Elena, my best friend since childhood, was there for me with open arms. Her apartment door was open as well when I arrived with my tail tucked between my legs, a small U-Haul full of boxes that represented almost eight years of married life, and three suitcases. Elena was thrusting a set of keys in my hand before I even crossed the threshold, telling me we were going to be best roommates forever and ever.
I had no family left in Henderson. My mom died during childbirth and my dad when I was seventeen, which meant my older brother Micah got custody of me for a little less than a year before I came of age. I left home at eighteen to go to college in Los Angeles, met and married Vince there, and made a home in sunny California.
It was a little weird coming back to Nevada. Micah lived in San Francisco, and sure… I could have gone there to crash with him and he would have loved it. But I needed a woman to talk to. Someone like Elena who I could shamefully admit to that my husband just didn’t find me sexy or thrilling in bed, and that’s why he kicked me out.
No way could I ever tell Micah that.
For the past three weeks, Elena has let me live with her rent and obligation free of doing anything other than moping around. I told her all the dirty details of my fall from marital grace, and she assured me Vince was the one fucked in the head, not me.
I didn’t believe her, so Elena had a more novel idea to get my head out of my ass.
She suggested I come with her to a sex club she visited on occasion called The Wicked Horse. I was originally horrified at the idea of having casual sex with a complete stranger, but I was also strangely turned on at the same time. That told me that at twenty-eight, my ovaries weren’t dried up the way Vince implied they were. In fact, as I mulled over her proposition for a few days, I may have overheated my vibrator with fantasies of what it would be like.
Elena told me all about The Wicked Horse and its various rooms where people could have guilt-free sex in an accepting environment. She explained that vanilla or kinky, one on one, or one on five were only a few options. I could be paddled or gang-banged if I wanted.
From her description, it was my fantasy waiting to happen, and eventually, I just said what the hell and decided to do it, although I was pretty sure it would only be vanilla for me.
Oh, and it helped that tonight is a masquerade event. Not only is it causal sex with a stranger, it’s also absolutely anonymous.
It was beyond fun getting ready. Elena and I picked out slutty dresses to wear, mine being nothing more than an electric blue tube dress shot through with silver thread that hugged every inch of my petite five-foot-three frame. Elena chose a slinky gold dress with spaghetti straps and a plunging neckline.
Best of all were our masks. Elena is a hair dresser, but she’s also insanely crafty in all things. Instead of a ready-made mask, Elena glued an elaborate design of sapphire blue feathers to my face, interlacing the ends of peacock feathers at my temples. She put my bobbed hair under a tight cap, and then glued feathers all over it as well. My green eyes, which I’d done heavy with smoky shadow, my nose, and my lips were all that were visible. The feathers even caressed my jaw and brushed down along the sides of my neck. It was exquisite, and I wanted to wear them forever and ever. I’d gotten several looks from both men and women, and I felt sexy, mysterious, and beautiful.
And I was going to get laid tonight and prove to myself—and that asshole Vince—that I had it going on in between my legs.
Elena leads me through the main room through a set of double doors and into a foyer with several hallways that lead to the various sex rooms. While I admire Elena and her open sexual nature, I make her promise me again.
“When I decide on someone, you’re going to leave the room, right?”
“I promise, Jorie,” she says with a squeeze to my arm. “I know it’s going to be awkward enough; you don’t need your best friend watching.”
I stop and turn to face her. “Thank you. You know you’re the best thing to ever happen to me, right?”
“Right,” she says with a sharp nod. “Now let’s go dust the cobwebs off your hoo-hah.”
Laughing, she turns me to the right and we head down the hall that says The Silo.
This was my preference as she told me there were a few rooms in The Silo that had curtains that could be drawn in case I got a little shy and didn’t want people watching. I have no clue what my preference will be because I’m half expecting to bolt out of here the minute I get my first look at the debauchery.
When we walk in, my breath is sucked from my lungs as I look around.
People having sex everywhere.
On couches, on the floor. Standing up against the wall.
And then my eyes take in the glass-walled rooms on the perimeter of the circular Silo, and I suck in a hard breath. There’s a room with a set of stocks. A woman is locked inside while a guy fucks her mouth gently, and another has his face buried in her ass.
Another room has a man tied to a St. Andrew’s cross, getting his dick sucked by a man and a woman taking turns on him.
And still another room where there’s a mattress with a single couple getting their sixty-nine on.
“Hot, right?” Elena breathes into my ear. A shiver runs up my spine as my panties get drenched with a rush of moisture.
“Oh, wow,” I tell her softly. “I never could have imagined this.”
“See anything you like?” she asks me slyly.
And yes, I see a lot I like. I look around at the people, immediately noting several men staring at me and Elena hungrily behind their masks.
I’m so getting laid tonight.
And then, I see him.
Him.
A fucking god.
Wearing nothing but a pair of faded jeans that hang low on lean hips, above which rises a trail of dark hair that stops at his navel. He’s not the type of guy who struts around flexing his abs, but I could tell if he did, they’d be washboard perfection. Muscular chest and arms, but in a toned way.
Tanned skin.
No, not tanned… olive.
Exotic.
And that’s all I can see because he’s hooded. His entire head is covered in a form-fitting leather mask. It must be laced or zipped up the back, revealing only a pair of golden-brown eyes, full lips, and dark, longish hair.
“God, he’s magnificent,” Elena whispers as he walks from the opposite side of the room.
No, not walks.
He prowls, but not toward any particular prey. Arms hanging loose but swinging slightly in that confident way that says, “I’m the fucking shit and I know it.” The confidence exuding from him is sexy as hell.
He doesn’t look at anyone, just quickly walks down a short hall in between two of the rooms and disappears.
I’m slightly dizzy because I’ve forgotten to breathe, and I take in a shaky lungful of air. When I let it out slowly, I register abject disappointment that he’s gone.
“Oh, this is interesting,” Elena murmurs as she nudges me in the shoulder. I follow her gaze to one of the previously unoccupied rooms. It’s now lit up.
The masked man is in there. He’s all alone except for some type of furniture that’s covered completely in a silk sheet. Casually walking up to it, he takes the material in hand. He pulls it off not with a magician’s flourish, but slowly so the object is revealed.
And it’s a…
Well, I’m not quite sure what it is. He walks around it, blocking it from my view for a moment. People move toward the glass to get a better look. Before I know it, my legs are moving, too, and Elena follows me so we are standing right in front of the room, the sexy, mysterious man no more than five feet from us on the other side.