The Principle of Desire (The Science of Temptation) Page 2

  But if you had to scream it via your wardrobe, you didn’t have it. And her natural inclination was to decide once she arrived at the club, anyway. Leave herself open to all possibilities. Everyone knew her there anyway, it wasn’t like she needed to flag. That was one of the benefits of a discreet, members-only standing play party. They all knew each other, who liked what, who disliked whom. They all knew each other’s stories, but only the kinky ones.

  There were disadvantages too...like the fact that everyone knew her there. And it was small, only four or five dozen members. Houston didn’t offer many alternatives, though. After she and Aaron broke up and he left for England, it had taken her two months to find an available, agreeable bottom to try out her fledgling topping tendencies on. Longer to gain the confidence to let somebody else top her again. That had been the Professor. His newbie sub had helped with aftercare, then breached club etiquette and invited Beth to go shopping and hit a movie the next weekend.

  Beth accepted, surprising herself. Shortly thereafter, Cami had become her first female friend since moving to Houston almost four years earlier. She’d followed Aaron to his new job here based on what she thought was love. The move meant earning her doctorate at a less prestigious college than she’d originally planned, and generally bending her life around Aaron’s. Keeping her Master happy while keeping up with her classes, her dissertation, and later her job as a lecturer at another local university, had not left Beth much time for socialization. Or much time to consider whether what she and Aaron shared was really what she wanted. It was what she’d had since the age of twenty, when he’d spotted her at a kink club, carded and expelled her, then escorted her home and claimed her for his own; it was what she knew. She’d convinced herself it was what she wanted, because it included none of the things she didn’t want at age twenty. To a barely post-teenager, marriage was a meaningless piece of paper, kids only kept you from traveling the world, a white picket fence was something that presaged evil in a bad horror movie, and vanilla monogamy was a bourgeois concept. With Aaron, she faced none of those dangers.

  Now, of course, she recognized the real danger. She wanted all those things now, but she feared that getting them would mean sacrificing everything the Dark Side Closet implied. The kink community, kink itself, having and occasionally flying a freak flag.

  Beth smoothed on thigh-high boots, running her hands over the buttery black leather before beginning the tedious job of lacing them up. All the way up, from toe to a few inches below her crotch. They were almost as good as pants, coverage-wise, though she’d rue the heat-trapping leather and the four-inch heels by the end of the night. She’d bought these boots the first time she went shopping with Cami, which was also the first time she’d gone shopping with a girlfriend since her early undergrad days. The pre-Aaron days.

  “You have to get them. Wait...can you afford them? If you can afford them,” Cami had self-corrected, “you must get these boots. Obviously, you need to have these and wear them every time you go to the club. I’m getting hot and bothered just looking at them.”

  Beth had glanced around at that, a reflex trained into her over the years. Was anyone listening? Could anybody see? Did people standing nearby in this slick urban mall even realize how very fetish-adjacent these boots were?

  “They’re not as uncomfortable as I would have thought,” she’d admitted, stretching her legs out before her, then angling herself in front of the mirror to see if they made her calves look thick. “Not bad at all, really.”

  Of course she’d bought the boots. And after shopping and the movie, she’d ended up back at Cami’s apartment, where a disgruntled Professor—Ivan, when he was at home—had scowled while pouring them wine.

  “I knew if I let these relationships turn into a Venn diagram, the intersection would become increasingly problematic.”

  Oh, that Ivan, such a charmer. It was fascinating to see him edgy and uncertain, and even more interesting to see Cami turn to him and say, “Remember, not everything’s about how you want to compartmentalize things. This is my Venn diagram. And you can intersect with it here or not—either way is fine. Go with the one that makes you more comfortable. It’s after ten but it’s Friday night. Why don’t you go see if anybody’s still online?”

  “I should just go to bed. My signals are all crossed. I feel like I should be ordering you both to come with me.”

  Beth had giggle-snorted hard enough to snork chardonnay up her nose. The searing pain was wildly at odds with the humor inherent in the situation. “Jesus. No thank you. My circles don’t overlap that far.”

