By the time I came back to myself, the water was barely warmer than room temperature, my fingers creased and pruned. I sucked in a breath that felt a lot like the first one I’d ever breathed, then collapsed onto my ass. Spread out in my bathtub, shower raining down against my spent cock and my thighs, I shoved my hair out of my face and closed my eyes, cursing under my breath.
Being submissive, wanting to be told what to do was one thing. Enjoying pain was something else entirely, and that was absolutely what had just happened to me. Every nerve in my body was alive and alert. My brain, aware of every contact pointon my body whether it was skin against water or skin against porcelain, skin against skin where my thighs pressed together.
This was unexpected.
This…changed everything.
CHAPTER 10
RIGGS
After Smith left, I spent the whole day working. I had back-to-back appointments that ran me straight through to ten at night, and by the time I finished cleaning up after the last client, I was ready to call it a night. Unfortunately, my brain had other plans because my apartment smelled like Smith Covington, smelled like nerves and want and money, and I was never going to be able to fall asleep without a fight.
I didn’t want company, but I didn’t want to be alone, so I found myself at Rapture. Ever the good best friend, I did let Damon know I’d decided to come out, but he had plans in Orange County which was admittedly a relief for me. At the club, I made small talk with Callum behind the bar, then took my beer and found Greg and Jack on the patio.
Greg’s husband owned Rapture, and Jack was one of their closest friends, married to the bartender. I admired the neat little group of friends and family they’d made for themselves, and I smiled sincerely when I joined them at a cocktail table in the corner.
“I think it would be a good anniversary present,” Jack said to Greg as I settled in. “It’s been a few years since Callum was in New York.”
“I’m sure he’d love it,” Greg agreed, turning to me and sipping at what looked to be a water with lemon. “Jack was just trying to convince me to finesse Landon into letting Callum take a week off for an anniversary trip.’
I snorted. “Good luck.”
“He was my best friend before he met you!” Jack joked, rolling his eyes.
I didn’t know much about their history, but I knew Landon and his friend Verity had started Rapture almost ten years before. Jack was a friend of theirs from college who, at some point, had gotten involved with their much younger bartender.
I shrugged at them both helplessly, reminding Greg, “I’m sure you could convince Landon to give him the time if you really wanted to.”
“You could literally just tell him,” Jack said.
“I could,” he agreed. “But where’s the fun in that.”
“I feel like I’m interrupting a lovers’ quarrel,” I told them both, “and it’s been a delight, but I was hoping for something a little quieter.”
“Jackisexhausting,” Greg teased. “Heading up to the loft?”
“We’ll see. But I’ll find you before I go, and hopefully you’ll have resolved your little Callum-on-vacation debacle.”
“He doesn’t even need the job,” Jack complained, and I said my goodbyes to them both before heading into the club.
It was refreshing to know I could come to a place like this and not be alone, but I was more in the mood for observation than conversation. My brain was too bogged down with Smith’s puppy dog eyes and the burning heat of his skin for much else. It was bad form to hook up with clients, I reminded myself as I headed toward the back of the club, especially younger clients. IfI did, Smith wouldn’t have been the first one, but shitting where I ate wasn’t something I tried to make a habit of. Everybody who wasn’t a tattooer thought it was a very romantic kind of job, pursuing my passions and creating art and all of that, but a lot of the time it was a slog.
Keeping Ink and Ember in the black was about five full-time jobs, which meant I didn’t get to spend my days doing the kind of art I enjoyed. It was mixed in, sure, but it was also lots of butterflies and bible verses too. And even then, I couldn’t complain too much about it. I’d built the life for myself that Ev and I had always talked about, and that had to count for something. No matter, the loft at Rapture was alive and loud, exactly the kind of distraction I’d hoped for.
I greeted some men I knew by sight, not by name, who were on their way out, then found a comfortable spot on the couch and settled in. There was a couple set up on the cross, so focused on each other somebody could have pulled the fire alarm and neither would have noticed, and I watched them get lost in their own little world until my cock was hard against the side of my thigh. Things between them turned intimate quickly, and while they were in public and aware people could see them, it began to feel intrusive in a not-enjoyable-for-me sort of way.
Heading toward the other end of the loft, I found the first three private rooms closed with red lights lit over the door. The door to the fourth room was open, though, and there was a fair crowd of people inside, all of them spectating a group of three on the bed. I flipped my hoodie over my head and stepped deeper into the room to see what the fuss was about.
The bondage was creative—a man sat against the headboard with his arms strung up to the ceiling and his ankles pulled toward each corner of the bed. He had a black leather hood over his head, and painful-looking clamps on each of his nipples. Another player in bondage, this one a woman with her faceburied in the man’s lap and a wedge pillow shoved beneath her hips. She undoubtedly had a throat full of cock, and both of her holes were most certainly on display to the rest of the room. She had a plug in her ass, one of those punishing looking stainless steel hooks that curved up the small of her back in line with her spine, and attached to the loop at the end was a thin twist of twine that connected to the ends of the clamps on the man’s chest. Every time the woman gagged and jerked away from the dick in her mouth, the tension pulled tight and tugged the man’s nipples. As a result, he thrashed around and lifted his hips off the bed to get deeper into her mouth. It was predicament bondage at its finest.
Heat pooled between my legs, a familiar rush of interest at the suffering of the couple in front of me. Their third produced a flogger with thin rubber falls, and I shouldered my way into the room so I could settle in and watch alongside everyone else. There had to be at least a dozen people in the room, some of them watching nervously, others brazenly touching themselves as the scene unfolded. It would have been a sight to witness the bondage from the start, the trust and intimacy required for something so vulnerable worthy of a show by itself.
The flogger cracked against the back of the woman’s thighs just as I reached the rear of the room. She let out a garbled cry, quickly followed by a muffled male groan, both of their noises washed away by another slap of rubber against skin. The triad was in for a long night, and there was a collective sense of arousal as everyone settled in to watch the show. Some people moved to the couch, others to their knees, and I pressed my shoulders into the corner of the room, ready to watch it all.
Pressing the heel of my hand against the base of my cock, I bit the inside of my cheek and appreciated the enjoyment that came from the pressure alone. I loved knowing everyone in the room was going to get off before the end of the night…everyone but me. It wasn’t denial, nothing like that. I’d never been in the habit of denying myself the things I wanted in life. It was something closer to boredom, I thought. I could watch people suck and fuck and get off, and I could—and I often did—experience my own arousal from it, but the need for release was secondary for me.
Almost irrelevant.
