30. Thirty #2
I lingered at the coolant vent, letting the wind-up toy nerves settle. “Are you working the main room tonight?” I asked, voice pitched casually.
She blinked, amused, then set her phone face down. “They put me in the cage.”
“What’s your name again?” I asked, and she grinned.
“Harley. You?”
“Echo.” I smiled.
She grinned wider. “I know. I’ve watched you on stage before with Zephyr. You’re hot.”
“Thanks. Want to share the cage tonight?”
There was a flash of excitement in her eyes. “I fucking thought you’d never ask.”
We spent the next ten minutes doing our makeup. Harley painted my lids with a churning smoke and edged my lashes with diamond dust.
Every once in a while, her fingers grazed the bite on my neck, and her eyes softened as she said, “He did that to you? Damn, girl.”
I licked a thumb and smudged the glitter on her cheek.
The club melted from a riot to a single thrum when the lights went cold blue, and the DJ dropped a beat that dripped sex and violence in equal measure.
Zephyr handled the suspension silks, gliding up and down with his usual plastic smile, but Harley and I owned the cage—me in my glass platform heels, her in latex and mesh, both of us strobing under the lazy orbit of a spotlight.
Wrapping a hand in her hair, I dragged her off-balance to exaggerate the arched sprawl over my lap.
When the crowd started to howl, Harley looked at me sideways and whispered, “You want to improvise?”
“Always.”
She kissed me, and the whole floor pivoted our direction—the kind of snap that turns a dozen Wall Street creeps to rubberneck at once.
I kissed her back, harder, then licked her collarbone and left a lipstick stain at the hollow of her throat.
She pawed at my ass, half-dragging, half-lifting me onto her thighs, and I straddled her, letting the dancers on the upper balconies catch the silhouette of my legs splayed wide across her waist.
Harley ran a palm up the inside of my thigh, tracing the edge of my thong. A few hands in the crowd rose—hesitant, worshipping, some even clapping, like the scene at the cage was a gift. I let her, then flicked my hair up and let her fingers slip into my thong and touch the slickness there.
She worked two knuckles in, getting me ready for more, and the look on her face, focused but playful, as if she was teasing parallel universes where this ended in us on opposite sides of something bloody, sent a shiver from my spine down to the pivots of my knees.
She arched her brow, eyes flicking between my mouth and my cunt, as if to memorize the way I blushed all the way to my navel at her touch.
The crowd roared at any uptick in tempo, and on the other side of the cage bars, I could see half a dozen men and women with their hands pressed to the glass, fogging it over with hungry breath.
I let my back bend, head lolling so far that my scalp grazed the metal mesh. Harley followed, sliding her fingers deeper, then curled them until I nearly yelped.
When I bucked, dragging her hand in that last centimeter, she leaned in and whispered, “You’re going to get us both in trouble, you know that?”
Her breath was hot against my ear, her fingers still working inside me as the crowd beyond the cage grew more frenzied.
I laughed, a sound that tasted like freedom and spite. “Trouble is exactly what I’m looking for tonight.”
Her eyes widened slightly as she caught my meaning.
She knew who I was—who I belonged to.
Everyone in this city knew.
The chain’s absence from my throat felt like a declaration of war, and maybe it was.
“Your man will kill me,” she whispered, but she didn’t stop. Her thumb found my clit and circled it lazily.
“Fuck Arrow Romanov. He’s not my man tonight,” I said, grinding down harder on her hand. “And I sure as hell am not his.”
The music throbbed around us, bass so deep I could feel it in my teeth. I closed my eyes and let the sensation wash over me—her fingers, the heat of the crowd, the knowledge that I was betraying Arrow in the most public way possible. It should have felt wrong. It didn’t.
Harley’s lips found my neck, exactly where Arrow had marked me last. She bit down, reclaiming the bruise, and I moaned loud enough for the front row to hear. Someone threw money at the cage. Someone else whistled. I didn’t care about any of them.
“Make me come,” I commanded, tangling my fingers in her hair. “Make me forget him.”
She obliged, and fucked me with her hand, gently but relentlessly, thumb working a spiral around my clit, while, with her other hand, she pulled my face to hers and kissed me the way you’d hoard the last sip of oxygen in the world.
The crowd pressed closer, hands up, the glass a pulsating membrane between what they wanted and what they could never touch.
I laughed into Harley’s mouth, letting her own the rhythm, the wet staccato of her knuckles dragging the ache out of me while she matched my every tremor with a tightening of her wrist and a slow circling pressure that made the world disappear into white noise.