by SM Johnson
He was shaking his head. “It’s just weird. You’re like, too perfect. Almost as if the hell I went through over the past decade was purely to prepare me for the moment you walked into my office. Except I don’t believe in things like that. You’re too good to be true, and it makes me nervous.”
I wasn’t sure what I was feeling just then. I mean, it was nice to hear Avery admit that what was happening between us wasn’t something to be expected. It was almost funny to hear him say he was nervous, because that was maybe the one thing I wasn’t feeling just now, and that was a relief. I liked Avery so much that I wasn’t nervous about having a boyfriend, even if I’d never be able to read his mind.
Avery would tell me what was on his mind. And if he thought something was bothering me, he’d find a way to pull the details out of my mouth.
I remembered how disconcerting it was when I could see all the world’s connections, and my own connections to the world. It was too big to think about on a daily basis, but if I considered all the tiny details required to get Avery and I to meet at the exact moment we were each ready for the other, well, yeah, it seemed like the universe somehow intervened.
He was staring at me like he was watching me think, and there was an expectant look on his face, as if I could come up with some kind of answer.
And then I found it was true. “If there’s one thing I know well, Avery, it’s how to cope with being nervous. For starters, make sure you remember to breathe.”
An hour later Avery picked through my closet and basically shoved the clothes at me that he wanted me to wear, and then brought me to his bathroom and spiked my hair. He dug through a drawer after that and came up with an eyeliner. When he told me to boost myself up onto the counter, I did, sitting with my back to the mirror. His tongue poked out of his mouth when he concentrated, which made me giggle.
“Stop moving, or I’ll mess up your lines.”
I asked the question without really thinking. “Why are you putting makeup on me, but not yourself?”
The moment the words were out of my mouth, I was sorry because of course he wouldn’t be interested in feminizing himself. And yet, I was still curious about why he was putting makeup on me.
“The barber did it first, remember? And I’ve always liked it on Tristan, so why not?” He stained my lips with some kind of gloss. “Does it bother you?”
I craned my head around to look at myself in the mirror.
There was just the eyeliner, just a hint of soft red on my lips, but I hardly recognized the face staring back at me.
Well, and the haircut, and the fitted shirt with the v-shaped neckline.
And Avery, standing behind me, with that hunger in his eyes.
“I don’t mind,” I said. “Especially when it makes you look at me like that.”
I think neither of us dared to even glance at the bed on our way out, or we might not have made it to the club at all.
It wasn’t much different than last week, except for more familiar and less shocking. I expected the bartender to greet Avery, and wasn’t all that surprised when Tristan approached us right away. “Can I show your boy around, Mr. Phoenix?”
Avery told me in the cab on the way to the club that I could talk if I wanted to, but that I should respectfully ask him for his permission first. And if I didn’t ask, he would assume that I preferred not to speak.
And even though the whole idea of trying to make conversation with Tristan practically made me break out in hives, I thought I should at least try. I didn’t know anyone my age in New York, and Tristan had been so open last week about wanting to be friends. “May I have permission, sir?” Avery leaned toward me and kissed my cheek. “Yes, you may.”
Tristan’s gestured toward the back of the club with an arm covered in black tape. “Bathrooms are that way.” The tape matched his black leather pants, flip-flops, and a harness made of thin black straps that crisscrossed his chest and was connected to a silver collar around his throat.
“Why are your hands like that?” I asked.
He gave me the look, the one that meant I’d said the wrong thing, and countered, “Why weren’t you allowed to talk last week?”
I felt my face flush and my throat get tight. “S-s-sorry.” There was a way to fix it, right? I mean, Avery and I had talked about this. I had to trust other people to take care of themselves, socially. But apparently my question was rude, even here, where pretty much everything was outside normal. There were a lot of dynamics going on around me, and I couldn’t be expected to understand them all, especially since I’d only been here once before. I stewed in my head for the longest moment ever. If my question was rude, then I at least had a responsibility to apologize.
