Page 34 of Boneyard HEA

This hall is an enormous long rectangle, running to left and right and paralleling the rear of the main resort. All along the opposite side glass doors have been concertinaed open, allowing a glimpse of a covered outdoor entertainment area with tables, chairs, and sofas, and white columns at intervals, as well as a distant view over the ocean. It’s early morning, the breeze is warm, and a few outdoor tables are occupied, though I can’t see much over the heads of the people currently fucking and fellating, and trying out their favorite piece of wicked debauchery on other humans.

In here, it’s a kinky paradise, I guess.

One or two hundred are in here. The cries, moan,s and conversations carry in an undercurrent. Immense screens along the walls show some of what is happening—the crudest, lewdest, or perhaps most artistic kinks. A man and two women cosplay half-naked, dueling with swords, as if to vie for possession of a naked woman. She’s tied to a pole with intricate ropework that winds about her like vines. When one of them mock dies, the others swarm him and tie him and drag him to another pole. Whips are uncurled. Swords go into places they shouldn’t. I blink and move on.

The woman dressed as a cat is here, being spit roasted by her owner and another man, with a camera zooming in on her at ass and mouth, all of it is being streamed to a screen.

We pass someone tied upside down in a rope harness. They spin slowly, strung from a thick rope attached to the two-story ceiling. A pulsating dildo projects upward from between their legs.

On a square of black sofas, an orgy is happening. I smile, writing my own Google review: kinda boring.

A mural on the left wall has a man and a woman tied to it, gagged, legs and arms spread, like zigzag art exhibits. The stripes on their skin are whip strikes. A woman in a black pantsuit moves from one to the other delivering fresh lines of red.

A central stage, a hundred yards away, is studded with St Andrew’s crosses, currently empty.

I drag my feet and halt at a scene where a man is binding a woman, face-up, to a table with barbed wire, and though it seems done with minimum force, she bleeds from scratches. When he kneels and starts to lick her pussy, she writhes and squeaks. I stare. I’m almost feeling the barbs digging in and scraping along my skin, the licking softness of his tongue. I hear his laugh, then her pitiful moans as she arches toward him. My throat tightens.

“Close your mouth, Miss Juniper,” Loxland says dryly.

I do so and follow the tug of the leash.

This room with its montage of sex and sadism is affecting me in ways I never imagined.

Then a man goes through a door to my left, on the wall that holds the main entry doors. A private room, I assume. He closes the white door. A millisecond later, I recognize him. That was Baxter, Nathan’s friend.

I need to know what he’s doing here. Or, even better, I need to see his dick. Is it scarred? I should be checking them all. No one will see that as strange here? Surely? I purse my lips.

Fuck, I pray I’m right because I start scanning dicks. How do I get Tomás and Mr. Loxland to head toward that room?

“Perverted people, as usual.” Mr. Loxland has stopped and drops the unzipped black bag to the floor, standing before me with his feet planted. Unhurriedly, he assesses my body until he reaches my face, then holds out his hand, palm up.

In his other hand he clasps a looped red rope that must have come from the bag. That’s shibari rope. My stomach flip-flops from nerves, and heat teases my insides like an uncoiling snake. This is it. This is where I become one of the exhibits in this hall.

I thought I could be blasé, but this is unsettling. No one will see me. They’re all doing their own thing.

“Your hand, Juniper.”

I hesitate, staring at his palm, aware of his eyes dwelling on me. How gray those are. I don’t think I’ve noticed their color before.

Though his mouth barely moves, I think he’s amused by my hesitation. And a little concerned or annoyed, judging by the creasing of his forehead.

Still, he waits.

I don’t know why I’m afraid to put my hand in his.

Perhaps it’s because every other time he simply forced me.

I exhale then place my hand in his. He closes his fingers, shifts his warm grip upward to encircle my wrist with those long fingers then a cinched-in loop of rope. From the strength of his grip, I can tell I’d have little hope of pulling free. My heart stutters.

He’s tied me up before.

Yet I swallow as he slowly loops the rope, again, shuffles the loops closer, and knots them into a bracelet. Then he again holds out his palm.

He wants my other hand. I swallow and give it to him. The heat from his skin, the pressure, the knowledge I just gave him a part of myself to restrain how he wants to, it’s like taking my first taste of a full-bodied wine.

Intoxicating. Electrifying, even.

I feel a clarity all the way down to my soul, or whatever part of me is the essential me.