The Pleasure's All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive by Joan Kelly

inked entries.
        “Like this one.”
        “Darling, there aren’t any other places like ours!” she winked.
        “There’s an ad right here for one,” I pointed at the troubling text for the other place I’d just discovered. “And what about all these other people?” I tapped the varying announcements that were lined up in neat columns on the page opposite the Dominion’s ad. There were quite a number of listings for Mistress-This and Goddess-That, covering the Los Angeles and Orange County areas.
         “That,” Vanessa pointed a sharp red fingernail at the other dungeon’s ad, “is not a place like ours. It’s a shit hole where the pimp-owner makes mistresses take their clothes off in session and tries to shortchange everybody’s pay whenever he thinks they’re too stoned to notice.”
        “Oh,” I said.
        “Those others,” Vanessa took the magazine gently from my hands. “Let’s see—” She scanned the page and flipped to another one. “Some of these women are escorts pretending to be pro dommes, and some are real dommes who work independently. You can pretty much tell by what they say in their ads. Look.” She pointed again. “This one says she’s into sensual domination, allows full-body worship, some massage. That’s a dead giveaway she’s a hooker. Full-body means he can go down on her, and massage means she’ll jerk him off at the end. Can you picture a real dominant woman doing any of that?”
        I didn’t know what to say. T had wanted me to go down on him all the time, and had loved touching me to try and make me come. I looked at Vanessa with raised eyebrows and a shrug.
        “But this one here—” She pointed to another ad. “—this one is a real domme. That’s Mistress Catherine. She works downtown, has her own great space, and has been around for a long time.”
         She must have started when she was twelve, then, I thought to myself, eyeing the youthful face of the woman in the ad. It would be months before I would find out that “a long time” in this business meant anything over two years.
        Vanessa handed the magazine back to me and I found the page where the ads started and skimmed through them. I was relieved to find no other “dungeons” per se, but was curious about something else now. “I don’t see any ads for submissive women working on their own.”
        “Of course you don’t,” Vanessa sniffed.
        “There aren’t any pro subs working independently, Marnie,” Taylor spoke up, finished with her boots.
        “Why not?”
        “It’d be much too dangerous for a submissive! How could a girl protect herself if she were meeting strangers out on her own like that?” Vanessa frowned at me.
        “But don’t people like Catherine meet strangers on their own?”
        “That’s different. They’re in charge of the sessions they do. A poor sub girl would be totally at the mercy of God knows what kinds of psychos!”
        On the surface, her argument seemed logical to me, but then I thought, how could it be any more dangerous than working here? It seemed to me that, either way, I would end up alone in a room with a man I didn’t know who wanted to hurt me in one way or another. I mean, I guessed there was something to be said for having a bunch of potential crime-scene witnesses around, but my gut sense already told me that most men who sought out these kinds of sessions weren’t interested in genuinely harming anyone.
        As I wondered about sharing these conclusions with Vanessa and Taylor, the loud sound of someone’s arrival at the front door put an end to the discussion. After checking his bona fides over the intercom, Vanessa buzzed in a tall, broad-shouldered, darkly good-looking fellow who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
        “Hello,” he said, his eyes shifting between the three of us. Vanessa immediately took