T is for… (Checklist #20)

Chapter 1

The 3-D rendering spun slowly on the screen, a mess of lines and numbers. Unless you knew what you were looking at.

Nathan tapped the screen and leaned in over the dark-haired woman’s shoulder, reading the technical notes attached to the slowly rotating image of what looked like a very fat pen.

“Based off a tattoo pen.” Tara put two fingers on the screen and zoomed in. “A tattoo isn’t actually how the subcutaneous biosensors would be applied, but calling them ‘smart tattoos’ and this a tattoo pen makes it easier for the doctors to understand.” She looked up over her shoulder at him, her face a familiar half-exasperated expression.

Nathan chuckled, feeling her pain. Doctors were great. Doctors were the ones who actually used the biomedical products they developed.

Doctors also had zero patience with technical information. Hence reducing state-of-the-art medical innovation to “smart tattoo.”

But “smart tattoo” did sound cool. Damn near everything Tara’s team developed was cool.

Tara Patel, PhD, was smart, driven, witty, a little stubborn, and also his oldest friend.

And he was about to actively ignore her.

Tara hiked her bag up on her shoulder, still holding her tablet with one hand, the screen tilted so he could see it. For a second, he wondered if he should offer to hold her bag or help her take it off her shoulder and set it on the ground where his own weekend bag waited.

Would that be weird?

Probably.

Tara would set the bag down if she wanted to.

“What type of system is running the data?” he asked, reaching over her shoulder to touch the screen and zoom out once more.

“Not my department.” Tara smiled. “I don’t?—”

The large front doors of Las Palmas opened, a group of three people entering together. A red-haired woman wearing soft feminine clothes that Nathan was fairly sure were stylish entered first, an overnight bag caught in the crook of her elbow. She was laughing and joking with the man who held the door open for her and the brunette who entered two steps behind her.

The brunette wore a trim suit that made Nathan twitch, because she looked like either a lawyer or investor. Both groups of people that Nathan did his best to avoid, though his bosses liked to bring them by his office and make him show off the multicolored hand-drawn system maps that were always his first step during the initial coding.

He flipped his attention back to his best friend, but Tara was watching the redheaded woman.

Nathan had no clue what the expression on her face meant. She didn’t look upset. At least he didn’t think she was upset. It was disconcerting, given how long they’d been friends, that in this moment he didn’t know what she was thinking.

Then again, he hadn’t known she was a sexual submissive until several years ago when he’d run into her here at Las Palmas, LA’s most exclusive BDSM club.

Nathan’s eyes flicked to the doors that led into the club proper, his shoulders tensing. The foyer where they now stood was the transition place between the outside world and Las Palmas. This wasn’t the first time they’d stopped here to chat, but it always left him with this itchy feeling that he was walking on the edge of something dangerous.

Tara shook her head once, looking away from the other members who’d pushed through the doors that open off the foyer. “What was I saying?” Once more, she looked up at him, and for a traitorous moment, his brain started to picture things it shouldn’t. He stopped, because for fucks sake, he shouldn’t think about his best friend like that.

“I think you were going to be snobby about being a product developer rather than a backend systems person,” he said, maybe a little too quick.

Tara laughed, and the familiarity of the banter and her laugh made it easier to ignore where they were. “I’m not snobby about it.” She turned off the tablet, stuffing it into a side pocket of her bag.

“You’re a little snobby.”

“Only because I’m better than you.” One dark eyebrow arched.

Again, Nathan wrestled to keep his thoughts about his best friend appropriate for her status as his best friend.

“You’re jealous,” he declared, leaning back against the wall.

“Oh, this should be good. Why am I jealous?”

“Because I can sit in a nice air-conditioned office all day and drink tea whenever I want.” With anyone else, he would have said coffee, but Tara was a tea drinker.

Tara huffed. “Low blow, Joyce.”

“You know I’m right, Patel.”

Tara set her bag down, rolling her shoulder a little. It must be heavy. He should have offered to take it.

“Are you still working on that integration?” she asked, interrupting his thoughts.

“Yes.” He grimaced. “At this point, I think we need to bring in an electrician—not an electrical engineer, an electrician—and have him walk the consultant docs through the basics so everyone gets back on the same page.”

“The cardiologists will be insulted.”

“The lead consulting cardiologist refers to himself as a plumber all the time, so I don’t think he’d mind. Now, the product development team.” Nathan mockingly tsked and shook his head, eyeing his product development team lead best friend. “They’re a bunch of prima donnas.”

“Ha! I don’t think so. Though from what you’ve said, you could have better people.”

“You sure you don’t want to jump over and work on cardiac implants?” Nathan could get her hired at his current company in a heartbeat.

Tara shook her head. “No, you know my heart, and more importantly most of my research and experience is in CGMs.”

