Closer and Closer Page 3

  Walt’s fingers stilled on the metal under them. “You okay? I can find another bottom if you’re really hurt, Claire. Or we can cancel.”

  “No, no. I’m okay, really.” She glanced past him, shrugging, and turned a small smile toward him. “Sir is doing a trial week with Tessa.”

  “Trial week?”

  “Yes, a trial week of 24/7 service to Sir. Wally, stop making that face. It’s fine. He’s probably going to collar her. They’ve had the main bedroom. I’ve been downstairs on the futon.”

  Plenty of the people they knew from CPEP and many among those that visited the Enclave had alliances within the community that made their relationships look more like a Venn diagram than the traditional one plus one. Since the most recent influx of newly curious people started appearing in the scene a couple of years earlier, Paul and Claire’s relationship had shifted from two happy, overlapping circles to a pyramid. He sat at the apex, and a steady stream of new girls—younger, edgier girls—made up the layers beneath him.

  And that was just how Claire said she liked it. Her Sir; his rules.

  Walt pulled Claire to him for a quick hug. For now, Paul hadn’t forbade anyone touching her without his oversight.

  “I’ll get things ready. See you in a bit.” He left Claire to finish changing.

  A new wave of arrivals were already coming in across the club’s vestibule. More faces and voices he didn’t recognize. Paul still stood by TK’s desk preaching his version of the one true way to do kink. Now with his friend, Tommy, standing by as Paul’s favorite gospel of BDSM yes-man, he’d managed to pull a pretty impressive audience.

  Walt let out a long, slow breath. Oh yeah. Amen, brother.

  Instead of looking for the few familiar faces he saw in the crowd, Walt turned for the rear exit, making his way to the narrow outside space where people took a breather from the press of bodies and attitude. He’d been back at Area 51 for less than thirty minutes and already needed one himself.

  “Hey, you made it!” Claire’s reflection beamed at me in the mirror, her smiling face topping a heavy, gleaming silver collar—and her bare breasts.

  “Oh…um…hi.” There was little I could do to cover the absolute discomfort of being in a small space, so close to another woman who was so completely unclothed—and who was apparently so completely unfazed by it.

  She noticed me looking anywhere but at her very prominent nipples and winced with sympathy. “Here, hand me my shirt, I’ll put it back on.”

  “No! No, there’s no need unless…I mea—if you’re more comfortable, it’s really oka—”

  “Erin, take a deep breath; your energy’s all over the place,” she said, stepping past me. I flinched as her breast brushed my arm. “You’re going to see mostly naked people here. A lot of them.”

  “Okay.” I sagged against the opposite wall. “I’ll do that. Over here.” Far, far away from any more accidental crossings of my appendages and her breasts.

  “Do you need some water?” She studied me with concern, looking at the number of inches that separated us. “Did you have dinner? You look woozy.”

  Claire, I’d learned, looked after everyone, not just her husband. In the month since our friendship had developed beyond my dental woes, she’d decided I needed looking after too. I still hadn’t found a way to dissuade her—or accept her attention, for that matter. Having someone care for me felt foreign. I’d been able to go about my business, generally unnoticed, for most of my nearly thirty-five years.

  “Oh, fine. I just feel a little awkward dressed like this when almost everyone else really isn’t so…um, dressed—and look like they belong here…just being new, not really knowing anyone.” I shrugged with a rueful laugh over my litany of social woes.

  “I understand,” Claire said as she sat again and began to wind her long, burnished auburn curls into a thick braid. She’d forgotten her shirt and her breasts were still out there, rising and falling as she worked at her hair. “I was so young at my first play party. I’m naturally an introverted person—a lot like you, actually. But back then…very reserved. I only really knew how to relate to people through my art. Sir—erm, you know, Paul—was so poised and…well, his personality is just so big. He brings people together. He taught me how to come out of my shell and have some confidence in myself. And not have so many hang-ups. Like about nudity.”

  “Claire, it’s fine. I’m really fine.” If I heard myself telling it to her enough, then maybe I’d believe it. I needed so much to be fine, at the very least to show all of these people that I was fine. I liked Claire. I wanted her friends to like me; I wanted to know more about this half-shadowed world they played in.

