by SM Johnson
“Are you okay with staying a while longer?”
Oh. Sure. Why not? It’s only going to drop me further into the abyss of intrigue. Nothing dangerous to my mental health at all.
I looked at Avery. Blinked. He seemed more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. I mean, he always looked confident, self-assured, and calm, like the world and everything in it was well within his control. Even when his partner at Phoenix & Phoenix teased and thwarted him. Maybe especially then. But now he was different, he looked… looser somehow. Genuinely comfortable. Like he was in his element here more than anywhere else. Maybe it was that these other men at the table were his actual friends?
I shrugged, then nodded. Leaned my body toward him and nuzzled my face against his sleeve. I don’t know why I did it, except, well. Maybe I did know. I wanted him to touch me. I wanted him to kiss me. In front of these people.
“Very nice,” he said softly, and raised his hand to tilt my chin up. He stared into my eyes, a searching look, and then his lips touched mine, gently, with a hesitation that I didn’t understand. He nibbled at my lips, playing with me, teasing, while I waited and hoped he’d deepen the kiss, fuck my mouth with his tongue like he had earlier when my hands were tied to my desk. While I was helpless.
I wanted to be helpless.
I sighed, disappointed, when he turned his head away from me and drained his glass.
“I don’t offer public displays,” he said. His eyes were dark with dilated pupils. He was offering some kind of honesty with that statement, giving me information. I could look around, I could watch the people on the blue mats. I could be shocked or turned on, comfortable or uncomfortable, but he was telling me that it would never be me on those mats, or at least not me with him.
That was the point where I managed to get my nerves to settle. Okay. Okay then. This was good, because I didn’t want to be a public display, either. I think nuzzling at him like that wasn’t me wanting to do things here, in front of people, but more… wanting him to claim me in front of his friends. Or wanting him to show them he liked me. Maybe both of those wants were one in the same, in the end.
chapter seven
name five things you can see
A little while later Sunglasses led the golden-haired man, Dare, toward the blue mats.
“I’m going to get another drink,” Avery said. “Do you want one? Same thing?”
I nodded.
I was left alone at the table with Zach. I was too embarrassed to actually watch what Sunglasses and Dare were doing on the mats, but that created a problem of not knowing where to look at all.
Five things I can see. Golden hair. Blue mats. I craned my neck back toward the bar. Red-topped bar stools, shining silver front of the bar. Zach. That’s five.
“I hope you’re having a good time. Avery’s hot, and his command is just effortless, isn’t it?”
I blushed, and nodded. Not speaking was starting to feel silly.
“I’m not allowed to play in public right now, or I’d be with them,” Zach said, jutting his chin toward Sunglasses and Dare. “But watching them is always fun.”
I was glad I wasn’t expected to ask why he wasn’t allowed to play in public. But I was curious if they were all boyfriends together, or if two of them were boyfriends and the other was an extra.
Zach kept talking, managing to answer some of the questions I couldn’t ask. “I fell apart last time – way too much drama for the inside of a club. I got fired not long ago, and I’m a mess over it. Thomas says I have to practice saying the words, owning them. He says it will get easier, I’ll get more comfortable with the idea, but it makes me feel sick, every time.
“Sorry, am I talking too much?”
I shook my head.
“It’s just… you’re not allowed to talk back, which means I can say it, that I was fired, and you don’t have to react. I mean, you don’t know me, so you don’t have to react much anyway, I get it. I’m not trying to dump on you. Actually, I was trying to explain why my partners are playing without me. But you’re new enough I guess you probably wouldn’t realize it was weird in the first place. Or even that they’re both my partners.”
I smiled what I hoped was a sympathetic smile. I liked him.
Avery returned and set our drinks on the table. “Having a nice talk?” he asked, and there was a mischievous glint in his eye.
“I’m dumping my emotional crap all over his defenseless head,” Zach said. “I don’t know if you heard, but I got fired. Quite suddenly.”
