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I find the restraints section with the focused energy of a woman on a mission, which is the only way I know how to move through the world right now.
It’s an impressive section. Whoever stocked this place was thorough in the way that only a true enthusiast can be. There are handcuffs in approximately a dozen varieties: fur-lined, metal, velvet, hinged, chain-linked, glow-in-the-dark, and others in materials that I can’t name, but that make me feel tingly in a way that I don’t know whether it’s good or bad. There are leather restraints with buckles, nylon restraints with Velcro, silk restraints that probably wouldn’t hold a golden retriever but look very romantic. There are spreader bars and hogtie clips and something called a Lover’s Lasso that looks like it came from John Wayne’s wettest dream.
No. I remind myself that I am not browsing; I am shopping with intent.
Get some fucking restraints.
I grab two pairs of metal handcuffs — the heavy-duty kind, the ones without the fur lining because this is not a spa treatment — and a set of leather ankle cuffs with a short chain between them. I’m reaching for a coil of actual rope, the good nylon kind, when I spot the whip; it’s in the next aisle over, hanging on a peg hook next to a wall of things I’m going to need years of therapy to process, and it’s a good one. A real whip. Leather, braided, about three feet of it with a weighted handle that fits my palm with a kind of terrible rightness, and makes me feel like a vengeful, powerful, sexy Indiana Jones.
I put it in the basket.
Then I add a second coil of rope because I will not deal with any more of Wraith’s bullshit, and a padlock — small, solid, the kind that doesn’t care about your feelings — and I’m standing there surveying the basket with the grim satisfaction of a woman who has finally, finally become prepared, when I hear something that turns my stomach upside down.
“June?”
The voice comes from behind me and slightly to the left, and I know it before I turn around, the way you know a song from the first two notes, the way you know weather from the smell of the air, the way you know your entire world is about to shift in a way that’s either wonderful or catastrophic and you can’t tell which yet.
But it’s probably catastrophic.
I turn around.
It’s Evan.
My brother is standing in the aisle of The Love Hole at approximately twelve-thirty in the morning, holding a small paper bag with the shop’s logo on it that he immediately puts behind his back, and he is staring at me with the specific expression of a man whose brain is trying to process several things at once and failing at all of them simultaneously.
We stare at each other.
Yes, this definitely qualifies as catastrophic.
Because nothing good can come from bumping into your brother at The Love Hole in the middle of the night.
“Hey bro, uh, what are you doing here?”
Chapter Four
June
“Molly sent me here to pick something up for her,” he says, with no hesitation. My question hasn’t phased him like I’d hoped it would, and now I’m stuck having a conversation with my brother in a sex shop at midnight. “What are you doing here?”
In his eyes I see brotherly concern, which I don’t blame him for having. On some level, I’ve earned that look with everything I’ve done, and yet, I know that because of everything I’ve done — all the trouble I’ve caused — I don’t deserve that look.
I wanted to turn my life around, yet here I am, at midnight, with my brother… in The Love Hole.
My new life is not off to a responsible start.
“June, seriously, what are you doing here?”
It’d be so easy to tell him the truth — that I have Wraith locked up in my apartment — and let him deal with it. But then I’d just be dumping another problem in his lap instead of dealing with it myself.
And I won’t do that to him.
New life, new June.
“Just shopping,” I say. Breezy. Casual. The voice that absolutely does not belong to a woman who has an unconscious man tied to her radiator with dish towels.
Evan’s eyes drop to my basket.
I watch him take inventory. The handcuffs. The ankle cuffs with the chain. The two coils of nylon rope. The padlock. The whip, which is sitting right on top like a garnish.
