The Darker Side of Love (A Dark Erotica Boxed Set)

by Tara Crescent

  But it started to go downhill after that. I’d done nothing with women. I’d never licked pussy. I’d never been tied up. I’d been spanked by men before but I’d never been whipped. I’d never been caned. Electricity terrified me. Each negative response was met with a frown that got larger and larger as the list of things I’d never tried grew.

  Finally, she pushed the paper away from her, and looked at me. “Kelly,” her eyes searched mine, “you might be a little too innocent for our club.”

  I coughed into my coffee. I hadn’t been called innocent in a very long time. “It’s just lack of opportunity,” I tried to explain. “I mean, if I’m going to let someone tie me up and whip me, I should trust them, right?”

  She said nothing. I could see that she was thinking about what to do with me. I wanted to plead my case, but I kept silent while she deliberated. The list of sexual experiences she’d rattled off had aroused me and the idea of being able to do all of this — safely — was very captivating.

  “What do you want?” she asked me. “What are your fantasies?”

  Heat rose in my cheeks. I was already a little turned on. My core had wound into a tight ball as she’d made her way systematically down her list. “I want to get used,” I whispered. It seemed so wrong to admit that most secret desire.

  “Rape fantasies?” Her voice was shockingly matter-of-fact.

  I flushed in shame. “Not exactly,” I mumbled. “I want to be treated like a sexual object.”

  She noted it down without comment. “Okay,” she said finally. “Let’s give it a shot. But you are a neophyte. You will need a Watcher.”

  A shiver ran up my spine at those words, but at that moment I didn’t understand why. I would only understand much, much later. When it was almost too late, my mind would travel back on the paths I’d taken and I’d come to this point where the road forked. This moment. This point in time when, in the dark recesses of my innermost soul, a switch was flipped.

  The top starts spinning.

  “What’s a Watcher?”

  “When the club believes,” she started, “that you might be unable to make informed decisions in the heat of the experience, we assign you a Watcher. He or she will act as an extra level of protection and make sure you are in the right mental state to safe word if necessary.”

  Goose bumps rose on my skin. “Why would I not invoke my safe word?” I didn’t understand. Surely, even if I was gagged, there’s be some way to ensure I could signal a break or a stop?

  “At its best, submission is like a warm blanket that nourishes your soul,” she replied, not meeting my eyes. “At its worst, it is a pit of despair that you fall down. Sometimes the pit is so deep that you can’t climb out.”

  My hands were cold and clammy. The solemn way that she’d said the words, her sudden, stilted manner, both were very much at odds with her earlier relaxation. What she was saying was serious. Real.

  “Does the Watcher keep this from happening?”

  “The Watcher is a lifeline. It is always up to you to decide if you want to seize it.” She gave me a steady look. “Tonight,” she said. “Nine in the evening. Mr. St. Clair will bring you. Does that work?”

  “That soon?”

  “You are in Akron next weekend, are you not?”

  I nodded. In sixteen hours, she knew my travel schedule. Or perhaps Miles had just told her. “Tonight,” I whispered in confirmation. Miles was going to take me to the sex club. I gulped and I rubbed my arms, trying to warm myself from the sudden chill. I took another sip of coffee and let the heat of the beverage permeate through. “That works.”

  The top keeps spinning.

  We discussed safety. It would have been remiss not to. I was given the business card of a doctor and ordered to go get tested as soon as possible. “For tonight,” she said, “if sexual contact does happen, it will be with protection, of course.”

  “Does sexual contact happen without protection sometimes?”

  “If you’d like,” she responded. “There’s a subset of members that do not have unprotected sex at all outside the club so that they can indulge inside the club.” She looked disapproving of this behaviour and I had to agree with her. I was as pro-sex as the next person, but I was not stupid about my health. I’d just finished watching a sobering documentary about Henry the Eighth and untreated syphilis. Granted I didn’t live in the sixteenth century, but I didn’t see the point of taking any risks.

