by Laura Kaye
Jamie frowned. He absolutely had gotten off on the pain tonight. There was no denying that. But still… “No. I’ve just never associated myself with being a masochist.”
Jer’s eyebrows rose to his hairline. “For real?” When Jamie only shrugged, the guy continued. “Well, hell, dude. Maybe you should look into it. Could be fun.” He made a face full of innuendo and waggled his brows.
Goosebumps raced down Jamie’s back, and his heart kicked up in his chest. “Look into it how?” he asked, and then he shook his head. “Is it weird we’re having this conversation?”
Jeremy laughed. “Dude, I have no self-consciousness, trust me. Baltimore has a pretty big kink and fetish community. There are discussion boards you could look into, and there’s even a club…” His expression went thoughtful and distant.
“What?” Jamie asked, needing Jer to finish that thought. Because it felt like he was on the precipice of something important here.
“There’s this club called Blasphemy. I have a friend who belongs. One of the co-owners, actually.” Jer nailed him with a stare. “I could put you two in touch and you could see if it interests you.”
Blasphemy. Exactly what kind of club was it? Jamie didn’t know, but he was sure as hell curious to find out. “Uh, yeah. Yes. That sounds…good,” he managed. Jer already had Jamie’s cell number, of course, but he took down his email address, too.
And then all Jamie could do was wait. And wonder. And hope that Jeremy’s mystery friend called and told him what this Blasphemy place was all about.
Three
Jamie walked into his townhouse, made directly for his office, and booted up his laptop. And then he typed exactly one word into the search bar.
Masochist
The search engine helpfully highlighted a definition right at the top.
A person who derives sexual gratification from their own pain or humiliation.
Jamie’s pulse kicked up and heat roared over his body, making him realize he hadn’t taken off his coat. He ripped it off and dropped it to the dark floor beside his chair.
His gaze scanned down.
Masochism: The condition in which sexual or other gratification depends on one’s suffering physical pain or degradation that is self-imposed or imposed by others.
Jamie swallowed hard and sat back heavily in the big leather chair.
Which was when he realized his dick was rock hard.
Jesus Christ.
Was this…could this be…was this why he always felt so distant when he was having sex? Because he’d been needing something more without being aware of what it was?
And all this time…could it really have been pain he’d been missing?
Pain and degradation, a little voice in his brain whispered.
He stared at the laptop for a long moment, and this his own voice broke the silence. “This is fucking nuts.”
Wasn’t it? Except then he remembered the dark, twisted images he sometimes latched onto to get himself there during sex…
Jamie adjusted himself—because nuts or not, his erection wasn’t going away—and then he typed the name of a porn site into the search bar. A dozen movie previews played showing people engaged in various explicit acts—just none doing quite what he wanted to see. So he searched for masochist again.
A new screen of thumbnails popped up, with preview after preview showing dominant men tormenting women with various kinds of rough sex. Spanking, flogging, electroshocking, orgasm denial, clothes pins and nipple clamps, and so much more…
He watched snippets of them all, definitely intrigued, clearly still aroused, but not yet connecting.
Because the recipients of the pain were all women. His fingers flew over the keyboard again.
Masochist men.
The new search term brought an entirely different array of movies—this time, all the men were on the receiving end and the more dominant partners were women. Some with a rough, aggressive touch, some with a more teasing approach, and yet others more motivated by dishing out humiliation than pain.
Jamie shifted in his seat, and finally gave in to unzipping his jeans. Because the more he looked, and the more he thought about this—really thought about it—the harder he got. And as he watched parts of one video, then another, he found himself thinking back over his relationships.
Unquestionably, he’d always dated strong women, most of whom he’d met either through his engineering program, law school, or his work as a patent lawyer. Like Liz, a copyright lawyer at another firm he’d met through mutual friends, the women he’d been with were smart, professional, and ambitious. And he’d like that about them. In the bedroom, however, it was clear more often than not that they’d wanted him to take charge…and he hadn’t questioned it.
