Manties in a Twist (The Subs Club Book 3) (5 page)

I dropped my voice. “Can I ask you a question about caning him?”

This was probably way inappropriate, but I didn’t think D would mind.

He nodded again.

“Do you feel bad when you do it?” I would feel like a giant shit-sword if I caned someone, period. Even if they loved it. So I could only imagine how it felt to do it when someone
didn’t
like it.

D took another bite of burger and appeared to contemplate this. “I feel like I am giving him something that benefits him. But it does not make me happy to see him in pain.”

“So why do you do it?”

“Because he asked me to.”

“But, like, you have to get something out of it too, right?”

He chewed slowly. Swallowed and glanced down at the half-eaten burger. “David is a force of nature. If I can help him be that safely, it feels satisfying.” He looked up. “Like installing a ceiling fan, or replacing the regulator on a camping stove.”

“You think caning my best friend is like installing a ceiling fan?”

He picked the lettuce off his burger, used it to sop up the meat juice and mustard, licked the lettuce clean, then set it on the side of his plate. “In a way.”

He patted my shoulder and lumbered off.

Someone had turned on music in the living room. Dave, since it was Enya. Dave was always saying bitches love Enya.

I enjoyed a few minutes of relative peace in the kitchen before my mom found me.

My mom was, like—I don’t even know. Picture an aging Marilyn Monroe as a domme, and then imagine she thought of everyone in the world as her kid, even if they were thirty years older than she was. She had a voice like she’d swallowed flour, and she always smelled a little bit like blue raspberry slushie.

She hugged me even though she’d already squashed my guts out when she’d arrived. “Hi, hon.” Possibly she was a little drunk.

“Hey. You having a good time?”

“Of course. I was just talking to Miles’s boyfriend. The vampyre? He’s lovely.”

“Yeah, Drix is cool.”

“He told me I carry a lot of tension in my sphincter.”

I barfed in my mouth pretty much immediately. “I don’t even want to know how he figured that out.” Drix was seriously interested in bodies. He did some sort of yoga/massage therapy program for members of his vampyre coven and helped people figure out how to release their tension. One night last month, he’d made me breathe ten times in this special way before bed, and I’d slept for like sixteen hours straight. That dude was full of vampyre magic.

Mom reached for a bag of chips on the counter. “I think he’s right. I rarely bottom, but when I do, I have the most trouble with anal play.”

“
Mom
!”

“What?”

I clapped my hands over my ears. “
Don’t talk about anal play
.”

I waited several long seconds, staring at her. When she didn’t say anything, I slowly lowered my hands.

She immediately opened her mouth. “If you have any pointers, I—”

“Noooooo!” I put my hands back over my ears. “What is
wrong
with you?”

She shrugged, smirking, and placed a stack of tortilla chips in her cupped palm, then began picking them up and eating them one by one. That was how I ate chips too—the ol’ stack-on-hand. I’d never realized I’d gotten it from her.

“I can’t believe it took me this long to meet him.” She glared at me kinda nastily, like I was personally responsible for her not learning about sphincter tension until tonight. “You boys haven’t done a very good job of coming to see me these past few months. I already scolded Miles.”

“We’ve all been ridick busy. Miles is, like— His head’s gonna pop off with this whole adoption thing.”

“Well, he’s doing a good job hiding it. He just talked to me about it, and he sounded so happy.”

“Oh, he’s happy. He’s just cracked out.” I felt kinda guilty, like I was just borrowing what Dave had told me and making it sound like I knew what Miles was feeling. I really hoped he was doing all right. I mean, he’d called me a few months ago having some kind of spaz attack about cribs, and I’d had to, like, talk him down.

“He’s going to be a wonderful father.” She scratched the corner of her mouth with one long, rounded nail. “Did you hear Cobalt’s closing?”

I stared at her a few seconds, stunned. Cobalt was one of two dungeons in the city. My friends and I were members of Riddle, the other one, because Cobalt was kind of gross. Dave said it was a place where dreams were carried to the Underworld on a river of tears, but I didn’t think it was that bad. “I heard it might. I didn’t think it seriously would.”

