6. Vaughn
Vaughn
Ikeep a spare shirt in my locker because I always keep extras of everything.
I'm the kind of person who plans for a ruined shirt.
I'm the kind of person who plans for a ruined shirt.
This spare is identical to the one in the sink: charcoal, fitted, same maker, same fabric.
I bought two at once. I do this with most things. It works.
I'm standing at the mirror in the attached bathroom buttoning the third button from the bottom when I notice my hands are steady.
Good.
Fourth button. Fifth. The fabric catches on the bite scab above my nipple.
A small tug, a flare of heat under the cotton.
I pause, adjust, continue. The scab sits under the shirt now, hidden.
Nobody will see it. In two weeks it will be a scar, and the scar will be something I notice in the shower and then forget.
I'm already not thinking about it. Sixth button. Seventh. Collar.
My mask is on. It's straight. My hair is fine. I run my fingers through it once, not changing anything, and catch the movement in the mirror. I stop because it's a fidget, and I don't fidget.
Teddy is visible in the mirror behind me.
He's face down on the bed, one huge hand open on the pillow, the other tucked under his chest. The sheet is at his waist. His bare back shows the marks of the night: the bruise on his shoulder blade, the nail marks I left, the paddle marks on his sides fading from purple to brown.
His mask is on. His breathing is slow and even.
From this angle in the amber light, he looks like the kind of person you'd want to make breakfast for.
That isn't a thought I'm having. I'm already past it.
I don't turn around to look at him directly. The mirror is fine. The distance is fine.
I finish the last button. My collar sits flush against my throat.
The man in the mirror looks exactly like the man who walked in last night.
Clean shirt. Good slacks, already on, belted, the buckle click satisfying the way it always is.
Cufflinks from the small tray in my locker.
Dress shoes. I look polished and sharp and entirely intact and I hold the look in the mirror for one second longer than I need to and then I turn around.
The room is small, warm, quiet. The amber light stays the same. The bass from the main floor is gone. Last call must have been hours ago. The private rooms at the end of this corridor are insulated well enough that I wouldn't have heard it anyway.
I walk back into the main room. My shoes are quiet on the carpet but not silent, and Teddy stirs behind me. I hear the sheet shift. His breathing changes.
I'm at the foot of the bed when he opens his eyes.
He sees me. I watch him take in the clothes, the shoes, the mask in place, the posture. He sees me. I watch him take in the clothes, the shoes, the mask in place, the posture. I watch him understand what all of it means.
He doesn't speak. He doesn't ask me to stay.
I'm grateful for this. I'm aware that I'm grateful for it, which is new for me. I've never needed an alpha to make my exit easy because my exits have always been easy.
I walk to the edge of the bed. Teddy sits up slowly, carefully, bruises and soreness and a body that's been through more in one night than most bodies go through in a year. His hand moves toward the sheet. Instinct. Cover up, the impulse to stop being seen. I make a small flat gesture. Don't.
His hand drops. The sheet falls away. He's bare.
Everything I did to him is visible in the low light: the paddle marks, the crop lines on his inner thighs, the handprints I left on his thighs, the nail marks on his back that I see when he shifts.
He's carrying a week of my work on his skin.
He'll carry it until it fades, and then it will be gone. That's how this works.
I say, quietly, in the tone I always use to close a scene:
"Kneel."
He goes to the floor.
No stumble. No hesitation. He moves off the bed and onto his knees beside it, smooth and immediate, looking up at me with his hands open on his thighs.
It's the exact posture I've been seeing at the end of scenes for eight years, and he does it more beautifully than anyone I've directed.
He's enormous on the floor, his shoulders at the height of my hip, his head tipped up, his eyes calm behind the mask.
He knows what this is. He's accepting it.
I reach down. Put one hand under his jaw. Tip his face up another degree.
His eyes are wet. Still, or again. I can see the shine of them behind the mask's openings, and the small strip of skin below the mask's lower edge is damp. I don't acknowledge it. I hold his jaw and look down at him. The moment stretches longer than the ritual requires.
I could take the mask off. I could give him my name.
I could sit down on the floor with him and stay until they make us leave.
I don't do any of these things. I'm not that person.
I wasn't that person when I walked in, and I'm not that person now, even though the gap between who I am and someone closer to that has narrowed a little.
"You did well tonight."
The words come out right. They land on him.
His eyes close behind the mask for one second as he receives it, absorbing it the way everyone I've said this to absorbs it, except he believes it.
He believes it the way he believed everything I said all night, fully, with his whole body, without checking whether he should.
I let go of his jaw.
I turn.
I walk to the door of the private suite. I pick up the plastic bag with the ruined shirt inside it. The beta left it on the hook by the door, folded neatly into club-issue plastic, because the staff here are excellent and I've always said so.
I don't look back.
Down the corridor. Past the bathroom. Past the two other private room doors, both closed, both quiet. Into the wider hallway that connects to the main floor. A beta with a tray of empty glasses nods at me as he passes. I nod back. He's the cleanup shift. The night is over.
Past the bar. The bar beta who had my drink ready eight hours ago isn't here; the morning beta is a younger man I don't know by name. He's wiping down the counter. He doesn't look up.
Across the main floor. It's almost empty.
A beta sweeps near the center, stepping around a dark stain she doesn't look at.
The club at the end of the night feels different from the club in the middle of it.
Deflated, tired, the pheromones thinning out like smoke after a fire.
I know this atmosphere. I've been in it before. Usually I'm gone before it arrives.
The exit desk. My coat is there. The morning door beta, different from last night's, hands it to me and takes the locker key I slide across the counter. She nods. I slide a tip across the counter that's more than what I usually leave.
She doesn't comment.
Outside.
The cold hits my chest and I feel the bite flare under the shirt.
Early morning, pre-dawn, and there's a dampness in the air that smells like the bakery two blocks over firing its ovens.
The street is empty except for a delivery truck and a man walking a dog through the mist. Daylight is coming.
I can feel it in the color of the sky, even though the sun isn't up yet.
My car is waiting. I messaged the service from the private room while he was asleep — the one thing I managed to do right tonight. The driver knows the drill. He's parked in the same spot he always parks in. The engine is idling. The interior light is off.
I get in. Close the door. The car pulls away from the curb.
The city moves past the windows. Streetlights.
An early cab. A bodega rolling up its gate.
The ordinary world of a Friday morning resumes around a man in a clean shirt with a bite mark under it.
There's a plastic bag on the seat beside me, holding the evidence of a night that went differently than planned.
I lean my head back against the rest. Close my eyes.
The thought arrives. It's not new. It's been there since the private room, since the lull, since the knot, since the moment a twenty-one-year-old kid on a concrete floor looked up at me and said oh, you're crying and I didn't have an answer.
It's been sitting quietly in the back of my head, waiting for me to stop moving long enough to hear it. I've stopped.
I'll find him.
Not a promise. A fact, the same way any good piece of data is a fact: verified, cataloged, actionable.
I don't know his real name — whether Teddy is Teddy or something he picked because he panicked when I asked.
I don't know his face. I know his scent, his voice, the shape of his mouth behind a mask, the way he kneels, the way he says thank you when no one asked him to, and the way he looked at me like I was a person.
I'll find him.
The car turns onto my usual route home. I close my eyes. The bite under my shirt pulls against the cotton with every breath.
***