by Nicki Rowe
As I work, I can still picture Gideon sitting at the table, laughing at inside jokes with Anthony and Alex as they threw peanuts at each other, and how he had spilled his ginger ale on his yellow star-printed shirt. I can still picture his blond hair falling into his face as he leaned back on the hind legs of his chair and told a story that involved waving his hands around excitedly, and ending every other sentence with ‘dude’.
I never thought I would be interested in burying my cock balls deep inside someone who called everyone dude or man, or wore funky, wild printed button ups, but here I am still daydreaming about cornflower blue eyes and that killer dimple in Gideon’s right cheek.
At least he doesn’t say bro, I reason. I can’t stand that word.
“Pops, you gonna pine away all night or are you going to fill glasses,” my pseudo-daughter, Lacey Vega asks, snapping her red polished fingers in my face.
I turn to see her knowing smile, and slap her hand away which makes her laugh.
I’ve known Lacey since she was in diapers; my wife and I had babysat her when we lived in Vegas while her mother worked as a showgirl and gambled her money away. There was a point, when Lacey was ten, that she didn’t see her mother for three months, and had been living with us full time.
‘You and Doris are my real parents,” she had told me once. It was a horrible and wonderful feeling to be elated that someone else’s kid viewed you as her father.
A year after Doris and I moved our son to Seattle, which had been hard on all of us--we didn’t want to leave Lacey behind--her mother had died, and we fought tooth and nail to get Lacey put in our custody so she wouldn’t end up in foster care, and thanks to a very sympathetic judge we were granted full custody of Lacey two months later. Doris and I worked hard to try to adopt Lacey before she turned eighteen, but the process was long . . . and then Doris had died, and my entire world narrowed into darkness.
After Lacey left the house with a full scholarship to a college in Florida, the darkness became way too much--especially after the worst thing I could possibly imagine happened to Lacey three months into her freshman semester: she had been raped by a person she had considered a close friend.
Even to this day I think about those weeks of being with Lacey in the hospital and the courthouse. I think about that fucker’s smug face when the judge told him he would only have to do three months in jail and community service. Even now, five years later, the anger burns through me like a wildfire.
It had been my son’s idea to call Lance DeMarco, a man who went above and beyond the law to bring people justice, and I spent ten thousand dollars for Lance to make that asshole pay for what he did to my daughter. Sam and I never talk about that call, and although Lance is a regular at OMS, I had never asked him what he had done to the fucker. Some things were better left unknown.
The bells over the door jingle, turning my attention from the shots of tequila I’m pouring to the door. Sam enters with Lance on his heels, both of them shaking the rain out of their hair. I watch as Lance goes to the other end of the bar, barely acknowledging me as he passes, and orders his usual drink (a rum and coke) from Lacey.
Sam plops down on the empty seat across from me and smiles slightly. “What’s up, Pops?”
My son is thirty-two. Two years older than Gideon, my brain reminds me. Jesus. Sam has the same black hair I had when I was younger, before everything started turning white, but his hair is wild and curly like Doris’s had been. He has her brown eyes and her broad smile. Sam looks more like his mother than he does me; he had also inherited her pale skin and freckles. At least he has my love for music and being early everywhere he went. Cason likes to joke that Sam’s love for eighties music and need to be anywhere five minutes early is the only proof that Sam is my kid.
“Sammy, you heard from Mike?” I ask while also trying not to think about how close my son and my forty-six-year-old bartender are; I don’t want to dwell too much on that friendship; it gives me acid reflux. “He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”
Sam fidgets with the peanuts in an almost empty bowl, his voice small when he says, “It’s another bad one, Dad.”
“As bad as last time?” I ask. It’s that time of year again; Mike’s going into dark places in his mind. “Will he be okay to come in tomorrow?”
Sam shrugs, looking like he either wants to punch something or cry. I pour him a beer.
“We’ll keep an eye on him, okay, Sammy? It won’t be like last year.”
Sam nods and takes a sip of his beer. I reach over and pat his shoulder before making my way down the bar to where Lacey and Lance are talking.
