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  “Sorry, Celia,” Crawford said. “You know I don’t swing that way, love. I’m strictly a Top.” More laughter from the spectators.

  Marcia returned with a couple of towels. “Can she be next?”

  “Sure. I hadn’t yet selected my next victim.”

  Marcia gently bumped hips with her. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s the sweetest damn sadist you’ll ever hope to meet.”

  “Marcia, darling. Quit ruining my reputation. I will have zero street cred with the international sadists union if you keep that up.”

  “There’s a sadists union?” Mel asked.

  That made everyone laugh, including the woman on the table, who was desperately trying not to laugh. Crawford reached over to place his hand on top of one precariously jiggling jar toward her far side.

  “No,” Marcia finally managed through her giggling. “That was a joke.”

  “Oh.” Her face heated again. “Sorry.”

  “Marcia, she is absolutely adorable,” Crawford said. “May I keep her?”

  “No, you may not keep her,” Marcia joked. “She’s mine.”

  “You never let me have any fun.” He broke the seal on the precariously positioned cup and removed it, rubbing at the circular mark left behind with his other hand. “Mel, sometimes the cups leave bruises behind, like you were attacked and tentacle-raped. Will that be a problem?”

  “Oh, no. It won’t.” Not like Mike would see them.

  “The easiest excuse is the truth,” Marcia told her. “‘I saw an acupuncturist, and he did fire cupping on me.’ Anyone Googles it, they’ll see it’s a legitimate thing. It was vanilla long before it was kinky.”

  Twenty minutes later, it was her turn. She turned toward the wall and Marcia held a towel up to shield her. Then she started working on her bra.

  “You can keep that on, if you want,” Marcia said.

  “No, it’s no worse than changing in a gym, I suppose.” She took the towel and wrapped it around her before lying on the other, fresh towel Marcia had laid on the table after it’d been vacated and wiped down.

  She felt the guy sweep her hair to the side and off her neck. “You’re not allergic to any kinds of oils, or baby oil, are you?”

  “I’m only allergic to bullshit,” she said.

  Crawford actually laughed. “Marcia, seriously, you have to let me have her.”

  “She’s only a loaner, buddy.” Marcia leaned in. “Don’t worry. He’s just a flirt and a tease. He’s completely professional.”

  “Quit telling damn dirty lies about me, woman. You’ll ruin my reputation.”

  Mel involuntarily flinched when she felt the warmed oil hit her back. Then he started spreading it out with his hands, talking to her, asking her health-related questions, probing her shoulders and along her spine with his fingers before he did anything.

  Finally, “Okay, I’m going to place the first cup. If it hurts, do not hesitate to say red, understand?”

  “Yep.”

  She heard the flick of the barbecue lighter he was using, followed by the soft whomp of the alcohol igniting.

  There was a flare of heat where the cup hit her skin, followed by a pulling sensation that wasn’t uncomfortable. He lightly tugged on it, then paused.

  “How are you?”

  “That feels…good.”

  “Excellent. Let me place a few more.” He did, one of them not taking the first time and needing a redo. Then he slid them around on her oiled skin into new positions, and she felt herself relaxing, moaning at how good it felt as the tightness in her shoulders began to ease.

  She hadn’t realized how damned tense her body had been.

  He added a couple of more, and now she felt her entire body relaxing, nearly melting into the massage table.

  This was kinky?

  Sign me up!

  Hell, she didn’t even feel self-conscious anymore. She realized people were more interested in what Crawford was doing than who he was doing it to. She could have been lying there totally naked and it wasn’t like anyone would care.

  So why should she?

  By the time he finished with her thirty minutes later, she was unaware there’d been a crowd gathered around to watch, and had tuned out most of his talk as he explained to everyone what he was doing. Marcia had pulled a chair over to sit at her head and talk to her.

  But frankly, she wasn’t giving much more than monosyllabic mumbles in response.

