NightWhere

Chapter Two

Initiation

“It’s almost eight thirty,” Mark called up the stairs.

Rae poked her head out of the bathroom, her hair spiked and gelled to look both windblown and styled. He loved the way the blonde strands wove in and out of the darker dyed stripes, married by the honey of her natural color. She looked perky and sassy, a girl who could laugh and kiss at the same time. Right now, her two hands were working on inserting an earring as she spoke.

“I know, I know, I know,” she said. “Who wants this the most? Don’t you think I’m hurrying? I’ll be ready in five.”

“Not sure if they will let you in if you’re late,” he teased, pacing. His stomach churned. Mark felt more nervous tonight than the first time they had ventured into the world of the forbidden. From the whispers he had heard in dark rooms about NightWhere, they were about to enter a very different game.

Some people loved the simple life.

But the simple life hadn’t been enough for Mark and Rae. Or at least not for Rae. She had wanted to go farther. Needed something different. Rae desperately loved Mark, but…in the end, he wasn’t enough for her, not really. She had a chasm inside her that begged for more, always more. No single man could or ever would be enough, though she tried to make it work with Mark.

Mark, on the other hand, was smart enough to realize that this wasn’t a slur on him, but simply a quirk of Rae’s psyche. From the moment that he’d met her, sipping tequila and flirting with the bartender at Huevo’s, he’d been completely taken with her. He knew from the start that she was untamable. Nobody could ever own her energy. But she did give a large part of it to him…and that was all he could ask for. He knew in his heart that if he gave her enough rope, she’d never feel trapped and would always come back to him.

And so two years after they had married, when he could tell she was struggling against the need to be faithful and seemed to need more, he had made the suggestion that they try the forbidden.

He would never forget that moment. She’d been lying in bed with him, the sweat of their lovemaking still drying on her bare skin. The sex had been good, but he could tell she was struggling with something. Trying to get more out of it. Trying to get more of him inside her. Trying to find…something deeper between them. Something new. Something to affirm that it was all worthwhile. The sterile white walls of their cookie-cutter suburban frame house were closing in. Day by day their home felt smaller and smaller. The mundane was smothering Rae.

Mark knew he couldn’t give anymore. And so he’d said the words that had changed everything. “Do you want to try having sex with another man?”

Rae hadn’t missed a beat. “Who did you have in mind?”

Mark hadn’t freaked out. His stomach may have contracted a little, and he was a little surprised at how eagerly she’d jumped on the offer, but he’d known in his heart for a while that this was what she really wanted. Rae needed to play or she would wither. And whatever was left between them would die.

“No one in particular. I’ll look for a swingers club if you want” was what he’d said.

“Cool,” she’d answered. When she’d turned to kiss him, her mouth was hotter than it had been during their lovemaking.

And so it had begun.

Mark himself had never needed the variety…not that he didn’t enjoy it. But he had done this all for Rae. And he had to admit, there was a voyeur buried not so deep inside him. There was nothing quite like standing in the shadows and watching her face light up when a guy came on to her and something inside her that had been dark for weeks suddenly ignited.

She couldn’t be contained…but she agreed to stay in Mark’s cage. Still, she lost her light there after a while. Until he let her out of her cage for the night. But, she always chose to go home with Mark.

That was enough for him.

But nothing was ever enough for Rae.

They had slipped easily into the swingers scene and Mark found himself sleeping with more wives than he had ever imagined slept around. Meanwhile, Rae enjoyed a parade of partners who provided both variety and an increasingly dark flair. Sometimes when Mark finished rubbing thighs with his partner of the night in the back of the club, he dressed and walked out onto the floor to find Rae being spanked, whipped or abused at the hands of someone he’d never seen before.

He’d made the mistake of intervening once, in someone’s basement in Humboldt Park, when a tall guy with bleached hair in a Revolting Cocks T-shirt was whipping Rae with a long, flesh-welting twine of leather straps. But when Mark had stepped between her punky abuser and Rae’s naked body, her hands tied up in white silken bonds leaving her helpless to stop the man’s abuse, she’d cried out at him in anger, not relief. “Get out of his way,” she’d demanded. “Just go home. Someone will bring me later.”

Mark tried to give her space, but increasingly he wondered where her dark side was going.

Right around the time he started wondering that was when he first heard the word NightWhere.

A secret sex club.

A place where your wildest fantasies could be enacted.

