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  “Fuck it.”

  She could have used a shower, but she needed the sleep more. Dragging herself into the bedroom, she opened her nightstand drawer and pulled out Old Reliable. She reached behind the nightstand and plugged the big Hitachi in by feel, then flipped the comforter back and rolled onto the bed. She didn’t have to set an alarm. Didn’t have to be anywhere too early. She could get off, fall straight to sleep without worrying about cleanup, then shower at the gym in the morning after her own workout. It would be practically as good as a vacation—and the closest thing to a vacation she could currently afford.

  Amie felt herself up, rolling her nipples one at a time, exhaling, trying to let the tension of the day go and concentrate on that ephemeral thrill between her legs. Images flitted through her mind: Pookiebear’s ass dimpling under the cane, a glint of wetness on Mara’s thigh, Kaleigha’s dark-brown nipple with a bite mark next to it. Her mother’s face—revulsion, horror, betrayal—right before she’d slammed the door on Amie. “Even if you did tear this family apart . . .” “Nothing that can’t be made whole if you’d repent . . .” Dru’s face, seen from below, her hair falling over one eye the second before she swept it back.

  Focus.

  No good. So it would have to be up to Mr. Buzzy to get the job done, because there was no denying Mr. Buzzy.

  She flicked the vibe on, brought it to her clit, and held it there until she felt like squirming away from it. Then she increased the pressure, locking down her body, refusing to move until the orgasm ripped through her.

  Once she was done, she turned the vibe off, but didn’t bother unplugging it. She just curled away from it, grabbed her pillow, and wrapped herself around it, wishing it could be a living thing. If she’d invited Mara home with her, it could have been Mara, right? Warm, rosy ass pressing against Amie’s thighs. Slightly sweaty, tired bodies cuddled together. Soft breathing. The scent of somebody else’s shampoo in her nose. Somebody’s perfume. A bruise she could find in the dark, press to earn a whimper before kissing the pain away again. A last reassurance of the shared connection.

  But then, the next morning. And then, always, eventually, a fight about the future. About how ridiculous it was to think of a future—two women, who mainly only had kink in common anyway. What were they going to do, move in together, get married? Be “that lesbian couple”?

  Mara would say, Why not? But Amie knew that couple from her hometown. They had the same bad haircut and always wore men’s pants and polo shirts and they ran a pool-cleaning company together and several times a year when she was growing up, assholes from the high school had painted rude words on their store window. They were viciously sarcastic to each other. She didn’t want to be them.

  She also knew that wasn’t how it had to be, and that she was being prejudiced and irrational and thinking like a hick. She knew other lesbians. Who were all simply people, in and out of relationships like anybody else. Even some people from the club, kinky people passing as vanilla out in the world. She’d see them around town—at the gym, at the store, at restaurants—living their lives, doing normal-people things. Being couples. If she hadn’t known who was the top and who the bottom, she might never have guessed. Which seemed terrifying in some ways, but magical in others. So equal. So freeing.

  That was what she’d tried to have with Mara. Mara, who sometimes reminded her so much of Dru it hurt, but with none of Dru’s switch tendencies. So she should’ve been perfect, right?

  Either Mara or Dru, if Amie had shown them that email from Chris, would’ve groaned in exactly the right way.

  Either one could, if Amie had let them, have gotten her off with no need to resort to Mr. Buzzy.

  Except back when Dru had done that, it had seemed so . . . illicit, somehow. Dru had been the bad girl who knew an astonishing amount about this new kink thing Amie had started exploring, and Amie had been on a near-constant high from the thrill of finally discovering she wasn’t alone in the world.

  It had still been easier to do the whole sex thing in the first place. Hell, Amie had even still been dating some vanilla women back then. Figuring the whole thing out. But a lot of time had passed, and she’d been burned over and over again, and become set in her ways. She’d never understood the way her vanilla dates wanted to play around, kissing and petting, acting as though it revved them up when it all left Amie completely cold. She wanted to find it arousing, she just . . . didn’t. She hadn’t gotten any better at it, so eventually she’d abandoned the effort. And when Mara had tried going down on her once, outside of a scene, when necking during the boring part of a movie had turned friskier . . . it hadn’t gone well. The term “stone butch” might have been bandied about defensively by Amie, something she still wasn’t proud of because it was a lie and a cop-out. Mostly she hadn’t known why Mara seemed so interested in doing it—in making her lose control.

