by Amy Valenti
§
The street. The stone steps leading up to the dark blue door.
Club Extraordinaire prompted so many, often conflicting, feelings in Julie. Right now it was a mix of the thrill of anticipation, the excitement of doing something that would be frowned upon or worse by the majority of people she knew, and... that guilt thing again. Not guilty that she was here without Nathan – she was an independent, grown-up woman, she could do what she wanted – but that this was escape, that it was too easy.
How could she just lose herself in the Club on the evening she had discovered her sister was going through Hell and she hadn’t even noticed?
As soon as that thought occurred, the moment was past.
She turned away from the steps. Not tonight.
Tonight she needed to think.
She glanced across the road. The coffee shop was still lit up. A young woman in a college hoodie sat at a laptop, her fingers dancing across the keys; a group of three guys sat at the next table, check shirts and beards and suede jackets; an older woman sat alone in what Julie now regarded as her window seat, a hardback book held too close to her face.
She crossed over, pushed the door and saw him at the counter, his back to her. She didn’t even know his name.
Was it sad that one of the first people she thought of to turn to on an evening like this was a near stranger whose name she did not know? Rachel wouldn’t say so: she’d say the anonymity was the key, that Julie needed someone without the personal history to judge her.
Whatever.
He turned and smiled immediately. “Hey,” he said. “Coffee, black. That right? Let me do you a long black – you get so much more flavor that way and you still get the crema on top, the froth. The best bit.”
She shrugged, and he seemed disappointed with her response. He was trying to impress, and she remembered now the uncertainty before of whether he had been hitting on her or just being nice. He seemed to have perfected the art of the mixed signal.
“Thanks,” she said, forcing a smile. “That’s lovely.” He didn’t deserve her sour face. “I’m Julie,” she went on. “I figure you should know my name, what with me being a regular now.”
“Pleased to meet you, Julie.” While they talked, he’d been making her coffee: hot water from the steamer, with a double espresso on top. He handed this over now. “I’m Matthew. Matt. I don’t know why I went all Sunday names on you: just Matt.”
She smiled at the way he’d suddenly got all flustered.
“Thank you, Just Matt.”
“Quiet night,” he said. “You want to share a table so you can not tell me what’s in your head again? You look like you could do with someone to talk to.”
“That obvious?”
He nodded. “Like someone’s written it across your forehead.” He moved from behind the counter and followed her to a table by the wall.
“Man trouble?” he asked. “Woman trouble? Pet trouble? I don’t judge.”
She smiled again. There was something about his manner that made her feel as if she’d known him for years.
“Yes to the first two,” she said. “In a way. Sister trouble. Double man trouble.”
“Double? That doesn’t sound good.”
“She lost hers. I lost mine. Other way round, though: I got in first.”
“Hence the sitting alone in a coffee shop staring out of the window? Does he live over there, somewhere along the street?”
She looked down into her cup. He was right: long black was the way to have your coffee. “No, no. I just... this is on my route from the train, you know? Do you think I’m some kind of stalker?” Too close to the truth.
“Your sister – are you close?” he asked, ignoring her question.
It was like talking to Rachel: he knew exactly how to get her talking without probing. Ask about the sister, not Julie’s own traumas. Was he a smooth operator, or just a nice, sensitive guy? She seemed to have lost the ability to distinguish, and she could put that down to Nathan: since him, she probably hadn’t trusted a single word a guy had said to her.
“We are,” said Julie. “Like... well, like sisters.” She laughed. “Like sisters should be, you know?”
“And her man?”
“They’d been together seven years. Married five. He was bored. That’s what he told her. Last night. He just got home from work and started packing, and when she asked what he was doing he told her he was bored. How can a relationship get to the point where one partner doesn’t think it’s worth trying any more and the other person doesn’t even know?”
“You don’t think she knew?”
She thought of all those comments about how Rachel admired Julie and her approach to life. Had they signaled the frustrations of her own life, and an awareness that things had gone flat?
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You do. Know. There’s always a part of your mind that picks up on the clues and notices when things aren’t quite how they used to be, or when they’ve never quite been right.”
“Well that was from the heart.” She wasn’t quite sure how this had happened, talking like this to a guy who was still little more than a stranger.
It was Matt’s turn to look down, away. Just then, the woman who had held her book too close to her face got up and made to leave. Matt stood, nodded, held the door for her, then moved to clear the table.
Seconds later he rejoined Julie, the moment passed.
“You own this place, right?” She’d had him down as a barista, probably ten years older than most people doing that kind of work and so therefore a drifter, an under-achiever. But he had that sense of propriety, a responsibility for the place.
He nodded. “I’ve only been here a few weeks,” he said. “Bit of a change of pace for me. I like it. I like the people.”
That last comment: another little nudge, a flirt.
“So your sister: is she okay?”
“She is. Or she will be. You get through, don’t you? You learn how to move on, how to stop all the little reminders from feeling like barbs under your skin. How to stop seeing yourself through his eyes as he saw you when he just wanted to get out.”