A place where you could be free… And be a slave.

Somehow each of those appealed equally to Rae.

“I want to go,” she said to him one night at a swingers mixer in the northern suburbs. She’d been masquerading that night as an X-rated cupid, with a fake bow and arrow strapped to her back and a Mardi Gras red mask over her eyes. While she hid part of her face, the rest of her was scandalously unclad. Mark had joked that her red nail polish and lipstick covered more of her than her outfit did-she wore only a tissue-thin piece of see-through red silk across her chest and a barely effective V shield over her crotch. Men groped her body even as Mark talked to her. He wanted to yell at a couple of them: “Could I just finish a conversation with my wife before you grab her tits? Please?”

Behind her, right after she’d blurted her desire to find NightWhere, a hairy-chested man with even fewer clothes on than Rae slipped his arms around her middle and whispered something in her ear. Rae had laughed, tossing her head back. Then she’d looked at Mark and said, “I’ll be back.” Then in a conspiratorial whisper she’d added, “I don’t think he’ll take very long.”

Mark watched as they danced on the private club’s dance floor, first touching only their fingers, and then more, her breasts slipping up and down against his chest. The man drew her hard against his body and she complied, slipping her hands around his back. Her fingers explored his flesh as they ground together on the dance floor, their moves increasingly dirty, as she flaunted her breasts and he grabbed and kneaded her barely covered ass.

This was going to take longer than she thought, Mark had realized, as he’d drifted back to watch it all unfold.

Watching her with another man both excited and humiliated Mark. He loved to watch her as his porno queen but he also realized that, no matter what he did, he would never be enough for her on his own…he was just the thing she turned to when she needed something stable and unmoving. That wasn’t what she needed normally. He was peanut butter…but someone or something else always brought the jelly…

Mark had wound his way deep into the heart of the secret web of Chicagoland swingers clubs with Rae, and sometimes they even traveled to Wisconsin and Indiana gatherings. But ironically, he was always the man at the bar who gave the pity fuck to the woman who was still alone late in the night…he never did straight trades with Rae’s parade of lovers, taking their wives or girlfriends in exchange for his wife…he looked for women whose partners had left them to fend for themselves. It wasn’t a totally intentional act, but maybe he did it because he understood the feelings of the ones left behind.

After the night that he’d asked Rae if she wanted to have sex with another man…the night he had set Rae free to have whomever she wanted…the months melted into years with increasing speed. On most days, Mark was a happily married man, ecstatic to get home from work to kiss his wife. And every few weeks, he was a troubled, but still somewhat happy man who offered her on the seedy underground altars of sex, allowing her to take any comers she chose, to scratch the itch that he could never touch.

Somehow, it had worked.

Until the day that someone had said to them, still hot in the afterglow of a night of musical-chairs sex, “Have you ever heard of NightWhere?” Rae’s eyes had lit up. She certainly had, but had not found anyone who knew how to get to the club. It was like an urban legend in swinger circles. A utopian place where no holes were barred, and no backs were left unscarred.

“Yes,” she’d answered the pale, thin man who’d asked the question. “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know how to find it.”

“You don’t find it, it finds you,” the stranger had said, slipping a long arm around Rae’s waist and massaging her nude tummy a moment before descending lower. “You need to be invited.”

“Do you know how to get on the list?” Rae had asked, arching her back slightly and moving her body like a gently dancing snake against the man’s bare chest.

“I can get you an invitation,” the man had said.

That was when the game had changed forever.

There was nothing about the building that would have suggested that behind the brown door was a den of sin. Mark had parked on the street a couple blocks down and they’d walked the cracked and weed-overrun city sidewalk to the address quickly. As much from nervousness of the neighborhood as from anticipation of the night to come. Rae’s heels cracked on the pavement like small gunshots with every step. That’s what Mark thought they sounded like, anyway, until somewhere nearby, maybe a block or two away, something cracked with a larger, fast report. Now that was a gunshot. A moment later, someone screamed. And then the snaps of Rae’s shoes were all that echoed in the night air.

Her steps quickened.

“Not crazy about the neighborhood,” she breathed.

Mark shook his head. “Gotta agree. Though the architecture is tres modern.”

Rae snorted. “Modern Ghetto?”

This was the industrial section of town; the broken sidewalks snugged to brick walls that held no trace of architectural motive, despite Mark’s jibe. These were walls that were simply that-walls. Steel-framed windows flanked in crumbling concrete occasionally interrupted their unwelcoming façade but mainly…these were barricades. Proud factory faces that had grown old and creased with time.

