NightWhere (6 page)

The man held out a long hand that looked paper white against the black curtains. Rae took it, and the man pulled her closer, raising her arm to kiss her knuckles with exaggerated slowness. When his eyes caught Rae’s, she felt instantly weak. As if the connection literally sucked the energy from her soul through her eyes and fingertips.

She drew in a breath as his eyes held her own. His face was thin and drawn, but his eyes…they were like black holes. His eyes were wide, and in the dim light she could only think that they were pools of black. Pools of electric, magnetic black. She couldn’t look away. Seconds seemed like minutes, and she could almost hear him speaking in the silence between their eyes. The words were nonsense, but they sounded important. Like ancient knowledge. Secrets lost. Then without warning he broke the connection and held out his hand to Mark, still keeping his eyes on her.

“My name is Tailor,” he said. “They call me a Watcher, because I’m here to watch! But not just as a voyeur—though I am one.” He laughed. “I’m also here to make sure the night goes well for everyone. NightWhere can be everything you’ve ever wanted…or everything you were ever afraid of. Let me know how I can help you find what you need here.”

“Thank you,” Rae said. “I think I found what I needed here last time. I just need to find her again. She told me that she’d see me, um, in a place called The Red?”

Tailor’s lips spread. “All in due time,” he promised. “Until then…” he motioned towards the moving green and blue spotlights and the band playing on a stage before them, “…go in…and sin!”

The doorman slid away from them, still smiling with some hidden humor. Rae leaned up and kissed Mark hard on the lips after Tailor passed. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s get some sin!”

She pulled him by the hand out onto the dance floor. The band—dressed in requisite black—was in the midst of a gloomy rock set. The singer crooned almost in monotone, as he picked a heavy Stratocaster. Next to him, the bassist practiced androgyny and boredom, standing stock-still in silk sleeves, black eyeliner and lipstick. His hair was kinked and hung on his shoulders, but only his fingers moved, throbbing a steady thunder on four thick strings. Behind him, the drummer’s mascara ran across bloated cheeks as he pounded out a challenge to the rest of the band. Off to one side, behind a wall of smoke, a tall, bony man who reminded Mark of Ric Ocasek hung intently over his keyboards, filling the spaces between the beats and the guitars with strings and fuzz. He wore sunglasses in the dark.

It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. They were hypnotic. And energizing at the same time. The small crowd on the dance floor didn’t stop moving. Mark and Rae had to edge their way in to find a place to dance to the hypnotic, hazy groove. They ended up between an androgynous couple who both appeared flat-chested beneath their ripped T-shirts, but who both wore fishnets and eyeliner (were they both women? men?).

On either side of the stage metal stairs led to cages suspended in the air. A line of men and women ascended and descended the stairs in a slow but steady procession while the band played. They took turns above the dance floor, fondling and fucking the gyrating cage prisoners before returning to the floor.

Beneath the cages and against the black metal walls, a dozen men were down on all fours, collared and chained to hooks on the walls as women strode back and forth fondling riding crops in their hands.

Periodically people slipped away from the strobing blue lights in twos and threes, and sometimes fours, to claim the only partly public cots that were strung out around the place beneath velvet tents. Many of them returned from the tents without even bothering to pull their clothes back on, driven by the beat of a favorite song to dance clothed solely in the sweat of their bacchanalian passion.

The band slipped into a dreamy interlude, with something like a sitar punctuating the still-urgent beat as the singer suddenly opened up and showed he could sing more than two notes. And he
could
sing …with a charisma that melted inhibitions.

The couples on the floor surged closer to the stage, bodies pressing against each other indiscriminately as the singer hugged the mic. You could taste the lust in the air at that moment. Mark felt himself growing erect from the scent of sex all around him, as much as from the sight of it. Rae shook the chains of her leather bra against Mark, and then twisted to the right to rub her barely concealed breasts teasingly against a man’s biceps with a smile at the man and a wink back at her husband.

