On Halloween, I do not retire the leather. I add a hat. A tall black witch's hat over platinum hair changes a dominant into a judge, and my regulars know what October means in my house. Once a year, a man may call me and submit his whole year for judgment. Every lie, every indulgence, every filthy little thing he stroked to in the dark since last Halloween. I weigh them. I price them. And I collect, in strokes and smacks and long delicious silences, while the rest of the world plays dress up.
Last Halloween's defendant called me from a spare bedroom at a house party. I could hear the music through the door, the laughter, the ordinary joy of people who did not have a Mistress waiting in their pocket. He was dressed as a vampire, which amused me. A costume of a predator, worn by my prey.
"Kneel," I said, before he had finished his greeting. "The court is in session, and witches do not stand for defendants. State your first sin."
He began with the small ones, because men always open negotiations at the lowest price. Glances. A wandering hand at a summer wedding. I let him list them, lighting my cigar in the pauses, counting silently. Then I said the sentence that turns a confession into a surrender.
"Those are the sins you rehearsed. Now the one you came to confess. The one you have been stroking to all month while you told yourself you had stopped calling girls like me."
The silence was long and honest. He confessed it in pieces. The calls he had hidden. The voice he could not stop replaying. The nights he had knelt alone in his own house, practicing for a woman who was not there, hoping Halloween would give him an excuse to be caught. Darling, Halloween gives everyone an excuse. I am simply the only one who invoices for it.
Judgment was thorough. His costume came off piece by piece on my instructions, cape, shirt, everything, until a grown man in a borrowed bedroom was naked on his knees in a pair of plastic fangs. I made him take the fangs out. Predators do not beg in my court. Then I set his sentence. Fifty strokes, counted aloud, at a tempo I controlled, stopping dead every time I took a drag of my cigar and chose to let him wait at the edge with his hand frozen and his whole year throbbing in his fist. At stroke thirty I added the belt. His own costume belt, ten cracks across his own thighs, counted, each one answered with my title spoken correctly. At forty I took him to the edge and held him there through three full minutes of my silence, the party laughing through the wall, until his pleading had no words left in it at all, only sound.
"One thing remains," I said at last, and tapped my ash. "A witch's price. Tell me the wish under all of it. Not the sins. The wish."
He whispered that he wished he belonged to a woman who knew everything and kept him anyway. Sentencing does not get more complete than that. I counted him down from ten, slowly, each number a stroke he was permitted, and on one I gave him the only absolution I sell. "Now. For your Mistress." He came apart on that bedroom floor like a spell breaking, groaning my name into a stranger's pillow, while downstairs his friends in their costumes never knew their vampire had been judged and found deliciously guilty.
"Same court date next year," I told him. "Arrive kneeling. Bring a fuller confession."
The court is still in session, darling, and your year has been so very full. If you have sins you have been stroking to since last October, a wish you have never said out loud, and a suspicion that a calm voice in a witch's hat could own you more completely in twenty minutes than your own hands have all year, you know where the courtroom is. I am on PhoneBuckFuck for a dollar a minute of halloween dominatrix phone sex, and the rest of this year's costumes are hanging on the Halloween page. If you have not yet read how I handle a man who calls just to talk, my first confession session is on record. Kneel before you dial. The witch will know if you did not.