by Lilia Moon
I don’t know enough about what he likes. I could probably still take a good guess at his favorite foods and his favorite music and the things he dreams about at night, but I don’t have a clue what his kinks are. I just know he has some, and right now that feels like a deep, dark chasm.
He doesn’t say a word. He guides me over to another spotlight, shining down on a table where the action is a lot quieter—and far more intense. A woman I don’t know is thoroughly strapped down. There are wide leather straps over her legs in three places, her arms, her belly, her forehead, cupping her breasts. She’s spread-eagled enough to be on display, but that’s not what anyone is watching.
A couple of feet above her belly, a candle is tipping.
The man holding the candle smiles slightly and lets a single drip fall on her quivering skin, just below her belly button. I can see the trail he’s been making from the valley between her breasts. I can see where he’s going.
The woman barely reacts as the next drop lands, but the small shiver that shakes her makes more noise than all of Eva’s yelling. I hear how loudly I’m breathing and quiet it. There aren’t as many people watching here, and all of them are caught in the hush of hot wax meeting skin.
Eli’s hand brushes down my back.
Every hair on my body orients toward him, but I don’t take my eyes off the woman on the table or off the man who is utterly focused on the trail of waxy tears he’s building. Her eyes are closed and his are glued to the candle wax, but they’re as attuned to each other as any two people I have ever seen. Melded together by small splatters of falling molten wax.
His control is absolute—and it’s all for her. For what builds between them.
He lets a drop fall on his inner wrist and lifts the hand holding the candle a little higher. The next drop heads straight for the valley between her legs.
The sound that comes from her is a glacier cracking off into the sea, an iceberg chipped off her soul by hot wax and the man holding it. Her muscles tense, pushing against the straps. Telling me what I already know. They’re not melded anymore. She’s fighting this.
Eli straightens beside me, the hand on my back a wordless warning.
I know better than to speak. The hush of this moment is fragile and taut and filled with impending doom—and somehow holy. The eyes of the man holding the candle have gone from focused to utterly, unmistakably tender. Those of a man watching his love do a hard thing, the very hardest of things, while six people watch and breathe together and somehow try to will her back into the place of melting.
I already know it won’t be us who gets her there. It will be her, and her trust in the straps and the candle and the man who’s offered them for her journey.
Another drop.
Another cracking. This one causes her Dom’s eyes to cloud with pain, but his hands on the candle remain absolutely steady. A man looking hard in the eye and not flinching—so that maybe the woman on the table can too.
Yet another drop, and this time her reaction is less sharp. More potent. More poignant.
Eli breathes beside me, the first inhale I’ve heard him take. His hands wrap around mine, and I realize I’ve made them into fists. He moves slowly behind me, enveloping me in his arms. In his care. In his reassurance, entirely unspoken, that no matter what happens on that table, the woman trying to take this journey will be held. Will be caught. Will be loved, whether she cracks or melts or can’t find her way to either.
I can feel the tears pushing hot into my eyes, clogging my throat. This isn’t theater. It’s absolutely real and it’s stunningly beautiful.
One more drop, and this time, whatever is building breaks through the straps inside the woman, the ones we can’t see, and sets her free. Her soft moan is one of complete surrender. The candle pours a waterfall of wax, straight onto the sensitive skin between her legs, and I bear witness to the quietest, most intense orgasm I have ever seen. One so strong it turns my legs to goo.
Eli has me, holding me up and moving me away. I can see the other watchers making haste to leave too, and that feels wrong somehow. An abrupt end to the sacred, for us and for her.
Eli feels my hesitation. “Her Dom asked us to leave. He knows she won’t want eyes on her now that she’s come apart.”
I missed the signal, whatever it was. It doesn’t matter. I’m carrying the echoes of her surrender with me as I walk. I lean into Eli’s strength. The desire to feel held is blazing inside me right now, but I don’t know if it’s truly my need or echoes of the artistry I just watched.
