Make Me

Copyright © 2015 Tamara Mataya

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews.

Cover art © 2015 Date Book Designs

Cover photo: Bigstockphoto/contributor/Maks08

Formatting by Caitlin Greer

This is a work of fiction. References to real people, places, organizations, events, and products are intended to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Clutch your pearls elsewhere—it’s not about you!

ISBN-13: 978-0-9940060-0-4

This book is dedicated with love to my NAturals girls. You mean more to me than you’ll ever know. I love you all for different reasons, most of them highly inappropriate.

I unlock the door and step inside Tessa’s apartment. The dark hardwood floors are clean, and a light grey leather couch and glass coffee table rest on a fluffy white sheepskin rug in the living room. On the coffee table, a large book of nature scenes of the world’s most beautiful places lays perfectly centered.

A small, flat screen TV hangs on the wall above the fireplace. Maybe... I stride over and crouch, hoping for remnants of a note, a letter. Tessa used to write letters to the universe and burn them to make them come true when she was depressed, as part of her recovery. No ashes dust the bottom of the fireplace. Just clean, dry emptiness.

The kitchen is equally disappointing. Food in the fridge means she was eating, and the quality of the food shows she wasn’t binging on junk, but I throw out all the perishables that are starting to spoil.

She’s still keeping her apartment a little too neat, but there’s a dirty coffee cup and a plate with crumbs on it in the sink. If she was really in a bad state of mind, there’d be no dishes; she’d have been unable to leave them unwashed.

No laxatives or castor oil in the medicine cabinet to indicate she’s been binging and purging. The bottle of stomach medicine creaks when I remove the lid, leaving a bit of pink dust in my hand—she hasn’t opened this bottle for a long time. When her obsession with order turned inward, the only things she’d eat were vitamin pills and things to make her stomach feel better. It’s safe to assume she’s been eating healthily and not falling back into her eating disorders.

It’s one positive sign that I cling to. There’s literally nothing in her apartment to indicate she’s in a bad place emotionally. It also makes me feel worse. All signs point to her being fine until I came along and told her she was sick. Who knows what my words have done to her?

How could I not have known she’s been involved in this for two years? I know her schedule better than my own. The harsh words I said to my twin in our last conversation coat me like a second skin made of guilt.

“I’ve wanted to tell you this for a while, Sloanie, but didn’t know how.”

My heart throbbed painfully with worry. She’d pushed me away once before, only to spiral into a darkness so deep I barely found her in time. I’d hovered protectively from the day I found her in a pool of her own blood when we were nineteen. What was wrong now? My expression must have given my thoughts away.

“I’m not going to hurt myself and I’m not in danger,” she huffed. “I didn’t want to tell you like this. I’m into kink, Sloane, and I’m tired of hiding it from you.”

We’re identical twins and I’d thought I knew everything about her. But this threw me big time. “What, you like reading kinky books?”

Tessa had stood and paced back and forth. “Not like the books. Like in real life. I’m into BDSM.”

“Bondage and...”—I struggled to remember the terms—“sado-masochism? You mean where people get gagged and whipped?”

She laughed dismissively. “It’s not like that.”

All I could see was her blood, her bruises, the way she used to cut herself to relieve the emotional pain I couldn’t protect her from, her nearly starving herself to death to gain the illusion of control over her life, and I pushed back against the idea—hard. “Why are you doing this, Tessa?”

“Everything is consensual. Besides, I’ve been doing this for years. Obviously, I’m fine.”

“This is so sick. And an ingenious way to self-harm without inflicting the injuries yourself.”

She was silent for a long time. “I thought you’d understand or at least be open-minded.”

“Well, I don’t. Not with your history of self-harming.”

“I don’t do that anymore. This is a part of who I am. I can’t believe you of all people are judging me.” The pain in her eyes hadn’t stopped me.

I touched her forearm. “We’ll book you into a treatment center, get you help. You don’t need to hurt yourself to feel better.”

Her face hardened with resolve and she jerked her arm away. “I don’t need help; it’s not a disease or a disorder!”

“You want people to beat the fuck out of you. Sounds sick to me.”

Her eyes got a faraway, glazed look. “Whatever. Anyways, I’m going on a drum journey in Mexico, so I’ll be unavailable for a few weeks.”

Angry at her refusal to talk about it any further, I stormed out of her apartment, intent upon looking up treatment centers.

I haven’t seen her for three weeks.

Drum journey, my ass. The timing was too coincidental.

Now, I clutch the plastic, credit card sized pass to The Underground with ‘Tessa Winters, VIP’ printed neatly on the back and signed. No address or further information. I’d bet my eyeteeth that this is the place she goes looking to be hurt.

I press ‘reprint’ on her printer and it spits out a flight itinerary to Montreal, Canada—further proof of her lie. If there was nothing for me to worry about with this BDSM lifestyle she’s gotten into, why did she lie about going to Mexico?

I text one her more time.

My phone dings a minute later.

Tessa: You have no idea what this life can do for someone, or what it even is. Call me when you’re less judgmental, or not at all. Just leave me alone. I’m fine.

