NightWhere

by John Everson

  With that she turned and disappeared back to the child’s room. Gordon poked his head in and looked at his baby, quiet now that it had its mother’s full attention, mouth on her breast. There’d been a time that the same act-only his mouth on her nipple-would have quieted the noise in Gordon’s head. But that time was gone. He needed more than just a tit now. A lot more.

  He went back to their bedroom and stripped out of the clothes of the day. Then, still naked, he reached into the back of his closet and pulled out a leather handle. The rest of the whip followed, and he cracked it once on the bedroom floor.

  For the first time in ten hours, Gordon Hayworth smiled.

  Chapter Two

  Initiation

  “It’s almost eight thirty,” Mark called up the stairs.

  Rae poked her head out of the bathroom, her hair spiked and gelled to look both windblown and styled. He loved the way the blonde strands wove in and out of the darker dyed stripes, married by the honey of her natural color. She looked perky and sassy, a girl who could laugh and kiss at the same time. Right now, her two hands were working on inserting an earring as she spoke.

  “I know, I know, I know,” she said. “Who wants this the most? Don’t you think I’m hurrying? I’ll be ready in five.”

  “Not sure if they will let you in if you’re late,” he teased, pacing. His stomach churned. Mark felt more nervous tonight than the first time they had ventured into the world of the forbidden. From the whispers he had heard in dark rooms about NightWhere, they were about to enter a very different game.

  Some people loved the simple life.

  But the simple life hadn’t been enough for Mark and Rae. Or at least not for Rae. She had wanted to go farther. Needed something different. Rae desperately loved Mark, but…in the end, he wasn’t enough for her, not really. She had a chasm inside her that begged for more, always more. No single man could or ever would be enough, though she tried to make it work with Mark.

  Mark, on the other hand, was smart enough to realize that this wasn’t a slur on him, but simply a quirk of Rae’s psyche. From the moment that he’d met her, sipping tequila and flirting with the bartender at Huevo’s, he’d been completely taken with her. He knew from the start that she was untamable. Nobody could ever own her energy. But she did give a large part of it to him…and that was all he could ask for. He knew in his heart that if he gave her enough rope, she’d never feel trapped and would always come back to him.

  And so two years after they had married, when he could tell she was struggling against the need to be faithful and seemed to need more, he had made the suggestion that they try the forbidden.

  He would never forget that moment. She’d been lying in bed with him, the sweat of their lovemaking still drying on her bare skin. The sex had been good, but he could tell she was struggling with something. Trying to get more out of it. Trying to get more of him inside her. Trying to find…something deeper between them. Something new. Something to affirm that it was all worthwhile. The sterile white walls of their cookie-cutter suburban frame house were closing in. Day by day their home felt smaller and smaller. The mundane was smothering Rae.

  Mark knew he couldn’t give anymore. And so he’d said the words that had changed everything. “Do you want to try having sex with another man?”

  Rae hadn’t missed a beat. “Who did you have in mind?”

  Mark hadn’t freaked out. His stomach may have contracted a little, and he was a little surprised at how eagerly she’d jumped on the offer, but he’d known in his heart for a while that this was what she really wanted. Rae needed to play or she would wither. And whatever was left between them would die.

  “No one in particular. I’ll look for a swingers club if you want” was what he’d said.

  “Cool,” she’d answered. When she’d turned to kiss him, her mouth was hotter than it had been during their lovemaking.

  And so it had begun.

  Mark himself had never needed the variety…not that he didn’t enjoy it. But he had done this all for Rae. And he had to admit, there was a voyeur buried not so deep inside him. There was nothing quite like standing in the shadows and watching her face light up when a guy came on to her and something inside her that had been dark for weeks suddenly ignited.

  She couldn’t be contained…but she agreed to stay in Mark’s cage. Still, she lost her light there after a while. Until he let her out of her cage for the night. But, she always chose to go home with Mark.

  That was enough for him.

  But nothing was ever enough for Rae.

