My Journey to Submission Pt. 11

"What's the matter with you?" my wife asked.

Her tone was surprised and annoyed, not mocking and insulting, and it sent me into what I'd later call the death spiral of impotence: A slight feeling of flaccidity would lead to nervousness, which would distract me from the task at hand, which lead to further flaccidity, which would lead to panic, which would lead to catastrophe. Once caught in the death spiral of impotence, I found myself almost never able to escape and achieve a satisfactory erection.

"It's just so hard when you're angry like this," I said.

"It wouldn't be if you were still a man," she said. "You'd just get it up and fuck me. But you're not a man anymore. You're a sissy faggot who only wants it up the ass."

"Stop," I said. "Why are you doing this to me?"

"Doing what to you?" she asked, mocking me. "I'm

I turned away, breaking contact with her.

"You're pathetic," she said, and she walked away.

***********

I don't remember how I got to bed. But I vividly remember waking up in the middle of the night to find Ellen fondling my cock, this time with affection, even passion. I grew very hard. She mounted me, not in reverse cowgirl or Amazon, but facing me. Leaning down and burying her face in my neck.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." She was sobbing. I turned her onto her back, and I made love to her -- not as her slave, not as her dominant. As the man who loved her. I came into her vagina for the first time since I entered submission.

***********

I walked on eggshells for the rest of the week. Throughout my time in submission, Ellen had always been, if nothing else, supremely rational. Of course, by this time she'd already made peace with her blossoming sadism, and when her urges got the better of her, she could be very cruel and, well, sadistic. But for the most part, I could predict how she would react to nearly any circumstance, and I was usually well-prepared.

That week, however, she seemed to have become a completely different person. She'd fly off the handle for no apparent reason. Then half an hour later, equally inexplicably, she'd order me to kneel at her feet so that she could caress and coo at me. Something was definitely wrong. But what?

On Friday afternoon, I received a text from Ellen ordering me to arrive home no later than 8:00.

The order forced me to cancel a client dinner, one which I'd arranged in a last-ditch effort to finalize a lucrative lobbying contract. My cancellation risked allowing a competing firm to swoop in and swipe the client out from under my nose, which would cost me a hefty chunk of change. But given how volatile my wife had been all week, I considered it worth the risk in order to avoid whatever unpleasantness that might have arisen from failing to obey her.

I sat at my desk and pushed through until 7:30. I switched off my computer, grabbed a couple of sandwiches from the office kitchen, and headed down to the garage. I ate in the car on my way home, knowing that it was even odds on whether I'd get the chance to eat at home.

I cut it close. There was more traffic than usual on Connecticut Avenue, and at 7:45 I was still navigating around Dupont Circle. But when I finally turned onto my street, I got lucky, and I found a parking spot just a couple of doors down from ours. I opened the front door just at 8:00 and raced upstairs to strip off my clothes and splash the sweat from my body.

Ellen was downstairs in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea. I entered and stood nearby with my head bowed, awaiting her attention.

One thing I noticed right away was that she was wearing her house slippers, not her spike-heeled boots, which meant that she probably wasn't in a particularly sadistic mood. With luck, I'd be able to enjoy an evening sipping beer and watching a baseball game, while catching up on email, instead of doing chores or enduring a lengthy punishment session. I breathed a silent sigh of relief.

Another thing I noticed was that she was dressed to the nines. Her cherry-red cocktail dress was strapless and extended barely to the middle of her thigh, and it accomplished the seemingly impossible task of making my wife's perfect body appear even more perfect. She looked incredibly sexy, of course. But Ellen being Ellen, she managed to look sophisticated at the same time. A three-hundred-dollar trip to the hair salon, a pair of black silk stockings, and a few very pricey items of jewelry no doubt contributed to the effect.

Certainly, I had questions. But just as certainly, I was forbidden to ask them.

My wife ignored me as she efficiently poured her tea and stirred in her preferred two teaspoons of sugar. She picked up her cup and saucer and went to the family room, snapping her fingers for me to follow.

She sat in her chair and drank her tea, while I knelt down, reverently removed one slipper, and began to kiss her foot. I say "drank" rather than the more elegant "sipped" because she consumed the tea in largish gulps, so much so that I worried that she might burn her throat. She seemed impatient to get through the ritual, bored by my pathetic attempt to please her.

