My Femdom Wife Started Making the Rules, Part 3: One Word From the End

Previously: Part 2: The Three Page Agreement

I was on my knees at the foot of our bed with the lamp on, and my wife was sitting on the edge of the mattress in her scrubs with her shoes off and her hands in her lap, and I had about four words left to say, and instead of saying them I came within about one second of saying peaches, which is the word that ends all of this permanently with no questions asked. That is the night this is about. If you have been reading this femdom wife story in parts, this is the one I kept not writing since July, and I want to say up front that nothing bad happened to me. She stopped. She stopped before I got there. That is somehow the part I cannot get around.

Quick context again for anybody landing on this cold, because I know people do. I am thirty four. I do estimating for a building supply company outside Allentown. I have been married six years to Rachel, who is thirty six and cleans teeth for a living and wears mint green scrubs and glasses and has handwriting like a nurse. In February she put an index card on the fridge with four rules on it. In May she replaced it with three typed pages off the printer at her office, which I signed in her blue pen at our kitchen table. End of June we had the first review date, where either of us can add or cut anything. She cut one rule, and she added two. One of the two was small. The other one is the reason I am typing this at eleven at night with her asleep in the other room.

The rule my femdom wife added in June

Here is the rule as she wrote it, and I am close to word for word on this one because I have read it maybe two hundred times.

Each Sunday I will pick one thing off your daily list from that week. That is what Thursday is. You do not get told which one until I am ready to tell you. If you can tell me out loud why you will not do it, we do not do it, and that is not a punishment and I will not sulk.

I should back up for the people who have not read the other parts, because this only lands if you know about the daily list. One of the original four rules from the index card is that I say one true thing I want, out loud, every day. Even if it is small and even if it is embarrassing. Especially then. She wrote the especially then in bold on page two when she typed the pages up, because I had been quietly sanding that part off for about six weeks and she caught me. There is also a line underneath it that says if I say the same want twice in a week it does not count, which is the single most effective thing anybody has ever done to me, because it means I run out of safe ones by about Wednesday.

So before June, the list was just talking. It went up into the air and it was gone. I had been treating it like a toll I paid to get to Thursday.

After June, everything I said on a Tuesday was ammunition.

I argued about it at the table for maybe ten minutes. Not well. I said it was not the same as the other rules because the other rules were things she decided and this one was her using my own mouth against me. She let me finish and then she said, "Yes. That is correct." And then she said the thing that ended the argument, which was, "You have spent six years making sure nothing you say can be used later. I am not interested in living like that anymore."

And I said okay, and she said say the whole sentence, because of the speech rule, and I said okay, leave it on the page.

The small one, since I keep forgetting to mention it, was that the daily want has to be said in the same room as her, to her face, not shouted from the kitchen while she is in the bath. Which I had absolutely been doing.

What the Thursday pick actually meant

Three weeks of this before the bad night, and I want to do the three weeks properly, because the way this escalated was not dramatic at all. It was just extremely patient.

Week one, she picked the kindest possible thing on the list, and I think she did it on purpose to show me the rule was not a trap. On the Monday I had said, out loud, in our living room, feeling like an idiot, that I wanted her to tell me when I had done something right without me having to fish for it. That was my want. That is what she picked. So that Thursday I came home at ten to seven, showered, phone in the bowl by the door, and sat on the floor in front of the couch like always, and she sat behind me on the couch and told me, in detail, for about four minutes, three specific things I had done in the last month that she had noticed and liked, and one of them was about how I handled her mother, and I was not touched at all that entire night, and I lay in bed afterward with my face hot like I had been slapped. That is the one that got me. That is the one I was not ready for. Being complimented out loud for four minutes with nothing to do with my hands turned out to be harder than kneeling.

Week two was more what I expected. On the Wednesday I had said I wanted to be made to kneel somewhere that was not the bedroom, which I said in a sort of half brave voice. She did not wait for Thursday. She did it Tuesday, at the kitchen table, under the overhead light, while she ate leftover chicken and read something on her phone and did not talk to me for nineteen minutes. I know it was nineteen because I could see the clock on the stove, which she knows I can see from down there. When she was done eating she put her plate in the sink and stepped over me and said, "Thursday is still Thursday," and went to bed. I was so worked up I could not sleep and I was not allowed to do anything about it and I had to ask permission out loud the next morning while she was putting on her shoes, and she said no, and she said it the way you decline a coupon.

