by Kell Brannon
(04/17/02)

"Katie, the food here had better be great."

"Oh, liven up, Liz! Where's your wild side?" Katie sees herself as a Walt Whitman spirit with an Anais Nin id, and, as such, welcomes new experiences the way a pack of hungry hyenas welcomes a fresh antelope carcass. Not that this is a bad thing, of course; sometimes I envy her sense of adventure, but, being a more cautious type, I wish she'd plan these excursions better. This place is in an alley in a rather poorly lit part of the city, I just saw some creepy-looking characters skulking around and looking dangerous, and, to my knowledge, no one knows where we are tonight.

My sense of adventure, in other words, was at home with a mug of hot tea and some poetry, with a blanket tucked securely around her toes.

The muscled zombie guarding the door gets a nod of confirmation from a bigger, even more muscled zombie who's been checking us over, and he intones "Welcome...to SweetMeat," snarling theatrically when he bites off the Ts. I can barely hold back titters. Katie just beams at him, in that wondrous, wide-eyed way of hers. He gives us the low-down on the club; apparently no one is granted Family status until the fifth visit. Ergo, we are not allowed to wear the kicky little studded bracelet that binds us to the clan, and we are thereby restricted from certain privileges, like participating in the stage shows, renting private rooms, or making table reservations.

I steal a glance at Katie, about to ask her if we can just leave, but she is already on her way in. She's been dying to come here for months. Eh, what could it hurt? It's just dinner, after all, I lie to myself.

After we surrender our licenses for the age check (body cavity searches are an extra $25 per person, just inside and to the left, he says), we promise repeatedly to conduct ourselves in a respectful manner, and are at last allowed in. We can feel eyes on us as we shuffle down the candle-lit hall.

"Wow, these must be the private rooms," Katie says; the doors lining the hall are thick, dungeonesque, the kind they put in movies when they want to destroy all hope that the plucky heroes will escape. Each one has a little window cut out, with a sliding privacy panel, controlled from the inside. There are only a few occupied rooms with panels open; the second door on the right contains a naked man suspended by his wrists and ankles, vertically and X-style, with weighted clamps attached to his nipples, a slender rope tied around his scrotum (which looks about to burst), and what looks like dried wax tangled in his chest and pubic hair.

He looks up from his meditation and grins when he notices us. "Hiya," he warbles.

"How ya doing?" Katie chirps. "Got yourself into a predicament there, I see."

"Nothing too serious. She hasn't even brought out the branding iron yet. She must not be in the mood. Always a bright side, I say."

I'm waiting for him to burst into song when a tiny woman dressed like a fairy, a vision in white gauze and sparkly wings and the curliest blonde hair I have ever seen, pipes "Excuse me!" and shoves past us to open the door. She's got a tray of appetizers. "I got some of those stuffed mushroom caps you like!" With that, she slams the door behind her, which reverberates through the hall, and snaps the little window shut.

Katie keeps on walking like nothing had happened. "Come on! We've got to get good seats for the show!"

"The...show? There's a show?" I'm still stunned by the surrealism of a fairy feeding stuffed mushroom caps to a guy with tied-up testicles.

"Yeah, that's the main attraction! A magicienne dominatrix!" I think of disappearing objects and cringe.

"But these...I'm not too sure I fit in here, Kate." I glance down and feel my breasts pressing out and up, the cleave between them burgeoning just so; they're just so... so visible, and I want to lunge for a menu, slap it protectively over my chest. "I'm a librarian, for Pete's sake!"

"But librarians are the lucky ones who get jumped in porn movies."

"Great. I'm fetish material. I should've brought a big, fat book to carry around. I could offer to slam people's fingers in it."

"Liz, dear. Wine. My treat. Hit the bar."

Ooh. I forget about my breasts. "Done."

It takes us a little while to thread our way in and find an unoccupied spot. The club is crowded, but it's a very civilized mob, orderly and dignified. There is flesh, latex, and metal; we see piercings in more bodyparts than I even thought it possible to pierce. There are groups having a good time, couples or trios engaged in scenarios, and singles scouting for others on the prowl.

We're so busy trying not to gawk that I nearly trip over a large dog, before I realize it's not a dog, it's a man on all fours, sheathed in latex from head to toe, but for a few strategic holes for his face and nether regions. His -- his companion? Owner? Whomever he's there with slips him bits of food, which he accepts gently and with grace.

At long last, the bartender hands me a goblet of wine with a knowing grin, and I immediately take a big gulp.