  They had slipped easily into the swingers scene and Mark found himself sleeping with more wives than he had ever imagined slept around. Meanwhile, Rae enjoyed a parade of partners who provided both variety and an increasingly dark flair. Sometimes when Mark finished rubbing thighs with his partner of the night in the back of the club, he dressed and walked out onto the floor to find Rae being spanked, whipped or abused at the hands of someone he’d never seen before.

  He’d made the mistake of intervening once, in someone’s basement in Humboldt Park, when a tall guy with bleached hair in a Revolting Cocks T-shirt was whipping Rae with a long, flesh-welting twine of leather straps. But when Mark had stepped between her punky abuser and Rae’s naked body, her hands tied up in white silken bonds leaving her helpless to stop the man’s abuse, she’d cried out at him in anger, not relief. “Get out of his way,” she’d demanded. “Just go home. Someone will bring me later.”

  Mark tried to give her space, but increasingly he wondered where her dark side was going.

  Right around the time he started wondering that was when he first heard the word NightWhere.

  A secret sex club.

  A place where your wildest fantasies could be enacted.

  A place where you could be free… And be a slave.

  Somehow each of those appealed equally to Rae.

  “I want to go,” she said to him one night at a swingers mixer in the northern suburbs. She’d been masquerading that night as an X-rated cupid, with a fake bow and arrow strapped to her back and a Mardi Gras red mask over her eyes. While she hid part of her face, the rest of her was scandalously unclad. Mark had joked that her red nail polish and lipstick covered more of her than her outfit did-she wore only a tissue-thin piece of see-through red silk across her chest and a barely effective V shield over her crotch. Men groped her body even as Mark talked to her. He wanted to yell at a couple of them: “Could I just finish a conversation with my wife before you grab her tits? Please?”

  Behind her, right after she’d blurted her desire to find NightWhere, a hairy-chested man with even fewer clothes on than Rae slipped his arms around her middle and whispered something in her ear. Rae had laughed, tossing her head back. Then she’d looked at Mark and said, “I’ll be back.” Then in a conspiratorial whisper she’d added, “I don’t think he’ll take very long.”

  Mark watched as they danced on the private club’s dance floor, first touching only their fingers, and then more, her breasts slipping up and down against his chest. The man drew her hard against his body and she complied, slipping her hands around his back. Her fingers explored his flesh as they ground together on the dance floor, their moves increasingly dirty, as she flaunted her breasts and he grabbed and kneaded her barely covered ass.

  This was going to take longer than she thought, Mark had realized, as he’d drifted back to watch it all unfold.

  Watching her with another man both excited and humiliated Mark. He loved to watch her as his porno queen but he also realized that, no matter what he did, he would never be enough for her on his own…he was just the thing she turned to when she needed something stable and unmoving. That wasn’t what she needed normally. He was peanut butter…but someone or something else always brought the jelly…

  Mark had wound his way deep into the heart of the secret web of Chicagoland swingers clubs with Rae, and sometimes they even traveled to Wisconsin and Indiana gatherings. But ironically, he was al
ways the man at the bar who gave the pity fuck to the woman who was still alone late in the night…he never did straight trades with Rae’s parade of lovers, taking their wives or girlfriends in exchange for his wife…he looked for women whose partners had left them to fend for themselves. It wasn’t a totally intentional act, but maybe he did it because he understood the feelings of the ones left behind.

  After the night that he’d asked Rae if she wanted to have sex with another man…the night he had set Rae free to have whomever she wanted…the months melted into years with increasing speed. On most days, Mark was a happily married man, ecstatic to get home from work to kiss his wife. And every few weeks, he was a troubled, but still somewhat happy man who offered her on the seedy underground altars of sex, allowing her to take any comers she chose, to scratch the itch that he could never touch.

  Somehow, it had worked.

  Until the day that someone had said to them, still hot in the afterglow of a night of musical-chairs sex, “Have you ever heard of NightWhere?” Rae’s eyes had lit up. She certainly had, but had not found anyone who knew how to get to the club. It was like an urban legend in swinger circles. A utopian place where no holes were barred, and no backs were left unscarred.