He stared at the video playing before him, of a man tied down to a bench seat while a woman jerked him off—to just before the point of orgasm. And then she’d back off, leaving the man moaning and writhing in frustration and pain. A pain she ratcheted up by jerking him off again, focusing only on the tip. Or by squeezing him hard at the base of his erection while tapping with more than a little force against balls held tight within a cock ring. She brought him to the brink of orgasm again and again. Applying hard slaps against the insides of his thighs when the man seemed to need help holding back. And when he finally lost it, the orgasm was epic, wringing every one of the man’s muscles, coating his chest with a massive come shot, and leaving him limp and panting—and then nearly crying when the woman took pleasure in stroking his now spent and painfully over-sensitive dick.
Jamie had watched the whole thing with bated breath, and finally had to take his own cock in hand. The guttural moan that ripped out of him as he stroked himself revealed the depth of his arousal. And his body lurched far too close to orgasm way too fast. So Jamie squeezed himself tight, cutting off the urge with a pinching pain that make him suck in a breath through his teeth.
And damn if that didn’t provide its own kind of arousal.
“Fuck,” he rasped. He didn’t want to come yet. He wanted to see more. Explore more. Consider more. If this was really him. And, if so, what he intended to do about it.
Breathing harder, he navigated back out to the other movies, where a pattern quickly became obvious. The men in these videos weren’t just masochists, they were also submissives. And the women weren’t just aggressive or into rough sex, they were more often than not Mistresses within the context of BDSM.
Did masochists also have to be submissives? Watching a few more movies led Jamie to believe that, on some level, the answer was yes. Because they were submitting to the treatment that delivered the pain and humiliation.
Which of course made him wonder, am I submissive?
Shit, he really didn’t know.
But what he did know was that, as aroused as he was, he’d lost some of the connection he’d felt during the handjob videos once the videos focused more on the women fucking the men. It almost felt like someone had turned down the heat. But as he watched one woman ride a man she’d tied down and gagged, and then another fuck a guy’s ass with a strap-on dildo, Jamie’s arousal definitely became less urgent.
What was working for him? And what wasn’t?
God, he could barely believe he was thinking through this as methodically as he might one of his patent cases. Trying to understand the evolution of an idea into an invention. Analyzing how and why a machine worked. Considering what rules and laws applied—and which didn’t.
Seeing men on the receiving end of the pain had been hotter for him than when it was women.
So…maybe seeing men on both sides of the equation would be hotter, too?
The question gave him pause, especially as he remembered his surprising reaction to Jeremy earlier. Could he really be pushing thirty and just learning that it was possible for him to be turned on by men, too? Although, if he was just figuring out the masochist part, how was that any different from realizing he might be…what? Bi? Bi-curious, at the very lea
st? Granted, he’d spent most of his twenties buckled down pursuing multiple graduate degrees and clerkships, and, more recently, pulling sixty- and seventy-hour weeks as a new associate at his law firm. And amid the busy-ness of everyday life, he’d never before had any reason to question his heterosexuality. Although maybe he should’ve, given how often his relationships had gone down in flames.
Still, it all left him feeling like he was arriving late to the party of his own sexuality. For fuck’s sake.
No more questioning it. It was about time to figure this shit out. So he ran the search for gay porn involving rough, painful sex, his heart beating hard against his breastbone as images populated the screen. He scrolled until he found one that looked promising.
“Oh, Jesus fuck…”
Jamie’s jaw fell open and his pulse raced as the scene unfolded. One man unexpectedly overpowered another. Forcibly removed his clothes. Shoved him to his knees. Choked him with his cock, making him learn to take it all. The dubious-consent element lessened as the man on his knees began thanking the other man for the abuse he dished out, both verbal and physical—although, Jamie had to admit, he’d found the part that had pushed the boundary of consent hot as fuck. And wasn’t that something to file away for further consideration?
