Mackenzie didn't see any exit signs, didn't pass any mile markers. There was no single thing that let her know she was headed this way, but nevertheless, there she was. Driving down the road that was her life, she had gone off of the expressway and into a rut. Damn. Not even an attractive word, and yet symbolic of her feelings in way that hit too close to home. Home. Another word that just didn't measure up to her hopes for the word. Yet here she was, about to leave home for the umpteenth time to get in her car and head back into the rut. She married young, right out of college. She had her first child, a son, when she turned thirty, and her daughter at thirty three. Two years later she started noticing a sameness to the lovemaking with her husband. By the time she turned thirty seven, she became the only one to initiate sex. By forty, even that dwindled to near zero.
Shrugging off her gray mood, her thoughts were buoyed by two things: the job and career that she found so much satisfaction with, and her two kids that brought such intense feelings of joy to her very gray life. It was everything else that was responsible for growing melancholy. Fuck it, she thought to herself, I'm going to have a good day anyway. Slipping out of bed so as not to wake her husband, she showered, dressed, and headed to work.
She was not a woman to let a problem fester, nor one to feel sorry for herself. This morning, she occupied her thoughts with trying to pin down what it was that was bugging her most. Once you give a name to the devil, she thought, it's easier to chase him out of the room. She knew that if she could name two or three things that were getting her down, she could address them one at a time. By the time she got onto the northbound freeway, she had Number One: Sex. It's not that it was bad, but that for the last few years, it either wasn't any different or wasn't there at all. An image popped into her head; John Cleese, in "A Fish Called Wanda", getting ready to go to bed with the shrill harpy that was his wife. A shudder passed through her. No way! She'd never let herself get that far into a freakin' rut.
At forty years old, her body's sexual energy was at its peak, and here she was with a twice-a-quarter, fifteen-minutes-and-a-nap sex life. No wonder I'm in a funk, she thought, as she sped up to meet the early-morning rush hour traffic. Now, how to fix this?
Two months after her commuter's epiphany, she hadn't solved her problem, and her frustration was growing. Initially, her plan worked. She pulled all of her seduction tricks out of the bag, and started working on her husband. It was great the first couple of times. She fixed romantic dinners, wore clothes she thought would get a rise out of a cadaver, and rented some steamy movies to watch before bed. Her husband responded well to the seduction, and the missing spark rekindled into a small tongue of flame licking the bigger logs. Unfortunately for Mackenzie, they always wound up in the bedroom, in the missionary position, with her watching him sleep after fifteen minutes. If anything, her unease was far worse now, because her engines were revved up, but she wasn't getting the release she wanted.
One Tuesday, she was eating her lunch at a sidewalk café, the weather being particularly nice, even for South Florida in the winter. The café was busy, the clientele was mix of natives and snowbirds escaping the really gray weather that she was so glad she didn't have to endure. Two women, very well-dressed, sat at the table next to her. Either they didn't think their voices would carry to her, or they didn't care. They looked to be in their middle forties, were slender, pretty, and had that sleek look of security and beauty that is seen so often this time of year.
"Kate, I finally decided to meet the guy I was telling you about."
"You're kidding! Tall and in charge, or the twenty-five year old?"
"Tall and In Charge."
"Mmmm, goody. Now tell me everything."
"Well, we'd been chatting online for a few weeks, and he really seemed to know what I wanted. You know how so many guys want to know if you'll meet them behind the Publix in fifteen minutes, or start off a hot chat session with 'On your knees, bitch.' You know the type."
"Booger-eating morons, every one of them."
"You do know the type. Anyway, this guy was different. He really knew how to push my buttons, so to speak. Anyway, we met for lunch in Wellington last week. He started off by telling me that if this was going to work, it would have to start right away. He said, either you accept all of my decisions right now, or we have a nice lunch and that's the end of it.
"I was a little scared, but I told him I agreed. You're not going to believe what happened next!"
"Believe me, Susan, I'm all ears."
"We sat down, and he said he was going to ask me some questions, and that he only wanted me to answer with as close to one word as possible, and that any deviation from the truth would be grounds for punishment later."
"You're kidding!"
"Then, he said I wasn't to talk to the waiter for any reason, and that I should hold my hands in my lap until he said otherwise.
"When the waiter came, he ordered lunch for both of us, and then he fed me my lunch, one bite at a time, while he ate his lunch. It was so sexy, I was dripping by the time the entrees arrived."
Just at that moment, a family of three was seated at the table on the other side of the two women, and they changed the subject. Mackenzie was intrigued, and really wanted to hear the rest of the story, but she had to get back to work.
For the rest of the day, the start of Susan's story kept replaying in her head. That night, after her husband had gone to sleep, she got on the internet and started looking around. She learned that there was a ton of information about sex, power, control and submission. She started reading.
