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me on his way to the door and waved stiffly.
        “Well, take care.”
        “You, too,” I answered lamely, and waited to get up until he’d closed the door behind him.
        I exhaled loudly at the ceiling, feeling the adrenaline I’d had to ignore when he’d still been with me. I felt something else then as well, something that made me even more uncomfortable than what had just happened with Daniel. It’s just a reflex, it doesn’t mean anything about anything, I told myself emphatically. But I really had no idea what it might or might not mean — that even in the midst of my fury at Daniel, my body had still been aroused by being restrained and touched without permission.
        After gathering up the equipment and wiping down the table with alcohol and paper towels, I opened the door to head back downstairs, and then closed it again. What am I going to say to them about it? Should I even say anything? I flashed on what Vanessa had said about pro subs not being able to work independently, and worried that she or Hillary might decide I couldn’t handle working here, either. I should keep quiet. There’s nothing anyone can do about it, anyway.
        I didn’t get any other sessions that shift, and spent the remaining few hours watching television and trying to make sense of the day.
        Had I really been in danger, or had I overreacted? And if there had been a real threat, and I had been turned on even in the midst of it, I couldn’t help but wonder if my response made me more of a danger to myself than any man could ever be. I knew I had been really pissed off, not some porno-queen version of sexed-up helpless victim, but I still understood so little about my kinky urges. It felt impossible to tell whether they came from the part of me that just loved having good sexual encounters, or if there was a darker drive being stimulated, a drive I did not romanticize or wish to nurture.
        As I was getting ready for bed later that night, something odd caught my eye in the mirror. I thought for a moment that perhaps some kind of dye had rubbed off on me at the dungeon. I looked more closely, and saw fingertip-sized spots of black, as well as robin’s-egg blue, dotted along the length of my rib cage. I patted the bruises gingerly to see whether they hurt or only looked bad, and then dropped my hands nervously. Pressing them, I’d felt myself on the bed again with Daniel and had that familiar mixture of resentment and confused arousal. I knew I hadn’t felt that way at all with Robert or Bill the Saturday before. What we’d done together had felt normal to me. I didn’t know what other word to use for it. I knew also that these feelings I was having now mimicked pretty closely the way I’d felt throughout the entire relationship I’d had with T. I wondered which experience of S/M was the exception, and which was the rule.

FOUR
        
        
         CLIENTS OFTEN ASKED about the first time I realized I had a fixation on both spanking and erotic dominance and submission. The truth is, unlike some other kinksters, I could not remember a “first time” or a defining moment that flipped an internal switch for me. As far as I know, I always felt like I do now. What did stand out was the first time I understood that this feeling I got in my stomach around kinky stuff was connected to sex.
        At age fourteen, I decided to try something I’d read about in Judy Blume books, despite the popular rumor at the time that masturbation either made you a lesbian or proved you already were one. One night during my eighth-grade year, an image formed seemingly out of nowhere in my mind’s eye as I pressed and stroked underneath my bedcovers.
        I saw the boy I had a crush on spanking me.
        Whatever blood had not already migrated underneath my right hand rushed hotly to my face and neck in the pitch-darkness of my bedroom. Humiliated, I forced the picture out of my mind. A