But it was the dominant man’s roughness, his strength, his size, his ability to manhandle that Jamie found so appealing. God, to experience that… Just imagining it shoved Jamie hard toward the need for release.
By the halfway point of the clip, the submissive man endured weights hanging from his balls, the soft flogging of his straining cock and the much-harder flogging of his ass and back, and hard smacks of black-gloved hands against his pecs.
And Jamie realized he was squeezing his own cock so tight that he was sweating.
This. This worked for him. This worked for him in fucking spades.
All it took was the top flipping the bottom onto his back and shoving his cock deep into the other man’s ass before Jamie absolutely had to jack himself off. Before his need was beyond urgent. Hard pinches of the man’s nipples rushed sensation into Jamie’s balls. But the thing that shoved him over the edge was when the dominant man grabbed hold of the throat of the man beneath him and choked off his air.
“Fuck!” Jamie roared into the emptiness of his office as his body detonated. “Fuckfuckfuck.”
He collapsed back into his chair, unable to care about the mess he’d made. Unable to move.
Unable to make any sense of the fact that a gay sadomasochism porn scene had just made him come harder than he’d ever come in his whole life.
Unable to do anything…except accept that what he’d just watched had turned in a way little else ever had.
And pray that Jeremy’s friend might somehow help Jamie find an opportunity to experience something like this in real life.
“I had an interesting conversation yesterday,” Master Kyler said as he came up to the desk in Blasphemy’s member registration office on Monday evening.
Alex looked up from where he’d been logging into the computer system. “Is this where I’m supposed to ask you what it was?” So, obviously, he was still in a mood. It’d been a shitty weekend, and the misstep with the submissive on Friday night still hung over him like a cloud.
Kyler smirked, not at all put off. “Yeah, motherfucker.”
Okay, that eked a chuckle out of Alex. He stopped what he was doing and asked, “Please tell me about your interesting conversation, Master Kyler.”
Now the guy grinned. “You know, you can be quite accommodating when you put your mind to it.”
“Jesus, Ky,” Alex said, chuffing out a laugh. The one problem with being a hard ass? The people who knew you best and saw through your façade also knew how to push your buttons—and took great pleasure in doing so.
“Okay, okay,” he said, holding up his hands. He swung a chair around and straddled it backwards. “A good friend of mine owns a tattoo shop across town. Has a regular client who’s become a friend and who’s interested in the lifestyle. I had coffee with the prospective this afternoon.”
Alex blinked. “Did we get to the interesting part yet?”
“The guy comes with my friend’s highest personal recommendation and I got a good read off of him. Works as an attorney. And he’s a masochist. Completely untrained, of course, but eager as fuck.” Kyler arched an excited brow over those bright blue eyes.
Groaning, Alex shook his head. “I don’t do newbies.” It wasn’t the ignorance of D/s protocol that Alex had a problem with, so much as it was how high the physical and psychological stakes were in a S&M scene, let alone a S&M relationship. Errors in protocol could offer some very useful grounds for creative correction. But Alex had had one too many conversations with self-styled masochists who really wanted the façade of sadism they saw Hollywood depict, which usually amounted to no more than garden-variety rough sex.
“I know, I know,” Kyler said, holding up a hand. “And nobody says you have to scene with him. But maybe you could, I don’t know, answer some questions? Show him around? Get him oriented to all this a little? As a favor to me.”
“Sonofabitch. He’s coming here tonight, isn’t he?” Alex said.
Kyler’s smile was one Alex had seen drive women to their knees. But it just made Alex want to punch something. “Told him to come around nine thirty.”
Perfectly timed for Alex to be the one to in-process him before his shift at the registration desk ended. He gave Kyler a well-practiced stern stare, the kind that usually made a submissive drop his or her gaze to the floor.
“You want to beat the shit out of me right now, don’t you?” The guy winked. Fucking winked!
“Desperately,” Alex said.
Ky chuckled, rose, and swung the chair back into place. “Guy’s name is Jamie Fielding. Thanks, man.”
