Leather Bound (13 page)

I tugged on the door again, realised it was silly and then looked around for a buzzer or a camera or something that would let us in.

I was poking at what was probably just a lump on the wall when the door opened.

A bald-headed man stood in the doorway. His eyes were cold, so dark they were nearly black. His stance was that of someone guarding treasure, like a knight or a dragon. The bald-headed version of Smaug the dragon. Everything about his presence screamed doom. Or dom. I imagined him with a leather crop in one hand and a ball-gag in the other. The vision seemed perfect.

‘Yes?’ he said. His voice was higher than I imagined, which created an odd sense of dissonance about him.

‘Uh,’ I said. Because clearly that’s what one says when faced with a big dude who scares the crap out of you while also maybe turning you on.

‘The coffee shop’s out front,’ he said. He waited for about half a second, and then made as if to shut the door.

‘We have tickets,’ I said. ‘For the show.’

He looked me up and down, clearly waiting for me to produce the tickets.

I pulled them from my pocket and held them out. My fingers were shaking; the tickets bounced slightly in the air, giving me away.

He eyed them and then ran some kind of penlight over their corners before nodding. ‘You’re late,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

‘Yes, you are,’ he said.

I’d had a lot of weird exchanges in the past few days, but that was one of the weirdest. I looked at Kyle but he was clearly as confused as I was.

‘Come in then,’ he said. ‘And quickly.’

Suddenly we were inside a long, well-lit hallway and the door was closed behind us.

‘Tech?’ he asked.

Once again, I was utterly at a loss. I was going to say ‘Uh’ again, but I got the impression that you only got to say that once around him without him breaking into a snarl. So I managed an ‘I’m sorry?’ then realised I’d already said that too.

He sighed, shaking his head. It was a big head, and I had to bite my lip not to snort at the slightly bobblehead image it gave him.

‘Newbies,’ he sighed. ‘Don’t you do your homework before you come here?’

‘Hey, I tried –’

He silenced me. ‘No cameras allowed. No recording devices. Do you have anything?’

‘Just my cell.’ I dropped it into his outstretched hand. Kyle did the same with his.

‘We’ll have it here for you when the show’s over,’ he said.

He looked Kyle and me over slowly. Whatever he saw he did not approve of, but he seemed willing to let us go in anyway.

‘Three things to remember,’ he said. ‘If you’re chosen, you’ll know what to do. If you’re not chosen, that’s that. No whining about it. You can come back and try again. Come back a million times if you like. Long as you have tickets. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about –’ he looked me over specifically this time ‘– and it’s clear that you don’t, then just enjoy the ride.’

‘Ride?’ I said.

‘In you go.’

Then we were through a double door that opened into a dim room. It looked like a small, old, high-end theatre, dominated by a huge black curtain across what must be the stage. The chairs were large, linked in semi-circled rows that faced away from us. Small candles flickered against the walls. In the semi-dark, it seemed like almost all of the seats were full, and yet there didn’t seem to be more than two dozen people in the audience. I couldn’t tell if they were men or women, young or old. Just that there were dark heads in seats.

A shadow moved against the wall and then I saw two eyes through a dark mask.

‘Your tickets,’ the shadow said in a soft, feminine voice.

I handed them over. The shadow ran a small light over them, then nodded. ‘This way,’ the masked woman said.

We followed her. Kyle reached for my hand in the dark and squeezed. His eyes looked huge in the half-light. She led us to the last two open seats together, right in the front row. Every time I show up late to a show and there are seats open in the front row, it makes me nervous. I wondered if I should have brought a raincoat or something. Well, too late. I was here now. If I was going to get drenched by something on stage, I’d just have to deal with it.

I smiled at the dark-haired man on the other side of me as I took my seat. He didn’t smile back.

‘How did I not know about this?’ I whispered into Kyle’s ear. My voice was too loud, even at a whisper. No one else was talking or whispering or even opening a piece of gum. But I couldn’t stop talking. ‘I come to Cream all the time. How does Stefan not even really know about this? Also, choose us? Choose us for what?’