  “Yes,” she’d answered the pale, thin man who’d asked the question. “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know how to find it.”

  “You don’t find it, it finds you,” the stranger had said, slipping a long arm around Rae’s waist and massaging her nude tummy a moment before descending lower. “You need to be invited.”

  “Do you know how to get on the list?” Rae had asked, arching her back slightly and moving her body like a gently dancing snake against the man’s bare chest.

  “I can get you an invitation,” the man had said.

  That was when the game had changed forever.

  There was nothing about the building that would have suggested that behind the brown door was a den of sin. Mark had parked on the street a couple blocks down and they’d walked the cracked and weed-overrun city sidewalk to the address quickly. As much from nervousness of the neighborhood as from anticipation of the night to come. Rae’s heels cracked on the pavement like small gunshots with every step. That’s what Mark thought they sounded like, anyway, until somewhere nearby, maybe a block or two away, something cracked with a larger, fast report. Now that was a gunshot. A moment later, someone screamed. And then the snaps of Rae’s shoes were all that echoed in the night air.

  Her steps quickened.

  “Not crazy about the neighborhood,” she breathed.

  Mark shook his head. “Gotta agree. Though the architecture is tres modern.”

  Rae snorted. “Modern Ghetto?”

  This was the industrial section of town; the broken sidewalks snugged to brick walls that held no trace of architectural motive, despite Mark’s jibe. These were walls that were simply that-walls. Steel-framed windows flanked in crumbling concrete occasionally interrupted their unwelcoming façade but mainly…these were barricades. Proud factory faces that had grown old and creased with time.

  The factories were gone now, and this South Side Chicago neighborhood remained quiet most of the days. Except for the warning shots of gangs and drug deals gone wrong.

  “Well, I didn’t figure they’d set up shop at the Four Seasons,” Rae admitted. “But I still don’t like it!”

  “It’ll be different inside,” Mark promised.

  At last they arrived at the door. There was no sign. No Playboy symbol silhouette or kitschy neon sign saying Open 24 Hours. It was just a door, with the numbers 2367 in rusting letters nailed to the front.

  “They could have at least gotten an address like 6969,” Rae said.

  “Always looking for the extra kisses, aren’t you?” Mark laughed.

  He lifted his hand to knock, but before his fingers touched the wood, the door creaked open six inches.

  “Invitation?” a masculine voice demanded.

  Mark pulled the folded paper from his front pocket and handed it to the hand that extended through the narrow opening.

  The hand disappeared inside.

  Mark looked at Rae. Her eyes were narrowed, her anxiety visible.

  Mark leaned in to kiss her and she smiled just a little before gently pushing him back and nodding. “I’m okay,” she whispered.

  The door opened.

  From inside, a sinuous drum-and-bass combo pounded strongly. Blue and red lights reflected off the dark eyes of the doorman, who now revealed himself to them. He was tall, maybe five feet eleven inches, and thin. He wore a black, button-down shirt and dark jeans. Over his shoulder, Rae could see wisps of fog and the movement of tousled hair. A dance floor.

  “You’re first-timers,” the doorman said simply. His tone left no room for argument, and Mark nodded.

  “I will tell you this now,” the man said, his eyes unblinking. “And I will tell you this only once. You have been given a gift to come here. Very few people receive this invite. But there is a reason. What we do here? It cannot be revealed. Where we hold the club? It cannot be revealed. NightWhere exists where we want it, when we want it. Any member who reveals anything about this club outside the walls of this club…will be killed.”

  The man smiled. Thinly. His lips were pink and drawn.

  “I’m not joking here,” he said. “If you breathe a word of NightWhere to anyone, you will not live to see tomorrow. We are serious about this; it is the only way that NightWhere can survive.”

  The man smiled then, and his teeth were shark white in the shadow. “Go in and sin.”

  He moved away from the door and Mark stepped past him uneasily. Rae followed fast, both of them walking past the doorman until they stood in the open foyer. After weeks of wondering whether the subject of the furtive whispers was real, Mark and Rae got their first look at NightWhere.

