Top to Bottom

by Delphine Dryden

  Dru nodded toward the door Amie’d entered through. “There’s a storage room by the entrance, then some extra equipment up in the loft space. Another few of the small scaffolds, plus some extra benches and horses. Things we rotate in and out of the private rooms, mostly. But we could pull them for demonstrations or classes. Here, let me show you the rooms and you can get a sense . . .” She was already walking back toward the bar, letting Amie catch up. The lace dress hugged her ass, the seam down the middle of the fabric accentuating the dip between her rounded cheeks, just as her stockings seams accentuated the backs of her legs.

  When they’d been together—brief, hot, college fling—Dru had always led the way. Even when Amie had been topping, Dru had known what was up. Had known where to go, what to do. The evening was turning into a blast from a very uncomfortable, if formative, part of Amie’s past. She hadn’t done the following in years.

  “Hey, wait up.”

  Did I actually just say that out loud in the middle of a club?

  Down the hall past the bar were more doors, then even more around a corner. Red and green occupancy indicators over the doors suggested that most of the rooms were full. Dru unlocked and opened the door to one of the green-lit rooms and flicked the light on. “They don’t all look like this. This room and the one next to it are on a wet wall, so they’re more specialized.”

  “Wow, chilly.” The whole room was covered in white subway tiles, all four walls and the floor—which had a drain in the middle of it. A sleek stainless steel sink with a mirror over it was fitted to one wall, a row of white cabinets along another. In the center of the room, three metal exam tables were lined up. Next to them sat an adjustable, padded exam table with stirrups. Not Amie’s particular jam whatsoever, but she knew plenty of people who would be very into the room’s sterile vibe.

  “It’s versatile.” Dru nodded toward the sink. “That and the cabinets are the only fixtures, the tables are portable. So we’ve fitted this out for general medical play, but also had some special requests. It can be a kitchen or a locker room.”

  “Oh, nice. Have you had films shooting in here?”

  Dru shrugged. “No. We’ve had some still photography shoots. But these were individual requests. All the rooms are fairly customizable.”

  Three solid metal tables. “You could get somebody to do a medical play workshop. Or wax. Or sharps.” She glanced at Dru to see her reaction. Still the cool face. No indication that she was thinking of the time they’d first experimented with blood play. Dru’s naked back taut as a drum, Amie terrified and trying to bluff her way through it, and so turned on she’d gasped along with Dru as she’d made the initial, tentative scratch with the scalpel.

  And then there it was. The clipboard trembled, a minute movement in the still space. Amie glanced down and saw that Dru was white-knuckling the thing, all her tension channeled into that one spot. The moment of weakness hit Amie right between the legs, revving her up instantly. She took a step closer to Dru, instinctively occupying her personal space, half-expecting her to make a counter-move to keep a polite distance between them.

  Dru stood like a statue, her face calm as an unruffled lake, her fingers clutching the clipboard so hard the paper attached to it was tugged and crumpled along the clip.

  One move. Amie could have her flat against the table—were the wheels locked, were there safety issues?—or pushed back against the cold, hard tile wall. Black lace against white tile, and both of their mouths smeared plum with Dru’s lipstick. Dru making the noise Amie remembered all too well. A beat throbbed behind Amie’s clit, echoing the thumping in her chest.

  She forced her shoulders to relax, unwrapped her fist from the handle of the crop she’d been gripping like a lifeline. Dru had always drawn her this way, drawn her to her own extremity, to the limits of her control. But Amie was older and wiser now. She didn’t have to lose herself like that. She could make better choices.

  Dru’s eyebrows rose a few millimeters. “Sharps would be interesting. A whole series on edge play, maybe. We’d need to get very experienced players to demonstrate. And see if any of the regulars have medical training. It would be good to have somebody standing by, just in case.”

  So she was going to pretend nothing had happened. Pretend the tension wasn’t there. But she still wasn’t stepping away.

  Amie had a lot of willpower. She could resist a lot of things. But mixed signals pissed her off, and she could never rest until she’d unmixed them.

