I am standing in the kitchen up to my elbows in dish suds. My ankles hurt as my only clothing is a pair of stockings and a pair of impossibly tall and stilt like patent heels. The rubber of the garterless stockings pinches the dark hairs on my thighs. This is what is making me hard. That and the sight of the stilettos as I look down, and knowing that these things all contain my skin.

I am cleaning not as punishment but as gift.

I lean forward towards the sink, pressing my prick, which stands out at an angle I always thought was rather silly, tighter against my stomach. The enamel is cold. The dishes pile up in the drain board steadily, slowly. I find the water's temperature somehow calming.

Waits like these always seem interminable no matter how long or how short. My mind wanders. Memories of days less happy but simpler, when I was left to my own devices, fill my thoughts. I used to make and keep lists.

Madame made me hand over these lists to her. She found them rather enlightening, and sometimes requires me to make her a new one. I use them in my art as well.

I am contracted to own no property except that which I write or make and the space and tools to do so. Madame is most generous and wants me to be happy. The happier I am the more income I manage to contribute. My work does fetch a decent price.

Though of course....it is her prerogative as to whether I ought to be happy or not. She has tested me in myriad ways, punished me with lack of things I love for some time, but never once has kept me from my work as part of it.

She has told me she does not want anything to interfere with my success or my self-regard. Yet there is no picture in my mind of happiness that does not include her in the frame. Sometimes I worry, wondering if she is as prepared for the taking as I am for the giving, if anyone truly can be.

Tell me, after she straddles me, after she takes me inside her own body, there is no God. Tell me that we have no soul and that our souls cannot touch.

I finish the dishes and pick the nastiness out of the drain as they sit in the drain board, my erection finally flagging a bit as I cringe and throw away the soaked scraps. Few things make me flinch...that being one.

She has a way of guessing anyway. I would not put it past her to involve dish-drain muck if I cross the agreed to lines.

I wash my hands carefully, and set the table, slicing a loaf of ciabatta with the long serrated knife. I put out a stick of butter to soften and the Medoc she drinks.

She told me I was to do it this morning with one hidden challenge and one less hidden. That was what the note read.

Slave....don't forget ciabatta and Medoc. The cheaper Medoc. In getting these items I want you to give yourself two hurdles. One hidden from everyone and one outward and obvious, if not downright embarrassing to you.

Grin and love it sweetie. Tonight.

In training a slave I have so often heard it repeated that tasks must be clear and concrete, one must not be a crazy-maker. Madame has scoffed at those who discourage the ambiguous, and blessed me with the recognition that I am an analytical man, happiest with creative leeway. In fact, if I respond to her rather open-ended challenges with anything less than deliberation and measured thought that is cause for some kind of punishment.

"Hidden" was easy enough. I put on my best suit, the one she likes me to be seen in public in most. It's a linen suit, a vague honey color. I wear it with a cream colored linen shirt and a green tie if I must have a tie. It sets off the darkness of my hair and the warmth of my skin. I am a reasonably handsome man, though she seems to have a slightly higher opinion of me in this regard. I war with my gut, as do most, but I care fastidiously for my skin and my hair, which is cropped close at the back of my neck but falls in my eyes if I bow my head.

I went to the top drawer of her bureau. and withdrew from it a solid, blue flanged anal plug....of a similar size and thickness to my own cock. Once in, the flange is wide enough that it never goes anywhere. It stays in throughout all kinds of activity. I slicked it with a handful of lubricant. At the first wet clicking sound of my hand on the object I felt myself become hard again. I dropped my pants and lay back on the bed to insert it, watching the dark asterisk of my ass yawn open around the rubber, knees drawn up, back propped on pillows, head craned to watch with a dreamlike floating pleasure.

I waited till the erection subsided. I am not permitted to climax without her presence or her permission in her absence, and I have learned the hard way that I am not to call her about it frequently, only in dire and desperate need. She does love to hear me begging over the telephone.

I stood, gingerly, and pulled up my black silk panties (the only kind of underwear I am allowed to own) and then my pants and buttoned myself.

Now for more obvious. Here she demands variation and resourcefulness. It need not always be extreme. The more subtle and imaginative I am here, the better.

I thought and thought as I walked around the house a bit...adjusting to the pressure and fullness in my ass....till I came up with something I thought she would appreciate.