  Rae slipped her arm around Mark’s waist. “It looks normal enough,” she said.

  He nodded. “Looks,” he said.

  In front of them, a couple dozen men and women moved on an impromptu dance floor, dry-ice smoke jetting out in plumes between their feet. Now and then, when the grey cement of the warehouse floor was fully obscured, Rae could only think of one thing. They were dancing on a cloud.

  “This is just the doorway,” Mark said. “Let’s have a drink and get the lay of the land.”

  “I thought we were just going to get a lay?” Rae laughed. Mark could see the glint of excitement in her eye. She was anxious for the evening games to begin.

  They skirted the dance floor and stepped up to the bar on the other side. A bartendress almost wearing half a black T-shirt and a leather skirt raised one eyebrow as Mark leaned in to order.

  “You gonna tell me what to do, or am I gonna tell you what to drink?” she asked. Her voice was low and throaty, but somehow Mark could still hear her above the grind of the dance music.

  “How about you make me a gin and tonic and a Corona,” Mark asked.

  “Can’t make the Corona, but I’ll pour you one,” she answered with a wink.

  “Don’t mind her,” a voice next to them said. “She’s an attitude with a slut.”

  “Don’t you mean a slut with an…”

  A brawny guy in a white T-shirt turned on his stool and put up a hand to stop Mark’s question. “Nope. I mean she’s one big attitude. And she’ll take it from anyone. Even you, if you’re still drinking here at 3:00 a.m.”

  “Like anybody is still out here at the bar at 3:00 a.m.” the dark-haired bartender laughed. She held one slender hand out to Mark, while with the other she pulled the ripped collar of her black T-shirt down to expose her breasts. “I’m Sin-D,” she said. Mark got the cute spelling since one tit had Sin written in black marker, while the other was punctuated with a big D. She released the ripped cotton and pointed at the guy next to Mark.

  “This is Asshole.”

  The brawny guy laughed. “Thing is, she likes assholes. You’ll find that out if you stay near the bar too lon
g. My name’s Kendrick.”

  “Call him Dick for short,” Sin-D chimed in.

  “You’ll find that she likes those too,” he answered. He held a hand out to Rae. “You can call me Ken. Or anything else you like.”

  Rae felt her face flush as he gripped her hand and held it firmly. His hand was heavy and warm. A serpent was tattooed around his wrist. Rae felt instant, biblical temptation. Mark answered for her when the silence stretched. “Hi, Ken, I’m Mark and this is Rae,” he said. “She’s not usually shy.”

  “I said she could call me Ken, not you,” Kendrick said, never taking his eyes off Rae. “And no, I don’t suppose she is shy,” he added, still squeezing her hand, then moving his fingers up to stroke the inside of her wrist. “Or she wouldn’t be here.”

  “How much do I owe you,” Mark asked Sin-D as he handed Rae her drink.

  She shook her head. “On the house. I live to serve.”

  Kendrick looked at Mark and smiled. “First time?”

  “Do we stand out that bad?” Mark answered. “No,” Sin-D said. “It’s not that. But we get to know everyone at NightWhere pretty fast-it’s a closed club, you know. So…it’s pretty easy to tell who’s only been here once or twice. After that…”

  “After that, Sin-D’s probably slept with you,” Kendrick finished.

  The bartendress slugged him. “I hope you’re ready for some welts, mister.”

  “She promises a lot, but her flogging arm is soft,” Kendrick said.

  “You are soooo going to hurt tomorrow,” Sin-D promised. “I want to warn you about one thing,” she said, moving out from behind the bar. She took Rae’s waist in her hands and moved closer, until the swell of their chests nearly touched.

  “You came to NightWhere because you have sexual fantasies that you still have not been able to fulfill. Well…you can do anything you want here. Anything.”

  She looked deep into Rae’s eyes, and Rae found herself moving her hands to Sin-D’s shoulders, engaging in the sensual dance.