“We’re not talking about your sister now, are we?”
“Some,” she said.
“Were you too boring?”
It was a game: the sensitivity, the jokes, and then daring to press just a little harder. She bristled at the question, fought down the urge to find some kind of verbal slap to use as a retort, and then said, “It wasn’t that I was dull. It was that I became too interesting.”
§
There had been a moment at the Club. One of those instants that when you look back later you understand it was pivotal but at the time... you’re lost to that moment, caught up in the atmosphere, in the now of it all.
Julie was cuffed to the wall, her arms high above her, her legs spread by a metal bar, naked save for a leather strap bound tight against her pussy and secured around her waist. Her face was hard against the wall. Her wrists and arms ached, her shoulders stabbed with pain, and she could feel the delicious, burning glow across her ass and thighs from repeated spanking with a wooden paddle.
Nathan had paused, drawing the moment out.
She hung there, her eyes closed, savoring that wonderful sense of anticipation of the next blow. Sometimes he left her waiting forever, making her wait; others he would spank her rapidly, thoroughly, and then have her there and then, up against the wall, taking her from behind.
Being watched by others at the Club just added to the thrill.
Not many people would understand. She knew that even Rachel only understood in a textbook sense: she knew people got off on the complex tapestry of power-play and submission, but Julie doubted very much that she actually got it.
It wasn’t something you could ever talk about with friends, out in the real world.
It was a secret life.
But then, in that moment, she wasn’t thinking. She was in the zone. There wa
s only the pain, spreading and transforming; and the anticipation, the increasingly urgent need for more.
One time... she’d even climaxed from that alone. The need. What was in her head. The physical sensations of having just been spanked, and of the restraints. Suddenly she’d felt it building up, surging through her body as she hung there. It was almost a scary thing: normally there’s an element of control as an orgasm builds, steering the sensations, adjusting the position, the contact; but this one time, it had crept up and there had been nothing she could control about it. It was a wild thing, untamed. She’d screamed when that climax hit, and Nathan had confessed that he had not realized what was happening at first. It had left her ragged, gasping, confused; a feeling unlike any other.
Now, cuffed to the wall, she waited for what might happen next but for some reason the moment started to slip away from her.
She turned her head, opened her eyes, and saw Nathan with the redhead, the one they’d chatted with earlier who knew him from something outside the Club, something to do with work.
They were kissing, legs tangled, hands stroking, squeezing, exploring. His tux was open, his shirt half-undone. Her latex skirt was pushed up, his thigh between hers.
It wasn’t a shocking thing, not at Club Extraordinaire. Julie and Nathan were exclusive elsewhere in their life together, but here the rules were different.
It was the look in his eye as he glanced across that made it different now, though.
He was punishing her, spanking and controlling her in a different way. Flaunting this other woman while Julie watched. There was a cruelty in his look. A viciousness, even.
Now that he saw Julie was watching, slowly he slid his hand round the woman’s waist to her thigh, to where his thigh pressed. He eased his leg back a little to make room, and now his hand caressed the redhead’s pussy. She wore no underwear beneath that skirt, and she was shaved smooth. Julie could see wetness glistening as Nathan’s hand worked.
All the time, his eyes were locked on Julie’s.
She felt a heat, like the burn when the sharp pain of a blow starts to soften and spread, only this time deep in her belly.
She started to twist her body, pulling at her restraints, triggering more pain and discomfort.
She felt herself getting wet. Felt the pressure of that leather strap against her sex. Pressing against the wall, twisting at the waist, she could manipulate that strap with the movements of her body, feel the pressure shift and intensify.
She started to groan, and that was when it happened, the pivotal moment.
The look in his eyes.
She wasn’t supposed to enjoy this: he really had wanted to punish her.
He stared, and his hand stopped moving. The redhead said something, he snapped back and she looked surprised, hurt even.
Julie didn’t care. The moment had taken her. Things had shifted to the physical: the sensations of pressure and ache and pain, and the pull of that strap against her, sliding against the fleshy hood of skin over her clit, and then she was lost to everything as orgasm tore through her body and her senses.
§
Now, in the coffee shop, she hadn’t told Matt everything about that moment. She hadn’t gone into detail at all. She’d kept it in the abstract so as not to scare or shock him. She’d just explained how you can reach a point in a relationship where everything becomes clear and you only realize later that this was when things had changed.
“He’d thought I was safe and conventional. He wanted me to be boring. What he couldn’t handle was that I was a grown adult who wanted to explore life and have fun. He couldn’t handle my liberation. Does that make sense?”
He nodded. “Some men can’t handle a liberated woman,” he said. “It intimidates them. You don’t need that kind of bullshit in your life.” Then he caught himself and looked embarrassed. “Sorry... I mean for the language, and for the telling you what you want in your life.”
“You should know better than to tell a liberated woman what she may or may not need.”
They laughed, so easy. So sweet that he apologized for swearing – she suspected he really would be very easy to shock.
