by Alyssa Clark
“That sounds like sacrilege!” she gasped and put a hand to her chest. “I find it offensive! There’s nothing wrong with buying shoes.” She released a breath. “But I’ll relent. He can still have a commanding air about him while wearing tennis shoes.” She offered her hand to Sam. “I’ll be back by six to pick up the new suit, I’ll pay for it then.”
She was given a receipt and hooked her arm through mine, leading me out. I didn’t tug away from her, but I made sure to voice my displeasure. “Not an ornament you can play dress up with and put on display.”
“No,” she agreed as she brought me around the corner. “It’s like I said before, this isn’t a charity case. This is me trying to present a specific picture for my club. I want patrons to look at you and see an attractive, dangerous man.” She kept leading me down the sidewalk as she spoke. “The first night went so well, and I want it to continue down this path. If you’d rather not, all you need to do is say so. I’ve already reported to your parole officer that you are working for me now.”
I snorted, “And did you tell her what kind of club you run and what my position was in it?”
“It didn’t seem necessary to elaborate on it. However, she seemed concerned that you were a guard for me.” Her lips twisted up as she spoke. “I have a feeling she will probably have to do some sort of business inspection to make sure that it's not more than that.” She sighed then. “I’ll have to get with Matt to make sure she doesn’t bring any sort of trouble to my door.”
“Lawyer?” I was curious about how she would be willing to get into any sort of trouble for me.
“And the boyfriend.” She suddenly looked less like the dominatrix I knew her to be and damn near girlish. “I want to make sure we have all our bases covered with you.”
“If you have a man,” I shrugged her off then, “why go through this trouble with another man?”
“I don’t want you like that.” She didn’t look ruffled at all. “Don’t assume that I do. I have an employee base that is mostly made up of subs with a few switches in the mix. You are the only one that screams dominant,” she said like I had any idea what she was talking about. Half of it went over my head. “And while being a dominant myself does give me leeway, I have the unfortunate side effect of being female where I get the occasional alpha male that feels the need to throw his testosterone around. Having you there, even if you’re completely ignorant of the community, will help keep anyone from trying to put me ‘in my place.’ Do you understand?”
“You’re using me because I’m big and intimidating,” I abbreviated for her.
“Exactly,” she sounded way too pleased at that.
“And you’re okay with putting an ex-con into that position?”
“Your circumstances are all the more reason for me to put you into this position,” she kept on like she had any idea what she was talking about.
I pulled her to a stop I wanted to show her just how misgiven her trust could be. “Jail changes people,” I said lowly, aware of the crowd of window shoppers around us. “You put too much faith or trust in the wrong person, and you’re gonna get burned.”
She looked up at me, and her blue eyes darkened, but she didn’t look intimidated at all. She took a step closer to me. “You can paint yourself as the picture of some sore asshole fresh out of jail if you want to, but I see through it. Whether or not I’m the only one, I can’t say, but you can't fool me and you won’t.” She tilted her head as she made a show of adjusting my t-shirt. “I see through it. I won’t call you on it. But if you were really the asshole you’re pretending to be then you would have no problem fucking a strange girl in a public restroom.”
I frowned down at her, she didn’t know me.
She gave me a pretty smile. “Don’t look so fearsome, Mr. Davis. Don’t try to disprove me. Just understand something. As long as you are willing to have my back, even if it is just for a paycheck, I will have yours.” She took a step away from me and dug into her purse. “Appearances will only get you so far.” She seemed to have found what she was looking for without paying any attention to my glowering. She slid it into my hand, and I realized it was folded dollar bills. “I’ll see you at six thirty. I appreciate punctuality, but if you’re going to be early, you’re going to find yourself waiting much like you did last night.”
She whisked away from me with one last parting smile, leaving me on the sidewalk in a part of town I really didn’t belong in. I glanced down at the money she had slipped into my hand, five twenties. A hundred bucks for shit I wouldn’t even call work.
Damnit, she’d found a way to win me over.
5
The weekend had found the club, and it was just as busy as I would expect any conventional club to be. I didn’t recognize any faces entering from the first night, save Kenneth and Nico. There were other people that I hadn’t been introduced to, but after watching them interact with customers, I quickly realized why.
They were what Angela had called subs. I was sketchy on what sub meant, but I took it to mean bottom.
“You look confused,” Kenneth commented from the other side of the door.
I eyed him for a minute before I decided he was as good as any person to ask this. “What is a sub?”
“It’s short for submissive,” he answered without giving me any problems, which surprised me. I’d expected him to rib me for it. “It describes a person that allows another to drive the interactions, they submit to that person who is usually their dominant.”
I nodded. “You’re a sub?” I thought back to the view of him kneeling at Angela’s feet. How was he able to be a bouncer at the same time?
