Whereas Dru knew from experience her own face, neck, chest, and possibly back were probably mottled red and white now, with vivid spots on her cheeks like a clown but all the rest of the blotches spread about at random.
She always looked, after bottoming in a scene, like she had completely lost her shit. And Amie looked barely affected at all.
Still, Dru had to say it. She’d adopted a policy of “honesty as long as it isn’t the brutal kind” with her partners long ago, and it had always served her well. “Okay, that got nothing out of my system. How about you?”
Without looking up, Amie instantly replied, “Nooooope.”
“Well, fuck.”
“Think we just kinda did that, sugarbuns.”
“Ah, yeah. About that. Oops.”
“You still doing okay? Hey.” Amie turned and pointed at the water glass. “Hydrate.”
Dru obediently took another sip. It felt good going down, like something her body had needed. God knew she was overdue for that sensation. “Okay. So. Oops.”
Sighing, Amie walked back and sat down on the ground facing Dru, folding her legs and leaning her elbows onto her knees. This close, Dru could smell the faint whiff of sex about her, or possibly she was projecting. The sub-goggles were still firmly in place. All was beauty and pain and pleasure and orgasmic love-crumbs, and that would simply have to run its course.
Amie wouldn’t start. That much, Dru remembered clearly. “If you’d wanted to negotiate that into the arrangement, all you had to do was say so. I was down to fuck.” And vaguely disappointed with what had happened instead.
Amie frowned, then looked off toward the spanking benches. “I didn’t . . . I was fine with giving you what you wanted. Whatever you needed to get it out of our systems, right?”
Did she not hear herself? Dru sighed and tapped a finger against the glass. “It should have been whatever we . . . whatever each of us needed. But we both knew, right, that was just an excuse to get here and fool around? Because when has that actually worked, in the history of ever? The ‘getting it out of our systems’ thing?”
“It could have worked.” Amie pouted. “At least we both enjoyed it, right?”
And there it was, the old problem. How could Dru have forgotten? “Not as much as we would’ve if you’d told me you wanted to fuck in the first place. If you’d— Hey.” Amie looked away again, but Dru reached a hand from the blanket nest, gestured to grab her attention back. “If you’d told me what you wanted, right up front. You don’t have to sneak through the back door, Ames.”
“That would’ve required lube and a strap-on.”
“Amie.”
“Which I do have, if—”
“Okay, I give up.” After a scene wasn’t the time. Dru lacked the brain cells to get into it. “We can debate the finer points of kink ethics and full disclosure and whatever over drinks or something, I guess, some day when we’re both off work again.”
Amie opened her mouth, closed it again, and waggled her shoulders as if she wasn’t sure whether to say what was on her mind. After another moment, she came out with it. “If we’re talking full disclosure, Druse . . . what was really on your mind when you kept tuning out of the scene?”
Drusilla’s face turned even paler. She still wore the hot pink highlights on her cheeks, the lighter polka dots of flush starting to fade over her forehead and neck. Lust measles, Amie always thought. But . . . sexy lust measles. She’d never told Dru because she knew Dru hated how she looked after a scene. Wrecked. Which Amie loved.
This time, though . . . there was more to it. She’d struggled. Amie had watched her try to work through those moments, had practically seen the gears working in Dru’s head as she tried to think her way back into the scene. And while that was happening, neither of them had been having any fun.
If there was one thing Amie hated to have to do during a scene it was think too much. Give the sub a beating, work out some energy, possibly get off if the stars aligned. The power and adrenaline rush were worth it either way. But not when she had to treat a sub like a client coming back after a car accident or a long illness. She wanted subs who had their shit together, and Dru had always served that role so well before today.
But . . . this was Dru. Druse. How had that popped out? Amie hadn’t even remembered the nickname but now it came back—the word she’d brought home from a geology class, the term for a piece of quartz or other rock sprinkled with a coating of fine crystals like fairy diamonds.
This was her Druse, and she wanted to make it better. She’d never been very good at that. Then she’d lost the chance to keep trying.
Dru held the still-cold glass up to her cheek, pressing against it as if she had a fever. “It’s been a while since I bottomed. I’m out of practice.”
She was lying. Amie didn’t know how she knew; she knew it in her gut like she knew when a client hadn’t really been doing reps or cardio at home between training sessions. And she wanted to call out that lie, but . . . something about it reminded her of that one client who had come back after cancer. Something around the eyes, a hollowness, a haunting pain that people maybe only knew when they’d spent time around death. The exhaustion, the “cheating” on homework, hadn’t had anything to do with physical symptoms, and Amie had backed away from whatever it was she saw in that woman’s eyes. She backed away now, because she was a chickenshit.
“Maybe you need more practice, then.”
“Yeah.” Dru closed her eyes briefly, then switched the glass to the other cheek. “We could do some scenes here sometimes. Um. Keep it at the club, you know?”
“Right.” Amie tried to picture that. Coming to Escape, putting on a show. She’d thought of Mara as Dru 2.0, but maybe it was really the other way around. Because if there was one thing she and Mara had done well at Onyx, it was put on a show for the crowd. They’d always been worlds better at that than the part where they went home and tried to talk to each other. What Dru was proposing should sound perfect—Mara without the interpersonal complication. An upgrade. But . . . “Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Her insides squirmed. She hated when she didn’t know why she was saying things.