I stepped out into the day. Since I was made hers, its light is hard and cold and pure. One appreciates it more when it becomes a clearer light, one that illuminates most starkly.

It is in my contract that I am not to unless my career or my own or another's safety should require it. It is one more way in which I am dependent on Madame.

So I waited for the bus, ass plugged and fighting off another imminent erection.

I went first to Walgreen's and picked up a package of Sesame Street kids bandages. Leaving the store, I opened up the pack, put a cookie monster strip across the bridge of my nose, and made my way to the bakery.

You can get away with a lot if you are dressed shabbily, less if you are not, I have discovered. If something seems "off" people do not know what to make of it. It can be the smallest thing, really.

Part of me wants to die when it is like this....simply curl up and die right there, like any other person. It's natural. Well, not natural, but a whole lifetime's worth of conditioning.

The part I breathe deeply at and welcome with open arms is that part that knows she will be proud of me....knows she knows how very hard it is. And deeper still is a sense of release. No outcome matters. If I please her it is good. If I am punished I have done what I can for now. Even my life is simply a life. Even her love is simply that. Outcomes are not within my power to control.

It is the most illuminating of lessons, it comes in rare bursts of insight and goes away. But while it lasts I am at my happiest.

She brought me there. Her and her love of me, even brought low in my shame. Her love of me, whatever I do. Her love relies on no outcome.

In this sense no shame is shame, merely a challenge that I must rise to for her. I think about how deeply I love her. Not merely because I am hers....she is my friend.

"No...I just thought it looked really neat, "I answered, smiling a holy-fool smile and taking the ciabatta, ceding the three bucks.

I wore the damn thing the whole bus ride home, sitting in the back with the teenagers who would really think I was certifiable. Being entertaining. My ass feeling a kind of delving dig from the plug....fighting off visions of her squeezing my balls gently as she fucks me with a dainty fist.

That was how this lovely bread made it to table. I do bring home the bacon in a way, just not the usual way, I guess.

Her key in the lock, and I am on my knees at the door, my head lowered and my hands clasped behind it. Stripped of my suit and naked but for stockings and heels. Her preference.

"Hello, angel, miss me?" She smiles tenderly and ruffles my hair. I lean into her hand and look to her, getting to my feet and taking her coat.

Mistress is sharp and beautiful in a way that defies most convention. After a year her scent still maddens me, her presence still leaves me desiring and amazed. Her wit touches me and makes me laugh even at the oddest and most intense of times.

"Oh, I miss you too all day pet, I do." She purses her lips and pinches my cheek. "Did you do as instructed?"

"Yes, Mistress. I did. I hope you will be pleased with my solutions to your problem. Hidden was something elongated and blue."

I go to the bathroom, and re-emerge with a Bert and Ernie band-aid on the bridge of my nose.

She giggles delightedly behind one hand, her eyes soft brown, almost girlish. She winds a dark strand of hair around a delicate fingertip devoid of nail, childlike and bitten-back.

She throws her arms wide and kisses my brow as I kneel between her thighs, tilts my lips to hers. She caresses the bridge of my nose.

Reversal. I should know to expect it yet I never do. It is her passion, her specialty.

I rise, a little stunned and bow slightly at the waist and mince off to the kitchen in those infernal heels. One of the stockings sports a big run.

My heart rate is up. No equilibrium and quiet tonight. I am excited and beginning to become excited sexually as much as I wish I weren't. The body still betrays me, no amount of training will erase those telltale signs, no amount of self-control and thinking of baseball stats.

She appears in the doorway of the kitchen, leaning up against it, while I kneel near the empty chair.

"I see you've run your stockings, slut. Doing what? Fucking the neighbors? Fucking the dog? Answer me."

Any time she accuses me of fucking anything I know that this is the time to be humble about my prowess.

She pours herself a glass of the wine....picks the end off the ciabatta and chews it lustily, losing lipstick on it. She sits.

"I have a fondness for this little thing, even if you like to have it anywhere you can stick it. Can't say why. You are so lucky I do, slut, so very lucky."

She lifts my balls with her boot toe, jostles them up and down a few times, laughing as she does.

"But are you sure you are lucky? Are you really sure? I mean...can you be sure?"