Normally during foot worship, she either contentedly lapped up my adoration (if she was pleased with me, which was most of the time), or she rubbed her feet in my face and insulted me, mocking me as her worthless slave and sissy faggot (if she wasn't), or she tormented me physically with her stiletto heels (if she was feeling sadistic, regardless of her attitude towards me). But this time she did none of those things. instead, she acted as though I weren't even in the room.

This was her prerogative, of course, but it was certainly unusual. I thought that whatever issues had been causing her strange behavior all week must have been coming to a head.

She took a final gulp of tea and set the cup in its saucer. Without waiting for me even to start on her second foot, she pulled me up by my hair and attached my collar perfunctorily. She stood and snapped her fingers, and without waiting for me to get up, she headed toward the stairs leading to the basement. I hurried after her, fearing that my hopes for an evening's relaxation were about to be dashed.

***********

When I'd planned the dungeon long before, I'd included a small jail cell in the design. It was simple, consisting only of a row of floor-to-ceiling iron bars, spaced six inches apart and set diagonally across one corner of the room, with a hinged gate in an iron frame. The row of vertical bars was seven feet long, and the two side walls were five feet, creating a triangular space where a person could stand or sit unimpeded and, if necessary, lie down to sleep, although not comfortably.

As simple as the jail cell was, it was very secure. I'd made certain that once a woman was locked inside, she had hope of freeing herself.

When I was a dominant, I rarely used the space, primarily because I liked to have my partners where I could easily get my hands on them. Once in a while, however, I'd meet a woman with an abandonment fetish, who would look longingly at the cell and beg me to lock her up leave her alone in the dark. One submissive in particular -- a sexy, nineteen-year-old exchange student with perky breasts and deep-seated daddy issues -- let out an audible whimper when she saw the arrangement for the first time, and then a deep moan when she heard the iron gate creak open in front of her. A quick check between her legs as she stepped into the cell confirmed that the anticipation of abandonment literally made her pussy drip.

For me, the primary benefit of the cell was that it provided a place where I could keep a woman out of harm's way in the event that I had matters to attend to elsewhere, and I'd never have to worry that she might hurt herself or wander about unsupervised.

***********

Ellen clicked shut the large padlock on the iron gate, imprisoning me inside the cell, then went to find a pair of wrist cuffs. "Give me your hands," she said when she returned, and she hooked my wrists together around two of the iron bars.

I was not prepared for her next move.

She unclasped the bracelet that held the little key to my chastity cage. She fit the key into the brass padlock, and in a few moments, she'd worked the steel bars off of my shaft. My cock was free for the first time in over three months. More interestingly, it was situated so that I could easily position it between the iron bars and grasp it in my hands.

"Mistress?" I asked. "Why..." I didn't finish the question; I didn't need to.

"I've decided to give you a little test," she explained. "I'm going out for a bit, and when I come back, I will check to see whether or not you masturbated while I was away. I'm quite sure I made the right decision when I locked up your penis, but I don't want your cage to become a crutch. The whole point of putting you in chastity is for you to develop self-control, and I want to see if you've managed to do so at all over the past eighteen months."

"Yes, Mistress. I'm sure I have," I said. In fact, with longer and longer lockups, I'd been getting used to having no access to my cock, and I didn't obsess about it nearly as often as I did before chastity. I was confident that I could pass her little test easily.

"More importantly," she continued, "I want to see if you're coming to accept the loss of your penis as a sex organ, as we discussed. In an ideal world, you would feel precisely the same down there as you would if I had the whole apparatus surgically removed. Touching yourself shouldn't interest you in the slightest. I want to see how much progress we're making on that front."

Whoa, Nellie. I never actually agreed to that, if you will recall.

But I didn't see the point in arguing that I had not -- and almost certainly never would -- accept the loss of my penis as a sex organ. For that to happen, she really would have to have it cut off, which thankfully didn't seem like a realistic possibility. So, I simply answered, "I understand, Mistress," which didn't commit me to anything.

"I'm not making this a game," Ellen continued. "There will be no reward for keeping your hands to yourself, other than the satisfaction of knowing that you've pleased me. And no punishment for masturbating, other than your own shame at knowing that you're not the man I need you to be."

