“Seriously?”
“Seriously. King doesn’t have employees. He has slaves and submissives. Well-paid slaves and submissives, of course. But they don’t work for the money. They work for the kink. None of his employees are vanilla.”
“Vanilla...that means like straitlaced and normal, right?”
The Mistress smiled at him.
“Vanilla means ‘not kinky.’ It’s what we call people outside the scene, the straight types. You, for instance, are vanilla.”
“No way. I have more tattoos than Brian Setzer. We counted one day.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s not clean versus ink, Goth versus normal, gay versus straight, Mohawk versus buzz cut. If you don’t do kink, you’re vanilla. And didn’t you just say yourself a few minutes ago up in King’s office that you’re ‘not one of those guys’? Or did I mishear you while I was eavesdropping?”
“I said that, yeah. Just not used to be described as, you know, vanilla.” He winced at the word as if she’d called him something really offensive, like “impotent,” or “racist,” or “a politician.”
“Get used to it, Vanilla. If you aren’t kinky, that’s what you are. There’s no shame in being vanilla. Some of my best friends are vanilla.”
“Really?” he said with some hope.
“Nope. Come on. Let’s get to the club.”
Kingsley had a Rolls-Royce waiting for them outside his town house. The driver hopped out and opened the door for them.
“Nice car,” Dante said, studying the interior. “Total pussy wagon.”
“You have no idea....” The Mistress said as Dante got comfortable on the bench seat where she’d seen Kingsley fuck at least a dozen different people over the past year. “So tell me about this video. What are you envisioning?”
Dante looked at her and shrugged. Pretty boy. Rock-star pretty. Eyeliner, pierced ears, good tan, good smile.
“I don’t know. The song’s about a guy really in love with this woman, so in love with her he wants her to be her slave. You know, all guys feel that way when they fall in love with a woman. They feel...”
“Owned?”
“Yeah. Exactly. Like she could order us to do anything we’d do it. And in bed, we’d do anything she told us to. It’s not kinky. It’s just love. All guys feel like that.”
The Mistress studied him as streetlamps cast their glow through the Rolls window. His face went from dark to light, dark to light, with every lamp they passed.
“Do you ever feel that way when you aren’t in love?” She stretched out her leg and rested her booted foot on his thigh. He looked down at her foot but made no attempt to remove or even ask her to take her dirty shoe off his pants.
“What do you mean?” His eyes narrowed at her.
“I mean...do you ever think you’d like to do that, I don’t know...every day of your life? Maybe with a woman you weren’t in love with. Maybe just a woman you found attractive. Maybe all women.”
“I told you, I’m not one of those guys.”
“What guys?”
“One of those guys. Kinky guys who want to get used by Dominatrixes, who want to crawl on their hands and knees for a woman, who want to get ordered around and treated like a fuck toy. That’s not me.”
“Really? Wonder why you have an erection just talking about it then...”
Dante glanced down at his lap and laughed.
“I don’t. You can’t even—”
“You looked down to see if I could see it through your pants. If you weren’t hard right now, you wouldn’t have needed to look.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “Would you?”
“Maybe I’m just—” he paused midsentence to take her leg by the ankle and move her foot back onto the floorboard “—turned on because I’m in a fucking Rolls-Royce with a beautiful women with black hair, amazing tits, wearing a leather skirt and corset. I think about any guy on the planet would pop one in this situation even if he is vanilla.”
“Which you are, right?” She batted her eyelashes at him.
“Yeah. Right. I’m...vanilla.”
“Don’t feel bad. Happens to the best of us. Anyway, the club we’re going to is called The 8th Circle. It’ll give you a boner, too, but don’t get excited. You can’t film there. King has a couple other smaller kink clubs that you can use for a location shoot if you want. But The 8th Circle’s off-limits. It’s his baby.”
“Why are we going there then?”
“Because that’s where my dungeon is. It’s where I see my clients. Thought you’d be interested. Aren’t you?”
“Why would I want to see your dungeon?” He shifted in his seat.
“Research for your video, of course.”
“Yeah, of course. Research.”
On the way to the club, Dante asked her a few questions about her background.
Q: How did she become a Dominatrix?
A: Created by God. Trained by Kingsley.
Q: Is it hard being a Dominatrix?
A: More wet than hard.
Q: Is it fun?
A: Define “fun.”
Q: What’s the craziest thing you’ve done as a Dominatrix?
A: I can’t answer that without an attorney present.
Q: Do you ever have sex with your clients?
A: No.
At that “no” she saw a flash of disappointment cross his face. Why? Why would he be disappointed she didn’t have sex with her clients? Did he consider himself a client because he’d bought two hours of her time to take a stroll through Hell? Technically he was. He’d paid for a kinky service and she’d agreed to provide it. Not that she wanted to have sex with him. He was a gorgeous kid with probably enough talent to earn that attitude of his, but nothing about him made her want to jump in bed with him. No...she had no desire to fuck him. That wouldn’t be a challenge at all. If she came on to him this second, they’d be fucking in five minutes. Fuck fucking. She wanted to get this bad boy to admit he was a sub. She could see it in his eyes that watched her for her pleasure and approval, read it in his body language—passive but alert, eager to please. And yes, aroused...so aroused from merely being in her leather-clad, thigh-high boot-wearing presence.