“Well, it is. The owners are selling.”

“Jesus. So now you’re gonna be at Riddle all the time?”

“I won’t have much choice.”

I shrugged, trying to play it cool. “The guys and I hardly go to clubs anymore.”

Which sucked, because I actually liked the clubs. Even Cobalt. But Riddle was where Hal had died, so my friends hardly ever wanted to go there anymore, and I’m pretty sure they thought I shouldn’t want to either. Especially ’cause GK and Kel, Riddle’s owners, had let Bill Henson be a member again. Which
was
kinda creepy—like,
Hey, you accidentally strangled someone at our club, but it’s fine, you can still hang out here
. And I almost never went to Cobalt because it was where my mom played, and there was nothing more awkward in the world than running into your mom at a dungeon.

But I
missed
that scene. I’d had a whole bunch of friends at Riddle, before Hal died. I mean, they were probably still there even now that he was dead, but
I
wasn’t. I’d had the same issues my friends did with going back: Yeah, it was weird to be in the same room where Hal had been killed. Yeah, it sucked that we might run into Bill or Cinnamon the ponygirl, who’d been the only person in the room with Hal when he’d died, and all of us were still trying to wrap our heads around how she hadn’t noticed. But we had to move on at some point, right?

We didn’t say much else for a few seconds. Then:

“Hon?” It was her fucking decepte-tron tone, like,
Oh, let me sound so casual when I’m about to say something that’s gonna ruin your day.
You should have heard her when she told me she and Dad were separating. Or when she told me about Hal—that was the fucking worst. Because yeah, even though Dave was at Riddle when Hal died, I guess he was too freaked out to call the rest of us right away. So my mom heard about it from some of her scene friends and called me and was all,
“Kamen? Hon?”
like she was just gonna ask me how to take a screenshot on her phone.

Except I’d known better, because she always did that fake-casual thing, and because it was late at night, and—this’ll sound weird—I’d been thinking about Hal all day. And sometimes when something big—good or bad—was about to happen to someone I knew, I thought about them a lot just before the thing happened. I wasn’t saying I could predict the future, but I
was
obsessed with Stephen Hawking and very aware of the changeable nature of space and time, so we had to at least consider the possibility I was tapping into other dimensions where these things had already taken place.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Have you talked to your friend Ricky?”

I glanced toward the living room, where I’d last seen Ricky Chuy. Ricky was new to kink, and had been the Subs Club’s MVP for a while—he’d helped us with our website, and he’d contributed lots of articles to the Sounding Board and had participated in pretty much every discussion. He was this skinny little guy who looked about twelve. Dave called him the Little Mermaid, ’cause he thought Ricky was super innocent and asked way too many questions. But I figured Ricky was way filthier than he looked. I mean, Miles dressed like Jimmy Carter but liked to be cut with knives, so . . .

“You mean tonight?”

“I mean recently.”

A group of Ryan’s friends came in looking for the brownies. “Hey, Mrs. Pell,” Amanda said, stopping to hug my mom. They took the whole tray back to the living room, one holding each corner, like they were carrying a casket.

I turned to Mom again. “It’s been a while since I’ve hung out with him. I think he’s with some guy. I told him he could bring the dude with him tonight, but I guess he didn’t want to.”

She pushed her platinum-blond curls behind her ear. “Yes.” Her expression was strange. She seemed like she wanted to say something more.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked at me sort of pleading-like. “He seems very happy.”

“Okay. That’s good, right?”

“Just keep an eye on him. He’s new, and it’s easy to be . . . taken advantage of.”

Ohhh. So that’s what this was about. My mom’s first serious play partner had pretty much tricked her into being his sugar mama, then made off with a bunch of her jewelry and credit cards. Now she had a real thing about warning newbies to be careful. “We look out for him.”

“Good.” Mom made another chip stack in her hand.

I decided to change the subject. “So what’s Dad coming here for?”

She picked up a chip. “I think he’s missing you.”

