Delaney
It was my first time at Club Crawl. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this normally, and frankly, my parents would be rolling over in their graves. Lacy was my only friend in Los Angeles. She begged me to come with her. I pretended to be skeptical, but secretly, I was curious. She was my roommate in college, and when she heard I was moving back, she begged me to stay with her. So, even though I could afford my own place, I took her offer. I’ve never really been a girl with a ton of friends; even as an adolescent, I was always the solitary one.
Growing up in the tiny town of Jasper, Arkansas, where the population was just over five hundred, everyone knew everyone. This made it challenging to keep anything personal a secret.
Throughout my summers, I was often engrossed in a book. As other young girls enjoyed sleepovers and birthday parties, I was immersed in a fantasy world born from love stories. Two individuals on oppositepaths, yet fated to meet, each on a journey to find the other. Every tale ends in a similar pattern: they fall in love, get married, and have two children, a son, and a daughter, living eternally in joy within their two-story house, surrounded by a white picket fence.
I genuinely loved those stories, and for a while, I often wondered who my blue-collar Prince Charming might be, what he would look like, and whether he would be humorous, intelligent, or witty; doubt usually crept in at some point. What if he didn’t share my passion for literature? What if my fantasies to him seemed dull? Or worse, repulsive? I was blissfully wearing rose-colored glasses until I discovered the dark romance genre. Where I shamefully enjoyed reading dirty, filthy stories of women living out their darkest fantasies of degradation, and forbidden sexual encounters with multiple men at once. It was my secret escape from my otherwise vanilla life. Had anyone ever found out I had secret desires and fetishes that included masked men I’d be exiled? Maybe not that extreme, but it wouldn’t have been good. Something I would never in a million years actually experience, but I’d lay awake at night touching myself as the stories played out in my head like an X-rated movie.
My first boyfriend didn’t come around until my senior year in high school. He was the pastor’s son at the church my family attended each Sunday growing up. He was cute and charming but not quite as innocent as he let our parents believe. He was a bad boy in disguise; it was initially exciting and fun. I was a very timid, virginal young woman still trying to figure out life and he was way more experienced than I. He wasn’t afraid to express his needsconstantly.
One night, right before graduation, we talked about sneaking away together with the plan of losing my virginity before going off to college on opposite sides of the country. I was excited to have been accepted into UCLA. I didn’t have a desire to go there specifically; I was just desperate to get out and spread my wings without having my parentsbreathing down my neck and controlling my life. I needed to fly, and UCLA was 3,000 miles away from everything my parents had overseen or touched.
This would be new and exciting andmine. I loved my parents so much, but being an only child brought the word overbearing to a new level. UCLA would offer a great opportunity for me to get my Bachelor’s Degree in Literature. It wasn’t tough to convince them to support me. They always encouraged my passion to become a writer one day.
On the night of my farewell party, I finally managed to break free from the overcrowded gathering intended to celebrate me. On my way to my favorite diner, searching for alone time and a slice of apple pie, I stumbled across my boyfriend and another girl in the back seat of his car. He said he couldn’t make it to my party because he was elbows deep in chores for his mother. She didn’t like my mother very much because of something that happened back when they were in high school together. So, any chance she got to keep us away from each other, she took it. When he told me his excuse to skip my party, it was unfortunately believable.
At first, I didn’t believe my eyes, but the longer I stood there witnessing the unfathomable, the louder my heartbeat sounded. Anger consumed me, and I had to fight the urge to react, potentially making a fool of myself for someone who didn’t deserve the acknowledgment. I turned and walked home, leaving the two of them and any lingering hurt behind.
I left for college only a few days later avoiding him at all costs. I never told anyone about what happened that night, not even him. I just left and never looked back.
My parents got into a fatal car accident during my sophomore year of college. Losing my parents was something I never expected. There are times that I miss being suffocated by their rules and expectations. My father was a planner. He planned for any possible tragedy.This is why I wasn’t surprised when a lawyer found me and told me that my father had set aside a large amount of money in the event of their deaths. He always told me:
Prepare for everything so that you may worry about nothing.
Though I never understood his logic, I felt a wave of gratitude for his peculiar lessons when I wasn’t kicked out of school for lack of payment for my tuition. Which meant I didn’t have to face returning home to the hollow house full of lost love and painfully happy memories at least not for a while longer. The thought of how it once brimmed with the lavender and vanilla aromas of my mother’s perfume or the pungent scent of super glue from my father’s model airplane collection that filled his office.
After college, I had to move back home for a while. Everything was different, and the worst part was the pity shown by all of my parents’ old acquaintances. No one expected me to show up when I did.
I tried to move on with my life, trying to stay close to what was normal for me growing up. I worked for the school district and one of the law firms in town but nothing was fulfilling.
I wasn’t happy.
One day, I woke up and decided it was time for me to make a change. I boarded up my family home and returned to the West Coast.
* * *
“OMG!” A squeal escaped Lacy’s lips as she ran over, nearly knocking me to the floor. She threw her arms over my neck, hugging me tight. “I freaking missed you so much, bitch,” She screamed. I winced at her poor choice of endearment as if you could say being referred to as a female dog was a term of endearment, but I chose to ignore it; after all, that was just the‘Lacy way.’ She had no filter. Ever.
“Jesus, Lacy, tell the whole dang airport why don’t you!” I giggled as I hugged her, dropping my bag and purse in the motion. When I looked behind her as we hugged, my eyes connected with what I could only describe as the perfect man.
His curly brownish-blonde hair was styled back toward his nape, sort of in one of those modern mullet styles, and his neatly trimmed beard lined his chiseled jaw. His eyes bore a captivating hazel color into mine as they searched my face.
I felt my face flush when I looked down and saw that everything from my bag now lay scattered all over the airport ground. I quickly dropped to my knees, shoving everything back inside in an embarrassed rush. I reached over to scoop up my glasses when my hand was met by another. His hand and wrist were covered with tattoos, a face. I recognized the ink face as Poseidon, the Greek God and ruler of the ocean.
“Here you go, sweetheart.” The handsome stranger gave me my sunglasses, his fingers grazing mine in the exchange. My throat tightened, and my heartbeat quickened.
The energy between us was something I had never felt before. I pulled my hand back in shock, uncertain if he could feel it, too. If he could, he hid it well behind his unreadable expression. I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out. I just stared, transfixed.
This man’s presence was commanding and assertive, but his voice was smoothly persuasive. I looked up from where I kneeled unintentionally at his feet, meeting his gaze from under my lashes.
He smirked.
* * *
Which brings me here. Club Crawl. The hottest kink Club in LosAngeles, known well for its exclusivity and the mystery brought on by rumors throughout the city.
“That’s Dallas Kingston. He owns this club and a few others, he’s hot but he’s an arrogant asshole,” Lacy gossiped in my ear, drawing my attention from the figure staring down at me from behind a chrome mask. Everyone else wore the mask they were assigned, different colors but the same style, but he wore a shiny, intimidating Ghostface mask.
