Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story Read online

  And at 13, I was only really interested in the opposite sex in a ‘I ought to get a boyfriend’ sort of way but my friend’s obsession with sex – and my childish willingness to go along with her – were soon to cost us both our virginity.

  CHAPTER 8

  LOSING MY VIRGINITY

  On one of the many afternoons when she spurned getting the bus in order to walk home from school, Jennifer had met a man more than twice her age whom she felt was a promising candidate to take her unwanted virginity. She told me all about him the following morning at school: ‘Oh Miranda, he’s great. He’s called Ron, he’s 26 and he wants to see me again – and he’s got a friend, and he really wants to meet you too.’ The age of Jennifer’s latest conquest might perhaps have set alarm bells ringing in my mind but I was well-used to her chatting up every man – in fact any man – with whom she came into contact. It was after all the whole purpose of our regular strolls through West London with our school skirts hitched high on our thighs. ‘Oh come on Miranda, it’ll be fun; he’s good-looking and his friend really wants to see you and you have to come with me.’

  Despite some initial reservations I agreed, as I always did, to go along with Jennifer’s plan. We set off after classes to meet her new man and his ‘friend’ who had clearly been earmarked for me. Although Jennifer was the one who always did all of the talking, we both knew that I was the one to whom most of the men were attracted. It was therefore nothing out of the ordinary for Jennifer’s guy, Ron, to start chatting me up as soon as we met. It did not upset Jennifer at all; she was equally happy getting to know his friend and I was pleasantly surprised by Ron’s good looks.

  It was a rainy afternoon when we all met outside Ron’s parents’ house, a mile or two from my school. It seemed only natural to accept the boys’ invitation to ‘come into the garage to get out of the rain’. What was perhaps not quite so natural was that two mattresses had been laid out on the garage floor with a few blankets to transform them into useable, if temporary, beds. There was, as you will already have guessed, a certain inevitability about what was to happen over the next half-hour. Ron was kissing me and his friend was kissing Jennifer and things just rolled along a little bit too quickly for me to think. I lay down on the bed with Ron and didn’t really resist when he started stroking my body. Boys had touched me before but not quite in the urgent and intimate way he was touching me now. I can’t pretend that I was enthralled by what was happening but I went along with it willingly enough. It all just sort of happened, really.

  Looking back on the events of that afternoon, it is obvious that those two 26-year-olds had planned all along to seduce us with the minimum of fuss and effort. Being half their age, both virgins and still at school we must have been the easiest of targets. The only thing that might have given me pause for thought was if they had not used ‘protection’. The story of my own birth-mother’s pregnancy from her first sexual encounter was always in my mind. But Ron and his friend had each come prepared with condoms and that was never an issue.

  The precise details of this distinctly unromantic tryst are now a little hazy. The lights were on in the garage but Jennifer and I were both lying under blankets. I was still wearing most of my school uniform and worried that it was getting damp and creased. I certainly remember being self-conscious about my body as Ron fumbled his way inside my clothes while continuing to smother me with kisses. I don’t think he even undressed me completely, just unbuttoning my white school blouse, lifting my skirt up and pulling off my pants.

  There was the briefest of pauses in his attentions as he slipped a condom on under the blanket and I was aware that Jennifer was lying a few feet away. Her guy was by now on top of her and she was making all of the correct ‘Ooh-ah… I am really enjoying this’ sort of noises. A few moments later I was conscious of a tight, painful sensation as Ron entered me and started rocking backwards and forwards. I think I made a few ‘Ooh ah’ noises as well, although the truth is that I was thinking: ‘Oh God, this isn’t really very nice at all. It’s bloody uncomfortable. If this is what it is all about, I am not interested anymore.’ In common, I believe, with many women’s own experiences, the most charitable thing I can say about my first fuck was that it didn’t last very long. Ron seemed to come very quickly.