The factories were gone now, and this South Side Chicago neighborhood remained quiet most of the days. Except for the warning shots of gangs and drug deals gone wrong.

“Well, I didn’t figure they’d set up shop at the Four Seasons,” Rae admitted. “But I still don’t like it!”

“It’ll be different inside,” Mark promised.

At last they arrived at the door. There was no sign. No Playboy symbol silhouette or kitschy neon sign saying Open 24 Hours. It was just a door, with the numbers 2367 in rusting letters nailed to the front.

“They could have at least gotten an address like 6969,” Rae said.

“Always looking for the extra kisses, aren’t you?” Mark laughed.

He lifted his hand to knock, but before his fingers touched the wood, the door creaked open six inches.

“Invitation?” a masculine voice demanded.

Mark pulled the folded paper from his front pocket and handed it to the hand that extended through the narrow opening.

The hand disappeared inside.

Mark looked at Rae. Her eyes were narrowed, her anxiety visible.

Mark leaned in to kiss her and she smiled just a little before gently pushing him back and nodding. “I’m okay,” she whispered.

The door opened.

From inside, a sinuous drum-and-bass combo pounded strongly. Blue and red lights reflected off the dark eyes of the doorman, who now revealed himself to them. He was tall, maybe five feet eleven inches, and thin. He wore a black, button-down shirt and dark jeans. Over his shoulder, Rae could see wisps of fog and the movement of tousled hair. A dance floor.

“You’re first-timers,” the doorman said simply. His tone left no room for argument, and Mark nodded.

“I will tell you this now,” the man said, his eyes unblinking. “And I will tell you this only once. You have been given a gift to come here. Very few people receive this invite. But there is a reason. What we do here? It cannot be revealed. Where we hold the club? It cannot be revealed. NightWhere exists where we want it, when we want it. Any member who reveals anything about this club outside the walls of this club…will be killed.”

The man smiled. Thinly. His lips were pink and drawn.

“I’m not joking here,” he said. “If you breathe a word of NightWhere to anyone, you will not live to see tomorrow. We are serious about this; it is the only way that NightWhere can survive.”

The man smiled then, and his teeth were shark white in the shadow. “Go in and sin.”

He moved away from the door and Mark stepped past him uneasily. Rae followed fast, both of them walking past the doorman until they stood in the open foyer. After weeks of wondering whether the subject of the furtive whispers was real, Mark and Rae got their first look at NightWhere.

Rae slipped her arm around Mark’s waist. “It looks normal enough,” she said.

He nodded. “Looks,” he said.

In front of them, a couple dozen men and women moved on an impromptu dance floor, dry-ice smoke jetting out in plumes between their feet. Now and then, when the grey cement of the warehouse floor was fully obscured, Rae could only think of one thing. They were dancing on a cloud.

“This is just the doorway,” Mark said. “Let’s have a drink and get the lay of the land.”

“I thought we were just going to get a lay?” Rae laughed. Mark could see the glint of excitement in her eye. She was anxious for the evening games to begin.

They skirted the dance floor and stepped up to the bar on the other side. A bartendress almost wearing half a black T-shirt and a leather skirt raised one eyebrow as Mark leaned in to order.

“You gonna tell me what to do, or am I gonna tell you what to drink?” she asked. Her voice was low and throaty, but somehow Mark could still hear her above the grind of the dance music.

“How about you make me a gin and tonic and a Corona,” Mark asked.

“Can’t make the Corona, but I’ll pour you one,” she answered with a wink.

“Don’t mind her,” a voice next to them said. “She’s an attitude with a slut.”

“Don’t you mean a slut with an…”

A brawny guy in a white T-shirt turned on his stool and put up a hand to stop Mark’s question. “Nope. I mean she’s one big attitude. And she’ll take it from anyone. Even you, if you’re still drinking here at 3:00 a.m.”

“Like anybody is still out here at the bar at 3:00 a.m.” the dark-haired bartender laughed. She held one slender hand out to Mark, while with the other she pulled the ripped collar of her black T-shirt down to expose her breasts. “I’m Sin-D,” she said. Mark got the cute spelling since one tit had Sin written in black marker, while the other was punctuated with a big D. She released the ripped cotton and pointed at the guy next to Mark.

