I came to the dungeon searching for whips and chains, and in my first session, the worst I suffered turned out to be a man tickling my ribcage.

I sat on the floor in Medusa’s interview room, taking the submissive posture my coworker had shown me a few hours earlier: kneeling with my legs spread apart, hands on my thighs, palms turned upward. I was dressed in a tiny plaid skirt no actual schoolgirl would wear, a white crop top, and a pink dog collar. When I’d interviewed for the position of “professional submissive” a week earlier, the manager had emphasized that submissives must wear collars at all times, and I didn’t have the money or courage to step into a fetish store and buy a real one. So here I was in a scratchy, cheap band of fabric with a bulky plastic buckle, its weight around my neck a reminder that I didn’t belong here.

I was just a shy, quiet, ordinary-looking girl who had spent my entire life, all thirty years of it, keeping my thoughts and desires locked up inside me. What was I doing at a commercial dungeon?

“I don’t go in for all this spanking and bondage,” said Thomas, the client sitting on the sofa across from me. I’d been too nervous to take a good look at him, but from the quick glance I’d gotten, he seemed like the sort of kindly, pleasant older man you’d like to have as a grandfather or uncle. “I just do a little tickling. Are you ticklish?”

“I’m very ticklish,” I answered, as I’d been advised to do by the desk mistress—the dungeon term, as I’d just learned, for the receptionist/manager. “A tickling session sounds great.” In truth, I’d had no idea tickling was even a part of BDSM until I applied for the job at Medusa’s. To me, that acronym and all its connotations—bondage, domination and submission, sadism and masochism—conjured up images of women being flogged with their hands tied above their heads, moaning and writhing in a dizzying tangle of pain and pleasure. I drew my mental pictures from books like Story of O and movies like Belle de Jour, those adult fairy tales that had cast their strange spell over me in my early twenties. The spell had lingered, like tendrils of smoke when a candle burns low but steady; fantasies had smoldered in the back of my mind for the past ten years, while my daily life had been almost painfully ordinary.

But those fantasies certainly hadn’t involved tickling. Now, I’d discovered it was a very common BDSM fetish, and I was about to get paid a hundred bucks to allow a man to tickle me for an hour.

Again, what was I doing here?

My pulse thrummed through my veins as though it were trying to escape the cage of my flesh. I shifted back and forth, unaccustomed to kneeling on a stiff carpet, the fabric prickling like tiny needles against my shins and knees. I could barely remember the information I’d been coached to recite to all clients: Are you familiar with the House Rules? Underwear must stay on at all times. There’s no sexual contact of any kind, and no exchange of bodily fluid is allowed. The house safe word is Mercy.

And, if those more serious lines went over well: How long would you like to play for?

We called it playing, but it was the kind of play where you might need a safe word, an agreed-upon signal that would immediately stop the scene. We weren’t children kicking around a soccer ball or waiting for a turn on the swings. Some version of that recitation must have escaped my lips, and before I knew it Thomas had paid at the front desk and we were headed upstairs to the Venus room.

Thomas walked behind me with the slightest stoop to his shoulders, but as soon as I’d unlocked the door he straightened up and took the lead. My client headed to the far end of the room with its black and red furniture, splashes of crimson everywhere, as though we were standing on the inside of a heart. A bondage bed and a St. Andrew’s cross lined the opposite walls, while between them sat a massive leather spanking bench that seemed about the same weight as the boulder forming in the pit of my stomach. Thomas returned with a pillow and blanket—he’d been coming to Medusa’s for years and clearly knew the room better than I did—and laid them out on the bondage bed, then asked me to get undressed and lie down on my stomach.

That morning, during my tour of the two upstairs rooms where submissives seasoned, my new coworker Melanie had shown me how to use the intercom to alert the desk mistress we were beginning. I could also press the intercom at any time to ask the desk staff a question or get help if something went wrong, so it was important to know where it was, but Thomas had lowered the lights and turned the room into a murky, mysterious landscape. Now, after taking off my undersized schoolgirl outfit, I spun in a complete circle without spotting that little square speaker and button affixed to the wall. I stood there in only a G-string, goose bumps dancing their way along my flesh even though room wasn’t cold, and stared at the wall where I was sure I’d pressed the plastic button this morning. “I’m so sorry, I can’t seem to find— Do you know where the—”

Whenever I start to panic, my reaction is either dead silence—my default in a group setting—or the kind of embarrassing, unsophisticated babbling I was doing now. I bit my lip to stop myself; this wasn’t the behavior of the cool, calm girls I imagined working in a dungeon, like ebony-haired Melanie who’d stood here with me just an hour earlier. I tried to remember where she’d pointed…

“The intercom’s over here,” Thomas said from an entirely different wall, and I realized I’d mixed up the two upstairs rooms in my head. In this one, the intercom was next to the light switch and close to the door. I hurried over, pressed the button and heard Mistress Amber answer “thank you” from her post at the front desk. My first session was officially beginning.

