Chapter 10
RIGGS
After Smith left, I spent the whole day working.
I had back-to-back appointments that ran me straight through to ten at night, and by the time I finished cleaning up after the last client, I was ready to call it a night.
Unfortunately, my brain had other plans because my apartment smelled like Smith Covington, smelled like nerves and want and money, and I was never going to be able to fall asleep without a fight.
I didn’t want company, but I didn’t want to be alone, so I found myself at Rapture.
Ever the good best friend, I did let Damon know I’d decided to come out, but he had plans in Orange County which was admittedly a relief for me.
At the club, I made small talk with Callum behind the bar, then took my beer and found Greg and Jack on the patio.
Greg’s husband owned Rapture, and Jack was one of their closest friends, married to the bartender. I admired the neat little group of friends and family they’d made for themselves, and I smiled sincerely when I joined them at a cocktail table in the corner.
“I think it would be a good anniversary present,” Jack said to Greg as I settled in. “It’s been a few years since Callum was in New York.”
“I’m sure he’d love it,” Greg agreed, turning to me and sipping at what looked to be a water with lemon. “Jack was just trying to convince me to finesse Landon into letting Callum take a week off for an anniversary trip.’
I snorted. “Good luck.”
“He was my best friend before he met you!” Jack joked, rolling his eyes.
I didn’t know much about their history, but I knew Landon and his friend Verity had started Rapture almost ten years before. Jack was a friend of theirs from college who, at some point, had gotten involved with their much younger bartender.
I shrugged at them both helplessly, reminding Greg, “I’m sure you could convince Landon to give him the time if you really wanted to.”
“You could literally just tell him,” Jack said.
“I could,” he agreed. “But where’s the fun in that.”
“I feel like I’m interrupting a lovers’ quarrel,” I told them both, “and it’s been a delight, but I was hoping for something a little quieter.”
“Jack is exhausting,” Greg teased. “Heading up to the loft?”
“We’ll see. But I’ll find you before I go, and hopefully you’ll have resolved your little Callum-on-vacation debacle.”
“He doesn’t even need the job,” Jack complained, and I said my goodbyes to them both before heading into the club.
It was refreshing to know I could come to a place like this and not be alone, but I was more in the mood for observation than conversation.
My brain was too bogged down with Smith’s puppy dog eyes and the burning heat of his skin for much else.
It was bad form to hook up with clients, I reminded myself as I headed toward the back of the club, especially younger clients.
If I did, Smith wouldn’t have been the first one, but shitting where I ate wasn’t something I tried to make a habit of.
Everybody who wasn’t a tattooer thought it was a very romantic kind of job, pursuing my passions and creating art and all of that, but a lot of the time it was a slog.
Keeping Ink and Ember in the black was about five full-time jobs, which meant I didn’t get to spend my days doing the kind of art I enjoyed.
It was mixed in, sure, but it was also lots of butterflies and bible verses too.
And even then, I couldn’t complain too much about it.
I’d built the life for myself that Ev and I had always talked about, and that had to count for something.
No matter, the loft at Rapture was alive and loud, exactly the kind of distraction I’d hoped for.
I greeted some men I knew by sight, not by name, who were on their way out, then found a comfortable spot on the couch and settled in.
There was a couple set up on the cross, so focused on each other somebody could have pulled the fire alarm and neither would have noticed, and I watched them get lost in their own little world until my cock was hard against the side of my thigh.
Things between them turned intimate quickly, and while they were in public and aware people could see them, it began to feel intrusive in a not-enjoyable-for-me sort of way.
Heading toward the other end of the loft, I found the first three private rooms closed with red lights lit over the door.
The door to the fourth room was open, though, and there was a fair crowd of people inside, all of them spectating a group of three on the bed.
I flipped my hoodie over my head and stepped deeper into the room to see what the fuss was about.
The bondage was creative—a man sat against the headboard with his arms strung up to the ceiling and his ankles pulled toward each corner of the bed.
He had a black leather hood over his head, and painful-looking clamps on each of his nipples.
Another player in bondage, this one a woman with her face buried in the man’s lap and a wedge pillow shoved beneath her hips.
She undoubtedly had a throat full of cock, and both of her holes were most certainly on display to the rest of the room.
She had a plug in her ass, one of those punishing looking stainless steel hooks that curved up the small of her back in line with her spine, and attached to the loop at the end was a thin twist of twine that connected to the ends of the clamps on the man’s chest. Every time the woman gagged and jerked away from the dick in her mouth, the tension pulled tight and tugged the man’s nipples.
As a result, he thrashed around and lifted his hips off the bed to get deeper into her mouth.
It was predicament bondage at its finest.
Heat pooled between my legs, a familiar rush of interest at the suffering of the couple in front of me.
Their third produced a flogger with thin rubber falls, and I shouldered my way into the room so I could settle in and watch alongside everyone else.
There had to be at least a dozen people in the room, some of them watching nervously, others brazenly touching themselves as the scene unfolded.
It would have been a sight to witness the bondage from the start, the trust and intimacy required for something so vulnerable worthy of a show by itself.