A thickset redhead with a wide face and too-bright eyes shoved into Mark and Rae’s circle and leaned closer to Mark, as she kept an eye on Rae to gauge the other woman’s reaction to the intrusion. Rae only smiled and slipped her arms around the biceps guy to make space for the woman to move in. And she did…leaning forward to make sure Mark saw that her freckled chest was braless beneath the thin red dress she almost wore.

Mark shot Rae an evil look—she knew he was not into big girls—and humored the woman with a couple of short hip sways together, before he put his hands on her shoulders and excused himself.

He could almost hear Rae laughing as he escaped to the bar. He wasn’t worried about leaving Rae…she was eager to explore. An obligatory dance with her hubby was a nice gesture, but…he knew the score—he was only holding her back.

The band stepped up the energy and launched into something gothic behind him, maybe Bauhaus…or Joy Division…Mark wasn’t sure. He just knew it sounded like the growlingly ’80s club scene he vaguely remembered. Hell, the singer even looked like Ian Curtis from his brief Joy Division heyday—wan, thin face and close-cropped hair broken by two intensely wide eyes. He looked angry as he sang, but the sound was comforting somehow, regardless. Mark watched for a minute and then turned away to the bar with a smile, ready to order a Jack and Coke. His eye was caught by a blonde woman who sat alone, at the far end of the bar, so he didn’t notice who was mixing drinks until she spoke.

“Just couldn’t stay away, could you?” Sin-D said. She leaned forward across the wood, the intricate tattoos on her bare shoulders exposed. Finely detailed, her left arm showed a witch star in a clouded sky and the hands of the dead rising from the earth beneath it. A broken tower faded into the horizon of her biceps beneath the low-hanging strap of her black tank top.

“Once you’ve had black, there’s no going back?” Mark joked.

“You better be talking about my shirt, not my skin, baby. This is a hard-core tan! You want black, you’ll have to hit the floor some more,” Sin-D said. “You want hot, fast and naked white girl with a shot of tequila…get your ass back here.”

“I warned you last time, she’ll do anyone, and usually does!” A broad-shouldered man in a red-and-grey-checkered shirt held out his hand. “Kendrick, remember?”

Mark took the hand and nodded. “Sure, I remember. Only my wife gets to call you Ken.”

“Gotta separate the men from the toys,” Kendrick winked. Then he made a big show of peering over Mark’s shoulders and looking beneath his bar stool. “Huh. Looks like I’m too late here. Someone’s already
 
cucked your goose?”

“I told you she wasn’t normally shy,” Mark said.

Sin-D pushed Kendrick’s shoulder away from the bar. “Git!” she said. “Can’t you see this boy needs a stiff drink from a soft bartendress?”

Mark smiled. “How about just a Jack and Coke for now?”

“You want Jack’s Cock? Has this place turned you that fast?” She exaggerated a roll of her eyes. “How disappointing.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “Liquor?” he pleaded.

“Ah, so easily swayed. Now he wants to lick her.” Sin-D reached down and lifted her skirt, unveiling the smooth-shaven bronze skin he still remembered very clearly from the last time. Sin-D was hotter than hell. Mark wasn’t embarrassed easily, but Sin-D’s completely overt sexuality made his face warm.

Kendrick laughed and shook his head. He clapped Mark on the shoulder. “Take a flashlight if you hit that, so you don’t get lost.” He held a drink up in the air in Sin-D’s direction before walking off towards the dance floor. Sin-D flipped him off and then rested her head on her elbows on the bar, blinking doe-eyed at Mark. When he didn’t react to the innocent pose, she slid one finger down the front of her tank top until a nipple popped free.

“How ’bout a li’l nip of a nip?” she offered.

“How about you just pour me a drink from the bottle for now?” he suggested with a smile.

“I was good enough for you last time,” she pouted. “Fuck ’em and leave ’em, I get it.” She poured a long stream of Jack and then squirted a shot of cola on top. “I like the fuck ’em part though, you know?”

“I do know,” Mark grinned.

Sin-D pushed the long-discussed drink across the bar just as a couple came up, hands groping each other with almost embarrassing freedom. Sin-D moved down the bar to help them, and Mark took his Jack and Coke with a smile, pulling himself up on a stool. He turned to look at the band, who, beneath the fog and the blue-green lights, seemed to be channeling something from an early Cure album. The keyboards hummed beneath a dark but steadily moving bass.

