Chapter Seven Rae
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rae
I GET OUT, GRAB my stuff from a busy, smiling Daff, and race up the club’s stairs like I’m being chased by a pack of rabid dogs, quietly mouthing the lyrics to “Guns and Ships” from Hamilton the way I do whenever I move quickly.
I had to get out of there, right that minute.
It was all too much. Too intense, too real, and then the speed-dating thing ended, and I snapped out of it and understood that none of it was real at all.
It was pure fantasy, and I’d fallen face-first into the deep end.
The scene finished, and I was standing there looking at that guy, that stranger, who’d barely touched me and somehow made me feel so much more than I’d ever felt with Brendan or anyone before him, and suddenly, I was drowning.
“Have a good time?” Harlow asks as I burst out onto the brick sidewalk and suck in my first breath of crisp, early-fall air.
I blink at the lights and the traffic and all the ordinary, everyday things that oddly didn’t magically melt down while I was downstairs getting my whole world blown wide open.
“Yeah.” The truth rises up like a fresh sunrise.
I did it. I went to a BDSM club, and I did the Dom/sub thing. “It was amazing.”
“Guess you’re one of us, then, huh? That mean you’ll be comin’ back?”
I hesitate, unsure if it’s a good or terrible idea to regularly partake in something so absolutely cataclysmic. “I don’t know.”
“No?”
“It was a lot.” Understatement of the freaking century.
“You okay?” She steps closer. “Sure you don’t want to stick around for a while? Maybe wind down? Just hang out and chill?”
“I need to go.”
“Safe to get home?”
“Yep. Parked over there.”
“That’s right. The Honda.” She snorts. “You sat there for like ten minutes before getting out.”
“Come on. Give a shy girl a break.”
“Shy? More like scared shitless.” Smirking, Harlow watches a group of people approach, dressed in club wear and carrying sports bags and rolling suitcases, no doubt full of BDSM and fetish gear. “Next time, instead of lurking all night, you can hang with me until you’re ready to go in.”
“Next time I’ll walk right in.” If there is a next time. Do I want a next time? “But hanging out sounds fun too. Thanks.”
She gives me a friendly elbow nudge and takes IDs from a couple of the people now crowding the entrance. “See you soon, then.”
With a final wave, I head to my car, get in, lock my doors, and let out a long, uneven exhale before turning on my phone. Hands shaking, I text my best friend.
Me: Done.
Samantha: Whut?
Me: The club. The Dom/sub thing. I went.
Immediately, the phone rings. I start the engine, pull out into the late-night Richmond, Virginia, traffic, and accept the call.
“You skank, how could you?” Samantha’s not happy. She takes her role as my best friend very seriously. More seriously, actually, than her role as Sugar’s coms director, which is frankly too bad.
“I needed to do it on my own.” Not to mention, Sam’s been MIA recently.
“Without even warning me? Who’d you use as backup? Your dad?”
“No!” Dad’s liberal and all, but no. “Absolutely not.”
“What if they’d been serial killers? Or, like, truly bad people?
What if they’d chained you up and had their way with you or tortured you with…
? What’s your worst thing?” She gasps. “What if they glued your eyes open and forced you to watch the non-equity tour of Mean Girls? Or, oh, oh, blackhead-removal videos. For hours.”
As always, I gag at the thought of another person’s pores up close and personal. “Both of those are terrible.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you’re not. You love the yucky skin stuff.”
“Yes, but you hate it. Weird, since you’re the masochist. I’m just a simple girl who enjoys a good pop of—”
I barely contain another dry heave. “I’m not a masochist. I told you, I’m a submissive. A bottom. I don’t want to be hurt or treated badly or made to watch anything. I want someone to, like…” Rub my back and call me beautiful. “Do things to me,” I end on an embarrassed half whisper.
“I could boss you around if you—”
“Ew. Stop it.”
“So, how did it pan out? You meet the Dom of your dreams? Did he put a collar on it? Throw you over his leather-clad shoulder and drag you back to his lair?”
“Clearly not, if I’m calling you.”
“Yeah, why are you calling? Shouldn’t you be getting it on right now?”
I go quiet, the only sound the click of the turn signal as I pull up to my place.
“You didn’t even go in, did you? Bet you did a walk-by and chickened out. Am I right?”
“I went in.” I look around to make sure the street’s empty before getting out of the car and rushing around the house to the converted garage that contains my entire life.
“Selfie or it didn’t happen.”
As usual, Samantha manages to put a smile on my face. “They don’t let you bring your phone inside.”
“All right. Hickey or it didn’t happen. Or, like, I don’t know, lash marks or something.”
