Complicated Games

1. Jules

JULES

The thing about stalking someone to a BDSM club was that you really couldn’t half-ass it.

Jules had considered the alternatives. Bumping into him at a coffee shop. Engineering a meeting through one of his father’s business contacts. A well-timed charity gala where he could lean against a bar and let fate handle it.

All viable. All boring. All missing the critical piece of data he needed, which was whether Connor Thorne was the same man in the dark that he was in a boardroom.

Hence, the club stalking.

He’d done his research. Three years of it, if he was being honest. Connor Thorne: forty-one, self-made, quietly devastating in a way most business magazines failed to capture because they were too intimidated to dig beyond the surface.

Former CEO of a firm he’d built from nothing after walking away from a partnership that went wrong in ways nobody seemed willing to detail on the record.

Currently unattached to anything except a one-year guest lectureship at Marion University.

Jules had found the club through a receipt.

Not Connor’s. It came from his father’s investigator’s.

Dear old Dad kept files on the people he hated, and he hated Connor Thorne with more fury than he seemed worth.

It never made sense how a man so young could have such a hook on his father’s psyche.

Jules had skimmed the file on Thorne at seventeen, looking for ammunition against his father and finding instead a grainy photo of Connor leaving this building wearing a long black coat and a scowl that made his mouth water.

He’d stared at it for a long time. Longer than was polite.

His father had handed him his sexuality on a surveillance printout. Jules found this genuinely hilarious in a way he would never be able to explain out loud. He could definitely never tell his father. That was a death wish.

Now he was twenty-three, standing in the low amber light of a club called Veil, wearing a black shirt he’d chosen to blend in, watching the man at the end of the bar who hadn’t yet noticed him. Or who was pretending he hadn’t.

With Connor Thorne, Jules suspected, it was hard to tell the difference.

The club was subtle in its design. Dark wood. Low ceilings. Music ambient enough to make him feel relaxed despite his nerves. People moved through the space comfortably, as if there weren’t half nude people fucking on nearly every surface.

Jules gave it all a passing glance. A woman in leather did a double take his way as he passed where she kneeled for another woman who had to be her Domme based on the power exuding from her and the leash connecting them.

A couple a few feet from those two were engaged in a negotiation that involved a lot of sustained eye contact and roaming hands.

The bartender, a beefy man with a neck tattoo and a scowl, worked the crowd in a blur of movement.

None of them were why he was here.

Connor sat alone three stools from the end of the bar, his back partially turned as if to ward off attention while staying part of everything. Spine straight. Jaw set. He held a glass of dark amber liquid, probably a whiskey based on the information Jules had gathered on his preferences.

Jules shook away the last bit of his nerves. It was time to put his plan in motion.

He’d studied this man long enough to know he was exactly what Connor Thorne needed. And he was finally close enough to reach out and touch the man.

“Mind if I sit?”

Connor looked at him, eyes roaming from head to toe in a slow perusal. It lasted long enough that Jules felt it across his skin, a caress he wanted more of. Holding perfectly still, he waited out the man he intended to seduce.

“The bar has other seats,” was his reply in a voice lower than the interviews Jules had watched. The tone sent a lick of fire over his body.

“It does.” Jules sat down. “They’re worse. I prefer the view from here.”

Connor’s expression shifted a minute fraction. “You’re young.”

“Twenty-three isn’t all that young.”

“That’s what I said at that age. I was wrong, just as you are today.”

Jules smiled. He couldn’t help it. Most people softened their words around him. Wrapped them in qualifiers, tucked them behind polite expressions. Connor did no such thing.

It should’ve been taken as a sign to leave. Instead, it made Jules long to set up camp right there on the stool until Connor decided to leave. Then maybe he’d follow him out and to wherever he went next.

A dream, of course, considering Connor would definitely notice him now. Jules couldn’t hide his stalking after introducing himself this way.

“And you’re here alone,” Jules said. “Which either means you’re looking for a specific person, or you’ve decided no one here is going to interest you. I’d like to know which one it is.”

That got him another look. Longer this time. Connor’s eyes were grey, or close enough to grey that the low light made it so he couldn’t pick up any other colors. Jules could get lost in those eyes. He had, if he were to think about the hours he’d stared through photographs of the man before him.

“Presumptuous,” Connor noted.

“Efficient,” Jules corrected.

Connor took a sip of his drink, then set it down. Turning more towards Jules, he delivered two very unexpected words.

“Impress me.”