  And I very much wanted all of them to still be clothed while I did that.

  “Sit.” She pointed to another plush, oversized, pink velvet-covered ottoman beside the one she sat on and began coating her eyelashes with mascara. The ottoman was the same lurid pink of the walls and the puppet-fur pelt under my feet. Every surface that wasn’t pink was burnished with thick gold paint.

  I’d worn my black knee-length business-dress skirt and a tailored black silk blouse. What looked marginally edgy-elegant in my bathroom mirror suddenly felt very dowdy. I unbuttoned the blouse’s top button, then another, and glanced at my reflection. The result barely approached sexy secretary.

  “It’s very…um…My Pretty Princess in here.”

  “It’s the sissy-boy room.” Claire’s reflection nodded at me, and she continued to touch up a thin flare of black eyeliner on one closed eye. “I didn’t plan on playing tonight since it’s your first time, but a friend—um, he called a few minutes ago. He needed an emergency stunt-bottom, you know, and this is the only place I could change.”

  I caught my own stunned face behind hers in the mirror and snapped my mouth shut. She giggled and looked through her makeup bag.

  “Which part didn’t you understand?”

  “Nearly all of it.” I stood, shouldering my purse, and gave her a weak smile. “I think I’m going to go.”

  “Erin,” she said, setting her bag aside. “Please. Don’t leave before you give yourself a chance to see everything. Maybe say hi to a few of the people I introduced you to at munch?”

  “Is the woman with the neon purple foxtail attached to her jeans going to be here?”

  “Foxtail? Oh, you mean Lucy. Yes, she will definitely be here, but there’s no telling what she’ll be wearing tonight. That one always makes an entrance.” Claire rolled her eyes, giggling. “Don’t let her intimidate you. She’s only scary if you allow her to be scary. Or, need her to be.”

  Women were never easy friends for me, Claire being an unexpected and surprisingly pleasant exception. Thanks to life spent as the other twin to my sister Danielle, flamboyant, attention-grabbing women like Lucy—and like Dani—set me on edge. I sank into the depths of the ottoman again.

  “What are you demonstrating?” I assumed it wasn’t Tupperware.

  “Flogging. Well, the Top is—I’m just the target.” Sliding a tissue over her lips, she pressed them together, blotting at her dusky plum lipstick. “You’ll like it—the end’s really showy—Florentine flogging. The Top uses two of them, swings them in circles like this.” She moved her arms in arcs, creating a kind of infinity symbol in the air.

  Before I could stop myself, I asked the obvious. “Two? Doesn’t that hurt?”

  Rising, Claire gathered her bag and placed it in one of the gilded metal lockers that lined the opposite wall. “It can. The big leather ones are like a smack with some force behind it—we call them ‘thuddy.’ If he was using thinner leather or plastic, there would be less force but much more sting.”

  She could have teased me, or even rolled her eyes, dismissing such an inane question. Reflexively, I’d braced myself for it. But Claire, as I had come to understand from her actions and words, didn’t judge. It seemed beyond her.

  “Oh.” I wanted to hear more but didn’t know how to ask.

  “This demo probab
ly won’t hurt much—Walt’s showing his technique to the guys in the new member group, not hitting me for play.”

  “Of course,” I muttered, suddenly aware of my hair charged with static and clinging to my cheek. As I raised my arm to brush it away, the silk of my sleeve rippled over my skin. My hair floated away from my hand, live on the current in the air. Play. Hitting. Hurting. Play was hitting and hurting. I turned my eyes to her, ready for more.

  “I wouldn’t mind if it hurt, though.” She was so close. How did she clear so much space without me noticing, and what was she noticing as she watched me? I was upended, in the middle of this absurd pink closet, and nearly begging Claire to describe every sensation, name each toy and what it did to her.

  Behind me, a burst of cool air carried in the sound of distant other voices. And Nitzer Ebb. The club’s playlist really wasn’t helping me dismiss the specter of my sister and her club-kid life so many years ago.

  “They’re ready to get started, honeybuns,” said a throaty female voice. I turned to it as Claire stepped by me, finding Lucy—minus the purple foxtail hanging from her belt—standing just inside the door. Her eyes flicked toward me. Cool appraisal, recognition, and nothing more. “Oh…hi. Karen?”