“I think you need a refresher course in consent, Vance,” Alex said, his fingers taking out his frustration on the keyboard.
“You’re a god among men, Master Alex,” Kyler said, walking backward toward the door to the club’s main floor.
“I don’t like you.” Alex kept his gaze on the screen, but he could feel the humor radiating from the other man without looking. And then Kyler slipped into the club, leaving Alex alone to begin his shift at the membership registration desk, where the club processed the paperwork for all members, and issued color-coded and flagged cuffs to all submissives so that their availability and limits were knowable on sight. All of Blasphemy’s Master Dominants took turns running various aspects of the club’s operations, and without question their ownership of the club went way beyond the financial stake each of them had in it.
This place was a community for them. A lifestyle. A family, even.
So, fine, Alex would do Kyler this favor, not to mention his duty to the club, and give the guy a basic orientation. Besides, who better to make sure the man wasn’t in over his head in billing himself as a masochist.
But, beyond that, he was out.
Four
As Jamie stepped from the rear of the public Club Diablo and into the private courtyard that fronted a huge church, he felt like he’d walked through the back of a magical wardrobe and into a fantasy land that he’d never known existed. He never would’ve known this old church building was back here, located as it was behind a big renovated warehouse building, the quirk of some long-ago evolution in the city’s development. Given the emphasis that Kyler—Master Kyler, he needed to get used to saying—had put on confidentiality, no doubt the hidden nature of the location was part of the point.
Jamie’s breath frosted in puffs as it hit the cold December air, but underneath his coat, he was over-warm with anticipation and nervous excitement.
Forcing his feet to move again, he crossed the courtyard toward black double doors situated off to the side. A guard checked for his name on a list, then welcomed him inside.
Beyond the initial entry and waiting rooms, he was led into a registration room where he f
ound a man sitting behind an ornate desk. A man who threw him a look that was momentarily so hard, so almost mean, that his pulse spiked and goosebumps rushed over his skin.
But Jamie must’ve imagined it, because then the man gave him a polite smile as he gestured to the chair opposite the desk. “You must be Jamie Fielding. Welcome to Blasphemy. Please have a seat.”
“Thank you,” Jamie said. He removed his charcoal wool pea coat and sat.
For a long moment, the other man studied him, and Jamie was too curious about everything not to study him right back. He was older than Jamie, had dark hair above even darker eyes, and possessed a face that appeared both distinguished and harsh. He wore a black button down with the sleeves rolled to mid-forearm, revealing a worn soft black leather cuff with an embroidered Gothic ‘M’ on his right wrist. And his gaze was so intense, so piercing, that it made Jamie’s heart beat faster. He almost felt like they were locked in some sort of contest, one that Jamie was losing if the urge to look away—to look down—was any indication.
And then it occurred to Jamie, and he did look down. “Thank you, Sir.” For as much reading as he’d spent the day doing—thanks to Master Kyler’s recommendations after they’d had coffee—Jamie had forgotten the most basic aspect of the protocol here. “I’m sorry, Sir. I’m new. And nervous.” And an idiot, apparently.
“You’re fine, Jamie.” But it did earn him a short, approving nod. “I’m Master Alex, and I’m going to get your provisional membership processed and give you an orientation to the club and its rules,” the man said. “Did you bring the paperwork Master Kyler gave you?”
Nodding, Jamie pulled an envelope from the inside pocket of his coat and handed it over, once again chancing eye contact. “Yes, Sir. Everything’s there.” As a favor to Jeremy, Master Kyler had arranged to sponsor Jamie for a provisional two-week membership. At the end of the provisional period, the head Masters would apparently vote on whether to extend him a regular membership. The only thing that sucked was that Jamie wasn’t going to be able to make use of the whole two-week period given the week he was spending with his parents for Christmas. Still, it was an in that Jamie would’ve never gotten for himself, and he’d have to do something big to pay Jeremy back for having helped pull these strings.