“What?” Avery reacted with stunned surprise. “From the hospital? What happened?”
“See?” Zach said to me. “Questions. Theoretically, I didn’t chart a patient’s deviant sexual fantasies to the satisfaction of administration. And rather than react with shock and outrage to my patient’s shameful secret longing to be dominated, I told him about the existence of FetLife. Tut-tut. Cause for termination. They certainly don’t want someone who knows all about a place like this –” he spread his arms, indicating the club – “around their precious, innocent patients.”
“Yeah, well.” Avery was shaking his head. “Kinky people might need medical treatment, at some point in their lives. Or is society now denying us that right?”
Zach shrugged. “I’d been floated to psych for a couple shifts. Perhaps I didn’t understand that they don’t view psychiatric patients as people with the same rights and responsibilities as other people. Normal people. Administration tends to see psych patients as judgement deficient, vulnerable, and not of normal intelligence.”
“That’s sickening,” Avery said, and I was thinking the exact same thing. Only more fervently, because I’d been a psych patient in a hospital. I felt very strongly that Zach was right about that, although I’d been lucky enough to be the patient of an exceptionally wise psychiatrist.
“Well,” Zach continued. “In a way I agree with the vulnerable aspect. I believe my patient might have been subject to ridicule or humiliation if I made notes in his medical chart about his sexual proclivities. That didn’t seem fair. And frankly, it didn’t seem relevant to his treatment plan.”
“Are you fighting it?” Avery asked. “I mean, is your union backing you?”
“To a point,” Zach said. “It’s a slow process. The union warned me it could take over a year to grieve my termination, and even then, I might not get my job back. But I’ve got a meeting set up with the board of nursing. Trying to control how far the damage reaches. I love being a nurse.” He looked over at the mats, at Sunglasses and Dare. “I can’t play with them here, because I’m just so raw right now. I completely fell apart last week. Wasn’t pretty.”
I looked over toward the area with the blue mats, and imagined coming apart at the seams in front of everybody.
I barely suppressed a shudder. All these people, seeing you devastated.
It reminded me of being in school, of all the unexpected slights that made me want to cry, and yet I couldn’t bear the humiliation of showing my tears, the shame of letting them know they’d hurt me. Something in that always felt worse than what I wanted to cry about in the first place. So I’d blank my face, hold my head up, and try to exit the situation despite the fact that I couldn’t see through my water-filled eyes.
The saddest part of it all was that I’d been so excited to go to school. My mother had taken me shopping for pencils and crayons, markers and paper. Bright white gym shoes and a whole set of clothing designated to be worn only for school. And a backpack. Oh, how I’d loved that pack with all of its pockets and zippers. I’d wanted the Spiderman pack, but my mother said it was “cheap” and “trashy” and that I was a big boy now.
On the first day of school, I was so excited I couldn’t settle into a walk, and my step-father said, “Julian. Stop prancing like a girl.” But even he couldn’t quell my excitement. Besides, I wasn’t prancing like a girl, I was dancing like a ballerina. I told him that, and he scowled. He was new to our family back then, and I hadn’t learned how to
navigate him yet.
I liked my teacher, and there were a lot of girls who let me play with them, enough that I really didn’t notice that none of the boys played with us. I continued on oblivious of this fact until about fourth grade.
That was the year a new boy came. He was the most beautiful boy in the world and made me want to play with the boys. Only they didn’t have me easily. They tried to shove me out of their games and teased me, saying things like, “girls aren’t allowed to play with boys,” or “no girls allowed on our side of the playground.” These were the times I had to be stoic and not let them see their comments bothered me. I’d say something like, “Ha-ha, you boys are so funny,” and stare longingly at Jake – that was the new boy’s name – while the rest of the boys ignored me.
Jake ignored me, too. That’s probably important to point out.
