Wild Licks (18 page)

She smiled. “We try. The club got sort of dropped in our laps after our grandfather passed and it turns out there's still a need for it. I mean, yes, BDSM is less stigmatized than it used to be, but there's also more intense interest in our private sex lives than ever.”

“Very, very true.” At that moment Gwen and her group returned with a short, plump woman in tow, solving the mystery of whose boots and corset we had seen earlier. Her skin was almost as dark as the leather and her smile was brilliant.

“Hey, everyone, if you haven't met her yet, this is Chita,” Gwen said. “We have a staff of three hosts—Chita, Madison, and Bradley. They're fully trained with all the equipment and are available to be invited to play, but let me emphasize the word
invited
because they are never required to do anything they don't want to do.”

I feigned interest in meeting the hosts, enough to seem believably polite, whilst armoring myself to ignore Gwen further.

That plan worked for a few short hours. The guests began arriving after our orientation ended, and it was pleasant enough to socialize with a few people I'd met before like the model/performer known as Sakura and the people who were new to me like Madison, who seemed to always be there with a ready conversation whenever my attention lagged.

Perhaps inevitably I ended up in a conversation beside the bar that included Gwen, and when the other two moved off to play together, I was unable to simply walk away from her. That would be rude.

For her part, she was fulfilling the role of perfect hostess, as promised. “Can I pour you a drink, Mal? Some soda water? I'm going to have some.”

“Um, yes, that would be very thoughtful.” I made small talk to fill the silence while she went around to the other side of the bar and got out glasses. “So. Your new agent. You like him? Or her?”

“You met him at that banquet,” she said as she scooped the ice. “Simon Gabriel. Did he make a good impression on you?”

“Good enough, anyway.” My eyes followed her as she put the ice into the glasses. Her hands were entrancing me. “Seemed a reasonable fellow.”

“He says he's going to try to get me some gigs in music videos.” She shrugged.

“This idea doesn't thrill you I take it?”

She poured from a bottle into each glass and then set one in front of me. “Oh, it's not that it isn't a good opportunity, but it's the whole thing of being a pretty face but not getting a speaking part.”

“Aaah, I see.” I wasn't particularly fond of the mimicry and vamping that filming a video often required of the band, either. I picked up the glass and raised it to her in thanks. “What is it that drew you to acting?”

“I resisted it at first, actually.” She took a sip and looked off into the distance instead of at me. “But I fell in love with that feeling of inhabiting a character, of becoming another person. Talking like them, thinking like them, it's like a whole new internal logic springs up in my mind.”

I murmured in agreement, barely aware that we'd slipped into an easy intimacy: me asking, her answering from her heart.

“It can be really…intense sometimes. Like I've changed how I thought or felt about things personally as a result. Like the first time I did a death scene. It wasn't even for a show; it was just an acting class. But it was like…I died and woke up a new person.”

The ghost of Risa in the back of my mind would not let that go unremarked. “New how?”

“Less afraid. More willing to embrace the mysteries in life. It sounds weird, I know, but it was almost like a…religious epiphany. One of my theater professors warned us about it. Even though you're ‘just acting,' real emotional change can happen.” She paused for a second before going on. “You know, now that I think about it, that must be true for role-playing in a BDSM scene, too.”

“You think?” I tried to keep my voice neutral, knowing I wanted to avoid anything that smacked of “relationship talk” and yet part of me craved hearing what she was saying. Perhaps I was unable to stop picking at a wound as I asked, “Did you have any epiphanies when we played?”

Gwen met my eyes. “I don't know about epiphanies exactly, but I do feel like, even when you told me who to be, the character I became, the person I inhabited, was actually the best possible version of myself.”

Sweet Gwen. I was speechless. How could I explain to her that once I gave in to my cravings I felt I became the worst version of myself? I was unable to muster even a polite automatic response.

She glanced at the clock and took a hurried last sip from her glass. “Ooh. Gotta run! I've got to go get ready for a scene Madison and I are going to do. Talk to you later, Mal.”

