Brooke thought about it some more. “Seth Erikkson?” He ran the management company that had previously owned the building her shop was in. She’d made him an offer to purchase it from him several years earlier, when she’d wanted to expand into the rest of the space. He had taken it over from the previous owner, who’d died not too long before, and who coincidentally had the same last name. He’d been fair and easy to work with throughout the sale process.
Eliza nodded as she danced from foot to foot, a serious case of the giggles struggling to break loose right there in the office.
“Are you shitting me?” Brooke hissed, barely able to keep her voice down.
Eliza wildly shook her head and held up three fingers.
Scout’s honor.
Rusty grabbed his wife by the shoulders and leaned in. “It’d probably be easier to see how many people you recognize tonight. There are a lot of kinky people in Sarasota.”
All heads in the office turned as Eliza finally lost it and burst out laughing.
* * * *
It took another ten minutes for them to get checked in and for the volunteer at the desk to enter Brooke’s information and process her membership. Since Rusty and Eliza were bringing Brooke and sponsoring her, she didn’t have to wait to talk to one of the staffers.
Who, tonight, was Tony, and she’d already talked to him at dinner anyway.
She wasn’t sure what she’d expected when they walked from the office into the main dungeon area. The house lights were up, leaving it far brighter than she’d imagined a dungeon would look. To her right was a section of tables, with no chairs. It looked like all the chairs had been lined up for the audience in front of a large, metal red A-frame. Past that, on the far side, were stations of play equipment, bondage benches, large X-frames, and other things she wasn’t even sure she wanted to know about.
Before she could step back, Eliza caught her elbow and steered her around the back of the chairs and to the far side, about halfway up, the three chairs at one end. Then she planted herself inside, with Brooke between her and Rusty at the end.
“This is it?” Brooke asked, vaguely feeling let down.
“The riggers frequently prefer the lights up to see what they’re doing,” she said. “Especially for a demo.”
“Oh.”
Tilly and her guys arrived and took the seats directly behind them, Rusty and Tilly swapping places so the three women could sit together and talk.
They were still sitting there and talking when Brooke was vaguely aware of more people entering. In fact, it felt like there were eyes on her.
When she looked up, she spotted Cody and Justin heading right for her.
“Oh, boy,” Eliza said. “You okay?”
“Um…”
“They were supposed to be at dinner tonight. I didn’t want to say anything to you and freak you out, because then they didn’t show up.”
As to what Brooke had wondered what the men were doing tonight…
Question…answered.
Tilly looked up at them as they stopped at the end of the row. “Yeeesss?”
Cody lifted a hand in greeting, looking a little abashed. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Brooke said.
Justin nodded. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Hey there, hi there, hold on a second.” Tilly turned to Brooke. “You want a few minutes alone with them?”
“Um…”
“I think that’s a good idea,” Eliza said.
Brooke found herself surrounded by Eliza and Tilly, who grabbed her elbows, prompted her up onto her feet and moving across the room, where they handed her off to Cody and Justin, who’d followed.
“We’ll save you two guys some seats,” Eliza said before they returned to the chairs.
Brooke watched them go before finally realizing she needed to deal with this.
And it wasn’t exactly a bad thing.
Was it?
Justin shook his head in apparent amusement. “Dinner with friends tonight, huh?”
“Hey, you didn’t come right out and admit you’re kinky.”
“We didn’t want to freak you out,” Cody said. “Especially when we really like you.”
Her eyes widened. “You…like me?”
“Well, yeah,” Justin said. “We didn’t know you were kinky, though. Eliza didn’t volunteer that information.” The last part he delivered slightly louder and staring pointedly over at Brooke’s friend.
Eliza smiled and waved at them.
“So, long story short,” Justin said, “it’s a little confusing. Cody and I are both Doms, and we like to Top men and women, but we’re also slightly poly and we enjoy being in a relationship with the same woman.”
She blinked. “Huh?”
“What part didn’t you understand?” Cody said.
“None of it, actually, but especially the part where a gay guy is telling me he and his gay partner like sleeping with women.”
“That was too short of a version,” Cody told him.
“Start over,” she said. “You guys aren’t gay?”
“We’re gay,” Justin said. “Homoflexible, some might say, but we’re more pansexual. We can’t share a guy in bed, for some reason. It just ends up not working out. But we have fun with the right woman.”
“Wow. I know Eliza told me dating in the kinky community was a lot more direct than I’d be used to, but I wasn’t prepared for that direct.”
“Look,” Cody said. “How about we steal you from Eliza and Rusty tonight?”
Fear took over. “I’m not here to get spanked tonight or anything. I just wanted to get out and meet new people.”
“That’s fine,” Justin said. “That’s all you have to do, then. We promise, we’ll never try to get you to do something you don’t want to do. And we also promise we’ll break anyone’s arm who tries to do something to you that you don’t want done. We’d love to have a chance to spend a few more hours with you today.”
She looked over at Eliza and Tilly, who were both wearing stupid, manic grins and giving her double thumbs-ups.