The loneliness crushes the walls toward me, and I crash to the bed and put my head between my knees, breathing slowly when all I want to do is gasp because there’s no air left in the apartment.

Panic leaves me one sip of air at a time. As soon as I can breathe normally, tears burn a trail of fear from my eyes and drip down to my jeans. Tiny puddles of panic and desperation, branding me as useless. Fuck this—I’m not going to sit here crying and hoping when there’s something I can do to help.

I am going to expose that club, and the lifestyle, to the world, revealing the dangers and abuse, proving to Tessa that I very much know what I’m talking about. And when I do, I’ll scoop Tessa from the rubble of The Underground, and help her the way I should have before: patiently, gently, and without judgment.

I’ve just got to open her eyes.

The men at the door wave me in without bothering to look at the pass I stole from Tessa’s apartment. Heart thundering inside my chest—I’d been sure they’d call me out as an impostor—I walk inside the heavy steel door, trying to maintain a bored expression as though I belong here at The Underground.

The door closes into place with the heavy solidity of a bank vault, leaving me alone in the hallway as music unheard until now gently pulses over my body. The walls are rough, charcoal-grey stones, pitted and gouged and out of reach. Swallowing hard, I tuck Tessa’s pass into my small clutch and blot my sweaty palms on the thighs of my dark jeans. I’ve never been this nervous before. Probably because this time the stakes are higher than just getting a good story.

Every few feet, large beams are vertically bolted into the craggy walls, bolstering the structure, hopefully keeping us safe two floors below the surface of the street. I don’t trust the people in charge of The Underground to care much about structural engineering or safety regulations, but the wooden steps are solid beneath my feet, long and fairly shallow, leading up to an archway at the entrance to a longer hall.

Get in. Find the angle. Deal with the fallout later. And move. There’s probably a camera on you right now.

The large beam crowning the handrail is identical to the ones on the walls, but its surface is smoother, though not varnished, the edges rounded. How many people’s hands nervously pulling themselves along did it take to create this soft, burnished glow?

If I was doing a story on the underground history of Seattle, I might include this in the investigation, do some research to bulk up the narrative. Find out how many people had passed through these doors and disappeared into history, putting to rest the truth vs. myth of the Shanghaiing that allegedly happened all over the coast. I’d be fighting my editor for extra words for my article, wheedling an extra hundred word count. But this is not about history. It’s about sex. I’m going to blow the roof off of this place, and the lifestyle.

BDSM is not harmless. My sister is wrong about that and I’m going to prove it.

Squaring my shoulders, I stride forward up the steps, breath slightly restricted by the boning in the corset I borrowed from Tessa’s closet. It wasn’t the most comfortable one there, but the rest were too low or too short, leaving me fidgeting to cover up, and I need this to be believable.

I don’t have Tessa’s long hair, having hacked mine last month for an exposé about young homeless women being approached by pimps and enticed into prostitution rings. If I hadn’t cut my hair to go undercover, I could have used it to cover up a bit of skin. As it is, I’ve had to tuck it into the hat I found at the top of her closet, exposing even more of myself.

The black corset was the only suitable one that went with the hat, which looks like a metallic hedgehog fucking a floppy trucker cap. The brim’s short with a shiny gold plate on the top, and the rest is adorned with layers of metal spikes in varying lengths.

I can’t believe she seriously wears this shit.

I pull a few extra strands down to frame and cover my face a bit more. It doesn’t really add to the disguise, but it slightly calms me and that’s the main thing. I’m masked with my identical twin’s identity and a whole bunch of black eye makeup.

My sister’s stilettos take me down the hall. Three doors on the left, two on the right, one at the end. The most light comes from the room straight ahead, and I suspect it’s the one spewing forth the club music. My gaze is fixed on the entrance.

When we were younger, I’d picked up the pieces of my sister, bruised and bloody from the bathroom floor. The reality of control and abuse—it wasn’t pretty, or sexy, or hot.

Walking in like I own the place, I head straight for the bar off to the left and slide onto the stool closest to the wall. I don’t want someone sneaking up behind me, trying to tie me up, or down, or whatever it is they’re doing to that man strapped spread-eagled on the large wooden X in the corner.

“The usual?”

The blonde bartender’s about my age, with dainty features and a perfect pair of breasts bared above a corset with no cups—a cincher? “Yes.” Is this a dress code, or her choice to bare herself like this?

She sets a light but murky drink in front of me—a vodka slime. At least some things don’t change. This small, familiar piece of my sister smoothes the jagged edges of my nerves enough that I can breathe a little deeper.

The alcohol helps too, and I savor the crisp citrusy burn.

It’s not as packed in here as I expected it to be, maybe forty people. Then again, The Underground is no public dance club. Scantily dressed men and women walk around, laughing and dancing. Two women and a man do something to another man with a bunch of white scarves and a lit candle. A woman’s stiletto-clad feet are perched on the back of a curvy redhead on her hands and knees acting as an ottoman. In another corner, a naked man is suspended by a harness, ankles bound and raised, hands tied as well. His penis is fully erect, even while he’s exposed in a way that makes my upper lip sweat, and I blot it on the back of my hand. A woman caresses the curve of his bare ass.