NightWhere Read Free Page A

hairy-chested man with even fewer clothes on than Rae slipped his arms around her middle and whispered something in her ear. Rae had laughed, tossing her head back. Then she’d looked at Mark and said, “I’ll be back.” Then in a conspiratorial whisper she’d added, “I don’t think he’ll take very long.”
    Mark watched as they danced on the private club’s dance floor, first touching only their fingers, and then more, her breasts slipping up and down against his chest. The man drew her hard against his body and she complied, slipping her hands around his back. Her fingers explored his flesh as they ground together on the dance floor, their moves increasingly dirty, as she flaunted her breasts and he grabbed and kneaded her barely covered ass.
    This was going to take longer than she thought, Mark had realized, as he’d drifted back to watch it all unfold.
    Watching her with another man both excited and humiliated Mark. He loved to watch her as his porno queen but he also realized that, no matter what he did, he would never be enough for her on his own…he was just the thing she turned to when she needed something stable and unmoving. That wasn’t what she needed normally. He was peanut butter…but someone or something else always brought the jelly…
    Mark had wound his way deep into the heart of the secret web of Chicagoland swingers clubs with Rae, and sometimes they even traveled to Wisconsin and Indiana gatherings. But ironically, he was always the man at the bar who gave the pity fuck to the woman who was still alone late in the night…he never did straight trades with Rae’s parade of lovers, taking their wives or girlfriends in exchange for his wife…he looked for women whose partners had left them to fend for themselves. It wasn’t a totally intentional act, but maybe he did it because he understood the feelings of the ones left behind.
     
     
    After the night that he’d asked Rae if she wanted to have sex with another man…the night he had set Rae free to have whomever she wanted…the months melted into years with increasing speed. On most days, Mark was a happily married man, ecstatic to get home from work to kiss his wife. And every few weeks, he was a troubled, but still somewhat happy man who offered her on the seedy underground altars of sex, allowing her to take any comers she chose, to scratch the itch that he could never touch.
    Somehow, it had worked.
    Until the day that someone had said to them, still hot in the afterglow of a night of musical-chairs sex, “Have you ever heard of NightWhere?” Rae’s eyes had lit up. She certainly had, but had not found anyone who knew how to get to the club. It was like an urban legend in swinger circles. A utopian place where no holes were barred, and no backs were left unscarred.
    “Yes,” she’d answered the pale, thin man who’d asked the question. “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know how to find it.”
    “You don’t find it, it finds you,” the stranger had said, slipping a long arm around Rae’s waist and massaging her nude tummy a moment before descending lower. “You need to be invited.”
    “Do you know how to get on the list?” Rae had asked, arching her back slightly and moving her body like a gently dancing snake against the man’s bare chest.
    “I can get you an invitation,” the man had said.
    That was when the game had changed forever.
     
     
    There was nothing about the building that would have suggested that behind the brown door was a den of sin. Mark had parked on the street a couple blocks down and they’d walked the cracked and weed-overrun city sidewalk to the address quickly. As much from nervousness of the neighborhood as from anticipation of the night to come. Rae’s heels cracked on the pavement like small gunshots with every step. That’s what Mark thought they sounded like, anyway, until somewhere nearby, maybe a block or two away, something cracked with a larger, fast report. Now that was a