  Amie came. She just didn’t come during sex outside of scenes anymore . . . and rarely during scenes. She didn’t come with other people. She came at home, usually with her vibrator. And it felt necessary. It was not a source of joy. It was time to face the truth about that.

  And probably discuss it with her therapist or something. So she should add “move therapy appointment up by a week” to her long to-do list. Just as well she’d passed on Dru’s card to Mara. Amie didn’t have time to rekindle old friendships. No matter how nice she’d heard Dru’s new club was, or how astonished Amie had been to hear that the slinky, black-clad Goth siren had come to the gym looking for her while she was out with a personal-training client.

  Nope. No time. And no more energy left. The series of beatings and the orgasm finally took effect, and Amie nodded off, one arm slung over her pillow, the Hitachi rolling against her back.

  “It’s too painful.” Dru knew when she had reached her limit. She groaned, slapping the leather side of the spanking bench.

  “Just a few more minutes,” crooned the man behind her. “For me.”

  “Ugh. Fine. Keep going. Might as well finish.”

  “Oh, we’ll finish.” Gavin tapped the screen on his tablet, frowning at the new spreadsheet he’d pulled up. “So this is your advertising budget? How are you tracking ROI?”

  Dru’s head was too full of acronyms already. “Remind me what—”

  “Return on investment.”

  “Oh. So you mean, if I put an ad out, how do I know if it helped?”

  “Right.” He leaned over to make a note on his laptop.

  Dru slumped against the bench, squirming restlessly. She was sitting on one of the knee supports, and it wasn’t the most comfortable. But the office had felt too small, too stuffy with two people in it. Besides, sitting out in the main room of the club gave her a better perspective. She’d started in the chair next to Gavin, then paced for a few minutes, then wound up draped against the bench—taking comfort in the familiar, probably. Though it had been a while.

  “I haven’t done a chart or anything. But I have the dates of when the ads go up, and I have the spreadsheet that shows each night’s admissions. So I can kind of tell . . .” She could see from his expression that she hadn’t been doing enough.

  None of it felt like enough. Padma had always handled most of the business side of things for their club in Seattle, and Dru appreciated more and more each day how much work must have gone into that. Of course, Padma had also had the safety net of a partnership at her accounting firm. The club had been a sideline—a profitable one at times, but nobody relied on that profit to survive.

  Dru probably should have taken Trip’s offer after Padma died. Stayed on as part owner at The Slice, instead of letting Trip buy her out. Kept doing her job as the club’s manager. She was good at working the room, at helping connect players. She could’ve been set for as long as she liked. But she and Padma had made plans, and Dru had promised she’d see them through. They’d both missed the New England autumns, the true winters. The feeling of history. And more, Dru had wanted to get away from Seattle, from the memor
ies of those last few months.

  Gavin typed something into the laptop, the sudden clicks snapping Dru back to the present. Her own club, Escape, was smaller than The Slice, but more boutique. More private rooms, more personal contact with the patrons. She’d already brought in new visitors through word of mouth, through what Padma had once called her matchmaking superpower. Local folks, people from neighboring towns, even some all the way from Boston.

  “Okay, so take a look here.” Gavin swiveled the laptop on his knees so she could see it more easily. Dru rose from the bench and pulled one of the small side tables from next to the “spectator” chairs, then sat to view the screen Gavin was showing her.

  “It’s the admissions, only sideways?” She tracked the charted line with her finger. “Okay, so what does that tell me?”