The flogger cracked against the back of the woman’s thighs just as I reached the rear of the room.
She let out a garbled cry, quickly followed by a muffled male groan, both of their noises washed away by another slap of rubber against skin.
The triad was in for a long night, and there was a collective sense of arousal as everyone settled in to watch the show.
Some people moved to the couch, others to their knees, and I pressed my shoulders into the corner of the room, ready to watch it all.
Pressing the heel of my hand against the base of my cock, I bit the inside of my cheek and appreciated the enjoyment that came from the pressure alone.
I loved knowing everyone in the room was going to get off before the end of the night…
everyone but me. It wasn’t denial, nothing like that.
I’d never been in the habit of denying myself the things I wanted in life.
It was something closer to boredom, I thought.
I could watch people suck and fuck and get off, and I could—and I often did—experience my own arousal from it, but the need for release was secondary for me.
Almost irrelevant.
Rustling from the bed drew my attention, and I watched, rapt, as the dominant of the triad undid the leather piece over the man’s mouth to insert a decent-sized cock gag before sealing his lips closed around the base of the toy.
The snaps on the mouth covering clicked into place, and it was a violent burst of spasms from his body as he grew accustomed to the intrusion.
All of it fucking his dick deeper into the woman’s throat, her hips moving and tugging, and the cyclical nature of it was truly diabolical.
Someone in the crowd came with a sharp cry, and the dominant was back at the woman’s thighs with the flogger again.
They laid down stripe after stripe over the purple and red welts, and even though I didn’t know their name, we had the same thought at the same time.
The stripes left from the sharp falls were too perfect to do anything less with.
The dominant discarded the flogger in favor of a cane, and that was when I heard an almost familiar whimper from the couch to my right.
Smith had made that gentle and scared kind of noise at the shop.
After he’d passed out and was coming to in my arms, it was a vulnerable and defenseless kind of thing.
He apparently made the same sort of noises when he was turned on because it was surely Smith Covington sitting on the couch at Rapture, his hand down his pants and his eyes wide and focused on the scene across the room.
He quickly grew flustered, fighting the fly of his pants and freeing his cock so he could stroke himself with more room.
His dick was proportionate to the rest of him, average length but thick enough his fingers barely wrapped around the middle of it.
The tip shined, precum leaking from the tip with every stroke.
Again, I pushed down against my own dick, but unlike before, I found little relief.
It was one thing to watch people who knew they were being watched.
And he knew he was being watched, I reasoned with myself.
He was in a public space at a private club, surrounded by people who were doing the exact same thing as him.
He didn’t know I was watching him, though—someone who knew him, no matter how casually.
It was very close to a breach of trust, but it felt more wrong to make him aware of my presence in the room.
I didn’t want to interrupt the scene, and I certainly didn’t want to interrupt him.
Instead, I adjusted my shaft so the tip of my cock pointed upward and stuck out from behind the waistband of my jeans. The A/C blew steadily from a vent overhead, sending a burst of air and violent shiver down my spine. I teased my finger over my slit, pressure knotting at the base of my spine.
God, how long had it been since I’d come?
Frowning, I listened to the couple on the bed writhe around, lost to their own pleasure, but my stare stayed fixed on the man on the couch.
He touched himself aggressively, stroking his cock with an overhand pull that had it popping up against his palm with every slide of his hand.
If I had Smith’s dick in my hand, I would touch him with much more care than he allowed himself.
I would be slow and soft with my attention, teasing an orgasm out of him as opposed to forcing it.
Smith touched himself like he needed to come.
I would have touched him to make sure he wanted it.
Pulling my lips together between my teeth so I didn’t accidentally make a sound, I stared as he worked himself into a frenzy.
Sweat beaded against his temple, the sounds from the bed already lost to me.
Everyone in the room could have left, and I wouldn’t have even noticed, not as long as Smith stayed put on the couch.
Time blurred, but Smith got himself off.
Ribbons of white sprayed out of his cock, and he let out a startled gasp, almost like he’d forgotten himself.
He tried to catch as much of his cum in his hand as he could, but there was no stopping the pulsing bursts of pleasure as he rode out his orgasm on the couch.
The force of it had caught him off-guard, I wagered, if the flush on his cheeks was any indication.
And it was after the initial waves of his pleasure had died down that the reality of his situation began to sink in.
I noticed it in the tension of his shoulders, the awkward rest of his cupped palm against his thigh.
He had been so lost to himself he didn’t realize what he’d done or where he’d done it, and I…
I wanted him to experience that fully.
Privately.
Instead, I watched him force his still-hard cock back into his pants.
He barely managed to pull up the zipper before he climbed off the couch and snuck out of the room with his chin tucked against his chest and his hand still cupped and full.
On the bed, the woman came, and I did look over in time to see pulses of pleasure leak out of her cunt as she squirted all over the bed.
The dominant had their entire hand inside of her, the woman’s lips gripping tight around their wrist.
Any other night, in any other life, I would have stayed.
But this night in this life, I snuck out of the room and went in search of Smith.