11. Luna
LUNA
Two weeks ago, over Thai food on his impossibly comfortable couch, with my feet in his lap, Ivan mentioned the club.
“There’s a private club,” he said, “for people with our interests, if the word interests means anything to you.”
By his tone, I could have guessed what he meant, but I needed confirmation. “Interests?”
“The kind we explore sometimes in the bedroom. And that restaurant bathroom. Like when I blindfolded you last night.”
“Oh, a kink club?”
He nodded. “Would you care to join me there?”
“Well… I’m curious. I’ve always known those things exist, but I never thought I could go to one.”
At that, he paused. “Does curious mean yes?”
That brought a smile to my face. “In this case, yes.”
And then neither of us brought it up again for fourteen days, while I have been able to think about nothing else.
But tonight he says, “Wear something you can move in. We’re going to the club.”
Oh my.
So, I wear the black slip dress with nothing complicated underneath, and Lev drives us somewhere the streetlights get older.
Ivan holds my hand in the back seat the entire way, thumb moving over my knuckles in slow passes that give me chills for some reason, and says nothing.
The silence has a current in it you could power a city block with.
The club is underground in every sense of the word.
An unmarked black door below a shuttered tailor.
A man at the bottom of the stairs who greets Ivan by no name and with all the deference in the world.
The air is cool on my skin. We pass a dark purple velvet-swallowed series of rooms that look the way a cello sounds.
Warm dark wood, low amber lights, and conversations conducted at the volume of secrets.
They have good black candles lining the wall sconces, too.
I expected to feel nervous. Not cataloging, like my brain is misfiring my last moments in this body.
When something works for me, really works, my brain doesn’t flood, it itemizes and makes lists and takes notes.
The hush of a space. The couple by the bar speaking quietly, her wrist wrapped in his hand.
The rules posted at the entry, actual rules, framed, presumably enforced, a whole architecture of structure running under the velvet.
1.All play on these grounds is consensual.
2.All persons will be respected and respectful.
3.Every room is equipped with a stop button. Press it, and security will arrive within thirty seconds.
4.Anyone who breaks our rules wishes they had not.
I’m not sure what punishments a club can legally mete out, but considering I’ve seen bouncers break noses at regular clubs, I don’t want to know what a kink club would do to someone.
Ivan sees me reading the rules and leans down to my ear. “Security comes in ten seconds, not thirty.”
“Then why say thirty?”
“Partly to give themselves leeway, but more importantly, if a sub hits the button and their dom is not cooperating, the dom can more easily be caught in the act of their transgression if security comes sooner. This gives the club more witnesses to the act, ensuring the punishment is administered correctly. Less liability that way.”
I almost want to ask about that punishment, but I’m not brave enough yet. I focus on other aspects of the club to take my mind off that punitive thought pattern. “Your people understand lighting. Their candle budget is criminal, but the lighting?—”
“Tell me about the candles later.” His mouth does the almost-smile, and his hand finds the small of my back, searing me there and steering us deeper. “Tell me colors first.”
We’d done this part at his kitchen counter two nights ago, the negotiation. Green, yellow, red. What I wanted, what I’d wondered about, what was off the table entirely, written down, his actual pen on actual paper.
I’d expected to feel clinical about it and instead found it was the hottest conversation of my life.
This man takes my desires as seriously as money.
Somewhere around item six, he’d asked a follow-up so calm and so filthy that I’d had to put my tea down, and he’d waited, pen ready, while I recovered the power of speech.
“Green,” I say, and mean it down to my shoes. “Aggressively green.”
The private room is small and warm, a leather bench, a low bed, an iron stand of those candles. A tall cabinet stands looming in the corner opposite a St. Andrew’s Cross. He opens it to show me before he touches anything else, every item presented for inspection, transparency as seduction.
“Anything in here spark your interest?”
“You, mostly.”
That near smirk again. “The cabinet, Luna.”
“Right.” It’s a lot to take in, all the different things. Some I know from porn and the internet and books. As for the others, I’m not sure what they are. “Maybe some light bondage to get things rolling?”
“And then?”
Why is my heart racing? “Um… you pick something.”
