“I don’t suppose you will,” Amelia said. She smiled thinly and walked past Rae towards the back of the club. “I’ll see you later, I’m sure.”
Bemused, Rae watched Amelia walk away. What had she done to deserve the ice treatment? The last thing she knew, they’d had a great session near the racks. She thought back, trying to think if there had been some problem at the end of that night, but…
“Rae,” a voice called. And then cool fingers slipped around her elbow. Kharon stood behind her. “We need you in The Red. There’s something that must be done tonight. Consider it…your initiation.”
Rae smiled, but inside, her stomach trembled.
Initiation?
She thought of sorority hazing and wondered…in a deviant sex club, what sort of thing would an initiation involve?
Her heels clicked faster and faster as she crossed through the growing crowd in the Blue Room, anxious to find out.
“Here she is,” Kharon said. His teeth smiled wide and white in the dark room. A small crowd of NightWhere regulars was gathered there, in a room just off the entrance of The Red. Three of them were Watchers. She’d learned quickly that not everyone who was in the in-crowd of NightWhere was a Watcher.
Watchers were different. Easily recognizable. Rae didn’t know why, but the Watchers all seemed to look alike. They were thin, almost emaciated, and their skin was white as a cave amphibian; they didn’t appear to have ever gone out in the sun in their entire lives. They almost always wore black leather-of course, almost everyone here wore leather but…there was just something about the Watchers. They walked differently, talked differently…they were like the sex club elders even if they didn’t look old.
Kharon took the hand of a middle-aged man in the center of the circle and led him to Rae. “This is Peter,” he said. “I want you to take him around the club tonight. Show him the ropes. Do whatever it takes to make him happy here. But bring him back here at midnight.”
Kharon smiled at Peter and said simply, “Enjoy it. This is your night.” Then he signaled to the others and the group streamed from the room, leaving Rae and Peter alone.
“Well, hi there,” she said, holding out a hand. “My name is Rae, and I guess I’ll be your tour guide tonight!”
“Peter Rathburn,” he said, squeezing her hand tightly before letting it go. “I didn’t realize when I got my invitation that I would have my own private sex queen as an escort if I came tonight.”
Rae laughed. “Not sure if I qualify as a sex queen, but thank you.”
He nodded at her small but prominent cleavage, pressed up by the leather, and her barely concealed crotch. “Well, you look like a sex queen to me! So, do you help run this place?”
Rae snorted. “Hardly. I’ve come here a few times, but I love it so much I’m staying on for good. But…I don’t really know what I’m helping with yet.”
“Apparently, the entry level position here is ‘Welcome Wagon’. Sorry about that!” He smiled awkwardly, as if embarrassed.
“Don’t be,” Rae said. “I’m happy to show you around. Come on.”
She took him by the hand and led him out of the dark room and into the red-lit hallway. “I’m surprised that you actually are starting here,” she said, motioning at the murky hallway. “Normally people don’t get access to this part of the club right away. It’s called The Red.”
“Why not?” he asked. “I get the red part-all the lights here are red. But why is it restricted?”
Rae considered for a minute and then shrugged. “Well…what the hell, they said to give you a tour. Follow me.”
She pulled him down the hall, away from the exit. “Let’s see what we can see.”
The screams advertised the action before they even turned the corner to the first doorway. They stepped inside the room and stopped almost immediately. A group of six or seven stood a few feet away, surrounding a small stage. It was a bare stage, except for one thing.
A giant, ten-foot-tall cross grew from the floor to dominate the room. And from it, a nude woman hung.
She was Italian, Rae thought. Her skin appeared dark in the red light, and her hair was black and lustrous. She still showed underarm hair, black and wispy, and her crotch was a thatch of heavy black bush. But the denizens of the room were not paying attention to her bounteous body hair. A man wearing only a leather belt and a black jockstrap stood before the cross. A black leather hood covered much of his head. He held a long black pole that tapered to a thin, barely visible end. While it may not have been easy to see, it was easy to
He slapped it across her small tits and thin-stretched belly with a practiced ease-
With each connection, the woman yelped, but otherwise didn’t complain. And the man didn’t slow. He flicked the fishing-pole-like cane and caught her on the breast and the chin and the belly. Her body reddened and she still never said a word. Only cried out, and moaned in between.
“What they love even more than sex in NightWhere is pain,” Rae said to Peter. “And back here, in The Red, they really get into it. Things are a lot tamer out in the main club area.”
Peter shrugged. “I’m here because I love the pain,” he said softly. “I suppose that’s why I got the invitation. I was at a local swingers club not too long ago, begging for people to use a whip on me. And when they could never get up the courage to really use the thing, I took it and showed them how you are supposed to use a whip. Made the guy bleed, and after they pulled me away from him and untied him from the pipe I’d tied his wrists up to, they threatened to call the police on me. I said, ‘C’mon, he asked for it. I mean, really…he did! How else could I have tied his wrists to a water pipe in the basement?’ He was a way bigger guy than me!”
“And that is exactly the difference between the real world and NightWhere,” Rae said. “Here, you can ask for it and it might happen. But you have to be a part of it-you can’t just wander in and out. Because…you’re either
It occurred to her as she said it, that she was a parrot of what Kharon had said to her.
“And you’re in,” Peter said. “Do you have a boyfriend, or…”
“Husband,” she answered, stepping away from the caning as the woman’s cries grew louder. “And he’s
Peter slipped an arm around her mostly bare ass and said, “Well, I’m here because I want to be
She didn’t shrug him off. He wasn’t a muscular stud or anything like that. He wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd, even a crowd of ten. But Rae liked Peter. He seemed honest and easy to talk to.
“C’mon,” she said, pushing him out of the crucifixion room and into the red-lit hall. “Let me show you the regular part of the club. Start at the beginning.”
“Sure,” he said. But in a moment, he stopped her.
“Wait,” he said. “What’s this?”
He pulled her closer to the hallway wall, which held a long series of black-framed pictures. They were lined up three and four tall as you walked along the hall. There were so many that Rae had never really stopped to look at them in the couple of times she’d been here. They became overwhelming-wallpaper-by their sheer number.
But now she did look; she stepped closer with him.
The pictures were probably in color, but in the heavy red light of the hall, they appeared almost black and white. In one photo, a man was stretched out naked on a rack, legs pulled taut in one direction, while his arms were clearly, painfully stretched in the opposite. Two nude women bent over his torso. The photo couldn’t show what they were doing given its perspective, but it did show what they held at the end of their fingers.
Knives.
And those knives looked to be touching various portions of the man’s anatomy, some more private than others.
The photo below that showed the same two women holding knives up in the air, with something hanging from each blade. Something paper thin and dripping…
In the photo next to that, a woman stood smiling as wide and provocatively as she possibly could. She held her hand on her hip and cocked it out, as if she were ready for an ass slap.