“Lance,” I grumble. I don’t like a man like Lance DeMarco associating with my daughter. Besides being a gun for hire, or a thug--whatever you want to call him--it’s no secret that Lance will fuck anything with two legs. He isn’t called Seattle’s King of One Night Stands for nothing. It wouldn’t surprise me if the number of people he’s had sex with was up in the triple digits. Not that I had to worry about Lace; she hadn’t been interested in anyone since she left Florida five years ago. “What are you doing here?” I ask, wedging myself between Lacey and the bar, earning a low huff from her. “It’s Thursday.” Lance only came into the bar on Saturday to get drunk or find someone to fight or to fuck. Not always in that order, sometimes all at once. And sometimes with the same person.
“Meeting a client,” he replies curtly.
I shoot him a dirty look. “How many times have I told you not to do your business in my bar?”
“I know, I know, Wally, but the kid suggested it and I have to get him to trust me.”
“The kid? How old is your client?”
Lance shoots me a look that a more fragile man would have wavered under, but it only makes me stand taller. Lance didn’t share info on his clients, but I’m not going to back down. “I don’t know,” he said after a long beat of silence. “Twenty, maybe.”
I sigh and shake my head. “Never again, Lance. If I find out you’re meeting clients in my bar I will not hesitate to ban you for life.”
“Pops!” Lacey exclaims behind ne.
I give her a look that as her rolling her eyes at me. “I mean it,” I say, turning back to Lance. “No illegal activity in my bar.”
The bells over the door jingle again, drawing our attention to the two men who enter: one is tall with a swimmer’s build and the other is shorter and skinnier. The shorter one looks nervous, and bites his lip unconsciously when he sees Lance before they make their way over to the bar. As they come closer I notice a bruise under the kid’s eye and the cut on his cheek.
Jesus. Someone had done a number on him.
“Robbie?” Lacey breathes out and rushes around the bar to take Robbie’s face in her hands, examining his injuries. “Is this from that night?”
“I-I didn’t know this was the bar you worked at, Lace,” Robbie stammers out, pulling his face from her hands, his cheeks red with embarrassment. “I should have picked somewhere else to meet.”
It’s then that I remember Lacey mentioning a Robbie. Ever since she had moved home, Lacey spent a lot of time playing online games because she hated going out and meeting new people. Ironically, she had met Robbie and Duncan, who I assumed was the other man, through a game called Fantasy Quest.
“Robbie?” Lance says, his usual hard, no nonsense voice is soft and gentle. “Let’s talk.” He looks at the man behind Robbie with no smile, but a quirk of his eyebrow. “Hi. I’m Lance.”
The man nods. “Duncan.”
“Use the office,” I offer, even though I hate the idea of Lance doing business at OMS, but I can’t tell the kid to take a hike and find somewhere to meet; he looks so young and innocent. “Cason’s in there, but you can kick him out.” They move to leave, but I stop them by saying, “And Lance?”
He looks back, his brown eyes are unwavering and hard. “What?”
“I meant what I said: banned for life.”
He nods and they make their way to the
office. Lacey attempts to go back to work, but Robbie grabs her by the elbow, pulling her along behind the three men.
A few moments later Cason, my best friend and business partner, comes out of the office with a sour look on his face. “That Lance DeMarco is a cold motherfucker,” he says as he comes around the bar.
“What did he say to you?”
“‘Get out. We’re using the office’. Lacey put him in his place and kindly explained the situation. That daughter of yours is a tough cookie.”
I shake my head. “No wonder everyone is always trying to fight him.”
Cason laughs. “True.”
Cason and I have been friends for nearly fifteen years. We had been through hell and back in Iraq, especially after our humvee struck an IED, leaving half our unit dead and Cason with no right leg, but after getting evaced to the same hospital and dreaming of a future of domesticity, we became even closer, more like brothers than friends, and opened OMS together.
“Where’s Mike?” Cason asks, looking at Sam.
“Bad day,” I reply.