  This just felt too. Damn. Good.

  All she wanted now was to go to sleep.

  He removed all the cups, rubbed her skin down, then handed Marcia a tub of wipes to help Mel clean off the excess oil as he started cleaning his cups in preparation for the next person.

  When Mel sat up on the table, she didn’t even think about grabbing the other towel to cover herself at first.

  Marcia smiled. “Someone looks happy.”

  “Holy crap, that was great.” She looked up at Crawford. “Thank you. Can I have one of your business cards?”

  “Of course.” He pulled one out of his case and handed it to her. “My sister is my receptionist, and she’s in the lifestyle, too. Feel free to tell her I worked on you here. Obviously, it goes without saying that if you tell others about me, please don’t mention where we met.” He smiled.

  “Of course.” He was located in Sarasota. “I’ll be making an appointment with you.”

  “See?” he told Marcia. “That’s how I get the monkey on their back. I give them the first one free.”

  Mel giggled. “You’re a sneaky sadist.” She hopped off the table and took her clothes from Marcia. “Thank you,” she said to Crawford. “I really appreciate you doing this.”

  He shrugged. “Just one of the many sadistic services I offer. If you’d like to try the violet wand later, remind me to show it to you before I pack it up after I play.”

  “Thanks.”

  Marcia took her into the bathroom to help her get dressed. Mel turned so she could look at the marks on her back. “Holy crap, it does look like I lost a battle with an octopus.” Some of the marks were only light pink, round circles. Some of them were deep purple she suspected would bruise for several days.

  “Yeah, but at least it’s easily explained.” Mel looked at her. “Tell Mike, if he asks, that we went to a spa.”

  “Ah.” She examined the marks again in the mirror. “The sad thing is, he won’t even notice, I’m sure.”

  Chapter Five

  Carl rode with Don to the club and struggled to pull his mood out of the toilet.

  He knew his friend was right, that he needed to move on, but telling his heart that was another thing entirely.

  A new direction, a new life lay before him, if he could just work up the gumption to start walking in that direction instead of stumbling around in tiny circles while following his own shadow.

  Kind of hard to do when all he wanted to do was collapse, curl up, and go to sleep.

  Just a couple of weeks ago, he’d thought he had a handle on this. He thought he was on the road to recovering his self-esteem, his personality.

  His dignity.

  Seeing eight years of his life dissolved with a judge’s signature had completely upended him emotionally. Yes, he’d known six months ago, from the moment his brain had processed what he was seeing when he opened his bedroom door to investigate the strange noises he’d heard, that the marriage was over.

  This made it final.

  This meant that it wasn’t a bad dream, that it had really happened.

  That the woman he’d loved, who he thought loved him, was actually total stranger.

  Hell, there were probably acquaintances and total strangers he could expect more loyalty from than his own wife.

  Ex wife.

  “Get out of your head,” Don warned.

  Carl looked over at him.

  “I saw the frown,” Don said. “You always get that frown when you start diving into the depths. Focus. Here and now. Stay in that.”

  �
��Easier said than done.”

  “You don’t think I mourn, do you?” Don asked.

  “What?”

  “When a relationship ends, you don’t think I mourn it. Right?”

  Carl shrugged. “Not like you’re married to them.”

  “So? It reinforces that I know I need to make sure when I do find the right woman that I don’t fuck it up six ways to Sunday and back. I’ve cried over relationships, okay? Maybe it looks to you like I’m some callous bastard, but that’s not the case. Only twice have I basically kicked women to the curve without a look back, when their crazy started showing. But even the relationships that have ended that I knew were going in a toxic direction, or were doomed, or whatever, I still grieved. Maybe only a couple of days, or maybe even a few weeks. Still, I grieved, in my own way. We all grieve differently.”

  Carl had only been around for two of Don’s latest breakups. For the past month, Don had played with a couple of different women at the club, and was talking a lot to one of them on FetLife.

