I twist up my mouth. “Do you? Do youreally?”
“Fuck off with thatchild-of-divorced-parentsshit.”
I snort a laugh. One of those laughs laced with years of childhood pain—if you can’t laugh about it, you’ll cry, right? “Okay, but let me just make my point.” I lift a finger. “A year ago, you watched me get absolutely crushed by Shawn.”
“Mount Shawn of Shit,” Ophelia hisses. His name is still a curse in our apartment.
“Exactly. And it wrecked me. I can say that now. I put my heart out there and it ripped me apart. And now look at me. I’m not chasing love. No, I am grounded, and real, and doing things that make me happy. I spend all day eating cheese. I get all the tattoos I want and drink all the wine I want. And the only man in my life is a submissive who does whatever I want.”
Her gaze measures me. “Howisthat going?”
“Great. I spend my Fridays making a grown man whimper and he does my dry cleaning.”
Ophelia sucks in her teeth. “You’re living the dream.”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
I lay my head back. The fire escape is freezing, but I don’t mind it. It’s a cold relief, like those cucumbers they put on the backs of your eyes at a spa.
You can’t see the stars in Brooklyn; the New York City lights are too blinding. But I can see streaks of black, an empty canvas where starsshouldbe.
Ophelia’s boot knocks against my leg. “Don’t you miss it, though?”
“Miss what?”
“The Seekers Club. Playing. Submitting.” She presses her lips together. “The Club missesyou.”
I feel like I’ve swallowed a bird, and it’s trying to get out now, flapping its wings frantically, sending scratchy feathers scattering all around my chest.
I don’t want to tell her the truth, but I can’t lie to Ophelia, so I ask instead: “Do we have any pickles?”
3
THE SEEKERS CLUB
Dove.Then.
I got into the kink lifestyle the way most people get into trouble—by reading too much.
Two years ago, I found myself in a large bookstore on 14thstreet. I’d moved to New York to attend an artist residency—which had been great news for my mom, not because she was sculptor and I was following in her visual art footsteps, but because I was finally out of the house and she had her studio to herself. Now that my residency was over, I was determined to plant myself in the city and stay out of mom’s way. I found myself exploring every crack in the sidewalk, any strange, fringe community I could fit myself into. And New York City was full of them. Poets, performers, people who dressed up in dinosaur costumes and engaged in wrestling competitions every Saturday now. My investment in thefringe and freakwas how I found myself sitting in a stiff folding chair and clutching my copy ofDamaged Heartsby Quinn Siobhan. The crowd was packed—mostly women inyoga pants and ponytails—all wearing coy, shy smiles, all similarly clinging to their book.
The book in question was an (allegedly) semi-autobiographical, steamy romance about a married woman and her illicit affair. The story goes like this: Quinn is twenty-eight and in a rut. She just had her first child and she’s exhausted. Her sex life with her husband, Mark, has completely dried up. Desperate, she decides to lean on familial ties. She enlists the help of Mark’s playboy younger brother. She knows from her husband that his brother is into “strange and dark” things and participates in a kink club. So Quinn decides that, to spice things up in the bedroom, she’s going to get him to teach her his devious tricks.
Poe (that’s his scene name—Poe, after Edgar Allen) is a dominant in the kink community. He reluctantly agrees and, for three hundred and fifty pages, he teaches her how to be a submissive. He spanks her. Chokes her. Puts her on her knees and degrades her. Teaches her safe words. Teaches her aftercare. And she takes her lessons to her marriage bed. Her marriage is finally growing heat again. But…and I think you can see where this is going…there’s a second fire growing between Quinn and Poe.
Quinn—the real-life Quinn—was a gorgeous woman in her early forties. She had long, shiny black hair, dark eyes, and a svelte figure. A square-faced man with a salt-and-pepper beard sat in the chair behind her, his eyes frequently darting around the crowd. He seemed like a bodyguard, but by the way he constantly twisted his wedding ring, my guess was that this was the real-life Mark, her husband.
Quinn took the podium with confidence. She pushed her hair back, cracked open her book, and began to read:
The club was a cacophony of sights and sounds.
A woman was bound to an X-shaped structure. A man crawled on all fours with a muzzle. Another woman screamed as a whip lashed across her back.
I shivered and took a step back. Poe’s strong body brushed against mine. His hand clasped over my arm.
“This way,” he murmured into my ear. He led me through the chaos of the room. We found a quiet corner with a bench. He instructed me to straddle the bench, then he mirrored my position, taking a seat in front of me.
He set his bag down beside us. It was a leather satchel, the type of bag a professor might carry, but Poe’s bag didn’t hold textbooks. I watched as he unzippered it, rummaged through, and pulled out a small, leather paddle.