  “By itself, nothing new. But if you look here, you can add events. Vertical lines. Like this.” Gavin demonstrated, dropping a line a few weeks prior to the current date and then labeling it—it was the date Dru had run an ad in a Boston paper. “So you get a clear visual of the event and the result. If you were an actual client,” he added with a not-so-subtle nudge to her elbow, “I would help you set up a database so you could generate reports to tell you this stuff automatically. But this is a down-and-dirty alternative that will at least eliminate some of the guesswork.”

  “I really, really appreciate your help, Gavin. I’m sorry I can’t afford you!” She didn’t have the backup of a lucrative job, with new money coming in to supplement investments. Hiring a consultant would have been her first choice if she could have. But Gavin had offered to look over her books as a friendly favor, and Dru couldn’t be more grateful. She had given Gavin and his Dom Simon six months’ worth of free cover and first pick of the private playrooms, but she knew he was worth more.

  “I’m teasing. You know, you’re really not in terrible shape. Your receipts are orderly, you have a handle on inventory, no problems with payroll, and it looks like you picked a solid point-of-sale setup for the bar. All the internal workings are great. Getting the word out is always tough.” He saved the spreadsheet, then cocked his head thoughtfully. “Have you thought about more community involvement?”

  Dru raised her eyebrows. “Have you been reading my mind? The food bank’s right down the street, I was planning to set up a donation box.”

  Gavin smiled. “That is awesome. You absolutely should. But I meant the kink community.”

  “Oh!” She blushed and coughed. “Of course. Right. Sorry, I’m from St. Andrews originally, and I thought . . .”

  “No, no, it’s a wonderful idea. Go ask them for a donor kit, and they’ll give you signs to put on the donation boxes.”

  “I will. But what did you mean, if not that?”

  Gavin gestured around the empty club. “Get people in here for stuff that isn’t on club nights. Right now you’re running eight to two, five nights a week, right? Hour on either end for setup and cleaning?”

  “Right. And I don’t have the margin to pay the staff overtime, so—”

  “No, no, you wouldn’t have to. Not much, at least. I’m talking about hosting events either in the afternoons or during the day on weekends. Like right now.” It was eight thirty on a Saturday morning, and the place was only open because the weekly cleaning service would be arriving shortly. “It’s a space looking for a use. You could have . . . shibari demonstrations. Try-it-outs. Mini vendor fairs. Regular training sessions. You could charge admission at the door, probably use it to cover some of the speakers, but you wouldn’t need to have the bar open. Maybe one bouncer for security, since you wouldn’t have DMs around. You could probably get some club members to volunteer to do the trainings and help out at the events, or offer them a small flat fee. Or free admission to the club, like me and Simon. And the real benefit would be in getting more word of mouth out. We’re not that far from Boston here. There are a lot of folks who’d come for a weekend daytime event, then stay to play at night during regular hours.”

  “Like a mini-convention!” Dru could almost picture it. Then the implications crept in. “Lining up the trainers and keeping track of who was registered, that would be a whole new set of software, wouldn’t it?”

  “True. You’d need a more robust notification system too. Your newsletter is fine for a monthly update to a whole subscriber list, but you’re not really set up for automated class-reminder emails, online registration and payment, all of that.” He closed the laptop and tapped his lip thoughtfully. “Do you know anybody who runs, maybe . . . a daycare? Or a cooking school, something like that? Anything where people sign up for regular classes, and there’s an online calendar, and the system has to track the classes and who’s in charge of each one, and handle the registrations and payment.”

  Dru knew. Right away, she knew. Saw the gym as clearly as if she were still standing there as she had been the previous afternoon. Looking around for a familiar blonde ponytail, reluctantly handing her card to the burly bald guy in the ridiculously tight Torque staff T-shirt.

  “Like a gym,” she offered. “One with exercise classes.”

  Gavin’s jaw dropped. “Oh my God, that’s perfect! Do you know somebody who owns a gym?”

  “Owns? No. Comanages . . . I think?” And was, once upon a time, an information systems major. Before she’d had to drop out of college because she couldn’t afford it anymore, even working two jobs. Amie had been a semester and a half away from graduating. “She’d know how the software worked. The whole setup.”