  Cami was grinning, too. “Agreed. I’ll be over there by, say...eleven-thirty. Okay, honey?” When Ivan didn’t respond, Cami pressed him. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” he finally conceded. “I’m saying okay because I know I’m supposed to, but I don’t really feel okay because it’s still weird.”

  “That’s fine. That’s a perfectly valid way for you to feel. But we can talk more about it at eleven-thirty.”

  After a few rehearsed-sounding but socially acceptable parting words, he went home to his own apartment down the row from Cami’s. Utterly bizarre, but somehow Cami smoothed it all over. She knew Ivan needed lots of guidelines and clear boundaries, but admitted she liked managing all of that for him. She said she liked the sense of providing control and being needed, as much as she enjoyed relinquishing control to him at other times. Beth got that, at least in theory, but it was still strange to see Ivan outside what she considered his natural habitat.

  At the club, Ivan seemed a bit odd but he was never awkward. He was in command and calm, because he knew exactly what he was doing and what contingencies might arise. He’d had a lot of practice, building on natural talents, and it showed. Quiet, intense confidence and absolute mastery with all manner of whips and restraints. He didn’t need to be loud or flashy to be in charge. Ivan’s focus was on meeting his own needs and those of his sub, never about proving himself to anyone else, and Beth admired that. It was almost as if, because he had trouble understanding how other people ticked, Ivan overcompensated to make sure he was covering all the bases.

  Not quite Aaron’s opposite, but close enough. Beth’s onetime Master was a good Dom and a decent human being, but he could carry a chip on his shoulder at times. He needed to be noticed, acknowledged as alpha, in the bedroom and the club as in all other venues of his life. But he was good at everything he did, and charismatic, so he managed to come across as mostly philanthropic, interested in leading for the good of all concerned. At twenty, Beth had found that quality supremely reassuring in him, in and out of bed. At twenty-eight, she recognized that Aaron was usually just throwing his weight around because he was insecure. With him, life was one long dick-measuring contest. And she’d come to realize that sometimes she liked to be in charge, which didn’t sit well with Aaron at all.

  Beth slipped the black dress on over a lime-green thong and nothing else, loving the way the fabric moved against her skin. The halter showed a borderline scandalous amount of her chest, but the skirt ended just above the knee, covering her boot tops. Modesty-wise, she could have worn it almost anywhere but work, but the nearly weightless material was like wearing nothing at all. Secretly naked, that was how she felt. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be any form of naked tonight, but the dress looked and felt too great to take off.

  No collar, no cuffs, no spikes or brads or heavy chains. Tonight her only accessories were a tiny silver triskelion pendant and simple diamond earrings. Plus bright red lipstick and a crapton of mascara, even though she knew it would probably mean raccoon eyes before the night was through.

  “You look like a moderately expensive hooker,” she told her mirrored image, then gave herself two thumbs up. “Perfect.”

  I look like a Domme. Maybe it was going to be that sort of night, after all. It was the attitude, not the outfit, that mattered...though perhaps the boots were a bit of a giveaway.

  Aaron would come back full of lines from Juli
us Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, the tragedies he’d been studying in performance as research for his next book. Literature, theater and sociology, an interdisciplinary triple threat. That was Aaron. He would have been outstanding at Trivial Pursuit if he’d ever deigned to play it. Once upon a time she would have been the first to respond to one of his Shakespearean sallies in kind, with something like “O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!” She had loved to be the one who could keep up with his references, who knew all the inside jokes. She’d double-majored in psychology and English lit, and could have happily studied either for her graduate work. Looking back, perhaps she’d chosen psychology because a part of her was already seeking distance from Aaron. She’d somehow known that if she chose English, he would never stop trying to influence her work.