  I received a few slightly more perfunctory kisses as Ron rolled off of me and lay for a moment under the blanket. The others had clearly finished as well and I could hear Jennifer giggling and muttering with her man. It didn’t seem at all unnatural when one of the guys suddenly suggested, ‘Let’s swap.’ Clearly having planned the move all along, the two men quickly changed beds and partners and I found myself now kissing the friend who had always been intended for me from the start. He was a nice enough looking guy as well and accepting him was presumably part of the deal. I did not raise any objection the second time around, even though the sex was now a distinctly painful activity which I just hoped would be over as rapidly as it had been with Ron. One quick condom application later, a few more uncomfortable thrusts, and my daily double of losing my virginity to two men in the same afternoon was complete.

  The same cannot be said of my poor friend Jennifer. I knew that she really liked Ron but he was clearly having problems. Jennifer was disappointed that Ron could not get erect enough to have sex with her as well. ‘She’s killed my dick… she’s killed my dick,’ he kept saying, presumably needing to use my virginal tightness as an excuse for his own erectile problems with Jennifer.

  Despite her disappointment in not arousing Ron enough to perform his manly duties, Jennifer was delighted to have lost her virginity. The footballers’ cliché ‘over the moon’ best describes her mood as we continued our interrupted walk home. ‘We’re women now,’ she said several times. Jennifer asked me how I was feeling. ‘Sore,’ I replied, ‘and worried we’re not going to get home in time for our 7.30pm curfew; and then I’m in trouble with my mum.’ After what had happened that afternoon, my need to get home at the time my grandparents had demanded perhaps illustrates the pointlessness of such parental restrictions. The truth is, however, that I was undoubtedly a little shell-shocked by what had happened. I hadn’t had the slightest inkling when I agreed to meet the guys that such a thing was going to happen that day. Now that it had happened I think I was emotionally a little numb. I certainly was not physically numb because I remember sitting at school the next day and being worried that I was still so very uncomfortable between my legs. It had not been a nice experience, nothing like as pleasurable as I had imagined and I wasn’t overly anxious to try it again.

  Even so, and to my shame, it wasn’t long before my still-tender vagina was called into action again. Just three days later, on a Saturday, Jennifer was chasing a boy far nearer to our own age and I was drafted in as usual to make up a double date with his friend. Once again, however, the plan went slightly awry because I ended up with Trevor, Jennifer’s original target and she started dating his friend Mark. With the cast list sorted to my satisfaction we spent the afternoon wandering around the shops and a local park with the boys on the look-out for somewhere to take us a little more intimate than the town centre. Eventually the guys resorted to drastic measures. They broke into a disused water tower and led us upstairs to a room that although mostly bare concrete and industrial pipes was at least warm and dry. Judging by the debris scattered around, others must have been dossing there in the recent past and probably using drugs. Unlike the first occasion with Ron, I now knew what was likely to happen and the naughtiness of these new, different surroundings made me excited in a way I certainly had not been before.

  Trevor and I ended up having sex while Jennifer had her evil way with Mark on the other side of the room. The game was nothing like as painful as it had been a few days earlier; I think my body had sort of recovered from that agony, but again to me it wasn’t really an enjoyable experience. Not as traumatic as the first time but I kind of felt that it was one of those things that guys want to do and that therefore I needed to get
it out of the way as soon as possible and get on with other things. I do remember being in the missionary position on the rather hard floor and being grateful that it was once again certainly not a marathon session of sex.

  Even though the earth had hardy moved for either of us, Trevor was keen enough to ask me out for another date and we were boyfriend and girlfriend for a while. He lived just a short bus ride away from my grandparents’ home, and sex was regularly on the menu when I could slip away from the house and hop on the bus to his home. By then the sex had got better. As I was still barely 13 years old, my grandparents were constantly questioning where I was going and I constructed what I thought was a foolproof and elaborate web of lies to conceal my new and growing enthusiasm for outings after school. The best and most obvious excuse was that I was simply seeing Jennifer, but she was now regularly shagging Mark, and the times of our dates sometimes failed to coincide.

