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

by Tara Crescent

  My hand lingered at the door handle but before I could weaken and press down on it, I pulled it away.

  Miles had knocked on my room door just when the growling in my stomach was growing too insistent to bear. He escorted me downstairs to the full-service restaurant. My mouth fell open as I looked around and he grinned. “It’s a spa, remember?”

  I gawked openly at the spacious space, with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, comfortable dove-grey couches and glass-topped tables. “So the wait staff doesn’t know it’s a sex club as well?”

  He shook his head. “There’s less crossover than you’d think,” he replied.

  We ate breakfast in silence. I was replaying last night’s scene in my head, trying to sort out how I’d felt about it. There were bits I’d liked. I’d liked being cropped and flogged. I’d liked the sternness in Adam’s voice when he told me to behave.

  I hadn’t entirely liked the impersonal nature though. As much as my fantasies centred around being used as a sex toy, when it came down to it I’d been more offended than turned on when Adam had called me a filthy little pig.

  It occurred to me that I should mention this to either Miles or Anna or even Rafael. They’d repeatedly told me that the purpose of my scenes was to figure out what turned me on and what didn’t. My realization was information that I should have shared with them.

  But I didn’t speak. I was unwilling to give up on such a long-held fantasy so quickly. Perhaps I’d be more into it with a different guy.

  On the drive back, I looked at Miles. I’d barely made eye-contact with him all morning. My memories of bottle-green eyes watching me were too startlingly vivid. But Miles had years of experience and I had questions so I pushed aside the thousands of prickling sensations I was feeling when I looked at him and I buried my little shower fantasy. “How do you compartmentalize?”

  He gave me an intent look. Perhaps he’d expected the question from me. It was the obvious thing to ask after all. “More things matter in life than sexual desire,” he responded quietly. “I know that’s not the popular answer in this age of self-expression we live in, where every hedonistic urge is to be indulged at will. Nonetheless, my sexual desires are only one facet of my personality.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “You can like ice cream and fabric, Kelly. Two different facets of you. You can hate putting your face under water and still hate spiders.”

  I smiled a little at that. I’d been seven and an inexperienced swimming instructor at the community centre had thought the way to make me swim was to push me into the deep end of the pool. I’d been terrified and Miles had yelled at the guy before taking me home. It had been so long ago, but to this day I wouldn’t submerge my face in water. Even in the shower I stood with my face outside the stream of water so I didn’t recreate that panicked, out-of-control sensation that I’d felt so long ago in that swimming pool.

  “Doesn’t it feel false to keep it hidden?” I didn’t necessarily want to go around shouting through the streets that I’d been in a sex club and a man had whipped me, but the experience still deserved recognition, not the indifference that Miles was displaying.

  “Do you want to walk up to the grocery store and spill the details of your sex life?” he scoffed. “Of course not. Some things are private.”

  “There’s a difference between privacy and keeping things hidden.”

  He shrugged. “It seems pretty much the same to me,” he replied.

  He did have a point but I was pretty intimidated at how well he could just box away his emotions in a tidy compartment. I didn’t think I could do that.

  “Don’t let it bleed over,” he warned. A variation of the same warning as yesterday. Today though, after experiencing the vivid brushstrokes of last night’s session, I understood the warning a little better. Real life felt a little bit washed out.

  I didn’t want to dwell on the same topic over and over again. “How come Adam didn’t orgasm?” I asked instead.

  Miles laughed. “It’s because of what he does,” he replied. His tone was amused. “Adam is an infectious disease specialist. You haven’t cleared a medical test yet. It would have been incredibly ironic if the two of you had had sex.”

  My mind flashed back to my daydream. As I heard the amused tone in his voice, I realized how out of place my fantasy was. Miles wasn’t interested in me. He sounded almost cavalier at the idea of me having sex with a stranger and I was not stupid about love. I didn’t spend my time in unfulfilled yearning.