  Carl had a suspicion she would be Don’s next ex.

  At least Don was up front with them. Carl would give Don all due credit for that. He didn’t string them along with false promises, or try to juggle several at once in secret.

  Carl had to admit that part of the BDSM lifestyle, the easier honesty, was a welcomed change. Especially after looking back through a couple of years’ worth of cell phone records just to realize that Maria had probably been stepping out on him far longer than she admitted.

  Fortunately, all the STD tests he made his doctor do came back negative.

  And to think I was going to bring up the subject of children with her again.

  Thankfully, he hadn’t.

  Which sucked, because he’d wanted kids. Until this all exploded, he’d wanted them with her.

  Now he might not ever have kids if he didn’t meet the right woman soon enough.

  Then again, maybe I’m better off without kids. Or maybe they’re better off without me.

  It was a little after nine p.m. when they pulled into the parking lot at the industrial complex housing Venture. In a portable storage unit positioned in front of the neighboring unit, Carl knew they were assembling their supplies for the club’s planned expansion. With the tenth anniversary celebration not far away, once the expansion was completed, there was a large party scheduled to mark the occasion.

  In the short time Carl had been coming to Venture with Don, he’d already met a lot of people he was happy to call friends. There were even a few they’d gone out with a couple of times, to a sports bar to shoot darts or watch a game on TV.

  He had a social life again. Before, their lives had revolved around Maria and her schedule and the events she wanted to attend, the friends she wanted to see. She’d neatly managed to nudge all of his friends out of the picture, keeping his time occupied to the point that there hadn’t been much time for him with his friends. Any time he’d tried to schedule a guy’s night out, Maria nearly always had an excuse as to why he couldn’t go, usually involving him tagging along with her and other couples to whatever it was she wanted to do.

  Any time he did go out without her, he usually faced days of almost complete silent treatment as punishment for it.

  Yet she’d had no problems doing things on the side, apparently, when she was supposed to be “working.”

  I’m an idiot.

  Looking back, he could see it all. At the time, he’d wanted to be a good husband, take care of her, make her happy, do anything for her.

  The bottom line was nothing could make her happy because she wasn’t a happy person inside.

  He knew he should probably feel lucky it was only eight years of his life he’d wasted on her and not more, but it still stung like fuck.

  This place had quickly become a second home to him, with people who were, yes, helping him learn to live again.

  Taking a deep breath, he got out and stretched.

  “You going to be okay?” Don asked.

  “I have to be.”

  “You know you have a lot of friends here, right? People who you didn’t know with Maria. People who have your back.”

  “That’s damned spooky.”

  “It wasn’t hard to connect the dots.” Don headed around to the trunk to get their rope and implement bags. “Try to remember how many new friends you have before you get sucked back down into your own head again. Remember that they aren’t going to screw you over the way Maria did. That it’s a new life for you. Quit thinking about the time you think you ‘wasted’ with her.”

  “Seriously, are you like a mind reader or something?”

  “No, it’s just really obvious. Common. Again, why do you think I’m not committing until I’m sure I meet the absolute right one? I don’t consider my time with them wasted, either. If I did that, I’d be one miserable goddamned fuck. I think of what I learned, what I took away from the relationship. The good things. Even the craziest chicks I dated, I still had some fun times, learned something. I was living my life, so that is in no way a waste. You’re only wasting the future by staying mired in the past.”

  Carl grabbed his bags from the trunk. “You should go into making fortune cookies.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered it.” Don grinned. “You should see what I can do with chopsticks and rubber bands.”

  “I’ve seen what you can do with chopsticks and rubber bands. I don’t even have a clit, and it made me cringe.”

  “She loved it. That wasn’t a kiss of loathing she gave me when I let her loose.”

  “Only you could turn chopsticks and rubber bands into instruments of torture.” Carl headed toward the front door.

