Six Shades of Romance

by Darling, P. K.

  She dug around in her purse and pulled out a string of Trojans and just grinned wickedly.

  “What does that even mean?”

  “Oh, it means I’ll find one or two to make me happy tonight,” she told me with a wicked grin. I must admit, part of me absolutely loved the idea. Getting the tinder lit, hot random sex, letting the fires of lust burn bright, even if only for a time.

  “One or two?” I asked her, shocked.

  “I’ve never been naked between two brothers like my slutty best friend. I think it’s time to try it, or try to beat her record.”

  “Hey,” I said, punching her arm, and she started laughing when the door bell rang.

  “You better get that,” she told me, making a shooing gesture.

  I ran down her hallway, pausing in front of a mirror to make sure my makeup was still good, and then answered the door. I could make out a masculine shape in the frosted glass and opened it, butterflies in my stomach ready to take off.

  “Hi there.”

  “Hi, you must be Caroline. I’m Michael,” he told me, handing me a small bouquet of flowers.

  “Oh wow, thank you, yes, come in,” I told him.

  Half a glance, and a hand brush, was enough to let me know that as long as he wasn’t gay, I’d definitely let him be my next conquest. Where the boys were muscular and looked slightly unkempt, Michael was tall and lean like a swimmer, his hair cut short, and no beard stubble. There was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on, though; part of it was his self-confidence, I was sure.

  He followed me to the kitchen, where Janice had been lining up a third shot glass and pouring a new round. I grabbed mine, and handed a shot glass to Michael.

  “To new friends,” I toasted and Jan clinked her shot to mine as we downed them. Michael just set his glass back down.

  “Sorry, I don’t drink,” he told me with a sheepish smile. I was already buzzing from the first two shots (empty stomach; I don’t recommend tequila on an empty stomach) so I was feeling bold. I downed his as well.

  I coughed at the taste a bit, but honestly, after the first one, my taste buds were going numb.

  “That’s OK, I’m probably good for the night now,” I told him, and Jan just gave me a sly grin.

  “So what’s the plans tonight?” I asked the two of them; nobody had really given me much of an answer.

  “I was thinking dinner, and maybe a club or two,” Janice said and Michael added, “Or dinner, and maybe a walk through the city? So we can get a chance to get to know each other?”

  The evening wore on (and yes, that was meant to sound painful) and I realized that although Michael was physically attractive, he was too bookish and too into his church to be ready for anything else than a casual conversation once in a while. I had that all figured out by the time we were ordering dinner, and I won’t bore everyone with the details, but when I went to the bathroom, Jan excused herself and followed me in.

  “So what do you think?” she asked me, trying to smile, but I could spot that it was a fake from a mile off.

  “I’m thinking of ditching both of you and going to find someplace to dance,” I told her with a wry grin.

  “How about we pretend you’re sick, and we have to leave early?” she asked me.

  “I’ll take care of it,” I told her after finishing washing my hands.

  I could see that Michael was nervous having being left, and was obviously waiting for something like what Jan suggested, and he had a look of relief as we sat down at the table.

  “Michael,” I opened, “I grew up in a very religious family, I’m sure you know what that’s like, by the sound of your upbringing?”

  “Yes, yes ,of course, our church life is almost as important as our home life,” he told me. Wait a second, OUR church life, and OUR home life?

  “Wait, who’s this ‘our’?” I asked him

  “Well, my parents and my brothers and sisters,” he said shamefacedly.

  “You still live at home with your parents?” I asked him, liking the way he squirmed.

  “Yes, it’s a rather large house, maybe I can get you to come out and see it sometime next week,”

  “Hm…” I said, chewing on my lip for a moment in thought. “Are you committed to that lifestyle?”

  “The family, the church? Yes,” he said.

  “Well, then let me stop this right here. You are kind, charming, and probably a very good man. I am not only running from old family business, I am fleeing the very memory of how it almost killed my relationship with my parents. When it comes to men, I want someone who can be a little bit dirty. Do you think you can do that?” I asked him, surprised at my monologue.

