Rose
I wouldn't call myself one of those women who use sex as a weapon, though I've been accused of it more than once, usually by men who confused losing with being attacked.
The truth is simpler than that. I use sex as an outlet.
Physical therapy. Catharsis. When I feel myself starting to unravel at the seams, it's what re-centers me, an hour where the rules are mine, the outcome is mine, and every variable in the room answers to me.
Other people run marathons, drink too much, journal, take up pottery or scream into pillows.
I hold a leash. We all have our systems, and mine has the benefit of never requiring kiln space.
I have very specific needs and very specific tastes, and I've never apologized for either. Control isn't a preference for me so much as the load-bearing wall. I decide who touches me, how, for how long and what it means afterward. Inside that structure, I can let go completely.
David understood that. Or I thought he did.
He was my submissive before he was ever my boyfriend, eight months of an arrangement that ran beautifully before I made the tactical error of promoting him.
He was good under my hand, obedient, eager and grateful in a way that settled something in me.
More importantly, he understood the rules, and for a while I mistook that for understanding me.
Then I got greedy.
I let him become dinner reservations and weekends away.
He acquired a drawer in my dresser through what I can only describe as hostile expansion, because I do not remember authorizing that much square footage.
Eventually I gave him a key to my apartment, which should've been the moment someone tackled me from the side and asked whether I'd learned nothing from the previous forty years of my life.
Apparently, nobody was available.
And now here we are.
So no, sex isn't a weapon.
But tonight it's going to be medicine, and I intend to take the full fucking dose.
I hadn't planned on going out. At least that's what I told myself for most of the afternoon. In reality, I probably made the decision somewhere around the moment Jackson told me he had to get home to his wife and some deeply unreasonable part of me wanted to overturn his desk.
It would be significantly easier to resent Jackson if he'd occasionally cooperate by behaving badly.
Instead, he remembers I get cold, brings me aspirin, carries me home when I'm drunk and then has the nerve to go be married to somebody else as though this arrangement wasn't specifically designed to irritate me.
That's a me problem.
I am fully aware it's a me problem.
Awareness, unfortunately, has proven to be a very poor treatment plan.
Walking back into my apartment earlier had felt like walking the plank.
David hadn't stripped the bed like I asked, although he did leave the key on the counter, which represented the absolute ceiling of his ability to follow directions under stress.
I stood there holding it for a while, staring down at this tiny piece of metal I'd spent weeks convincing myself was a symbol of emotional growth when in reality it had mostly functioned as unrestricted access for adultery.
Very inspiring.
Jackson had put me in the guest bedroom last night, which I hadn't even realized until this morning. Some quiet instinct of his had decided I wouldn't want to wake up in the bed where I'd found David, and, because the man is exhausting, he was right.
He's always fucking right about me at the most inconvenient times.
So when I finally went into my bedroom this afternoon and saw the sheets still twisted across the mattress, I didn't cry. I didn't scream. I didn't throw anything.
I became administrative.
By the time I walked back out, every piece of furniture in the apartment had been scheduled for removal.
All of it.
The bed obviously had to go because it was now a crime scene in my mind and I refused to negotiate with it.
The sofa went because David and I had fucked on it, and once that standard was established, the dining chairs became vulnerable because two of them had also participated in activities not covered by the manufacturer's intended use.
Somewhere around the coffee table, I realized I was no longer making individual judgments and had moved into full regime change.
Fine.
Take it all.
I wanted anything David and I had touched gone, anything David and Jet could conceivably have touched gone, and anything I looked at too long and developed an irrational suspicion toward gone for good measure. Fresh furniture would arrive tomorrow, and until then I'd happily eat dinner standing up.
A fresh apartment for a freshly amputated chapter.
Efficient.
Expensive as fuck, but still efficient.
And still probably cheaper than the number of therapy sessions I'd need to stop imagining Jet losing a fistfight with his pants every time I walked into my bedroom.