That earns his patient glance. “I’m not the one having things done to her. I’m the doer. My tastes are less relevant.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Ivan, and I appreciate the consideration, but I want you to be satisfied, too.”
He thinks for a moment. “You liked it when I used the gag. Was it because it was your own underwear or because it slowed your breathing?”
I swallow. I haven’t really thought about that night at the restaurant too closely. But I know the answer in my throat. “Both.”
“Very good.” He takes his watch off and sets it on the cabinet, deliberate, both of us watching the gesture mean something. “Hold out your wrists.”
I do, and then he binds my wrists behind me with charcoal silk, wrapping with a care that’s almost ceremonial, two fingers sliding under every loop to check the give.
The restraint hits my bloodstream warm, the first sip of wine, heat moving outward from the center. My heart thrills at the prospect of danger, but my mind sinks into murkiness. Something quieter.
Something… safe?
In that moment, I understand something about myself with clean clarity. I’ve spent my whole life being the one who holds everything. The shop, the books, the schedule, the fish, my own unruly heart.
Being held is new. Held is a sabbatical. Ivan is in charge now. I don’t have to think. I’m not running the show here. He is. Even with just this silk, he’s holding me.
“Color,” he says, against my ear.
“Green. Very green. Forest, emerald, the whole arboretum.”
I feel him smile against my earlobe. “Very good.” Then he sits atop the bench. “Come to me, pet.”
I swallow and then I join him there, and he stares in my eyes as he lifts my dress up, up, and up over my hips.
“Now, lie over my lap.”
I bend forward to follow the order, my brain going gooey at the thought of what I’m about to do.
He arranges me until I’m comfortable there, my ass exposed fully to him. “Tonight, in this place, you will call me ‘ Sir .’”
I take a quick breath. “Yes, sir.”
His hand comes down on my ass gently at first. I don’t make a sound. It doesn’t hurt.
But then there’s a bit more firmness on the next few hits. My breaths come faster.
A smack echoes in that dark room, and I wince.
He builds with the patience of a man tuning an instrument, each strike asking a question that my body answers louder and louder, heat blooming, breath going ragged.
Between them, his scarred palm smooths over the sting in slow circles, and the contrast unmakes me.
Pain with aftercare built into its own rhythm.
By the tenth or more, I stop counting entirely. Sweat on my low back catches a breeze from the air conditioning. I’m dizzy and hot and so horny I could hump a tree. No thoughts, just delicious torment. By the time he stops, I’m liquid, draped over his thighs, moaning into the leather bench.
“Stoplight, pet.”
I say green so emphatically it echoes.
Then his hand comes to my throat and arranges me back against his chest. I feel his hardness in my low back, jabbing me there. In front of me, the dark, kinky room full of experiences I want to try. Behind me, the man who can make it happen.
He growls in my ear, “Still green?”
I nod with as much force as I can. It’s not much. I’m kept in place by a collar made of him. Kept breathless by that pressure. By his presence.
“Tell me what you think you’ve earned, babydoll.” He loosens his grip.
I say the only two words on my mind. “Your cock.”
Without a word, he drags a hand up my inner thigh, and when he reaches my pussy, a masculine huffed laugh tickles my ear. “So wet for me.”
I nod, trembling for him. For this.
His large hand goes back to my neck, wet this time. His other hand fiddles with something behind me until I feel him there. The thick head, notching inside as he pulls me onto him. When he knows he’s in place, he pulls me down his length with that free arm around my waist.
He never lets go of my throat. Not even as he’s fucking me. He varies the pressure, keeping me just on the edge of madness. “You are mine, pet. You take my cock so fucking good…” He rambles in filthy Russian, lost in the moment, while I’m just trying to stay in my body.
But I’m hazy. Lack of oxygen, impending orgasm building in my core, submitting to his whims, all of it has me deep in a hole in my head. It’s peaceful and warm there.
Safe.
This man breaks people for a living. The same hand, the same precision. One on my throat, and now, the other on my clit. I’m edging toward dark madness, and every degree of it, every practiced ounce, is currently in service of my pleasure. My trust in him does more for me than the hand does.
I come apart the first time, gasping, choking, flying in my skin. He eases me down through it, loosens nothing, kisses my temple, murmurs something in Russian. Somewhere in the warm wreckage of me, mid-gasp, drifting back up, my eyes catch the iron candle stand by the bench.