“This is Asshole.”

The brawny guy laughed. “Thing is, she likes assholes. You’ll find that out if you stay near the bar too long. My name’s Kendrick.”

“Call him Dick for short,” Sin-D chimed in.

“You’ll find that she likes those too,” he answered. He held a hand out to Rae. “You can call me Ken. Or anything else you like.”

Rae felt her face flush as he gripped her hand and held it firmly. His hand was heavy and warm. A serpent was tattooed around his wrist. Rae felt instant, biblical temptation. Mark answered for her when the silence stretched. “Hi, Ken, I’m Mark and this is Rae,” he said. “She’s not usually shy.”

“I said she could call me Ken, not you,” Kendrick said, never taking his eyes off Rae. “And no, I don’t suppose she is shy,” he added, still squeezing her hand, then moving his fingers up to stroke the inside of her wrist. “Or she wouldn’t be here.”

“How much do I owe you,” Mark asked Sin-D as he handed Rae her drink.

She shook her head. “On the house. I live to serve.”

Kendrick looked at Mark and smiled. “First time?”

“Do we stand out that bad?” Mark answered. “No,” Sin-D said. “It’s not that. But we get to know everyone at NightWhere pretty fast-it’s a closed club, you know. So…it’s pretty easy to tell who’s only been here once or twice. After that…”

“After that, Sin-D’s probably slept with you,” Kendrick finished.

The bartendress slugged him. “I hope you’re ready for some welts, mister.”

“She promises a lot, but her flogging arm is soft,” Kendrick said.

“You are soooo going to hurt tomorrow,” Sin-D promised. “I want to warn you about one thing,” she said, moving out from behind the bar. She took Rae’s waist in her hands and moved closer, until the swell of their chests nearly touched.

“You came to NightWhere because you have sexual fantasies that you still have not been able to fulfill. Well…you can do anything you want here. Anything.”

She looked deep into Rae’s eyes, and Rae found herself moving her hands to Sin-D’s shoulders, engaging in the sensual dance.

“You can do anything at all here,” Sin-D said again. “We are invisible. We are outside the law. But you’ll never do anything here at the bar. If someone here talks to you, it’s just bullshit.”

She put her hands on Rae’s breasts, gave them a gentle massage and then pushed. “Get out onto the floor and don’t listen to a word this loser tells you,” she said. Sin-D grinned and pointed to the strobing lights of the dance floor.

“Go.

“Get.

“Fucked!”

Kendrick shook his head and took a deep sip of his beer. “Whatever,” he said, nonplussed. “I’ll be here waiting when you get back. I’m always waiting.”

“Because every now and then, there is a chicken that comes back,” Sin-D finished for him. “Ken bats cleanup.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Sin-D shook her head and pointed towards the dark corners of the room beyond the bar, where men and women danced provocatively in the dark. Farther past them, in the blue light of shadows, he could also make out nude bodies strapped on some kind of contrivance.

“This is the foyer of NightWhere,” she said. “Over there is the front room. This is the place to have a drink so you can kick off your shoes and move on inside. Sooooo…” she said, “…drink up, and get in there and get it on.”

Mark took Rae by the hand and led her out into the smoke and lights of the dance floor. “C’mon,” he smiled. “I’ll get you started.”

Rae kissed him, her mouth warm and soft. He could tell she was already excited. “You always do,” she said.

An old New Order bass line slapped through the fog and green strobe lights, as the singer sang about playing with his pleasure zone. Rae let the strap of her tissue-thin black blouse slip down her shoulder as she moved her hips and shifted her feet in a careful kaleidoscope across the floor. The blouse was really just strategic. If you looked hard, you could see all of her through it anyway, but it offered the illusion of clothing. It was a lot like this place. The black walls and black floors and mirrors that made it all seem larger and more grand than it really was…all just illusion. The clean smell of the smoke machines and the dancing arcs of light that made the whole place seem like another world. All illusion. It looked like a goth dance club, but this was simply the antechamber. The lobby, for pretense. People gathered here, got their blood pumping with a couple drinks and the ultra dance mix of an ’80s Depeche Mode song and looked for the reason to walk farther inside. Because nobody went anywhere just to stand in the foyer.

The dance floor was just the appetizer, not the main event.

People danced singly for a while there, running their hands seductively across their bodies, as if making love to themselves in public. And pretty soon, they weren’t dancing alone anymore. Not long after that, they weren’t dancing at all. At least not upright. And they most likely left the dance floor at that point for the seedier, darker corners of the club.

