The number I’d been circling on my notepad was the number to Chase’s club. I’d written it down in what seemed like an eternity ago, on the day Jake had said we’d gotten an invitation to the club. To Chase’s club. To a club he’d been to before, with Jane.
My mind went back to the conversations we’d had about visiting the club. How he’d heard that we’d need an invitation from the club’s owner in the first place.
How he’d had things in storage he needed to put in the tower room.
And his first message to me, on the dating site that brought us together.
I clicked open the dating website, risking bringing the Human Resources department down to my office for accessing a personal site...and a personal bondage dating site at that...on a company computer. But I didn’t care.
I clicked through to the first message Jake had sent me:
To: Venus247
From: Dom Meyers
‘Hello Venus247,
I saw your profile tonight and it interested me a great deal. If you’d like to chat, please reply. I’m new to this site, and new to the BDSM world as well. I get the sense you are too.
Dom Meyers’
There it was, in black and white. New to the BDSM world as well.
It wasn’t until now that I’d put all these pieces together. They didn’t fit. And it bothered me.
Impulsively I dialed the number for Chase’s club. It’s Wednesday; the club is closed.
But the phone was answered on the first ring. By a female voice, a voice I recognized as Stacy’s.
The conversation was brief. I explained that I wanted to meet her. There was the briefest hesitation on Stacy’s end. I wasn’t sure if she was going to agree to see me.
“I finish up here at midnight. There’s an all-night diner on I-45 South. You can’t miss it. Big red sign on the right, just before the exchange. I’ll meet you there.”
Stacy was at the diner before me, waiting in a booth at the very back. She had a breakfast platter in front of her: eggs, pancakes, sausage, hash browns, along with juice and coffee. I slid into the booth across from her.
“Hope you don’t mind that I ordered. I’m famished.” She tucked a forkful of pancake into her mouth.
“No, not at all. It’s fine.”
The waitress appeared and I ordered a decaf coffee and pie. I’d be up late anyway, no use compounding it with a caffeine jag. Stacy was watching me, her blue eyes intent.
“You want to talk about Chase?” She started working through the hash browns, waiting for my reply.
“Actually, no. I’d like to talk about someone else. Her name is Jane.” I waited for her reaction, not surprised that she had none. She wiped her mouth, took a drink of coffee.
“Jane? What do you want to know?” Her tone was neutral but I sensed tension behind the suddenly serious blue gaze.
“I was wondering if you could tell me about her and Jake...Jake Meyers. Chase told me that you knew her from working at the same dance club. I know she disappeared, had some trouble sometime back. I wondered if you could tell me a bit more about that.”
Stacy looked at me over the edge of her coffee cup. “Jane had a lot of problems. I think she tried to work them out by being a submissive or something. Can’t say that’s the best route to take when you have that kind of history, but we all do what we think is right, you know?”
I nodded, unsure as to what she meant exactly, but desperate for her to continue.
“But between you and I, I really think she chose the wrong guy to be her Dom. Jake was completely out of his league with her. Almost anyone would have been, really. She was a handful. A real lost soul with the kind of pain that you just don’t mess around with.” Stacy set down her cup, motioning to the waitress for a refill. She waited until the waitress had left our table before speaking again.
“Did Chase tell you that she had been abused?” Her question caught me off guard.
It occurred to me she didn’t know Jake was my Dom. I nodded. Close enough to the truth.
“He did something that sent her over the edge. She’d told me some of the things he’d done to her so I wasn’t all that surprised.” Stacy was studying me, watching my face closely.
“Abby, are you okay? You got real pale all of a sudden.”
I shook my head. “Yeah, I’m fine.” My voice sounded totally unconvincing, even to myself. I shrugged, fidgeted for a minute and then gave up trying to bluff my way through this.
“Jake is my Dom.” I met Stacy’s gaze, expecting some kind of negative reaction. She reached across the table, her hand on top of mine.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know that but you really need to rethink that decision.”
Stacy spent the next twenty minutes recalling every conversation she had with Jane about Jake. The more she talked, the harder it became to listen to all that she had to say. Nothing she said sounded anything like the Jake I knew. I finally held up my hands in protest, unable to stomach any more.
“Please...this isn’t...it can’t be true. Maybe it’s Jane’s version of the truth, but it can’t be right.” My head hurt. Stacy had described some very dark and intense things, things that made my heart thud uncomfortably in my chest, made me incredibly uncomfortable. Jake had said their sessions were intense, but what Stacy had just described seemed almost surreal.
I looked down at my pie, pushing the half-eaten bits around on my plate, my appetite suddenly gone.
“Well, you can always ask her yourself, if you want her side of the story.” I looked up, startled.
