A week or so after their first ‘date’, Kendra looked down at the hypnotised, submissive, obedient straight girl she had made into her loveslave as Emi, kneeling beside her own sofa with her hands folded behind her back, watched Kendra play on Emi’s own Switch.

It was, she thought, probably time.

“Tomorrow morning,” she said, “we’re going to go shopping.”

“Yes, Kendra.” Emi’s lips twitched into a smile, her eyes still glassy.

“Do you want to know what we’re going shopping for?” Kendra asked, and there was a measurable pause before Emi answered.

Emi always wanted to give Kendra the answer she wanted to hear, as had her other conquests using the same technique. That was perfectly acceptable; more than that, it was an expected part of what Kendra did to her prey.

Evidently, though, Emi wasn’t sure what would be the best answer here. Kendra could guess that she was torn between two.

A gentler domme, she thought, might prompt her submissive once she’d worked that out. Kendra belonged to the school of thought where you used them until they broke then passed them on to someone else. She was someone people wrote warnings about online and she took extensive pleasure in that fact; accordingly, here, she simply waited for Emi to resolve her dilemma and risk an answer.

“If you want to tell me, Kendra,” was the eventual answer, and Kendra was unimpressed. It felt like a split-the-difference play. If the preferred answer was a no, it showed deference to her wishes; if the preferred answer was a yes, it showed that she would restrain her curiosity for Kendra’s wishes.

For a moment, Kendra debated not telling her as a kind of punishment, but that would only have denied her a pleasure of her own. So she said “We’re going to buy you a new outfit,” and then “Something much sluttier. Something that makes your current status in life clear. Something less comfortable to meet old friends in.”

“Yes, Kendra,” Emi answered promptly, as if she were trying to make up for her previous indecisive response. And then, a few moments later. “Old friends?”

“Oh yes.” She smiled, her eyes sparkling. “In a day or two I’m going to unveil you to my friends. You know them.”

Emi nodded. “Yes, Kendra,” she said. She looked as if she wanted to say more, but after Kendra gave her a few moments to do so, she still hadn’t.

Kendra went right back to the game, smiling to herself. She uncrossed her legs and re-crossed them, stretching one out in front of Emi as she did, apparently casually - unless you knew Kendra well enough to know the only thing she did casually was work.

It would never stop amusing Kendra that at any given job her work colleagues saw her as nice, pleasant, and a very forgiving person, because very little of that came as default. True, she did actually like her friends, including those work colleagues who made the day better, but she certainly didn’t like clients or anyone whose attitude at work led to more effort for Kendra, and she was pretty sure that if you asked them, they’d be convinced Kendra had at least a neutral opinion of them.

Introducing Emi back to Pete would definitely change that, at least for a few months, but on the other hand, it would be good for him to see that it wasn’t worth keeping an open door for her.

This could have been achieved without playing dress-up on Emi, of course. But with the right outfit, Kendra figured she could also persuade Pete he was better off not to have Emi on his horizon anymore.

That could be worth a lot in getting her friend ‘back’, and all it would really cost were a couple of awkward conversations until her friends found ways to explain away what they’d seen to themselves, and Emi’s own dignity, offered up on the altar of embarrassment.

Kendra accepted the first as an occupational hazard and she was perfectly willing to spend the second to get the results she wanted.

*

The shop Kendra made Emi hold open the door to, so she could enter first, was not at all what Emi had imagined. For one thing, there was a strong perfume of leather to the interior.

While the stock lining the walls and hanging from the rails was mostly dark, with the occasional splash of bright colour, the walls were a pristine white and the room itself was lit clearly if softly. Three or four armchairs were dotted around the interior, all of them facing - she noticed as she continued to drink her surroundings in - the red curtains of what was obviously a changing area.

Breaking up the racks was the occasional display space, sometimes with mannequins dressed in the shop’s offerings, sometimes simply with outfits on a hanger against the wall.

Emi found herself staring. Kendra didn’t wear anything like this, and Emi had always dismissed fetishwear as so far from her own interests that she’d never really absorbed any information about it beyond ‘black leather catsuits exist’, which was information you couldn’t help picking up when Pete took you to the movies for a date.

Now she was seeing a whole world of differences and distinctions she could barely describe, not knowing the words.

“Pardon me, Kendra,” she said, as she had learned to do whenever she needed to offer at least a light corrective to her lover. “Are you sure this is the right place to find my outfit?”