Week three is the week I said the thing.

It was a Tuesday, late, and I was mostly asleep, and this is the detail that matters: I was careless. I had been careful for five months. Every single day I had picked a want that cost me something but not too much, and I had gotten very good at it, like a guy managing a budget. That Tuesday I had already used up everything I had that week and I was tired and the Flyers were on with the sound off and she was next to me reading one of those fat paperbacks, and she said, "You owe me one," and I said it without thinking about it at all.

What I said was that I wanted her to make me say what I actually think about myself, out loud, in front of her, with the light on, and not let me stop and not let me make it funny.

And then I heard it in the room.

She did not react. That is the thing about Rachel. She did not look up from the book, she did not say anything clever, she just turned the page. And I lay there for about an hour knowing exactly what Sunday was going to be and already trying to work out how to get it off the list, and there is no mechanism to get it off the list, I checked the pages that weekend when she was out, standing in the kitchen with the takeout menus in my hand like a man reading his own medical results.

The night I got one word from ending it

Sunday she said, "I picked." That was all. She did not say which one. That is in the rule.

Thursday I was home at twenty to seven. Showered. Phone in the bowl. I had been nauseous since about two in the afternoon, which I had never been before, not once in five months, not even the night of the pages. I actually ate crackers in the car in the parking lot.

She got in a little after seven, still in scrubs, and she did not change, which was already a signal, because for anything she has planned she changes. She put her keys down. She drank a glass of water at the sink with her back to me. Then she said, "Bedroom. Lamp on. Foot of the bed."

And I want to be clear that she did everything right. She did everything the pages say. She sat down on the edge of the mattress so she was above me but not standing over me, and she said, out loud, before anything started, "This is the Tuesday one. You know which one." And I said yes. And she said, "Tell me the two words," and I said peaches and oranges, which is the thing she makes me do before anything that she thinks might be hard, say both of them out loud myself so they are in the room in my own voice. Peaches ends it. Oranges pauses it without ending it. She added oranges to page one back in May because she worked out that I would never pull a full stop but I might pull a brake.

Then she said, "Go on. Same as you said it."

And I could not.

I want to describe what this was actually like, because I have read a lot of stories on sites like this one over the years and they do not cover this. There was no pain. Nobody was holding me down. I was fully dressed in a t shirt and shorts kneeling on a carpet I have vacuumed a hundred times, in a room with a yard sale lamp and a radiator, and the hardest thing anyone has ever asked me to do was happening, and from the outside it would have looked like absolutely nothing. A guy on the floor not talking.

I got the first part out. The easy half. I said that I think I am a coward about small things, and she let that sit and did not nod at it, and then she said, "That one is cheap. Keep going."

And she was right, it was cheap, I had prepared that one in the car.

So I started the real one and I got about six words in, and the six words were true, and they were about my father and about how long I have been managing my own wife to keep her from finding out what I am actually like, and I felt the whole thing coming up behind those six words like water behind a door, and my hearing went underwater the way it does, and the only clear thought I had was that if I said one more sentence she was going to be looking at my face while I said it with the lamp on, and I could not have that.

And what came into my mouth was not oranges. That is the thing I have not been able to get past since July. The pause word was right there, it is on page one, I have said it out loud a hundred times, I have used it once before for forty seconds over something completely unrelated and she stopped so fast it frightened me. And my mouth did not go for it. My mouth went for peaches. Burn the whole thing down, five months, the card, the pages, the review dates, all of it, rather than say out loud to my wife that I needed thirty seconds.

I got the p sound out. That is not me being dramatic. There was a sound.

And she said, "Stop. Hands."

Because she had been watching my hands the whole time. I did not know that. My hands were shaking on my knees and apparently had been for a while, and she had been watching them instead of listening to me, which is the most Rachel thing in this entire story. She did not wait for me to use either word. She put her hand flat on the top of my head, not stroking it, just flat and heavy, and she said, "We are done. That is me stopping, not you. Nothing is owed." And then she said, "Say nothing for a minute."

And we sat there like that with the lamp on.

What she did after, which is the part I actually think about

She got me water. She always gets water, it is a habit at this point, and the ordinariness of it is what undoes me every time. Then she sat on the floor, which she never does, on the carpet with her back against the dresser in her scrubs, so we were at the same height, and she let me be a mess for a while without commenting on it.