Her soft, wood-brown eyes are warm, as she drops my genitals and raises her foot over them. The threat of sole, the threat of heel. Implied and stark. I twitch to painful hardness. A heated glance passes between us. I look down at my cock again, her sole like a hawk's shadow over a rabbit.

She takes away her boot, breaks off a piece of the ciabatta and puts it in my mouth. I chew with flabbergasted quickness.

It is her pleasure that I know no equilibrium and follow her plans doggedly and clumsily at times. I ache too often for equilibrium, I want to control situations by understanding them, by not ever being surprised by anything.

I know this, and sometimes the knowing makes it a little easier, in rare moments. Usually I am in a kind of daze. The not knowing hurts if I let it.

If I cling to the fact that no appearance matters and her love is deeper than any and all tests she could dream up, I flourish in its certainty while all externally seems uncertain. I come more alive than ever. She gave me a mantra long ago, when humiliation was a limit of mine. "I love you no matter what anyone says. Even me." The mantra took a subtle hold. The words that could have crushed me now are powerless to touch me.

If she is angry with me she will take me aside and tell me, directly. Anything else that looks that way is not actually anger.

She is looking at me with a kind of studied curiosity. Her features neither harsh nor tender, just open, searching, deciding.

I avert my eyes politely and hold still thinking the less I do the less likely I am to upset the silence.

I bend my lips to it and nibble. Gentle. Lamblike. Breathing softly and finding a brief moment of indescribable calm.

"I love you, Martin," she says quietly. My name is a rare and sweet sound for its rarity on her lips.

"I have decided that you are going to suffer," she informs me. Her voice is quiet, serious but not angry. "Tell me why you will suffer."

"No, no, no. Answer me and answer correctly or I will ask you to bring me the cane."

Her eyes are large and luminous, and filled with affection that doesn't match the situation. I feel this warmth as palpably as that which inhabits me. I want to say the right thing...

She rises in response and comes back with the first-aid kit. She puts it down and begins to pace a little, as she always does when she is going to session with me.

I remark, quietly, at last, "because it pleases you. And so it pleases me, and deeply, Mistress."

She doesn't say anything and yet I know it is the right answer, the one she was hoping I would disclose.

She sits and motions for me to come near her. I kneel between her knees and she opens her legs and pulls me closer. She swabs my upper arm with alcohol while she speaks.

"Yes Martin. That is why you are going to suffer. It's a sweet and brief suffering. The one you have wanted for so long. And the one I have wanted to give you for as long as I have known you. You deserve it. And so much more."

The cut. The one I asked her for, hardly daring to ask. So hesitant, so scared of offending and of asking too much. I warred for a week with whether or not I had the right. It loomed so large in my mind that I could not bring myself to ask. She had to punish me for something to get me unwound enough to ask for it. But I did.

Of course I could. I must always speak of these things. Instead of keeping a secret gnawing angst.

I needed to have her cut me. To bleed for her. To give her the blood that has been in my veins and passed through my heart.

"Someday" was all she said, but she had that faraway look that comes over her only once in a while, the slightest vulnerability that I have no desire to claim, simply to witness.

She takes my hand, holding my fingers, my elbow resting on her knee. It is like watching a movie. Everything happens faster than I want it to, with a sense of inevitability. The scalpel is drawn lightly, in a single straight line along my bicep and I watch myself open so slightly, sliced as easily as butter, nothing but a piece of meat...meat endowed with a soul by some strange and marvelous chance.

My eyes water. Emotion of unforeseen power floods them, floods me. I look up at her with these silent tears of such gratitude it is all I can do.

My fingers feel like ice in her hand. The lump in my throat feels blade-sharp itself.

It is a swift and silent, wordless taking. There is no drama, no sound, no cries, no impacts, just the willing parting of flesh and the blood itself, come up to her from under, from inside me.

We both look at this line of red, the tiny resultant beads of red. It is a beautiful thing that could only have been made by the two of us. Her hand clasps mine lightly, almost formally.

We sit for a long and unmeasurable duration. Our breathing is matched, even, deep.

Eventually we decide that it is time for bed. Without words, just knowing, rising quietly at the same time. She bandages my arm, and I embrace her. She opts for the comfort of my body that night, sleep beside her rather than at her feet, my arms around her, hers around me. No outcome matters tonight in this world, not success nor failure, not perfect obedience, not unfailing commanding. In the final analysis, we will be embracing one another in our dreams.