NightWhere (5 page)

The hand disappeared and Amelia followed it inside.

The door closed behind her and the boom and throb of the Blue Room’s sound system suddenly disappeared. In its place, she heard a more appealing sound. The sound that made her blood pump faster. The sound that made her thighs grow damp and her groin warm. Her whole body, in fact, underwent a change as she stepped past the candle flames on either side of the room and heard the first few screams from beyond the foyer, back in the dark recesses. She took a deep breath and the stress of the week slid away from her as quickly as she shed her clothes. Once stripped, Amelia walked past the first dark curtain. The red lights trained from the ceiling and floor accentuated the road map of her scars, but Amelia didn’t care. She would make new ones tonight. Deeper ones. Always deeper…

“I’ve been waiting for you,” a man’s voice said.

A hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her sideways, into a room cloistered by curtains dark as blood.

“It’s been too long,” he said.

Amelia looked up into his angry, dark eyes and matted black hair and grinned.

“I’ve missed you too, Gordon,” she said, reaching out to touch his bare, thick biceps. She trailed her fingertips down the gentle curves of his ribs and then brought them forward, teasing across his groin to the edge of the waist of his shorts. She began to work on the buckle of his belt, but Gordon slipped his hands around her wrists and forced her hands away from him. He yanked her backwards. Something sharp stabbed Amelia in the back, and she strained her neck, trying to see what. As she did, something pinched her skin again and again.

“Fuck,” she complained, and then looked at the wall and said it again, only this time it was more in a tone of admiration than complaint. “Fuuuuuck!” she said.

Gordon hoisted her wrists into the air and into two waiting leather shackles. He quickly pulled them tight and then he bent and slipped cuffs anchored to the wall near the floor around her ankles as well.

Amelia felt her breath catch as she considered what was about to happen. She couldn’t escape her bonds by leaning forward, and if she leaned back…her skin would be pierced by a hundred points of steel. The pinching she had felt was because the wall was lined in long, sharp nails, all pointing outward. She was bound against a vertical bed of nails.

Gordon bent to retrieve something that looked like a long black baton. Then Amelia saw what hung from the end of it, and her eyes widened. Her blood warmed, as her heart began to pound faster, long before the first blow. Terror tied inside anticipation. The sweat flowed instantly under her arms.

He held a cat-o’-nine-tails. Only…the end of each small whip glittered in the red light.

The glitter of metal.

Hooks.

“My wife was a complete bitch tonight,” Gordon said. “So I just want you to know that I need this just as much as you do.”

From somewhere not too far away came a moan of orgasm, followed quickly by a bloodcurdling scream.

Amelia saw something move on the far side of the room—the curtains shifted. She saw the pale jaw and black-pit eyes of a Watcher take position. They never missed an exhibition of pain.

“Let’s begin,” Gordon said. He smiled and raised his arm.

Chapter Four

Reality

It was 2:00 a.m. The street was so silent it was surreal. As if they had exited the noisy club to step into a lost ’50s
noir
film. Their footsteps echoed disturbingly loud on the concrete; the distant clattering rhythm of the elevated train could have been a block away. Mark held Rae’s arm as they walked hurriedly through the broken back end of the city. The sound of their steps only made them hurry more, as if they were chasing themselves. They didn’t speak the entire walk, but when they reached Mark’s car, Rae couldn’t contain her excitement anymore.

“That place was…amazing!” Rae said as she pulled the seatbelt across her waist.

Mark’s smile turned into a yawn, as he started the Sonata and pulled onto the street. “It was pretty wild,” he admitted. “You found a good guy, I take it?”

“A good girl,” Rae corrected.

“Oh
really
?” Mark grinned. “I’m sorry I missed seeing that.”

“Not what you think,” she said. “She knew how to handle a flogger better than any man I’ve ever met. You wouldn’t have wanted to watch.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “You’re really getting into this pain thing.” He flipped the turn signal on and focused on the road, pointedly avoiding looking at his wife. Her obsession with whips and pain had seriously begun to worry him. At first it had seemed harmless enough, but now she didn’t seem to have an interest in sex without first getting, essentially, beat up.

“Did you at least get laid afterwards?” he asked finally.

Rae smiled as she thought of what she had done to the man she’d pulled to the ground. She’d basically forced him to take her, dragging him onto her and then suddenly flipping to be on top of him, demanding that he enter her and meld his penetration with her body’s already burning landscape of raw, lashed skin.

“Yes,” she answered simply. “Did you?”

He laughed. “Apparently I’m one of those antisocial types. The bartender had to take me under her wing.”

“Her wing, huh?” she laughed. “I’m guessing that’s not all you were under.”

“No,” Mark admitted. “She was pretty good.”

Rae sighed. “I can’t wait until the next one.”

“Who says we’ll be invited?”

“We will,” she promised. “I talked to a couple people about it. We’re in.”

Something in Mark’s belly sank. All at once, for the first time since they’d started playing in the lifestyle, he found that he wanted, more than anything, to have a boring life. He wanted to cut the grass on the weekend and watch football and maybe have some boring missionary sex with his wife once or twice a week.

He didn’t want to bed horny women with tattoos on their asses and perversion on their brains. He didn’t want to see his wife tied up and banged by beefy bald guys who preferred wearing leather chaps to jeans.

In his heart, Mark just wanted to be like normal people.

But one sidelong glance to the woman in the passenger’s seat said that there was nothing that Rae wanted less than that. And so he didn’t say a word.