  Finally Anna signaled for the check. I reached for my wallet, but she waved me away. “I get to expense it,” she pointed out. “Perks of the job. Now, go to the doctor as quickly as you can and good luck tonight.”

  “Will you be there?”

  She nodded. “You won’t see me though. There will just be the participants and the Watcher.”

  Once she’d left, I stayed at that booth for a long time, staring into my coffee cup, wondering what I’d just signed up for. The man’s voice from my dream echoed in my ears. Dream of oblivion, my pet.

  Chapter 3

  Anna hadn’t told me how much or how little to wear, so I played it safe and reached for a basic black dress. I had made it two years ago, but still wore it as often as I could. Silk dupioni, with a scooped neck, a nipped in waist and just shy of my knee; it had an updated-vintage feel about it. I wound a long string of fake pearls around my neck and wore my hair in a low knot on the back of my neck.

  Everything in fashion was about a look. Mine conveyed a low-key sexiness that tended to be my default. I’d been a lot more ‘look at me’ when I was in high school in Akron. But then I’d been rebelling against the confines of a small town, aching to move to a big city and to experience everything it had to offer. After a few years in New York working in the fashion industry, where practically every person screamed ‘look at me’, I’d become more relaxed about the way I dressed. Not sloppily, because I still cared deeply about clothes. Rather, as I grew older, I became more confident in myself and it showed in my choice of outfits.

  Or it had, until the cares of my mother’s illness drove all of those trivialities to the back of my mind. Nowadays I dressed on auto-pilot.

  Miles had texted me to tell me he’d pick me up at seven. Exactly at seven I heard a knock. “Hi,” I said, opening the door, only to be shocked into momentary silence. I’d seen Miles in a suit plenty of times and was more or less immune to the ‘guy in a suit’ thing. But tonight, Miles wore a black short-sleeve t-shirt and dark denim jeans and he looked smoking hot.

  “Am I overdressed?” I asked him in an effort to distract myself from openly ogling him.

  His eyes took a slow sweep over my body and as he surveyed me I felt myself flush. Miles had always been good-looking, but I’d gotten out of the habit of noticing his appearance. Tonight my entire body reminded me that I was suddenly very aware of him.

  “You look good,” he said. He flashed me a wicked, toe-curling grin. “Somehow I doubt the dress will stay on very long, in any case.”

  On some level I still couldn’t believe Miles belonged to a sex club. I had a hundred questions I wanted to ask him but I was also feeling unexpectedly shy and insecure. I had assessed Miles and had found him wanting. I had assumed he was bland and boring and more interested in being the powerful corporate CEO than in surrendering to his hedonistic urges. Now I was being forced to re-evaluate and I didn’t know how to talk to him.

  I settled for politeness. “Want a drink?” I asked but he shook his head.

  “Let’s grab one in the car.” He gestured to the door. I grabbed my tiny beaded purse and followed him out.

  The limo driver held the door open for me as I got in. I flushed slightly as I met the man’s gaze. Maybe deep down inside I was still a girl from Akron, Ohio, with the accompanying small-town morals. I wondered if Miles’s driver knew that I was going to a sex club to get worked over and if he thought I was a slut. My reaction wasn’t logical — it was New York and no one cared. In the anonymity of a big city I could do whatever I wanted without
judgment.

  “You look a little nervous,” Miles remarked as he got into the car. Though the dress had ridden up my legs, his green eyes stayed on my face.

  “I feel like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole,” I replied honestly. That wasn’t the only way I felt, but talking about the logistics of the sex club was easier than figuring out why I felt turmoil around Miles. When he’d surveyed my dress before pronouncing judgment, my sex had clenched painfully at his assessment. It was so clichéd, yet so primal. He was a man; I was a woman and my body was very aware of the contrast between my softness and his steel.

  There’d been plenty of men in the years since my mother had been diagnosed and I’d become aware of the genetic time bomb ticking away inside of me. But there’d been none that affected me. This seething mass of churning emotion was a very unfamiliar feeling.