Dru blinked, clearly startled. “Oh. Okay.”
“Well, we could do scenes. That part’s a good idea. But also . . .” What did people do? What did normal human beings even do? “We could have dinner? We could . . . go . . . to a movie? Sometime. I’d really like that.”
“You would?”
“Yes.” She could hear the defensive tone in her voice, and took a breath, hoping to modulate it. “Of course. Remember? We always liked the same movies.”
Dru gave her a skeptical look. “We’re lesbians.”
“Oh my God. That is so toxic.”
“I think you mean it’s so regressively second-wave.”
“Are you going to be snide about feminism, now? And you’re not a lesbian anyway.”
Dru shrugged, then pushed a hand free of the blanket and waggled it back and forth. “These days, occasionally bisexual, but almost purely homoromantic. I do sometimes like the D, but I currently have only a passing emotional interest in what’s usually attached to it. So, like—”
“Dru, this is why God made strap-ons.”
“It’s not quite the same. So there’s still that . . . element.”
Amie smirked. “I think you haven’t met the right strap-on.”
Dru laughed, the trill echoing through the empty club. She looked adorable wrapped in the blanket; the chocolatey mink-like nap set off her skin. Amie realized it nearly matched the brown in Dru’s dark eyes, and knew she would always think of the color as “mink” from now on—that almost-black that sometimes made Dru look like a movie vampire or demon in low light. For club life, it was an asset, part of the appeal . . . the beautiful bartender or proprietress who might secretly be a creature of the night. For daily life, the skin was such a hassle. Amie recalled so much waiting while Dru put on sunscreen, then put on more sunscreen later. Her
constant refrain in those days: “Come on, let’s go.”
These days she was starting to wish she’d listened when Dru had tried to press the sunscreen on her. She had started too late with that, and now had the wrinkles and freckles and seemingly permanent tan lines to show for it. Not too cute now that she was on the far side of thirty. Dru looked better.
Dru looked incredible. It was a problem. If she hadn’t stayed as attractive, Amie wouldn’t have been feeling so many weird feelings, she was pretty sure. But there she was, if anything even more beautiful and mysteriously alluring than before. Moth to a flame. That was it. Dru was magical light and warmth and possibility, and Amie couldn’t help but be drawn in.
Except Dru seemed to have a different plan. “I appreciate the offer. But I’m not . . . in a place right now where I feel ready for that. For anything outside of doing scenes.”
And wasn’t that loaded with about a dozen potential questions if Amie was brave enough to ask them?
For the first time in their friendship, though, she had a feeling Dru wouldn’t be inclined to answer. Everything in her face, the set of her mouth and shoulders, the tension lines already returning to her neck, said she wanted to close down that line of discussion.
Why did that make Amie’s throat tighten?
She shook it off and shrugged. “Okay then. I guess we declare it’s all out of our systems, right? And we go forward as friends.” She shoved her hand out, hoping like hell Dru would shake it, then let go, not hang on and drag the moment out with touch-filled ambiguity.
Dru looked down and pondered the proffered hand for a few seconds before even doing that much, then shook it once, quickly. Her hand was slightly clammy, probably from the water glass she’d been fiddling with earlier, and that she still held in the other hand.
“Out of our systems,” she agreed as she ended the shake and withdrew. “And we’ll set up a time to talk about class schedules and all of that . . . tonight? Are you coming back to play? We’re getting a lot of people in from Boston and the other outlying towns. You could probably find some new partners if you’re interested.”
The brush-off. Cold. But practical. And yeah, Amie probably was interested. Not that she expected any of those encounters to feel half as right as the . . . whatever it was she had just semifailed to accomplish with Dru. Kink? Sex? They’d sort of done both those things, but it hadn’t quite worked for either of them, so why was she so eager to try it again? It was fail-kink and fail-sex, and she usually treated that as a sign to move on.
“I’m interested.” It wasn’t entirely true, but again . . . practical. “I’ll be here.”
“That’s great.” Dru put on her club-greeting smile, smooth and professional, as if she wasn’t dressed only in that smile plus Amie’s marks and a fuzzy blanket. “I look forward to seeing you.”
Dru wriggled on the chair at her computer desk, trying to ease the chafing of her fading bruises against the inner seams of her jeans. No use. Five of them were still fever-hot, and the sixth—the first one Amie’d given her, the big one on the top left, right next to her vag—had formed a dark blood blister that seemed specially designed to serve as a weeks-long reminder of why it was a bad idea to try hooking up with an ex.
She’d barely spent any time in her rented condo since returning to St. Andrews, but she’d set up the office in her spare bedroom first thing. Priorities. Adulting. God, had it really been six months already? She needed some artwork on the walls, some personal . . . something, around the place. But she’d never gotten around to it in Seattle either. Before Padma, there had been no money. After Padma, she hadn’t cared. Padma’s house was gorgeous. It was insta-home, and eventually it was their home. Nothing Dru tried to do here would ever re-create that.