The beat from the speakers throbbed all around as Mark and Rae stepped into the mix of people on the floor. There were a dozen or so other couples moving in the circle that had been marked off on its perimeter with chairs and round tables. A few people stood on the sidelines, watching the action, but Rae loved to dance and didn’t slow as they stepped onto the floor. The vibration of the music sank into Mark’s bones, and while he was normally shy about dancing, it didn’t take long to fall into the rhythm. This was a dance floor unlike any normal goth or dance club because here…there were no rules. That was obvious at the start, as Mark watched one bald guy lift the black Harley T-shirt over the shoulders of a blonde woman. He dropped the shirt and fondled her tits right there on the floor as she ground her ass backwards against him. No false pretenses of propriety here.

Next to them, another couple had been engaged in a slow, very tight sway, but at the sight of the blonde’s disrobing, the woman-a thin little thing with a short-cut shock of black hair-suddenly broke away from the sinuous embrace with an equally rail-thin guy and instead knelt before the sumptuous, formerly Harley-clad, blonde, pressing her face to the blonde’s belly and reaching her hands around to cup the ass of the bald guy, drawing the three of them tight. Her former partner didn’t waste a moment, but instead moved behind the kneeling woman and raised his hand to spank her miniskirted ass. The skirt slipped up after he delivered the first couple blows, driving the small woman’s face against the blonde’s bare belly, before she moved her mouth lower.

Mark watched the spectacle and Rae bit his ear and whispered, “I think you can get some blonde or brunette here if you want tonight. But you might have to use your hand on them.”

“You know I don’t like that,” he smiled.

She slapped his ass playfully. “Well, maybe what you need is a mistress, since you don’t want to be a master.”

Just then, another man in a black silk button-down shirt split off from where he’d been moving closely with a fat woman whose heavy chest seemed ready to explode from the overly constricted confines of her pink blouse at any moment. He grinned as he shook his hips and stepped across the floor three strides to slip his hands up on Rae’s hips. Mark smirked at the tuft of wiry black hair that escaped the man’s equally black shirt. He had a sudden image of his wife braiding the man’s chest hair. Now that would be a different kink from the usual whips and chains…

“Those who give it out, get it back double,” the man yelled at her over the music. He leaned in to smell Rae’s neck, then raised a hand and slapped her across the ass. Mark could hear the snap even above the speakers, and Rae visibly stiffened. And then she turned to give Mark her back, and the stranger her smile.

“I hope so,” Mark heard her say.

The tall man winked at Mark and pulled Rae in close, kneading her ass as the music changed tempos and went into a steady, pounding pulse. It was machine-gun sex set to music, and the new couple oozed together easily, Rae sinking into his chest and moving her hips to offer him access.

He toyed with her, moving in and away from her, and then put both palms out in front of her face. Mark watched her grin at the game, and she answered by putting both of her palms on his and pushing their hands into the air as she danced in closer to him, close enough that her nipples brushed lightly back and forth across the man’s chest. Then he moved her hands down from pointing at the ceiling, and her blouse slipped down her thin biceps, exposing the upper half of a smooth breast.

The man didn’t waste the moment. He put one hand on her upper arm and urged the sleeve lower. Then he pulled her arm up and out of it, and Rae was exposed on the dance floor, one breast hanging out for all to see. The man covered it with himself, palming her nipple in his hand. Instead of fixing herself or pulling away, Rae only tilted her head back and closed her eyes, running a tongue over hungry lips.

The man leaned in and whispered something. Rae responded with an openmouthed kiss. He accepted, bending in to swallow her tongue as she slipped her fingers up his neck and into his hair. They writhed sinuously together for several minutes, their bodies locked, their mouths hungrily tasting, as their hips still moved with the beat.

Finally, he began to lead her off the dance floor. As they moved, the stranger began to spank her ass, gently, but continuously, in time to the music. Rae looked over his shoulder and caught Mark’s eye and raised her eyebrows, as if to say wow!

The green strobes poked the couple’s black outfits full of a hundred pinprick holes as they stumbled farther and farther away from the stage. The sound of the man’s hand against his wife’s ass echoed in time to the music and the two of them drifted across the floor away from Mark. He saw where they were going and shook his head.

The racks.

