by Livia Grant
Her stomach tightened. Be strong. She rubbed her hands on her thighs again, the damp of her palm soaking into the transparent lace. You can do this.
That one awful day two long years ago was not going to rule the rest of her life. Tonight… tonight she was going to break another paralyzing tie.
“Excuse me.”
Abby quickly stepped aside, letting Newton pass her with his giant black suitcase of a playbag rolling along behind him. He headed straight to the Roulette stage and the contestants already gathered there.
This was it. Time to take her place among them.
With one last steadying breath, she pressed both hands over her stomach to stop its nervous fluttering before weaving through the crowded tables to join them.
It was going to be a good night.
Chapter 2
Fuck. His. Life.
Newton stood frozen on the stage as the roulette wheel turned in one direction, the white marble spun in the other and—thunk!—dropped with a bounce into a named slot. Just over half the waiting submissives had already been chosen and now stood to one side next to their assorted Doms. Of the remaining ones, however, he only knew two by name: Abby and Marcy the Crier. God help him, but he would put up with anyone, including Marcy, to avoid spending the next few minutes, much less hours of scening, with Abby. But no. The damn ball wobbled to a stop and in that moment, every nerve in his body bounced wildly between the culminating buzz of weeks’ worth of heightened anticipation and this curious prickling, crawling sensation that seemed only to intensify the longer he stood frowning at the black pie-wedge with Abby’s name on it.
“Abby,” Chase announced, removing her name from the wheel and handing a corresponding index card to Newton long enough for him to glance over the hard limits she’d listed: Medical play, fine with him. Confinement of any kind—so, no locking her in the closet until she promised to behave; more’s the pity. Masks and gags—damn—and rope—double damn; he loved rope. It wasn’t a lot to memorize, but once he had, he dropped the index card with her name and limits onto the discard pile with those who had already been picked.
At this point in the process, the other subs had ventured onstage to join their newly selected Doms and spun the roulette wheel that designated their first scene of the evening. Stepping back from the wheel, Newton glanced expectantly across the stage. In that cluster of waiting submissives gathered before it, Abby wasn’t hard to pick out. She looked stunning. She always looked stunning, but apart from dropping her head back to cast her ‘why me’ glare at the defenseless tracklights above, she wasn’t moving. That stung a little.
“Lucky,” someone behind him whispered. “I was hoping for her.”
“Want to swap?” Newton replied without looking to see who it was. He was too busy trying to decide how irritated he was—enough to drag her up onto the stage by her hair… or to quit the event before it had even started.
“Abby?” Chase said, beckoning her to come up on the stage. “Come on. You’re holding up the line.”
Dragging her head up, Abby looked right at Newton. Everyone in that room could feel her unspoken disappointment. That included Chase, who crooked an authoritative finger at Abby and summoned her up onto the stage as easily as, well, a Dom with a short-leashed sub. And Abby came, although she did it dragging her feet and scowling.
“There is no swapping partners without one hell of a damned good reason, and that reason is approved only by the DMs,” Chase told them both, sternly repeating what they both already knew. The rules had been printed on the applications both had agreed to back when they each registered for this event. “You can choose not to participate, but should either of you leave the premises, or fail to scene, or not complete the minimum time requirement for your scene or scenes—no less than thirty minutes if you choose three smaller ones or one long scene at no less than ninety minutes—or call ‘Red’ before you’ve met the full ninety-minute requirement outlined in the terms of your applications, then you will both be declared forfeit.”
He gave them each a stern and, to Newton’s eye, oddly paternal ‘Are you going to mind me, or do I have to spank’ frown. He knew Chase and very much liked the man, but looks like that tended to slither up a man’s spine and set his teeth on edge. A dominant soul, he didn’t need or enjoy being told what he already knew he had to do. Oddly enough, that same look had a much different effect on Abby. Her face lost some of its glowering mutiny, her shoulders drooped and her gaze fell to the floor.
“I want verbal acknowledgement that you both understand the terms of this event,” Chase persisted.
“I understand,” Abby muttered.
Newton folded his arms across his chest, gritting his teeth to keep back the sarcasm. He still liked Chase and he understood why MC felt the need to say this—it wasn’t a secret how he and Abby felt about one another; by now, most of the newbies in the audience tonight had likely picked up on it. Chase was right to address it now before it became an issue, but Newton still didn’t like being talked to as if he were three. It took effort to keep his tone light and civil. “So do I.”
“Do you plan to proceed?”
For his part, absolutely. Black Light was one of the newest BDSM dungeons in the whole of the D.C. area and yet, it was already touted as being one of the best. It was big, it was spacious… it was still a money pit for the owners, but it was rumored that, unless something catastrophic happened, the dungeon space would be completely paid off and running in the black much sooner than it took most new businesses to either succeed or fold. That was a huge achievement for any club and virtually unheard of when it came to BDSM-oriented ones.
“I do,” Newton said.
Abby nodded as well, though she had to take a deep and bracing breath before she could make herself do it.
