Page 15 of Brave
Just once, she would do something normal. Something that wouldn’t leave her feeling useless, helpless. Pathetic.
Bending, Pony covered her too-thin face with too-thin hands. “I want to die,” she whispered.
Sharp anger drilled through Puppy, only to be swallowed by guilt. Pony wasn’t saying that to be mean or to gain attention. She was saying it because she meant it, and she meant it because the only person Puppy thought about these days was herself. What she wanted. What she could bear. What she desired.
She was selfish. She was unbelievably selfish.
“I’ll call a cab,” she whispered. Jumping off the bed, she ran down the hall so Pony wouldn’t see or hear it when she burst into tears.
She didn’t want to see Ethen, and yet when the cab pulled up into their driveway a half hour later, she was in perfect menagerie step right behind Pony as they walked out to it together. In the backseat, they held hands the whole way to the bus station, and again during most of the long ride to the penitentiary in West Virginia, where he was being housed. It wasn’t until they walked across the prison parking lot that Pony released her grip on Puppy and stepped into the lead, adopting the haughty strut that they’d all practiced to perfection.
She looked proud. She looked strong. When she reached the door and tossed that smile back at Puppy over her shoulder, she looked happier than she had been all year, and all Puppy wanted to do was to get through this without getting sick.
She really was selfish.
* * *
It was probably too much to hope that Puppy would come back to Black Light two nights in a row. After all, Carlson thought, trying not to get his hopes up, he’d been a part-time employee/member here for eight months and he hadn’t ever seen her until now. Also, he was working tonight, so as much as he might wish he could, he just couldn’t devote his time to just hanging out and talking with her.
Still, every time he heard the door open or spotted movement near the door out of the corner of his eye, his excitement would blossom. And then, every time he saw it wasn’t her, that same blip of excitement promptly crashed.
“Looking for someone?”
Carlson startled. He was standing in the shadows near the wall, an unobtrusive sentry watching over two dommes as they alternately tickle-tortured their slave boy and shocked the hell out of him with the violet wands humming quietly at the ready in a secondary helper’s hands. Despite his growls of frustration during the tickling or his grunts and shouts during the zapping, the slave had a high-standing hardon, and no safeword had yet been uttered. Still, one of those dommes was known to get a little carried away when she got deep in a scene. So here he was, keeping close watch to make sure everything went all right.
That being true, it was more than a little embarrassing not to have noticed Spencer walking up behind him.
“Not really,” Carlson said, more than a little embarrassed to have been caught not paying attention, and by the boss.
“Are you expecting her back tonight?” Spencer asked.
Blinking twice, Carlson dismissed the scene playing out in front of him and gave his boss his complete attention. “Who?”
Spencer gave him a withering look. “You know who.”
All right. Now he really had Carlson’s attention. “Am I stepping on toes by talking with her? She didn’t tell me she was high protocol or even that she was someone else’s submissive.”
Spencer watched the tickle-torture scene playing out before them, the lines of his body perfectly relaxed and yet the subtle nuances of his normally unflappable expression anything but. He looked… not angry, really. But there was an intensity about him that immediately raised every one of Carlson’s suspicion-flags, especially when his boss ignored his question and countered with another of his own. “What did she talk about last night?”
“To be honest, I was the one who did most of the talking. She was pretty quiet. What’s this about?”
“Probably nothing,” Spencer hedged.
And now his irritation was pricked right alongside his doubts.
“No,” Carlson said, in a voice he normally reserved for smart-ass recruits too new to have figured out they’d just stepped past the point where they should have shut up. He apparently even said it loud enough to draw attention from some of the voyeurs watching from the perimeter of the scene. Aware they were now being watched too, Carlson caught Spencer’s arm and pulled him aside.
“No,” he said again, much softer. “If there’s something you want to know, you better tell me why. Otherwise, my conversations with other members and potential play partners is absolutely none of your business. Sir,” he added, just so they both knew he was well aware of how low on the employee totem pole he stood.
Spencer huffed a sigh, his expression now wavering between annoyed and embarrassed. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Then nothing is exactly what we talked about.”
The two men frowned at one another, but it was Spencer who gave in first. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s none of my business. But if she brings up the name Ethen O’Dowell, will you do me the favor of letting me know? Please?”
Again, that name tickled at the back of Carlson’s head, but already his boss was walking away, back stiff, arms folded, eyes restlessly scanning the room and—although that might have been a trick of Carlson’s pricked suspicions—more than once drifting to the club’s entrance where his mystery girl was not standing.
She didn’t arrive until hours later when he was clocking off work. Like a modern-day Cinderella with the rules in reverse, she shyly stepped out of the entrance at just after midnight, dressed in jeans and a pink kitty-cat shirt that had him wondering if she was a Little.