Eli asks me no questions. He merely guides me to the edge of yet another small gathering of people.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Eli
She’s lost the clean, clear edges of Chloe Virdani.
I know this, and I know she wants nothing more than to sit in a quiet corner and let what she just saw work its way through her as she climbs back into her own skin. Part of me is tempted to let her, because there’s also a storm brewing inside of me. A wild, hopeful, grateful one, because I just got my first look at the sub that might live in the heart of the woman I love.
Or at the Domme she wants to be. Her eyes spent as much time looking at the man holding the candle as they did at the woman he was tormenting.
I take a breath. She saw the beauty of what they were together, and that’s enough to earn her a place in my world. Whether she wants to enter and who she might want to be if she does are questions I don’t know the answer to yet, and the storms inside me will just have to wait until I know. Until she knows. Being a Dom can be the most patience-demanding job in the universe.
I let my attention shift to what is outside me. In the last scene, Chloe saw arrows lighting the pathway to her own surrender. This one is meant to let her see if the arrows on another path burn brighter.
I guide us toward a loveseat, one that Ari has kindly arranged for the guest of honor. I catch Tamelia watching us, and do my best to signal her to take a good read of the woman at my side. The wax play has untethered Chloe, and that might impact what happens next, or at least how she perceives it.
Tamelia nods and says a few quiet words to the man perched on the edge of a stool, blindfolded and ball-gagged. He shakes his head, and she removes the gag, touching his cheek. A Domme who can’t stop pushing boundaries, even when this scene is mostly for the benefit of one of its viewers. I don’t know Martin well, but I know it’s a victory he let her put the gag on at all.
Tamelia turns to her second sub, a young woman sitting back to back with Martin and casting interested glances at Chloe. One word from the woman in the latex pants and she pales, eyes heading straight for the floor.
A quiet chuckle from beside me. Chloe, appreciating the theater. Well on her way back into her skin.
Tamelia hasn’t missed that either. She gives Chloe an assessing look as she holds up a mess of thick, clanky chains, and then her attention is entirely back on her two subs. Which is a good thing, because they’re both reacting in spades. Martin is relaxing, already headed to subspace. The young woman, who I don’t know, is fidgeting hard enough that she’s going to dump both of them off the small stool they share.
One sub who enjoys bondage, and one who very much doesn’t, but wants this badly enough to be willing to try. Tamelia has a reputation for wringing her people dry—and for building a bonfire of confidence inside them while she does.
Chloe’s eyes follow the chains, fascinated, as Tamelia wraps her two scene partners up into something that looks like it belongs in a prison holding cell—one where they think Martin might turn into a werewolf any minute. Ambience. Tamelia is famous for it.
She finishes her cuffs-and-chains artwork and pulls a blindfold down over the young woman’s eyes. Her satisfied hum as the nervous sub finally quiets is audible, which isn’t an accident.
And is echoed by the woman sitting beside me.
Chloe, resonating with what she sees. I hold my body still, determined to be the Dom she needs in this moment, eve
n though I want to kick this scene in the knees or find a Domme with less-fascinating skills to finish it out. Neither of which would be remotely fair to Chloe. I take her hand instead, stroking her palm in my lap. A distraction for me, and a way to help me hang on to whatever patience I have left. There’s more noise in the audience now, so I lean over and find Chloe’s ear. “Any questions?”
She nods slowly. “Why the blindfolds?”
I grit my teeth and give her the answer a Domme would want to hear. “It takes away one of the ways a sub can hold themselves steady. It encourages them to lean on the steadiness the top is providing.”
“It’s scarier for him,” Chloe says softly. “But not for her. The blindfold soothed her.”
I blink. She’s talking about Tamelia’s two subs. “Some subs find the limited sensory input to be comforting. They like knowing someone else is firmly in charge of their experience.”
Chloe’s eyes are on Martin now. “Not him.”