“So, do you cum here often?” the woman on the stool next to him asked. Mark turned to take her in and was struck by the intensity of her ice-blonde hair and pale, high cheeks. She was stunning and delicate, in a Nordic kind of way. If she’d been lying on a white sheet, he thought she might have looked the lighter.

“And I meant cum with a
U
,” she added.

“That’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it?” Mark smiled.

“No, it’s kind of a bad cliché,” she answered. “But that’s what you’re supposed to do here, right?”

“Speak in clichés?” Mark asked.

“More like cum in clichés, I think,” she mused. “Look at them.” She waved a hand at the girls on the dance floor. The band had revved into “Blue Monday” and the black fishnet and teased hair of the women in the crowd moved faster, the sexy goth trappings just window dressing; they all knew they’d be nude in one corner or another of this place within the hour.

“They’re just having fun,” Mark answered.

“It’s always fun until somebody loses an eye.”

Mark cleared his throat. “Ahem…I think you’re the one with all the clichés.”

She didn’t answer him right away. Instead she took a long drink on a glass filled with something clear…and ice. Mark didn’t believe that it was water. He stared at her fingers circling the glass. They were long and creamy white, with unpainted nails. The soft look of her skin made him yearn to reach out. As soon as he looked at her, he ached to touch her. She looked as naturally beautiful as anyone could. Her eyes flickered wider then and met his own over the top of the glass. Still, she sipped. Finally, she set the glass down and stared at him straight in the eye.

“Why are you here?” she asked quietly. “Why did you come to NightWhere?”

“Why does anybody come here?” he asked. “To have fun.”

“That’s not why anybody comes here,” she said. “NightWhere is not about fun, it’s about obsession. If you follow that rabbit into its hole, you will become a very lonely man.”

“That or a man trapped in a hole.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “You don’t want to really be here, I can tell. And that means you’re not only going to get lost, you’re going to get lost without reason.”

“Hey, you hitting on my customers?” a chirpy voice piped up from behind the bar. Sin-D propped her head on her hands and nodded at the blonde. “She’s a downer, man. I’ve listened to her before. Maybe it’s all that Russian vodka she drinks. Want to come over here and give me a hand behind the bar? I could use a little help right now.” She made a visible play of looking down the cleavage showing in the V of her skintight tank top and then pressed her arms against her sides to accentuate it. “Please?” she asked, in a patented little-girl voice that made Mark grin.

“Rain check?” he asked and patted Sin-D’s arm. “I’m just getting to know…um…” he turned to the snow-white woman beside him.

“Selena,” the woman whispered.

“…Selena here.”

“You’re sure?” Sin-D asked, pouting, while dragging one long black fingernail under the swell of her tank top and again pulling the material down as far as it would go. Mark saw the pink hint of her nipple before she rolled her eyes beneath the raccoon coat of mascara, licked the tip of her tongue to her lip, and then faded back from the bar.

He turned to Selena and shifted the conversation back at her. “What are you doing here, if you’re so down on the place?”

“I’m waiting for someone,” she said. “Hoping he’ll leave with me. If not…well, I’ll at least get to hear some music and have a couple of drinks, right?”

“I guess,” Mark said. “Though this isn’t exactly the typical destination for a casual drink.”

“Look who’s talking?” Selena laughed. “What are you doing sitting in the back at the bar?”

He smiled and took a drink. “My wife is really into this. I don’t really mind it…hell, how could a guy mind, right? Coming here is like she gave me a Free Sex card, for chrissake. But yeah, I’m kind of in the same boat as you, I guess… At this point…I’m just waiting for her to come back.”

Selena’s ice-blue eyes narrowed. “Has she mentioned The Red yet?”

Mark shrugged.

“If she goes in there, you will never have her back, I’m just warning you.”

Selena leaned towards him to whisper something, but just then a man walked up to the bar. He was tall and rail-thin with a shaven head and hairless chest. He showed it off in a black-mesh shirt.
Effete
would be the word for him, Mark thought.