He didn’t understand Rae’s need for pain before accepting pleasure…sometimes it seemed that she wanted the violence more than the novelty of the new men inside her. But he knew he couldn’t give her the pain she craved. He’d tried using the floggers and paddles and he simply couldn’t go through with it. Not in a meaningful way.

Mark shook his head and smiled. His wife was insatiable; she could easily spread herself for five guys a day and somehow still wake up the next morning wanting more. He had been hurt and jealous once, when he realized that there was no way he could ever fulfill what she needed, not fully. But over time, he grew to realize that she did love him, even if she couldn’t tie herself to only one cock. She loved him even more for permitting her to exercise her needs with other men.

He let her go, knowing that he’d be the man she went home with. Sometimes he found himself a good lay at these clubs as well, while she indulged her pleasures, but he wasn’t driven to it, as she was. Mark would have been happy to have fucked Rae and only Rae for the rest of his life. She was a dynamo in bed-not surprisingly, since she never tired of slapping the sheets. Mark wasn’t opposed to fucking other women…thanks to Rae, he’d met some amazing females in the past five years at clubs like this. But he didn’t need it.

He couldn’t give her what she needed, that was for sure.

She always begged for him to hit her harder, and then begged him not to make her beg. He knew that he could never give her what she craved and so he let her go find it elsewhere, praying each time that she still loved him enough to come back.

And she always had.

Across the room, he saw her hold her wrists up in complete subservience, asking to be bound. Mark watched her clothing slip to the painted floor. After a while, he heard the sound of her twisted pleasure bleating above the screams of the techno music.

He edged his way off the dance floor after two men tried to sandwich him in a dance. In the regular world, Mark was pretty liberal-he let other men fuck his wife and had worn masks and costumes while fucking others himself. He’d given some floggings and taken them too, and he had no judgment on virtually any bacchanalia that Rae or his partners wanted to engage in. But he did have his preferences. And while he’d let a man flog him a time or two, he had no interest in dancing with one.

At the bar he ordered a bourbon, neat. Sin-D delivered it wearing only a smile. He couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows at her sultry brown skin. A pink jewel glimmered in the club light near the shadow of her belly button, and her breasts looked full and achingly ready for sin. She reminded him of the kind of girl you’d see playing volleyball in the middle of a summer’s day on Miami Beach. He realized that, below her neck, there didn’t appear to be a hair on her body.

“Looks like you’re a free man already, and I’m just a girl trapped here at the bar. I need to get me a double shot of love,” she said, stepping around the bar to ease her legs up and around his. She straddled his knee and he smelled the scent of vanilla and liquor on her breath. “You buying?”

Mark laughed at the bad pun and tilted back the bourbon, taking it all down with a burn and a cough.

“Let me pour you some,” he said and pulled her fully onto his lap. He ran his hands up her naked back and felt knobs of scarred flesh there. So, she likes the taste of the whip too, he thought to himself. After a moment, she slipped off his thighs and led him around the bar to a couch tucked against the wall. “I might need to stop to pour a drink once in a while,” she warned.

“Occupational hazard,” he began, but her tongue choked out the rest of what he’d been about to say.

Amelia didn’t pause as she walked into tonight’s NightWhere. She knew the layout by now. No matter what old building they settled in for the night, the space seemed to look exactly the same. Just beyond the doorman was the rookie bar and grill. The newcomers fresh from the Triple A league of swingers clubs and peep show hallways clung there for a while before they discovered what the club was really all about. The Blue Room was the just the starting dance of the damned for those who had been recruited. With its go-go cages and air of total orgiastic abandon, it seemed like nirvana to the first-timer, but the reality was, its offerings were pedestrian compared to the deeper reaches of the club. They needed to prove they were worthy to take that next step before they were invited in. But most of them eventually were. Something set each of them apart from the usual pleasure-seekers at strip and swing clubs. Some deeper weakness, some darker kink. Some need that took them beyond the mundane pleasure-seeker and kink jockey.

The Blue Room held some S &M trappings-wooden racks with chained manacles lined one wall, where the pain play began. The sound of whips cracking echoed above the industrial dance music now and then, when the synthesizers grew quiet. But the neophytes were still all about the tease-strutting and baring it on the dance floor, switching partners with the unabashed glee of kids set loose without rules for the first time in the midst of a toy store. They tried everyone and everything as fast as they could, anxious to embrace the dark seduction of NightWhere.

