1
Andrew
Butterflies fluttered around in my stomach as I’d casually walked toward the entrance of Club Oxygen. Tonight was my first night as owner and co-operator of the club. I was grateful that James was willing to assist with the operations side of the club until I fell into the swing of things.
“You’ve been here before. You’re not new. It’s just like any other time,” I murmured under my breath as I reached for the door handle.
Kind of.
“Hi, Andrew!” Ali beamed from behind the check-in desk when she saw me. “I mean, Mr. Boss Man.”
This wasn’t like any other night. I would need to earn the respect of club members and prove myself as a fit leader who had the club’s best interest at the forefront of decisions.
The kicker to this was that practically everyone at Oxygen would have reason to laugh at my ability, or lack thereof, to make decisions. I’d made some pretty piss-poor decisions in the last year or so. Luckily, the support of my friends and my dad had helped me get through everything. I wasn’t proud of the mess I’d allowed myself to get into, but I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes twice. I hoped none of the club members would hold it against me, though.
“You don’t have to call me Boss Man,” I told Ali as I approached the counter she sat behind.
“I like calling you Boss Man. It’s a sexy new title and nickname for you,” she teased. Ali stood on the rungs of the stool she sat on and leaned across the counter. With the cap of her pen, she tapped my shirt collar and smiled. “I like the open shirt.”
Naturally, my hand gravitated to the top of my light blue dress shirt. I frowned at her as I ran my fingers over the top two buttons. This was far from an open shirt.
“It’s not that open. It’s only the top two buttons,” I reminded her. Ali chewed on the end of the blue pen cap, considering what I had said.
“It’s open just enough to see your necklace,” she added. I pushed two fingers inside my shirt and felt the two letter A charms in honor of my brothers. She pulled the pen out of her mouth and smiled. “If you’d put on one of those velour track suits and went shirtless but zipped the jacket up halfway to expose your chest hair and necklace, I could say you would look very mob-like,” she teased.
“Mob-like?”
“Well, and you’d have to slick back your hair so it would look darker. The blondish-light brown hair isn’t a popular mob look. Though, maybe you could be the start of a new mob. Like, a Nordic mob.”
Should I button one of the buttons so I only have the very top one open?
I reached for my shirt and was starting to do just that when Ali gasped in horror, leaned over the counter, and smacked my hands with her pen.
“Stop that, Andrew!”
“What? You’re giving me shit about my shirt being open and giving me a mafia complex.”
“I’m just teasing you. Don’t button it up any more, or you’ll look like you’ve been going around door to door with Bibles trying to sell religion to people.”
I dropped my hands to my sides and stared at her.
“You know, I’m already kind of nervous for tonight,” I admit.
“Andrew, you have nothing to be nervous about. Everyone respects you and is excited for you.”
“I don’t know about the respect part. They all know I’m the guy who was so upside down over a woman that I ended up in a situation where I was stabbed,” I said quietly so only she could hear.
“And they will be happy to see that the relationship with that cunt Elise hasn’t jaded you or kept you away,” Ali said matter-of-factly.
Not wanting to get into that topic, I smiled and nodded at her. Elise’s antics and instability wouldn’t keep me away from Club Oxygen, but I was in no hurry to have sessions with anyone. At least, not for a long while.
“James said for me to tell you that he’d be in the main room waiting for you,” Ali said.
“Okay, thank you.” I headed toward the doors that led from the lobby to the main room.
“Andrew, aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked. I stared blankly at her, and she rolled her eyes at me. “The club is almost at capacity tonight with all existing members. There aren’t any new members in attendance. There are only public session demos planned for this evening. Juan’s fire cupping session is at nine o’clock in room one, and Mistress Tabitha’s session on getting inside the submissive mind is going on now in room ten, ” she reported.
Oh, fuck. That’s right! I should have asked her that when I arrived.
