Mark shrugged.
“If she goes in there, you will never have her back, I’m just warning you.”
Selena leaned towards him to whisper something, but just then a man walked up to the bar. He was tall and rail-thin with a shaven head and hairless chest. He showed it off in a black-mesh shirt.
“Is there a problem with the music?” the man asked with a thin grin. “We could have the band perform a striptease, if that would help you get in the mood.”
Mark laughed. “No, I don’t need to see that drummer naked!” The drummer in question was bald and looked fiftyish and about 200 pounds overweight. “We were just talking.”
Selena didn’t say a word…she just stared at the man, as if by staring she could wilt him.
“The night moves fast in NightWhere,” the man said with a crooked smile. “I wouldn’t want you to miss the pleasures of the club because you lost track of time. Do consider taking a walk around, before it gets too late.”
“Got it,” Mark said. He nodded, but made no move to leave his stool. The man stood still in front of him for a moment, searching for something to say. And then he leaned across the bar, said something to Sin-D, and walked away.
“Kharon,” Selena said quietly. “A Watcher.”
“C’mon,” Mark said. “Let’s you and me take a walk.” There was something about that guy he just didn’t like.
Selena slipped from her stool and together they moved to the dance floor, swaying slightly in time to the bass- and-drum combo.
Rae hated to admit it, but she’d felt relief as her husband had walked away towards the bar. Part of her recognized that they had reached the divide; NightWhere was her ticket into the places she had only dreamed of before…places that, honestly, she was afraid to admit that she’d dreamed of. It was not the place for Mark; he didn’t have the need burning inside his bones like she did. He couldn’t follow her here, not now. In the most private place, Rae walked alone.
She let the dark, pounding beat of the band sink into her bones as she slowly moved to the back of the club, back to where the slaps of leather on flesh resounded, even above the echo of the drums. Fingers reached out from the crowd to trail across her bare arms as she passed by. She welcomed their touch, but didn’t slow to answer their invitations. There was only one thing she wanted now.
The feeling of surrender.
The feeling of the dark, welling up through her skin.
“How can I help you?” a voice said from next to her. “My name is Kharon.”
Rae looked up and saw a man with large eyes watching her intently. His head was shaved, his face pale, his lips barely pink. The faint stubble of his beard looked like salt and pepper against his skin, and she found herself instantly imagining how it would feel rubbing against the soft skin of her breasts. He had that magnetism-that weird electricity that in just a moment of speech made you want to be closer to him. In the strobes of the dance floor, his features jumped and jagged, sharpened and smeared-he was both extreme and soft as the light shifted.
“I was looking for a woman,” she began, but stopped as he began to laugh.
“Aren’t we all?”
“She was here last time, right here in this room. I met her at the racks…she made me feel deeper than I ever have before. She whipped me…”
“This is not narrowing it down much,” Kharon said, again with an audible trace of humor in his voice.
“I need to find her again.”
The man stared at her until the silence between them was filled with nearby cries. Rae could almost count the pores of his forehead as she stared back at him, daring him to hold his game longer than her.
“I want to show you something,” Kharon said and began to walk away. Rae wasn’t sure what to think…but she began to follow. He stepped through the aisle of whipping racks, where five pasty-white men had volunteered to be flogged and cried out like wounded kids with every light blow.
Rae stepped past them in disgust. She could tell with a glance that they were dabblers-they flirted with the pain but, really, they craved the humiliation. She had no use for them and hurried to catch up to Kharon, who slipped into the shadows of NightWhere as easily as paper slipped away on the breeze. Something inside her demanded that she not lose him.
Her eyes found him again, just ahead, and she quickened her step. He opened a black door hidden in the black wall at the back of the club and Rae ran across the intervening space to follow. She caught the door before it closed and darted inside to join him in wherever it was he was going. But on the other side of the door, she realized that she had left…everything…behind.
When the dark door shut behind her, Rae felt suddenly alone in a room of shadow. The air seemed to glint with some kind of floating light… But it was a hazy, cottony illumination. The strangest, most ethereal beams bled from random holes in the dark. Rae stepped forward and a dozen bells chimed, announcing her walking presence. She felt nothing touch her. Even her feet seemed to move across air. But with the movement of every muscle, the room sang, betraying her feet.
Not so far ahead, she could see the man, still walking.
Bells chimed and sang as she followed, the cacophony growing louder the faster she walked. Rae couldn’t see what was causing the bells…her skin seemed to touch nothing as she walked through cool black air. But with every step, the echoes of chimes and other shadowed sounds flared painfully in her ears.
Finally she stopped and the cacophony also stopped. The man she chased turned to face her, a look of amusement in the crack of his lips.
“If you want to follow me,” he said, “you must learn to walk between the shadows. You still have much to learn.”
With that, he turned and disappeared into the dark.
Rae ran forward, trying to find him, but as she moved away from the club, the noise grew so loud that she stopped and held her hands to her ears. She couldn’t see anything…the room was black. Now that he was gone, she was totally in the dark. An orchestra of angry sound assailed her ears.
“Wait!” Rae called, trying to be heard above the din, but nothing answered.
“Shit,” she said to herself. She put her hands out, crying again, “Wait,” and the air chimed.
“I will not be afraid of noise,” she promised. But she no longer walked ahead. Rae retraced her steps through the dark, hoping that her feet were truly following the same path and not leading her in circles. The sound inside her head pounded until she felt her eyes swell. She wondered if her ears were bleeding. But little by little it began to diminish. And then her hands met a wall.
She moved along it, a little to the left, and a little to the right, looking for the door. Her hand knocked against something cold and metallic, and Rae grinned, curling her palm around the knob and turning…and then she was suddenly out of the stark aural pain and back in the blue haze of the club. The bell screams turned to human cries of pleasure and pain. Rae smiled. The cries of passion sounded like home. She moved towards a man with a riding crop, and when he favored her with a grin, she bent over and offered herself to his hand.
She accepted his slaps with interest…but as his hand touched her, she felt cold. Bored.
There was sting in his spanking, but something wasn’t connecting with her. He didn’t give her what she needed. Rae began to look around at the other subjects being spanked and whipped around her, and realized there was more to her need than simple pain.
Her chest was filled with a horrible void. Rae found herself struggling not to cry.
“Were you looking for me?” a voice asked. Rae looked up and Kharon stood behind her, a riding crop in his right hand.
“Yes,” Rae admitted. The relief flooded her voice as she wiggled her hips for him to see. She needed him.
He leaned down and pressed his lips to her own as his left hand slid from her bare shoulder, down the velvet skin of her back, to finally cup the soft skin of her ass. His hand squeezed.
“There are things that you must learn if you are to follow me,” Kharon said. “And the first is this.”
He stepped back and raised his hand. Then brought it down.
In moments, Rae’s cries joined the moans that reverberated above the band in the Blue Room.
Cries of wanting.