And away she went. Gwen and Madison? I was still trying to absorb what she had said about becoming her best self while in scene. If that was so, then what was she trying to prove by doing a scene with Madison? I wondered if I could go through watching it. Perhaps I should leave.

I knew I wouldn't, though. I was as drawn to Gwen Hamilton as the proverbial moth to the flame.

Oh, man. Here I'd promised myself I'd keep my distance and I'd gone right for the jugular instead. Why did I tell him that? If Mal needed a reason to think I was turning into an obsessed stalker, telling him I found BDSM a potentially life-changing experience probably just handed him one. He'd stared at me like I'd told him I liked to kick puppies. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe he was just so moved by my confession that he was speechless.

Yeah, right. I tried to put it out of my mind while Madison showed me what she'd brought, laying them across the bench in the changing room.

“Oh, Maddie, these are absolutely beautiful.” I ran my fingers through the tails of the matching pair of floggers. The leather was dark blue and managed to be both thick and soft at the same time. The handles were braided with dark blue and silver strands. “Where did you get them?”

“A woman in Virginia makes them, I think. Maybe it's Maryland. I loved the color but I had to get both because they only came as a matched set. They're moose hide.” She stepped back and swung them, though there wasn't quite enough space in the changing room to really flail them around. “They're a little on the heavy side, but if you like more thud than sting, they're exactly what you want.”

I felt myself blush a little at the thought that flashed through my mind: If it had been Mal, I would have wanted it to sting like crazy. But to play with Madison, thud was probably better. She wasn't really a sadist. We were just having fun.

Well, having fun
and
provoking Mal.

“That's all you're going to wear?” she asked.

“I couldn't come up with anything better given the description in the book,” I said, looking down at my feet. I was wearing thin, strappy flat gold sandals, a plain black knee-length skirt that was slit all the way up the sides, and a gold string bikini top.

“I better double-knot the bikini in the back if you don't want the flogger to untie it,” she said.

“Sure.” I held my hair up so she could double-knot the string behind my neck, too, even though that one wasn't going to be directly struck with the floggers.

“To save time, I brought the wrist and ankle cuffs in here.” She dug them out of a tote bag on the bench.

“Great idea.” I held out my wrists and she buckled the soft leather and sheepskin around each one. The chrome quick-release snaps dangled. If there was an earthquake or anything like that I'd be able to free myself easily, but not accidentally if I wanted to thrash around and pretend to struggle. I bent over to do one ankle while she did the other one. “Okay, ready?”

“I think so.” She grinned at me. Her red hair was in a bun and she wore a short black cape over her sleeveless mock turtleneck, the closest we could get to her looking sort of like a nun without an actual nun outfit. “Okay. Walk in front of me, head down, wrists crossed.”

I stepped out of the changing room into the hall and we made our way into the main room. With each step, my heart rate seemed to speed up and I felt my palms grow damp. About a dozen people were socializing and they quieted down as soon as we stepped in. Mal was still by the bar, but I didn't dare look at him. Club regulars were used to me and Maddie doing an “ice-breaker” scene, and I could feel their anticipation sharpen as Maddie cleared her throat.

“Kneel,” she said, and I did, in the space between the last two couches and the wheel. “Excrucia, you have been found guilty of wanton conduct. However, the tribunal has determined your behavior is most likely caused by demons. Rather than banishment, we offer you the choice to have the demons beaten out of you. Do you accept this sentence?”

“I do,” I said, my breathing getting shallow and quick, the way it always did in a scene—any scene where I was acting, not just a BDSM one.

“Then place yourself on the punishment wheel.” She tested that it was locked in place and then I stepped up. Maddie quickly clipped the cuffs to the attachment points so that my face was to the wheel and my back was to the room.

That was it, all the setup required, and then she began to swing the floggers and hit me, slowly and softly at first, then gradually increasing the pace and force.

Those heavy moose hide floggers felt wonderful. Didn't hurt at all. The closest thing I could compare it to was one of those massages where they thump on you until everything relaxes. I moaned into it.