"Check it out! The opening act is starting already!" squeals Katie.

At center stage, a tall, skeletal woman in a bustier and red leather bikini underpants whips a dark-skinned, tied-down woman who, from the sound of it, is obviously a well-trained operatic singer, practicing arpeggios. The wielder smacks the singer with the whip every time she hits the high note, which makes her shriek -- "ah-aah-aaah-EYAAAGH!-aah-aah-aaaaah!" The audience claps politely after each set of two or three, providing a smooth opportunity for the singer to catch her breath while the top sucks up the praise.

Katie chats with a young man who has just approached her from the other side, and now leans against the bar next to her. He brushes his open shirt aside to reveal a special belt of some kind, containing four phials of an uncomfortably dark liquid. I lean in just a little, but discreetly, nosey in spite of myself, and catch something like "... try a sample first if you wish," at which point he brushes his collar aside, in the same practiced move he'd used with the shirt, exposing a vulnerable spot on his neck. Katie is bending down to eyeball the phials, and I'm about to poke her and hiss something about our mothers telling us never to accept blood from strangers, when I feel a tap on my shoulder. A shortish, skinny man with wild hair, barefoot and in the requisite leather pants, is at my left side. His eyes are startlingly dark, but friendly, with a few weather-lines carved around them. Cute.

"Yes?"

"My wife and I...we've got Private Room B. We've been looking for a third, for a long time, and you look like exactly what we've been hoping for."

Great. One guy is trying to sell blood to my best friend, and another is inviting me to hop on in with him and his wife. I haven't even had a date in two and a half months. Unbelievable. "I don't -- I don't know...."

He senses my trepidation and interrupts, waving frantically as if to flutter it away. "It's not like that! You wouldn't be, uh, having relations with either of us. Not exactly," he says with a shy grin.

The tiny ghost of Katie that lives in my cerebellum screeches Live a little! Live a little! while it reaches down to fan at the sips of wine I've had already, shooing the buzz prematurely into my bloodstream. And, I must admit, the guy doesn't seem too scary.

To pique my confidence, then, and to shut up the shrill little voice, I try to work up a Sultry Librarian Mode.

"So what would this encounter entail?" I run a finger around the rim of my glass.

"She...well, we...." He fumbles a little, shuffling his feet, then spits it right out, in a near-whisper so soft I have to lean in to hear it: "We want you to whip her while I watch." I almost drop my wine. "Not hard enough to really hurt her or make her bleed or anything. Just...yeah." He shrugs.

Something in his manner is so earnest, so sweet, that my curtain of caution slowly begins to rise. He continues, still emphasizing every phrase with his trademark gestures: "No bodily fluids, no hands-on contact or anything. Just topping her with the whip. She's blindfolded, even."

Katie and the bloodletter are watching us now; they probably couldn't hear his request, but the sense of invitation is, I'm sure, pretty obvious.

"It'll just take a few minutes! You can come right back!" he pleads.

A bubble of once-in-a-lifetime, give-it-a-try wildness rolls up from my belly, swells into my throat, and escapes. "Let's go," I tell him. Katie cackles.

All the way to the room, he explains the deal. They dabble in domination play when they're alone, a little bit of pain here and there, have been together for years, are focusing on fantasies right now. They've been planning this one for a long time. "Her safeword is teapot."

"Teapot?"

"Yeah, teapot."

"As in I'm a Little?"

"Yup."

"She's in the throes of passion and she has to say Teapot when she's ready to stop?!"

"Hey, don't ask me. She picked it out." I'm just impressed with myself for knowing what a safeword is. "Hang back until I get her ready. On my signal, you can start."

"Just start whacking at her? Can I talk to her at all?"

"You've never done this before, have you?"

Geez, am I ever going to yank my foot out of my mouth? Then again, foot-eating might be a fetish unto itself; maybe my subconscious is just trying to get into the scene. "No," I admit, preparing to bolt gratefully if he changes his mind.

He grins again, a wry half-turn at one corner of his mouth. "Neither have we. But that's probably why I picked you. You just...don't have the same kind of immersion going on that most of the others here do, so I guess I feel like I can trust you more easily."

"Why not have a friend do this? Somebody you know?"

"She's had this fantasy, like, forever. A stranger is part of the deal." There's a slight downturn in his tone when he says this; I start to ask about it, sensing that he's not completely into the whole stranger-whipping idea either, but we're already there and he shushes me.

