Leather Bound

by Shanna Germain

  The tables were always filled with couples and singles. Every table had a sugar bowl, a napkin dispenser and a coffee cup filled with free condoms. Off to the left, a library shelf was lined with sex books, some of which I knew they’d picked up at Leather Bound. Another shelf offered more books, these for sale, along with a glass case filled with leather whips, blindfolds and other sex toys.

  You could always tell who was coming to check it out; they were the giggly ones. Tonight, two young women sat at the farthest table, their mouths open just a little, watching everything. Their gazes followed me as I made my way to the counter. The table in the corner was full of the local cops, as it always was. A couple of them gave me a nod as I went by.

  Behind the counter, two women worked to the sound of steam and espresso. A huge blackboard was handwritten with drinks and prices, mostly offerings with a sexual slant. Asking for a Red Hot got you a cinnamon mocha and a kiss from the barista if she was wearing red. Their drinking chocolate came in matching nipple cups. Here, even a vanilla latte had double meaning.

  I didn’t recognise the woman working the register. She was young, bleach-blonde in a way that made her look punk and tough, with hoop piercings in both eyebrows. Sexy in a very ass-kicking kind of way.

  ‘Welcome to Cream,’ she said. ‘What’s your dream?’

  Before I could respond, she pursed her lips. ‘Hm. I was trying that out, but I think it’s a flop. What do you think?’

  ‘The guys will like it,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, girls are harder. Ain’t that the truth?’ She shook her head, laughing. ‘What can I get for you?’

  Stefan came around the corner from the back at just that moment.

  ‘I’ll have one of him,’ I said. ‘And a cup of coffee to go.’

  ‘Everyone always asks for the exact same thing,’ she said, shooting me a smile. I do like people with a quick wit.

  ‘Sugar,’ Stefan said.

  He was one of the few people in the world who could get away with calling me that. I think it’s because he gives the impression that you’re the only person he’s ever called by that nickname, as though he’d just tweaked your given name slightly into this new form.

  He came around the counter and gave me a hug. He was at least six inches taller than me and at least that many inches wider. Getting inside his hug was like being enveloped in a coffee- and sugar-scented blanket. A very strong, very masculine blanket.

  ‘Her coffee’s on me,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Stefan.’ Normally I pay. And I tip. Which means that on the rare times I do run into Stefan and he offers to pay for me, I don’t feel bad about it. I stuffed a couple of dollars in the tip jar and gave the bleach-blonde a nod of thanks when she proffered my coffee.

  ‘Tell me all,’ I said, once we’d grabbed ourselves a small table in the corner.

  ‘First, I don’t know how you found out about the Cat House, but watch yourself.’

  OK, if he was playing assistant to my Girl Friday again, I could play that. I leaned in conspiratorially, lowering my voice. ‘Right, because the book buyers are dangerous.’ I looked around, as if to make sure no one was listening to me or watching our conversation. ‘And they might –’

  ‘No, I’m serious, Janine.’

  I’d never heard Stefan use my given name in my whole life. It brought me to a complete stop, my coffee cup halfway to my mouth.

  ‘Wait. What? Are you being serious?’

  ‘Did I not just use the word “serious” in the previous sentence?’

  ‘Yes, but …’ I started.

  Then I sat back and rephrased my question. ‘What do you mean? What do you know? Why am I the last one to know about everything?’

  Everything at this particular moment being Kyle’s desire to get married to me and this whole Cat House thing. And possibly something about Lily and something about Davian and what the hell was up with our rent being raised anyway. So, yeah, turned out I really was the last to know about everything.

  ‘I don’t know very much, to be honest,’ Stefan said. ‘As long as I’ve owned Cream, I’ve never gone. Too cult-like for my taste.’

  ‘Cult-like?’ I echoed.

  He nodded. ‘Sure, they have a leader who makes all the decisions. Some kind of initiation ceremony. Secret sex stuff that happens underground and that you can’t talk about.’

  ‘Are you pulling my leg, Stefan? Because I really need to know this stuff.’