  Now I’m all about how those were “my salad days, when I was green in judgment.” Even as she thought it, she corrected herself just as Aaron might have. Cleopatra had been “cold in blood” too in her younger days, blithe and reckless and sure of her own emotional indestructibility. Love had not yet brought her low. In contrast, Beth felt invincible now, finally impervious to Aaron’s version of love. And he had accused her, before he left, of indulging a childish, rebellious “phase” at his expense, so he obviously didn’t think much of her current judgment. The accusation was her own fault, really, since she’d known he wouldn’t take well to her request to teach her how to throw a single-tail whip. Maybe asking anyway had been a rebellion on her part...and definitely, asking him to be her practice dummy had been waving the rhetorical red cape under the bull’s nose.

  “You know what? It’s fine,” he’d told her—in full Master mode, as though his say in the matter was final and all that counted. “Do what you need to do while I’m gone. But when I come back, I expect you to have this foolishness out of your system. And your lease will be up so you can move into my place, which I suspect is what you’re really getting at with all of this anyway. That’s fine, too—it’s probably past time. We can pretend that whole whip conversation never took place. I’ll give you a pass on it.”

  “Ah. Like allowing a dog one bite?”

  “If you want to characterize it that way. I was thinking of it as allowing you to save face, because you’ll probably be embarrassed about acting up like this once you’re over it.”

  “No, thank you, then.”

  “No, thank you, on the pass? So you want to be a Domme now, but you’re asking for punishment when I’m willing to skip it? Top fail,” he’d scoffed. He only used colloquialisms when he wanted to be particularly dismissive. She could taste the extra irony on the air, and where once his snark had intoxicated her, now it only irritated.

  “I never said I wanted to be a Domme. And I was saying no, thank you, to continuing our relationship when you come back. Bon voyage, Aaron.”

  That was the last time she’d seen him in person. He’d spent the next six months emailing her as if that exchange had never happened. At first she had responded politely but briefly, hoping he would take the hint that she wasn’t interested in what he was doing. For the past month or so, she had ignored his emails. For the past week, she’d ignored the voicemails he’d started leaving. Today, she had also ignored his text.

  Tonight, things might turn interesting.

  * * *

  Stupid baggy-ass shorts. Stupid pockets. Stupid phone.

  It had taken Ed a few hours to notice his phone was missing, and some more time to figure out where he must have lost it. Ivan’s car, on the way back from the damn beer run. Because he’d been wearing the baggy-ass gym shorts with the pockets that weren’t deep enough, and put his phone in his pocket anyway, like an idiot. He was bound to lose it at some point.

  Karma, he suspected. The instant kind, because he’d been doing something unethical. Under the pretense of searching Ivan’s phone for a better song selection, he’d flipped through his friend’s contacts and noted Beth’s number and email address. Ed spent his days looking at line after line of code, and complex formulae and algorithms, so it was no effort at all to hang on to a ten-digit phone number and standard firstname.lastname@nameofcollege.edu email for long enough to return to the music app, pick a song at random, then switch to his own phone to enter the information. Ivan, focused on the road and his compulsive mirror-checking routine, didn’t even notice.

  If he wanted to keep people out of his phone, he should have a better password than his girlfriend’s name with numbers replacing the vowels. A fifth grader could’ve hacked that. Really, Ed had picked up the phone out of idle curiosity, not with anything underhanded in mind. He would have expected Ivan to use a random character sequence as a passcode, and was startled as hell when the altered name he entered got him in. It seemed like providence, though, so he’d taken advantage.

  The universe was obviously smacking him down for it. When he’d worked up the nerve to try calling Beth around nine that evening, he’d finally noticed the absence of his phone. And now Ivan wasn’t answering his cell. Neither was Cami.

  Despite what Beth had said about not having plans with Cami that evening, it was at least obvious that Ivan, Cami and their neighbor Ben had all gone somewhere together. Making the rounds of the connected duplexes, Ed confirmed that none of them were home, but only Ivan’s car was gone from the carport. It was a short logical hop to deducing that Beth had been covering for the group because Ed hadn’t been invited. That stung a bit, but it was hardly the first time something like that had happened to him. He’d been a self-professed curmudgeon since the eighth grade, and he wasn’t usually who people wanted along when they went clubbing. In this case, the real annoyance was that he wouldn’t be getting his phone back until morning.

