Roots

I jotted down “refill birth control prescription” on my list of things to do, and then I paused. I just started my sixth pack of birth control—that can't be right, I thought to myself, I can't have been on it for that long. But I scanned through the dates in this journal and the timeline is right.

Almost six months have passed. Looking back at beginning makes me wonder how we got from there to here.

I met Master at the end of my last school semester. I was stressed out about exams. I had just come out of a messy, drawn out fling that left me disappointed with myself. My close friends at school found themselves in relationships with fellow classmates and temporarily left me without social networks. My academics were concurrently dwindling; my two-year research project was rejected from a major journal. My priorities were all screwed up because I decided to start drinking and partying last year instead of engaging in my usual, wholesome pasttimes. In general, my entire work-life balance was skewed. Suddenly, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel very whole or very happy.

I knew that a relationship wouldn’t fill the gaps but I was looking for companionship, while I pieced everythings back together. It was getting progressively harder to meet singles my small school, so signed up for lavalife. I was skeptical about online dating, embarrassed, and in denial that I’d have to resort to it—I was, after all, young, attractive, fun. I had no trouble flirting, or picking up boys at bars...but I didn't want to do that. I wanted a real connection. I didn't necassarily think that looking through profiles during study breaks would do this for me, but there was a secret but deeply rooted hope that it would.

I had posted a sparse, picture-less profile on the normal relationships section. Then, just to see what kind of responses I’d get, put a kink-receptive profile one on the intimate encounters page. I was skeptical at the site’s prospect for vanilla dating, let alone anything D/s related but I thought it would be an interesting experiment anyway. I had long given up my search for a D/s relationship, stopped reading the forums, stopped reading the stories, relegated my desires only to the world of muted fantasies and nighttime explorations with my hands. I don’t know what possessed me to put that profile up, but for some reason, I saw a small glimmer of hope. Logic cautioned me but there was something deeper in me, something longing for mystique, and romance, and all my simultaneously wild, cruel, rough, sweet and tender fantasies to be realized.

I was only on the site for a few days, and talked to only a handful of people, when Master messaged me. It was a no-nonsense exchange. He told me his name, his profession and what he was looking for in a relationship. I was guarded, but we revealed our faces via webcams. I immediately thought he was very handsome. Just my type, actually. And that’s when the hope began to rise: good career, young, cute, interested in the type of relationship I have harboured in my fantasies. I was excited by the prospect.

Unfortunately, he was an asshole.

I asked him questions about himself, he’d answer them without elaborating, almost sounding defensive. He told me that he wasn’t lying and that he didn’t feel the need to prove himself to me. I asked him whether he wanted to know anything about me. He told me that he wasn’t interested in learning about me online, or even as just a person, but rather only wanted to get to know me as a sub. He was very set on getting down to business, and while the nature of the business did excite me, I didn’t feel like I could or even wanted to trust him.

“Be online tomorrow”, he told me at the end of that first conversation.

“I can’t,” I said, “I’m studying.”

“You better make time for your new Master.”

He was getting ahead of himself and I was outraged.

I googled his name, and read up on him, and searched his credentials to see if he was who he claimed to be. It was hard to find definitive information, but with his profession in mind, and because he was so darn cute, I decided that there would be no harm in talking to him some more. After all, I reminded myself that despite this small glimmer of hope, I needed to keep my original skepticism in mind; exams were my main priority and it didn’t ultimately matter if I didn’t find someone.

I talked to him again the next day on messenger, with our webcams on. He continued to disappoint me. He didn’t smile, and when I asked him if he would, he gave me this crooked, half-hearted smile, that resembled a smirk more than an interested show of friendliness. He seemed distracted, he kept looking over to the left (which I have since learned is the direction of the TV in relation to the computer) and seemed annoyed when I asked him what he was doing. I asked him more questions and while he answered them, he continued to be dismissive and told me that getting to know each other online was very pointless. I got defensive. I am a cautious person-- for me to even consider meeting someone online is a big deal and I wanted to develop a rapport before meeting anyone. I wanted him to acknowledge this and make me feel comfortable. He didn’t. He acted as though he was amazing, that I should take everything he said at face value and consider myself lucky to even be talking to him.

I thought then that he was probably a guy who just wanted to hit girls, to be served and pleasured, but who didn’t give a shit about the woman doing it. I thought then, that he would never respect me and this wouldn’t lead to the companionship that I was searching for. I argued with him, and told him his approach to online dating and trying to find a submissive girl was wrong and that he was too pretentious. He told me that I didn’t know anything about online dating and that I was really close-minded and probably very uneducated about dominance and submission. Then, he shut off the webcam, told me he had had enough and that this was not going to work.

Imagine—it could have ended there. None of this could have come to pass. I could still be a virgin. I could have picked up the pieces of my life, and rediscovered meaning in my work and still been single, but accepted it happily. But that didn’t happen. The glimmer of hope was still there. I blame his attractiveness for why I did what I did next.

I messaged him again. “Hey, I’m sorry. I don’t want to antagonize you…I just don’t understand your approach. Maybe you can explain it to me so I have some sense of where this is going.”

“Okay.”

And he explained the outlines of his plan. Then, he gave me an assignment: find a submissive’s online journal, pick a few entries that intrigued me, and we would discuss it. We did this and suddenly, the lines of communication opened.

We started talking about D/s and fantasies, and integrating submission into reality, and about respect and understanding and companionship. He started asking me questions about mysef. Not a lot, but enough to get a global picture of who I was.

This progressed into little assignments over the next week, which started to include chats about our respective days and revelations of who we were. We are both writers. He asked me to write him a Dom/sub scenario and even though I was really stressed out about impending finals, I took time out of studying to write him a detailed story. It captured the feeling of what I wanted from this encounter. After he read it, he told me that was the exact type he was looking for too. We shared favourite poetry, he sent me some of his writing too. I have a huge soft spot for people who like to read and write; who see the beauty in words, who can appreciate poetry and imagery. He also gave me assignments to kneel daily, and take a picture to send to him. He comforted me as I studied, encouraged me, gave me fun tasks during study breaks...I started to look forward to talking to him. When we spoke on the phone for the first time, I grew immediately smitten with the sound of his voice. He can seem quite harsh online—and sometimes still does—but when I talk to him, I hear the sarcasm, and playfulness and the sweet intonations that are impossible to detect online. His voice is hard to describe, it's distinctively masculine--without being deep or echoeing or intimidating (though I've since learned, he definitely has a no-nonsense tone when he means bussiness). It’s charming, playful, soothing. I grew excited.

We decided that we would meet on the weekend about my finals were over. I had a lot planned for that weekend. A lot of my friends were graduating, there were lots of goodbye parties planned, I had family matters to attend to, an opera night planned. But I rearranged my schedule to fit everything in and still meet him.

That week, I was simultaneously nervous and excited. I wanted to see him in person, to touch his hand and see if he was real. Everything I had wanted for a long time, and then suppressed, was being dangled in front of me. I wanted to reach out and grab it, to taste it, to live the impossible.

I couldn’t sleep the night before our first date. I was exhausted. My social shuffling combined with exam-period sleep deprivation and just starting my period had turned me quite zombie-like. But the night before, he told me that he would have a calming effect and that he completely understood that I was not at my best and would take care of me. We met up, and he did.

And he still is. Sometimes it's hard to believe how we went from there to here. Now, he is my Master, the one that owns all of me: my breasts, my cunt, my ass, my lips...my heart.