As soon as I decided on that, the tightness in my throat eased. “I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Last week, Avery wanted to come here, and wanted me to come with. I asked him to leave me home because I’m horrible in social situations, and I was sure to embarrass him. So he forbade me to speak. It worked out pretty good.”
Tristan grinned at me, and lifted the back of his forearm to rest against his forehead. He sagged half of his body into a swoon, and said, “Awww, my heart. That’s like, totally the sweetest thing ever. He takes care of you.”
“Yeah. I’m a nervous wreck, but he makes me okay.”
Tristan held up his taped fists. “Doc takes care of me, too.”
I didn’t understand, but I believed him. And I suddenly realized that yeah, we didn’t know each other, so maybe now wasn’t the time for blunt personal questions. I wasn’t brave enough to push the question, either, so I said, “This place is, just wow.”
Tristan grinned and led me toward the bathrooms. “It is, isn’t it? Doc is the manager, so I’m here a lot of the time. Mostly grunt work, cleaning tables, running empties back to the bar, which is all kinds of fun without hands, let me tell you. The club used to be different than this, a lot different. It was owned by a guy named Roman, and was members only all the time. There was a stage where the blue mats are now, and side bars with go-go dancers, which, honestly is a code word for boy strippers. The actual dungeon was in the basement, with pretty much any kind of bondage equipment you could imagine. It was really ‘wow’ then. Well. From what I remember, anyway. I only got to see it like once, because I was underage. I got to work the coat-check a couple of times, though, and Roman… man.” His eyes got real big. “You should have seen him. Muscles, and tattoos, these green-gray eyes that just shot right through you – people still ask for him all the time. He’d get up on that stage with a flogger, and the regulars would swarm it, hands in the air, begging, ‘pick me!’ He was like, the Master of all the masters. Soooo intense.”
I didn’t know what to think, why he was telling me all this, but even as he stopped in front of a door that had an ‘employees’ only sign’ I was sucked into his story. “What happened?”
Tristan shrugged. “I don’t know all the details. He picked Dare, one of the guys you were sitting at the table with last week.”
I remembered Dare – the golden haired man. The one Sunglasses took to the mats. “And?”
“Well. Roman also had a partner, a guy he’d been with a long time. But somehow he fell a little in love with Dare, too, and I dunno after that. Just life, I guess. Jeff, Roman’s partner, was in a bad accident, and he recovered, but what I heard was he left Roman, and Dare left Roman, and then Roman inherited his grandma’s house in Minnesota and just… left.”
“I’m from Minnesota, too!” I said. One second later I noted how sad he made “just…left” sound. I made my voice less excited. “But I don’t think we have clubs like this.”
Tristan recovered from his sudden sadness and laughed so hard I thought for a second he was choking. “Dude. They got clubs like this all over the place. You just ain’t been to the right clubs.”
True enough, and I said so. “I don’t ever go to clubs. Before coming here, wild horses couldn’t had pulled me out of my simple peaceful life a
nd into a club. I read a lot of books. That’s how I met Avery. I’m a slush pile reader, and found a great book. I made sure it got to him, and he called me into the office to thank me or something. I was such a nervous wreck I couldn’t even talk, and he started ordering me around. And we’re boyfriends. I’ve never had a boyfriend before.” I could feel my face flaming, because I sounded young and naïve. And because I somehow managed to say all of that, all at once, which probably wasn’t socially appropriate.
“Sweet, like a love story.” Tristan used both balled fists to manipulate the doorknob and push the ‘employees’ only’ door open. “This used to be the backstage area, but Doc turned it into an aftercare space. When you see people leave the mats and go behind the curtain, they’re coming back here. This is like, stage left, and just past the mats is the door to stage right.”
The room had a couple of floor lamps that gave off a warm glow, and was partitioned by curtains.
“There are four resting places back here.”
“What’s the point of this again? I think someone tried to explain it last week, but I didn’t quite follow.”