  Don closed the trunk and followed. “Not only me,” he said. “Hell, I learned that trick from Ross. And I’m damn sure not the first person he taught it to, and he’s definitely not the inventor of that trick. Remember what Tony always says—”

  “If you can’t pervert it, you’re just not kinky enough. I know.” He pulled the door open and held it for Don, who had the larger, heavier bags. Carl just had a small carry-on rolling suitcase and a backpack for his ropes to haul his slowly growing implement collection. Some of which were actually flea market or home improvement store purchases.

  Jenny checked them in and they headed inside. In one corner, it looked like Crawford was doing a fire cupping demo. They spotted Marcia sitting there as well and suspected whoever the man’s latest victim was, she must be a newbie or a personal friend of Marcia’s.

  Marcia always took a special interest in women new to the lifestyle, making it her personal mission to make sure they had all the tools they needed to navigate the kinky waters as safely as possible without them letting subfrenzy get the better of them.

  That was something else Don had warned him about, not to jump into a relationship with someone he played with just because of the shiny new relationship energy he felt for them. That it was okay to play and not take it any farther than that.

  So far, he’d stuck to that rule.

  Even easier now with the emotional dampener of the divorce being finalized.

  I should have let Don throw me the party.

  Don had wanted to invite several of their friends over, take a copy of Carl’s original marriage certificate, and burn it in the barbecue grill in a symbolic cremation of the marriage.

  In fact, maybe he would ask Don to do that after all. He’d nixed Don’s suggestion out-of-hand when his friend had first brought it up the day the papers arrived in the mail from his attorney.

  “She looks new,” Don said, nodding toward Crawford’s scene.

  Carl looked. The woman was now sitting up, smiling, as Marcia stood ready with her clothes. Then Marcia shuffled her off into the bathrooms. He didn’t get a good look at her, but what he saw he liked, octopus marks or not. She had shoulder-length dark-blonde hair and he couldn’t tell what color her eyes were from that distance. About Marcia’s size, she wore a dazzling smile most often seen o
n new submissives experiencing things for the first time.

  “I’ll have to ask Marcia about her,” Don said.

  “Maybe I was going to ask Marcia about her.”

  “Were you going to ask Marcia about her?” Going after the same woman had never been a problem for them before. Usually, they were attracted to totally different types.

  When Carl turned, Don’s pointed blue gaze had pinned him down.

  “Maybe I was,” Carl mumbled.

  “Then do it. I’m supposed to do a rope scene with Crissy tonight, if she even shows.” He looked around. “I don’t see her yet, and she can be flakey sometimes.”

  Saying Crissy could be flakey was like saying the Grand Canyon was deep, or that Mt. Everest was tall. The only reason Don played with her was because she was happily married, with a vanilla husband who didn’t care what she did to get her kinky fix, as long as she didn’t have sex with anyone but him and she came home to him every night.

  Meaning she was the perfect kind of play partner for Don.

  Carl had played with her a couple of times, because she was an experienced bottom who didn’t mind helping break in newbie Tops. But he wasn’t attracted to her in the slightest and usually left her to Don.

  Carl was quickly coming to find he needed to have some sort of mental or emotional attraction to a person to really enjoy a scene with them.

  They’d settled in at one of the tables to watch others play when Marcia returned with the unknown woman.

  And, lucky them, made a beeline right for them.

  Don leaned in. Under his breath he said, “Don’t fuck this up.”

  Marcia pulled out a chair for her friend. “Hey, guys. This is my friend, Mel. Mind if she sits here for a few minutes? Mel, this is Don and Carl. I’ll go get you some water.”

  The woman—whose eyes were hazel, it turned out—looked a little subspacey and out of it. “Hi. Thanks.”

  “No worries,” Don said. “First time?”

  “No, second. First time I’ve ever tried anything though. That was great.”

  “Fire cupping’s pretty cool,” Carl said.

  Next to him, he was aware of Don covering his eyes with his hand.