  For a moment, he just stared at me slack-jawed, then shook his head no.

  “Well, Michael, lets finish our dinner, and we can keep in touch,” I told him.

  “You are nothing like I thought you were, so don’t worry about it, I think we got our wires crossed,” he said, looking at Janice—who looked as if she wanted to crawl under the booth and hide.

  “So it won’t hurt your feelings if we finish dinner and go our separate ways?” I asked him sweetly, and he just nodded with a relieved smile.

  “You know, Caroline, that’s the quickest breakup I’ve ever seen,” Janice said, and we all busted up laughing.

  Chapter 12

  Since Michael drove, we elected to call a cab, Janice giving the cabbie an address I didn’t recognize. He told us how much the fare would be, and told us about twenty minutes with the way traffic was. I just nodded, and Janice turned sideways in the seat and faced me.

  “You remember me mentioning the club?” she said cryptically.

  “Yes, of course, you go on and on about how much fun it is but clam up when I ask you for details.”

  “Well…” and for the next twenty minutes she filled me in on it, and stopped to reassure me she wasn’t lying. My jaw dropped a couple of times and she just grinned, pulling out her smart phone and showing me. I was blown away, to say the least.

  “So what happened with you, Daniel, and Derek could be at least a monthly thing, but being a girl, and open-minded, you could probably get as much kinky sex as you wanted. It’s kind of expensive, though,” she told me.

  My whole body was tingling. A club that catered to Fantasies, sexual and non- sexual ones. A club where they had their own dungeon, a place where anything went as long as both parties consented, with their own doctors and staff on hand. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was the fact that everything was video- recorded, and I told Jan that.

  “It’s part of the legal stuff. You can put it in a shredder right there, or you can keep it. You have to sign all sorts of non-disclosure agreements for privacy, and I can tell you one thing… I’ve fucked a crown prince, just a couple of nights ago,” she told me, and I was just floored.

  “Nuh-uh,” I told her, not believing it.

  “Oh yes, I’ve even got video proof back at my place, but it would be breaking the non-disclosure agreements to show you…”

  “Ewww… I don’t want to watch you in a porno,” I told her, sort of surprised, but it didn’t gross me out as much as I pretended.

  “Then how about I show you how we started the night off?” she asked me, swinging a leg across me, straddling me in the back of the cab. She grabbed my head, just under my hair, and pulled me close and kissed me. My breath caught, and I was suddenly a ball of lust.

  I reached around and pulled her closer, so her crotch was up against my stomach. I could feel her heat radiating through her clothing, and I started tracing the curves of her back through her dress. I caught a peek and saw the cabbie was watching through the rearview mirror, so I pulled her dress up past her waist so I could get a good grab on her ass. Her breathing sped up, almost matching my heartbeat. If my heart didn’t slow down, it was going to explode.

  I moved my hands down along her side as she started pinching my nipple through the fabric of my blouse, trying to work her hand inside. While
she had troubles with my layers of clothing, I simply moved my hands up her sides, inside the dress, until I had them in front of her, cupping each breast. Both of our breathing was starting to get rough. It stopped in a heartbeat when the cabbie, who wasn’t paying attention to anything else, had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a parked car.

  “Damn,” I said as she rolled off me, and with a shock, I saw that she had worked one of my coral-tipped breasts out of my shirt.

  “Sorry,” the cabbie told us, getting us moving again while we got our clothing back in place and checked our makeup.

  “Damn is right, I thought you would have freaked out on me,” she said, biting her lip for a moment.

  “So do you like girls?” I asked her, a little unsure of myself.

  “I like anything that makes me feel good,” she said with a smile. It was a sentiment we both shared, at least in theory.

  “So what do you think?” she asked me, still flushed, and I pulled out a small mirror. Lipstick smudges, easy enough to fix.

  “I think it sounds too good to be true,” I told her truthfully.

  “Well, how about we sign you up and you can find out for yourself?”

  “Oh my God, I don’t know. How much is it?” She whispered it into my ear and I pushed her back immediately.