The stern MC gave them each another dark look before, content that his warning was being taken seriously. He motioned Abby toward the submissive’s roulette wheel. “Take your spin.”
Accepting the marble from Chase, she waited for him to spin the wheel before dropping it onto the track. She stepped back, almost bumping into Newton. “Do you actually know how to use the things you carry about in that suitcase of yours?” she muttered at him out the side of her mouth.
“Better than you’re going to wish I did,” he replied the same way.
The wheel spun vigorously. Across the stage, an entire soap opera was silently taking place among the other paired partners. A pretty boy switch was trying on his Dom-y pants with a submissive who liked to top from the bottom. One submissive had already run for the door, sparking an impromptu capture scene when her Dom chased her down and dragged her back. And if that wasn’t bad enough, unless the wheels of fate aligned themselves with this particular roulette wheel, there was a very real chance that the happily divorced Mastersons might actually get stuck playing with one another.
Newton looked at Abby again, but no. The prize for the most unlikely couple here still went to them.
“I just want you to know, I’m a big girl.” Abby watched the marble and wheel spin, the force of both slowly beginning to diminish. She folded her arms across her chest. She probably thought it made her look tough, but all Newton saw when he looked down at her diminutive five-foot-four-inch height—and that included those potentially ankle-breaking stiletto heels—was a woman eight inches shorter than he was, a good eighty pounds lighter, and shy any kind of personality that he’d have found appealing. “I can take care of myself.”
“I never said otherwise.” Newton fought to stifle a sigh.
“Bullshit,” Abby scoffed.
He frowned at her. “I beg your pardon?”
“You did so too say otherwise.”
“Tickling!” Chase announced to the room when the marble finally dropped into a scene slot.
“When?” Newton demanded.
“Now,” Chase started to reply, but stopped when Newton held up a staying finger.
“When?” he demanded of her again.
>
“Oh, like you don’t know,” she hissed back. Mouth snapping shut, her eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared. Like she had any right to be upset when he’d been putting up with her snarky ass for years!
His teeth ground. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking because I’d already know. And knowing is half the battle. G.I. Joe taught us that.”
One of the already partnered subs giggled at that.
Up until that moment, Newton hadn’t known that Abby could deliver her snarkiest comments without ever saying a word, but the look she turned on him said everything she no longer had to. “I didn’t come here to argue with you. I came to have a good time.”
“So did I.”
“So did everyone else, frankly,” Chase tried again. “So if you guys would just take your place over—”
Newton snapped up that silencing hand again. He also took his last deep breath and, just like his subsequent exhale, let it all go. “Look,” he told her, extending his best proverbial olive branch. “We both want the same thing. It’s just one night. There’s nothing to be gained by this constant antagonism and I don’t know about you, but I could use a 30-day free membership.”
The blonde lines of her eyebrows beetled and the flatness of her mouth twitched. “Are you suggesting we put aside our differences long enough to win the prize?”
Newton inclined his head. “I promise, you can go back to hating me for no good reason tomorrow.”
“I don’t hate you,” she snipped, twin spots of color rising to stain her cheeks. “And I have a very good reason.”
Now it was his turn to scoff. “Like hell you do.”
Her arms unfolded; her fists snapping down straight at her sides, fingers so tight that even her knuckles flushed with anger. “Like hell I don’t!”
“Not that the audience isn’t enjoying the drama, but…”
Ignoring Chase’s attempt to get the event moving again, Newton gave Abby his complete and beginning-to-get-annoyed attention. “Like what? What could I possibly have done, except be an incredibly good sport about the way you badger, mock, and insult me every chance you get?”
“Who insulted who?” she shot back, eyebrows arching in outraged surprise. Somehow she pulled that look off well, too. No one knew better than he did how often he’d bled to the cutting edge of her very sharp tongue over the years, and yet he was almost convinced she didn’t know what he was talking about.
“If you two aren’t—”
Newton spun around. “Shush,” he snapped, with just enough irate Dom in his tone to startle the MC silent. “Now you look here,” he growled at Abby next, unsure whether to be pissed when she promptly knuckled her fists into her hips and growled right back at him, or be endeared by that appalling unsubmissive-like behavior. Not that submissives couldn’t be feisty; he’d known more than his fair share of those, and he adored them—the fire, the sass—but usually when a Dom’s temper flared, a submissive’s backed down. Not Abby. No part of her was backing down and he found that at once highly aggravating and, worse, faintly arousing. He absolutely refused to be aroused by anything this woman did. “I have never in my life ever blindly insulted anyo—”
“The first time we met,” she challenged, not letting him finish.
Newton stopped, trying to think, but coming up with nothing that could explain two long years’ of enmity. It wasn’t that he couldn’t remember their first encounter. No one could have walked in on the scene he had and ever forgotten the sight. He remembered huge, muscular Terry—a DM at both Overtime, and now Black Light as well, but back then he’d been just another Dom competing for play partners. The large man had been picking up short, scrawny, battered Abby—her face covered in a mottle of old, ugly yellowish-brown surgery bruises—and flipping her like a pancake before slamming her to the floor.