I laugh outright now, which isn’t easy to do quietly as I squint, trying to locate the lock. “It happened.”
“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat exactly happened? Come on, spill!”
“I mean, nothing happened. But I went.” I don’t even know why I bother prevaricating. She’ll get it all out of me eventually.
“So, when can we go? I want to see it. I want the full HD kink experience.”
“I don’t think I’m going back.”
Quiet on the other end. The only sound is the jingle of my keys.
“You home?”
“Yep.”
With a deep, relieved sigh, I lock the door behind me and turn on a light, kick off my shoes, and head to my compact kitchenette to wash my hands, taking care not to trip on a meowing Pepe as I go.
“Is that my boy?” asks Sam, who’s known—and loved—my cat since the day she went with me to the SPCA and helped me pick out the feline most likely to eat his person before the body goes cold.
Pepe’s got the eyes of a stone-cold killer and the body of a gelatin pillow.
I love him more than anything in the world. “Geez, he’s loud.”
“I know,” I say, cooing as I bend and scratch him behind the ears before filling his food bowl to the brim.
Everyone thinks I’m ridiculous for moving into this place after the split with Brendan, but I don’t hate it, at all.
Yes, it’s about the size of my bedroom growing up, but it’s mine.
Not Dad’s house, where my sisters tried to pressure me to move, more I suspect to keep an eye on him than anything.
Not the creepy storage room at Samantha’s shared house.
Mine. One space for just me and my babies.
I pick up baby number one, Pepe, who puts up as much resistance as a bowl of slime, and turn to my other babies: book nooks.
What started as a way to blow off steam during lockdown has become a full-on obsession.
Despite it being a little wonky, I’m still proud of the very first one I built from scratch.
It’s a scene from the old Sugar headquarters.
Since then, I’ve done more than two dozen, including a Paris bookshop, a sweet little greenhouse, and a cozy winter cabin, complete with a mountain man, his dog, and Pepe snoring in front of the fire.
Brendan hated my book nooks. Sam thinks he was jealous of all the time I spent on something that wasn’t him.
My sisters are convinced it’s because I was good at something.
And he wasn’t. What matters, though, is the deep satisfaction I feel as I sit at my workstation now, settle my purring fur ball on my lap, and jump back into the process of putting my real-world problems into itty-bitty bookshelf boxes. Right where I can keep an eye on them.
“What are you working on tonight?” Samantha asks, knowing that I can’t go to bed without spending time with my projects. They’re my late-night darlings. My actual nightlife.
“My first commission.”
“Right. You mean the one you’re doing for Hannah,” she intones with obvious skepticism.
“Just ’cause it’s for my sister doesn’t mean it’s not a commission.”
“That and the part where you’re not getting paid,” she says around the Blow Pop she’s obviously just stuck in her mouth. “Let me see.”
I hit the camera button and give her a wide-angle view of the whole piece.
“Oh my god. It’s Romero’s!”
“You got it!”
“Closer. I can’t see anything.”
I show her the checkered tablecloths and the tiny candles in bottles and move up to the signed black-and-white photos on the walls. “What do you think? Is it okay?”
“Holy shit, Rae. That looks exactly like Otty.” She gasps. “Is this the soda balls incident?”
“Yep.” I step back and stare hard at my take on the incident that lost our youngest sister, Otty, her very first job, when she spilled an entire pitcher of iced cola in a diner’s lap.
“You need to start selling them.”
I don’t bother arguing. I’ve heard it before.
“I’m serious, Rae. You’re really good at this.”
She can’t see my shrug, but she knows me well enough to say, “At least have Hannah pay for supplies. That husband of hers makes money.”
“I will.”
“Why must you turn your she shed into a house of lies?”
A noncommittal hum is all the answer I give her as I sink into the minute details of creating worlds where everything is fine. Just fine.
“The second someone finds out at work, you’ll start getting requests out the ass.”
“I’m not telling anyone at work.” I glance back at the shelves, where probably two-thirds of the book nooks immortalize infamous scenes from work, including such classics as Pajama Party Friday (highly inappropriate) and Bring Your Pets to Work Day (an epic disaster).
“They’d want to see my work and… that wouldn’t go over well. ”
“Do Klaus as a marauding Viking. I’ll pay you.”
“With what? Blow Pops?”
She snorts. “You start a TikTok yet? You could totally monetize this.”
“Oh my god, Sam. Seriously? Let it go.”
“I’m not the only one who thinks they’re the greatest thing ever. You’d make a killing if you’d just—”
“Can we please talk about something else?”
Another smack of her lips. “Okay. So, why are we not going back to the sex dungeon?”