Even Rusty looked in their direction and gave her a thumbs-up.
If her two overprotective friends and their bad-assed-reputationed friend were giving the men unanimous thumbs-ups, she supposed she could take a chance and at least spend time talking to them that evening.
“Break someone’s arm, huh?” she playfully asked.
The men exchanged a glance. Justin spoke next, leaning in and dropping his voice. “Brooke, if anyone dares lay a finger on you and you don’t want it, believe me, Cody and I will kick their fucking ass before they can get the first word out.”
Her throat went dry. There was something so incredibly sexy and protective in his tone that she realized she didn’t have a response that wouldn’t make her sound like an idiot.
So she nodded.
Cody and Justin each held out a hand to her, waiting.
It took her a second to realize what they were waiting for. She placed her hands in theirs and let them lead her back to the chairs as Eliza and Tilly exchanged fist bumps.
Chapter Eleven
More musical chairs were required. Rusty joined Eliza in her row, swapping places with Tilly, so she could sit with her men, while Eliza waved Justin, Cody, and Brooke into the row in front of them.
Leaving Eliza directly behind Brooke.
Eliza leaned in. “You love me, and you know it.”
“Shh.”
The demonstration was getting ready to start. And yes, at some point Scrye, Ed, Seth, and a few other people who looked familiar from non-kinky settings had joined the audience.
Jeeze louise, am I the last vanilla person in Sarasota?
As Kel gave his opening talk, Cody leaned in and whispered in Brooke’s ear. “If you have any questions, or if you feel overwhelmed and want to step out into the office, just grab us and we’ll follow you.”
A wave of gratitude swept over her, that he was so clued in. She n
odded and reached over to pat his thigh.
Then she found it difficult to remove her hand from his thigh, especially when she felt the hard muscle encased beneath his denim jeans. They were both wearing jeans, black motorcycle boots, and button-up, short-sleeved shirts. Cody’s was solid black, while Justin’s was dark navy blue.
And they both had nice bodies. Not that she hadn’t already noticed that little factoid in the time she’d spent with them thus far, but something about the way they were dressed tonight accentuated that and made them even more…alluring.
She finally settled for resting her other hand on Justin’s thigh, too, balancing her out. Both men smiled at her, so it must not have been a problem for them.
She certainly didn’t mind it a few minutes later when she realized they each had a hand lightly resting on top of hers.
No stranger to masturbation, her libido hadn’t really been very vocal lately. Sure, the first several years after her last boyfriend, it had poked its head up from time to time like a groundhog checking the weather, but it had always darted back into its hole—no pun intended—and gone right to sleep again.
Not now. Now that bastard of a groundhog was running around like a squirrel with a snootful of cocaine and belting back Red Bull shots. All she needed was for that little fucker to pull out a couple of pistols and start shooting up the joint to have herself a raging telenovela in her pants.
* * * *
At the end of the demo, where Kel had bound and suspended his fiancée, Mallory, before doing some vibrator play on her, Brooke wasn’t sure what she was supposed to feel. So far, scared wasn’t at the top of the list.
Nervous, sure.
Did it make her a pervert that she enjoyed watching the scene play out before her and that it might have even dampened her panties a little?
Well, okay, she was surrounded by an audience full of other perverts who were obviously there to watch, so it wasn’t like she was in the minority at this point.
After the audience gave up a round of applause when Kel and Mal finished, Brooke politely refused and carried her own chair when Justin tried to carry it for her to the table area.
The house lights were then shut off, leaving focused, colored lighting in the play area and dim light in the social area. The music was turned on and several couples headed over toward the play area. In the social area, a buffet of light snacks and appetizers had been set out for the patrons along one wall. The men sat with her at one of the tables while Eliza and Tilly walked over.
“Well?” Eliza said.
Brooke considered her answer. “That was interesting.”
Tilly snorted. “I’ve heard that word used in a lot of contexts.”
“No, I enjoyed it,” Brooke clarified. “I really did. It’s not at all what I expected.”
“Most people say that,” Cody said. “It’s both weirder and more mundane than a lot of people expect.”
She startled when she heard a loud smack from the other side of the space, a wooden paddle being brought down on someone’s ass.
As she froze and forced herself to breathe through it, to process it, to not let it trigger her, she realized all four of them were staring at her. Make that five when Rusty walked over after he finished chatting with Landry and Cris, Tilly’s guys.
“I’m okay,” Brooke said as she got used to the sound. “I’m fine.”
“You didn’t look fine for a second,” Tilly said in her nurse voice, her eyes narrowed. “We can go out to the office, if you want.”
“No. I want to stay. I’m okay.”
She opted to watch from a distance to start with, asking Justin and Cody questions about what she was seeing, what people were doing. Since the men personally knew many of the people playing, they were able to add an additional level of information not available to the casual outside observer. What might look like a woman writhing in pain to some was, actually, a woman who was in the process of having a powerful orgasm.
Although there were a few women—and a man or two—who were also experiencing pain.
