‘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?’