“Part of it, at least,” Kendra said cheerfully. “Yes, I am.” Her eyes narrowed, something Emi now recognised as the other woman focusing in on her, having picked up on something. “Why do you ask?”

“I - that is - “

Kendra had a very throaty chuckle, Emi had noticed. There was nothing about her that Emi didn’t find attractive, she was very happy to say, but she found the chuckle attractive in a different way to, for example, Kendra’s tits and lips and ass.

It would be ridiculous to describe the way Kendra laughed as being organically attractive, because what did that make the other things about her? Artificially attractive?

“You don’t think you like these outfits, do you?” Kendra asked. Emi had noticed that when Kendra started asking questions in that tone of voice, with that cadence, her opinion on something was about to change, and it always started with her head going swimmy.

Was this gaslighting?

“Pardon me, but I actually don’t like them,” she said. She had a vague hope that saying it outright before Kendra got properly rolling would make it harder for her mind to change.

“Can I help you, ladies?” A woman had emerged from a back room. She stood taller than either of her visitors, though it was clear that high-heeled platform boots played a major role in this.

A long black pencil skirt, ending mid-calf, shone with reflected light, revealing it to be PVC. It was tight enough around her hips that Emi could make out the shape and musculature of her thighs. Above it, and above the hand that rested, curled into a fist, on one cocked hip was a red corset, steel struts largely exposed and polished to gleam between elaborately decorated fabric sections.

On her wrists and around her throat were white PVC ‘cuffs’. One could almost imagine the tuxedo jacket they would have protruded from to give the appearance of full shirt sleeves, but instead her shoulders and forearms were otherwise bare.

A detailed, brightly coloured tattoo began on her upper left shoulder, swirling down her arm, over her shoulder, and across her shoulderblades. It depicted a string of burlesque Betty Boop cartoon she-devils in different poses, some dancing, some playing musical instruments, and the ones on her forearm serving drinks onto nightclub tables.

Emi couldn’t help but stare. A woman like this came from such a different world to her own, only something like Kendra’s whim could ever have put the two together in the same room. The confidence radiating from her put Kendra’s own to shame; given the real thing to compare it to, Emi saw how much of Kendra’s confidence was a facade for the world.

“I’m not sure we need anything,” she blurted.

Kendra simply gave her a look, one of those aggressively predatory looks that always led somehow to Emi doing as she was told so that she’d be permitted to worship Kendra with her mouth.

“We’ll be buying most of an outfit,” Kendra said. “A coming-out party outfit, no less.” She smiled warmly at the shopkeeper. “She just doesn’t know it yet.”

Emi felt a rush of something, her head fuzzy, her body suddenly excited, just from hearing that. Yet it was still, a part of her insisted, wrong.

She was about to say something about that, but the shopkeeper tilted her head to one side, studying Kendra, and said “Are you going to do something I wouldn’t do?”

“Always,” Kendra returned with a winning smile.

“And you’re expecting me not to object because…”

“Because you’ll have a new regular customer.”

The shopkeeper sighed. Emi felt like speaking up, asking if she shouldn’t get a say in this, but Kendra had put a hand on her cheek and it would have felt wrong to say something on her own behalf like that. “You’re lucky I have overheads to make,” the shopkeeper said.

“You enjoy watching really,” Kendra flirted - Emi was intimately familiar with the tone when Kendra flirted now - and was rewarded with a half-smile and a shake of the head.

“One day,” she said, “you’re going to screw with someone who knows enough to mess with you back, Kendra McErlane.”

Apparently that didn’t merit any more attention than a dismissive wave of a hand, one that already had Kendra’s phone in it.

Emi realised that there had been over ten seconds there where she could have asked for help. Realised too that the shopkeeper had just taken a seat behind the counter, was picking up a magazine. She still could cry out, could do something.

Kendra wasn’t even holding onto her. If it wasn’t so melodramatic, Emi could have run out onto the street, sought distance from her lover, tried to assess whether or not what had been happening was something she wanted.

Instead she was standing there meekly, craving the attention from Kendra represented by something so basic as a hand caressing her cheek.

Something about that was wrong, surely?

She had fully articulated the idea; maybe she could actually say it aloud, she thought.

She was opening her mouth to do so when Kendra’s hand shifted from her cheek to the hair on the back of her head, tightening as it did so. Emi yelped in startlement, but her eyes briefly crossed in excited pleasure too.

The ways Kendra treated her were strange, but she ached for her lover so often, and at the moments it made least sense for her to. Reflecting on that made her want to cling to Kendra more tightly.