Not him at all. “It took him a lot of time and work with Tamelia to get to this point.” I don’t like the point I’m making, even as I make it. “Sometimes surrender is really hard.”
Chapter Thirty
Chloe
This scene is bothering Eli, and I don’t think it has anything to do with chains and blindfolds. I let myself touch the discomfort and the commitment of the man standing beside me and carefully giving me the space he said he wouldn’t. Steadfast space. He’ll catch me in an instant if I ask him to.
I breathe in and remember Quint’s words. I’m strong enough to do this with Eli standing beside me. And no matter what he’s feeling, he’s the one who set this scene up so that I could watch.
I know why. He thinks I might be like Tamelia. Everyone does.
I exhale and start taking inventory of my own soul.
My brain is fascinated. What’s happening on that stool is a hot mix of therapy and theater and sex, and the part of me that loves understanding motivations is captivated. So is the part of me that loves bringing people into brave new worlds—I just do it with silk and lace and a well-fitting corset.
Tamelia runs a feather down the arm of one sub and they both quiver.
I smile. Her sense of timing is exquisite. She’s anchoring them to each other in every way possible, these two people with very different strengths and very different fears. I’m watching a maestro at work—even as new to this as I am, I can already see that.
I shift my focus, and this time I don’t watch the woman with really excellent custom-made latex pants and fierce compassion in her eyes. I watch the two on the stool. Their shaking. The raw honesty on their faces, in their fingers, in the quiet whimpers and rasping breaths. Readying to go wherever Tamelia tells them to go.
My muscles tense in empathy with their bravery.
I close my eyes as the message of my own body sinks in. I’ve done the easy part. Now it’s time to do the hard one. It’s time to get out of my head and do the very real thing I came here to do and let myself do a walkthrough of this scene that Eli is causing himself pain to allow me to watch.
I take a quick breath and mentally launch myself out of my own skin. I head straight for a landing in Tamelia’s mile-high boots and wrap myself in her utterly focused, supremely confident self-assurance. I can feel the way she assesses and measures, the quick mental rummaging through her bag of tricks as she lays out the next steps, the alternatives if things go awry. An intricate dance, one where she weaves her intentions and her arrogance together with what unfolds between the three of them.
A dance that she loves.
A reverence for the partners who are letting her lead.
I let my body feel everything about this role. It doesn’t really matter whether I’m right about Tamelia. It matters that this is how I would play her, what I would feel if this were my scene and those were my partners and this was my dance.
I take one last deep breath and then I sigh quietly and step out of the mile-high boots. My body has what it came to collect. There’s more to see, but I have nowhere left to put it. I need time. Time to spread out all of what has just landed in me and let it vibrate and speak and reshape itself until it fits back inside my skin and lets me be Chloe Virdani again. And I can’t do that here.
I turn to the man beside me, the one whose gaze hasn’t left me since Tamelia picked up her chains. “I know you asked me to let you set the pace tonight.”
His whole Dom being snaps to attention. He studies me, in that way that says he’s seeing all my underthings whether I want him to or not. Finally, he reaches out and run his knuckles down my cheek. “Let’s go get a drink and find a couch and have a talk.”
That’s not what I need. I need space, unending vast expanses of it. The kind that comes with no questions and no corset laces and nothing that even kind of smells like control.
Oh, yes. Tonight has thoroughly stomped on my most sensitive buttons—and called to them. And until I know what to do with that, I feel like a ticking bomb in Eli’s presence. “I need to go.”
The hurt in his eyes gets whisked away in an instant—but I don’t miss it.
He takes both my hands. “I can’t let you do that, shorty. It’s one of the rules of my world. Intense experiences need aftercare. I’ll let you go once I know you’re okay.”
It’s a good rule. I’m sure it is, even if it feels like a barbed-wire fence right now. But that’s not what convinces me to stay. It’s knowing how much of him I would have to break through to leave. I agreed to let him hold me tonight.
I need to wait until he’s ready to let me go.
