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A door is in front of me before he answers. Solid, black steel barring my path. Both my hands go to it, my palms pressing against the cold metal. Again, the vibration flows through me, making me desperate to go in. I want it all. I want the sound around me, the feeling of nothing behind me, and the doors locked and bolted so I can forget what’s happened to me out here.
A hand suddenly touches my exposed shoulder, his grip warm and firm on my skin. I gasp slightly as he turns me back to him, watching as his height looms over me. He’s so still. So impossibly still. As if none of this noise affects him or pulls him deeper. I waiver under him, unsure why he seems so severe in his gaze. This is a party. A way of forgetting and moving on.
“Why so serious, Mr Rothburg?”
“Don’t forget who you are,” he says, solemnly. “Remember the chain. It’s all I’ve got to help you with.” I frown and look back at the door, one hand slowly lifting from the surface. “The temptation to never leave again is …” He stares at me, looking deep into my eyes. The depth of the moment sends a shiver over me because of his inability to finish whatever he’s trying to say.
“You’re worried?”
“I’m …” He chuckles lightly and pulls in a long breath. “Feeling …” He lingers on the end of the world, as if questioning what it means to him. “Protective. I’m feeling protective.”
“Are you my hero?”
Even I laugh at that, somehow filled with hilarity at the thought. Gray Rothburg isn’t my protector. He’s my dead husband’s boss. And, bizarrely, he appears to have become something real to me in a world where actual reality is nothing but pain.
My finger taps the steel, bouncing under the pressure of the dull bass still bounding through it. That’s real too. It’s solid under my finger. Genuine and sincere. I can feel it. “Would you feel better with the chain on?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Tough, I’m no longer manageable just because of a man’s wants. Open the door, Gray, and give me a pill. Live a little. You brought me here to watch. So, watch me.”
Minutes pass us by as he keeps looking at me. I don’t know or care what he’s thinking. I’m here to forget and move on with my life, be distracted as he said. Enjoy whatever I can so I don’t have to remember. But then something unexpected happens. He leans in and presses his lips to my forehead, lets them linger there. The door moves the second he does it. It slides under my finger, inching its way somewhere.
A breath puffs out of me because of his lips. They’re such soft lips. Barely a real feeling at all, and yet so real because they belong to him. I close my eyes under the loose pressure of them, part of me desperate to reach for him and cling on, but he moves away the moment I think about it. It’s only then that the noise assaults me.
I swing my gaze to it, unsure what I’m about to see, and am met with his chest blocking my view. “You’ve already had your pill, Hannah. Enjoy it,” he says, unmoving. “Everyone’s clean here. Including you. Tested.” Five seconds of him staring at me, and he backs off a few steps. “And remember the chain. Call if you need to. I’ll be watching,” he shouts.
The sudden eruption of the crowd appears as he goes, hundreds of people revelling and partying, the air thick with the smell of heat and arousal. Clean? The connotation drops into my mind like a bomb. Tested for sexual diseases. Unexpected nerves bounce around in me, especially as he keeps moving into the crowd and throws the fur coat into the masses. My feet move forward in his direction, my bravado dissipating as quickly as his presence near me does. He’s gone from view before I can manage even a few steps towards him, sucked into the mass of bodies undulating without a look back at me.
Every single thing in me that was feeling in control folds inwards. I steady my hand against the open doorway and look at the sight before me, wondering what this is, what the pill’s about to do to me, and how he would know if I’m clean of disease or not. Maybe the medicals we had to take? Who knows? Don’t care.
A sea of bodies move, all of them barely dressed and not giving a damn about that fact. I flick my eyes around, checking for a bar area, anything that I can get to so I can settle and watch what’s happening around me. There’s nothing that resembles a bar, though. There’s only a dark arena filled with bodies writhing to the sounds booming out. Doors lead off to the left and right, several of them holding firm in the walls regardless of the pressure of heat and sweat in the room.
The steel I’m resting on begins closing and I edge sideways, keeping my back pressed to the wall to avoid touching anyone or anything that’s in my way. What clothes I can see are sparse and odd. They seem like they’ve come from a comic store. Some leather, some rubber. A man passes me in a t-shirt and jeans, reasonably normal dress, but the heat of him radiating at me as he goes sends wafts of sex my way. It’s musky, heady even. I gulp and let go of the wall, as he passes by, damn sure I’m not going to look like a little girl lost in here. I’m not lost. I’m new. I’m searching for distraction and ready for whatever this is.
I laugh and step further into the masses, finally finding a spot where I can lean against a table and watch. A couple bound by me, the man laughing as the woman hits him with a long thin wire, repeatedly. It whips across his skin, leaving red marks. She only seems more enthused each time it lands, as if this is normal and customary for the venue. And then four men pass me by, two of them on the floor covered in a black sticky substance. I stare, almost enchanted at the look of them down there as the other two hurry them along on their hands and knees.
More people follow, three of them dressed as I am and two men in tuxedos.
“Hello.” I jump a little and turn to look at the woman behind me. She looks me over, a straw in her mouth as she drinks what could be a margarita through her wide lips. “So you’re Gray’s little thing.” It’s only when she’s said that, and narrowed her heavily kohl lined eyes, that I realise she looks like Catwoman. She’s even got the flick going on to elongate her eyes further. Black rubber coats her skin like a second layer, thigh high latex boots finishing the look off.
“You seem to be missing your ears,” comes out of me. “Where are they?” I laugh again, wondering what part of wonderland I’ve just landed in.
“Mal ripped them off earlier. He’s turned aggressive tonight. Wasn’t until he knew Gray was coming, but then … Ouch.”
“Who’s Mal?”
“Malachi Jones. My husband. And the host of this little venture.” She backs off a step and walks a circle around me. “Why did Gray bring you with him?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s trying to fix me, or distract me.”
“Do you need fixing?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
I let my gaze drift away from her back to the masses of people milling around. They’re not milling really. They’re doing anything they want to do. I move my gaze from something happening in the corner I’m staring at, not quite ready to admit I’m looking at actual sex, and watch a couple reaching into a large ornate bowl in the centre of the table instead. Their fingers pull out a handful of what seems to be pills like Gray had. The man takes a blue one, the woman a white one.
“Is that alcohol?” I ask, looking back at the woman and her drink.
