“Do you ever relax?” my buddy Axel asks as his hand mindlessly rubs his girl’s back. “Stella and I do this all the time. I’m telling you, you’ll get what you need.”
I glower at him. “How the fuck do you control someone else chasing Stella?”
Axel shrugs, beaming at Stella. “It’s never happened. But I suppose the animal in me might have to snap a neck.”
My eyes roam the room. Men and women talk casually like they aren’t about to indulge in sexual mayhem. Shooting the shit about mundane things like the weather and movies they like as if it’s normal when everyone’s here to fuck like animals.
“So, you gonna take the mask off?” Axel asks, his eyes roaming my face.
Out of habit, I raise my hand to my face, and my fingertips brush against the white plastic mask I’ve worn for over twenty years. The only time I take it off is when I sleep. No one alive has seen what I look like, not even my best friends. “Nope. Unless I want to turn this sex orgy into a bloodbath.”
“You can’t be serious about killing someone just for seeing your face?”
Axel is a good guy, but the hypocrisy dripping off his tongue is enough to make me want to slam his head against the bar and revel in the blood oozing out. “You kill men for looking at Stella, but I can’t if someone sees my face?”
“Stella is my life. I consider that self-defense.”
A burst of laughter escapes my lips. It’s so loud that various pairs of eyes in the room glare at me. Usually, I’d bash their heads in for looking at me with such contempt, but this isn’t the time to lose my shit and slit some throats. “My mask is important to me. It provides a barrier. It protects me in a way.” Truthful words spoken in a rare moment when I show one of my brothers my vulnerability.
“What are you gonna do when you finally meet someone?”
I take a moment to ponder his question, even though I know the answer instantly. I’ll never meet someone because you let your guard down when you allow yourself to love. And for various fucked up reasons, my walls never lower. I never want to love someone so much that losing them would bring me to my knees.
Sure, I love my friends—they’re family, and I’d take a bullet for them, but losing them wouldn’t feel like my heart was being sliced up into a million tiny pieces by the edge of a sharp knife. So I’ve kept myself hidden, an impenetrable stone mass with a blank face that keeps everyone at bay.
“I meet people all the time. Still kept the mask on.”
“Way to go at being obtuse, Mik,” Stella says, smiling slyly at me.
“Stella, my love, I’ll never meet a good woman because the best one on the planet is taken.” I wag my eyebrows when Axel growls and glares at me, nostrils flaring. “Unless you want to add one more to your menagerie?”
“Watch it,” Axel warns.
“Relax, buddy. I’m not sure I want you anywhere near my dick.”
“You couldn’t handle my anaconda.”
“I can handle it, pretty boy. I just don’t want to.”
Stella laughs. “Okay, fellas, we don’t need to get to where you both whip it out and start measuring on the bar.” She turns her gaze to me. “You sure you want to do this, Mik? It’s a little intense.”
Intense.
Sweet Stella thinks I’m less fuckin’ depraved than the three psychos she’s surrounded herself with. She doesn’t realize that my need for dominance and blood extends beyond my job and bleeds into how my cock gets hard. The only issue is that most women don’t look fondly on you hurting them to get off. And as fucked up as I am, I draw the line at taking someone’s will. I’m many fucking things, but I’m not a coward, and forcing a woman to do something against her will is the pathology of a fucking loser.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Stella. You need to worry about the poor woman I chase.”
ChapterTwo
Bree
Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat.
The ice cubes in my glass ricochet off each other because of the non-stop nervous tremors in my hand. As hard as I try to keep calm, I can’t. I keep thinking this is the worst idea I’ve ever had. There isn’t a friendly face in the room. I’ve hurled myself into the unknown with strangers.
This was a bad idea.
Fetlife—an online social media for kinksters—was one thing, but to come to a weird sex club in the middle of a forest hoping to get what I need without a friendly face in sight? That seems a little idiotic.