  At least she recognized me.

  My voice and breath were still tangled with the questions I wanted to ask Claire, leaving me unable to do more than make a genial sound and nod toward the golden-haired woman who, as Claire had predicted, was dressed to impress in deep ruby satin and high-sheen PVC—the complete antithesis of the black denim and leather that accompanied her purple foxtail at the meetup.

  Munch. It’s called a munch.

  As the door swung closed behind Lucy, I managed to get out a garbled “No, um…it’s Erin. I—I mean Reboot?”

  Too late. Lucy had disappeared into the sea of bodies behind her.

  Claire led me from the small room, making sure my scene name was repeated—correctly—and remembered as she navigated the knots of attendees. As we skirted the edges of the long, gallery-like room, she nodded to pairs of questioning eyes, their owners trying to place me. She told me the names of a succession of faces, all indistinct to me beyond the reach of the shafts of light scattered throughout the room.

  And in the shadows of the space, tucked into corners and lined in short rows were broad, crossed widths of blackened wood, low tiered benches upholstered in bright yellow and purple, and higher, single spans, covered in the same yellow and purple urethane. There were medical exam tables, time warps from a mid-century doctor’s office, wide ladders to nowhere braced into two adjoined walls, and a thick steel ring gleaming at the end of each step.

  It was real.

  As more people filled the space around me and the lights dimmed, my apprehension eased a little. Once I was sure there were nothing more than a few dim inches between the black-coated block wall and me, I took up residency behind one of the low benches. When the cool concrete blocks pressed into my shoulder blades, I was pinned in place.

  “Hey, y’all, I’m going to get started.”

  The chatter drew in, ceasing except for a few stray comments that quickly died away. And thanks to a universe that was occasionally benevolent even to me, that voice kept talking. It was deep, so male, and his accent…I’d heard plenty of elongated Southern vowels since I’d been in North Carolina, but none of them had turned my ear toward them quite like this one.

  Rising on my toes, I tried to peer between the sets of shoulders and outlines of heads that separated me from the owner of that voice. A shift in the crowd opened a narrow sight line, and I caught a glimpse of Claire as she passed under narrow bands of intense light, her pale skin gleaming in contrast to the coppery braid swishing around her shoulders. Her husband, who I reminded myself was now Paul, not Dr. Saldino, was before her, navigating the outskirts of the waiting crowd as she followed. He stopped in the middle of the room and Claire followed suit at his heel, her arms behind her back, her hands clasped.

  From the cavernous space overhead, a mechanical hum whirred to life as a length of steel tubing descended. Paul made an adjustment or two, then motioned Claire to his side. When she lifted her arms from her back and held them—offered them—to Paul, I noticed, for the first time, the thick black leather cuffs enclosing her wrists. The gesture, maybe the sight of the cuffs themselves, winded me. As I watched Paul attach the leather bands to a bar suspended from some point in the darkened space above, tension coiled up my arms toward my ears. My pulse coursed heavy against my neck, so strong my sight bounced along with it. I was boxed in by shaded figures on both sides, and with no clear route to move past them.

  Inhale.

  Claire’s arms rose over her head as the bar climbed back to the ceiling, bowing her back into a soft swath of bare skin. Even with the occasional rise of a shoulder or turning head obscuring her from my sight, I couldn’t look away from her. With her wrists bound to this bar by someone else, someone who decided that was where she was to be, and handed over for the use of another person, Claire was everything I’d been curious about for so long.

  Another figure stepped toward Claire, this one also male but much larger than her or her husband. Head turning to Paul as he spoke, he gestured to the points where her wrists were restrained. I shuffled along the wall, searching for a better vantage point. Two women, their backs turned toward the imminent scene, prevented me from moving any further.

  “Oh God, I’m so tired of them,” said a female voice. Young, I assumed from the high pitch, affected with a generous side of frustration and boredom. “All of those people who go up to that house are so into themselves and Paul’s bullshit high protocol.”

  “Do you accept what you are about to receive from me?” another female voice chimed, emulating a masculine tone.