  And then, like a stray sunbeam streaming from the clouds, a thought shone through Ed’s brain.

  I have that GPS tracking app on the phone.

  Ten minutes later, he was on the freeway with a printed Google map, headed toward an address in a dicey part of town.

  Not long after that, he parked on a side street near the Convention Center, wondering if it was really worth the risk of leaving his car. Scanning the street, he saw dilapidated warehouses on one side, and two on the other that had been remodeled into expensive lofts. Down the road a block or two were the tiny wood-frame houses of one of Houston’s rougher neighborhoods. Chain link surrounded the yards, several of the streetlights were out, and though Ed could hear the deep thump of a car stereo nearby, he saw nobody outside. No cars, no people on the sidewalks down there. Not even drug dealers or hookers.

  There were two guys in sight close by, however, sitting on folding chairs in the doorway of one of the warehouses. It was better kept than the others, and he saw pulsing lights at the grubby windows on the second floor. As the car-thumper drove out of sound range, Ed could hear music emanating from the warehouse building as well. A club, he figured, and the two hulks in front were the bouncers. One in jeans and a black T-shirt, one in black leather pants with a leather vest, both formidably muscled.

  “Fuck.” He never got through the door at clubs on his own. In groups with girls, sure, but on his own he had never made the cut. Even in college when just about everybody got in. He didn’t know if it was his looks or his vibe or what, but he’d come to dread the experience and was kind of relieved when, after his sophomore year or so, people stopped inviting him along. Clubs were dumb, anyway. He sucked at dancing, and the drinks were always overpriced. He couldn’t imagine what Ivan was doing in there, but Ed had seen his car parked down the block so he knew he had the right place.

  He’d changed into jeans, at least. With only one hole in the knee. His faded Ming the Merciless T-shirt had no collar, but from the look of the bouncers, dress code wouldn’t be a problem. Not that his problem with clubs had ever had anything to do with dress codes. Still, he’d come all this way, so he might as well give it a shot.

  He had to resist the urge to hit the remote lock button multiple times as he jogged across the street and u
p the steps.

  The leather vest guy stood up and spoke before Ed was halfway up the stoop.

  “Can I help you?” His enormous body blocked the doorway, and he’d crossed his arms, which made his biceps bulge even more. Unnecessary, Ed felt.

  “Uh, yeah. I’m looking for somebody who’s probably in there? I think he has my cell phone. I dropped it in his car.”

  “This is members only, I’m afraid.” the black T-shirt guy informed him. He had a crew cut and tattoos and looked like a Marine, but had the voice of a BBC radio announcer.

  Ed smiled, aiming for friendly and harmless but landing on nervous instead. “I don’t plan to stay or anything. I only want my phone. As soon as I find him I’ll be out of here.”

  Leather Vest took a step toward him, his expression getting even harder. “It’s. Members. Only.”

  Again, unnecessary. The belligerence ticked Ed off, and then he did something stupid. He knew it was stupid, even as he did it, but that didn’t slow him down. Crossing his arms to mirror the bouncer, he stood his ground and glared back. “I just. Want. My. Phone.”

  Chapter Three

  Somebody had put on music with a Latin dance beat, replacing the usual mix of hip-hop and disco throwback tunes. The new sound lent the warehouse a different flavor, made the familiar seem exotic. And the disco ball was on, because Master Lance, who suffered from epilepsy and couldn’t be around flashing lights, wasn’t there that night. All in all, a refreshing change. Beth stayed longer than she might have because of that. After an hour and a half, however, she knew she was wasting her time. Nothing interesting was going to happen that evening, and she wasn’t even in the mood to play. She was too anxious about the possibility of Aaron showing up. It finally dawned on her that she was letting him ruin her evening, whether he put in an appearance or not. If she went somewhere else, even home to watch a DVD, she’d be happy and it would be on her own terms.