  ‘Sugar, I never kid about sex.’

  He must have seen my look because he took my hands in his. He had featherlight hands, his skin far softer than it had any right to be.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It’s not dangerous to your life or anything. It’s just very underground. And there is sometimes talk of people getting sucked in.’

  ‘Sucked in? Sucked into what?’

  He waved a hand over my coffee as if to cool it.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘You’re smart and strong, Sugar. And you don’t have a crazy libido, do you?’

  I felt my eyes go wide.

  ‘OK, scratch that. Try to keep that sex lust of yours in check and you’ll be just fine,’ he said. ‘Do you have someone to go with you?’

  I pointed out through the window to where Kyle stood on the sidewalk, talking into his cell phone.

  ‘Right, of course,’ Stefan said. ‘Your cute blond boy. And you trust him?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘I’m just making sure. I don’t want you to wander off and get mugged by some invisible Cult of the Nine Nipples or something. Also, don’t drink the Kool-Aid.’

  I nearly snorted coffee out my nose. Unpleasant, but totally worth it for the laugh.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘How do I find this door?’

  ‘Go around the back.’

  ‘The back of what?’

  He made a gesture towards the back of the building we were sitting in.

  ‘You’re saying this place is at the back of this building, the building that houses your own shop?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And you’ve never seen it?’

  ‘Sugar,’ he said, ‘I’ve seen the door. And that is enough for me.’

  I looked at Stefan for more answers.

  ‘That’s all I know, Sugar,’ he said. ‘But come back safely to me and tell me everything you can.’ He made his eyes big at me. ‘I mean all the dirty nasty fun bits, of course. Even an old settled guy like me can dream.’

  Then he hugged me like I was going off into the wilds of the African jungle, never to be heard from again.

  When I walked back outside, the world kind of returned to normal. Kyle finished his call and gave me a smile. People were strolling back and forth on the sidewalk. Everything was as it should be.

  Except that nothing was. And one of my favourite people in the world had just bolted like a scared rabbit and warned me against a place named after a pet shelter. Or a bathroom. Or a wine room. Whatever.

  All I had to say to that was: What. The. Hell?

  * * *

  The door was surprisingly easy to find. It really was at the back of the building as Stefan had said, and it was clearly marked THE CAT HOUSE. Despite the obvious, I’d certainly never noticed it.

  The truth of all truly hidden things: they were right in front of your face all along.

  A tug on the door handle revealed that it was locked.

  ‘How do we get in?’ I asked.

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ Kyle said.

  ‘I thought you knew all about this?’ I said.

  He cracked me a grin. ‘I know about it. But I’ve never been here.’

  I tugged on the door again, realised it was silly and then looked around for a buzzer or a camera or something that would let us in.

  I was poking at what was probably just a lump on the wall when the door opened.

  A bald-headed man stood in the doorway. His eyes were cold, so dark they were nearly black. His stance was that of someon
e guarding treasure, like a knight or a dragon. The bald-headed version of Smaug the dragon. Everything about his presence screamed doom. Or dom. I imagined him with a leather crop in one hand and a ball-gag in the other. The vision seemed perfect.

  ‘Yes?’ he said. His voice was higher than I imagined, which created an odd sense of dissonance about him.

  ‘Uh,’ I said. Because clearly that’s what one says when faced with a big dude who scares the crap out of you while also maybe turning you on.

  ‘The coffee shop’s out front,’ he said. He waited for about half a second, and then made as if to shut the door.

  ‘We have tickets,’ I said. ‘For the show.’

  He looked me up and down, clearly waiting for me to produce the tickets.

  I pulled them from my pocket and held them out. My fingers were shaking; the tickets bounced slightly in the air, giving me away.

  He eyed them and then ran some kind of penlight over their corners before nodding. ‘You’re late,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ he said.

  I’d had a lot of weird exchanges in the past few days, but that was one of the weirdest. I looked at Kyle but he was clearly as confused as I was.

  ‘Come in then,’ he said. ‘And quickly.’