Meanwhile, Kendra was turning Emi’s head, and she was bringing her phone into view as she did so. Memories stirred, but they were hazy memories and they made no sense, and so they did not act as a warning. Instead, Emi focused her attention curiously on the screen.

What she saw was a completely white screen, although as Emi watched a blue dot appeared in the centre of the screen and grew.

At a certain size a white dot appeared inside it in turn, and as the blue reached the edge of the screen there was a strange sound, a kind of whoosh rendered as an electronic drone, with the centre of the blue now white again except for a second blue pinprick now emerging. She heard, too, the shopkeeper make a noise that was halfway between amusement and derision, a snort.

A second later whiteness had filled the edge of the screen and there was a distinct, if similar, sound to herald this.

Suddenly, with a certainty that this had happened before to accompany her, Emi had the dizzying sensation that she was hurtling down some tunnel with alternating blue and white sections, the sounds she heard at each transition registering not just audibly but in her scalp, as if each one were a fresh breeze generated by the passage through the tunnel.

She swayed slightly, and if Kendra hadn’t had a handful of her hair she might well have sagged at the knees and even fallen.

“Let’s go on a journey, Emi,” Kendra was purring. “Another journey where you’ll learn more about yourself. And you want to learn more about yourself. You want it so badly.”

A journey? Momentarily the answer was confusing, but Emi felt as if she was travelling, pulled ever onward by the image in front of her, the compulsion to move she imagined from it. And travelling did mean a journey, didn’t it?

She was still swaying as she stared. It was dizzying, not just the motion but the sense of helplessness, the sense of being putty in Kendra’s hands.

"You’ve already learned a lot about yourself, Emi. You learned how much you love pussy, remember?” Kendra’s tone was pitched halfway between teasing and coaxing, and Emi’s response was a burble of sounds all trying to get out ahead of one another.

“And you learned just how good it is when you’ve got a dominant girlfriend to tell you what to do, didn’t you?”

Emi just moaned hungrily.

“And why is that?”

“Emi… Emi is,” she was stumbling over the words, “a needy ball of lust.”

There was a hearty chuckle from the shopkeeper. “That sounds familiar,” she said. Emi was so dizzy, moving so fast down the tunnel, so overwhelmed by the prickle in her scalp from Kendra’s grip, that she didn’t wonder what that meant.

“That’s right,” Kendra continued, as if there had been no interruption. “Emi is a horny little slut.”

“Emi is a horny little slut.”

“Now, before we started our journey, you didn’t even understand that, did you, Emi?”

“No, Kendra,” she said. There was no tension in her voice; she floated, light and happy as anything.

“And you thought you were straight, didn’t you?” Kendra laughed. “You didn’t realise you’d fuck anything. And why will you fuck anything?”

“Because Emi is a needy ball of lust.” She was dimly aware, this time, that there was a world beyond the display on the screen; was dimly aware that the shopkeeper was watching all of this with an air of rapt fascination.

Kendra hadn’t done this until they got to the shop. Was that because Emi hadn’t spoken up, or had Kendra predicted this? Had she wanted an opportunity to play with Emi in front of an audience?

“Emi loves eating pussy.”

“Emi loves eating pussy,” she echoed obediently. It was true, and had sort of been true even before she said it, but now it was definitely more so.

“Emi loves Kendra’s pussy best.”

“Emi loves Kendra’s pussy best.” Her heart quickened, thinking about the times she’d been blessed with it before now, when Kendra had pinned her down or sat on her face or taken the controller from her hands and pushed her from the sofa and spread her own legs and told Emi to please her while she gamed…

“Emi’s journey is a dyke journey.”

“Emi’s journey is a dyke journey.”

Kendra abruptly walked her closer to a rack. Her vision swam around the edge of the screen, and she nearly fell, but some instinct - the one which needed to keep staring into the screen - kept her from stumbling and helped her recover when her knees wanted to buckle.

“Smell this,” she directed, though as she was all but mashing Emi’s face into a new leather corset, it didn’t need instruction. Emi had been given instruction nonetheless, so she breathed in deeply, filling a mind all but empty of thought with the aroma of fetishwear leather instead.

“Emi wants to be a leatherdyke,” Kendra purred.

“Emi wants to be a leatherdyke,” Emi echoed, and there was no concern in her voice, no hesitation in her mind. There was only agreement with something she had been told which was obviously, naturally, clearly true.

“Emi feels soooo sexy in red leather.”

