NightWhere

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.