  “Fuck that noise, all of them trying to act like they’re so exclusive and it’s some big mysterious thing that happens out there.”

  “Nic, don’t let them get to you. Getting to go up to the house doesn’t mean you’re anything special. It’s just another play party and getting there is a damn popularity contest. The lifestyle’s no different than vanilla life. And, besides, Tommy said he can bring guests to that big party they have in June.”

  At the front of the room, the same deep male voice began talking, his words obscured by my neighbors.

  “Whatever. I don’t care anyways. Too bad Walt’s mixed up with them. He didn’t even seem like he would be their type, y’know?”

  “I know. He’s the last person I could see buying into that bullshit D/s protocol of Paul’s.”

  “Ugh. Sir Paul.”

  “Please, a sadistic dentist. Now that’s a fucking cliché, right?”

  They snorted with suppressed laughter, and the taller of the two brushed her shoulder against mine as she swung her purse behind her in a dangerous arc. I tried to step away, in the opposite direction of the two faceless women, but the crowd had filled in the spot I’d just vacated. The concrete block wall behind me pressed twin points, cool and solid, into my shoulder blades.

  “Paul’s so sketchy, anyway. He hits on every new girl with all that I’ll be your Daddy-Dom, let me show you what the real, true lifestyle is bull—”

  “Did it to me.”

  “He did it to me too, girl. And poor clover—”

  “Poor clover, my ass—like she doesn’t know he’s doing half the twenty-year-olds who show up around here. And she’s just as bad as he is, with all of her new-agey crap about being a slave. Nobody fucking owns me.” Despite the harsh whispers of the two women, a few heads turned their way, accompanied by the sound of a cleared throat.

  “Hi, girls,” another, much huskier female voice said over the distinct rap of stiletto heels on concrete. “Question time is after the demo.”

  As unobtrusively as possible, I dipped my head forward, glancing sideways. At the side of the women I’d overheard, Lucy Johns stared back at me with a tight, challenging smile.

  “Yeah, thanks.” The two wh
isked past her, leaving a scented wake of sugared-fruit perfume and hair spray.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Of course you weren’t,” Lucy said, nodding. Around us bodies shuffled, reorienting toward a far corner of the room. “Those two were just getting started, and they like to keep the pot stirred around here. If they’d kept talking, you would’ve missed the demo. And that’s why you’re here, right?” Her sculpted eyebrows rose over her pursed, glossy lips. I didn’t know how to answer her, or even what to say if I could, only managing a weak nod in reply.

  Saving me from any further attempt at conversation, Lucy pointed toward the opposite side of the dungeon. During the conversation of my neighbors, I’d missed a change of location. Claire was now attached to the wide planks of one of the wooden Xs that occupied the opposite wall.

  The group stilled as Paul stepped before Claire and displayed what was a simply brutal-looking flogger. With her head bowed and hands raised past her shoulders, Claire’s chest thrust forward. A shaft of light fell from above her, highlighting the side of her breast and the slope of her back, clear even from our distance. Paul handed the flogger to the other man—the Top Claire called Walt, I assumed—who had removed the dark T-shirt he was wearing. A trail of heavy black lines accented with fiery patches of reds and oranges roped around his shoulder and ribcage, sprawling over the curved valley of smooth skin between his stomach and hipbone before disappearing inside a worn denim waistband.

  “Inch-and-half, buffalo leather. Fifty falls or so, I think. Solid. It’s a mean son of a bitch,” Lucy whispered in my ear. “One of my favorites too, but…something that thick is usually for boys.”

  Boys? Thick?

  My head whipped in her direction again, placing us almost nose to nose.

  “It’s okay, babysub. Some little girls can take it, too. Curious?”

  A hiss of air punctuated by a thud jerked my line of sight from her to the front of the room. Walt had swung the flogger, but not at Claire, whose back was angled toward the crowd. He’d grasped the long bands of leather at midpoint and, judging by the angry, oddly hypnotic red marks on his forearm, he had applied the flogger with some force to his own skin. I watched with a suddenly arid throat and mouth as he held his arm before Paul, then Claire. Once Paul stepped aside, Walt crouched, speaking quietly and directly to her. After a glance in Paul’s direction, Walt held the flogger before her.