“I’m what’s referred to as a switch.” He rolled a shoulder and looked away from me. I could see the discomfort this conversation was bringing him with the way he shifted his footing and the set of his shoulders. “That means I enjoy being both submissive and dominant.”
“You can do both?”
“Not at the same time,” he snorted. “But sometimes I like to be tied up, sometimes I don’t.” He shrugged again. “It’s doable, the hardest part is finding people that also switch or are okay with you interacting with someone else when you have needs.”
“Needs?” I prompted because he had me curious. We were both watching the crowd, a mix of nicely dressed people mingling with their near nude subs waiting on them on their knees.
“Try it,” he said and nodded as a means to gesture towards the crowd. “You’ll understand when you experience it.”
“I have no desire to be on my knees for anyone.” It came out harsher than I intended and I saw a little waif look up at me from the floor. Her eyes narrowed at me before she leaned in close against the thigh of the man she was with.
“Yeah,” Kenneth agreed with me, getting my attention. “I doubt there’d be a Dom out there willing to take you on as a sub.” He nodded again. “Let me show you though. Let’s do a circuit of the back rooms.”
It sounded like a bad idea, but there were two people behind the bar. There were also girls with trays skirting through the crowd. Curiosity was getting the better of me, so I followed him.
He opened the door and motioned me in. “Go look. Check out each room, and you’ll see. The ones in control of the situation are dominants, the ones that are in compromising positions are submissives. It's not hard to tell who is who in there. But it's hard to tell if the submissive is enjoying it.” He took a step closer. “We don’t interrupt unless there’s without a shadow of a doubt that not everyone is enjoying themselves. The safe word is red. If you hear anything that sounds like it then we need to make sure everything comes to a stop.”
His words set me on edge, I didn’t know what I was going to see, but I found myself preparing for the worse. I went into the cramped hallway that traveled the length of the six back rooms. The faster I got through this the faster I sated my curiosity.
I came to the first window, and I steeled myself before I looked in. A woman had her arms in what looked li
ke a sleeve, and her legs were forced apart by a bar between her knees. There was a blindfold covering the majority of her face, and she was bent over the end of the metal bed that so her ass was in the air. It looked like the perfect angle, and with all the noise she was making I could only assume that it was. How the guy fucking her managed to keep any kind of control was admirable. He had an arm around her neck so that her cries were projected around the room. His face was close to hers, and while I couldn’t understand what he was saying, there didn’t seem to be any objections from the woman.
I stood there, watching for a bit too long. Watching other people was a reminder of what I didn’t have and how long it’d been since I had it. It was enough to press me forward to the next window.
In the next room, I saw two men and a woman, though not quite in the way I would normally expect. One man was trussed up on the bed, stripped and spread out as if he were on display. The other man was occupied with his mouth in a way I didn’t want to watch, the female seemed to be enjoying the show.
I grimaced as I continued on. I didn’t have problems with other people’s sexualities. I hadn’t been overly bothered when Nico flirted with me on the first day, my response was to emphasize just how not interested I was.
The next two rooms were similar to the first two. I saw a man getting spanked and a woman all too eager to take the role of being the ‘man’ in the situation she and another woman created. It was an effort to walk away from that one.
The last room gave me pause.
The girl was bleached blonde and had a body that would make any man stop to look. What made me linger was the tear streaming down her face to the point her makeup was smeared. Her cheeks were red, and she was restrained in an upright that looked like it was from the Middle Ages. Her hands and head were in a wooden block that forced her to be bent over; was that a stockade? I had no fucking clue, but I couldn’t get over the fact that there were tears.
I went blind from there, I was out the doorway of the cramped hallway and in room six faster than I even realized. There was a sharp cry, and I had a half-naked man in a headlock. I didn’t punch him, even though there was an intense need to. It only took one mistake to learn that lesson. I just held him while he flailed.
“Davis!”
The noise started to come back to me, and I was faced with a view of myself holding a struggling man as well as the reddened ass of the restrained girl.
Kenneth had come barreling in after me, his expression shocked. Instead of going to the girl though he came at me. “Let him go he’s turning blue!”
I dropped the guy like the sack of shit I expected him to be, he wheezed and glared up at me with tears in his own eyes. “What the fuck?”
“You fucking came in here like a freight train.” Kenneth seemed amazed by it and even went as far to bend down to help the guy up. The concern that he had seemed so skewed. I couldn’t keep my cool.
“Are you fucking serious?” I snapped at him and went to break the girl out. “You’re looking after this shit instead of her?” I had no idea how to break the goddamn thing open, but eventually, I had the top part off, and I was helping her out of it. “Are you okay?” I was so fed up I might have growled at her.
She didn’t look up at me, but she still looked fragile as she nodded. I didn’t bother putting my hands on her, I gave her a wide berth. She didn’t say a word.
