If I wanted everything back, I had to find Cole. He'd given me no way to get hold of him. He'd said if I needed him, he'd know.
I needed him and if he knew, he hadn't come.
I had no doubt what he'd ask this time. Telling me I didn't have to have sex with him, that was the used car salesman pitch for the first couple rounds. This time, it was pay up or shut up.
"Where are you staying?" My driver asked.
Alarm bells went off. "Shouldn't you already know what?" Because if she didn't, who was she? Fresh faced and looking like a kid. I was fresh faced and looking like a kid and look what I really was.
"Right. Sorry. It's hard to make friendly conversation when you don't know shit about the passenger."
Apparently swearing wasn't against the rules. Or she hadn't noticed she'd done it. "How did you start driving for them?" I asked. It was better than asking how long she'd been driving in the first place.
"I'm older than I look," she said, answering the question I hadn't asked. "And yeah, I know your destination. I just don't know what I'm supposed to talk about." She sounded distressed now. I hadn't read stellar things about driving for them. Then again, given my job choices and what I was here to do, I was the last person to give her any advice.
Instead, I asked, "So are you in school?" Please say college.
"UCSF," she said. "Criminal justice."
"What do you want to do with that?"
Without blinking or seeming to be kidding, she said, "Write murder mysteries," and for the rest of the ride she talked about her favorite authors – everyone from Agatha Christie and Jane Austen to Stephen King and more Stephen King.
I gave her a huge tip and wished her well. Better another mystery writer let loose on the world than another cop. Especially one who drove like she did.
The dungeon looked like a slightly run down gym. Not a spa, not a health club. A gym. The old timey ones where people lifted big barbells and grunted and sweated and didn't make eye contact. Where half the people there probably got their tats in jail.
I suppose that was the look they were going for.
It was literally underground, accessed after passing through an adult gift shop upstairs, giving it a nightmarish feeling of being part of one of the amusement parks in Anaheim. The store itself featured an entire wall of dildos, some of them frighteningly real and some of them – one in particular which was as long as my forearm and lime green – hopefully only for alarming home décor or joke gifts. There were harnesses, masks, whips, paddles, something that looked like a pizza cutter, wands that had nothing to do with wizardry and plugged in or had a battery pack.
By the time I’d paid my fee and reached the dungeon door, I felt nauseated and uncertain and hot and bothered and like I really, really wanted more fet. Or coffee. Or bourbon. Or any other fucking thing. I'd read that some people dragged the drug out of patches for pain and I didn't know if those were prescription or if the Salonpas type thing would do the same.
I was ready to suck one of those things if it would help.
Down the plain every day steps into that gym-looking basement, it was dank and cold as a basement should be, and everywhere I looked there was something that made me feel too shy to study and at the same time desperate to look at.
Mounted on the wall was a St. Andrews cross. Seven feet tall, decorated with rings for attaching arms and legs at different heights. I shuddered and moved on. There was an event open to newbies going on, and the noise level was soothing, easing away my thoughts, keeping me from feeling like I was nothing more than a lookie loo moving through the gawk-worthy dungeon.
There was no sign of Cole.
There was a box with a double metal frame and monkey bars going between the two boxes of metal, all the way around. If I had any doubt about its purpose, the man being trussed up into it, his arms and legs spread and secured, was enough to explain it to me.
Stationary bicycles with erotic attachments. Whipping posts. Spanking benches. Cabinets loaded with paraphernalia, canes and slappers, tawses and paddles, crops and canes, each cabinet stocked with disinfectant and huge signs ordering users to USE IT. That detail really made it look like a gym.
It sounded like a gym, too, with people groaning and thrashing and metal hitting metal as chains bumped the things they were chained to.
The feeling of being watched started low in the pit of my stomach. It hadn't occurred to me what bad form it would be to come and only watch. This wasn't a spectator sport. Part of the reason so many people could do this was they had a touch of the exhibitionist in them. But others did it only because others were doing it and right out in public.
I was violating that trust. So the best thing to do would be not to linger, fascinated by the way a woman's flesh appeared to wait for a heartbeat or two after the cane struck her ass or legs, with nothing happening, with her not even making a sound, and then an instant later the color bloomed hard and bright, twin lines of red around the center of almost gray white where the cane itself had hit. And at the same time, she would moan or cry out as the delayed reaction sank in.
It was hard not to watch.
It was hard to keep reminding myself this wasn't me. I wasn't like this. I had yelled at poor Mark that time just for holding me down for a second.
This wasn't me.
This wasn't going to be me.
I'd find something else to trade with Cole. Maybe I'd even put him on the defensive, threaten him with law enforcement.
A thrill of nausea passed through me and it had nothing to do with the man hanging over another man's lap and being spanked roughly by hand.
It had everything to do with the fet leaving my system.
The race was on.
"What is it you're looking for?"
The voice was like velvet, stroking over my ears. Female, but low and throaty. At the same time the timbre sent a pleasant frisson through my system, panic overrode it. I don't like people getting that close to me without me being aware. I started to turn around.
Hands settled onto my shoulders, light but controlling. "Don't turn around."
"Why not?" Everything in my body had gone tense.
"Ooh, the little cat has bite," the voice said.
I didn't think that made any sense. At the same time, there was something responding to the touch and the command. Don't turn around. And I didn't.
"What did you come here looking for?"
I couldn't say Cole St. Martin. If I did, I'd blow my chances with him before I ever found him. I couldn't say to find someone to play with.
I was pretty sure my new guide would offer, and I didn't know what I wanted.
I didn't know if I wanted anything. Yet.
"Did you come to play?" I'd taken too long to answer.
"I don't know what I came here for." Sometimes the truth is the easiest way out. "I’m..." I paused and considered all the things I could say. Out of place A cop but not right now. Looking for someone (but I can't tell you who). Strung out.
"Scared."
The woman with her hands on my shoulders purred. "You're honest. I like that. Everybody is scared when they first come somewhere like this."
"How do you know it's my – "
"Please." Her voice was still velvety, even when amused. "Are you a top or a bottom?"