© Copyright 2011 Lydia Nyx
On numerous couches in the room, people dressed in leather and latex, in various states of undress, were smoking, drinking, and making out. Cigarette and other kinds of smoke clouded the air. Women straddled men’s laps. Hands roamed exposed flesh. Soft voices and giggles emitted from every corner.
“Where’s your friend?” Darius asked, keeping his voice down.
“Sit down,” Jordan said, and motioned to a nearby couch. One end was vacant; on the other end, a man and woman were sucking hungrily at each other’s mouths, the man’s hand tucked inside the shiny pink bodice of the woman’s dress.
Darius grimaced, hesitated, and sat down on the edge of the cushion. “Do we have to talk here? Isn’t there somewhere more…” He swept the room with his gaze. “Private?”
“This is as private as it gets here.” Jordan stood in front of him, skin still glistening with sweat. “Don’t worry. No one is paying any attention.”
“Where’s your friend? I don’t want to hang out here all night.”
“You want a drink?”
“I’m on the job. I can’t.”
“I don’t drink on the job either.” Jordan held his glass out. “It’s just water. I thought you might be thirsty after watching me up there.”
Darius sighed and took the glass. He wanted to move things along. “So is your friend coming back here, or what? Or is he—back here?” He glanced across the room again, saw bare breasts, and looked away.
Jordan did the most unexpected thing then—or really, the thing Darius fully expected. He climbed on his lap, straddling him, pushing him back against the couch. His pants crinkled. Heat radiated off of him. He was heavier than he looked. “Hey,” Darius said, holding the glass aloft so the water didn’t spill. He put his other hand against Jordan’s chest. “I’m on the job. I just told you.”
Jordan leaned in. “What if you weren’t?”
“Get off me.”
“I can feel your gun.” Jordan lowered his voice, leaning in closer yet. His hair swept around his face. “Against my thigh.”
“I don’t want to cause a scene, Jordan. This is inappropriate.”
“Just cool off.” Jordan gripped the glass and maneuvered it toward his mouth. “Calm the fuck down. I don’t want us to look out of place back here. You want everyone staring at us?”
He wondered later, often, how he could have been so easily coerced into taking a drink from a glass in a club, offered to him by a man he didn’t know. He thought compliance would make the situation turn in his favor. He tasted nothing odd in the water, but this meant little. Jordan put the glass aside, on a table next to the couch.
“Now about your friend—”
“There is no friend. I lied, so I could see you again.”
Darius stared at him for a moment. Jordan’s eyes burned in the sickly red glow in the room, boring into him, pinning him against the couch. Darius gripped Jordan’s hips and tried to push him off, but he didn’t budge.
“I can arrest you, you know. That’s false information, wasting police time, obstructing an investigation—”
“I’m a bad, bad boy.” Jordan sat back and lifted his arms in front of him. Dark welts encircled his wrists, vivid even in the low light. “Are you going to put me in handcuffs?”
“What the…”
“Some of us like to be restrained.” The ring on his collar jingled as he leaned forward. “If you have to take me in, I’ll understand.”
Whatever he’d put in the water kicked in fast. Heat spread through Darius’s limbs and filled his chest. His heart sped up. He felt sensitive, light, aroused. Jordan slid his hands over Darius’s shirt, up his neck, down his arms, creating little electric shocks.
“You wanna go somewhere more private?” Jordan whispered, close to his mouth. His breath smelled like menthol cigarettes.
“You said this is as private as it gets.” Darius’s voice tickled his throat. His mind shouted at him to be alarmed, to get the fuck out of there, to call for help. It was as if the panic belonged to someone else.
“I lied again.” Jordan lifted Darius’s hands and placed them on his neck, over the collar. Darius nudged the ring with his thumb. “We have a special place we take our customers from time to time, if you’d like to go.”
Darius couldn’t answer, too mesmerized by his eyes, stricken by the way Jordan’s face looked in the red light, otherworldly, demonic. He flexed his fingers around Jordan’s throat, so slender and vulnerable. Jordan brushed his lips across Darius’s mouth, the touch soft and tantalizing, leaving his lips tingling.