  “Nuh uh, no way. That’s too much,” I told her.

  “Oh, I’ll help if you’re interested.” She grinned.

  “How do you have that kind of money?” I asked her, confused.

  “You sort of meet… high-end people there. People who have a lot of money, and I’ve been sort of seeing one of them outside of the club.”

  “Oh my God, you really are a slut! You have a sugar daddy!”

  “Oh, it isn’t just like that, but I have a card he left me, one he gave me as a gift, but I’ve never used it,” she said, digging through her purse and pulling out a leather card case, with a matte black card with an infinity symbol on the front, and a magnetic strip on the back.

  “I don’t recognize the credit card,” I said, looking it over.

  “That’s because it’s a club card.”

  “You mean, as in house credit like the casinos use?”

  “Yes, just like—oh goody, here we are,” she told me as we pulled up to a hotel.

  “This?”

  “Yes, this,” she said, “let’s go,” she told me taking me by the arm and throwing a couple of twenties on the seat next to the cabbie. He gave us a pathetic wave and took off.

  “It doesn’t look like much,” I said, looking at it. It looked like any other hotel in Vegas, just older. The windows all had reflective tint on them, and none of them were open, which was hardly surprising given it’s Vegas.

  “The whole place has been gutted and redone,” she told me.

  “So what do we, uh, do?”

  “Let’s get your sexy ass signed up, and while you’re busy, I’ll go see if I can work some kinks out,” she told me, dropping me a wink. “That is, if Melinda is working this late.”

  “Who’s Melinda?”

  “She’s the, er… matchmaker?”

  “Matchmaker?”

  “Come on, you’ll see.”

  We walked in the mirrored doors and I was floored. We were at a security checkpoint that would make the TSA drool. I put my purse and shoes on the X-ray slide, and walked through a metal detector.

  “Ma’am, do you have a cell phone, or any other metal objects?” a large guard asked.

  “Oh shit, yes,” I handed them my cell phone, and they wrote something down and gave me a ticket.

  “You can get your phone when you get out. You are signing up tonight, ma’am?” he asked me.

  “I didn’t call ahead, Josh,” Janice told him. “Is Melinda or another scheduler available?”

  “Let me check,” he said, pulling out a tablet. “Yes, she’s having drinks at the Cozy. I’ll have her step down here for a bit.”

  “Great! Can I take my friend to the visitor’s lounge?” Janice asked him.

  “Sure, here,” he said, clipping a visitor’s badge on the collar of my blouse. “That’ll let you get in to a couple of areas. Your friend can explain the step process, but if you don’t keep that badge handy, security will stop you.”

  “Oh, I won’t lose it, but how would they know?” I asked him, more curious than anything else.

  He pointed up at the cameras that hung all over the ceiling. Right there in front of me, so obvious that I should have noticed, but working in casinos for a few years made me immune to the cameras that the house used to look for cheats, card counters, or teams of people working an unfair advantage.

  “Facial recognition…”

  “You got it,” he said with a grin, and Jan was already tugging on my arm. I gave him a smile and a half wave.

  “Come on, Caroline,” she said in a mock whining voice.

  “Well, what’s the hurry?” I asked her, looking around. The floor we were on seemed dead, and other than the two guards, it looked like a regular hotel lobby, without the people.

  “Oh, there’ll be a few people in the visitor’s lounge. Depending on how long it takes to put your signup information on the computer, I can probably get us upstairs to one of the member lounges.”

  “But I don’t have $10,000…” I told her, shocked that she was still pushing for this.

  “Here,” she said, shoving the card in my hand and opening a glass door.

  The music that hit us as we entered the lounge was some nice dance music, but it wasn’t something I recognized right off. I’m sure Jan knew who it was; anyway, I immediately felt at ease. Part of me expected the visitor’s lounge to be like the waiting room at the hospital, but when they said lounge, they really meant it.