“That's it,” Madison ad-libbed. “Let those wanton demons escape.”

Yes, of course, the logic of the scene suddenly clicked. I moaned louder as she hit me harder, thinking,
Ariadne Wood must have been a kinkster.

But the scene quickly plateaued; her hitting me only went so far. I ground my mound against the leather padded surface of the wheel but there was no way I could come from that. Where was this scene going? Or were we just going to play it like the demons were eventually banished? That could work. Maybe if I screamed a bit louder she would decide at some point I'd had enough?

There was a pause in the blows and I wondered if Madison was taking a short break. I dared to peek behind me.

Mal had stepped up beside her. His hair had been pulled back into a ponytail and he'd stripped down to a tank top and jeans. As he spoke, I swore I felt the vibrations of his voice. “There's a way to use the two floggers in tandem.”

Adrenaline coursed through me and I tried to send a telepathic message to Maddie:
Let him! Let him!

No message was necessary. “Here, why don't you show me?” she asked as she handed him the floggers and then shot me a wink.

Mal took one flogger in each hand and, without looking at me, twirled them in the air as if testing their weight. First one, then the other, then he twirled them together like something out of a kung fu film. My jaw fell open. That looked amazing, and so did the muscles in his bare arms as he swung the floggers through intricate variations.

My neck was getting stiff from craning to watch. He stopped then and came up to me, and I quickly straightened, pretending I hadn't been watching.

Mal lifted the back panel of the skirt, folded it, and tucked it into the waistband so that my butt and thighs were exposed.

He said one word before he stepped back, with a bit of a low chuckle. “Demons?”

I could not stand by and watch Madison struggling with two floggers that were too heavy for her upper body strength and that she didn't know how to use to full effect. She had stepped back and was testing whether she could swing them both together with both hands like a baseball bat when I asked to cut in.

Though this was no ballroom dance, she bowed out and let me take over. Gorgeous instruments, these floggers, though they paled in comparison to the beauty pinned to the wall in front of me, a beauty so clearly pining for release that it felt like a moral imperative to step in and relieve her need.

And my own. A bound, half-naked, needy Gwen was too much to resist. I was utterly seduced, as ensorcelled as any character in an Ariadne Wood book. I took the floggers in my hands as if I were sleepwalking, almost like I was someone else. I had to hope that clarity would return in the aftermath of the scene, as it usually did once the air was cleared and the Need ebbed away.

I began to strike her with one flogger with a simple side stroke and the tenor of her cries immediately sharpened. Yes, I could hit harder than Madison and direct the blow at the surface of her skin with the tips, and I could also feel how much Gwen needed it, as if the craving were visible on her skin.
Ah, sweet pain, old friend, I welcome you into my bed once again.
I watched as Gwen rose on her tiptoes, tension building in her as the sensation intensified. I covered her from thighs to shoulders with wicked blows, reddening her skin, laying my claim to her inch by inch.

I backed off the sharpness of the strikes, changing to more of a swiping blow, one that would send the impact deep and resonate throughout her body.
Yes.
Her cries changed to low groans with shuddering breaths between them. She was losing the sense of herself, losing her self-consciousness and moving into a state almost akin to meditation, and I was taking her there.

The release from a beating like this is not, strictly speaking, sexual for most bottoms but is more of an emotional one, a kind of catharsis that some truly need and crave and something that cannot be achieved solo. I didn't know if Gwen had ever experienced that before but now would be the perfect time for it. It was time she let go of whatever petty emotions she was clinging to that made her think it could work between us. Clean out the cobwebs and surely she would see how wide the gulf was between what she actually needed and me.

Yes, there was the note my ears were straining to hear, the first hint of the tightening of her chest that would lead to tears. I needed her tears as much as she did. I changed to swinging the floggers in tandem, “Florentine” style, doubling the rate of the blows and pushing her rapidly toward complete emotional breakdown.
I am a destroyer, Gwen. Now you'll see.