Cason nods as he slides a glass of some fruity shit to a girl trying to show him her cleavage and slurring something about getting a room at the nearest motel. I make a mental note to cut her off after this one.
“We have to keep an eye on him,” Sam says as he reaches across the bar to pour more beer into his glass from the tap. “I can’t see him like that again.”
Cason reaches over and pats Sam’s hand. “We’ll keep an eye on him, Sammy. Don’t worry.”
Chapter 3: Gideon
ALTO is a large, nondescript building about twenty minutes away from my apartment. In the early 2000’s it was a Chinese restaurant; the two faux jade dragons still stand at the entrance, but now it was Seattle's hottest kink club.
It has been months since I have stepped foot in the club; the paperwork Curtis had left behind had been taking up most my time, but tonight I had free time, tonight I’m free to play with the owner of the club and his sweet sub.
The hypnotic music washes over me as I sit in a booth in the dark club, filling me with an urge to dance, even though I have never been much a dancer. I’m dressed in my tight leather pants and boots, but no shirt, instead a bulldog harness is pulled across my chest. I love the feel of leather against my skin, hard yet supple, smooth yet rough There’s a leather cuff around my left wrist and a gray bandana wrapped around the right, dark in contrast to my tanned skin. Alex had seen me in my kink gear once, and had said it was like I had been replaced by my darker, sexier shadow twin. He had then asked me a bunch of questions about the scene, and I proceeded to show him different bondage knots he could use on Declan and Lucky; I heard he had put those skills to good use.
I sip my drink, a whiskey sour, while I watch the doms and subs drink and dance. The air pulses with sexual energy.
In another booth sits Mr. Sebastian and his sub, Wendy. They wave, but make no moves to get up. We have plans to meet up later and play out a scene, but until then, I want to sit in the club, and experience it for myself.
The club is brimming with scantily dressed men and women. Some subs are on leashes, some sit on the floor at their doms feet. It’s dark, lit only by a faint blue light. Around the room are doors leading into playrooms, some of the doors stand wide open, even as couples (or multiple people) fuck inside. Other people are gathered around to watch. The bar stands at the other end of the large, open room lit with it’s white LED surface and lined with black and steel stools. The bartenders were all dressed in tight jeans or short shorts with a black ALTO tee.
Most of the stools are occupied, only two stand empty, but there is one stool I have not been able to take my eyes off since the person had sat down nearly ten minutes ago. I had known there was something dominating about Wally’s presence when I had first met him, but I had no idea that he was part of the kink community. Tonight, he’s dressed in tight blue jeans that showcase his bulge (I had been able to get a glimpse of it before he had sat down), boots and the same leather vest he had been wearing at the bar a week ago, but no shirt. His large nipples and hairy tattooed chest are on full display, and I’m practically drooling. There’s heavy scarring on his left side, and it has me wondering what had injured him so severely. Subs are lining up and peacocking to get his attention, but I’m sitting back, observing and waiting for him to see me, to come to me.
That was how I had met Sebastian and Wendy; they had been at Leather Night at Oasis, a dance club on the other side of town, and Sebastian had approached when he had realized he had seen me around the dungeons and at a leather convention a year prior. After our first scene together, we had kept in touch, but hadn’t played since. I had only been with one other dom since then.
I had started getting into the kink scene in college; a few months before I had met Alex I had taken multiple classes on bondage, domming, subbing and spanking. I was able to learn what I liked and disliked. Alex and I had gone through a very brief friends with benefits stint, but we had quickly realized that Alex was not into telling people what to do, and was slightly more vanilla than myself.
And things with Oscar, my ex, had been disastrous. He had tried to let me go out and have fun with doms while we were together, but he had a jealous side, and didn’t enjoy my love of voyeurism, both watching and being watched. He didn’t like bondage and choking me during sex, but he couldn’t handle sharing me with other people, and his need for full monogamy, and lack of wanting to participate in BDSM had led us to going our separate ways.