  My strict 7.30 curfew was broken more and more often as I found it harder to tear myself away from the fun of my boyfriend’s bed, and my grandparents started digging a little deeper into my life. Once they realised that my Jennifer excuse was holed below the waterline, my next line of defence was to invent fictitious evenings with another ‘friend from school’. The Asian girl I claimed to be visiting did exist but we certainly were never friends. I had grasped at her name as a drowning man grasps at a straw but I am sure that her parents would have been baffled to learn that I was allegedly a frequent visitor to their house, a home that in reality I had never even seen. Amazingly, my grandmother trustingly accepted my tale… for a while.

  My downfall came because I had never counted on my grandmother sharing quite as much of my life as she did do with her daughter, my missing biological mother, who then lived more than 30 miles away with her husband and growing young family. My birth-mother had always stayed as part of my life, visiting me at my grandparents’ home or having me visit her when I stayed with my aunt nearby. There had been lots of toys and presents and clothes from her through the years but the relationship had been far more strained ever since I had discovered the truth about my birth.

  Now, unbeknown to me, the ‘mum’ who I lived with was sharing her worries about my late nights and suspect behaviour with my birth-mum, a younger woman who represented a much more daunting prospect when it came to lying through my teeth. The first I knew of her growing involvement was a visit in which she suggested we go for a walk together to the local shops. En route I found myself being cross-questioned at length by a woman who was far harder to fool than my adoptive parents.

  ‘So what’s this girl’s name?’ she asked chattily. ‘Oh and where does she live… which road is that… what is her address… what’s her mum like… does she have many brothers and sister for you to play with…?’ The questions poured out in a torrent that I was ill-equipped to dam or divert. For a while I struggled to maintain the pretence of my Asian friend but I knew too few real facts to fool anyone. ‘I think it’s a good idea of I meet this girl’s mum, don’t you?’ my birth-mother said. ‘Shall I give her a call?’

  It was a killer blow and red-faced and stammering I blurted out that I had told a ‘little fib’ to my grandmother. That little fib was soon exposed as a series of whopping great lies as I finally admitted that I was seeing a boy and that my clandestine visits to his home each evening were the reason for breaking my curfew. I had been well and truly caught out – but I knew that however tough the questioning, one fact must remain a tight-lipped secret.

  ‘I’m worried; are you having sex with this boy?’ my birth-mother demanded; a question that would never have passed my grandmother’s lips.

  ‘No, of course, I’m not… he’s not like that.’

  ‘Well you know it’s against the law, don’t you? You can get done for that at your age, and so can the boy. If the police catch you you’ll be in trouble.’

  The prospect of PC Plod peeking through the curtains to spy on me every time I dropped my knickers was worrying, but seemed to be a little unlikely. More worrying was my family’s joint insistence that in future they would need to safeguard my welfare more closely. ‘We need to keep tabs on you a little more,’ my birth-mother insisted. ‘You should hold on to your virginity until you meet someone special, the man you’ll marry.’ I was the only one among those in the room who knew that her concern was a little late in arriving: quite a while too late.

  The end result of the ‘fibs’ debacle was that I was grounded for weeks by the combined forces of my grandmother and my birth-mother working in harmony to ensure my moral welfare. I was not allowed to go out anywhere other than to school and back, and my relationship with Trevor was stopped in its tracks. Demonstrating the true spirit of schoolgirl friendship, Jennifer took the opportunity to start going out with him herself. As soon as she mentioned that she had ‘seen’ Trevor the evening before I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that they must have had sex. I didn’t really mind because I was imprisoned in my nan’s house anyway. It did feel a little unfair when she revealed that my former boyfriend had been grading my performance: ‘He says you’ve got a ten out of ten body, but a six out of ten face,’ she announced with some glee.

