by Cecilia Tan
I pressed my fists against my thighs. “Yes. I know I’m not acting like myself. It’s that I’ve never felt this way about a woman before.”
“Some playboy you are.” Mal looked at me again. “You’re in love.”
Hearing him say it like that was like a knife through the heart. It wasn’t just the pain of being in love with someone who wasn’t, apparently, in love with me. This of all moments was not the time to fall in love. Not right now. Not when we were about to be on the road for most of the upcoming year. We were supposed to get to work on our next record while we were in LA, and then by March when the weather would start warming up, hit the road right through the summer. “Maybe it’s that it was the first time I really did the dom/sub thing for real.”
“What do you mean, ‘for real’? I’ve heard the spanking from your hotel room.”
“Yeah, but that never felt like anything more than some silly play-acting. This was like …” I could practically feel the way the curve of her hips had fit in my hands as I held her still and filled her with my cock, like my palms had imprinted the way she’d trembled, the way she’d taken me all the way in despite how tight she was. “This was like I owned her. Claimed her. Like we belong together and if I can’t have her again I’m going to go insane.”
“Hm,” Mal said. “Love.”
Fuck.
We drove in silence for a while, Mal snarling at the traffic from time to time. I think if it would’ve been legal to mount flamethrowers on the front of the car, he’d have done it. Fortunately for the rest of California’s drivers, it wasn’t.
“So,” he said when I was just starting to think we weren’t going to talk again until we got to the house. “You own her? You claimed her as yours? Explain to me, then, why don’t you just call her?”
I looked at my hands. “She’s really angry with me.”
“Why is she so angry at you? Over the publicity stunt? Or because you had sex? Or because she doesn’t want to be your slave girl?”
“All of the above,” I said. “I’m waiting for her to call me.”
He actually turned his head to glare at me this time. “You expect to get anywhere with this woman like that?”
Trust me, I wanted nothing more than to drive directly to her mansion, demand to see her, and then … and then what? My fantasies of talking my way into her panties again were undone by the memory that I’d tried that. I’d even succeeded in having more mind-blowing sex with her. And she’d still thrown me out. “I don’t want to come off like a stalker and scare her off completely. No one likes a stalker. And that’s assuming I haven’t blown it already. She’s got some issues.”
Mal shrugged. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe kidnapping her raised some consent issues?”
“But she kissed me first.”
Mal was heavily silent. I’d known him long enough to know the difference between the silence that meant he was paying close attention and the one that meant he was trying to ignore me. He was listening intently.
“In fact, she kissed me like a drowning woman taking my last breath,” I said. “And I was all too happy to give it to her. The sex was like that, too. Like she needed … every inch of me or she’d die.”
Mal replied with more silence.
“And now it’s me who feels like that.”
This time he added a thoughtful “hmm.”
“Come on, Mal. Give me some actual advice. You’ve been doing the BDSM thing a lot longer than me.” Mal was my best friend. We knew a lot about each other’s sex lives. I knew full well that between when we met when he was ten and when I ran away to his house in England when I was sixteen, he’d started tying up the girls he liked.
“All I can tell you is it’s very bad when one of you wants a relationship and the other one doesn’t,” he said.
“That’s true in general,” I said. “Not specific to BDSM. Seriously. I want her and I know I can establish total dominance over her if we’re alone in a room together. But tell me how not to freak her out. What should I say to her?”
“You’re the one with the fantastic chemistry with her. What do you think you should say?”
“Well, probably not ‘hey, can I kidnap you again?’” I couldn’t tell Mal, of course, that I might have a chance to see her in a kinky context again. I needed to figure out a vanilla strategy that would work better. “Maybe I ought to offer to take her out to a nice dinner. What’s the best restaurant in the city?”
Mal snorted. “Something tells me an heiress is going to be unimpressed by displays of wealth.”