  She lifted her hand, brushing the backs of her fingers against Dru’s upper arm—soft, so soft, that skin that marked like it was made for it. “Remember when we tried out sharps?”

  “Yes.” Dru’s tone was flat. “Of course I do.” Then, more softly: “I remember everything.”

  Amie wanted to stop touching her, but she couldn’t. Couldn’t make herself. “Me too.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Mm-hmm. Too long.” She turned her hand, curved her palm and fingers around Dru’s arm, gripping firmly. The sharps had been Dru’s idea, of course. Most of what they’d done had been Dru’s idea. But Amie had taken to all of it like a duck to water.

  Dru’s eyes closed, and her throat moved as she swallowed. “I invited you to talk about the classes.”

  “Right,” Amie agreed. She dug her nails in enough to make it clearly intentional. “I only came here for that.”

  Dru’s lips parted, then she pressed them together for second, wetting them. Smudging the lipstick a bit. The imperfection was one crack in her veneer; Amie wanted to take a hammer to the rest of it. Shatter the cool facade. But at the same time—touch. Hold. Retrace every remembered line of Dru’s body, study every change. She wanted to lick her almost as much as she wanted to bite her. It was unsettling, but there was only one way Amie could think of to deal with it.

  “What time do you close?”

  “We shouldn’t.”

  Amie laughed, the sound echoing off the tiles. “I think we have to, babycakes.”

  Dru finally smiled. “Nobody’s called me that in a long time. Why do we ‘have to’?”

  Amie bit her lip, took a breath, released it. Then pulled Dru close enough that she could feel the heat of Dru’s breath against her lips. This had always been Dru’s role, leading them both into temptation. But Amie had learned the lessons well. She said the first ridiculous thing that came to mind. “If we’re going to work together, we’re going to have to get this out of our systems first. Or we’ll never get anything accomplished.”

  “Get it out of our systems?” The wry look on Dru’s face suggested she wasn’t falling for the line, but at least she wasn’t objecting either.

  “One big blowout.” Amie slid a hand up to cup Dru’s neck, reveling in the almost-forgotten feel of all that hair sliding over her fingers. “For old times’ sake.”

  She knew it would mark them both, but she kissed Dru anyway, holding her firmly in place and taking her time. Soft at first, teasing, enjoying the play of lips and breath and the tips of tongues. Then, unable to resist, she sank her teeth into Dru’s bottom lip, pulling until Dru groaned. The sound was a siren call to her pussy, and she had to back off before she got carried away.

  Dru’s face was a mess, lipstick everywhere like a toddler had put it on, coloring outside the lines. Amie smiled and rubbed at the worst stray marks with her thumb. Dru shrugged and walked to the sink, turning on the water and grabbing a paper towel from the dispenser Amie hadn’t noticed earlier. Frowned at herself in the mirror, and set to work with the dampened corner of the towel.

  “You’re not much better off,” Dru said. “And you have lipstick on your teeth.”

  Amie slid her tongue forward. Sure enough, the unmistakable taste and texture of whatever high-end goo had tinted Dru’s lips was now coating her incisors. “Lovely. Scoot over.”

  Dru made room, and they repaired their faces to the extent possible without makeup remover. Finally, Dru sighed and wadded the paper towel, pitching it tow
ard a small metal trash can in the corner. She made the shot. “I think the tour has gone on long enough. I need to get back out on the floor.”

  “Understood.” Amie bit back an apology for mussing her up. She wasn’t sorry, and she wasn’t going to lie about it. Dru was beautiful no matter what, but as great as she looked polished, she looked ten times better rumpled. Her ideal aesthetic was costly silk stockings with a strategically sexy run up the inner thigh. High-end bad girl. “So what about it? What time do you . . . get off?”

  Dru rolled her eyes. “I think you’re really asking what time you might get off, but okay. Getting it out of our systems?”

  “Right.”

  Dru sighed as she retrieved the clipboard from the metal table. Amie didn’t even recall when she’d put it down. “I’ve been up since seven, and I won’t be out of here until three.”