“Yeah, but he never leaves Oregon. And I told him I’d fly out there as soon as I can get the time off.”

“Well, I don’t know.” She glanced into the living room. “I haven’t talked to Maya yet. I should go catch her before someone else takes her.” She turned back to me. “Congratulations, sweetie. The place looks beautiful. I like your painting.”

She headed off in search of Maya, leaving me alone in the kitchen once more.

Except I didn’t even have time to put a burger on a plate before I heard commotion on the back balcony. I went over to check it out.

Gould was standing by the deck’s wooden staircase, his arm around Dave, who was holding him up by the waist. He looked pretty drunk, for Gould, and he was glaring at Ryan. The only other people around were a couple of Ryan’s friends out in the yard, who were staring up at the deck, watching. And Ryan was getting pretty loud in terms of, like, “I didn’t
mean
it like that! It was just a joke.”

Dave held his other hand up. “It’s okay. It’s fine.” He saw me in the doorway and gave me a sheepish smile. He turned to Gould and jostled him. “You, my friend, have had enough to drink.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Ryan’s face was all red. “I made a joke—”

Gould stumbled dangerously close to the stairs, jabbing a finger at Ryan. “It’s bad taste. Bad
taste
, man.”

Since Gould didn’t usually say much of anything, let alone get openly pissed, I figured whatever’d set him off had to do with Hal. That was the only thing I could think of that would get Gould pistols-at-dawn mad.

I was right.

“I was making a joke about—” Ryan shook his head at me. “I don’t know, we were doing BDSM puns. And I said something stupid, like, ‘I already used all my best
gags
, but if I think of
smother
one, I’ll
throat
out there.’” He gave me this look that was possibly defiant. “I wasn’t even thinking about what happened to your friend. I was just thinking, like, gags, smother boxes, breath play, etcetera.”

“It’s fine.” Dave tightened his hold around Gould’s middle. “It just caught us off guard.”

But I could tell from Dave’s tone and the way he was eyeing Ryan that it wasn’t fine. Normally I was all for puns. But, yeah, I could totally see how this had blown up. Gould
really
didn’t do great with reminders about Hal dying. And since he hardly ever got drunk, probably the alcohol was making this ten times worse.

“How could you not’ve known what you were saying?” Gould demanded, still staring at Ryan. “You
know
about Hal.”

“Yes,” Ryan snapped. “I wasn’t thinking. Take it
easy
.”

Ryan’s friends were still watching kinda wide-eyed from the yard, and I didn’t see any of the people who would’ve been a real help in this situation: Mom, D, Miles, and Drix . . .

“Hey.” I wasn’t sure who to reassure first. “Why don’t we all go back in? It’s cool, Ry, they know it was a joke.” I glanced at Gould. “Dude, he really didn’t mean anything by it.”

Gould was breathing hard. He looked into my eyes like maybe I’d betrayed him a little. The weirdest thing was that when I’d heard Ryan’s joke, I’d gotten a little jolt of,
Whoa, too soon
. But it didn’t
feel
too soon. Like, the joke didn’t offend me personally. Maybe I should have been upset, but I mostly just felt like, yeah, the world was still allowed to make jokes, even jokes about stuff that wasn’t funny to us anymore.

Dave helped Gould inside, and I held the door for Ryan, putting a hand on his back as he walked through. He turned to me once the door had swung shut behind us. “I’m sorry. It was stupid.”

“It’s cool, seriously. They’re just—” I didn’t want to imply my friends were making too big a deal of this, because their feelings were, like, their
feelings
. But I wanted to make Ryan feel better. “They know you weren’t trying to be a dick. Let’s get back to partying.”

Around 2 a.m., Ryan and I lay on the couch in the dark, exhausted. The only light came from the streetlights outside and the glowing red switch on the power strip next to the TV. A veggie tray strewn with broccoli remains and random baby carrots sat on the coffee table next to a bunch of open dip containers, and the houseflies were having a field day pooping in our hummus and stuff. Empty beer cans were everywhere, and the empty brownie pan had a pile of plastic spoons in it.