Two hours later, I'm in the elevator dressed, made up and on my way to RAGs.
I catch my reflection in the mirrored wall and give myself a once-over. Hair behaving. Makeup flawless. Dress fitted tightly enough to remind me that God remains benevolent in certain very specific departments.
Much better.
No crying. No David. No Jackson or his irritatingly competent hands or stupid beautiful face.
Fucker.
Tonight, I'm going somewhere the rules make sense. And if I happen to work out a little emotional inflammation while I'm there, well. Physical therapy is important at my age.
Three years ago, I took the bones of that old app I used back in the day and built them into something with walls, a roof and a liquor license.
Red, Amber, Green.
RAGs.
Most people assume the name is clever branding.
The members know exactly what it means. Red means stop.
Amber means slow down, check in, something needs attention.
Green means keep going. Simple language for situations that can get complicated very quickly, which is precisely why I built the entire place around it.
RAGs is a nightclub if that's all you want it to be.
Drinks, music, dancing, beautiful people dressed in things that would get them escorted out of most respectable establishments.
But underneath all of that, it's a controlled space for Dominants and submissives who want somewhere they don't have to explain themselves.
Rules are explicit. Consent is explicit.
Security is excellent and very large. Anyone who forgets the first two gets personally introduced to the third.
I built it because I needed somewhere to put myself.
Some women take up running after heartbreak. Some repaint their kitchens, cut bangs or go on a spiritual retreat where they drink pond water and rediscover their inner child.
I built a sex club.
We all cope differently.
The week Jackson got married, I spent every night crying into a different one of his shirts.
Hoodies, old T-shirts, one particularly soft Henley he'd left at my place years ago.
I had an entire drawer of him I'd never gotten around to returning, which had seemed harmless right up until he married another woman and suddenly became the saddest fucking drawer in Los Angeles.
I had no right to be that devastated.
Nothing could ever happen between me and my brother's best friend. He was a full decade younger than me, complicated in approximately seventeen different directions and, by then, very publicly in love enough with someone else to marry her.
I'd known all of that from the beginning.
Didn't stop me from being quietly, catastrophically in love with him from the moment we walked out of that hotel room.
So I did the sensible thing. I loved him from a safe distance and made my peace with the terms. I always knew the day would come when he'd meet someone. Build a life. Fall in love.
I want him to be happy. I truly do. Just not with another woman.
A wife, no less.
Honestly, the ideal outcome would've been monkhood. Deeply committed monkhood. One of those lifelong vows of celibacy followed by immediate relocation to a monastery carved into the side of a mountain, preferably somewhere with poor cellular service and absolutely no attractive pilgrims.
He could spend his days making cheese.
Illuminating manuscripts.
Growing medicinal herbs.
I would've supported him wholeheartedly. Personally delivered care packages and pussy. It’s a delicate balance.
I think it would've been a beautiful life.
But no. He had to get fucking married.
Anyway.
Once the Jackson spiral had run its course and I'd exhausted his drawer of absorbent fabrics, I did what I do whenever something in my life becomes unbearable.
I made it a project. Then the project became a business, the business became a building, and somewhere along the way RAGs became one of the few places in my life where I never have to second-guess the rules. A place I can go when I need control back.
Which, tonight, I very fucking much do.
The elevator reaches the lobby, and Gerald spots me the second the doors open. His eyes widen before he catches himself, and then he scrambles out of the driver's seat so quickly he nearly clips the curb with his shoe.
The scramble is what gets me.
Gerald is a grown man with grandchildren.
I take it as a compliment.
For my age, and I say this not from vanity but from fair, evidence-based assessment, I still have it.
Whatever it is.
I get carded often enough for it to have gone from flattering to administratively inconvenient, and people routinely do that little double blink when they find out how old I am.
I've reached the point in life where pretending not to know I'm attractive feels considerably more obnoxious than simply acknowledging the available evidence.