  “Networking success, it sounds like.” He was already packed, his laptop in its bag, his jacket slung over his shoulder. “Thanks for agreeing to meet me so early, by the way. This way I also get to swing by Bohemia before it’s open. Make sure Simon hasn’t broken the cash register or anything.”

  Dru chuckled. “I didn’t realize that was one of the services your company provided.”

  Gavin grinned, flicking his over-long hair out of his eyes. “No, that’s a purely personal service.”

  Simon ran the local bookstore, Bohemia, which had seen a lot of improvement since he first hired Gavin as a business consultant. Dru wondered what the two men were like outside the club environment—it sounded like they worked well together. And they always seemed happy.

  She pushed down the pang of envy. Simon and Gavin had a new relationship; of course they were happy. Dru had been over the moon when she first met Padma and Trip. And it had been even more magical when she and Padma decided to go their own way, with Trip’s blessing. That first three-day vacation with just the two of them, to a friend’s cabin in the Cascades. Days of laughter and nights of every kink they could dream up. Figuring out how they worked as a pair, acknowledging that what they had wasn’t only about the kink anymore. Confessing feelings they hadn’t been able to name while Trip was still in the picture.

  “Dru? You okay?”

  She started, putting a hand to her throat. Gavin’s eyes were full of concern, and Dru smiled at him, shaking her head and chuckling at herself. “I’m sorry. Just tired from closing last night. I should’ve ordered the economy-size coffee instead.”

  She saw Gavin out, thanking him for his advice, locked the door behind him, then returned to the main floor.

  It wasn’t home yet. It was only a big empty space, too quiet and dimly lit and borderline creepy. If she were in a movie about a serial killer, she’d be right in line for next victim, and the oppressive silence only made her edgier as she anticipated the sound that might break it. A footfall, a knocked-over glass.

  “Ugh,” she said after a few minutes of trying to look at the notes she’d made during the meeting with Gavin. Giving up on trying to make sense of things, she tidied the notepad away to her office, strolled back out to the floor, picked up her phone, and scrolled to the contacts. There it was, the number for Torque, the gym where Amie worked. Would she be there on a Saturday morning? It seemed like prime time for personal trainers, a likely time for Pilates classes.

  Per
fect career for Amie, really. One of her many side jobs in college had been teaching aerobics classes at the campus gym. She’d seemed to enjoy that more than any of her course work. Dru had never really understood Amie’s determination to work with technology; doing the opposite of what her fundamentalist, Luddite family wanted seemed like a poor way to plot out a life. But a decade had passed, and they’d all come a long way since college. Dru didn’t feel like the same person she’d been back then; probably Amie didn’t either.

  Should she call? She’d claim it was business, claim it was at her “consultant’s” urging, but all the while she’d be wondering what would happen if they met up. Wondering if Amie would still look the same, still have the same laugh. The same way of frowning when she was ready to cut through anyone’s bullshit. The same way with a whip or a cane. Would she be as suggestible? Mention a kink, and a week later Amie would be exploring it as if she’d thought it up herself?

  Dru shivered and pressed the screen to dial. Waited through a few rings, then held the phone away from her ear slightly as a loud man’s voice blasted through.

  “Yeah, this is Chris, how can I torque you today?”

  Really?

  “Hello, this is Drusilla Stasevich, is Amie Templeton in today?”

  “Yeah, sec. Hey, are you the one who dropped the card off yesterday?”

  She’d thought he sounded familiar: the big, leering bruiser who’d taken the card and lingered too long over the handshake, leaning too far into her personal space. “Yes, I am.”

  “’Kay.” He plunked the phone down on a hard surface, and Dru heard him calling over a background of clanking and gym grunts. “Amie! It’s your Elvira calling. Aw yeah, girl on girl! Bow chicka wow wowwwww.”

  Dru sighed heavily, stifling a groan of disgust.

  Another voice spoke up, getting louder. “. . . aware that I am a lesbian, Chris, but thanks for reminding everybody in such a classy way.” She picked up the receiver. “Hello, this is Amie, can I help you?”