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Tempting Arrangement
Luca
One night, on Halloween,a woman walks into my club dressed like a devil. Red wings, secured by a black harness, a short red dress, long red gloves and thigh-high boots in patent leather, and a pair of shiny devil horns.
The wearer belies the costume—there’s something almost angelic about her.
Big eyes, long dark hair falling past her waist, a fuckable sort of innocence in the way she looks around the club. Her glances are quick, her movements hesitant. She seems fresh-faced and intimidated, nervous yet excited.
Tonight, the club is dark and loud and vibrating with the boom of ambient music. The lights are dim and carefully placed along valleys of shadows, meticulously designed to dim the vision and dull the senses, to lull intoxicated patrons into underthinkingtheir indiscretions. Every part of my club is engineered to facilitate easy sins and mindless mistakes.
But for this woman, the lights organise themselves into a halo that softens her skin, her features, the crimson of her wings and dress. She appears almost dreamlike, the edges of her a delicate blur as she walks past dancing bodies, past writhing princesses and hungry beasts. She’s got a tiny purse in her hand, which she holds with her elbow tucked on the ledge of her hip and her hand dangling down, projecting the kind of elegant nonchalance high society women curate meticulously.
But I know high society women. I’ve had my share of them—in more ways than one—and they are all the same once the shimmery veneer of them has been scraped off with the edge of one’s teeth.
Women, when it comes down to the red, beating core of them, are the same as any other human being. Needing and hungry and oh so very desperate to be seen and desired.
This woman—ginger steps over the plush carpeting, teeth worrying her bottom lip while she searches the shadowy corners with her eyes, only delicately, to avoid disturbing the perfect red of her lips—is not so different. The need and hunger and despair are there, right below the surface. Ready to be scratched open, gashed like a freshly re-opened wound.
She just needs to find someone who’ll do that for her.
Her gaze slides over me but doesn’t linger. Does she know who I am? Probably. Maybe she doesn’t think I could give her what she’s looking for.
I watch her watch the men. My patrons are some of the most powerful men in the world; I have as much in common with them as I do with the rats that scuttle the back alleys of London looking for food scraps.
These men—no matter how rich and powerful they are—are all little more than animals. They crawl in, stinking of cologne andalcohol and money, and they’re all just as hungry and dirty as the rats outside. They come here looking for something that will sate their hunger; I make sure they get it.
It’s why I created CHOKE, after all.
The most exclusive gentlemen’s club in London. Here at CHOKE, there is no patron too high and lofty—no request too depraved. Whatever the patron desires—the patron receives. It’s good business.
The club sees everything; that’s better business. Here, the walls and corners and ceilings have eyes. Nothing goes unnoticed, unknown, unrecorded. Once you’re in my club, you’re on my recordings. And when you’re on my recordings, you’re in my power.
I don’t hide the nature of my trade. I don’t make veiled threats and sinister allusions. The waters of my business are never muddied by attempts at subtlety—that’s bad business. Obscurity obfuscates too much. I prefer to keep my business clean and clear—no matter how dirty it is.
My patrons, once I blackmail them, know they are being blackmailed. They know the power I hold over them. They know what I expect from them. Everything is dealt with cleanly and immediately, like cauterising the wound as you make it.
It’s for the best. If they hate me, or resent me, or, more pathetically yet, they deign to cast judgement upon what I do, then—well, so be it. They can insult me behind my back, revile me to my face. What do I care? Pride is an unnecessary limb, easily wounded yet useless. I have none.
The true nature of power is low and dirty and dark. Power is not something lofty one rises to meet—power is something filthy one stoops to scrape off the ground.
Isn’t that how the devil ended up ruling hell, after all?
He first had to fall.
Almost without fail, Halloweentends to be the most successful night of the year for CHOKE.
There’s something about costumes which leads men to folly like beasts to water. Perhaps it’s the element of titillation, the naughty so often juxtaposed with the innocent. An Alice in Wonderland whose sky-blue skirt is barely long enough to cover her ass, a Little Red Riding Hood in fishnets and stiletto heels. Maybe all men secretly dream of fucking nurses and kitten girls.
I wouldn’t know.
All I see when I look at costumes are disguises. Masks men and women wear to make them feel as though God won’t know the sin from the sinner. That’s why Halloween is the club’s most successful night. The freedom of anonymity.
It’s why my patrons gather here tonight, buzzing with excitement. After all, who cares if you make a girl dressed like a zombie cheerleader piss on your face in the hotel bathtub if you’re wearing a mask? Nobody would ever know.
I watch the patrons, noticing them as they notice the new girl—the innocent angel in the devil costume. She’s a bit too old for some of them, a bit too young for others. But she’s got a look about her like she’s not used to places like CHOKE, a look like she’d let a guy get away with just a little more than most women might.