  He reached for the side console and poured me a drink. “In that case, drink me,” he quipped as he handed me the glass.

  It was just club soda and wasn’t going to take the edge off my nerves. I took a deep breath and tried to relax. But my palms felt cold and clammy despite the warm summer evening and I shivered as I took a sip.

  Would Miles answer my questions? I wanted to know what his path was; why he hid who he was under a mask of perfect blandness. His words from yesterday echoed through my head. “Once you take a step on this path, you might not want to return.” I told myself that Miles was just being protective, exaggerating the dangers of the sex club for me so that I would be too afraid to make the move and call the club.

  “Why did you give me the business card yesterday?” My voice came out too loud in the quiet of the car. I glanced at the partition between the passenger seats and the driver, but it was raised. The driver couldn’t hear our conversation.

  We were moving through the streets of Manhattan, the car inching through traffic. Outside it was daylight and people settled into outdoor patios to fill themselves with food and drink. The weather didn’t fit my mood. It should have been the dark of night; there should have been lightning flashing in the sky and the sounds of crashing thunder. My heart thudded in my chest. I felt like I was walking through an archway and there would be no going back.

  His voice was much lower than mine. “I faced a choice,” he replied after a few moments of silence. “And a realization.” His eyes were on my swell of cleavage. “You are no longer the little girl who trailed around after me in Akron. Somewhere, in those intervening years, you grew up.”

  He sipped at his own drink, staring into the cut glass crystal as if there was a message there for him. When he didn’t speak and explain further, I asked him another question. “Should I be nervous about tonight?”

  My question was met with one of his own. “Do you watch porn, Kelly?”

  I tried to hide my surprise at his question. “Do you?” I shot back. “I can’t see that. But of course I do. It’s a myth that women don’t watch porn.”

  When he replied, his voice had a thread of sarcasm running through it. “As amusing as it is to indulge your astonishingly incorrect assumptions about my life, yes. On occasion, I do watch some porn.” I opened my mouth to ask him what the point of his line of questioning was, but he lifted his hand to silence me. “Since you do watch porn, let me answer your question about Club Phoenix by drawing a parallel with internet porn.”

  “This ought to be interesting,” I commented and his eyes flashed at me dangerously. I shivered instinctively. I would have liked to pretend it was fear that made me tremble but it wasn’t. It was the anticipation of peeling the layers back and exposing Miles’ secret darkness. It was the head-rush that came with placing yourself in the path of oncoming danger and refusing to flinch away from it.

  “When I first started watching BDSM porn,” he said, his voice level, “the sight of a woman’s tears were abhorrent to me. In a real-life session, I’m there to monitor a submissive’s well-being and I can judge whether the tears are troubling, or they are just the visible effects of surrendering control. But on the Internet? I couldn’t tell if there was something more sinister going on. I couldn’t tell if the girls were being forced. Since I couldn’t judge whether a session was safe, sane and consensual, I couldn’t derive any real enjoyment from watching it.”

  “And now?”

  “If you watch more and more porn,” he said, his eyes troubled, “it all becomes old-hat to you. A woman choking on a man’s dick, while a line of impatient men wait for her to service them? No big deal. Been done a thousand times before. When she cries as her asshole is being torn open by a cock, you assume it’s all staged. Nothing is real. No one is human. It all loses its power to shock you.” He gazed at me steadily. “Some things should still have the power to shock, Kelly. It’s too easy to become blasé about sex. It’s not good to strip out the intimacy from the act and just make it about lust. I’ve seen it happen. You start just going through the motions and the result is indifference and numbness.”

  I considered his words, but I thought he was being too dire with his warnings. This was just Miles playing the protector, probably regretting giving me the business card. I didn’t want to listen to his cautionary tales. I wanted to dive into the deep end of the pool. “That’s not going to happen to me,” I said confidently. I liked sex too much to ever be indifferent or numb about it.