I climbed on the bed as Thomas asked—but this was like no bed I’d ever slept on. Across the bottom were black ankle stocks dotted with silver rivets, formidable and vaguely medieval, while metal rings along the sides provided a spot where ropes or wrist cuffs could be secured. As I settled myself on my bare stomach, head turned awkwardly to one side, my nerves jittered and jangled like the chains I imagined tied to that bed, holding me in place. I almost wished for those chains; if my limbs were tied down, I thought instinctively, my restless mind might finally go quiet. But as Thomas had said, he wasn’t into that kind of thing. He stripped down to his boxers, and I caught a brief glimpse of his protruding belly—the rest of him was remarkably thin and limber for his age—before he started brushing his wrinkled fingers lightly along my neck and back, my ass and legs. I figured he was trying to relax me, so I played along. “Mmm,” I whispered. “That feels good.”

“Good,” he said, his voice as casual as if we were exchanging pleasantries in line at the grocery store. “I’m glad. It feels good to me too.”

He continued touching me lightly, gently, and I began to think this wasn’t so bad. I moaned softly, aware he was expecting some sort of reaction, but then it occurred to me this was going on a little long. When was the tickling going to start? 

He reached the backs of my knees and lingered there, with the same delicate brushstrokes of his fingers, and suddenly I remembered the back of the knees was a notoriously ticklish spot. And it dawned on me…

Oh no. This was the tickling. This had been the tickling all along, and I should have been giggling rather than giving those pathetic porn-star-lite moans. But I couldn’t start laughing and squirming out of nowhere now. What was I supposed to do?

I giggled just a little bit and said, “Hey, that tickles.” He kept going and laughed a little himself, so it seemed like the right response. He moved his hands back up my body, and when he got to my ribs, the only place I was actually ticklish, I laughed harder and twisted from side to side. There—now I had two ticklish spots, my ribs and the backs of my knees. When he touched me there I would laugh, and everywhere else I would give the little pleasure-moans.

Oh god, I was hopeless.

Eventually Thomas had me flip onto my back, and I chose a few more fake ticklish spots: under my chin, around my belly button and nipples. But every time I said “that feels good” instead of “that tickles,” Thomas responded with “I’m glad,” and I began to wonder if his true desire was for a different sort of touch. Thomas confirmed my suspicion when, at the end of the session, he lay down beside me and pressed his bare skin against mine. I could smell him now, an old-man smell that reminded me strangely of earwax, and out of this entire surreal experience, one thought rang strong and clear through my mind:

You have never been this close to an elderly man in your life.

Stephanie Parent, what are you doing here?

His skin was warm and a little sweaty, and I held myself very still, thinking if I didn’t move one muscle, didn’t press into him or pull away, it would be as if this weren’t happening at all. I didn’t dislike the sensation of his skin against mine, but I didn’t like it either. It was more like I had lost all sense of what I wanted and what I didn’t; my only job was to just be, and wait, and know that eventually, this would end.

Maybe this was submission, or at least one version of it. But it wasn’t what I imagined.

Then Mistress Amber’s voice called through the speaker, saying our session had ended, and it was as if a spell had broken. Thomas rose and I came back to myself, blinking away what seemed like the dream of the last hour. This wasn’t for me, I had decided. I wasn’t always comfortable with physical intimacy even from men I was attracted to. I’d just wanted to be spanked and tied up, but—

Thomas, now fully dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans rather than the suit he’d arrived in, was standing before me. “I’m going for a night hike in Griffith Park,” he explained the outfit change, and I was suitably impressed. The guy was probably in better shape than I was, and we were back to strangers-exchanging-pleasantries again. Except I was still naked aside from my G-string. How was I supposed to navigate this bizarre form of social interaction? I didn’t even like normal social interaction most of the time.

You’re not staying, I reminded myself. You’ll take the money for today and run.

But then, as though my thoughts had conjured them, Thomas was suddenly offering two hundred-dollar bills in his outstretched hand. I was shocked. I had been told not all clients tipped, and I certainly hadn’t expected nearly that much.

Sometimes I wonder: if Thomas hadn’t tipped, would I have taken the long lonely bus ride home after that first shift at Medusa’s and never come back? Would I have missed out on all the fantasies I finally fulfilled, the dreams I achieved and the others I lost, the incredible friendships I made and the pain and disappointment that almost ripped me apart, the parts of my self I lost and the new parts that arose, unexpectedly, from somewhere deep inside me? Would I have remained that quiet, ordinary-looking girl who kept her thoughts and desires locked up so tight even she forgot they were there, most of the time?   

“Thank you, Lily,” Thomas said as he pressed the bills into my palm. “That was a great session.”

Lily. That was the name I had chosen for my new submissive identity. While I was here, while I was her, I was no longer Stephanie Parent. I wasn’t the girl who’d made a halfhearted attempt at a writing career and recently lost her job as an after-school teacher, the girl who lived alone in a tiny Hollywood apartment where she edited other people’s books till late at night, trying to eke out a living and hoping she wouldn’t have to ask her parents for more money that month.

Somehow I sensed that if I took this money, I would become Lily. I would come back for my next shift, and the next and the next, for months and for years—although of course, I didn’t know all that yet.

“Thank you,” I said, and I took the two bills.

-S.C. Parent

S.C. Parent is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing program at USC. She lives in Los Angeles, and she's currently writing a memoir about her secret life as a professional submissive and switch at a dungeon. You can follow her journey on Twitter @SC_Parent.