Wrecked (The Blackened Window) (24 page)

At least one night per week, Xander would go to the gym with the guys for Jiu Jitsu. Christy and I would go out sometimes, and she pressed me for details, but I didn’t really share anything with her.

Weeks passed like that and I was genuinely happy.

Winter break was coming. Two weeks with no school. It made me think about the possibilities of what two weeks uninterrupted with him would be like.
Maybe even dangerous
. But we both had family obligations. He was going to DC and I was going home to Chicago. Of course I was excited to see my family, but the thought of being apart from Xander was awful. I fluctuated between sadness at that thought and anxiety about finals. All our time together felt pressurized.

A few weeks before finals, we were both feeling edgy, too much pent up energy clawing at the inside of our skin. We were studying together at the library so we weren’t tempted to get on each other, but the casual touches were getting more suggestive and my concentration was completely blown.

“Hey, we need to blow off some steam this weekend. Let’s go to the Window.” He said it so casually, like ‘let’s go see a movie’—which is what every other boyfriend I had ever had would have suggested to blow off steam.
He’s all ‘Let’s just go to the sex club that our friend owns, where I have publicly tortured and fucked other women’.
It took me by surprise and I delayed answering him.

“A while back you once said something like ‘we’ opened the Window. Were you involved in its creation?”

He smiled slightly. “Yes, I’m a silent partner. I trust Jason. He’s talented at creating fun. When he moved here, he was a club promoter and we started getting capital together. I put a bunch of money I had saved into the club.” He sat back in his chair, a satisfied look on his face.

“I see.”
My boyfriend owns a sex club
. “What would we do there?”

“We don’t
have
to do anything, but…I need to check out of my brain some. I need to hurt someone.” A cold gleam tinged with excitement burned in his eyes. “Truthfully, Leda, I want you to see that part of my world, but if you don’t want to, I can live with that. But I need to go and I need to know that you’re okay with that.”

It was at odds with the Xander I knew and understood. He was always in control and never seemed to
need
anything. And I thought he hurt me a fair amount of the time—nipple clamps, spankings. My pride stung that I couldn’t satisfy all of his needs.

“Well, I want to go, but I hate the idea of you with someone else. I mean, are you talking about fucking someone else? I can’t handle that—hard limit, red.” He had been trying to get me to tell him what my
hard
and
soft
limits were for a while, but it seemed like such a weird topic to me. I had no idea what my soft limits were and all the hard ones seemed like they should be obvious.

“I don’t want to fuck someone else. Come with me and then you’ll know I’m not fucking someone else. I’ll save it all up for you.” A questioning look crossed his face. “I don’t know if you can handle what I’m thinking about doing. I want you to know what I am talking about before we even really consider playing this rough together.”

“Okay. I’m intrigued, a little freaked out. But I’m calling Christy so I have someone to talk with when you are…doing whatever you are going to do.”

“Perfect. Christy and Jason are good sounding boards.” His face brightened. “And June emailed that she’ll be around this weekend. I was thinking we could meet her for a drink or lunch, but this is even better.”

* * * *

The rest of the week passed in a blur and I was alternately totally focused on studying and completely distracted by anticipation. All week, Xander seemed edgier, something dark in him growing. We decided to go on Saturday night and all night Friday he was antsy and distracted. We had sex, as usual, but I could tell he was holding back. And when he came, he sounded more frustrated than triumphant.

Saturday, I tried to study and couldn’t, so I tried a bike ride instead when the rain broke for a while. The air was brisk and my head cleared. I felt more centered, my nerves settled. I got ready, wearing the same gun-metal gray dress I’d worn on our first date, maybe to subconsciously remind him of what we had. He came to pick me up and the tension rolling off him was palpable. He grabbed me, pushed me against his car and started kissing me. All of him was rougher, harder, pushing into me more. He buckled me in the seat, but dropped his face in my lap and bit me, smirking widely at my yelp.