“I remember that time you disassembled your roommate’s glucose sensor. If only I’d known I was witnessing history in the making.”

She shook her head at his teasing. “If I remember, you tried dissecting the app’s coding.”

“While your roommate tried to edge out of the room.”

“Probably so we wouldn’t mess with her new sensor.”

They shared a smile, this conversation not new, the story one that they’d both shared at various times.

Twenty years ago, they’d been in the same lab section for a bio-systems course in college. That alone might not have led to anything, but about halfway through the semester, they’d realized they lived in the same off-campus apartment building when they walked out of class together, only to park their bikes next to one another outside the apartment ten minutes later.

They quickly became study buddies, declaring one of the handful of study rooms on the ground floor of the apartment building as theirs, and defending it from all other interested parties with prejudice.

Nathan had always wanted to do something that married computer science and biology. Bioinformatic engineering fit the bill.

Tara had originally planned on going into biomedical tissue engineering. He vividly, and with a good amount of fascinated disgust, remembered the first time she’d explained how to 3D print a human ear.

Then her roommate nearly went into a diabetic coma, thanks to a faulty first-generation continuous glucose monitor that hadn’t alerted to her dropping blood sugar. Tara had realized something was wrong and force-fed her M&Ms while calling for help. Nathan had his head out of his apartment door at the sound of running footsteps, jerking back as paramedics with bulky bags jogged past.

Tara’s focus changed after that night, leading to, several months later, their attempt to reverse engineer both the hardware and software from her roommate’s old sensor.

“Do you realize we’ve been friends for twenty years?” she asked after a short, easy silence.

He whistled, though he’d just been thinking the same thing. “Yea, I guess we have.” They’d met when he was twenty, and he’d just turned forty.

Forty had once seemed so old, and yet here he was, feeling like he was still trying to figure it out.

Tara bent to pick up her bag once more. “We’d better go. I don’t want to be late for whatever this meeting is.”

They didn’t look at each other, the mention of the meeting a little too close to acknowledging where they were, and why they were here.

Once they passed through the foyer into the club proper, they became strangers by choice and necessity.

Nate and Tara had more in common than shared memories and experiences, thanks to the long-standing friendship. More even than the fact that they were both biomedical engineers could account for.

Nathan and Tara were both serious BDSM players, and they’d never once acknowledged the other’s existence in the club.

“I’m working next weekend,” Nathan said as he picked up his own bag, carefully not looking at her.

Tara nodded once. “Don’t ‘work’ on the weekend for me.” The emphasis on the word work was subtle but there. Nathan wasn’t actually working next weekend. This was the code they used to check when the other one planned to be at the club. Saying you were working gave the other person the green light to come.

“I’m not planning to come for…a bit,” Tara added.

If she’d been talking about anything else, he would have asked her about that vague statement. As it was, he merely nodded. “Sounds good.”

For years they’d managed to make sure they weren’t here at the same time.

Tonight was different, and they didn’t have a choice about it.

The club overseers had called a mandatory all-member meeting. Nathan had been stressed about seeing Tara at the club since the encrypted email announcement arrived in his in-box, and had hoped to arrive early and avoid seeing her.

Fate had other plans, and they’d met in the parking lot, just steps from the front door.

Tara, in her normal calm, competent way, problem-solved and bypassed any awkwardness by casually walking in and then pulling out her tablet to show him her latest project.

But now the awkwardness was creeping back as they stood there, both holding their bags.

“After-work drinks on Tuesday so you can show me the rest?” he asked in mild desperation.

“Sounds good. I’ll text you on Monday.”

“Monday,” he agreed, hanging back as she headed down the foyer and into the Subs’s Garden.

Even thinking the word “sub” in connection to Tara made him twitch, so Nathan turned, making his way to the Den, which served as the locker room and lounge for the Doms, Masters, and Owners of Las Palmas.

Nathan would avoid even looking at Tara during this all-club meeting, and then he’d leave and never, ever, think about the fact that his best friend was a sexual submissive ever again.

He didn’t know the overseers weren’t going to give him a choice.

Nathan considered himself an easygoing guy, who preferred calm and logical interactions.

Right now, he was neither calm nor thinking logically. He was planning to throw Mistress Faith through a fucking window.

Not that there was a window in the small “tack room,” but he’d find one if needed.

“Nathan—”

“No fucking way.” Nathan shook the envelope he’d been given thirty minutes ago in her face.

The envelope was a dossier on his assigned sub partner for the club’s new, mandatory, “game.” An assignment that had been set by the overseers, who included Mistress Faith.

“Anyone but her,” he snapped.

Mistress Faith raised a brow. “I’m insulted on Tara’s behalf.”

Hearing her name sent a fresh jolt of…something…through Nathan.

