NightWhere Read Free

her bare skin. The sex had been good, but he could tell she was struggling with something. Trying to get more out of it. Trying to get more of him inside her. Trying to find…something deeper between them. Something new. Something to affirm that it was all worthwhile. The sterile white walls of their cookie-cutter suburban frame house were closing in. Day by day their home felt smaller and smaller. The mundane was smothering Rae.
    Mark knew he couldn’t give anymore. And so he’d said the words that had changed everything. “Do you want to try having sex with another man?”
    Rae hadn’t missed a beat. “Who did you have in mind?”
    Mark hadn’t freaked out. His stomach may have contracted a little, and he was a little surprised at how eagerly she’d jumped on the offer, but he’d known in his heart for a while that this was what she really wanted. Rae needed to play or she would wither. And whatever was left between them would die.
    “No one in particular. I’ll look for a swingers club if you want” was what he’d said.
    “Cool,” she’d answered. When she’d turned to kiss him, her mouth was hotter than it had been during their lovemaking.
     
     
    And so it had begun.
    Mark himself had never needed the variety…not that he didn’t enjoy it. But he had done this all for Rae. And he had to admit, there was a voyeur buried not so deep inside him. There was nothing quite like standing in the shadows and watching her face light up when a guy came on to her and something inside her that had been dark for weeks suddenly ignited.
    She couldn’t be contained…but she agreed to stay in Mark’s cage. Still, she lost her light there after a while. Until he let her out of her cage for the night. But, she always chose to go home with Mark.
    That was enough for him.
    But nothing was ever enough for Rae.
    They had slipped easily into the swingers scene and Mark found himself sleeping with more wives than he had ever imagined slept around. Meanwhile, Rae enjoyed a parade of partners who provided both variety and an increasingly dark flair. Sometimes when Mark finished rubbing thighs with his partner of the night in the back of the club, he dressed and walked out onto the floor to find Rae being spanked, whipped or abused at the hands of someone he’d never seen before.  
    He’d made the mistake of intervening once, in someone’s basement in Humboldt Park, when a tall guy with bleached hair in a Revolting Cocks T-shirt was whipping Rae with a long, flesh-welting twine of leather straps. But when Mark had stepped between her punky abuser and Rae’s naked body, her hands tied up in white silken bonds leaving her helpless to stop the man’s abuse, she’d cried out at him in anger, not relief. “Get out of his way,” she’d demanded. “Just go home. Someone will bring me later.”
    Mark tried to give her space, but increasingly he wondered where her dark side was going.
    Right around the time he started wondering that was when he first heard the word NightWhere .
    A secret sex club.
    A place where your wildest fantasies could be enacted.
    A place where you could be free… And be a slave.
    Somehow each of those appealed equally to Rae.
    “I want to go,” she said to him one night at a swingers mixer in the northern suburbs. She’d been masquerading that night as an X-rated cupid, with a fake bow and arrow strapped to her back and a Mardi Gras red mask over her eyes. While she hid part of her face, the rest of her was scandalously unclad. Mark had joked that her red nail polish and lipstick covered more of her than her outfit did—she wore only a tissue-thin piece of see-through red silk across her chest and a barely effective V shield over her crotch. Men groped her body even as Mark talked to her. He wanted to yell at a couple of them: “Could I just finish a conversation with my wife before you grab her tits? Please?”
    Behind her, right after she’d blurted her desire to find NightWhere, a