“Emi feels sooooooo sexy in redlevver…” Her voice was starting to betray her, cracking and wobbling and sounding more like moans and gasps. Her arousal did this to her whenever Kendra played with her like this, and she didn’t know why, because when Kendra played with her like this clever observation wasn’t an option.

“Emi wears what Kendra wants.”

“Emi wears what Kendra wants.”

Abruptly, the journey on the screen, the pulsing waves of descent, disappeared, the screen going black, and Kendra did something with the wrist holding it that wasn’t exactly a flourish but would probably best be described as such.

“So,” Kendra purred, “are you really sure you don’t want to buy part of your outfit here?”

Emi’s eyelids were fluttering, but after a few moments she managed “Nooo…” if only just.

“Are you sure about anything?”

“Just you, Kendra,” she said softly. Kendra was her dominant girlfriend, and she was lucky to have her. Kendra would sort it all out.

“Let’s buy you something. Would you like PVC or leather?”

“Leather,” Emi said decisively. The last few minutes were already fading from memory as being nonrelevant.

“What colour?”

“Red.”

“Good choice,” the shopkeeper said, standing up to serve them. Emi noticed a faint red flush on the woman’s cheeks, and wondered why.

*

The trip to the tattooist was much easier, Kendra thought; Emi didn’t seem to have any objection to getting a lasting mark of their connection.

Kendra was always fascinated to study the different ways her playthings responded to their suggestions. By the time she tired of them and sold them on, she usually had a pretty clear idea of what their original viewpoints and opinions would have been on any topic you might name.

“We were looking to get my friend a tattoo,” she told the tattoo artist, who smiled lopsidedly.

“Is that right?” he asked Emi, who nodded. He studied her closely, much to Kendra’s irritation. She didn’t have an old friend doing this sort of thing the way she did the clothing, and she supposed there were some places you couldn’t speak for someone else without them reacting oddly to it.

People needed to respect protocol better, in her opinion. If they did, they’d be able to accept Kendra speaking for her partners.

“If I asked you what tattoo you’re getting, not your friend, would you even know?” he asked Emi. Kendra bridled. The audacity of the man, to be asking these questions, to so obviously suspect wrongdoing.

It wasn’t as if it was his place to be protecting her. She was just a customer; he should take her money and do as she wanted.

Fortunately, Kendra had let her plans slip in the Uber over, because she’d wanted to properly enjoy Emi’s reaction to the idea. So Emi was able to say “She’s going to kiss my neck. I want you to tattoo her lip print onto me in bright red.”

Kendra didn’t miss the visible surprise on the tattooist’s face, but she kept her annoyance under control and said nothing. Instead, she reapplied her lipstick. “Satisfied?”

He shrugged. “I’ll take your money,” he said, though throughout, she was conscious of him glancing up at her from his work.

Her own attention barely wavered from where the needle was, watching the image of her own lips emerge with genuine fascination. This wasn’t the first time she’d marked one of her playthings, but it was probably the most evident; she’d taken care to kiss her on the neck high enough that a collar wouldn’t hide it.

It gave her a surprising thrill. There wasn’t much left to prepare, she thought; once Pete saw this he wouldn’t be mooning about over her anymore.

It was a kill or cure strategy, but it was also a double-edged one. By turning her into an obvious dyke she was telling Pete it wasn’t his fault the relationship had ended (although she’d questioned Emi, while the other woman was deep enough for lying not to even be a possibility, and she was damn sure it was) and also saying to him that there was no way for the two of them to get back together.

*

They walked into the bar together. Emi was a little self-conscious about her outfit, but she was proud, too.

Her hair had been gathered up into bunches which she’d tied back with short lengths of thin red ribbon. The red lipstick tattoo of Kendra’s kiss was clearly visible, just below her jawline on the left side of her neck.

Below that was the high neckline of a red leather leotard, a heart-shaped cutout exposing almost everything of her bust. She was relying on tape below the leotard to keep her chest from misbehaving.

She had also donned black wide-mesh fishnet tights and a pair of pale blue jean cutoff shorts tight enough and trimmed high enough to better be considered as hot pants. She’d made the adjustments as Kendra watched, donning them and marking a line which would lay bare a healthy handful of each buttock before removing them and cutting the fabric down to suit.

There were no pockets; in point of fact there was no good place to carry things anywhere in her clothing. Her apartment key was clipped to one of the jeans belt loops, and she carried no card, money, or phone. After all, decisions on buying or on contact were for her dominant girlfriend to make, not her. Kendra was firmly in control, and Emi knew that was the way she liked it.

