I dreamed of being slapped and choked, being whipped and flogged. In the flickers of images in my mind I moaned with longing and I offered myself up for more. Cocks were thrust down my throat till I gagged. I licked ropes of semen off the floor. I barked like a dog in heat when ordered.
There were needles and blood. Ropes and chains. There was a fist in my cunt and a ring gag in my mouth, holding me open for the line of men who wanted my throat. My eyes were wild and staring. My body heaved and flailed. Was what I felt arousal? I couldn’t tell.
A voice spoke to me. Dream of forgetting. Dream of remembering. Dream of oblivion, my pet.
In my dream a top was spinning, spinning. And bottle-green eyes watched everything.
When I woke, I opened my eyes with the conviction that my dream was no mere dream but a warning of the many myriad paths that lay in front of me. When I walked the road, I would need to choose the fork I took with care.
“I’m meeting someone,” I told the concierge as I walked up to the restaurant Anna had told me to meet her at. It was a beautiful summer day. There was absolutely no humidity in the air, which was rare for New York. The sun shone down and a slight breeze in the air caressed my skin. The nerves I had felt this morning as I’d dressed for lunch felt very unnecessary.
The place Anna had picked seemed to be hopping with people. On the front, there were a couple of tables with festive checked tablecloths. Very Parisian. A blackboard advertised brunch and my stomach growled. I’d been guzzling coffee by the gallon all morning and I was starving.
“What’s the name of your party Ma’am?” the woman at the desk asked me with a polite smile. She was dressed completely in black, as was the rest of the wait staff. It made for an incongruous contrast to the romantic French music piping in through the speakers. Edith Piaf warbled out something mournful about the love of her life, but her voice was almost buried by the clinking of silverware, the pitter-patter of high heels on wooden floors and the hum of conversation.
“Anna? Sorry, I don’t know her last name.” I wondered if the concierge thought I was on a blind date.
“Ms. Smith is already at her booth,” she replied pleasantly. “This way please.”
Ms. Smith. Could that be any more obvious of an assumed name? She should have just called herself Jane Doe. I snickered a little as I followed the concierge through the noisy front part of the restaurant to the significantly quieter back, where there were four booths, three of them empty. Which was slightly odd given the busy front, but then I noticed the sliding glass doors that lead to the bustling back patio. Every single person was taking advantage of the fantastic weather to eat outside and Anna Smith, if that was indeed her name, was using the quiet to her advantage.
“Kelly,” the woman seated in the booth greeted me with a friendly smile. I guess there was some part of me that had thought that Anna would look like a Dominatrix. You know, jet black hair slicked back into a ponytail, tight clothing, knee high boots. Because we were meeting for lunch, she wouldn’t be wearing a corset, of course. But I’d imagined I’d see glints of leather in her apparel.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Anna was blonde and in her late thirties. Her shoulder-length hair was worn in loose waves around her face, and she wore a pink linen sundress that made her look fresh and wholesome. I recognized the dress. It was Bottega Venata from a few seasons ago, the dress that had made people outside the industry notice them for being more than just a handbag company.
“Nice dress,” I said, sliding in.
She grinned. “Ah, yes. You work in fashion, don’t you?”
I nodded. “How in-depth is my dossier?” I asked wryly. It was a sex club for billionaires. They’d have to be insane to even let me near the place without making sure I was thoroughly investigated.
“I like how matter of fact you are,” she responded. “It’s very tiresome dealing with faux-outrage. To answer your question, your dossier, as you call it, is as detailed as we can make it in sixteen hours. But that’s not really relevant.”
That was subtly done. She was really telling me that there was nothing in the information they had gathered about me that was a problem. Had there been anything, my lunch appointment would have been cancelled.
“Shall we get to it?” she asked after we both ordered food. “I want to make sure I give you plenty of time to ask any questions.” Her face softened into a smile. “This can sometimes feel intimidating.”
One issue was uppermost on my mind, so I thought I’d get it out of the way right at the start. “What does this cost?” I asked her tentatively. “Miles is the billionaire. I’m the assistant to a small fashion designer in New York.”
She nodded. “It doesn’t cost anything during your evaluation,” she replied. “After, there are opportunities to have your membership fees waived.”
I wanted to ask her how it was possible to waive fees, but I didn’t. I knew the answer; I wasn’t naïve. My body and my ability to be discreet would pay for my membership. I didn’t know how I felt about that, but I reasoned that that was a long time away. There was an evaluation that needed to happen first.
Our food appeared in front of us. I dug into my plate of eggs, bacon and toast, and Anna took a bite of the egg-white omelette that she’d requested. “How long is the evaluation period?” I asked as we ate.
Her shoulders lifted in a shrug. “As long as it needs to be,” she replied.
“Is it to make sure I do as I’m told?” I probed. Her answer had been unsatisfyingly vague.
There was a faint smile on her face as she shook her head. “It’s to make sure we can trust you to play safely.”
I was puzzled. “I’m not dominant,” I said, wondering if she hadn’t picked that up about me. “Surely playing safely is the Dominant’s responsibility.”
“You have a lot to learn about BDSM,” she shot back with a displeased look. “I’ll give you some reference resources before I leave. No, safety is a shared responsibility between the Dominants and the submissives.”
I thought about that as I chewed on my meal. The eggs and bacon were excellent, my scrambled eggs perfectly fluffy and seasoned. Too many New York restaurants were crowded just because they were good at courting the press and the food bloggers. This particular restaurant had the food to match.
“Shall we get to the questionnaire?” she asked me. “This one is about prior sexual experience.”
“I’ve done it,” I quipped.
She laughed out aloud. “Let’s define it,” she said, “I’m assuming that’s yes for vaginal intercourse.”
I nodded. “How many partners?” she continued.
I flushed. I knew she wasn’t judging me and that it was her job to ask me these questions. But saying the number would still make me feel judged. She must have noticed it in my expression, because she hastily added, “I just need a range. Under five, between five and ten, between ten and twenty-five and over twenty-five.”
“Between ten and twenty-five,” I replied, my cheeks flushed. I’d managed to stay in that range only by the barest whisker.
She pushed away her empty plate and pulled a piece of paper and a pen from her tote-bag. “We don’t use technology,” she explained as she checked a box. “We are very old-school.”
“Hackers?” I guessed.
“The threat of them,” she responded. She rolled her eyes. “Too many resident billionaires, all twitchy about being in the press.”
I liked her. She seemed very matter-of-fact about the billionaires she worked for. Which reminded me, she hadn’t mentioned Miles, the person responsible for handing me the key to this particular rabbit hole. “I can see Miles being twitchy about being in the press,” I started. “Miles St. Clair in a sex club.” I rolled my eyes. “Will wonders never cease?”
She didn’t take the bait. “I’m sorry,” she said politely. “I can’t discuss other members. Back to the questionnaire, have you had anal sex before?”
Ah, I could definitely see Anna as a Domm
e now. My line of questioning had been shut down quite firmly, but she had remained friendly. It was very well done. “Yes,” I replied to her question about anal sex. “Also between ten and twenty-five.”
She wrote that down. “Multiple partners?” she queried.
My cheeks were red as I remembered one night shortly after I’d moved to New York. Two hot guys in a nightclub and I hadn’t even got their names. It had been my only ménage experience. “Two guys, just once.”
“And the reason you haven’t repeated the experience?” she queried, her hand poised over her sheet of paper. “Opportunity or not interested?”
I laughed shortly. “Oh, I’m definitely interested,” I responded. “Just a lack of opportunity.” Her lips twitched as she noted down that bit of trivia.
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 i
nterested 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.
The Watcher (A Dark Romance) Page 3