At the bar, I ordered a Lemon Drop again, but he only drank Coke, telling me that he wanted to be completely clear headed. Jason and Christy met up with us there. They were brimming with barely contained excitement, and I felt so out of my element. That was how it had always been though, since I’d started dating Xander. Always off balance, always taken just a little bit further than what was comfortable. This was the first time in a while that I had really had misgivings.

Christy and I hit the ladies room before we left.

“God, girl! I can feel the nervous energy pouring off you! What are you really worried about, deep down?”

“Just the obvious, you know. I’m worried that he’s going to remember that I was just a phase, that he’s sick of holding back and he’ll realize that he has been slummin’ it this whole time with me.” It came out in a rush and tears sprang to my eyes. She turned to me and hugged me.

“Leda, that boy is devastated by his feelings for you. I mean completely destroyed, wrecked.”

Those were a lot of negative sounding adjectives and I wondered if I should be concerned about that.

“I think he can’t reconcile being in love with you and what he should do with his basic need for some occasional sadism. He never wants to hurt you like that. You’re too precious to him.”

She thinks he’s in love with me?

She let me go, looking in my eyes, momentarily serious. “Tonight will be a learning experience for both of you.” With her eyes trained on mine, she adjusted the neck of my dress, accentuating my cleavage then reached in my bra and pinched my nipples so that they were poking through the fabric, very visible. “That’ll get his attention.” She smiled devilishly as she nearly skipped out of the restroom. I giggled, letting go of some of my tension as we left.

It did get his attention. When we got back to the table, he grabbed me and pressed the length of his body against me. “Chilly, little girl?”

“No. Christy.”

He barked out a laugh, and tension in both of us broke a bit.

* * * *

The Blackened Window was dark and industrial feeling. When we first entered, it was into a large space that wasn’t that different from other clubs I had been to. Loud music, central bar, people dancing. The floor and bar were concrete. All the staff wore all black, some with random appearing BDSM accoutrement—a guy with a spiked cuff bracelet, a waitress with a red velvet collar. Jason guided us through the space, greeting patrons and staff alike. We headed up to a second floor open loft overlooking the main party space. A cocktail waitress delivered some drinks and we watched everything spread out below us. Jason’s pride was evident in his posture.

Xander exuded dominant glory. He wore all black, leather pants and a cotton V-neck T-shirt that looked expensive. His eyes ate up everything around him, maybe looking for June or someone else he knew, maybe trying to find a play partner, but he never took his hands off me. He guided me around by the small of my back, occasionally tracing his fingers up my spine to the back of my neck. I’d worn my hair down, at his request, and he tangled his fingers in it, pulling my head back for a kiss. And after a few drinks, he told me we were ready to move to more entertaining pursuits and clipped a thin bracelet around my wrist, but when he did, I noticed his matching bracelet—and that Christy and Jason each wore one as well.

“Are you ready, little girl?”

I nodded at him, wide-eyed. He took my hand and guided me through a door at the back of the lofted VIP area we’d been in. Christy came with us, but Jason stayed back to do owner-y things. Xander led the way, down a dark flight of stairs that had occasional bare red bulbs situated in the seam between the ceiling and the walls. Christy was behind me. There was no going back. Deep bass still thumped through the walls, sensuous and relentless.

The stairway opened into an area under the loft. It was like a foyer, an anteroom, of sorts. There was a type of ‘coat check’, where some people were dropping off or picking up clothes. They were selling a few random items there as well—condoms, lube, zip ties of varying sizes. A chill washed over me
. I am so out of my depth.
Christy was shining in all her bubbly effervescence, but Xander’s whole demeanor had changed. He was at once mentally stalking through the room for someone to release all his need on and possessively holding me close to his side, clearly staking a claim.

From the anteroom, there were doorways and passages to other rooms. Christy informed me that these went to the actual play spaces. She wanted to go to the left and take me with her. She pulled my hand and Xander squeezed me tighter, shaking his head at her. She gave him a sweet, innocent, pleading look.

“Just to show her around. Besides it’ll give you a few minutes to decide who you want. I won’t let anyone touch her.”