  Suddenly we were inside a long, well-lit hallway and the door was closed behind us.

  ‘Tech?’ he asked.

  Once again, I was utterly at a loss. I was going to say ‘Uh’ again, but I got the impression that you only got to say that once around him without him breaking into a snarl. So I managed an ‘I’m sorry?’ then realised I’d already said that too.

  He sighed, shaking his head. It was a big head, and I had to bite my lip not to snort at the slightly bobblehead image it gave him.

  ‘Newbies,’ he sighed. ‘Don’t you do your homework before you come here?’

  ‘Hey, I tried –’

  He silenced me. ‘No cameras allowed. No recording devices. Do you have anything?’

  ‘Just my cell.’ I dropped it into his outstretched hand. Kyle did the same with his.

  ‘We’ll have it here for you when the show’s over,’ he said.

  He looked Kyle and me over slowly. Whatever he saw he did not approve of, but he seemed willing to let us go in anyway.

  ‘Three things to remember,’ he said. ‘If you’re chosen, you’ll know what to do. If you’re not chosen, that’s that. No whining about it. You can come back and try again. Come back a million times if you like. Long as you have tickets. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about –’ he looked me over specifically this time ‘– and it’s clear that you don’t, then just enjoy the ride.’

  ‘Ride?’ I said.

  ‘In you go.’

  Then we were through a double door that opened into a dim room. It looked like a small, old, high-end theatre, dominated by a huge black curtain across what must be the stage. The chairs were large, linked in semi-circled rows that faced away from us. Small candles flickered against the walls. In the semi-dark, it seemed like almost all of the seats were full, and yet there didn’t seem to be more than two dozen people in the audience. I couldn’t tell if they were men or women, young or old. Just that there were dark heads in seats.

  A shadow moved against the wall and then I saw two eyes through a dark mask.

  ‘Your tickets,’ the shadow said in a soft, feminine voice.

  I handed them over. The shadow ran a small light over them, then nodded. ‘This way,’ the masked woman said.

  We followed her. Kyle reached for my hand in the dark and squeezed. His eyes looked huge in the half-light. She led us to the last two open seats together, right in the front row. Every time I show up late to a show and there are seats open in the front row, it makes me nervous. I wondered if I should have brought a raincoat or something. Well, too late. I was here now. If I was going to get drenched by something on stage, I’d just have to deal with it.

  I smiled at the dark-haired man on the other side of me as I took my seat. He didn’t smile back.

  ‘How did I not know about this?’ I whispered into Kyle’s ear. My voice was too loud, even at a whisper. No one else was talking or whispering or even opening a piece of gum. But I couldn’t stop talking. ‘I come to Cream all the time. How does Stefan not even really know about this? Also, choose us? Choose us for what?’

  He shrugged. ‘I told you. I have no idea. Exclusive.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ I said. It hurt my pride a little, I think. I thought of myself as a good researcher, as someone who knew what was going on around me. Especially around the Sweet Spot, which I considered my home. To get a glimpse of this secret sex world hurt a little. To know that people in my life knew about it and had never mentioned it hurt more. Which was stupid, I knew. If I didn’t know to ask, how would they know to tell me?

  I leaned in towards Kyle to ask more questions but, as I did so, half a dozen more shadows, clad in dark suits that covered everything but their eyes, seemed to materialise out of the walls. One by one, they made their way through the audience, moving more like flickering blackness than humans. It was spooky and mesmerising all at once. A shadow went to each of the candles and silently put it out.

  The theatre went dark.

  Not a sound. Not a rustle. No one opened a cough drop or sneezed or even moved. I wasn’t sure people were even breathing. I couldn’t hear or see Kyle next to me. If not for the heat of his leg where it barely touched mine, I would have wondered if he was still there.

  It was so quiet and dark, it felt like what I’d always thought a sensory deprivation chamber would feel like. On one hand, it made me want to cough, or snort, or laugh. Pound my feet against the floor. Pull out my iPhone, which of course I didn’t have. Kiss Kyle loudly and with lots of tongue. Make some kind of noise.

