Chapter 20
NOVA
Exiting the bathroom felt like leaving reality and stepping out into a dream. Even my own self-consciousness melted away, unable to survive in this realm of glittering sin.
“I need to find Jeffrey and show him my outfit. He wanted it to be a surprise,” Maisy said.
I was half paying attention to her departure, half paying attention to the woman dressed as a clown walking two men in suits and golden animal masks on leashes.
The clown abruptly stopped. “Now kiss, you disgusting little rich fucks.”
The two men turned to each other, hesitating, their mouths covered by the masks.
She grabbed their heads and pushed them together, her painted face scrunched with disgust.
The masked lips touched. The clown woman laughed at them. “I can’t wait to tell your investors,” she taunted.
“Nova,” Jayne said, drawing my attention to her. She smiled. “This is your first party. Explore. The auction won’t start until eleven. If you need anything, find me or Archer or one of the girls.”
She lightly tilted my chin up, scanning my eyes. The strength of her magnetic pull was on full blast tonight.
“Show that little girl who prayed for God to make her normal—who prayed for him to make her anything else but her true self—that she is perfect just the way she is.”
My chest tightened. Something raw and wounded surfaced, an ache that had never healed.
“You can be who you are here,” Jayne said. “You’re free.”
“I don’t feel free,” I whispered.
Jayne’s golden eyes were warm, maternal. “You will one day. You don’t have to fully believe yet. Start with the possibility that you might be wrong. That maybe, just maybe, your desires matter too. You matter, Nova. The you shame will never kill.”
My eyes burned and my throat clogged. I shuddered, caught between my familiar, stubborn denial that had been slowly weakening and a yearning that had always belonged to me.
A yearning that came from more than my body, a yearning I feared was embedded in my soul.
“Stop making your desires about the people who hurt you. Your desires have nothing to do with them. They are yours and yours alone.”
With that, Jayne backed away, and the girls who hadn’t already split off from the group trailed her as she took the stairs to the bottom level.
The medieval princess cone hats bobbing down the stairs somehow made me smile with their absurdity, even as I reeled from Jayne’s words. A flood of competing emotions and thoughts and impulses broke free, as if through a collapsed mental dam. I kept repeating my mission.
Lorelei. Lorelei. Lorelei.
God, why the fuck did my life still revolve around Lorelei?
Heat traveled down my spine, and I moved. I followed where the clown woman had gone, toward a room in the right wing of the mansion.
“You’re stunning,” a man said before I could pass through the doorway. He wore a wolf mask that covered half his face.
I realized in this moment how insane it was that Elliot hadn’t been masked. He was so lame and desperate for attention, he wanted everyone to know who he was.
Billionaires and their fragile little egos.
“Thank you,” I said to the man as we both stepped into the room together.
A room filled with what appeared to be medieval torture devices. The lights from the chandelier were dim, electric pillar candles scattered about the floor. The room itself looked like a royal chamber in some ancient palace.
I glanced around for Lorelei once, as if checking a box.
Maisy would be happy to know I’d discovered the pillory she’d expressed interest in. Currently, it housed a burly, bearded man. His head and wrists dangled out of the wooden circles, and he was being flogged by another man dressed as a fairy.
“What are you getting into tonight?” the man tried again.
My eyes flitted from spectacle to spectacle. On the other end of the room, a woman’s wrists were bound above her by chains attached to the ceiling. A man circled her, grinning as he whispered things I couldn’t quite hear over the cries and moans.
The man next to me cleared his throat, as if impatient for my answer.
Jayne and Wes’s nonstop badgering for me to follow my own desires suddenly became too loud to ignore, knocking something loose in my psyche. My current desire was for the wolf to stop bothering me.
“I’m exploring,” I said curtly in a tone I was unaccustomed to.
The man’s eyes widened, but he wordlessly backed away from me with his tail between his legs. I focused back on the woman dangling from the ceiling. The man grabbed her pussy roughly, whispering in her ear.
I moved forward, past the woman sitting on a throne with an opening for the man below her to feast on her cunt, past the man on a St. Andrew’s Cross getting his balls tortured, past the wooden cage where two girls giggled—no chaperone in sight—and past the woman crying in wooden shackles as a man caned the bottom of her feet.
I planted myself in front of what most interested me: the man groping the woman who dangled from the ceiling. He was broad and dark-haired. The woman was a tall brunette with strong Mediterranean features.
Neither of them looked at me, too enraptured by their scene. Intensity rolled from them both in waves, this potency that fascinated me as much as it terrified me. I wanted to hear what he was saying to her.
“You’re mine. Forever,” he growled. “Not even death can save you from me. I will find you over and over again, in every world. Do you understand me?”
His tone was like the crack of a whip. She nodded.
“Yes, Sir,” she said, her voice breathy.
He shoved two fingers inside her and pumped violently until she screamed and her legs shook. This was when the man finally noticed me, offering a slight smile before refocusing on the task at hand.
“Mine,” he growled again, guttural and raw. He withdrew his fingers and shoved them in her mouth as he stroked the back of her head. She sucked gratefully, devotedly.
My yearning multiplied. Not by the acts themselves, however arousing they were, but by the dynamic between them. It was real. I could feel it in his every word, the way their bodies angled towards each other even as he hurt her, degraded her, owned her.
Some people really lived like this. Some people really allowed themselves to live like this.
When the man undid her wrist cuffs, shoved her to the floor, and pulled out his semi-hard cock, I realized in a split second why the floor beneath them was different from the rest of the room.
It wasn’t merely a corner of stone for aesthetic purposes. There was also a drain on the floor.
“Oh,” I said to myself, too quiet for anyone else to hear. “Oh.”
The man pissed on his submissive. “Open your fucking mouth.”