"I understand, Mistress," I said again.

"Now, I don't want you panicking while I'm gone," she said. She gestured around the cell. "There's some water for when you get thirsty, and a bucket in case you need to pee. I've checked to make sure that the microphones are working, and I'll leave my phone on. So, you can call me if you really need to. But I'm counting on you to wait patiently and not bother me. Do you understand?"

This all seemed like Standard Operating Procedure, so I was a little confused about why she felt the need to go over it, but the only answer I gave her was, "Yes, Mistress."

Then, without a word of farewell, she walked away.

Due to the seriousness with which my wife took her responsibility as my dominant, she rarely left me alone in the dungeon for more than twenty minutes at a stretch, and even then, only if she were absolutely certain that there was no risk of injury. But putting two and two together (the cocktail dress, the jail cell, the bucket, the little speech about how safe I was), I understood that she'd made plans for the entire evening. For the next several hours at least, she would be out enjoying drinks, dinner, dancing, and who knows what else, while I would be confined to the small, silent, dimly-lit jail cell.

So much for my hope of having some beers and watching the Dodgers game.

I quickly understood that my main enemy was going to be boredom. By this time in my submission, Ellen had grown very fond of putting me in what is called "predicament bondage," wherein shifting my body to reduce one type of stress or pain or humiliation inevitably led to an increase in a different type of stress or pain or humiliation. Given the deviousness with which my wife created predicaments for me, boredom was never on my list of things to worry about when she left me alone.

This time was different. I had absolutely nothing on which to focus my mind, nothing to do but stare through the iron bars of the cell.

I tried to think of ways to distract myself. I decided that exercising would be a positive first step. I did some squats, with the metal rings of my wrist cuffs scraping noisily against the gate as I went up and down. I was out of breath after two dozen or so, and I stopped, vowing to do more later. Then, I tried to do some pull-ups by gripping the tops of the iron bars, but my hands weren't strong enough to keep me from slipping down as soon as my feet left the floor. I couldn't figure out a way to position myself to do push-ups. So much for physical fitness.

I remembered reading somewhere that prisoners in solitary confinement or explorers alone at the north pole would employ various mental exercises to keep from going stir-crazy -- reciting Shakespeare from memory or playing imaginary games of chess in their heads, things like that. But unfortunately, "To be or not to be" was about the extent of my Shakespeare, and I'd lost interest in chess when I graduated from high school. Mental fitness was also not a solution.

About an hour into my confinement, my legs grew stiff, so I did a few more squats to keep the blood flowing. I needed an alternative to my standing position, but with my wrists cuffed around the bars, my options were limited. I tried sitting on my knees Samurai-style, but my legs fell asleep after a few minutes, and standing up again was pure agony. I finally determined that my best bet was to sit on my ass sideways to the gate with my knees bent, leaning against the bars. But even that grew uncomfortable after thirty minutes or so.

After about two hours, I had to pee, which turned out to be tricky. I maneuvered the bucket into position with my foot and turned to face it. But after curling my wrists around the bars, my fingertips barely reached my cock, making it difficult to point my shaft accurately. And good aim was important, since there would most likely be unpleasant consequences if I missed the bucket. Whenever Ellen had commanded me to, I'd lapped up her refined, feminine urine from the floor or toilet without hesitation. But my own? Ugh.

Once I'd peed and slaked my thirst from the water bottle, there was nothing left to distract me from the excruciating boredom.

Well, almost nothing.

There was the possibility of masturbating. My sudden realization that my cock was within reach and that there was absolutely nothing to stop me from having my first orgasm in over three months -- or two, or three orgasms, depending on how long Ellen was gone -- was mind-blowing. Almost without thinking, I pressed my body against the bars, and my hand went to my cock. But it didn't respond. Even after massaging my shaft for a few minutes, while recalling my most reliable sexual fantasies, I had at best a semi-erection.

Hmmm... Is it possible to forget how to jerk off? No, don't be ridiculous. Just keep going, and it'll be back to normal in a minute. My hand resumed stimulating my shaft. Then I stopped myself mid-pull. Is this really such a good idea?