The instruction underneath them was clear. Prove you belong in this chair. Prove you’re worth my attention.

Jules’s pulse raced at the challenge. He leaned forward slightly. Just far enough to enter the space Connor had clearly delineated around himself. The space others hadn’t dared to enter.

“You’ve been here a while,” Jules said. “This is either your first or second drink. You haven’t spoken to anyone.

You’re sitting at the bar, not out on the floor.

It’s a barrier. Almost like a throne. You’re judging and everyone who walks through the doors, putting them up against some guideline you have in your head.

” He paused, letting what he’d said settle.

“You haven’t decided yet if I am. I’d like to help sway your decision. ”

Silence descended between them.

Connor’s overall expression remained unchanged. It was only a tiny tug at the corner of his lips that gave him away. A micro-expression so controlled it was almost invisible.

But Jules caught it. There. Right there. That was interest.

Buried under six layers of practiced indifference, barely alive, but present.

Jules had spent years learning to read people. His father’s boardrooms had been good training. The dinner parties even more so. People drifted through those spaces with masks carefully crafted to get them into the pockets of someone above their standing.

Connor was different. His mask wasn’t so much hiding his desire to use others. Jules suspected it to be protection tool. A way to keep people from using him.

“You’ve been watching me,” Connor said.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Long enough to know I want to keep doing so.”

Connor studied him. Jules understood, on some level he couldn’t entirely explain, that this was partly a test as well. The willingness to sit still under this powerful gaze without fidgeting or performing or looking away.

Connor Thorne dismantled people with his attention and silence.

Jules Goode had grown up under a different kind of scrutiny and survived it. Whatever Connor saw in him right now was the result of that survival.

He hoped it was enough to keep Connor from sending him away.

They talked for another twenty minutes. Jules tracked the seconds as if each one were earning him a shot at Olympic Gold. In essence, they were.

Connor asked questions, carefully studying Jules with each answer. What Jules studied, since he was clearly a college student. What he did with his time. Whether he’d been to places like this before and had experience in the scene.

Every honest answer he delivered appeared to please the other man. Not outwardly, of course. Mostly it showed in the way Connor didn’t dig deeper or argue with him. Jules took it as a good sign.

The only lie was one of omission since he gave only his first name. Connor accepted this without comment. Jules took it to mean Connor either didn’t care about last names or was planning to find his out later. He was betting on the second.

Connor didn’t offer personal details. He didn’t need to. The questions he asked revealed enough about his train of thought and preferences. Jules found himself adjusting, running a second track underneath the conversation that was all pattern recognition and strategy.

While this wasn’t the plan he’d had in mind, he could pivot on a dime. Another skill living with his father had taught him.

He was used to powerful men. Connor wouldn’t best him. Not when there was so much on the line.

Namely, his heart.

Connor wound up leaving after their talk. Jules wondered if it was because the other man found him lacking, or if the opposite were true. Had he fulfilled the requirements necessary to keep Connor from seeking someone else.

He didn’t offer his phone number or suggest there be a ‘next time’ for them to meet. He looked at Jules for one final moment and said, “You’re interesting.”

Then he walked away without looking back.

Jules sat there for a long while wondering just what the fuck had happened. Had he finally approached the man he’d longed for? Had they truly spoken at length without the world falling apart?

The bartender came by to ask if he wanted a drink. Jules shook his head, though he wondered why the bartender hadn’t approached during the entirety of his conversation with Connor. It seemed like an odd inconsistency with how the big man had been handling the crowd.

Maybe he’d been told to stay away until summoned. Or he could have possibly seen how the interaction was hanging on by a hairsbreadth.

Straightening his shirt uselessly, Jules stood and walked out of the club with a false air of confidence.

Outside, the air was cool and tasted like endless possibility. Jules leaned against his car, taking a few deeps breaths to settle himself before attempting to drive home. He needed to get ahold of himself.

Connor Thorne had been running a game tonight.

Jules liked games. He just hadn’t expected to find someone whose game might be better than his.

Once he’d calmed enough to drive, he sat with his hands on the wheel and replayed the conversation once, then again, cataloguing every pause and micro-expression. He filed it all into his mind, placing them in the collection boldly labeled Connor Thorne.

Three years of research and planning had come to a head. Now he had a baseline to use for his next run in with Connor. Jules started his car, smiling to himself as he thought of what was to come.

Marion’s semester started in three weeks.

So would his class with Professor Thorne.