Rae stared at the welts on her skin in the bathroom mirror. She’d let Mark undress and go to bed ahead of her so that she could have a minute to herself alone. She winced as she peeled her bra and shirt off the dried sweat and beads of blood that crisscrossed her chest. She didn’t want him to see her like this, not now. Rae could tell something was bothering Mark about the club. He’d acted a little funny when she’d finally come out of the bondage area and found him lounging at the bar, nursing a beer. She couldn’t figure out what the matter could be—she’d seen the bartender that he said he’d banged…a hottie. So he’d gotten it good, and she herself had found what she needed… What was the problem all of a sudden? Mark hadn’t had any issues with her sleeping with others in years. She pulled a nightgown over her head and made sure in the mirror that none of the welts were visible. She didn’t need to give his nerves any ammunition…though she didn’t know how she was going to keep the damage hidden long enough for it to heal.

She reached out to turn out the light and grimaced as the silk caught on the edges of raw skin.

“Wow,” she whispered. This night was going to take a while to live down. But in her heart, she was already ready to go back.

“NightWhere,”
she said with silent lips as the lights went out. The word echoed in her mind with the reverence of a prayer.

NightWhere.

Chapter Five

Return

Mark barely had the phone to his ear when Rae’s voice announced: “It’s tonight!”

Mark knew what she meant without asking. For the past month that’s all Rae had talked about. Her interest in pain which had long been bubbling near the surface seemed to have exploded into an obsession after their first trip to NightWhere. She’d bought books on bondage and submission. She’d tried to get Mark to flog her and when his slaps disappointed, she’d tried to turn the tables on him. She cornered him in the bedroom one night with thigh-high black boots, a leather corset, black gloves and a long, wicked-looking leather whip. He escaped from that with a couple of well-placed spanks and a deep kiss. She’d given in quickly and with energy—sex had not been that good with her in a long time, he’d thought at the time.

But it had only been the foreplay for what she truly desired.

“It’s tonight,” she repeated. “Are you almost home?”

Mark opened the garage door a half hour later and stepped into the house to find his wife lounging back on the couch, clearly posing for him. He did a double take.

“Do you like?” she asked.

Rae leapt up and did a twirl. The chains connecting the two small leather cups of her bra rattled as she did. Small chains hung in twin silver waterfalls across her bare belly. A curtain of ill-concealing metal.

She also wore a short black leather skirt and black fishnet hose beneath it. Chains looped from the waist of her skirt, and she wore silver bracelets of chain as well. Around her neck, she had a collar of chain bound to leather. She had painted her lips black and wore dark shadow around her eyes. Rae was darkly, dangerously stunning.

“Have you been watching
Rocky Horror
?” Mark asked.

She stuck her tongue out. “You have an hour to hit your wardrobe and attempt to keep up with me.”

“And then?”

“We have to drive to the north side.”

“I’m no Tim Curry, and anyway, I don’t think I restocked my fishnets,” Mark joked.

Rae pursed her lips. “I don’t think those would look good on you anyway. I picked you out a shirt upstairs. See what you think.”

Mark grinned. “Now you’re dressing me, huh?”

She slapped him on the ass. “Hurry up!”

“Don’t wear out your wrist before we leave,” he warned, hurrying away from her towards the stairs.

“I could say the same thing to you,” she laughed. “Better not take too long up there.”

While the last edition of NightWhere had been housed in a run-down section of the city, tonight’s invitation took them to the upscale part of town. The Evanston neighborhood was lined with tall, old trees, and the building they pulled up in front of looked one hundred years old. It was a grey-stone high-rise with ornate limestone accents and watchful gargoyles surrounding its roof. They walked into the U of its courtyard, Rae holding a black mesh cape around her bare midriff as they hurried to enter and get out of sight of any bystanders in the neighborhood.

Mark opened the heavy wooden front door and they stepped inside. The lobby floor was all black-veined, creamy marble, and a gilded elevator hugged one side of the wide room. A set of slowly curving steps led away from the street to their left. They stood there in the lobby, lost for a minute.

“Are you sure…” Mark began, but Rae interrupted him.

“There!” She pointed at the gold antique top of the elevator, which used a needle to show the floors. On the right-hand side, right after the number 12, a small black oval was pasted on, right over the place where 13 should have been. In the center of the circle, two letters were limned in grey:
NW.

“It’s upstairs,” she said, moving towards the elevator.

“On the thirteenth floor,” Mark said quietly. “Of course.”

They got on the elevator and pressed the black button that was also obscured with a small black disc reading
NW
.

The elevator creaked and ascended, each floor ticked off by the slow clockwise ascent of an arrow above the door. And then the needle stopped, and a bell chimed, and the gold doors opened onto a long, dark hall. They stepped out and saw a handful of dark doorways along either side of the hallway. But their destination was clear. At the end of the corridor, they could see flickers of blue light from beneath a door, and the throb of a bass-and-drum groove echoed dully in the air. They walked quickly down the hall. Rae clutched their invitation for the night like a life preserver.

Mark raised a fist to knock, but the door opened before he touched it.

A hand reached out, its fingernails glittered obsidian, its wrist was encircled by the dark ink of a symbol they both recognized from their last visit: a self-devouring snake tattoo.

Rae handed over the invitation, and a moment later they were inside. The volume of the music was overpowering inside of the doorway, and when the doorman leaned in to say something, Mark found himself yelling back, “What?”

The tall man grinned and motioned them to walk behind a curtained area on the other side of the door. The black-velvet draping deadened the sound of the band a little, and the man took Rae’s hand in his own, at the same time reaching out to grab Mark’s.

“You came back,” he said. “We are excited to have you as part of our secret family. The first time…we let you look and decide if this is really what you want. Some don’t return. Most do, because we don’t give out invitations lightly. But those that do come back to us a second time…almost never leave.”