“I didn’t mean most expensive restaurant in the city. I meant, hey, let me treat you right this time. As opposed to carrying her off like a Viking with a sack of … of … whatever it was Vikings pillaged.”
Mal started to laugh then, a slow chuckle that eventually put a wide grin on his face. “You’re ridiculous,” he said, and reached over to tousle my hair. “Are you at least writing lots of angst-ridden love songs?”
“Oh, yes,” I assured him. “Can’t wait to show you.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
GRAVITATE
RICKI
As I made my way down the stairs to the dungeon, I could hear Gwen shrieking and I broke into a run, imagining all kinds of terrible things might be happening to her.
I hurried into the central room to find her strapped to a giant wheel against the wall, spinning around and around like some kind of carnival ride, while an auburn-haired woman kept it turning with pushes of her hand.
“Rickiiiiii! This thing is so fun! Aaaaaaaaah!” Gwen cried.
The woman’s name came to me before I had to call her “hey you.” Madison. Madison Rofel. She had been hired by my grandfather two years ago to work the club and according to her file was an aspiring dancer. “Madison, could you let her down? It’s going to be difficult to have a conversation with her while she’s playing the part of human Ferris wheel.”
“Of course, Ms. Hamilton,” she said, running her hand along the padded edge of the wheel to brake it.
Gwen came to a stop, her face flushed, bits of her straight blond hair stuck in her mouth, panting and giggling. “Whew! Oh my goodness I’m dizzy.” Her wrists and ankles were secured to the spinning rack with heavy leather cuffs, lined with fleecy lambswool like you find in shearling bedroom slippers. “Ricki, you have to try this thing.”
I suspected it wasn’t as comfortable as bedroom slippers. “We have more important things to do right now. Besides, I think you’ve adequately tested it.”
She giggled as Madison undid the buckles at her wrists. Gwen was in a polo shirt and khaki shorts, which made her look like she should be testing golf clubs, not gothic torture devices. “This is definitely ready for Saturday.”
“Getting dizzy is a fetish now?”
“No, silly. That was just us having fun. It’s much more likely they’ll be strapped in the other direction,”—facing the wheel instead of facing the room, she meant—“and be flogged or whatever.”
Or whatever. Sakura was right. I had known about the existence of the dungeon and of BDSM for years but I had always shied away from learning the details. “Well, I’m glad it’s … adequate. What else do we need to check over down here?”
She stepped into her shoes and smoothed back her hair. “Madison and I were waiting for you before we checked the other rooms.”
“Great. Lead on.”
To my surprise Gwen turned to Madison and said, “Maddie, could you go upstairs for a while? I need some alone time with my big sister.”
“Of course. Ping me when you need me.” She handed a clipboard to Gwen, gave a little curtsy, and walked away. A few moments later I heard the beep of the main security door at the top of the stairs opening and closing.
“Are you training them to do that?” I asked.
“To do what?”
“Curtsy?”
“Oh tsk.” Gwen waved her hand. “That’s just Maddie playing around.”
“Okay, whatev
er.” Managing the club’s hosts and hostesses was Gwen’s job. Apparently her management style was pretty blunt. I probably would have said something like My sister and I can handle this. Why don’t you get a cup of coffee? and expected her to get the hint.
We stepped into a side room that had a four-poster bed in it, with not-so-subtle leather straps hanging from the posts. Gwen checked the drawer of the nightstand for safe sex supplies.
“Pooh, there are only latex gloves in here.”
“There’s a whole box of condoms on the bar,” I pointed out.
“That’s not what I mean.” She pulled the drawer open wider. “We’ve got condoms, lube, wipes, everything but nitrile gloves. For the people allergic to latex.”
“We have members allergic to latex?”
“Well, no, but we might in the near future, so I’m making sure we have the right supplies. Oh, here they are.” She dug a sealed plastic bag of purple gloves out from the back of the drawer and tucked them into the front. “Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“So I gathered.”