  On the other hand, I wanted to settle into that silent blackness, to let it envelop me. Isn’t that what sensory deprivation did? Gave you time and space to float and think.

  The lack of stimulus didn’t make me calmer. It made me hyper aware. My ears seemed to be actually turning this way and that, searching for sound. My eyes strained against the blackness. I needed something, anything to latch onto, to find my bearings. But nothing came.

  I sat. I breathed, inhaling and exhaling too loudly. Time stopped or expanded or speeded up. Something began to shift. My eyes and ears accepted their fate, stopped searching so hard for something to grab hold of. Instead my skin became alive, sensitive to every movement of air, to every change in temperature. My pulse thrummed in my veins, so fierce I was surprised I couldn’t actually hear it. The heat of my body overtook everything else.

  Every time the air changed, it was the stroke of a lover’s hand along my skin. The back of my neck dotted with sweat. I thought I could feel each droplet forming, teasing my skin with cool liquid. Someone somewhere breathed, and the hair along my face tickled my cheekbones.

  A touch brushed the side of my arm, a barely-there sweep, an almost-not-there feathering, something so light that it almost didn’t seem real. It could have been just another wisp of breeze, a mote of dust in the air.

  The way my body reacted was the only indication I had that this was something different. All of the hairs on my arm stood up as if to follow the touch’s trajectory. My skin went cool and then hot. Deep inside the centre of me, my pussy pulled tight in reaction to the touch. I almost gasped at the strength of the sensation, but resisted by biting down on the insides of my cheeks.

  Another soft brush along the edge of my neck, pushing my hair aside. The intensity of such light contact made me shiver. I couldn’t tell if it was skin or gloves or something far from human, like a feather. But with every touch my entire body responded, yearning for more, my insides opening up.

  My clit pulsed soft and tentative, asking for more. I refused to groan or shift or even make a noise. If no one else was falling prey to their arousal, I wouldn’t either.

&nbs
p; Then I had a horrible realisation: maybe this wasn’t part of the show at all. Maybe this was just someone in the audience touching just me. Maybe everyone else was just sitting there waiting for the show to start.

  And I realised it didn’t matter. My whole body hummed, alive and wanting. If I was the only one being touched, so be it. I liked it.

  Next to me, I heard a sigh, a quiet, barely-there sound that I knew instinctively was Kyle. I’d heard him sigh just like that the first time I brushed my tongue along his cock. Or trailed a damp finger around his nipple.

  The sound made me smile. It didn’t take long before I could hear soft sighs and breaths from all around, a kind of chorus of pleasure, as though the unseen people were playing us like instruments. The more I listened, the more it became just that, a perfectly played song of desire, sighs and moans and bodies shifting in the dark.

  The next time my touch came, I didn’t hold back. The brush of fingertips across my chest, landing just lightly at the edges of my nipples, made me sigh in want and pleasure.

  The song rose around us for a few more minutes, and then, without any kind of finale or last chorus, it just stopped. Everyone went silent. The touch against my skin didn’t come back.

  I sat in the dark and silence again, my body hyper aware, my clit throbbing so hard it was all I could do not to reach between my legs and touch it.

  A huge sound rolled through the blackness. The curtains in front of us were whispering open, revealing two men, oiled and naked, in a pale, flickering light. They were entwined, their bodies coiling together as if in time to some silent music. One was lean and thin, with a body like Kyle’s, the muscles of his legs pulsing with his movement. The other was taller, wider, his skin dark and shiny.

  They writhed, kissing, touching, grinding their bodies together, until I had to shift in my seat, the sexual tension unbearable. I drew in a breath, caught by their utter beauty, their lack of concern for anything but each other. It was the best and worst kind of tease, wanting it to go on for ever, but also wanting them to do something, anything, more. To find their way into each other, to move toward climax. Simultaneously, each one reached down and took the other’s cock in his hands, stroking so slowly, so leisurely, I could feel my own hips respond.