When we enter and pull the doom-reckoning door closed, she is in the corner, naked, kneeling serenely with her wrists bound in front of her. She's large-breasted and very curvy, an Earth goddess of a woman, with long, dark hair, worn loose and streaming about her shoulders. The blindfold is woven through it so her waves escape above and below, like the fabric just happened to grow there naturally.

"Carmen, we have arrived. Stand." He says this softly, but with a change in his voice and posturing that makes me jump. He's gone from wild-eyed and twitchy to quiet and controlling; the voice he uses is completely steady, slow, and leaves no smidgen of room for reluctance. She smiles softly and says, "Yes, David," while she slips gracefully to her feet.

He strides over, waits until he knows she is steady, takes some of that lovely hair in one hand, and pulls her head back, just a sharp tug. "As we discussed, Carmen, you will address me appropriately in front of our guest." Again, no room left for question, only absolute obedience, and she replies, "I'm sorry, Sir."

He gently turns her and steers her toward the center of the room, where a short, leather-upholstered bench awaits, with loops at all four corners. "Walk." She does, demurely, and responds to his other brief commands, stop, down, with evenness and absolute calm.

When he finishes buckling her in, she is on her knees and stretched over the bench, hands and feet tied, with her gorgeous, voluptuous ass presented toward the door, where I stand. He's put velvety cushions where her knees and hands touch the floor.

Wordlessly, he pads over, hands me the whip, holds up a single palm as if to say Wait; then he returns and kneels in front of her, close to her head. He gazes down at her and strokes her shoulder fondly; he takes a deep breath, steels himself, then nods and smiles nervously at me.

I smile back. I can't, just can't, screw this up.

So I stalk toward her, letting my boots clack on the floor, hoping they sound a little intimidating, but worried that it sounds like I'm goose-stepping. When I'm close enough to know that she feels me, I trail two fingers up the back of one thigh, along a cheek, and up her spine.

She spasms for several long moments. I can't resist -- surely she wants to hear a voice, a feminine voice that will reassure her -- so I lean over, close enough to breathe into her ear, and say, in my sultriest, slowest, deepest Librarian Voice ever, "Hello, Lovely."

She emits a yelp, just a tiny one, enough to make me wonder if she's truly scared and almost enough to make me rethink this whole thing before it even starts, but he pulls her head up by a fistful of hair near the crown and scolds, "Carmen, you will keep silent until you are asked to speak."

"Yes, Sir." She calms immediately, and bows her head again.

If I prolong it much more, the tension will break, so I step away and try the whip out for size, just snap it in the air once; a satisfying crack echoes through the room. I wonder briefly if it's going to hurt like hell, but he's nodding, so I take aim and let fly. Snap -- it lands on her back, with flair and a lot of noise, but doesn't appear to faze her. After a couple more tries, successively more powerful, I get a little jump out of her, and instinct tells me to linger in that zone for a bit.

I keep going for a couple of minutes, until she's squirming and breathing heavily. David stops me for a moment and converses quietly, almost silently, with Carmen, holding her face in his two hands; then he gets up, scampers over to me, and whispers, "Can you do it a little harder?"

"Harder?"

"Yeah. Maybe twice as hard."

"But I don't want to hurt her!"

"But she wants to be hurt, a little. Please? I'll let you know if it's too much."

"Oh." Do all dominatrixes fumble like schoolgirls at first? Sheesh. "All right."

He kneels in front of her again, signaling for me to go on. But I've followed him and am trailing the whip's end along her lush curves, noting the faint, reddened marks.

Then I have an idea. I trail the stiff handle of the whip between her thighs, along her soft-furred labia, very lightly. She cries out when it nudges her clit; David nods, enthusiastically, and scolds her again. "Carmen, be silent!" He never raises his voice, but the cold command in it again pokes at something tingly in my belly, and I, too, resolve to keep quiet.

So I resume the whipping, harder this time. Five or six strokes, and the marks are redder; she's moaning a little now, and he's allowing her to make the sounds, while she strains to reach his groin and mouth him through the leather. He's watching her face, breathing harder; he keeps running his fingers through her hair and over her shoulders and her back, soothing the red spots between smacks. Once or twice he doesn't pull back in time and flinches when the whip bites his fingers; I immediately start to apologize but he shakes his head and beckons for me to keep it coming.

She's moving her ass while I whip her, bucking upward to direct the blows, and I indulge her, letting a few land on the backs of her thighs, pulling ragged moans from her throat. David reaches down and gropes at his side, finds a little rectangular control of some kind, and fumbles with a switch; she immediately tenses and cries out, aloud this time, apparently not caring whether she displeases him; but from the look on his face while he gazes at her, glassy-eyed and with his mouth slightly open, he's anything but displeased right now.