  “Okay. What about tomorrow?” Amie wasn’t willing to let it go. She wanted to nail it down before they left the room. Somehow she knew if she didn’t, Dru would find a way to deflect future efforts. This was the moment. “Tomorrow I only have personal-training clients in the morning. No classes, and I don’t have to be on the desk. So any time after lunch, I’m free.”

  Dru tapped her fingers against the board, cocking her head. Amie held her breath. Finally, Dru shrugged. “Meet me here at two. Eat lunch first. We’ll have three hours before the employees show up.”

  “Three hours.” It didn’t sound like nearly enough time. “Any special requests?”

  Dru’s hand was already on the knob of the door; she called her answer back over her shoulder as she opened it and the noise of the club flooded into the room. “Surprise me.”

  Surprise me. No pressure or anything, God.

  After scarfing down a sandwich—ham and cheese and lettuce, and a silent prayer that nothing she’d eaten would result in any gastric weirdness during the afternoon—Amie packed and repacked her gear bag about five times, considering and switching and weighing options.

  In college, small-town Amie with her conservative parents had known basically nothing except that she liked hurting girls while she fucked them—and Dru had been the gold standard of kink to her untutored eyes. Maybe still was. A vaguely bisexual switch with all the information at her fingertips. Dru knew the players, she knew the clubs, she knew the techniques . . . and she was so beautiful. More than beautiful, though. Compelling, especially when she smiled. And down for just about anything, from anyone. Amie had always felt honored, singled out, playing with her. Learning with her. Loving her, possibly . . . although the idea had still been so forbidden and terrifying at the time, she hadn’t latched on to it. It was more than her brain could take in. She was secretly still half-convinced that girls would turn out to be only a phase, as her parents had tried to persuade her.

  And then finances had intervened. Amie’d had to leave the cheerleading squad and get a job at a local gym, so she was on campus a lot less, and then she’d had to drop out of college altogether. It had become inconvenient for her and Dru to see each other around their work and school schedules. They’d started hooking up only at play parties or the club that had predated Onyx. Then Dru had graduated and moved, they’d lost touch . . . life had happened.

  Amie hadn’t seen Dru in years. The quality Dru had really developed in the interim was aloofness. Amie had noticed it the previous night at the club, and she noticed it again when Dru answered her knock on the door to Escape the next afternoon at two on the dot.

  Dru pushed the door only wide enough to admit Amie, then shut it behind her, pulling it tight to make sure the security bar engaged. Dru turned and faced her with a polite but cool smile and her arms folded across her chest. So distant compared to the previous night.

  Because she knew Dru from before, Amie knew the aloof face wasn’t normal—it was a mask. And because she’d learned a lot of psychology and body language on the fly while working as a personal trainer, she figured the mask was a protective mechanism. Something Dru had developed to shield herself. Like the taut shoulders, the crossed arms separated her from the person she faced.

  But Amie had grown in the meantime too. The dominant part of her was already leaning toward the sub in Dru, prodding for weaknesses, seeking vulnerability. What she had learned since college was how to give that part of herself the run of the house. And that when she did—when she allowed the beast in her to romp free for a time—everybody benefitted, as long as everybody consented. She had something that certain people wanted. And she could tell Dru wanted it, could practically smell it on her, beneath the chilly demeanor.

  There—the nervous tapping of the fingers against the arm. There—the flicker of the eyes away from direct contact as Dru made such a polite greeting. “I’m so glad you made it. Did you have a good lunch?”

  Oh, Amie wanted to devour her. “Yeah, you?”

  “Great, great. So . . . one big blowout?” Dru fingered the tie on the loose, black silk robe she wore. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, ready for the scene. Her voice was smooth and professional, as though they were about to negotiate a business deal. “Do you want something to drink while we talk about limits? Water, juice?”

  “Sure.” Amie slid her bag from her shoulder and dropped it near one of the spanking benches. “Ice water?”

