and permanently scarred. He said that he never regretting doing anything like that because he only every acted to protect those close to him, and he has grown up and knows now that there are much better ways of dealing with things. He said he denounced ‘that side’ of his family when he got married and never looked back. I believed him – I had no reason not to.
As the relationship began to develop, he became more and more interested in d/s, setting rules for me. They were fairly simple – I had to text him at least once every 3 hours, let him know where I was and what I ate, and give him the passwords to all of my internet accounts, and always wear a chain that he had bought me around my neck. Gradually, he began to know more and more about my life. He started asking about my friends, what they were like and where we went out together. He was particularly interested in my gay friends, who I went out in Soho with about once a month. He said that he didn’t like it, he thought they were a bad influence on me. But if I wanted to carry on seeing them then that was fine, he just didn’t like it. I carried on seeing them. He carried on not liking it. He had a way of flipping during conversations about this. He began by telling me that he was trying to protect me. Then he got angry with me, telling me that I clearly didn’t want his protection or anything else that he offered me, and that I obviously didn’t like him enough to ‘do this one simple thing for me, its not much to ask’. Then he would break down into tears, saying that it was all his fault, no-one wanted him around or respected him, he deserved nothing more and he might as well go kill himself. Our arguments always ended up with me consoling him, telling him that he didn’t have to go through this alone and that he could talk to me about it. I always felt that if I said anything he didn’t like he was liable to do something silly, either to himself or someone else, and that it would be my fault.
One day, I found a letter from the courts in his flat, mentioning ‘bail conditions’. He broke down in tears in front of me. He had been accused of trying to run over his ex wife’s new boyfriend. He told me that he hated him, he couldn’t cope with living life like this and now the police were trying to interfere as well. It emerged that our Saturday evening walks were actually him going to spy on his wife’s boyfriend, and see whether she was out with him on a Saturday. He effectively stalked her. It had been on a night like this, before we met, that he tried to run him over, but he stopped himself because he saw that his wife was there as well and he didn’t want to hurt her. It was only because I came with him now that he didn’t do things like this any more.
We were laying together in the bath in his flat, warm and surrounded by candles, when he asked me to lie for him. He wanted me to sign an Affidavit saying that I was with him in the car when he allegedly tried to run the guy over, and that it didn’t happen, he drove straight past. He told me that if I didn’t, he would never be able to trust that anyone cared about him enough to do anything for him and that he might as well be dead. I felt like I had no options – lie in court or be responsible for his death. I really believed that he would do it as well, and that these were the only options. I tried to tell him how I felt and that I really wasn’t comfortable with it, but he just kept telling me that it was the only option. I hate myself for doing it. He deserves to be locked up, but he got off.
Gradually, play between us happened less often. He developed a focus on punching and kicking – pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. I wanted to do other things, and he always promised it but never delivered.
The arguments about my friends continued. I pretty much cut all of my acquaintances out of my life, only my closest friends wanted to talk to me because I wouldn’t socialise with anyone else – I was too scared of how he would react. When I did go out, he wanted to know exact details – who with, what time I’d be back, how much I intended to drink. If things didn’t happen as I told him, he would get angry and then start crying. One day, I introduced him to my flatmate Cath. I have known Cath since I was in playschool, and we are quite close. Their meeting didn’t go to well, he asked her some personal questions and she ended up slapping him. He walked out in a rage, I stayed behind to comfort her. When I knew that she was OK, I went back to his to check on him. This was the first time he hit me in anger. He said that clearly my loyalties didn’t lie in the right place, and that I obviously didn’t care about him at all because I went to her first, when she should mean nothing to me after what she just did to him. He slapped me around the face, threw me to the floor by my hair and walked off. For days, he talked about ‘sending someone’ to Cath to teach her a lesson. I was terrified for her. I wanted to leave but I felt that my staying and pleading with him to calm down was the only thing protecting Cath and myself.
Eventually he calmed down. He was incredibly apologetic, saying that he hated himself for getting like that. I felt safe enough to tell him that I was leaving him. For three days he didn’t stop texting or calling, telling me that he felt awful, this was all his fault and there was no point in him living any more. He threatened to turn himself into the police, saying that everything he had said in court was lies – he reckoned it didn’t matter if he went to prison now because clearly I didn’t give a shit. He didn’t stop until I went back to him. For a couple of weeks he was different, forgiving, patient, and didn’t try to pry into my life at all.
He hated the fact that I still lived with Cath and that there was nothing he could do to stop me seeing her. He tried to get me to stay at his house as much as possible, and my social life dwindled even further. He also became even more possessive, wanting to know what I was doing and where I was all the time. He wanted to scar me with his initial so that I would be marked as his forever. I refused. Somehow, all of our arguments became associated with shouting, threats, him breaking down in tears, me apologising, and then us playing to make up – and the play always involved punching, kicking and violence.
As his divorce went through, he began to lose it – I started to believe that he was slightly schizophrenic. He believed that he could influence people’s decisions by calling on spirits and demons, that he could perform black magic and that he could read minds. He flipped readily between being a peace loving hippy and a violent satanist. I tried to convince him to get councilling but he refused. He stopped threatening my friends and began telling me that he was going to hurt everyone in my life through his mind and there was nothing that he could do to stop me. He told me that he was going to make Cath want to kill herself, to make her feel what he feels. I couldn’t hack it.
I wasn’t scared of being responsible for his death anymore, I was scared of being responsible for physical attacks on my friends and family, and I was scared for myself. I was too scared to leave. So I set up a new email account and new internet profile and started to secretly meet people online. One day, he read my text messages, and he found out that I had been on a date. I tried to explain how I felt, but he was blinded by rage and jealousy. He made me sit and listen as he called up the guy and threatened to come and find him and kill him because he had set hands on ‘my property’. I vividly remember he was shaking, he was deadly silent. He told me to get out. I went.
The phone calls started again, him pleading for me to come back. I told him that I was leaving him. He said that he agreed, but he couldn’t leave things as they were, he wanted to apologise for his threats face to face first. He drove to my flat to pick me up. He sat me down in his front room, and told me to close my eyes and hold out my hands as he had a parting gift for me, something that he wanted me to have. I sat there waiting. Suddenly I heard a swoosh and a crop hit me around the side of the face. He kept hitting me and hitting me with it, telling me that that was for what I had done to him. Eventually I managed to grab hold of the end of the crop. I looked him dead in the eyes and said the words that I knew would make him realise what he had just done: ‘That wasn’t consensual, that was assault.’ He broke down into tears. I said nothing for ages. My only words then were ‘Its time for me to go home.’ It was 3am and there were no tubes, and he wouldn’t let me go until morning. I was still terrified, I just wanted to get out of there, I didn’t care that there was nowhere to go, but he blocked the door. I locked myself in his bedroom until morning, when I left without saying anything else to him.
I am still scared of him. I am scared that he stalks me like he did his ex wife. I am scared for my boyfriend and for other people I know. And I hate myself for being stupid enough to go along with it all in the first place. I am not the person I was before I met him; I used to not care what people thought of me. I was spontaneous, slightly nutty, a bit of a performer and had a good social life. Now I am always worried about what people think, I’m much more reserved. I miss my friends, but I feel like they are gone – I treated them too badly. I still see Cath, but I can’t tell her what happened.