When I have enough oxygen and thought for words again, I pant, “Is that—wait. Is that a cotton-core wick in a high-fragrance soy blend? They’d last longer if?—”
Ivan laughs, full and helpless, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, his whole chest shaking against my bound arms. The sound is enormous and rusty and real, and I start laughing too, breathless, half-strangled with it, both of us coming apart.
“You,” he manages, against my shoulder, the laugh still moving through him in aftershocks, “are auditing the candles. Mid-scene. You are conducting an audit.”
“Someone has to, the wax is fighting the wick, it’s a hostile workplace, and that candle is the victim?—”
“Luna.”
I turn in his lap, and he lifts his head, and his eyes are bright in a way I’ve never seen. His crow’s feet have engaged, the whole face awake. “I will buy you the club. You can rewick the entire building for all I care. But do it tomorrow.”
Oh right. We’re in a scene. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to?—”
His hand slides up my throat, tightens fractionally. The voltage returns under the laugh, and his voice drops back into the register that rearranges me. “Tonight, the only flame I’m watching is you. Color.”
I whisper, “Green, sir.”
Ivan lays me back on the low bed and takes me the rest of the way down, the charcoal silk tied above me to the headboard.
Then I’m met by the slow, deep, relentless rhythm of a man with nowhere else to be.
He mounts me gracefully, moving like a dancer.
His eyes never leave my face, reading every degree of me and adjusting in real time.
He angles his strokes for maximum effect, and he gets my eyes rolling back in no time. The man could crush me under his weight, but instead, he keeps most of himself off of me, as if he knows he could crush me.
I don’t want Gentle Ivan tonight. “Harder. Sir.”
“You cannot fight back. Cannot push me from you.” He thrusts deep and holds, watching my face for my answer. “Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t hesitate, pounding me into the bed with a vigor I didn’t know he had.
I shatter the second time, screaming his name, coming around him, my pussy squeezing against that girth over and over again.
He squeezes my throat, and I see stars as another orgasm takes hold.
Bliss floods every limb, and I’m not a person anymore.
I am my orgasm.
The next thing I register is his roar as he follows my orgasm with his own.
After, he carries me to the attached bathroom for cleanup.
He takes his time with a soft sponge, vanilla soap, and a warm bath, gently humming a tune I don’t know.
Sounds like a lullaby. He pats me dry with a fresh towel, wraps me in a black robe, and carries me back to the room.
Next to the bed is a small side table refrigerator I hadn’t noticed before, and he pulls out bottles of water and fresh strawberries. “Open, pet.”
So, I do, either drinking the water down or eating a strawberry at his command. “Those berries are so good.”
He smiles and inspects each wrist, thumbs pressed to my pulse points, before he kisses me there. “How are you feeling?”
I assess quickly. “Wrung out in some ways. Better than ever in others. Does that make sense?”
“Completely.”
I sit folded into his side on the bed, boneless, smug, lit up down to the soles of my feet, and somewhere in the warm dark I think, “So this is what it’s for, all that control of his.
Not power over a room. This. A place to put it where it makes someone bloom.
” I almost articulate it, but my mouth isn’t working great just yet.
“The question,” he says, into my hair. “About the wicks. No one has ever made me laugh inside a scene.”
“Has anyone ever made you laugh? Scene or not?”
“It’s happened on occasion.” His chest moves under my cheek, and the sound of his heartbeat is more grounding than anything ever.
It draws a yawn from me. “Is it… we should go, right? I don’t want to hog this room, and I’m about to fall asleep.” I begin to sit up.
But he pulls me back down. “The room is ours for the night, babydoll. If you wish to sleep, we sleep.”
“I don’t really want to… it’s just…” I yawn again. “I’m not sure I have a choice.”
He strokes my hair and kisses the top of my head. “Dream for me.”
“You’re not going to fall asleep?”
“Too wired. You sleep.”
I don’t know why, but a twinge of panic grabs at my chest. “You won’t leave me here, right?”
“Never.”
“You’ll stay. The whole time I sleep.”
“Da.”
I take one last full breath. “Okay.” And then, all I know is black.