Chapter Thirty-One
Eli
I’ve fucked up. She turned to me cracked wide open and I somehow forgot that what she needs when she’s in that volcanic place is space and time to let her lava flow and make its way to the cool waters of the sea.
Instead, I stuffed her back into a bottle.
Major Dom blunder. One I can’t undo, because that’s not how volcanoes work. All I can do is try to fix it.
Chloe is back to her professionally curious self by the time we sit down on a quiet loveseat in the corner of the lounge. She holds a martini glass of something appropriately named Sam’s Pink Disaster in one hand, and reaches for my fingers with the other.
Comforting me, and making an unspoken demand to be back on equal footing.
I sigh. I already screwed this up once, and anyone who can pull herself together this fast after what she just let herself go through doesn’t need a Dom riding her ass. I take a seat beside her, sip from my own glass, which is not pink because Meghan’s a smart bartender, and wait.
“That was interesting.” Chloe gives me a small smile and sets her drink down.
That’s a really boring word for what just happened. “Tell me about your experience.” I might not feel like much of a Dom right now, but I can at least remember my lines.
Her eyes drift, tracking back through the last hour. “I like Tank and Eva a lot, but I don’t understand why two people who like each other that much want to be on either end of what they were doing.” She holds up a hand. “I don’t need you to tell me they wanted it—I could see that. Her maybe more than him. But I could feel in my body that I don’t want to be her.”
I try to shift my brain back to the one scene in there I barely remember. “The story of BDSM in the vanilla world is pretty attached to impact play, but in here, there are lots of people who only dabble, or steer away from it entirely.” Sometimes toward stuff she doesn’t even know exists, but that’s a conversation for a different day.
She nods, and then one side of her mouth tips up into a wry grin. “How long did it take before Tank figured out that she’s just yelling for fun?”
Long enough to cost the poor man almost every nerve he has. “She pushed on him pretty hard. Which is a good thing. A Dom can’t be tentative, and he’s a big man who was scared of his own strength when he first came here.”
Chloe picks up her pink martini and takes a th
oughtful sip. “He’d never hurt her.”
I laugh. “Listen when they come back in here. She’ll try to convince everyone he nearly killed her.” And in doing so, lay yet another brick onto the wall of Tank’s growing self-confidence. Something Chloe clearly got, even if the impact play made her wince.
She swirls the liquid in her glass, and I can feel her energy swirling along with her drink. “The wax play was different. They weren’t putting on a show.”
They were, but I know what she’s trying to say. “That was an intense scene for a public space.”
Chloe’s fingers trail along the hem of her dress, the only sign I have that she’s beginning to leak out of the bottle. “Why did she freeze up?”
Good question. Brave question. “Why do you think?”
Her forehead wrinkles, and I can see the lava, pushing its way up. “It wasn’t the restraints. It was almost like she was resisting the orgasm.”
Smart woman. Brave woman. “She was.”
She looks at me, and the entire volcano flows into her eyes. “Why?”
She knows. I know that she knows. But she needs me to say it, and I’m not going to pull out the Dom rulebook and make a second huge mistake. “Because she didn’t have a choice. He was making her come.”
Chloe’s breath catches. “Taking the last of her control away.”
I offer the counterpoint, as gently as I can. “And offering her pleasure and a chance to know herself more deeply in exchange.”
Chloe’s eyes have gone somewhere very far away. “He drove a very hard bargain.”
“For that sub, yes.” Tamelia’s young woman would have given over her pleasure in a heartbeat. “Everyone has different lines that are hard for them to cross.”
Chloe is quiet for a long time. “I think that would be one of mine.”
I hold my breath, her words so very fragile in the air between us.
And then I do what I should have done the moment we left the dungeon. I lean over and kiss her cheek. “Go, shorty. Take the time and the space that you need.” I lean my forehead against hers, willing my shit to stay together just a little bit longer. “Thank you for trusting me tonight.”