Room Two had a beautiful woman, alone and naked on the couch, just beginning to masturbate to p**n ography being projected across the expansive wall opposite her.
Room Three had an enormous, pale man in the tragic Melpomene mask, preparing to take a gagged woman from behind. Beside me, I could sense Sara grow more tense.
“This looks . . .” She gestured vaguely to the strangely fascinating scene.
“Adventurous?” I suggested. “You have to understand that people pay a lot of money to come here. They don’t want to see things they can see on the telly.”
I put my hand to the small of her back and reminded her, “Another thing you can’t see on the telly is real intimacy.”
She looked up at me and then her attention dropped to my mouth. “Do you think we’re really intimate?”
“Do you?”
She nodded. “When did that happen?”
“When has it been anything other than intimate? You just wanted to ignore it.”
She blinked away, but leaned into my side and we started walking again.
Room Four had three women, kissing and laughing as they undressed each other on a gigantic white bed.
Room Five had a man binding a woman up with rope, while a bound and gagged cuckolded man watched from the corner.
“We’re going to be boring,” she whispered, eyes wide.
“You really think so?”
She didn’t answer, because we’d arrived at Room Six, which stood empty. Without even looking to me, she slipped around the end of the hall to where we could enter the rooms from the rear.
The door handle to Six turned easily, and Sara stepped inside.
After a few moments, our eyes adjusted, and I could make out a bar in the corner and a huge leather couch with a low coffee table in front. Even in the darkness, the room felt very much like a corner of my own living room, and I suspected with a jolt that it was a replica of that space.
Without thinking to ask Sara first, I flipped on the light. I was right. Cream walls with deep walnut trim, a wide black couch, and the same plush area rug I had picked up in Dubai. Tiffany lamps decorated the two small end tables. The room was far smaller than my living room, which I used for large events, but the similarity was undeniable. The giant window through which people could observe us was framed by drapes, just like those at my flat, but from where we stood, it just looked like a window looking out upon a blank darkness.
Johnny had been to my house only once, but in a single afternoon he’d transformed a room in his club for me, no doubt assuming it would be familiar to us both, maybe put us at ease. He would have no idea that Sara had never actually been to my flat.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, walking closer and, realizing she could touch me in here, wrapping her arms around my waist.
“He’s made a replica of my living room for us.”
“That’s . . .” She looked around, eyes wide. “That’s crazy.”
“What’s crazy is that this is the first time you’re seeing my house. From inside a sex club.”
The absurdity of it all seemed to hit us both at the same time and Sara dissolved into giggles, pressing her face into my chest. “This is the weirdest thing anyone has ever done. Ever.”
“We can go . . .”
“No. This is the first place we’ll have sex where we’re supposed to,” she said, grinning. “You think I’m going to pass that up?”
Fuck. The woman could ask me to kneel and kiss her toes and I would do it.
I almost said it: I love you. The words got so close to escaping that I literally turned away from her, and walked over to the bar to fix myself a drink.
But she followed me. “And it’s probably late to be asking this, but what are we doing here?”
“I believe we’re trying to find a way to enjoy this aspect of our relationship without jeopardizing our careers or getting our faces plastered all over Perez Hilton.”
I lifted the bottle of scotch, silently offering. She shook her head, eyes wide beneath her mask as she watched me pour myself a drink.
“Three fingers,” she whispered, and I heard her smile in her voice.
“Just one, for now.”
She stepped close after I took a sip and stretched to kiss me, sucking on my tongue.
Fuck she tasted good.
The feathers of her mask brushed against my cheek. “Three,” she insisted.
As she kissed down my neck and spread her hand over the front of my trousers, palming me, I looked over her shoulder at the dark window. Out there, customers might already be sitting and watching, curious about what would happen. Or maybe we were all alone here at the end of the hall. But the idea that we weren’t, the sheer possibility that others could see how she touched me . . . for the first time I understood how being out in plain sight with me had allowed Sara to be whoever she wanted to be. She could play. She could be wild and adventurous and take risks.
And so could I. Here, I could be the man who was desperately in love for the first time in my life.
“Do you really want to fool around here?” I asked, wincing internally at my own bluntness.
But she nodded. “I’m just nervous. Which is slightly insane considering our history.”
She laughed and reached out to lightly scratch my abdomen. Fuck. I’d never felt such a tormenting mix of protectiveness, worship, and a blinding need to completely own someone physically. She was so beautiful, so bloody trusting—all f**king mine.
I bent down, kissed her jaw, and slipped the top few buttons on her shirt free. “What do you imagine when you think we’re being watched?”
She hesitated, toying with the hem of my shirt. “I imagine someone seeing your face and how you look at me.”
“Yeah?” I sucked on her neck. “What else?”
“I imagine a woman who wants to be with you, seeing you with me. Seeing you wanting me.”
I hummed against her skin, pushing her shirt off her shoulders and reaching around to remove her bra. “More.”
When I kissed her neck, I could feel her swallow against my lips. Her voice came out quieter when she admitted, “I imagine some faceless person who saw Andy treat me badly. I imagine the woman he was caught with seeing how you look at me.”
There it is. “And?”
“And him. I imagine him seeing how happy I am now.” She shook her head, digging her fists into my shirt and pulling me close as if I’d pull away. “I don’t think I’ll always hold on to it, but I hate that I still feel so much anger.”