The three guys left then, one of them pausing to slap Matt on the back and say, “Hey, dude. Next time, Matt, okay?”
Matt stood and went to clear the table. It was only a small place, but he seemed to do everything here.
Now it was just the two of them, and the student pattering at her laptop in the corner. Matt came back and sat across from Julie again. She remembered the last time she’d been here, when she’d realized they were flirting and then the shocking thought that she could have him right there and then, the images flashing into her head of urgent sex with this man.
She glanced across at the other remaining customer and wondered what might happen if she found herself alone here with Matt. She couldn’t deny the attraction, but still she didn’t trust it. She’d bounced from moping over Nathan to obsessing over a stranger at the Club, to now realizing that she was attracted to Matt, too.
It was a rebound thing. Hard to determine where real attraction lay and where it was merely a need for recognition and contact with another human being.
And all of it was getting confused in her head with what Rachel had just told her: Julie’s blindness to her own sister’s struggles.
“You okay?”
She wasn’t accustomed to sensitivity, to being around someone who actually noticed things.
She nodded, then shrugged. “A lot going on, you know?”
He nodded, too.
“Remember asking me what’s in my head?”
He studied her, waiting for her to go on.
“You really want to know?”
He was doing that Rachel thing, leaving the silence like newly fallen snow for her to plunge into.
“I’m thinking about my sister and how awful it is that she’s reached this point and I’ve been no use to her at all. I’m thinking about my ex, and how even now when he’s on the other side of the country he looms over my life, casting his shadow over everything. I’m thinking that my head is a mess and I’m jumbling everything up together so that I don’t really know what’s going on with me any more or what I want. And I’m thinking that in amongst all this, suddenly there’s this cute guy who acts like he really gives a shit about who I am and what I’m going through and I don’t quite know how to handle that kind of unprovoked niceness.”
“Am I really ‘cute’? I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before, not to my face at least.”
“That’s all you heard? Cute?”
“Guy has an ego.”
“Guy has an ego and a cute smile and I’m thinking I should probably leave now and get myself a cab before it’s just the two of us because then I really don’t know what might happen.”
“If I was as nice as you say, I’d call you a cab now, so you don’t find yourself in that dilemma.”
“I only said you’d committed unprovoked niceness, I didn’t say you’re through and through nice.”
“Fair point.”
“I thought it was an important distinction to make.”
His eyes were pale blue, flecked with a gray that was almost silver, a hint of green, too. He could do nice, he could do sensitive, he could do flustered and unsure, too. But when he fixed you with those eyes, he had presence, command. They were eyes that made you melt before him.
Her body was like a check-list just then. Heart racing, check. Skin flushed, a slight burn across her cheeks. Breath shallow, rapid. Throat suddenly dry and tight. Head spinning. Belly tense, with a focus deep down. Heat and tightness and wetness. All check.
She knew it wasn’t just him, just an attraction. She knew it was a combination of circumstance and emotion. She knew she thought things through too much sometimes, too.
But whatever it was, it was powerful and immediate.
She glanced across. The student was still tapping at her keyboard, earphone leads trailing from her ears.<
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“I should go.”
“I should get you that cab.”
The student glanced across then, eyes narrowing as if she finally realized she was the unwanted interloper in something incredibly intense and about to happen right here and now.
“You realize I’ve been unable to stop thinking about you since I first laid eyes on you?” His tone was one he might use in casual conversation, but those pale eyes were fixed on her, and there was a tension in the way he held himself as he sat there, across the table from her.
“And what do you think, when you think about me?”
That made him look away. Just as she had suspected: so easy to shock.
A few tables away, the girl snapped her laptop shut and slid it into a quilted shoulder bag. She took one last drink from a coffee that must have been cold hours ago, then stood.
Matt looked across, stood, went to hold the door.
Suddenly there was a lump in Julie’s throat, and it was hard to swallow. She felt like a teenager. Stupid to feel this way. She didn’t know what she was doing here, now. What she wanted.
All she knew was the physical response, which was undeniable. The anticipation. The way her head rushed uncontrollably.
And then he was there, standing beside her.
The door thudded shut, and it was just the two of them.
He leaned down and his face came close to hers. He smelt of coffee and something musky and citrus. His hand on her cheek was a gossamer touch that hinted of so much more, a kiss of steel against her skin, and she was thinking of his scent and how his eyes were blurred this close and the delicious thrill as his hand slid back, his fingers threading through her hair.
His lips pressed against hers, closed and then parting. His tongue pressed between her lips, against her teeth. He pushed deep and it was so intense, it was like being fully entered by him. Everything focused on his lips against her, his tongue driving home, the hand on her jaw and fingers in her hair, the scrape of stubble against her chin and lips.
Time stopped being a thing for her, just then. The kiss might only have lasted seconds, or it could have been much longer – she had no way of knowing.
She hadn’t expected this. The tenderness. The feeling of being opened up in so many ways, her layers peeling back before him.