“I thought she’d disappeared, that no one knew where she was?”
“Yeah, she did, for a time. But she came back to the club not long ago. You’ve already seen her.”
“I have?” I was more confused now than ever.
“She was at the club the night Chase brought you there.”
I shook my head. I hadn’t met anyone named Jane. And I certainly didn’t think Chase would have introduced me to her.
“You watched her in a session.” Stacy tipped her head, her eyes bright.
“She was the woman on the St. Andrew’s cross.”
The woman on the St. Andrews’ cross. The black-haired woman that was being whipped by a man named Martin. I’d watched her, watched the ecstasy blossom on her face as the whip bit into her skin, as the man cracked it higher and higher. I’d been so turned on by watching the scene that I’d practically begged for Chase to take me in the hall outside the session room. He’d given me exactly what I wanted, taken me upstairs, to a different room. We’d come together with such force, such incredible passion, it still took my breath away to think about it.
Stacy was still watching me. “You really got it bad for Chase, don’t you?”
I blinked, trying to keep from showing any emotion. But I’ve been told, repeatedly, that my thoughts and feelings are always clearly written across my face. I simply nodded.
“It’s complicated.”
Stacy laughed. “Most good things in life are.” She regarded me for a moment, as if weighing her next words carefully.
“He’s changed, you know...Chase has. Since he met you, I mean.”
Her statement confused me, caught me completely off guard. “How so?”
Stacy leaned forward, resting her arms on the table. “The weekend he went away, left me in charge of the club...he was with you?” I nodded. So did Stacy.
“Before that weekend, Chase brought a different woman with him nearly every night the club was open. But since then, he’s brought no one else until you. It really surprised me to see him change so much...so quickly. I’d been dying to meet the woman who finally tamed Chase Thomas.”
The smile on Stacy’s face was genuine, her voice earnest. “I’ve known Chase a long time. I know a bit about his past; he’s told me some. I guessed the rest. He’s not as good at keeping secrets as he thinks he is. At least not with me”
“I see.” I replied nodding although I wasn’t sure exactly what I was agreeing to. Stacy’s words caught me off guard. The idea of Chase being such a womanizer stung my heart like a swarm of angry hornets. I suppose I was naive to think that someone as beautifully broken as Chase wouldn’t catch the attention of other women or that he wouldn’t perhaps take advantage of the fact that people are naturally drawn to him. Still, the idea that right up until he met me he had been with so many women was hard to swallow and I struggled to force the idea down my throat so that I could once again breathe.
“For as long as I’ve worked with Chase at the club... hell, even before that, he’s always had a revolving door on his bedroom. He’d bring women to his club, show them off, take them back to wherever he takes them and...before you know it, they’d be gone. Next night, a new girl, same routine. I felt sorry for some of them...they were pretty taken by him. Some knew the game though and played along and those that didn’t learned all too quickly that Chase wasn’t the kind of man that would let women fall in love with him.”
Stacy cocked her head again, considering me in the bright fluorescent light of the diner.
“But you...he was different with you from the minute I saw you two together. He treats you like you really mean something to him, not like just another girl that he’s hooking up with for the night. For one thing, he introduced me to you.”
Stacy pushed her empty plate away. “I like seeing him like this. You’re really good for him.”
I didn’t know what to say. There was a voice in the back of my mind telling me something wasn’t adding up here, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Stacy interrupted my thoughts.
“How did you meet Chase?”
Hadn’t she seen me with Jake?
I thought back to that night we first met, when Jake had brought me to the club. I didn’t remember seeing Stacy. But I’d been so focused and incredibly nervous on being in a submissive role with Jake, then meeting Chase for the first time and the prospect of a public session with a stranger, I could have missed seeing almost anyone.
“I first came to the club with Jake, as his submissive. Chase...did some rope work with me in a session.” I wasn’t sure how far to go into detail with Stacy. I figured she would get the general idea without me having to spell it out.
It was her turn for her eyes to go wide. “You’re that woman?”
I scowled. “What ‘woman’?”
Stacy burst into sudden laughter. “You have a reputation. I only heard about the session after it was done. I didn’t get to actually see it. Chase had asked me to keep an eye on the club that night, that he had guests that he wanted to spend time with. So, I was back in the private rooms with our regular clients. I had heard later that Chase had a wild session and that it was just amazing.”
My frown must have deepened. I wasn’t sure where this was going.
“It’s okay. Don’t look so shocked. It’s just that every once in a while a session gains a kind of mythic status...yours is one of them. And especially if Chase is involved. He doesn’t do many sessions anymore. I’d heard he’d done some fantastic knot work and your reaction; well...it was pretty intense by all accounts. You went off somewhere we all wish we could go. I’m sorry I missed it.”