Page 25 of Salt in the Wound
The narrow door behind the desk opened and another employee came out, hands outstretched to help me remove my coat. I only hesitated a moment—it would have to come off at some point, anyway. No sense in being bashful about revealing my skimpy outfit now.
But as the young man slipped my coat off my body and the cool air of the lobby brushed against my shoulders and thighs, self-consciousness pulled at me like a cloak made of iron. Mark had chosen my wardrobe tonight, so I knew it would be pleasing to him, but there was no denying the sexual promise it embodied: a short dress made of white silk, with thin straps and a row of fabric-covered buttons marching down the front.
I can easily be undone, it said to anyone looking at it.I can be lifted up, tugged down, torn off.
And yet the white…it was practically bridal, especially with the embroidered white ballet flats he’d sent along with the dress, and his very clear instructions to wear my engagement ring.Bridalwas Mark’s point, I supposed.
But neither of Mark’s employees gave my barely-covered body a second glance, and I anticipated that a white negligee was the least scandalous of what anyone inside this glass box wore anyway.
I was in Mark’s world now, his kingdom, and apparently, I would be its queen. I needed to look like it.
We mounted the floating metal stairs and wound our way up to the second story, where we then pushed through another glass door and into a hallway. Though the lobby had been completely silent, music played in here, a slow, electronic pulse. We passed more glass doors, some frosted, some opaque, and then windows. The windows opened into some of the rooms, and some were full of people laughing and drinking, and some were full of people doing so much more…
A man had a woman bent over a bench and was swinging a paddle at her backside. She was sobbing; he was smiling. And she had her hand between her legs, masturbating herself with a desperation that sent heat flooding through me to witness.
I wrenched my eyes away, face burning. Luckily, my guide was ahead of me and didn’t seem to notice. And perhaps it was years and years of situational awareness, of martial arts, of being a social spy, but I couldn’t stop looking at the windows. At the people inside, naked or clothed, writhing or stalking around benches, all sorts of pairings and sharings.
The sexual parts of Catholic dogma had never much preoccupied me; I had planned on being a nun, so it wasn’t like any of the rights and wrongs would be applicable to me, anyway. But some of the things I saw through the windows tonight quickened my breathing. Made lust kick deep, deep in my belly.
A woman riding another woman’s face while she drank something amber-colored from a glass. Two men taking turns with another man, whose cock was trapped in a cage and was leaking semen in long, pearly threads onto the floor between his spread feet. A tangle of people fucking at one man’s command while he watched with an unsettling but very sexy sneer.
I had known—of course I had known—that there were things I dreamed about that didn’t match up with what my Church said about sex and desire. I knew there were images, impulses, thoughts that came when I saw other girls sometimes. Things that, if I’d confessed them, my confessor would have told me were wrong.
So I’d never confessed them—because they didn’t matter—because I was going to be a nun.
But what now?
What now when I wouldn’t be a nun…or at least not a nun until I’d served long enough for Mortimer to think I’d earned an annulment? What now when my future husband owned a place where the windows were full of this? And not just the women together, but the raw sex, the freedom of it, everyone being with everyone, the paddles and crops and hot wax and people arching in agony with stiff nipples and spread legs, like the agony was everything, everything.
I was flushed and shaken when we pushed out of the hallway to the far door, another glass one. Beyond it, lights danced and bounced, and when the employee opened the door, sound poured in, thick and pulsing and thrumming. Music for dancing instead of fucking.
“Right this way,” she called and led me onto a balcony that wrapped around the perimeter of the space. Below us, the dance floor beat like a heart, bodies lifting, dipping, moving as one. Above us were two more floors, also ringed with balconies. I thought I could make out more windows too—more private rooms, these overlooking the raucous party below.
Out here, there were no longer any rooms, but rather nooks open to the space, most of them filled with plush, semicircular booths, but some filled with rows of chairs, like at the opera. One nook was larger than the others, and there I saw him.
Mark in a black leather armchair that looked like a throne, surrounded by four or five people I didn’t recognize.
I followed my guide there, my hands shaking and my stomach twisting, the same way it did right before a judge lifted his hand between me and an opponent at a sparring match. Like for a single, crushing instant, I’d forgotten everything I’d ever known about anything, and I was a complete beginner all over again.
Then Mark looked over and met my eyes, and everything else stopped.
The shaking, the nerves, the vigilant prickle at the back of my neck, constantly reminding me that I was in a new place, a dangerous place, that I had a job to do.
He commanded my attention, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that wasn’t good. Around him, I would need to be warier and more watchful than ever—but it couldn’t be helped right now as I was seeing him in his domain for the first time. As I was being led to his dark throne like a sacrifice.
Mark Trevena looked like he owned every space he moved through anyway: stalking me in a grimy dojo with bare feet and a rubber knife in his hand; dancing at a rooftop party; wearing rolled-up shirt sleeves in his penthouse. He radiated complete control and dominion wherever he was.
But here? Here in the world he built for himself?
This was beyond an owner in his club, a king in his kingdom. This was more like some shadow god in his underworld, sprawled on his throne while his glittering eyes assessed the tribute being brought his way. The space matched him, reflected him, spoke for him. It was an extension of his will, and I could feel it as I walked toward his nook, the music pulsing, the glass and lights turning everything into a dizzy dream. He was the center of it all, high above his guests, watching them all cavort in his care.
He was the locus, the pivot on which the entire night turned. It was in the way the people in the other nooks watched him, the way people looked up from the dance floor, as if everyone were performing for him. Hoping to impress him.
We stopped in front of his chair, and I allowed myself a quick catalog of the nook before I respectfully dropped my eyes. Mark himself wore a black suit with a black shirt, vest, and tie. With his golden hair and the bored way he lounged back in his chair, he looked every bit the fallen angel.
Next to him was a woman with deep brown skin and close-cropped hair, wearing a dress of something shiny and red. She reminded me of Mark in the way she sat, leaning back with her elbow over the back of her armless chair and her eyebrow arched in a delicate crescent. There was a pale, dark-haired woman next to her wearing a tailored blue suit and a watchful expression that made me uneasy.
Two men sat on the other side of Mark, one in another armless chair in a black tuxedo, the other wearing leather pants and nothing else, kneeling on the floor next to him. Both men had dark olive skin, and the sitting man had a stubbled jaw and shoulder-length hair.