As she pulled on the straps attached to each post, she said, “I wanted to tell you right away about this. Schmitt’s trying to convince me we should let him run the club, and he said you’d go along with it.”
I tried to keep my annoyance in check, but honestly, did he really believe he could play us off each other? No wonder he wanted to talk to us separately. “What an utter rat. He tried to convince me of the same thing, and I brushed him off.”
“I get the feeling he’s been the one really running things for a couple of years now,” Gwen said, pulling herself up like a gymnast on the crossbar between the rear posts. “So he’s probably not happy with us taking over.”
“Well, tough cookies,” I said.
She laughed as she landed lightly on the carpeted floor. “I thought you didn’t like the idea of running this club.”
“I don’t! That doesn’t mean I want Schmitt running it, though!”
“Okayyyy …”
“He’s got to be the one who invited Grant to the party without checking with me.”
“Oh, well, that’s no good. No good at all.” She led me to the next room, the spanking specialty room. A padded spanking bench stood in the center of the room and the wall was hung with paddles of many sizes and shapes. “I thought you were vaguely interested in him, though?”
“Not anymore,” I said. “That was Schmitt’s justification for it, though. I think he thought I wanted to cozy up to Grant and therefore it must be okay to invite him.”
Gwen grimaced. “Well, for what it’s worth, there were people in the club Grandpa didn’t particularly care for.”
“But he couldn’t kick them out or they’d rat out the whole group,” I said. “We can’t un-invite Grant now that he knows. This is why I want control of membership! This is too important, and it’s not Schmitt who will be dragged infamously through the papers forever if the secret gets out.”
“Oh, I agree,” Gwen said, riffling through the drawer of the dresser in the room. “Bandage scissors, flashlight … Yep, this one’s good.”
We moved on to the next room, which was the most dungeon-like of all the themed rooms, by which I mean it was set up like something from the Inquisition, complete with wall sconces that looked like flaming torches and iron manacles built into the walls. For all I knew it had been decorated by a set designer from the studio. The floor was a few steps down from the doorway, and the ceiling was arched like something from an underground catacomb. I had heard stories that a famous actor who had been good with a bullwhip liked this room the best because there was room to swing a whip in it.
I wondered what Axel thought of whips. I quickly quashed that thought. Sakura had convinced me Axel hadn’t done anything wrong, so I figured now I really didn’t have to call him. Now I just had to try to forget him. The sudden tightening of my stomach, the crinkle of my nipples, every time “Kidnap My Heart” came on the radio—that would go away after a while, wouldn’t it?
Gwen flicked on the theatrical lighting first. Unaffected by the dramatic setting, she then found the switch for the main lights and brought them up full to make it easier to see what was in the supply drawer. She handed me the clipboard. “Here, be useful. Check off each thing as I find it.”
I looked over the full list of safety supplies found in each room, and checked them off as Gwen confirmed they were there. This room was missing the spray bottle of antiseptic and I noted it.
“So what are we going to do with Schmitt?” I asked, trying to keep my mind on the concrete problems at hand.
“Let’s have him come by early for an executive session before the party and tell him in no uncertain terms he is not to invite people to the club without our okay first. Which brings me to my next thing I want to talk to you about: orientation.”
“Orientation? Like for new college students?”
“Exactly. You know we need new members. Once we get some, we’re going to need a curriculum to introduce them to not only the rules of the club but, you know, how it all works.”
“How what all works?”
“Oh, you know, what happens when they want to bring someone they met? And do they have to get trained on how to use the torture rack? That kind of thing.”
“Do they have to get trained on the torture rack?” I tried to picture which thing that was—probably the one with all the ropes on it next to the spinning wheel.
“No, no, they don’t. It’s really easy and has safety releases built into it, just like the ones on the Catherine Wheel. Well, okay, they should be shown where the release switches are, but that’s it.”
So that’s what it was called. “Okay, if it’s so easy, then why do we need an orientation curriculum?”