Only Alex, Anthony and the doms I’ve played with know about my kinks. I hadn’t told anyone outside of that, and I never really plan to. Not a lot of people understand my need to submit and be choked. Shit, I can only imagine my family’s reactions if they ever found out.
Wally is still at the bar, drink in hand and surveying the club. My stomach knots as I wait for him to notice me. He nods to Sebastian and Wendy, raising his hand in greeting. Do they know each other? I wonder. Interesting. He continues to scan the club, and my body is taut with anticipation. I’m nearly bouncing in my seat. When his eyes finally meet mine, they widen a fraction in surprise, and then he’s out of his chair, stalking towards me. His strides are long, quick and purposeful.
I watch him as he walks towards me, intrigued with the confidence he is exuding in his steps. I watch the muscles of his tattooed chest and arms bind and unbind with his movements. As he nears that same electrical pull fills the air. Part of me wants to jump up and greet him, but I stay sitting, sipping my drink and trying hard to pretend I am unaffected by the older man making his quick approach.
Wally stops at the table and smiles a curious smile at me. “This is the last place I thought I would ever see you.”
I chuckle, the sound coming out breathy, and I mentally curse. “I’ve been told I am full of surprises.”
“Can I sit?” Wally asks, gesturing to the empty expanse of the booth across from me.
I nod, and Wally slides into the booth, leaning forward on his elbows. His scent surrounds me, the electric feeling in the air intensifies. He’s so close, I can nearly feel the heat radiating off his big body.
“Are you here alone?” He asks. His eyes are dark, black nearly taking over the green.
I lick my lips. “Yes.”
His mouth quirks as he sips his beer. “Alex told me that you’re coming on the ride tomorrow.”
“I am.” When Alex had asked me to come on the weekly motorcycle ride that last Tuesday, the first question I had asked was if the OMS crew was joining. When Alex replied with a yes, I had jumped on the chance to come along.
“Have you ever ridden a motorcycle?”
“I used to ride on the back of Alex’s all the time in college. He was a bit of a pothead in those days, so late night snack runs were a regular occurence.”
Wally laughs, the sound full and round, and I can’t help but smile. “I didn’t know you guys have known each other for that long.”
“Dude!” I exc
laim, nearly knocking over my drink as I gesture. “We’ve known each other for nine years.”
Wally’s eyes darken and his lips twitch. I’m fairly sure he doesn’t like me calling him dude. Hmm, what does he want me to call him? I can think of a few names… I put an end to my wayward thoughts before my dick starts to harden, it’s already trying to get hard from being this close to Wally. There’s one name in particular I would like to call him, but it is a name I will only use if I got into a real relationship. I can’t just call anyone that name.
Wally sips his drink and then puts the glass on the table, his eyes meeting mine, holding me with a wicked stare. “I would love to do a scene with you tonight.”
My heart flutters, and then stops. Surely, his words have just killed me. “I would love that,” I reply, more to my whiskey sour than to Wally. I’m having a hard time meeting his eyes, “but Sebastian and Wendy have asked me to do a scene with them, and I hate going back on my word.”
He nods, and I see in his face there is no animosity, no jealousy. He understands. “Are you with them?”
“Not with them with them. This is my second time playing with them. Wendy likes to be watched, and I like watching people, so…” I trail off, feeling awkward that I’m explaining this out loud, even if I feel like Wally understands.
“No problem, Gideon,” He says, smiling. “Maybe another time.”
I return his smile with a sheepish one. “I would love that, Wally.”
At that moment, Sebastian comes to the table with Wendy trailing behind, her pink and diamond leash firmly in Sebastian’s hand. They are both beautiful: Sebastian is tall and broad with a tattoo of a celtic knot over his right peck, and Wendy with her light brown hair, full lips, and curvy body. He’s shirtless and in jeans, and she’s dressed in a pink slip, no bra so her nipples poke through the fabric. Her collar--the physical symbol of her relationship and ownership by Sebastian--is a rose gold chain with a locking mechanism that lays in the hollow of her throat with a small diamond pendant.
“Ready, Gideon?” Sebastian asks.