When I could talk she asked me one question, and she asked it completely without heat. She said, "Why was peaches easier than oranges?"

And I said I did not know.

And she said, "Try," and I remembered the speech rule and I tried.

What I eventually got to, and it took a long time and I am compressing it, was that oranges would have meant admitting that I was not going to be able to do it. Ending the whole arrangement would have meant I was done with the arrangement. One of those is a thing about me and one of those is a thing about the rules, and I would rather have blown up five months of the only honest thing in my marriage than hand her a piece of information about myself in a moment where I did not look good.

She did not say anything for a while after that. Then she said, "Okay. That is useful." Not kind, not cold. Useful. Like a measurement.

And then she said the thing that I have been chewing on since, which was, "You understand that if you had said peaches I would have stopped and that would have been the end of it. I would not have asked you for a reason. That is what page one says. I would have spent the rest of my life not knowing why." And I said yes. And she said, "That is a lot of weight to hand to a person who loves you."

Then she told me to get in bed, and she put the lamp off, and she lay behind me which is not usually how we are, and around midnight she said into the back of my neck, "You did well tonight," and I said how, and she said, "You were on the floor for forty minutes telling the truth with nothing to hide behind. The part where you broke is not the part I am grading."

And then, because she is who she is, in the morning she asked if the arrangement was continuing or ending, straight out, over coffee, standing up, before she left for work. She made me answer in a full sentence. I said I wanted it to keep going. And she said, "Then it does not keep going for two weeks."

What changed on the pages

Two Thursdays of nothing. Not as a punishment. She was very clear about that and she said it twice, because she knows what I do with silence. She said, "You need two weeks where nothing is riding on you being brave."

So we had two completely normal weeks. We argued about the dishwasher. We went to her cousin's thing. I still said my daily want in the room with her every day and she still took it and did nothing with it. Nobody knelt. It was like a house with the power off.

Then the second Sunday she had the pages out on the table with a pencil, which is how I know that review dates are the actual load bearing thing in all of this and not any of the sexy parts, and she made two changes.

On page one, in her own handwriting underneath the typed part, she wrote that I use oranges once a month whether or not I need it. On purpose. Cold. In the middle of something that is going fine. And that when I do, she stops immediately, and we do not discuss it afterward, and it does not count against anything, and she will never once treat it as me failing. She put her initials next to that, which she has only ever done on one other line on the whole document, and the other one is the honesty rule, which tells you something about how she sorts things.

I have done it twice now. Both times felt completely humiliating in a way I did not expect and cannot really explain, saying a fruit out loud in a quiet room when nothing is wrong. Both times she stopped mid sentence like a light switch and said okay and went and got water. The second time I laughed, and she let me have the laugh.

On page two she put a limit on her own rule, which I did not ask for. The Thursday pick can now only come off a want I have said twice, in different weeks. Her reasoning, which she gave me unprompted, was, "If you only said it once, I cannot tell the difference between a thing you want and a thing you let slip when you were tired. I am not interested in the second one."

So the rule got narrower and the protections got wider, and the net result is that I am more locked into this than I was in June, and I was the one who said leave it on the page both times. I do not have a clever observation about that.

What the stories about a femdom wife never mention

Five months became seven. We are three review dates deep. The index card is still in my sock drawer and the pages are still folded in three in the takeout menu drawer underneath a Chinese place that closed.

If you are somewhere near where I was, the thing I would actually pass on is this. Everybody writes about the rules. Nobody writes about the fact that the brake is harder to pull than the switch, and that you will find that out at the worst possible moment, on a carpet, in front of somebody who has to live with whatever you do next. If you are the one in charge in a female led marriage, or trying to be, watch their hands and do not wait to be told. If you are me, practice the pause word on a night when nothing is happening, out loud, like an idiot, until it is just a word.

If you want this from the other side, where a woman is doing the deciding and taking her time about it, the piece about her side of the drawer covers a lot of the same waiting without being anybody's marriage. If the part of this you are actually here for is the permission and the saying no, orgasm control in femdom is a decent plain explanation of how couples set that up on purpose. There is more in True Stories, and a lot more in User Submitted Stories.

Part four is the August review, which is the one where she asked me a question off page three that I had been dreading since June, and there is something written on the back of page three in pencil that I have still not been allowed to read.

If you have your own, post it at submit a story. Somebody needs to read it.