  Couches, stuffed recliners, tables, chairs, stools, a bar, a small dance floor; and people of all ages were dancing and relaxing. I had to stop a minute and reel in my surprise, because nothing of the sterile room we had just left would have tipped me off that this was even here. Jan pulled me over to an open table and we sat for less than thirty seconds before a waiter got our drink orders.

  “He looks delicious,” I told her, grinning. This was surreal but I was having a good time.

  “Most of the employees do, but they aren’t usually allowed to play,” she told me cryptically.

  “What do you mean? Can’t fraternize with us?” I asked her

  “Something like that. The rules are fast and loose here, but here’s the main things you have to remember: privacy is of the utmost importance and lastly, anything goes; anything that you want to happen, they can make it happen. The money you spend here is a pittance for the times you’ll have here. I just feel bad for the poor fools who don’t already live in Vegas.”

  “I’ve got a lot to learn…” I told her, looking around. I didn’t know it at the time, but the visitors lounge was pretty much PG-rated in everything that happened, but members as well as visitors mingled together, and I saw a few other people with a visitor’s badge clipped to their shirts.

  “So what’s a scheduler/matchmaker do?” I asked Jan as she was making eyes at a couple of guys sitting closer to the bar.

  “She sets up our accounts… hey, look at that guy,” she said, gesturing with her drink.

  “Go on, you lush,” I prodded.

  “And helps us set up our wants and fantasies.”

  “Fantasies?”

  “Yeah, and I’m going to sign up for one tonight… She’ll tell you about the levels, but I want a set of twin guys. Girl, I didn’t know you had that kind of kink inside of you,” she said, breaking eye contact, watching a petite older redhead approach our table.

  “Janice, how nice to see you again,” she said as Janice rose and kissed her on the cheek. Feeling like the third wheel, and not knowing protocol, I stood and offered my hand.

  “You must be the prospect, Carrie?” she asked me.

  I laughed, because nobody, and I mean nobody except my father, had called me that in years.


  “You can call me that if you changed my diapers, otherwise folks call me Caroline,” I told her, trying not to grin ear from ear. Somehow, this lady put me at ease with just a glance.

  “So what brings you to Fantasy Inc.?” she asked me.

  “See… uh…. God, Jan, how do I explain this?”

  “Well, you could start out by telling her that you are a recent reformed virgin who had twin brothers and are looking for something bigger and better…”

  Melinda sputtered for a moment. “Wait, she’s not joking?”

  “No… One after the other, but I’d rather they’d done me at the same time,” I told her, flushing.

  “Oh well, that’s something we can arrange,” she told me, but Jan held up her hand…

  “Me first, I’m already a member. Anybody available?” Janice asked, her voice getting thick with lust. I looked over, and sure enough, her nipples were getting stiff, visible despite her outfit.

  “OK, her first, but if it’s that easy…” I looked to Janice. “What does it take to sign up?”

  “Forms, money, a questionnaire, and a doctor’s physical.” I groaned at the last. My doctor was an hour away and it took two weeks to even get in.

  “What’s the worry, the questionnaire or the physical?” she asked me sweetly. Damn, I had just met this woman, but she had the same sort of vibe I got talking to my lifelong best friend Jan.

  “Mostly the physical… but what’s the questionnaire about?” I asked her.

  “Ohh, what kind of fantasy/kink/sex or escapade you want. How rough, how to set it up, how much foreplay et cetera. You set the rules, we set up the players, and we even provide pictures with the faces blurred out in case you want to choose another. Being a woman, I can tell you that just about anything you request, the men will fulfill it.”

  I flushed with the thought. “Anything?”

  “I haven’t had a lady turned down yet… although some guys are rarely in demand as much as the ladies… but there is one of my clients that the ladies seem to request over and over and over…”

  “Really, what makes him so special?” I asked her, somewhat intrigued.

  “Normally it’s a privacy thing and I couldn’t answer, but this guy wears his heart on his sleeve and lets me share everything. Basically, his wife left him, and he’s been trying to find a woman who’ll take his mind off her. He’s still in love with her.” I was glad I was sitting, because that just about made my knees wobbly.