“It’s all consensual,” Justin assured her. “Anyone yells red, and if their play doesn’t stop, believe me, the DMs will step in and stop it and see what the hell’s going on.”
“DMs?”
“Dungeon Monitors,” Cody said, pointing to Tony, who was standing off to the side of the A-frame and watching a guy suspend another guy. Tony wore a name badge on a lanyard around his neck. Then Cody pointed across the room to Ross, who stood at the far end of the room, leaning against the wall and talking with someone, but from his body language and attention, you could see he was watching people playing. He also wore a name badge on a lanyard. Then Cody pointed to another man with a name badge. She hadn’t met him yet.
“That’s Derrick,” Cody said. “He’s one of the owners, and the guy who originally started this place. He brought Kel in as his partner less than a year ago. It’s just too much for one person to run alone. They take turns manning the place on weekends.”
The longer she watched and talked with the guys, the more she relaxed. Acclimating herself to the various sounds of the room also helped. She no longer jumped when she heard the smack or crack of impact or whip.
Or someone yelling or crying out, either in pain or pleasure.
Or both.
No one was running around chasing people down. No one was dragging anyone from around the fringes into their scenes.
It was all…
Well, except for naked people getting beaten and made to forcibly orgasm, it was all relatively polite and…boring, actually. Quite a few people seemed content to do nothing more than just watch and talk with other people.
“So you guys play?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” Justin said.
“Are you going to play tonight?”
“Probably not,” Cody said. “We did bring a toybag with us, but honestly? We’d rather sit and talk with you.”
He flashed her a smile that sent the suddenly caffeinated coke-fiend of a libido of hers scurrying a few more laps around her lady parts.
“Tell me about the kind of play you guys like to do.”
Justin went first. “Well, for starters, like we told you, we would never try to get you to do something you didn’t want to do. That said, I’m a pretty heavy sadist, if the bottom is willing and wants that. I love tight bondage, usually with rope, and then I love using canes on people.”
“Candy?” she asked hopefully.
He smiled as Cody laughed. “Rattan,” Justin said.
“Yeah. Had a feeling.”
“I love your sense of humor,” Cody said. “Seriously. I mean, some people take themselves way too seriously. They really do. We don’t. We’re not about strict protocols or anything like that. I tend to gravitate more toward doing forced orgasm scenes, but I’m also a sadist, I’ll admit.”
“Do you both play with the same person?”
“Sometimes, if the person wants that and we are both into them like that.”
While it didn’t seem that any two people played exactly alike or with the same exact implements, many of the Tops, as they told her they were generically called, seemed rather fond of orgasm play.
That actually didn’t seem so bad to her.
Some of the bottoms took everything from what looked like hardly any pain, with implements like soft fur floggers and bare-handed smacks, all the way up to one woman who took what looked like a vicious caning. By the time her Top finished making her orgasm, she wore a beaming, carefree smile.
“Do you guys do this to each other?” she asked.
The men looked at each other and burst out laughing. “Hell, no,” they both said.
Cody continued. “We’re two Dominants. Sure, we play around in bed. Have we bottomed before? Yes. We’ve both experienced implements for each other so we can feel what something does. The last thing I want to do as a Dominant is use an implement on a bottom when I don’t know what it’s going to do. Some things are very
deceptive. Tony, for example, has this damn orange silicone tasting spoon in his toybag. It’s from a freaking kitchen supply place. That thing, it’s like getting hit with a piece of iron if you use it hard enough, because the material’s so dense. But if you didn’t know that and smacked someone with it, like on an elbow or their shin, you could possibly do some real damage.”
“Wow.”
“Exactly,” Justin said. “Good Tops are always very careful. They know what their implements do, they know how to use them, and most importantly, they’ve practiced with them before using them on someone else.”
She smiled. “So what about the orgasm torture?”
“Huh?” they asked.
“You guys don’t have a clitoris hiding somewhere, do you?”
They laughed. “I don’t think anyone’s ever been seriously injured from receiving an orgasm, either,” Justin said. “Not in this setting, at least.”
“I’m just messing with you,” she said.
Cody held up a finger. “Just to clarify, no, we don’t have anything in our pants but boy parts.”
Brook and Justin looked at him.
“Well, I said to clarify,” he muttered.
* * * *
Brooke was actually yawning before midnight, much to her dismay. The men saw it.
“Can we drive you home?” Justin asked. “No pressure, just a ride.”
“Depends. Are we still on for dinner and zombies tomorrow night?”
“Absolutely,” Cody said.
“Okay then. Let me get my cell phone out of Eliza and Rusty’s car. And I want to say good night to everyone.”
She’d actually gotten brave enough, with the men flanking her, to approach the play area and hang out on the fringes of it at a respectful distance like others already were, able to see more closely what was going on without intruding on any ongoing scenes.
Yes, it was obvious no one was being forced to get onto the benches or other frames. One time, she even noticed a young woman practically dragging her guy away from where he was talking to someone else and begging him to Top her.
They explained she was a brat, but by that point Brooke had learned so much already that nothing new was taking anymore.