  He surveyed me silently. If he disagreed, he didn’t contradict me.

  “Tell me why you hide who you are, Miles.”

  “I have to,” he responded. “Too many people work for me. I won’t gamble with people’s lives. As long as I’m the CEO and the public face of St. Clair Biotech, I will play the role. There will be no scandal. I am responsible for more than myself.”

  I thought of my mother in the nursing home in Akron, of the bi-weekly trips back home to make sure she was as happy and healthy as she could be, though she stared at me blankly and wondered who I was. I thought of the constant, low-level heartache as everything that made her my mother slowly disappeared and a stranger was left. Each time I visited, it was like I was carving another slice of my heart open, yet week after week I flew home. I understood too well what it meant to be responsible for someone other than myself.

  His words hadn’t intended to wound; I could tell that. He’d answered the question I had asked honestly. But yet, they had hurt me and I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. Suddenly aware of the way our thighs were almost touching, I inched away from him and curled up against the side of the car.

  When he wasn’t trying to conceal his emotions, he was fairly easy to read. I watched him wonder what he’d said that caused me to draw away and then I watched the awareness of what he had thoughtlessly implied come to the fore. He shook his head in denial before he closed his eyes for one long second. When he opened them there was a look of apology in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to imply…”

  “I know,” I responded. It wasn’t his fault that his words had hit too close to home.

  We each retreated into ourselves and we sought refuge in silence.

  Chapter 4

  Once the car had made it outside the city, our speed picked up. “Where are we going?” I asked Miles after about an hour, breaking the silence that had fallen.

  “West,” he replied. “A little north of Allentown.”

  “We are going to Pennsylvania? I’d have thought a billionaire sex club would be in the Hamptons or something.”

  He laughed. “Club Phoenix has a rather large estate attached to it,” he responded. “There’s not enough room in the Hamptons for us. Besides, where the club is located, the catchment area consists of Philadelphia, Washington and even Pittsburgh.”

  “How often do you go?”

  “It depends on what else I have going on in my life,” he replied with an irritating lack of detail. “We’ll be there soon.”

  “Do you drive all the time?”

  He shook his head. “It’s usually fastest to
fly.”

  My anger over his unintended insult had faded, but my curiosity still burned brightly. “Is everything in the sex club BDSM themed? Are you a Dominant?”

  The roads were empty of traffic and the car ate up the miles with ease. Dusk was starting to fall and the rolling hills looked lush, green and peaceful. I’d never driven this way. Like most people in New York, I didn’t own a car. The few times I rented one, it was to go home and Allentown wasn’t on my way. But highways in America had a drab uniformity about them. Every thirty miles, signs screamed food and fuelling options and a tiny cluster of tightly packed houses appeared, only to disappear just as quickly in the rear view mirror.

  Miles chuckled to himself. “You can be whatever you want to be once you are a fully qualified member,” he replied, “but everyone starts out as a submissive unless they were referred by another club.”

  I couldn’t see Miles as a Dominant, but I really couldn’t see him as a submissive either. My eyebrows arched. “You have to be kidding.”

  His lips twitched and his eyes danced with merriment. “You have to learn to take it before you can dish it out, Kelly.”

  I considered that statement in silence, wishing that I had had a little more time to get prepared for tonight. I knew the basics of dominance and submission of course. I knew about the concepts of safe words. But that was all I knew. Then again, if I had had a lot of time to think, maybe I would have chickened out of the entire experience.

  “So there aren’t any parties where scantily clad women are groped by well-dressed men?”

  “Not during your qualification period,” he replied. “You won’t meet anyone except the people involved in that evening’s activity.”

  Activity. That word sounded so harmless and so innocent. But we were about to walk into the dark sea of desire and one misstep could leave me floundering, or worse, drowning. The vague sense of unease that had permeated my nightmares from last night returned with a vengeance. “Anna said I’d have a Watcher.”