After a few nights, the Watchers intervened. Nothing happened in NightWhere that wasn’t seen by one of their number. No sin was too small to be savored. And those who were ready received a second invitation, different from the ones that got them into the club. The Blue Room was the appetizer. There were some who never really grasped that and never traveled beyond its blue strobe lights. But those people eventually stopped getting invitations to come to NightWhere…because the Blue Room was not the point. Not really.

The Watchers were quiet, but they were always in the shadows. They walked the club at midnight and passed paper discreetly into waiting palms.

Amelia had received hers six months ago. And now she wore the invitation around her wrist. The mark of the snake. Its blue-grey scales wound around her skin like a bond. The serpent’s mouth swallowed its tail, the ultimate act of self-indulgence.

Amelia walked through the middle of the dance floor, letting one hand slide across the hairy chest of a man whose eyes were closed in pleasure. She smiled and ruffled the hair of the head that worked at the man’s groin and then passed on. Getting off on the dance floor was like premature ejaculation. They’d learn.

She passed the wooden racks where a woman and a man were tied to polished oak arms, as a bare-chested, brawny man swung a flogger in each hand. He smacked the leather straps against the man’s back, which arched with every contact. The woman was braver. Her short, spiky blonde-and-brown hair was matted in sweat as she stiffened with each blow from the leather. Each blow caught her across her small, tight breasts. Her nipples were hard and the sweat pooled in her belly button. The woman whispered one thing after every blow.

“Harder,” she begged.

Amelia nodded as she watched. The woman reminded her a lot of herself. Taking it right on the chest. Needing it to go deeper, below the skin.

She didn’t recognize the body, and so she violated the torture zone, forcing the flogger to stop. Amelia slid one finger beneath the woman’s hair, lifting it from where it had plastered against her forehead.

“What’s your name?” Amelia asked.

“Rae,” the woman whispered. “Tell him to make me feel it.”

Amelia kissed Rae softly on the lips, enjoying the heat of her need there. “I’ll take care of it,” she promised. Then she took the flogger from the big man, who was streaming sweat already from the exercise.

“Let me show you what she needs,” she said.

When the first slap of the leather caught Rae’s breasts, she cried out.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Amelia asked, and Rae nodded quickly yes, biting her lip as the straps fell again, and then dragged away.

Amelia whirled her wrist gently, but the sting of the leather on Rae’s flesh was audible every time she let her wrist go. Rae lost control and screamed out at one point, but she didn’t ask for it to stop.

The man in the rack next to her turned his head to stare at the whipping. His mouth creased, and he blinked back sweat nervously. The sweating “master” laid a hand on Amelia’s shoulder and gripped her tightly, a silent urge to take it easy. But Amelia only hit the girl harder, leaving line after line of red welts along Rae’s belly and thighs and then-smack, smack, smack-working her way up the girl’s body. Rae’s cries of hurt turned to mangled moans…but there was something orgasmic in the tone as the flogger turned red trails of agony into broken skin. Beads of blood now trailed in the wake of the leather when it bit the skin.

At last, Amelia set the flogger down and undid Rae’s bonds. She held the trembling woman close and kissed her hard on the mouth and neck, as Rae shivered with the aftermath of her first true paingasm.

When the trembling stopped, Amelia held Rae’s face between her palms and smiled. Rae struggled with a barrage of feelings; she wanted to kiss Amelia, and slap her at the same time. Her flesh burned, everywhere, and in the back of her mind she wondered how she would be able to wear a bra tomorrow. But mostly she felt a surge of love for this woman who had known exactly how to give her what she craved. No holding back. No halfhearted spankings or slaps. She had drawn blood. Amelia’s eyes held her own with a green flare that was piercing. Filled with a need that the beating had awakened in the other woman’s own flesh.

“I’ll look for you in The Red,” Amelia said. She bent down to take one last kiss, and was gone.

Rae sank to the floor and pulled her slut clothes close. She put her arms around her knees and rocked slowly on the floor, closing her eyes now and then to just live in the burn that followed every drip of sweat down her breasts and belly and thighs. Sweet heat.

The two men stepped over from the other rack and knelt beside her. Their erections were as obvious as their concern.

“Are you okay?” the flogger asked.

She looked up at him with eyes crying in desire and pained joy.

“Oh yes,” Rae said. “This is what I’ve been looking for.”

She pulled him down to the ground with her, wrapped her arms around his chest and cried.