Completing the ensemble were a pair of heavy, maroon Doc Martens polished to a high sheen and a red and black plaid shirt, thick and soft material, tied around her waist by its arms, giving her a little more modesty until, ready to sit at a bar stool, she would sweep the shirt back so anyone looking on could see the entirety of her thigh and hip, fully on display.

It was, therefore, perfectly reasonable for her to feel self-conscious. But it was also important that she recognise her own pride in the outfit. She bore her girlfriend’s mark as a permanent claim. Not just that, though - in fact, as important as that was, Emi didn’t think it was the most important part of her look - she was owning who she was now.

It didn’t matter that Kendra was wearing a loose tee with a geek slogan on it and a pair of skinny fit jeans that hadn’t been doctored or amended at all, and that standing next to one another this made Emi’s outfit even more unusual, even more likely to catch the eye of anyone looking across the bar crowds. It didn’t matter that anyone who saw the two of them together knew who wore the pants in their relationship, both figuratively and - that evening - literally.

What mattered was that for the first time in her life she had both the understanding and the courage to dress as the horny, needy little slut of a leatherdyke she was inside. Standing in that bar, she was herself in public in a way that she never had been before.

Kendra caught sight of Pete and the rest of her work crew before Emi did. She sent Emi over toward them, pointing her finger and slapping her ass for encouragement; there was something about feeling her own buttock jiggle that made Emi weak at the knees.

She didn’t need to be told where to go twice. She didn’t need to be told anything twice, not by Kendra. That was an important part of being an obedient subby slut of a girlfriend.

On her way over, Emi wondered when ‘slut’ had become such a major part of her identity. It was key to everything she was, but she couldn’t remember being willing to describe herself that way before Kendra had decided they should date.

Pete was playing pool when she got there, bent over the table. She took two more steps forward and at some point in that motion she must have entered his field of vision, because he glanced up and almost immediately sent the cue ball caroming off the cushion, far away from any of the balls he’d been aiming at just seconds before.

“Hi, Pete,” she said cheerfully, lifting one hand and waving her fingers for a moment. “Good to see you again.”

He straightened up, still staring at her, mouth open. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “Wow.”

Her smiled stayed in place. “I should definitely have tried to explain to you earlier,” she said. “I just didn’t really understand myself, so I couldn’t.

“And now it’s awkward.”

Pete was looking over her shoulder, back toward the bar, and without checking Emi knew he’d be looking at Kendra.

“Honestly, I think you deserve a lot of credit,” she surged on. Kendra and she had discussed this the previous night, curled up on the sofa together. Emi didn’t remember much of it except for Kendra’s hand in her hair, but she knew Kendra had helped her further along her journey.

“Is that right?” he asked. There was something funny in his tone. Like he knew something she didn’t. Emi didn’t bother thinking about it too much.

“Dating you kept me from realising I’m a dyke,” she pointed out matter-of-factly. There was no good way to say it except matter of fact.

His jaw dropped, and it wasn’t the only one. After a moment - was it Dan? She’d never been able to keep his work buddies completely straight - gave vent to a laugh that she could just as easily have described as a startled wheeze. “That’s, uh… that’s a pretty positive review,” he said, clapping Pete’s shoulder. And then he hesitated. “I think.”

“I’ll take it.” Pete took a drink of his beer, still looking Emi over. “You, uh… changed,” he said.

She shrugged. “I’ve been on kind of a voyage of discovery,” she said. “It’s all… new. But shouldn’t be. Only it kind of should. I’m not explaining this very well.” Emi took a deep breath. “But this is why we had to break up. I gave you some BS excuse at the time because I didn’t know how to say it.”

“We’ve been figuring things out together,” Kendra said from behind her. Emi turned and smiled at her, and was handed a drink. “I didn’t exactly explain this when we talked, did I?” Kendra continued, grinning at Pete.

“Oh, it’s safe to say I wouldn’t have believed you if you had,” he breathed.

“Any complaints?”

“No,” he said slowly. Then he took another pull at his beer. “No,” he said again. “Whatever else she might be, Emi isn’t my dream date anymore.”

Emi smiled softly. “If you need a wingwoman,” she said. “I know what you like so I know what to watch for.”

Pete stared at her for a long while, then at Kendra, who shrugged, and then at Emi again.

Finally he said “You know what, that’s crazy enough that I could believe it’ll work.”