  There was a sex club that he’d given me access to and I had plenty of exploring to do of my own. Though I was terrified of forgetting, I had memories to forget. I had oblivion to chase. I didn’t need to pine after Miles St. Clair.

  It was a busy week yet my mind kept returning to sex. To the sound of the paddle striking my skin. To the hard edge in Adam’s voice when he ordered me to obey. And always to the Watcher.

  Do you submit? Such a simple question. A renouncing of cares, even if it was just for a little while. But the cares were still there. While I was swimming in the sea of sexual arousal and pleasure, real life ticked on.

  At work, Nina was flitting in and out as usual, waffling about fabric choices and sending me on endless runs to the garment district. The sewing machine we used to make samples broke, and I had to call around to find a repair guy since my usual technician was on vacation.

  I also had to get sketching. Nina’s father bankrolled her fashion business but she’d long dropped the pretence of doing any real designing for her label. I was her one-woman operation. I sketched the preliminary designs, sewed up the samples, arranged to have buyers visit her studio space during the various fashion weeks in spring, summer, fall and winter and worked with the sewing contractors. Early on in my career it had been fantastic experience. But now, I was just doing the same thing over and over. The right thing for my career was to take the experience I’d acquired and use it at a larger fashion house.

  Besides, Nina was temperamental as all fuck and handling her was like walking on eggshells. As I listened to her rage about some fabric supplier who wasn’t meeting her needs on Tuesday, my mind flashed back to the absence of cares at Club Phoenix and I wished desperately to be whisked there in the blink of an eye.

  “Call Zac Posen’s team,” my small circle of friends urged me. I nodded and promised I would, but I had too many balls in the air and I couldn’t seem to find the energy to change my situation.

  Time speeds up when you least want it to.

  Friday arrived far too soon. As I balanced on the subway with my backpack, heading towards JFK, I sighed. I hated visiting my mother.

  Early onset Alzheimer’s was a horrible thing. My mom had started losing her memory in her thirties. By the time she was fifty two, she was in a nursing home. Her body was still young but the person she had been, had been erased, along with all memories of me. Week after week, I’d introduce myself as her daughter until I couldn’t take the distress in her eyes anymore. She had no memory of me and it terrified her when I told her who I was. So I’d stopped. I just pretended to be a friend. That caused her less anguish.

  When it struck this early, Alzheimer’s was genetic. I knew I should drag myself to the doctor and get tested as thoroughly as possible so I’d be able to prepare myself. But I was afraid and I’d avoided my doctor. I’d lied to both Miles and his mother Sarah and told them the tests had been fine and I was unaffected.

  Of course the uncertainty was never good. In many ways, not knowing was a black cloud hanging over my head. But I couldn’t force myself to go. I’d seen my mother disappear. I couldn’t face that again.

  I was about to board the plane heading to Cleveland when my phone rang. It was Anna from Club Phoenix. “I’ve arranged a scene for you tomorrow,” she said.

  “I can’t,” I replied instantly, a little surprised. I thought she’d know my flight schedule. Perhaps her detectives weren’t as thorough as they should have been. “I’m at JFK about to
take a flight home. I’m out of commission this weekend.”

  She exhaled in frustration. Even through the phone, I could make out the waves of irritation coming off her. “Damn it Kelly,” she ground out. “I wish you’d bothered to let me know your schedule. Now I’m going to have to rearrange everything.”

  I didn’t know what to say to her. She’d mentioned private investigators; I thought they’d have access to my schedule. Besides, shouldn’t she have checked with me first? I did have other things going on in my life. Was this what happened when you worked in a sex club? You forgot other things mattered?

  Miles had warned me.

  “Anna,” I counted till ten before I spoke my next words. “I’m going to visit my mother. Every other weekend, I’m in Akron. I thought you guys knew that. But I’m free next weekend if you can move the session.”

  She paused. Perhaps she too was counting till ten on her end, since we were both grown women and both unlikely to create a scene. “Okay,” she replied finally. “It’ll have to be Friday night though.”

