NightWhere

Chapter Twenty-Six

A Clue

His first thought upon walking into the dark bar lit with a combination of neon beer signs and long strands of colored Christmas lights was, “Well, this certainly isn’t NightWhere.”

No, Mark reminded himself. This was Bondage-A-Go-Go, a monthly bar scene meet-up for those who flirted with the S &M set.

Flirted was the right word though, he realized as he walked the club. The waitresses were all wearing black skirts and tight black tops. If they poured drinks as deep as the cleavage, you’d get drunk here really fast, he thought.

On the lower level, a DJ spun some ’80s techno, and couples and groups clustered at the long wooden bar and around some black highboy tables. Upstairs, a crowd had gathered around a small stage to play voyeur to the beating.

If you could call it that.

A fifty-something businessman wearing only white briefs and a steel-wool mat of chest hair bent over a sawhorse as a woman in a black leather corset and thigh-high black boots twirled and slapped a flogger against his back.

She might as well have been dusting the furniture, Mark scoffed silently, as he watched her tease the man. She didn’t land a slap that would turn the skin red, let alone break it.

Then Mark laughed at himself. Six months ago, this would have been as far as he would have considered going. And now he was making fun of it as too tame?

He made a mental note of the flogger’s face, so that he could find and follow up with the man later, and retreated to the bar at the side of the second floor room. Perhaps with a little side conversation, he might uncover someone with a lead on NightWhere.

Mark ordered a Sam Adams from a bartender with more piercings than birthdays. He leaned sideways against the bar, half watching the fetish play across the room, and half eyeing the rest of the patrons clustered around him.

He hated this part. Mark had never been terribly outgoing, and hitting people up cold was not his style. But still he tried. The guy next to him on the right looked as likely as any. He was balding and thin, wearing a healthy dose of black.

“Hey,” Mark said. “Do you go to these things a lot?”

The guy looked at him and shook his head. “Just checking it out,” he said.

“Gotcha,” Mark said, taking a sip of his beer. “I’m checking it out too, though I was hoping to find a place where they really let loose, you know? This seems…kinda tame.”

The other man raised his eyebrows and simply said, “Hmmm.”

“You wouldn’t know of anyplace, would you?”

The guy pursed his lips and shook his head. “Can’t say that I do. Good luck to you.”

The man went back to sipping his own beer and Mark looked to his other side. After a couple minutes, he started talking to a woman with long brown hair who had clearly started going to seed some time ago. But you could still see a hint of the wild “tease” in her brown eyes. And while her waist was no longer a girl’s, you could tell that at one time, the freckled cleavage and well-curved legs had drawn more than just a look or two.

“Have you ever gone out there and gotten flogged in public?” he asked, trying to break the ice.

She laughed. “Nah. I get whipped enough at home. Why would I go out for the humiliation when I can get it there?”

She winked. “I just like to watch. It’s a fun scene now and then, you know?”

“Been there,” Mark agreed and began to look around for another prospect.

A couple minutes later, he felt something warm around his neck. He turned back and found a face full of freckled cleavage at eye level. The woman was standing next to him now, arm around his shoulders. “I’d like to watch you,” she said, her voice slurring just a hint. “We could go into one of the bathroom stalls…”

He smiled and gently removed her arm. “Not tonight,” he said. “I’m looking for someone.”

She pouted. “And I thought that someone might be me.”

“Have you ever gone to NightWhere?” he asked.

She looked at him blankly, one brow crinkling. “Is that, like, code for something?”

“It’s just a place I’m looking to find.”

She drifted away after that, and Mark scoped the place again. A dark-complexioned girl who looked vaguely Slavic sat beside him next. She had on a leather bra and matching skirt and black hose. He suspected there was nothing under the skirt and had a hard time not looking at her belly, which was flat and perfect, with a thin pucker just above the skirt that he wanted so much to lick…

Mark mentally slapped himself and made eye, instead of belly button, contact. The woman looked about twenty-eight, old enough to really know how to screw but young enough to still have perfect skin. She wore a pale-pink dress that narrowed to two straps as soon as it cleared her chest. She had kinked, black hair that covered the straps and wanted to cover her face. She flipped it back every few seconds as she talked, because when she talked, she liked to hold her face low, so that she could look up with her eyes. A transparently provocative, yet still highly effective ploy. Mark found himself wanting to kiss her before he’d even told her his name.

