that’s so cool. They are.’
The handsome barista in a black silk shirt, leather pants and Zorro mask completes our order with a flourish and we take ourselves to a cream sofa in the corner, from which all things are visible.
‘This is nice,’ I say vaguely, sipping at my coffee and watching gorgeous exotically dressed people flit to and fro.
‘You can sit OK?’ Dimitri puts a hand on my spine, fingers crawling down towards my coccyx.
I flush with recollection, not wanting to talk about it. ‘Fine. This sofa’s very soft.’
‘I don’t hurt you too much?’
‘No, no. It’s cool.’
‘Cool?’ He tilts my chin up with a lone finger and makes my head swivel to face him. I drop my eyes, but he tuts and I lift them again. ‘What’s that? Cool? But did you like it?’
‘Like it?’
He tips his head to one side, watching me intently. He will have his answer. Hedging is going to be futile, I can tell.
‘It was … different.’
‘No, Rosie. You liked it. I could tell.’
‘How?’
He drops his neck low and sniffs with a dramatic flourish.
I raise a hand as if to slap him, but he catches my wrist and lowers it, chuckling. ‘What? It’s true. This is your thing, this spanking. This submission. Why pretend not?’
‘I don’t even know you.’
‘You know what you need to know.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘I like spanking and you like to be spanked. What else you need to know but that?’ His grin, almost broader than his face, gleams in my eye line.
Put like that, it does sound beautifully simple. Two halves that click into a piece. It really can’t be that simple, though, can it?
‘Ha, well, there you go,’ I say lamely, once my cheeks have reached the critical mass of blush. ‘So you like this place? You think you’ll, uh, come here often?’
His laugh is dirty. ‘Yeah. I will come here very often. And I hope you will too. Drink that, we’ll look around.’
He picks up a card from the sheaf tucked inside the menu.
‘This week,’ he reads in portentous tones, ‘at Kinky Cupcake. Second of October – that’s today, right? – in the dungeon at eleven p.m. – How to Use the St Andrew’s Cross. In the schoolroom at eight p.m. – Lessons With Mr Strict. Hey, that was what we saw, you think? In the boudoir at midnight – Share a Slave.’ He puts the card down, raising his eyebrows at me.
‘It sounds like a kind of college of kink,’ I muse. ‘Lessons and activities. If I’d known all this was here, perhaps I’d have tried to get in sooner.’
‘You think is allowed to watch any of this? Or only to join in?’
‘I don’t know. I feel I’d like to take a look, but I don’t think I’m ready to, er, throw myself into the fray quite yet.’
‘We find out.’ He puts down the coffee cup, wipes his moustache with the back of his hand and pulls me to my feet.
Almost immediately, every eye in the room is upon him. Even in a place jam-packed with people in chains and gimp masks, Dimitri manages to look picturesque and striking. I feel obscurely flattered that this charismatic man has somehow latched on to me and I follow him past the counter and towards the spiral staircase beyond.
We can go up it or down it. My guess is that the dungeon will be downstairs, along with that schoolroom we so fatefully peeked into, so we head for the basement.
A dark corridor lit with old-fashioned sconces is our destination. Three arched doors are set in the wall at intervals.
Dimitri pushes the first, gently enough, and it swings open to reveal the schoolroom, empty now. He leads me inside and we tiptoe around, running our fingertips over the desks, gathering chalk dust as we go.
‘You like this?’ asks Dimitri, opening the cupboard and taking out a cane, which he swishes terrifyingly.
‘Christ, watch yourself with that. You’ll take someone’s eye out.’
‘I never use one of these,’ he said, flexing it into an inverted U shape. ‘This could be very painful, I think.’
‘Yeah, so do I. Don’t even go there. I’m not ready for it.’
‘One day, maybe.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Go on, bend over for me. I just tap you, I promise.’
‘Dimitri!’
‘I promise. Bend over chair, like the lady we see, I forgot her name.’
‘Twinkletits or whatever it was, you mean?’
‘Do it. I give you, what they say, six of the best? Except it’s not the best. Six of the lightest, not painful, not at all.’
He wheedles so attractively that I can’t deny him. With a sigh, I place my hands palms down on the seat of the chair and wiggle my still rather heated behind inside its skirt.
He holds the cane at arm’s length and places it, very gently, across my posterior. Even the feel of it there, doing nothing, is scary. In rest, it is no more than dormant, lying in wait for the moment when it will deliver the fiercest sting in the spanker’s armoury. I clench my buttocks and Dimitri taps them.
‘Easy,’ he says, then he brings it down, lightly as anything, on the seat of my skirt.
Any force it might have had is muffled by the thick tweedy material, but I’m far from impervious to its effect. A pleasurable shock travels through my legs, reawakening the sensations aroused by the earlier spanking.
‘That hurts?’ My wriggle and gasp might have given the wrong impression.
‘No, it doesn’t. Look, let’s go and see what’s next door.’
If he carries this on, I’m going to need relief.
‘Oh, you don’t like it.’ He sounds so disappointed. ‘If I hit harder?’
‘Another time.’ I straighten up, put a hand on his chest. ‘Another time would be better. I’m worried someone will walk in and we’ll get into trouble and get thrown out. And, since we’ve only just got here, that would be a shame.’
‘Yes, it’s true.’ He puts the cane back on the rack with its brothers and runs curious fingers over the ranks of straps and tawses and paddles that fill the shelves.
The second room is also empty, but it’s interestingly fitted
