to a Boston song. It calmed his nerves.
The ride home sucked. It
The front screen door was unlocked (and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been locked, since the giant rent in the screening rendered any lock a pointless formality).
Something crashed from inside as the screen creaked open and Gordon tossed his backpack to the floor. “Helloooo?” he called.
From the back bedroom, a thin, bedraggled woman hurried out, shaking her head. Her thin white tank top was plastered to her thin white form with sweat, and the straps to her black bra were tackily obvious across her shoulders.
“I hope you’re ready for something good,” Gordon said and cupped both hands around her waist. She squirmed in his grasp and tilted her head away as he bent to kiss her.
“Bitch!” he complained.
From the back bedroom a child cried.
“Don’t waste it on me,” she warned. “I got nothing left for you tonight, and you got one of them fancy invites again to your favorite club. So go do someone who cares. Or doesn’t care, I guess.”
She slapped an envelope against his chest and then pushed herself out of his grasp as he took it.
“I can take you with me,” he offered, for the umpteenth time.
The thin, angry woman shook her head. “Go beat and fuck whoever you want. Just pay the rent and feed your kid when you’re done, okay? I don’t care about the rest.”
From the room behind them, the crying escalated.
“What’s the matter with Freddy?” Gordon asked.
“He needs love,” she said. “Just like the rest of us. Not that you would understand that.”
With that she turned and disappeared back to the child’s room. Gordon poked his head in and looked at his baby, quiet now that it had its mother’s full attention, mouth on her breast. There’d been a time that the same act-only
He went back to their bedroom and stripped out of the clothes of the day. Then, still naked, he reached into the back of his closet and pulled out a leather handle. The rest of the whip followed, and he cracked it once on the bedroom floor.
For the first time in ten hours, Gordon Hayworth smiled.
Chapter Two
“It’s almost eight thirty,” Mark called up the stairs.
Rae poked her head out of the bathroom, her hair spiked and gelled to look both windblown and styled. He loved the way the blonde strands wove in and out of the darker dyed stripes, married by the honey of her natural color. She looked perky and sassy, a girl who could laugh and kiss at the same time. Right now, her two hands were working on inserting an earring as she spoke.
“I know, I know, I know,” she said. “Who wants this the most? Don’t you think I’m hurrying? I’ll be ready in five.”
“Not sure if they will let you in if you’re late,” he teased, pacing. His stomach churned. Mark felt more nervous tonight than the first time they had ventured into the world of the forbidden. From the whispers he had heard in dark rooms about NightWhere, they were about to enter a very different game.
Some people loved the simple life.
But the simple life hadn’t been enough for Mark and Rae. Or at least not for Rae. She had wanted to go farther. Needed something different. Rae desperately loved Mark, but…in the end, he wasn’t enough for her, not really. She had a chasm inside her that begged for more, always more. No single man could or ever would be enough, though she tried to make it work with Mark.
Mark, on the other hand, was smart enough to realize that this wasn’t a slur on him, but simply a quirk of Rae’s psyche. From the moment that he’d met her, sipping tequila and flirting with the bartender at Huevo’s, he’d been completely taken with her. He knew from the start that she was untamable. Nobody could ever own her energy. But she did give a large part of it to him…and that was all he could ask for. He knew in his heart that if he gave her enough rope, she’d never feel trapped and would always come back to him.
And so two years after they had married, when he could tell she was struggling against the need to be faithful and seemed to need more, he had made the suggestion that they try the forbidden.
He would never forget that moment. She’d been lying in bed with him, the sweat of their lovemaking still drying on her bare skin. The sex had been good, but he could tell she was struggling with something. Trying to get more out of it. Trying to get more of him inside her. Trying to find…something deeper between them. Something new. Something to affirm that it was all worthwhile. The sterile white walls of their cookie-cutter suburban frame house were closing in. Day by day their home felt smaller and smaller. The mundane was smothering Rae.
Mark knew he couldn’t give anymore. And so he’d said the words that had changed everything. “Do you want to try having sex with another man?”
Rae hadn’t missed a beat. “Who did you have in mind?”
Mark hadn’t freaked out. His stomach may have contracted a little, and he was a little surprised at how eagerly she’d jumped on the offer, but he’d known in his heart for a while that this was what she really wanted. Rae needed to play or she would wither. And whatever was left between them would die.
“No one in particular. I’ll look for a swingers club if you want” was what he’d said.
“Cool,” she’d answered. When she’d turned to kiss him, her mouth was hotter than it had been during their lovemaking.
And so it had begun.
Mark himself had never needed the variety…not that he didn’t enjoy it. But he had done this all for Rae. And he had to admit, there was a voyeur buried not so deep inside him. There was nothing quite like standing in the shadows and watching her face light up when a guy came on to her and something inside her that had been dark for weeks suddenly ignited.
She couldn’t be contained…but she agreed to stay in Mark’s cage. Still, she lost her light there after a while. Until he let her out of her cage for the night. But, she always chose to go home with Mark.
That was enough for him.
But nothing was ever enough for Rae.
They had slipped easily into the swingers scene and Mark found himself sleeping with more wives than he had ever imagined slept around. Meanwhile, Rae enjoyed a parade of partners who provided both variety and an increasingly dark flair. Sometimes when Mark finished rubbing thighs with his partner of the night in the back of the club, he dressed and walked out onto the floor to find Rae being spanked, whipped or abused at the hands of someone he’d never seen before.
He’d made the mistake of intervening once, in someone’s basement in Humboldt Park, when a tall guy with bleached hair in a Revolting Cocks T-shirt was whipping Rae with a long, flesh-welting twine of leather straps. But when Mark had stepped between her punky abuser and Rae’s naked body, her hands tied up in white silken bonds leaving her helpless to stop the man’s abuse, she’d cried out at him in anger, not relief.
Mark tried to give her space, but increasingly he wondered where her dark side was going.
Right around the time he started wondering that was when he first heard the word