“Give me a different partner,” he demanded, once more shaking the envelope. Inside was copy of Tara’s BDSM checklist. A complete accounting of every kinky, toy, and scenario she liked, wanted to try, or had as a hard limit.

Nathan’s heart had stopped—and luckily restarted without the assistance of any implantable cardiac device—when he saw who’d they’d assigned to be his submissive.

Tara.

They expected him to scene with Tara. To dominate her. Touch her. Use her.

His best friend of twenty years.

Nathan willed his mind blank, refusing to picture her as a sub, let alone his sub.

“No,” Mistress Faith said, arms crossed casually over her stomach. She looked every inch the Domme, and was unmoved by his panic.

“She’s my best friend .”

“Then you’ll do well because she trusts you. Some of the other assigned groupings are going to struggle with the issue of trust.”

“She trusts me to not… Do this… To her.” He waved the envelope wildly around the tack room.

The all-club meeting—which turned out to be a mild scolding followed by the announcement of the checklist game—had taken place in the large barn which was now called the Conclave. Calling it a barn implied worn wood and straw, but like everything at Las Palmas, the Conclave was elegant and refined. Horse stalls still lined one side of the main floor. Above them, a loft with ample seating looked down over the open space, which was the only indoor space large enough to hold everyone.

Nathan had made sure he was seated in the loft during the meeting so he wouldn’t accidentally catch sight of Tara, who would have been kneeling with the other subs on the ground floor.

The walls of the tack room where he and Mistress Faith stood were lined with equipment—bridles, crops, and whips all perfectly normal items to have in a barn tack room, except the bridles were sized for people.

“You’re making a decision for her,” Mistress Faith said. “If you’re truly her friend, you’ll tell her that you’re her partner.” The older woman raised her brows. “Unless you object to scening with her.”

“Of course I object. She’s my?—”

“Best friend. Yes, you’ve said that. Tell me, why do you object.”

He swallowed the words because she’s my best friend! since that clearly wasn’t getting him anywhere. “She’s important to me. She’s one of the only...”

He rocked back on his heels.

“Oh no, now I’m curious. What were you going to say?”

Nathan gritted his teeth. “She’s one of the only people in the world I really care about.”

Mistress Faith raised a brow. “Then it seems all the more important that you discuss this with her, and not make a decision for her.”

Nathan shook his head.

“You knew she was a member, yes?”

“I did, but we don’t talk about it. We don’t come on the same weekends, not since we first saw each other and realized.”

Mistress Faith arched a brow. “Tell me that you’ve never imagined having Tara submit to you.”

“No, never,” he insisted.

“Interesting. I believe you. You truly don’t find her attractive, either sexually, as a submissive, or both.”

“What? No! That’s not what I said.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Then you’re saying that you don’t actually respect or value submissives?” There was a cold warning note in Mistress Faith’s voice.

“What?! No! No.” He knew he was getting railroaded, but shit if he could seem to course correct.

“Is there some latent misogyny at play, Mr. Joyce? A woman who submits to you isn’t worthy of being your friend?”

Nathan stared at her, horrified at her words, and baffled how this conversation had gone so terribly wrong.

“I know submission is a gift.” He spoke slowly to make sure he didn’t misspeak. “I respect the hell out of anyone who’s able to give that kind of trust.”

“Ah, you don’t trust easily, do you?”

“No, I guess I don’t.”

“But you trust her. Value her.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you don’t want to see her naked.”

Nathan hesitated, only a fraction of a moment, before saying, “No, I don’t.”

Mistress Faith caught the pause, her brow arching.

“Nathan.”

“What?” he snapped. Great, now he sounded like a sulky teenager.

“If this is something you truly refuse to do, we provided options for you.”

Anyone who didn’t play the game had to give up their membership. He opened his mouth to do exactly that. He’d walk away rather than risk the friendship with Tara.

“But I want you to imagine what Tara will say?—”

She’d say she was glad their twenty-year friendship hadn’t exploded because the Las Palmas overseers were on a kink power trip.

“—when you tell her that you gave up your membership to the club without even talking to her about why. How will she feel? Relieved? Or insulted that you made a decision without consulting her?”

Nathan’s stomach knotted.

“Upset that you didn’t talk to her? Or maybe guilty because she’ll know you gave up something you need for her? Without talking to her.”

Nathan blinked, then scrubbed his face with his hand. “Shit.”

“You might,” she agreed mildly.

Nathan snarled at her, anger and panic still swirling through him. Tara mattered to him. He’d protect their friendship in any way he could.

But Mistress Faith was right. Tara wouldn’t want him to make any decision that involved her—even tangentially—without first consulting her.

“Enjoy, Nathan.” With that, Mistress Faith exited, leaving Nathan alone in a room full of bondage and impact equipment, as a sense of dread slowly settled over him.