“Oh, you’re super new at all this, huh? Well. It’s like… people expend a lot of energy on the mats, right, spanking or getting spanked, flogging or getting flogged, or whatever. Not just physical energy, but emotional, too. And if you’re the one being spanked, you might lose your sense of reality a little bit. So this is a quiet place to recover. It’s what we call aftercare. You come back here with your dominant and he cuddles you and makes sure you’re okay. Gives you some space to come back to the world.”
“Oh! Avery does that. I mean, he never really called it that, but he never sends me back to my own bed after he’s tied me up, either.” He was also the most snuggly then, too, but I didn’t say that out loud.
Tristan laughed, but it wasn’t like he was mean or making fun, it was real. When I looked at him, his eyes were sparkling, and I noticed he had on eyeliner just like I did. And color on his lips. It made him look younger than he probably was. I’d have to check later if makeup made me look younger, too.
“I’m pretty sure Avery wouldn’t be the sort to forget aftercare,” he said.
Aftercare. I liked that this world had purposeful structure. It made it not altogether scary. It meant there were rules to follow, and as it turned out, I’m pretty good at following rules.
By the time Tristan led me back into the club and to the table Avery was sitting at, I felt like I’d found a friend. He’d even told me about his hands, that Doc taped them to ensure he couldn’t do ‘bad things’. He said Doc had put up with his devious ways for a little while, but there came a day when he stopped putting up with it. “I don’t think he knew what to do with me,” Tristan explained. “He liked me, and wanted to keep me around, but I’m a drug addict, and I can’t be trusted.”
“Not ever?” I asked. “Is it so impossible?”
He’d given a rueful sounding sigh. “I’m impossible, honestly. It’s like, once I get the thought in my head, or get the craving, I can’t stop myself. I do weed, meth, pills, even dabble with heroin – anything I can get my hands on. Doc promised to stop me. I accepted his promise, and part of it is this.” He held up his taped fists. “I literally can’t take care of myself. I need him to dress me, feed me, bathe me – I need him for everything. Which is exactly what he wants.”
I couldn’t imagine it. To need help eating, bathing – going to the bathroom! It sounded like an endless string of humiliation.
“You don’t get mad?”
“Well, not as much anymore. When it was all new and the cravings were hella strong, yeah, I got pissed. I screamed at him, I cried. I swung my stupid arms like little baseball bats and broke things.”
I was astonished. What would Avery do if I did something like that?
“What did he do?” I asked, and felt myself holding my breath.
Tristan grinned at me. “What do you think he did? He held me down and spanked me until I apologized and asked him to forgive me.”
I’d sort of had this conversation with Avery, about chewing on myself, and he definitely wouldn’t spank me. “Avery only spanks me when I ask him to. He said if he gives me punishments that I like, then I’ll manipulate him in order to get punished.”
Tristan bumped me with one taped fist. “I think it’s different with me. All my head and all my body just wanted to rip these tape wraps off and escape to the street, do whatever I had to do to get a fix, and I literally couldn’t think about anything else. It’s… not a weakness so much as an obsession. My manipulation was more about escape – escaping the craving, yeah, but even more than that, escaping the inside of my head where I’m a scared little boy convinced no one will ever really love me. I was desperate to get away before I got attached. Because if I cared about Doc, it would hurt when he didn’t want me anymore.”
“That’s a lot of insight.”
Another nudge from Tristan’s taped arm. “Two months of helplessness and therapy gives a person insight.”
I supposed that was true, because just a few days with Avery helped me in more ways than I could count. Like this conversation, how I’d been able to spend a full half an hour talking with Tristan like it was easy.
chapter twenty-one
knowing the rules can be helpful
Avery was at a table with the same three friends as last week, and looked happy to see me when Tristan delivered me and scurried back to see what task Doc had for him next. “You look relaxed,” Avery said. “Did you get on well with Tristan?”
Did I? I guess I did. “Permission to speak, sir?” I didn’t forget. I’m good with rules.
“Of course.”
“He told me about this place. How there used to be a stage, and dancing boys, and Roman.”