  Friday was a shitty night. There was a fashion industry mixer I had planned to attend, one where I could network with my peers and get an inside sense of what opportunities were available in the field.

  But I also felt a very real clenching in my body as I imagined what would be lined up for me. “Friday works,” I told her. The industry mixer wasn’t that important; there would be other networking events.

  The top starts spinning.

  Chapter 7

  “How’s she doing?”

  The nursing home that Miles paid for was about as state-of-the-art as it got. The onsite clinic put many hospitals to shame with the amount of equipment it contained.

  I sat across a beige table and looked at Dr. Patel. My mom’s aide had let me know that she wanted to see me and I was a bundle of nerves. In the last few years, I’d come to realize that when the doctor asked to see you, good news was rarely at hand.

  “Her cough is troubling.” Dr. Patel had grey hair and big brown eyes and her expression was filled with sympathy. My mom had a persistent cough and an infection that seemed to defy modern antibiotics. Right now, she was on some kind of crazy cocktail of medications, but the infection seemed resistant. “And her body is weak.”

  “I noticed,” I replied. I’d only seen my mother two weeks ago and I’d still been shocked by how much weight she’d lost in the intervening period. She was visibly thinner and she complained about being cold all the time. “Turn the heat up Jenny, be a dear?” she’d said and I’d blinked back the tears that came unbidden. She didn’t even remember my name.

  Not for the first time I wished I was back at Club Phoenix where I would be restrained and all sense of responsibility and control would be stripped from me. I needed that. My burdens felt like a physical weight and the idea of setting them down was a very seductive fantasy. Surrendering at Club Phoenix was thrilling and scary. Yet it was troubling how frequently it had been on my mind all week.

  Dr. Patel and I conferred for a while. She mentioned her recommended treatment plan. As the person who made the medical decisions for my mother, I made sure I understood everything she’d said before I approved of her approach.

  When we were done I made my way back to the St. Clair residence where I usually stayed when in Akron. Miles’ mom Sarah greeted me at the door with a hug. “How was it?”

  “Soul-crushing,” I responded. There was no point pretending my visits were anything other than heartbreaking. Sarah visited my mom every other day; she knew exactly what I was going through. She was going through it herself.

  She nodded in sympathy and pushed a mug of steaming hot tea into my hands, settling me down at the kitchen table. Miles had tried many times to get his mother to move to a nicer house, but she’d have none of it. I was secretly glad. I’d sold our childhood house when my mom moved into the nursing home and it had ripped a hole in my heart. If Miles’ mother moved too, a part of me would have been lost forever.

  Miles had inherited his green eyes from his mother. I looked at Sarah and I flashed back to that underground room where a set of emerald eyes had stayed locked into me. Waiting. Watching. Protecting.

  Stop it, I chided myself. You can’t keep thinking about this. You have too much going on. But, as if I were indeed in Emerald City, my dreams were tinted with green. Yet when the curtain fell back to reveal the Wizard, he surveyed me with the implacable expression that I’d become so familiar with.

  Thursday afternoon I received a phone call from Miles. “I hear you are scheduled at Phoenix for tomorrow night,” he said. “Didn’t you have something else to go to?”

  I’d mentioned the mixer in passing when we’d had lunch at Le Cirque. He’d said something about the MOMA and I told him that I was heading there in a couple of weeks for the fashion industry event. Miles’s memory was formidable. But I guess that went with the billionaire territory, along with his razor-sharp intellect. We’d grown up next to each other and most often I still saw him as that teenager who had no use for me. But sometimes it would be brought to my attention that he was a grown man. A very desirable man.

  “I changed my mind about going,” I responded and I felt the disapproval coming off him in waves through the phone line. But he let it go and instead asked me if I wanted a ride.