“What’s going on?” Angela was at the door now, and I looked up to see a small crowd had formed outside the room. She slid into the room with a look of confused concern. “What happened?”
“This asshole,” the guy Kenneth had been tending to spoke first, “came in here without even fucking knocking and he put me in a headlock!” I watched as the dipshit threw his arms around like he was swinging his dick as he made his case. “She came in here with me willingly.”
“Did she say the safe word?” Angela looked at him hard, like she expected him to ignore it.
“She didn’t,” he folded his arms over his chest. “Is this how you intend to treat your members? Have your muscle-bound goons knock us around so you can be taken seriously as a female dominant?”
I watched as Angela’s expression darkened; she looked at the girl that had, so far, stood close to me with her head down and her arms wrapped around her middle. She still had the same look on her face, the one that drove me into here without thinking.
“Red,” the woman said it shakily; like it mattered now. “I didn’t say it before. But… but I wasn’t enjoying it.”
Angela nodded. “In the event, you do not enjoy anything that occurs it is imperative that you say the safe word. Otherwise, anyone you interact with doesn’t know to stop.” She took in a breath and released it slowly as she eyed the girl. “I want to speak to each of you privately.” She shot me a look. “See to her while I take care of this gentleman, will you?”
I nodded, and I made sure to position myself between the nude girl and everyone peering into the room. It felt like I was giving her a semblance of privacy. “Get dressed,” I grunted at her.
I didn’t have an understanding of how this community worked, and I realized that I might have jumped the gun. But it didn’t fucking matter with the way she looked so shaken when I first set eyes on her. There was nothing sexy about the way she looked. I didn’t bother to look or watch because I could hear a soft hiccup and other tale-tell signs that she wasn’t okay. I could kick ass all I needed to, but there was fuck all I could do about a crying woman.
Fortunately, Angela didn’t leave me waiting in here long, even though it seemed like hours. She came back in with a serious look on her face. I didn’t know if I was in trouble, but I wasn’t backing down from my decision to come in here. Even if it was more of a gut reaction.
“I want you to wait in the break room while I take care of her from here,” her voice was the same hard tone that she had used when she first walked in here. “Don’t answer questions, don’t interact with anyone else. If someone tries to stop you, deflect them to me. Understand?”
I raised an eyebrow and swallowed the temptation to say anything. I nodded. If she was gonna give me shit about this, she was gonna get shit in return. I walked out of the room, and I could see that the crowd in the main part of the club had lightened significantly. Kenneth was standing on the wall that led into the hallway, and he gave me a nod. He didn’t look put out at all that I started shit.
I guess this was a learning curve.
I went to the breakroom and sprawled into a chair. I waited patiently for the backlash. I wasn’t indeposable. I knew that. Despite what she had said in the beginning, I would be assuming too much to think that she would turn a blind eye to something she disagreed with.
She was quick when it came to defusing a situation, but it was about half an hour before she strutted into the breakroom and came to join me at the table. She sat with a sigh and relaxed in the chair across from me, “What made you go in that room?” She didn’t look irritated, just mindful of getting the facts.
“She didn’t have the same expression like the girls in the other rooms. She didn’t look like she was enjoying it and she was crying.” I rolled a shoulder as I spoke and tilted my neck until it popped. Now seemed like a good idea to throw out my weakness to her. “Can’t handle a crying woman.”
“That's what got you in trouble last time?” She looked genuinely curious as she asked.
“Am I in trouble now?”
“No.” She shook her head and tapped her nails on the table. “Talking with him raised some red flags with me,” she admitted sighing. “He wasn’t paying attention to her at all, he was just doing what he wanted. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not a good thing either. She was here to be used, she just didn’t think it would be as violent as it was.”
“That normal?” I asked because I had to know. I couldn't imagine anyone wanting to be pushed into that position where they had to use a word to make it all stop.
“It can happen.” She purs
ed her lips. “But it's not normal for someone to not care about their partner's well being.” She tilted her head, and I felt her scrutiny. “What made you decide to check the rooms? I was perfectly fine with Lau keeping an eye on what went on in them.”
I didn’t want to tell her I was curious, I didn’t want her to think that she could put me into something that I didn’t want in on. I considered the pattern of the wood on the table between us. But what the fuck did I have to hide? “I was asking questions, Lau thought it was a good idea that I find the answers myself.” I shrugged it off like it wasn’t a big deal. “I saw some shit I’d be able to find on the internet,” I assumed, I didn’t really have the opportunity to look at porn. “Then I came across room six, and the look on the girl’s face drove me in there.”
She nodded. “Sometimes tears can occur. I think it would probably be a good idea that you exercise some restraint next time, get Mr. Lau or myself to look at the situation before diving in with guns blazing.” She paused for a beat and sat forward. “I am not reprimanding you. That is just a suggestion.”