  Dru nodded and led the way to the bar, sliding behind it and procuring two glasses of ice water with the swift, automatic movements of an expert. Amie wondered if she’d spent some of those missing years bartending. She’d heard this wasn’t Dru’s first time running a club, but she didn’t want to delve too deeply into it right then. Didn’t want to give Dru any more opportunities to get distracted from the topic at hand. She already seemed tense, nervous, more so than last night.

  Amie wanted to keep the tension but banish some of the nerves. “So, limits. I’ll show you what I brought as far as toys. You can nix any of them. Or add anything you want, I guess. Is there any of the big equipment in here you don’t want me to use?”

  Dru sipped her water, shrugged. “No hard limits on equipment, no. Don’t cuff me too tight, please. I’d prefer to avoid bruising my wrists or hands. Or . . . have you gotten into rope—”

  “Nah, not really.” Amie had always loved the look of rope, but lacked the patience to master the art of tying people up with it.

  “Pity.” This time Dru’s shrug came with a half smile, the slightest tip of one side of her mouth.

  “Any stress positions I need to worry about? Injuries? Body parts? You can give me a thumbs-down on anything you don’t think will work for you, and I can modify as we go.” She wasn’t really planning on predicament bondage—she didn’t want to work that hard—but it seemed smart to be as accommodating as possible up front.

  “Just the wrists and hands,” Dru repeated. “Well, and no bastinado. I still have to spend all night on my feet.”

  Amie raised her eyebrows. “In killer heels, no doubt.”

  Dru lifted the glass in a mini-toast. “I have to look the part.”

  “You do. You really do. You look more the part than I do, these days.”

  The cool mask descended again. “I’ve played more on that side recently. But it’ll be nice to lie back and let somebody else do the work.”

  Nice? For a second Amie thought she’d said it out loud. But it must’ve been the expression that tipped Dru off. The quirky smile came back for a millisecond.

  Amie knocked on the bar. “This thing is like a safety wall at the zoo, isn’t it? Come back into the enclosure. I swear I won’t bite.”

  Laughing, Dru trailed around to Amie’s side, but headed past her, toward the spanking benches. “Then what are we here for?”

  Amie caught up to her and snagged a finger through the sash of her robe, not pulling enough to stop her, only enough to slow her down. “Oh, I think we both know. Safeword?”

  “Spreadsheet.” Dru side-eyed her and laughed again. “Long story.”

  “Okeydokey. And if you’re gagged?”
>
  “Leave my hands free and I’ll flip you off with one or both fingers.”

  “Oh my God.” What kind of relationships had Dru been getting herself into lately? “Rude!”

  “Are you gonna show me what’s in your toy bag or not?”

  Oh, yes. Amie made a small production out of unzipping the big pink-and-black gym bag slowly, making a teasing kissy-face up at Dru when it was halfway open, batting her eyelashes. Dru strained her neck a bit, obviously trying to peer inside. But Amie knew how to be coy; she didn’t spread the bag wide open and show her whole business at once. Instead she reached in, found what she wanted by feel, and pulled it out, then laid it on the bench for Dru’s perusal. She lined the items up, using most of the long space by the time she was through.

  Dru only said no to the sjambok, the heaviest cane, the zapper, and the sharpest of the sharps—a scalpel and a set of sterile needles Amie had brought just in case. And she set a few more limits as they went down the list of possibilities.

  “I do have to work tonight,” Dru reminded her with a rueful look. “So I need to be able to walk around for hours. Try to keep the skin breakage and really deep bruising to a minimum.”

  Amie stowed the “no” items back in the bag, but hesitated over the zapper. “This wouldn’t break the skin or leave a bruise.”

  “That, I just hate.”

  “Ah, gotcha.” She stuffed it in, then turned and eyed Dru, propping her hands on her hips. “So, we’re good to go?”

  “I suppose we are. Unless you have any particular requests or limits for me?”

  Amie had to stop herself from physically recoiling. “I’ll take whatever you’re willing to give.” That was always what she took for herself.

  “Oh, that’s right.” Dru tilted her head with an expression Amie couldn’t read, then seemed to shrug it off. “We’re good to go.”

  “Okay. Let’s do this!”