  “Yes please.” I scratched ‘find rental car’ off my impossibly-long list of to-dos. Our sewing machine was still out of commission and the work was beginning to pile up alarmingly. Every time I looked at my list I felt a mild sense of panic. Club Phoenix was exactly what I needed. The oblivion I felt during a scene — I craved that sensation. That was the reason I’d dragged myself over to the doctor’s office and got myself tested for STDs. I could only hope that they wouldn’t test for Alzheimer’s at the same time. I didn’t want to know.

  “Okay, can you get yourself to my office?” he asked. “We’ll fly. I have no desire to tangle with the Friday afternoon traffic.”

  Ah, it must be nice to be a billionaire. Although if I were being perfectly honest, it was pretty damn nice to be billionaire-adjacent, like I was. “Thank you, Miles.”

  “No worries, Kells.” I heard voices in the background. “Okay, I better go,” he sighed. “See you tomorrow. Be here by seven.”

  Kells. I might have been increasingly aware of him but that sentiment was clearly one-sided. Nothing said that he still thought of me as just that annoying kid from next door as his repeated use of that childish nickname.

  Chapter 8

  The cane in his hand frightened me.

  The man himself didn’t look threatening. If I had to guess, I would have put him in his forties. He was carrying a few extra pounds on his frame. He was dressed all in black — pants, t-shirt and running shoes. A pair of glasses. He just looked like a guy on the street. I wouldn’t have looked twice at him.

  A cane dangled loosely from his fingers and I was certainly looking at him now.

  The Watcher had greeted the man in black with a nod of his head but no words were exchanged. I kept my gaze on the Watcher. His shoulders were relaxed and his demeanor was untroubled. Those bottle green eyes were clear.

  I wasn’t untroubled. The bamboo cane ensured that I was appropriately nervous.

  The usual safety checks were done. The Watcher outlined the rules and reminded me of the red-yellow-green traffic light system of safe words. Then he spoke the ritual phrase. “Do you submit?”

  The top starts spinning.

  The cane could do a lot of damage. I had an important work meeting on Monday. I’d finally sent my portfolio off to Zac Posen and someone was scheduled to meet me on Wednesday. I really did need to buy a ticket to fly home to Akron and visit my mother, even though she wouldn’t recognize me and my heart would get broken — again. Her persistent infection was worrying and Dr. Patel wasn’t making much headway against it.

  I shouldn’t do this. I had a busy week ahead of me. I didn’t have the time to recover from the strokes of the cane. T
here had been no information about today’s session. I had no idea if this man would hit hard; if he would break skin. I knew nothing.

  The top keeps spinning.

  “I submit.”

  “Let’s get started then shall we?” This was the man in black speaking for the first time. I shivered but I nodded my compliance.

  Although I hadn’t been told what was in store for me, Anna had sent me a brilliant blue corset with instructions to wear it and nothing else. My hair was to be tied back in a ponytail. My make-up was to be subdued except for the bright red lipstick that had been enclosed.

  The corset was cupless and it ended at my waist. My breasts and pussy were entirely accessible to the man in black. As he took my hands and wrapped cuffs around them, there was a brief second when I stopped to ask myself — what am I doing? I didn’t know this guy at all. What was I doing allowing him to tie me up and cane me?

  The Watcher’s eyes were on me. I took a deep breath and met his gaze squarely. If there was reproach in his gaze I didn’t want to know about it. I didn’t want to care what he thought.

  A black metal rod hung horizontally from the ceiling and the man in black took my wrists and cuffed them to each end of this rod. I stood still as he worked, carefully clearing my mind ahead of the session. When it started there would be no time for doubt. I had only my one experience to compare it against, but that time it had felt like I was drinking from a fire hose, submerged entirely in the experience.

  He trailed the tip of the cane up my thighs. I glanced up at his face. His expression was oddly rapt as his fingers guided the cane. First, a languid stroke up one leg. Then, a slow glide up the second, then the bamboo stick rubbed at my pussy.

  My breathing came in short bursts. My heart was beating fast as the cane slid back and forth between my legs. Once, twice, then it moved upward towards my breasts, trailing a relentless path over my body.