“Ask me another question,” she ordered.
“What’s the hardest part about being a Dominatrix?”
A good question, she had to give him that. And a thoughtful question. She liked thoughtful. Maybe there was more to this guy than a pretty face, tattoos and an uncomfortable erection.
“The hardest part...I’m not going to make the obvious penis joke I could make. I’m not. I just made it in my head but I’m not going to say it out loud.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Seriously, the hardest part is caring about my clients. I try not to care about them because my job gets a lot harder when I do.”
“Why?”
Sighing heavily, she leaned back in the seat, stretched out her legs and rested them on the seat next to his thigh.
“I have some fucked-up clients, and I say that with affection. These guys...they have fetishes like you can’t believe. They want to drink urine. They can only get off if you beat their cocks with belts. They need me to put puppy ears on them and make them drink out of the dungeon toilet like a dog. I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me, doesn’t freak me out, doesn’t gross me out. They’re fetishists and that’s fine. Takes all kinds. Sex is weird and wonderful and these guys are harmless. They love their wives, their kids. But they have this deep itch inside them that only coming to me can scratch.”
“That’s pretty crazy. Drink urine?”
Now it was her turn to wag her finger at him.
“Don’t judge, Little Grasshopper. Some of these men could break you in half. They’re strong, smart, complicated. That’s the thing. They’re not boring enough to be vanilla. Most of the men in this country, they’re meat-and-potatoes guys when it comes to sexuality. Gay or straight, they like it plain and simple. Penetration, thrust, orgasm, sleep. That’s it. But then you have my clients. These are the guys who crave escargot, shark fin soup, boiled duck embryos, fucking blowfish. Exotic fare. Those are my people. You eat crazy shit like that and people call you a foodie. You want exotic fare in the bedroom and people call you a sick freak. These men cut their chest open and show me where they keep their souls. It’s heartbreaking to care about them. So I don’t.”
She heard the tenor of her voice changing and she coughed to clear her throat. She didn’t care about her clients. Not any of them. They were paychecks and nothing more.
“You do care about them.”
“You’re a Backstreet Boy. What do you know?”
He laughed then and she had to laugh, too.
“I think you and I are both full of shit,” she said.
“We are. You respect your clients.” It wasn’t a question. She answered it anyway.
“I do respect them. It’s the scariest thing you can do—walk into a room where you know you’re going to meet your real self. Would you do that? If there was a mirror out there and you knew if you looked into it, you’d see the real you...would you look?”
“I think I’d cover that mirror with a sheet and then smash it with a sledgehammer.”
“Exactly. Me, too. But these guys, they look. So yes, I respect them, I care about them and I give them what they want and what they need. Then after an hour or two, I send them back out into the world that thinks they’re sick perverts. In my dungeon I can protect them, I can make them feel safe and even normal. But out there—” she pointed at the world outside the Rolls-Royce’s window “—they’re on their own.”
“You can’t save everybody.”
“I can’t save anybody.” She gave him a half-hearted smile. “But it doesn’t matter. That’s not what they pay me for.”
The Rolls brought them to a grey door in a grey parking garage. Dante didn’t seem impressed. That was okay. No one was ever impressed by The 8th Circle until they were inside it.
“This is it?” he asked as the driver opened the door for them.
“This is it,” she said, pulling her key ring out and letting him into the front hallway. “But don’t be misled. The 8th Circle is like the ugly chick you take home from the bar at last call because you struck out with everyone else. Then you get her home, drop your pants and discover she gives the world’s best blow jobs.”
“I like her already.”
“All I’m saying is don’t judge the joint by appearances. Oh, watch out,” she said, grabbing his arm to steer him from a stain on the floor. “You almost stepped in cum.”
He started to look back over his shoulder but no one really needed to see that. With her hand on his arm, she led him down the dimly lit hallway to a door inside the coat-check booth.
“This is the shortcut to the dungeons,” she explained as they took a narrow staircase down. “Otherwise we’d have to take the elevator to the main club floor. Big crowd tonight. Lots of people playing. You’d definitely get recognized.”
“Glad we skipped that part then. I’m trying to be a little anonymous here.”
“Hence the guyliner, the sleeveless shirt showing off all your tattoos, the professionally messed-up hair and the boots that probably cost more than my mortgage payment?”
“You don’t let me get away with anything, do you?”
“No.”
“Wanna tell me why?” They reached the bottom of the stairs. He leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. For a single beautiful second she saw the real Dante underneath the rock star uniform and the eyeliner and the well-cultivated tan. She saw the man, the musician who cared about his work, his art, and who put on the stupid clothes and the attitude because the world expected it of him. And in that split second she decided she might like him.