“…and he really likes to see me in corsets,” she was saying. Mark realized, as he nodded stupidly at whatever she said, that he had no idea who she was talking about. Hopefully (presumably) it wasn’t her father…which meant that she had a boyfriend or husband and thus that she was probably not on the market for him. Not that he was interested, he reminded himself. Yeah, right.

“Does he like to tie you up and whip you?” Mark blurted out, and the woman smiled. “Well, duh. But mostly we just like to dress up as different people in movies, and try to say their lines as we’re making out, you know? Like we are really Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman or Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze.”

She looked at him and suggested, “Maybe you could come home with us and be the cameraman while we play?”

“Will we be filming Love Story or Debbie Does Dallas?” Mark asked.

“I was thinking more Debbie does Chucky,” she laughed. “My husband is a dwarf.” She pointed across the room at a very short man in the front row of the flogging circle.

“He can even do trapeze-we have a swing above the bed at home.”

“Let me guess,” Mark asked. “He does a midair swing dismount…to mount.”

She flipped a trail of black, kinked hair out of her eyes for the tenth time and smiled widely. “How did you know?” She rolled her eyes. “And he ‘hits it’ every time. Like a dart.”

Mark was beginning to think he’d stumbled on a freak show, not a bondage club.

“Can I get you something?” the bartender interrupted, nodding at his empty beer glass.

Mark looked away from the dark-haired girl with relief. She was hot…but freaky in ways far worse than whips and chains.

“Yeah,” he said. “I need to find someone who knows about a bondage club called NightWhere. Do you think you can help?”

The woman looked at him for a moment, thinking. “I think we’re pretty much it,” she said. “But if not…Bradley might know,” she said, pointing to a leather-clad guy in the flogging audience. “Most people just come here for it, you know? Aren’t you enjoying the show? Why don’t you get in line? You can get flogged too, you know?”

Mark smiled. “That’s not it,” he said. “I’m looking for NightWhere because I’m looking for someone there.”

A hand slipped over his biceps and squeezed. “And I told you, you’ll never find her on your own.”

Mark turned from the bartender who floated on to her next drink and looked at the pale, ice-cool face of Selena.

“You following me?”

“Only if you’re following me,” she said. “Thought you’d be here. It’s the only bondage night in town. At least, that they advertise.”

Mark looked into those ice-blue eyes with irritation. “Look,” he said. “I need to find my wife. Will you help me find NightWhere?”

Selena shook her head. “No can do, my friend. I can’t help you get back there. You don’t have an invitation.”

“Then leave me alone.“

Selena took her hand from his shoulder.

“Mark, I am just trying to help you.”

“Then help me find Rae,” he said.

Selena shook her head. “That absolutely won’t help you. I can guarantee that. Now, on the other hand, if you took me home…”

Mark smiled thinly. “You know that if things were normal, I’d be flattered, and would probably even be able to take you up on it, if Rae approved. And she probably would. But I wouldn’t do it without her, that’s the thing.”

“So why is it that you are here alone, looking for someone who can help you find her?” Selena asked. “Obviously, she isn’t seeing your relationship in quite the same way.”

“If you’re not going to help me find her, then you’re just in the way,” Mark said. Soooo…”

“I’ll be around when you come to your senses,” Selena promised. “Call me?” She pulled out a business card from her thin black purse and handed it to him. “I know you already have my number but…here you go again,” she said. “I hope that I’ll like you. It would be nice if all this was worth it.”

Mark couldn’t help but see the sway of her hips as she walked from the bar to the stairs, ice-blonde hair gleaming in the oscillating strobes. She was a beautiful, perfect piece of ass.

But she wasn’t Rae. And she wouldn’t help him find her.