“Don’t interrupt my scene again,” was all Terry had growled back then when Newton voiced a very loud and startled objection.
Even then, when Abby had looked at him, she’d looked at him with fiery dislike. She’d also picked herself up off the floor and thrown herself at Terry again, and again, and again. Fiercely. Inexhaustibly. She did it punching, kicking, screaming, and even head-butting. She did it repeatedly, with Terry pinning her for her troubles each and every time. And he didn’t just pin her, sometimes he hit her back: cuffing her upside the head; slapping her—her shoulder, her hip, the back of her leg, whatever part of her that he could reach as she scrambled to find her footing; and then grabbing her by the hair to drag her around the playspace. He split her lip that night. That might have been by accident, but nobody got out of that kind of scene without bleeding a little, and God knows she drew enough of Terry’s blood to make the single Kleenex she held to her lip look inconsequential in comparison.
The brutality of that scene had been appalling. It had almost reminded him… well, of an attempted rape. Every single time Terry had thrown her down, pinning her while she’d bucked and kicked and screamed until finally, eventually, every single time she wrenched a hand free to strike back, break free, and scramble up far enough to attack him all over again. It had been disturbing to watch. On so many levels, some of which bothered him so much that to this day he dared not examine them too closely.
Long hours after that horrible scene had ended, Newton remembered running into Terry in the dungeon’s kitchen area. Having left Abby to recover while wrapped in a blanket on a well-used mattress in the Aftercare room, better known as the Suck and Fuck, he’d been fixing a plate of protein-heavy snacks, a few cookies, and two bottles of water from the fridge.
“What the hell?” Newton had demanded then.
“I didn’t ask your opinion,” Terry had told him bluntly. “Nor do I need your permission.”
“No?” Newton had shot back, his temper sparking in defense of what had, at that time, been a newbie given the worst of all possible introductions into the kind of things they did. “What were you doing to her?”
“Giving her her power back,” the battered Dom had replied. Then, with plate and waters in hands, he’d ignored the ‘No food in the play area’ rule and taken both back to Abby.
That had been almost two years ago. Now, as he stood on Black Light’s stage and stared into Abby’s accusing eyes, Newton had no trouble remembering any part of that night. Including the way she had glared at him when she’d finally come out of the back room, so exhausted that Terry had to help her walk to the changing room. He’d probably helped her re-dress too, Newton thought, then had to wonder where in hell that had come from. Not only had that been two years ago, but even at the time Abby and Terry had been nothing to one another but play partners. In fact, between then and now, Newton was hard pressed to think of a Dom in this room that Abby hadn’t scened with at least once.
…except him, of course.
“I am so terribly sorry,” he said slowly. “It wasn’t my intent to disrupt your scene, but I can see how that might be construed as insulting. In my defense, I was a little surprised. Most people come to these parties to get beaten with canes or paddles. I just… I hadn’t seen anyone opt for fists before.”
She looked at him as if he were an idiot. “What?” she demanded, her voice rising in both tone and volume.
“What?” he echoed back, openly bewildered.
“And a one, and a two, and…” Chase sang out, conducting the crowded room with two fingers as if they were an orchestra. And right on cue, the entire room cried back, “What?”
Newton and Abby both jumped, startled. He looked at Chase, who thumbed to the wheel. “Tickling,” Chase said again. “You want to take your place with everyone else so we can continue this?”
As one, Newton and Abby looked at the wheel. Sure enough, the wheel was stopped and the marble was lying squarely in the red pie wedge marked: Tickle Fetish.
Abby studied that for a long time before, arms swaying, head tipped, her expression as close to smugly triumphant as he’d yet seen it—and Newton could have sworn by now he’d already
seen every variance of that out of her—she turned on her hip to smile at him. “Good luck with that.”
It was the smirk that got him, and before he could stop himself, Newton fired back, “Why? Because you’re not ticklish? Or because you think I don’t know how to get around that?”
Her smirk vanished and gradually relocated itself onto Newton’s lips.
“I pay attention, sweetheart,” he said, gesturing for her to precede him off to one side where the others had been assigned to wait until all participants had their partners.
Her chin hiked. “If that were true, you wouldn’t have just apologized for the wrong thing.”
It took everything he had not to swat her ass when she walked past him, head held high. His palm itched to deliver one smack —just one; it would so be worth it—where it would do her the most good. And who knew, if he spanked hard enough he might actually remember what she’d no doubt have him apologizing for two years from now. Laughing, not really finding it funny, he followed in her wake.
The remainder of the spins passed much quicker. Or maybe it only seemed that way because time moved differently when a man paid more attention to the annoyingly hostile woman standing next to him than anything else going on in the room. It was a relief when it was over and everyone filed off the stage to start their scenes. It was fun seeing which submissives rushed to find a play place and which, like Abby and the ex-Mrs. Masterson, dragged their feet like condemned prisoners bound for the gallows.