Didn't I just read about a remote-control vibe in a naughty e-zine somewhere? Some writer named after a planet or something, a constellation? But I'm distracting myself. My arm is turning to rubber, so I have to switch the whip to my left hand, but I keep going, though I miss a few before I figure out how to aim correctly with it. I slow the pace dramatically while he fiddles with the control, watching his thumb for cues. Flick -- snap! Flick -- snap! He flicks it on in the split second before the whip strikes her skin, giving her a surge from within and without, and she rocks back and forth with the power of it.

He's encouraging her. "Come on, sweetheart. Yeah." He's absolutely bulging in those pants, still running his other hand all over her, tangling it in her hair and pulling her deeper into his groin, and she's huffing into it, still doing her best to pleasure him despite the distractions. I can't see the vibe, since it's buried inside her, but I can see the way her thighs tense when she clenches around it, trying to wedge it against her sweet spot without using her hands, as I have done so many times with my own toys, alone in my bed. She writhes to the music of her cunt and she's so wet I can see the light reflecting there, shining down the insides of her legs.

"Please -- please!" she breathes, just when I'm not sure I can take any more of this.

"Please what?" The cold, calm voice is back, but his face is soft, smiling down at her, his eyes kind.

"Please...let me."

"Let you what, Carmen?"

"Come. I want to come. Sir."

"Okeydokey." He reverts instantly from Master to David; they've both been tortured long enough, I guess. With his free hand he pops the quick-release on one of her hand straps. I expect her to dive straight for her clit, but instead, to my delight, she runs the freed palm slowly up his thigh to squeeze and caress his cock, gnawing at the head slowly with her lips, just for a moment. He holds his breath.

And then she smiles, such a big smile I can see it from behind when she lets her head droop against him, and her hand slides between her legs.

God, this is beautiful.

I almost lose track of my task, watching them, and I start to forget who I am. A stranger, an enabler. A fantasy. Two of her fingers are working inside, pushing the vibe against all the right places; the scent of sex and sweat is everywhere in the room, he's still stroking her shoulders and her hair, and I'm lost in the beauty of it all, of the way he buckled her to the bench earlier, arranging the cushions and tenderly readjusting the straps, gauging the welts carefully, making sure she is safe and absolutely comfortable. I'm lost in the look on his face, the adoration and the trace of fear, the sense that he doesn't really want to share her with a stranger, but he's doing it, just this once, because this, the fantasy, will make her happy.

She keeps rocking, pressing the heel of her hand against her clit, and I keep smacking with the whip, just a few more times. She comes, with long, low screams and so much shuddering I'm surprised the vibe can stay in there. After ten or twelve seconds she gasps, "Teapot, teapoooot! Urrgh!" and I stop.

And then they're both laughing, the shaky, relieved laughter of exhausted afterglow and climbing down. He immediately scrambles to free her from the restraints; she pulls him down, tumbles into him, and they laugh and laugh, arms wound tightly around each other, their cheeks wet with escaping tears. They've completely forgotten that I'm in the room. I'm standing there grinning like an idiot. I think of my safe, girly, pastel-colored vibrator, my lonely apartment, my empty bed that takes forever to warm up when I crawl in, and suddenly I have to blink back a rising flood.

It's time for me to leave them alone. I loop up the whip and lay it down beside them, turning to leave. David has pulled the blindfold off, and Carmen's eyes are incredible, a pale ice-blue that contrasts perfectly with her dark lashes and the peachy-pink, just-came-like-a-wild-woman flush high in her cheeks.

"Thanks," says David, beaming.

"Yes, thank you," adds Carmen. "This was...thank you so much."

"No. Thank you." I lean in to kiss her gently on the cheek, then him, noting the slightly musky sting of the salt on my lips. And with that, quietly, I leave, though I'm quivery and my legs feel all bockety. On the way out I check the privacy panel, meaning to shut it for them, but it's already closed.

Thank God I drink red wine. I never have to worry about it getting cold.

The magicienne dominatrix has just taken the stage, and her theme music, some kind of sensual techno with chanting in the background, is throbbing through the air and quaking the floor. Katie is alone at the bar now; the purveyor of blood has apparently wandered off in search of other clientele.

My friend takes one look at me and exclaims, "You look like the cat that just ate the canary! What were you doing back there?"

I can't stop thinking about teapots. Handle, spout; tip me up, pour me out.