“What did he say about Roman?” The question came from Dare, and too late, I remembered Tristan had also mentioned something about Dare and Roman.
“He said Roman was intense.”
“He still is,” Dare said, but then quickly looked away, as if he shouldn’t have said anything at all. He stared at the table, drawing lines with his fingers through the water spots left from the ice-filled glasses. “Even over the phone, he’s intense.”
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to respond to that, or what. Maybe say I’m sorry they broke up? But I didn’t know them, and Dare was with new boyfriends, Sunglasses and Zach. From an outsider perspective I didn’t notice any uncomfortable tension between the three of them, but what would I know about that?
Sunglasses took Dare’s face in his hands and pulled him in close enough to kiss. I turned my head toward Avery, certain I shouldn’t watch this, like I was a kid and this movie was rated R. “I think they’re all pretty comfortable with this topic,” Avery said. “Having a well-respected member of the community who presents well, plays safe, and provides good aftercare sometimes gets incestuous. Especially when that person owns the best dungeon in town. Seems like everybody has had some experience or another with him.”
“True that,” Sunglasses said. “He’s an intense Top, and also an intense bottom.”
I didn’t even know what that meant, but Avery exploded into that adorable full-body laugh, head tilted, mouth open, which made me laugh, too. “I heard that rumor, of course.”
“All true,” Sunglasses said. “And then I took his boy.” He pressed his lips against the side of Dare’s face, just below his ear.
Dare rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t like that, Thomas, and you know it.”
“That’s ‘sir’ to you, boy.”
Everybody laughed then, except me, because I was busy remembering that Sunglasses had a name. And even though Avery had obviously been trying to explain something, I didn’t really understand. Had he been trying to say that everybody at this table, or everybody in this club, had had sex with Roman at some point in the past? And they were all okay with that?
“That Roman dude sure gets around,” I whispered to Avery, and that j
ust made him laugh again.
More drinks were ordered. Zach told Avery that his meeting with the board of nursing seemed to go well, and he was expecting a letter that would reassure him that his nursing license was intact. “It’s weird, though,” Zach said. “A friend of a friend is looking for help in his veterinary clinic, and I’m thinking about it. I loved being a nurse, but even though the board of nursing cleared me of wrong-doing, I still kind of worry that I did something wrong. It’s got me feeling skittish about hospitals and how paranoid they are about liability.”
“Zach nursed any injured or abandoned creature he came across when he was a kid,” Dare offered. “I think he’d be great at working with animals. Maybe even happier.”
“Yeah, but most people would think I was insane. The pay isn’t remotely comparable.”
“But the hours are better, precioso. Te quiero en casa más. I want you home where I can play with you.”
Thomas’s Spanish came out somewhere between a murmur and a growl, and he sounded so, well, sexual, I guess is the word – that I pretty much couldn’t look at him again. Maybe not ever, in case he noticed that I noticed.
I sipped my cocktail that was mostly water, and let the conversation ebb and flow around me, not feeling at all pressured to participate, but finding myself surprisingly content in this social situation. These people were pleasant and direct, and I found them almost easy to be with. I’d even answered Dare’s question about Roman without stuttering.
Was Avery fixing me?
No one at our table went to the blue mats, but at one point I looked up to see Doc positioning Tristan in front of one of the posts. We were at a table further away from the mats than last week, so while I could tell Doc was talking, I couldn’t make out the words. Tristan stared at the floor, head down and shoulders slumped, as if he’d done something wrong and he knew it. One of his arm bandages was unwound nearly to the wrist, the loose end flapping next to his knee. Doc said something else, and Tristan flinched, but stood still as Doc peeled the leather pants off him, leaving him naked from the waist down. Tristan was still wearing the harness made of leather straps on his upper body, and even with his back to me, the contrast between naked and leather made my stomach clench. Doc showed Tristan a white piece of paper, and Tristan nodded, shuffling closer to the post. I felt sorry for Tristan the moment Doc held the piece of paper against the post and Tristan leaned forward to press his nose against it.