One day they were playing tag and another boy tripped Jake. He hadn’t been expecting it and fell down flat on his face. When he sat up, his nose was spurting blood and he had a nasty scrape on his forehead. The other boys were still laughing as I rushed over screaming, “Jake, Jakey, are you okay? Help! We need a grown-up, quick!”
I was trying to help him up when he swatted at me angrily and shook me off. “Geez, Julian, stop acting like a girl.”
The boys crowded around then, “Oh, Julian, you really like Jake, you like Jake so much you worry about him.”
I had no idea what they were saying. I said, “Of course I like Jake. We all like Jake.”
“Yeah, but you like-like him. You wanna marry him, don’t you? Julian and Jakey sittin’ in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g…”
And somehow after that I was always the boy who like-liked other boys, and none of them would be caught dead talking to me because this was such a terrible thing.
I went back to playing with the girls. They didn’t care. And I was grateful to have them as a buffer between me and the boys, but my nervous habits got worse.
I remembered all this in a flash as I watched Sunglasses and Dare on the mats, and tried to imagine myself there.
But then I remembered I didn’t have to.
“I don’t offer public displays,” Avery had said.
Relief rushed through me. It was safe enough to watch what was happening on the mats, because Avery didn’t want to do that, anyway. I got hung up in disappointment for maybe a second, and then wondered did he mean he wasn’t into this kind of thing, or was he just not into it here? In public. With people watching. Did he bring me here because he wanted to do something like this at his apartment? Did he want to see my reaction?
When I tuned back in to Avery and Zach, they were still talking.
Someone jostled me, and I glanced over my shoulder. There was a shirtless boy standing there – well, not really a boy, he was probably my age, which meant old enough to be in this bar. Anyway. He was grinning right at me. “Aww, you lost the tape over your mouth. I thought we could commiserate.” He held up his arms, which were wound in tape nearly to the elbows. He held a rag between his hands, which were nothing more than fisted balls of blue tape. “Can I lean over you to wipe the table? All of this makes me clumsy.”
I leaned toward Avery to give the boy room. I had so many questions and wasn’t allowed to ask even one. The boy dropped the rag onto the table and used one balled hand to push it around. I lifted my glass to oblige him in his task, and he grinned at me. “Pain in the ass, as I’m sure you can imagine. I’m Doc’s boy, Tristan. What’s your name?”
“Tristan, this is Jules,” Avery said from my other side. “If you saw the tape over his mouth, you understand he’s not allowed to speak. Don’t be rude.”
“I wasn’t being ruuuude,” Tristan whined. “I was being friendly. We’re the youngest pretties in this place, in case you didn’t notice. I thought we could be friends.” And then he stuck his tongue out at Avery, and I accidentally laughed out loud. I was grinning at Tristan, and he grinned back. “If you talk, will he spank you on the mats? Because I would looooove to watch.”
Zach, who’d also lifted his glass to accommodate Tristan, suddenly stood and said, “Whoops, there they go. I’m going to get in on the cuddling part.” He jogged across the mats and disappeared behind the curtain with Dare and Sunglasses.
Avery excused himself, too, saying, “Tristan and I are going to have a little chat with Doc. Sit here and don’t talk to anyone.”
I watched him walk away, and noticed other people watching him, too.
He wasn’t even out of my line of sight when some random guy interrupted my stare, approaching me with a purposeful stride, and pausing at our table, his slim frame blocking my view of Avery.
“Hello, Sunshine. You’re definitely new here. What’s your name?”
He had longish brown hair, blue eyes, and a mustache. Not bad looking, but the sort of Caucasian guy with a fake tan and a fake smile that flashed too many too-white teeth.
There was a skin-crawling sensation that I got sometimes when people paid me too much attention. It wasn’t new, and had been happening all my life. It was happening now, this strange sense that he was looking at me too closely. Normally I would struggle with words, stammer, try to say the right thing to let him know I wasn’t interested without being rude. Don’t talk to anyone, Avery had said.
I gave my head a little shake.
“Haha!” he brayed. “What, you don’t want to talk?”