He shrugged. ‘I told you. I have no idea. Exclusive.’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ I said. It hurt my pride a little, I think. I thought of myself as a good researcher, as someone who knew what was going on around me. Especially around the Sweet Spot, which I considered my home. To get a glimpse of this secret sex world hurt a little. To know that people in my life knew about it and had never mentioned it hurt more. Which was stupid, I knew. If I didn’t know to ask, how would they know to tell me?

I leaned in towards Kyle to ask more questions but, as I did so, half a dozen more shadows, clad in dark suits that covered everything but their eyes, seemed to materialise out of the walls. One by one, they made their way through the audience, moving more like flickering blackness than humans. It was spooky and mesmerising all at once. A shadow went to each of the candles and silently put it out.

The theatre went dark.

Not a sound. Not a rustle. No one opened a cough drop or sneezed or even moved. I wasn’t sure people were even breathing. I couldn’t hear or see Kyle next to me. If not for the heat of his leg where it barely touched mine, I would have wondered if he was still there.

It was so quiet and dark, it felt like what I’d always thought a sensory deprivation chamber would feel like. On one hand, it made me want to cough, or snort, or laugh. Pound my feet against the floor. Pull out my iPhone, which of course I didn’t have. Kiss Kyle loudly and with lots of tongue. Make some kind of noise.

On the other hand, I wanted to settle into that silent blackness, to let it envelop me. Isn’t that what sensory deprivation did? Gave you time and space to float and think.

The lack of stimulus didn’t make me calmer. It made me hyper aware. My ears seemed to be actually turning this way and that, searching for sound. My eyes strained against the blackness. I needed something, anything to latch onto, to find my bearings. But nothing came.

I sat. I breathed, inhaling and exhaling too loudly. Time stopped or expanded or speeded up. Something began to shift. My eyes and ears accepted their fate, stopped searching so hard for something to grab hold of. Instead my skin became alive, sensitive to every movement of air, to every change in temperature. My pulse thrummed in my veins, so fierce I was surprised I couldn’t actually hear it. The heat of my body overtook everything else.

Every time the air changed, it was the stroke of a lover’s hand along my skin. The back of my neck dotted with sweat. I thought I could feel each droplet forming, teasing my skin with cool liquid. Someone somewhere breathed, and the hair along my face tickled my cheekbones.

A touch brushed the side of my arm, a barely-there sweep, an almost-not-there feathering, something so light that it almost didn’t seem real. It could have been just another wisp of breeze, a mote of dust in the air.

The way my body reacted was the only indication I had that this was something different. All of the hairs on my arm stood up as if to follow the touch’s trajectory. My skin went cool and then hot. Deep inside the centre of me, my pussy pulled tight in reaction to the touch. I almost gasped at the strength of the sensation, but resisted by biting down on the insides of my cheeks.

Another soft brush along the edge of my neck, pushing my hair aside. The intensity of such light contact made me shiver. I couldn’t tell if it was skin or gloves or something far from human, like a feather. But with every touch my entire body responded, yearning for more, my insides opening up.

My clit pulsed soft and tentative, asking for more. I refused to groan or shift or even make a noise. If no one else was falling prey to their arousal, I wouldn’t either.

Then I had a horrible realisation: maybe this wasn’t part of the show at all. Maybe this was just someone in the audience touching just me. Maybe everyone else was just sitting there waiting for the show to start.

And I realised it didn’t matter. My whole body hummed, alive and wanting. If I was the only one being touched, so be it. I liked it.

Next to me, I heard a sigh, a quiet, barely-there sound that I knew instinctively was Kyle. I’d heard him sigh just like that the first time I brushed my tongue along his cock. Or trailed a damp finger around his nipple.

The sound made me smile. It didn’t take long before I could hear soft sighs and breaths from all around, a kind of chorus of pleasure, as though the unseen people were playing us like instruments. The more I listened, the more it became just that, a perfectly played song of desire, sighs and moans and bodies shifting in the dark.

The next time my touch came, I didn’t hold back. The brush of fingertips across my chest, landing just lightly at the edges of my nipples, made me sigh in want and pleasure.

The song rose around us for a few more minutes, and then, without any kind of finale or last chorus, it just stopped. Everyone went silent. The touch against my skin didn’t come back.