  So after the briefest of outings, my burgeoning sexual history had pretty much ground to a halt. A one-afternoon stand with two older men who took my virginity had been followed by a few inexpert couplings with a lad more my own age. None of the above had been much to write home about and none of it had been enjoyable enough to encourage me to seek sex elsewhere. I suppose that my reluctance to repeat the experience was some sign of how well my grandparents had succeeded in instilling at least some sense of morality throughout my childhood. I could not have articulated it at the time but I knew that something was not quite right about mere random sexual encounters. I did feel that I wanted a boyfriend but knew in my heart that I should be having sex with a proper partner, rather than with strangers to whom I had barely even spoken. No such standards had ever been spelled out directly at home but the message had been repeatedly conveyed by implication. It was a drip-drip, almost subliminal feed of my grandparents’ morality: ‘You do not have sex until you are married; look what happened to your mother at such a young age; be careful, be a good girl, behave.’ My grandparents had never had that sex education talk with me, but clearly something of their message had stuck in my mind.

  Perhaps more importantly, I was also spending a lot less time at that stage with my sex-mad friend Jennifer. Without her around to chat up a seemingly endless string of would-be partners, I was happy to concentrate on my schoolwork and to try and solve my perennial problem of never having any money. The age-limit for working in a ‘Saturday’ job was supposed to be 15, but for a long time I had looked older than my age. It was easy enough to get a job as a waitress in a local café, the first of a string of dull jobs which served one purpose for me better than any other: they made me determined to get a good education, good qualifications in order that I would never again get stuck in that type of boring, dead-end job.

  I was around 13 years old when I started my first waitressing job. The wages were about £10 each Saturday but that could rise by another pound or two if the customers contributed to my tips jar. The money felt like a fortune to somebody who had never been given more than £1 a week pocket money throughout their childhood. I can remember with crystal clarity how I spent my first week’s wages. I bought a denim dress from a clothes shop just around the corner from the café. It was a fantastic sensation. ‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘I can actually buy my own clothes. How cool is that.’ Although I didn’t know it at the time, the stretchy, tight, denim dress would prove to be an excellent investment. The following Saturday I wore it to work in the café. There was one customer who was like, ‘Wow, you look amazing.’ He was seriously chatting me up and making a continuous string of lurid comments suggesting that if I bent over just a little bit further in my short dress then I might show off my knickers. He was much older than me, a dirty, horrid old man – but he kept on g
iving my tips for my jar. Consequently I just smiled it off every time he called me over: ‘Oh, just bend over here would you, and do this, pick this up for me.’ I found him obnoxious but he kept making a point of showing me that he was dropping a pound here or there in my jar, which I instantly grabbed back and slipped into my pocket. I also made a point of never quite bending low enough to give him the reward he was seeking. It was an early lesson in handling men: always leave the customer wanting more.

  Not all of the customers were as horrible as that guy but I did learn that there are some rude people, really incredibly rude people in this world. Waitressing was hard but I had plans for my wages. There had been a disaster at home and I knew exactly how that money was going to be put to good use. My nan had broken her Hoover. Unable to afford another, she had been struggling for months to keep the house clean with a tiny, manual carpet sweeper. That was the reason I saved up my earnings for the next two months. I know it may not now seem like a brilliant present but I was finally able to take my £80 and buy a vacuum cleaner in Argos. I carted it all the way back home on the bus and gave it to my nan for her birthday. It’s one of my happiest teenage memories: ‘She’s brought me a Hoover; I’ve got a Hoover again,’ she called out to my granddad. There actually were tears in her eyes and I knew she could not have been happier if I had purchased a Cartier diamond necklace. I thought ‘Oh bless…’ as she insisted on plugging it in that moment in order to vacuum every carpet in the house from top to bottom. The downside was that my granddad and I had to endure hours of multiple-cleaning with her popping in and out of each room, muttering to herself over the sound of the vacuum cleaner: ‘This is so wonderful, wonderful; she’s bought me a Hoover.’

  My work in the café had served me – and the preternatural cleanliness of my grandmother’s home – well. It did feel, however, that it was time to move on to a Saturday job that might be a fraction more interesting. I found another opportunity locally that offered slightly better wages and the chance to stay serving behind a counter rather than mixing in with the frequently obnoxious and ungrateful customers. The only trouble was that accepting this particular summer job meant facing up to my only serious fear in life.