I shrugged.
“Not allowed to speak?” the man guessed, and I nodded.
His interest seemed to get even keener. “Well, I guess your Dom is either incredibly smart or incredibly dumb. I’m from upstate, not the city, so I’m thinking dumb. He shouldn’t leave you sitting here so vulnerable, like a fawn frozen in my spotlight. I don’t care for a lot of talking, anyway.”
He stared at me for the longest time.
I stared back, feeling small and weak, scared he was going to sit down at the table, and I wouldn’t be able to make him go away. My throat and chest grew tight, and it was an effort to keep breathing.
Avery appeared, seemingly out of thin air. He pushed in between me and the stranger. “Mine,” he said. “Go away.”
Avery. I was safe. He would take care of this. The man raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture, backed off, then strode away. The tightness in my chest and throat eased immediately.
Avery slid his hand under my hair and rested his fingers on the back of my neck, above and below the collar. And then nothing existed in the world but the feel of the pads of his fingers against my skin, not just warm, but electric. When he tapped a random and disjointed rhythm, each touch was a bolt of lightning that flashed straight to my dick. There was no club, there was no table. Just Avery’s fingers, my skin, and whatever was happening between us.
Did he feel it, too? Or did my inexperience with physical contact blow everything out of proportion? I had no way to judge this, no hope of figuring it out on my own. Tap, tap. A slow swirl, and his thumb brushing back and forth. I moaned inside my head, and maybe even out loud, because he used the hand at the back of my neck to pull me toward him, until I was half in my chair, half leaning against his chest. His hand shifted from the back of my neck to around my shoulder.
Somehow in the past few minutes I’d forgotten the smell of him, but the memory was in my nostrils now, in my throat, even, and the sense of impending doom brought goosebumps to my arms. My breath sped up. I held perfectly still, afraid to move even a twitch, and the fuzzy white-out in my head told me I was five seconds or less away from a full-blown panic attack.
And then I stopped breathing altogether.
“Breathe, Jules,” Avery murmured into my ear. “Nothing bad is going to happen.”
I took a few deep breaths.
Avery rubbed my shoulder until I breathed the anxiety away.
“Look at the mats,” he said, and I swore I could hear humor in his voice.
I looked, and there was Doc, sitting on a chair with Tristan over his lap. Tristan’s jeans and u
nderwear were bunched around his ankles, and Doc was smoothing a paddle across his buttocks. Then Doc leaned down and said something in Tristan’s ear. I saw Tristan shiver, even from this distance, and wiggle his ass in the air. He squealed when the paddle struck the first time, but then seemed to relax into it. I tried to imagine being in Tristan’s place, having this happen in front of all these people. The paddling went on until his cries were loud enough for me to hear, and at one point he was apologizing loudly for being rude to customers.
Had Avery said something to Doc to make this happen? Was this because of me? Or even worse, somehow for my benefit?
I wasn’t sure how to feel. I felt sorry for Tristan, but not sorry enough to look away and give him privacy from my eyes. I felt ashamed, too, because I realized that I liked watching this. It was…it was something to do with having talked to Tristan, with him saying he wanted to see Avery do that to me. With feeling like I knew him, even just a little bit. I’d been too embarrassed to watch Avery’s friends this openly, but maybe because Tristan seemed more my age, it was almost like I couldn’t look away. When the paddling was over, Doc lifted Tristan into his arms and carried him behind the curtain.
“I think it’s time for us to leave,” Avery said. He got to his feet and pulled me to mine, his arm still firmly around me. He used his other hand to tilt my chin up so he could look into my eyes. “You okay?”
I nodded, and Avery turned us toward the door. There was a herding feeling as we went outside, and then a curb, and then the back seat of a cab.
He settled me, pulled the seatbelt around me, and clicked it into place. There was a sliding feeling at the back of my neck, that new sacred space, and the leather collar slid away, the leash gathered into Avery’s hand, and tucked away into his back pocket again.