Dom.
It has sort of an old-fashioned sound now, doesn't it? Well, perhaps I've already become old-fashioned. It happens to us all.
Dom
was what we were called back when I first learned the trade.
My first teacher was a woman named Michelle. Perhaps more exactly, we learned together, she as my first sub and I as her first dom boyfriend. Like most important things in life, chance was responsible for our finding each other, and hence for my finding myself. This is the story of how it started.
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My father is a wealthy doctor. He and my mother had to live frugally in their early years together, while my father did two residencies and then tried to establish his practice. When the money finally started arriving, they made up for lost time by insisting on the best of everything for themselves and their growing family. My mother, to whom appearances were always uppermost, was the driving force behind that. My father sincerely loves medicine and, once his family was well provided for, thought only of that.
Both my father and my mother are still devout Catholics. We children (I'm the eldest of five) went through Catholic schools and were thoroughly indoctrinated, at home and at school, that the church was indispensable to a good life. I was the stereotypical good Catholic boy—good grades, athletics, student politics, regular sacraments and devotions. The system worked for me, and until I was 18 I never questioned it. I assumed that I would grow up, get some kind of professional degree, marry, and raise my own family in the church. I would become the sort of influential Catholic layman that my background had destined me to be. Destiny, however, doesn't have a chance against chance.
I met Michelle in the Catholic high school we both attended, though I scarcely noticed her then. I was one of the student body elite, she was nobody in particular. I remembered her as a smallish girl with sandy hair and a somewhat mousy demeanor. Not pretty, not ugly, just indistinguishable from many others.
After graduation I went to a prestigious Catholic university in the same city. So did Michelle, but I took no note of it. About twenty percent of our graduating class went there. It was large for a private school and entirely urban, so student life there had none of the relative closeness of a smaller, more isolated campus.
I took a standard liberal arts course for the first couple of years, realizing for the first time that I was strongly drawn to philosophy, particularly ancient philosophy, and to the Greek and Latin it was written in. This university excelled in the field. I planned to major in philosophy, then get graduate degrees and, presumably, someday teach at a university like this one, since there are few other places that will pay you to be a philosopher.
I joined several campus organizations, since it came naturally to me then to think of myself as a "leader." At meetings I would listen carefully, say little but ask a few questions, and then near the end would summarize what I thought the sense of the discussion had been. I could often frame my own view as, in reality, merely the consensus of the meeting, or at least of a majority. I don't think I'm being too self-complimentary. I was asked more than once to hold offices and organize projects.
But there were growing perturbations this ideal life.
One was my faith. I still practiced, but it was becoming something of a routine. Prayer, which before had been an important means of self-knowledge, was not up to my growing intellectual sophistication. I was reading modern as well as ancient philosophy, and a good deal of science, particularly physics. It was becoming clearer to me all the time that the classical-Christian fusion that had driven over a thousand years of Western culture, and that I still admired so much, was being gradually left behind. Perhaps deservedly so.
The other was sex. At 20 I was still a virgin. In high school I had dated female counterparts of myself—Catholic achievers. I liked some, kissed a few of them one time, one of them a quite a few times, but there was no question of premarital sex. Nice girls, and nice Catholic boys, didn't do such things. At the university, the few girls I asked out were, though they didn't know it (and even I didn't then think of it this way), auditioning as my future wife. I was no longer so hung up about non-marital sex, but I still assumed that sex without sincere attachment was wrong. There had to be
some
kind of emotional commitment. And I didn't feel that toward any of these girls.
I read Freud and all his spawn, I read popular marriage manuals, I even dipped into erotica, but I still couldn't really imagine
me
pulling a young lady's knickers down. I wasn't sure what I would do if faced a real live vagina. Yes, I knew what should, in theory, happen, I understood that it was perfectly natural and that the ancients wouldn't have made a big deal of it, but all that still remained an alien territory in my mind. And I was getting very dissatisfied with myself over that.
That is what you need to know about my life before Michelle.
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I was reading alone in the student union coffee shop when a woman's voice addressed me.
"Gus? Hi, how
are
you?"
I looked up and saw Michelle. For a second I didn't even remember her name, but then it came to me. I put some artificial heartiness into my voice as I greeted her.
A couple of years (and shedding that ridiculous school uniform) had not harmed Michelle's appearance. She was cuter than I remembered. Her hair was shaped more artfully. She was dressed, unusually for the campus, in a tidy skirt and a pretty long-sleeved white blouse that nicely set off a trim waist and an upper story somewhat more noticeable than I had remembered.
We chatted about something for a few moments, and then my good Catholic boy manners kicked in and obliged me to ask if she cared to sit down. I would really rather have gone back to my book. Michelle might look better than she used to, but she was still nobody in particular to me.
She quickly pulled out a chair and sat down; it looked like she'd been hoping for an invite. The conversation quickly turned surprisingly personal, considering that we had only the most distant relationship. Michelle said that the last weeks had been emotionally really hard for her. She had been going with Bob Kuhn, another member of our St. Benedict's graduating class. Now they had broken up for good.
"I just cry when I think about it," she said. "Sometimes I'm so upset I can't study."
Bob was something of a math genius, though his performance in other subjects was less impressive because he cared only about math. Bob's personality was also erratic. He alternated between being withdrawn into his own math world, and being hyperactively, inappropriately, social. He said things that I remembered as simply strange, not profound.
Michelle and Bob had been seeing each other, off and on, for a year. She described it in generalities, and then said, "We tried to work it out, but it seems we really just don't like the same things."
"As in?" I asked, stupidly.
After hesitating a few seconds, Michelle said, "As in sex." Her lips pursed, she pushed her hair back, and then looked up at me intently.
"Well," I said patronizingly, "it's a big world. Everybody ought to be able to find somebody." (Despite the fact that that is exactly what I was failing to do.)
"I'm looking," Michelle answered. Again the look.