Ellen had said that there would be no punishment for doing the deed. Truth be told, I didn't entirely trust her (Ellen never lied, but I'd learned to parse her words very carefully to avoid unpleasant misunderstandings), but nevertheless she had said it. On the other hand, whether she punished me or not, there was no doubt whatsoever that she would be disgusted with me if I did it. And, as she pointed out, I would also have to deal with my own feelings of shame and self-loathing.

On the other hand... Three months had been a pretty damned long time to go without an orgasm. And as for Ellen... Well, frankly, fuck Ellen. She'd left me stuck in a jail cell, while she went galivanting around town, so there was no reason for me to get worked up about what she might think. This was entirely my decision, and I would whack off or not as I pleased, Mistress or no Mistress.

This internal debate went on for quite some time, providing a distraction of sorts. To jerk or not to jerk, that is the question. I laughed at bitterly at myself and at my pathetic situation.

In the end, I didn't do it. Not out of fear of Ellen's punishment or of her disgust or of my own shame and self-loathing. Instead, I decided that it just wasn't worth it. Masturbation would provide at most ten or fifteen minutes of distraction, followed by a few seconds of orgasm. And where would I be once it was over? In the same jail cell, facing the same, seemingly endless boredom. But now with the inevitable feeling of achy emptiness in my groin.

Finally, having exhausted all possible alternatives, my thoughts turned inward. Naturally, my mind took advantage of the opportunity to torment me by replaying all the cringiest episodes of my life and filling me with feelings of shame and regret over things I had said or done -- both trivial and life-changing. Foremost among the latter, of course, was the way I'd treated Ellen in the first years of our marriage, and my mind confronted me with the inevitable conclusion that Ellen's treatment of me was exactly what I deserved.

But even this gut-wrenching self-reflection was insufficient to drive away the intense, unrelenting boredom for very long. I gripped the iron bars tightly and stared across the dimly-lit dungeon. I felt myself giving way to despair.

Then, I heard something. At least, I thought I heard something.

When I built the dungeon, I'd had it soundproofed in order to avoid the possibility that one of my submissive's screams (of ecstasy or otherwise) might arouse the curiosity of my neighbors. So, I knew that any sound coming from upstairs would be extremely faint. Even so, I'd definitely heard something.

Hadn't I?

I tried to bring the sound back into my mind -- could it have been the front door? I listened intently, but there was only silence.

Then I thought I heard another sound, perhaps a shuffling or scraping. Then more silence. And then, a sound that very definitely just might have been the sound of footsteps. Perhaps of Ellen walking from the living room to the kitchen?

"Mistress?" I called out, hoping the microphones would pick up the sound. "Are you there?"

For crying out loud, don't be an idiot.

She wouldn't hear me, because she always set the system to translate any voice signals it received from the basement into an SMS sent to her iPhone, rather than broadcast audibly. So, she'd receive my pathetic question the next time she checked her messages. And even if she did hear, she'd probably punish my lack of patience by ignoring me.

More silence.

Then I heard the absolutely unmistakable sound of water rushing through pipes. Ellen had just flushed the toilet. I let out an audible sigh of relief. Just knowing that she was home and would soon come to release me eased the pain of boredom. In my mind, I imagined the sound of her footsteps padding down the stairs, then across the brick floor. Then the creak of the gate as it opened, releasing me after God-knows-how many hours of torment.

But she didn't come. My breaths grew short and my heartbeat fast as I my anticipation increased. I forced myself to relax and focus on listening, but I heard nothing more.

OK, she's wants to tease me. She'll take her own sweet time. Maybe she'll shower and put on her negligee before she comes downstairs. Fine, I can wait. Just as long as she comes. Eventually.

Then, over the dungeon's speakers, I heard a voice. A male voice. My chest constricted.

I realized that Ellen had connected her iPhone to the dungeon's speakers, a capability that I'd built into the system long before. The way I'd used this feature was to tie my submissive to the wooden post, tear off her clothes, and leave her alone. After a while, her nudity and bondage would create a sense of vulnerability, which I would amplify by speaking into my smartphone (which also allowed me to watch her through the room's cameras) and asking her embarrassing questions -- Describe in detail the loss of your virginity. When and how did you last masturbate? Tell me your dirtiest fantasy. That kind of thing.