I sat in the dark and silence again, my body hyper aware, my clit throbbing so hard it was all I could do not to reach between my legs and touch it.

A huge sound rolled through the blackness. The curtains in front of us were whispering open, revealing two men, oiled and naked, in a pale, flickering light. They were entwined, their bodies coiling together as if in time to some silent music. One was lean and thin, with a body like Kyle’s, the muscles of his legs pulsing with his movement. The other was taller, wider, his skin dark and shiny.

They writhed, kissing, touching, grinding their bodies together, until I had to shift in my seat, the sexual tension unbearable. I drew in a breath, caught by their utter beauty, their lack of concern for anything but each other. It was the best and worst kind of tease, wanting it to go on for ever, but also wanting them to do something, anything, more. To find their way into each other, to move toward climax. Simultaneously, each one reached down and took the other’s cock in his hands, stroking so slowly, so leisurely, I could feel my own hips respond.

The thin man went down on his knees, looking up at the other. You could see the lust in his gaze, in the way he leaned into the man’s touch at the back of his neck. With a single, long stroke he buried the man’s cock in his mouth. They thrust together as one, mouth and cock, the two bodies with it. I couldn’t stop watching, couldn’t stop imagining it was me with that beautiful cock, that a man was on his knees before me, sucking the length of me into his mouth, bit by bit.

It wasn’t hardly enough. Even as I was straining my eyes to see more of them, every nuanced muscle and movement, they parted, a wholeness become two halves and then they were gone off the stage.

The lights went up, just a little. Enough so that I could see Kyle’s expression as he turned and mouthed ‘Holy fuck’ at me.

Kitty walked on a moment later. Where the men had been silence and truth and bareness, Kitty was everything that was the opposite of that – a black and white striped vinyl cat suit, complete with tail and ears, a blonde wig that added at least six inches to her already tall frame. Her smile was as big as her hair, ruby-red lips, perfect teeth, a glittery piercing in each of her dimples.

She cut the sexual tension as soon as she walked on stage. A song came up, the kind of beat you could clap to, stomp your feet to. You could almost hear people settle back into their seats, breathe sighs of relief, prepare themselves for the change of entertainment.

I leaned over to Kyle. ‘I could never do that,’ I whispered.

‘What? Wear a cat suit?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, yes, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that. Get up on stage.’

‘Sure you could,’ he said.

I just shook my head. No way I was ever doing that.

Sitting here in the dark, watching? Good. Up there, dancing? Or worse yet, showing my sexual self? No thank you times ten. No literary heroine in the world was going to give me enough chutzpah to do something like that. Nor did I want her to.

Kitty strutted around the stage, moving to the upbeat tempo, shaking her body inside the vinyl suit. Despite, or maybe because of, her over-the-topness, she was hot as hell. Embodying everyone’s fantasy woman, part cat, part pin-up girl, part pole dancer. My tongue went dry. I found myself wanting to lick the slick vinyl that curved over her breasts, her hips, the cleft between her legs.

She stripped slowly as she moved to the music, lots of coy moves. Pulled off her gloves inch by inch until she could catch the end of them in her teeth and tug them all of the way off. Seemed to toy with the idea of removing her tail, then thought better of it and left it on. Tugging her ears out of her big wig and throwing them into the crowd. She was down to her vinyl suit and her tail when the music changed, something slower, sensual, the background beat of drums echoing the pulse at the base of the throat.

Kitty came down off the stage, the lights moving with her to catch every curve, every jiggle. She made her way across the front row of seats, touching a few people here and there, her movements showing a connection with them, a familiarity that surprised me. She stopped at a man near us, leaned down and whispered in his ear until he released a low groan.

When she got to Kyle and me, she stopped a long time, eyeing us both. Her eyes were the neon blue of coloured contacts, the pupils slitted like a cat’s. A tiny black mole, a shape I couldn’t put my finger on, rested at the corner of one eye. I couldn’t stop staring at the contrast of her pale skin with her unreal eyes.

Finally, she held her hand out to me. I thought she wanted to shake it. Or, I don’t know. What do you think in moments like that? You think, ‘I should do this thing.’