NightWhere

Chapter Seven

The Rabbit

Only losers hung out at Firkin’s Pub on Monday nights. Losers who liked to drink. Alone. Because there weren’t any pickups left at Firkin’s after 10:00 p.m. on a Monday night. They rolled the carpets up in Roselle, and Travis wished they’d lock the doors to this pathetic excuse for an English pub when they did. Because without a locked door…he had to stay open.

And right now…he soooo wanted to close. Travis sat on a stool behind the register at the bar and waited for the last patron to leave (an old man who nursed a Fuller’s ESB as if it were 100-proof liquor-taking it down carefully, sip by sip). Meanwhile, beneath the bar, Travis flipped through a copy of Bondage Monthly. He loved to think about the leather and the chains, but Travis never would go beyond the page. He sat here at the bar night after night and watched the hopefuls connect and disappear…he knew some of them were probably doing the stuff he saw in his magazines. But he didn’t know how to meet them. Or really, how to suss them out. And honestly, if they came on to him…he’d probably run anyway.

Travis wanted it…but not enough. So he flirted with the pages and fantasized…and sat in his place at the bar, pouring drinks for people who were living. Unlike him.

He was enjoying a particularly hot spread-featuring a chick with long carrot-hot hair in black-leather straps that covered none of her private parts, merely bordered them, and a black man who held a cell phone and looked bored as the woman worked through a series of pictures of her in various unconventional (and physically demanding) poses to interest him-when the door to Firkin’s opened. A thickset man walked in and sized up the bar. Which didn’t take him long since the place was virtually all empty seats. And then he walked to the bar.

He studied a photo in his hand and then looked up and repeated the evaluation, this time on Travis. A grin spread across his face as he sat down on a bar stool.

“What time do you close?” the man asked.

“Depends on who is here,” Travis said, smiling. “Honestly, I was hoping that as soon as the last bit of that Fuller’s over there was done…” he nodded at the old man in the corner, “…that I might be able to close it up for the night.”

The man slapped a twenty dollar bill on the bar and asked, “Would you keep it open for me?”

Travis shrugged. “I guess. What are you having?”

The man smiled and said, “Give me a Bud. And keep the change.”

Travis’s eyes went wide, and he poured the four-dollar beer. The man nodded as he delivered it, but didn’t say another word until the old man in the corner stood up, slapped his empty glass down on the bar and mumbled, “Good night.”

And then the man at the bar drained his Bud and looked Travis right in the eye.

“You’ve always wanted to be stripped naked and given a good whipping, haven’t ya?”

Travis gulped at the forward question. “Um…huh?”

The man grinned. “I know what you want,” he said. “And I can help you. Nobody has to know. All you have to do is say yes.”

Travis blushed and opened his mouth to say something…but no words came out.

“What are you looking at there?” the man asked, pointing over the edge of the bar to the magazine.

Travis opened his mouth again, but still said nothing. The man reached over him and pulled Bondage Monthly out and waved the cover of a man in a black leather mask at the bartender.

“I…” was all he could say.

“Close the bar and come with me,” the man said again. “I know a place where you can go and live this magazine. Women in leather, men with whips…it’s what you have dreamed of. It’s what you sit here reading about every night.”

“How do you know so much about me?” Travis asked.

“They have been watching you. They want you to come and join them.”

“Who are they? Where is this place?” Travis asked, looking interested and scared at the same time.

“NightWhere.”