He relented, roughly kissing my temple as he let me go.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Xander

David Guetta featuring Kid Cudi,
Memories

“All right, but seriously, be careful, Christy.”

Christy saw the warning in my facial expression and understood that my instinct was not to tolerate Leda being away from me, potentially vulnerable.

Once they walked away, people noticed me. People who were regulars here, long term regulars, who had been around long enough to know me, at least by sight or reputation. The sinews of my muscles felt tight in my back and my face fell into the blanked out expression I wore when I played. I felt powerful, untouchable.

The music faded into another song that reminded me of conquest, conquering, the tremble of a woman’s thighs under my teeth. I felt my lips trying to pull back in a snarl, a dark smile, full of menace and soul-deep power opened on my face.

I watched the crowd around me, nodding to a few other Doms I knew, a sign of respect, but not open challenge. There were very few that I counted friends, but many I felt a kinship with. A few that I loathed. My mind flashed through images. The snap of a dragon-tail whip against the back of a creamy thigh, the jolt of her head as I slammed her into a wall, her moan-gasp as I licked her at the corner of her jaw. Interestingly, they were all generic images, no specific woman, not Leda. This wasn’t about her. It was about my dominion.

I walked to the door of the true dungeon play space, watching the various debaucheries playing out in there. Submissive-types—and a few Doms—dropped their eyes as I surveyed them. The new DM was actually a Dungeon Mistress—Kyla. She was a previous wrestler, like a real professional. The same height as me, could possibly lift as much as me. Hard, almost masculine angle to her jaw. She was dressing some new dominant-type down. I saw why behind him. A young woman with a bloody mouth, crying. And while some people may get into that intensity, she didn’t seem to.

The guy made some smart-ass comment, like a total pussy, to Kyla’s back as she started to walk away. She heard him and turned on her heel. Her hand snapped out from her body faster than I could follow. She delivered a strike with extended fingers directly into his trachea, and he dropped, grabbing his neck, choking and hacking, eyes tearing. She stood over him, fingers in his face. I knew what she was doing. She was rescinding his invitation into the club. Essentially, kicking him out, black-listing him in the kink community. There were always a few discrete bouncer types around and two of them appeared at her side, the threat imminent. But the crap ‘Dom’ got up, hands in the air, spewing some hateful shit, but leaving. The few bystanders who had been watching were nodding their heads, agreeing with Kyla’s intervention.

The bouncers escorted him out and Kyla turned to the sub girl, who had stopped crying, but was looking up at her in awe. I smiled, knowing Kyla was a good hire. She escorted the girl out of the dungeon, and I knew she’d be taking her to the recovery room—a quieter space with couches, refreshments, low lighting, blankets and no sex or play allowed. As Kyla and the girl passed me at the door, she met my eyes with a knowing look, raising her eyebrows as if to suggest I could rescue this little one. I subtly shook my head and she kept moving.

There was risk in this type of play, no matter how well partners knew each other. The risk was most assuredly higher when people didn’t know their partners well. I suspected that girl didn’t know that guy well, and I didn’t really want to play with someone I just picked up. It was too much risk. I couldn’t even imagine Leda’s response if I took a sub too far in front of her. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.

I left the dungeon, and went to find my girls. Christy was honorarily mine when Jason was busy here. Not to control or play with, just under my protection. I stood at the door of the sensualism space. Leda and Christy were on the other side of the room, holding hands and whispering to each other. Christy’s face lit in lust, while Leda’s was full of wonder. As I watched them, Leda’s wonder faded a bit, was replaced with heat. Her nipples tightened through her dress and a flush crept up her neck. Her lips were slightly parted and her tongue was just visible at the edge of her lower lip.

Mine.

Like she’d heard me, she looked up at the door, saw me. And her body language answered mine, saying ‘yes’. I pointed to the ground in front of me, thinking
Get the fuck within arm’s reach of me, now.
She leaned to Christy and kissed her cheek, disengaged and came to me. As soon as I could reach her, I grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the room, pressing her into the wall. I claimed her mouth with mine, laid my body against her, driving the air from her lungs.