“If we don’t develop one, right now the alternative is Schmitt tells them everything.”
“Oh.” We moved into a room that looked more like a standard bedroom, except for the attachment points on the bed frame. I sat on the edge of the bed. “Schmitt is a royal pain in the ass no matter what he does.”
“I agree. He’s the common denominator among everyone in the club now, not Grandpa. I think for the last ten years or so he’s really been the one doing all the inviting and vetting.”
“Which explains why it’s all older mid-level executives who owe him favors,” I said. “Okay, fine, curriculum. How are you going to write it if we’re never supposed to write anything incriminating down?”
She clucked her tongue and checked the drawer. “Condoms, lube, both kinds of gloves, flashlight, safety scissors … I’ll keep it encrypted on my laptop. Don’t worry about that.”
“Still seems like a whole lot of trouble to go through just so some guys from the executive suites can slap women around.”
“Ugh, drop that attitude, Rick’,” Gwen said with a sigh. “Now that we’re in charge we’re going to change that. Safety is so important. And there are dominant women, too, you know!”
“Like Sakura. I know, I know.” Thinking about bondage safety lessons made my head throb, though, and not in a pleasurable way. “I was only kidding, Gwen.”
“But you weren’t. Seriously, Ricki, the club doesn’t have to be a burden and it doesn’t have to be just a playground for the entitled libidos of the older generation. But if we want it to be something better, we have to change it ourselves.”
“Okay, okay! You’re right.” It was starting to upset me how she seemed so comfortable with it all and I was very definitely not. I didn’t want to have to study bondage techniques. I preferred to be on a need-to-know basis. But safety—I could get behind the whole safety idea. Speaking of which, there was a coil of rope hanging on a hook on the wall. “Is it safe to leave this lying out like this?”
Gwen opened the cabinet and hung the rope on a hook inside the door. “So, you’re supposed to be in charge of membership. What are you going to do to recruit new people?”
“Ah.” I honestly had no idea.
It wasn’t like I could put up a Craigslist ad. I followed her to the next room. “There’s no reason you can’t recruit people, too, obviously.”
“Well, I wanted to check with you first before I made any overtures to anyone. You should ask Sakura if there’s anyone she would recommend, too. She’s in the know, I’m sure.”
I nodded, but in the back of my mind I was thinking that I already knew who Sakura wanted to recruit and my answer was a definite “no” on Axel. If I was going to forget him, having him at the orgy in my basement once a month was really not a good plan. I still wasn’t totally clear what went on at these parties exactly but anything I could imagine was already too much.
“Earth to Ricki,” Gwen said. “Are you listening to me?”
No, I’m dreaming of the way his tongue felt after I’d been freshly shaved. “Of course. Look, we need to move carefully when recruiting, though,” I said. “We can’t just go down to the local fetish fashion night at a nightclub and hand out flyers.”
“Of course not. Though speaking of fashion, that fashion show is next week.”
I knew which fashion show she meant. The fundraiser for AWESM. The latest thing I’d heard from Sakura was that she was now going to model in it. “Next week? No. It’s in, like, three weeks.”
Gwen shook her head and took the clipboard from me, marking several things off for herself. “Check your calendar, Rick’. Time flies when you’re having fun.”
If it had only been about AWESM I would have been fine with writing a big check and not showing up at the event. But I’d told Sakura I would be there to support her. I pulled up my schedule on my phone and sure enough, the fashion show was eight days away. There was also a red flag on a date the week following that.
The anniversary of Mom’s death. This was going to be a big one. Twenty years. I wasn’t sure that meant I should reflect on it any more than I usually did. I had been four years old when she died and my standard thing to tell people was that my mother’s death hadn’t defined my life. Truthfully I remembered her absence better than I remembered the woman herself and the memories got more and more faded as time went on. But as I approached the age she had been at the time of the accident, the anniversaries seemed to be growing in significance.