She could only try to fulfill their dream, even if it sometimes seemed meaningless to do it alone. They’d talked about it so many times, it had felt inevitable.
But they’d never talked about shit like completing a Chamber of Commerce membership application.
“Jesus.” Dru scrolled down and filled out a few more easy fields—desired username, address, number of full-time employees—then returned to the list of interest areas. Healthcare? Definitely. Infrastructure? Okay, sure. Anything with “youth” or “education” in the name? Yeah, no, probably best to avoid. But eventually it was back to the big empty text block that awaited her under Description of Organization.
Adult entertainment venue? No, that sounded like a strip club or peep show. Which, fine, good for them, but not the same thing. Night club? No, it wasn’t exactly that. Yes to drinks, at least before a certain hour—after that, strictly nonalcoholic—but no to hordes of hopped-up college kids deciding Escape was the new “it” spot. Perish the thought.
Private club? It evoked British dudes in ascots, but it was technically accurate. Dru would have preferred to be more open about the nature of the business, but part of the nature of her particular business was discretion. So she settled on keeping it short and oblique, and finally hit Enter with a sense of achievement. Another thing to check off the list.
Dru had a very long list. More of a task outline, really. The CoC application had been today’s task under the category of “Business Administration.” Dru aimed for hitting items in at least three categories a day, and next up was “Community Involvement.”
She was already dressed for it, in her not-too-tight jeans and an MS 150 T-shirt; she and Padma had flown to Houston and biked to Austin for the charity event, in a team made up of a dozen Seattle-area nightclub owners. It was a garment she treasured, a comfort object. But today, instead of wearing it to sleep in, she wore it to present a credible face to the local food bank. I am a person who does this sort of thing, she hoped the T-shirt said. I bicycled across Texas for multiple sclerosis, so surely my cans of food will be acceptable to you and you won’t question their origin. Which was the “lobby” of Escape. Kinksters, Dru had found, were big-hearted folks on the whole. They gave, and gave generously, to all sorts of causes. And the food bank right down the street from the club was the perfect cause. The can donation box was almost full, and she stopped on her way out to grab a few paper bags from the pantry in case she couldn’t carry the whole thing to her car and had to break it down into multiple trips.
When she got to the club and tried to lift the box, however, she found that the weight was the least of her concerns.
A sharp, chemical smell greeted her nostrils at the same moment the bottom fell from the box, dropping cans all over the stained concrete floor and, sadly but probably inevitably, Dru’s big toe.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuuuuuuck!”
Cans rolled everywhere. The box collapsed when she tried to put it back down; part of it had stuck to the floor, and the whole thing had gone to shit once she’d picked it up.
Can containment had failed, and apparently so had can identification. When she tried to pick one up, the paper label smeared off and dropped to the floor in a graceful swoop. The can had been green beans; now it was silver. In the region under the slumping box, Dru spotted another stray label, then another. She plucked the box away, letting the cans slide free. At least half the labels had come off already, and from what she could see, the rest were loose and about to break off, anonymizing the cans. And over the whole thing, a few gleams of liquid and glistening bubbles confirmed Dru’s suspicion: the entire box had been thoroughly doused with the high-strength cleaning solution they used to disinfect the restrooms and playrooms.
“Shit!”
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, and she rubbed her hands against her jeans to get the cleaner off before grabbing it. A local number she didn’t recognize, but she’d been getting a lot of referrals lately and she didn’t want to lose a potential new member. She exhaled, forced a smile onto her face, and tapped the screen to accept the call. “Dru’s Mansion of Mayhem, how may I help you?”
“Uh . . . that’s new,” Amie answered. “I kind of like it better than Escape, though. To be h
onest.”
Oh. She hadn’t expected Amie. “You don’t have to be honest, you could choose to be kind instead.” Escape had been Padma’s idea, and Dru had never for one second considered naming the club anything else. “What’s up?”
“I wanted your email address. Sorry, did I interrupt something?”
“Well. Yes and no. I had a plan for today, and I guess you would have been interrupting that, except apparently the plan is shot to shit because . . . I don’t even know.” Dru was still trying to figure it out. An accident? A spill somebody had been too embarrassed to tell her about? The word “sabotage” floated around in her brain, looking for a place to land, but she didn’t want to accept that possibility.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I was . . . ugh. Okay, I had this box set up for a canned goods drive, and I got here today planning to take the stuff to that food bank down the street. But the box was all— The cans are all covered with . . . cleaner, or something, and the labels are off, and obviously I can’t take them in now. So that plan is hosed. And I think maybe somebody did it on purpose? And now I have all these cans—”
“Hey, hey.” Amie made a shushing noise, and even over the cell connection, it worked. “It’s gonna be all right. I’m coming over, okay? I’ll be there in like ten, fifteen minutes to help you figure it out. Lock the club door, though, right? And don’t let anyone else in unless it’s somebody you know.”
Dru sniffed, and stopped herself right before she wiped her chemical-covered hand under her nose. She would have loved for somebody else to take over the mess at her feet, but she knew it was her mess. “I can’t ask you to do that. I’ll figure it out. And I’ll text you my email address so you can—”
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