My own mouth fell open with shock. I knew this was a thing, but I sure as hell had never seen it. And I had no idea how it made me feel.
The space between my thighs pulsed. I couldn’t look away.
He began to stroke his cock, gripping her face close, clearly on his way to marking her with a second fluid. “That’s my good girl. You keep my pretty mouth open for me.”
I turned away.
Mine. My mouth.
The words were what stirred something inside me. Against my will, I remembered those initial explorations a decade ago, unsupervised on the Internet. I recalled the exact moment I realized there were other people like me—that I might’ve been a freak, but there were plenty of other freaks too.
That knowledge hadn’t saved me from the shame that ate me alive. But maybe it had given me something, a glimmer of possibility I might one day claim.
I left this room, curious to explore what else the party had to offer. Everywhere I went, I looked for Lorelei, hoping I would be able to recognize her even if she was one of the few women in a mask.
I peeked inside a smaller bedroom, full of people engaging in an active gangbang. When the men turned toward me, I quickly moved right back out.
I entered a room that was purely sensual, no torture devices in sight. A smoke machine blew a low trail of mist toward the entrance and into the hallway.
The room was decorated as if it was Mount Olympus—even the ceiling was hand-painted in a classical style, depicting the Gods.
A nude woman played the harp in a corner.
The floor was littered with cushions and blankets, and translucent golden fabric hung in swaths from the ceiling.
Some people were clothed and socializing while others slowly explored each other’s bodies in what appeared to be a relaxed orgy.
In the corner of the room, a woman lounged on a loveseat while two men fed her grapes.
“Chocolate?” a woman asked me, greeting me where I stood a few feet inside.
Capricorn. I smiled at her, remembering her kindness at the second soirée. She was wearing a sheer, flowy purple dress with nothing underneath, her supple curves on full display.
When I nodded, she smiled, lifting a truffle to my lips. I opened my mouth. She watched me as my tastebuds were overcome with an explosion of flavor, my eyes widening.
“Why is that the best thing I’ve ever tasted?”
She laughed. “Right? Some famous chocolatier brought them,” she said. “I bet they’re like fifty dollars a truffle.”
“That’s insane.”
“Welcome to Midsummer,” she laughed. “Have you been out back yet?”
“Like, outside?” I shook my head.
“It’s giving enchanted forest. That’s where they’re doing a fairy hunt. It’s just for fun, though, nothing as serious as the hunt in October. I wasn’t invited last year, but maybe this year!”
Maisy had mentioned the autumn party too. I was intrigued, but I soon remembered I wouldn’t be in The Circle by then.
“Ooh, let’s watch,” Capricorn said before I could respond. With her hand in mine, she gently pulled me closer to a woman carrying a violin who’d taken a seat on a plush chair by the arched windows.
The room turned its attention toward the performer.
A man approached her, kneeling at her feet. She was wearing a corset but no panties, sitting on the very edge of the seat with her legs spread open.
She began to play, filling the room with a beautiful melody that blended seamlessly with the harp. The man gripped her legs, slowly trailing kisses from her feet to her inner thighs.
Capricorn grabbed another truffle off a plate a man carried around. She wordlessly offered it to me, and being the whore for sweet treats that I was, I accepted with a nod.
“I feel like a horse being fed sugar cubes,” I whispered to her.
She placed the truffle in my mouth. Her lips curved as her eyes danced with mischief. “You know, that could work for me.”
I snorted. “I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m not sure pony play is my thing.”
She shrugged, laughing. “To each their own.”
As this new burst of flavor melted in my mouth, I was quite certain I could come right now.
“It’ll make the music sound better,” she said. “Savor it.”
She was right; the pleasure of the sound blended with the richness coating my tongue.
The man suddenly buried his face between the violinist’s thighs, licking and sucking as her music shifted. The notes became higher, less polished and more feverish. Her lips parted, a moan escaping her. Still, she played, the tempo moving with the speed of the man’s tongue.
It was like I could feel her cresting orgasm through the music, my own core pulsing, my body flush with decadent pleasure. I momentarily forgot where I was or why I was here.
I was captivated by each throaty moan, the man’s grip on her spread thighs, the climbing, quickening melody.
Beside me, Capricorn whispered to a woman who’d approached on her left. They giggled.
All my attention was focused on the violinist. I was so connected to her that I sensed the moment she reached the point of no return, her moans turning more violent as the bow glided smoothly across the strings.
I wasn’t sure how it was possible, but as her body shook with crashing pleasure, she still managed to continue playing.
It was as if she was channeling her orgasm itself, showing us exactly how it felt with every note.
The moment the performance ended, I clapped with the rest of the room. I turned to Capricorn, only to realize she was tangled up with the woman on the cushions next to me.
Good for her. I surveyed the room one more time. No Lorelei.
I didn’t see any tall blondes in the next rooms I dipped inside either. Nor did I see Wes, and I was surprised he hadn’t made good on his promise to find me. It was time to head back downstairs.
On my way down, I watched two men sneak up on an unsuspecting woman and shove a black bag over her head. She flailed, only to be quickly hoisted over one of the man’s shoulders as the other slapped her ass.
I remembered my enemy’s warnings during the etiquette class: just because a scene looked intense didn’t mean it hadn’t been pre-negotiated. Though, if something wasn’t wanted, how would bystanders even know the difference?
I tried not to think about that, reminding myself of all the people I’d seen tonight who’d appeared genuinely happy to be here no matter what was being done to them. As I watched the men carry the woman away, I didn’t hear the word red.
At the bottom of the stairs, I halted.
In front of me was a tall woman in heels and a light blue lingerie set, tiny fairy wings on her back. Her hair was in full curls, just as I’d seen Lorelei style hers thousands of times before.