The cab pulled up to the white-painted curb under the awning at Mandrake's, cutting around the line of double-parked beamers, minis, and audis awaiting valets uniformed in leather vests and chaps, wallowing in the stream of throbbing rave trance spilling from the open doorway and into the street. She met the driver's eyes in the rearview, unable to suppress a grin. He'd been an easy target for her teasing flashes of shiny black and smoky transparent latex with it's poured-on fit. Her catsuit's buckles, rings, and zippers gleamed multicolored under the neon, a pretty effect, but it was warm enough even on a February night to make her wish she'd been bold enough to leave her lightweight trencher at home.

He was still staring, just as he had throughout most of the drive, poor horny bastard; it was a wonder they'd arrived unscathed. She peered at the meter through the bullet-proof plexi, one hand lifting soft, honeyblonde, slightly-damp curls from her nape and tugging her collar around her neck so that the steel d-ring faced front. The fragrance of her shampoo drifted upward, shimmering and elusive as a heatwave over a desert highway, transporting her for a moment back to her candlit bubblebath, Tchaikovsky in the earbuds, even through the meticulous pussy shave, the douche...hell, even through the enema. Not that she expected to be fucking tonight; it was just part of the ritual preparation, mutated from her  rites of purification before a ballet recital. Since she'd been fired from the dance company for showing up late for rehearsal once too often, striped with welts and decorated with bruises peeking out from under the skimpy leotard, she took a perverse pleasure in tormenting herself with Swan Lake as she readied her body for a night of pain.

She reached into her coat pocket and extracted a couple of twenties, flip-flashing them in a slender hand before his reflected eyes; this seemed to break the spell, and he got out and came around, opening the passenger door for her on the sidewalk side, even offering her a hand; adorable chivalry which she nonetheless waved off: there was a line of slicked-up partygoers in fetish wear shuffling impatiently behind the velvet rope, and she couldn't very well let a cabbie block their view.

She paid the driver, tipping generously, and scanned the line casually: mostly male, as always, only a few with fucktoys in tow. She grinned again: a statuesque, gorgeous redhead in leather and an amazing six inches of viciously spiked heels had her nearly-naked slaveboi kneeling in the gutter at the end of a tight leash. The games had already begun.

She nodded at the bouncer and slipped inside: unaccompanied females admitted free of charge; shedding her coat gratefully as she shimmied between wriggling bodies on the pulsing, strobing, ear-pounding dance floor, hot, dark, and reeking of aroused deviants. She spared only a quick glance at the spotlit stage as she passed: a tall, shirtless male in a leather mask was putting the finishing touches on a fully-suspended hogtie. He grabbed the sub's dark ponytail and cranked her head up and back to face the writhing crowd; in a surreal moment of frozen immediacy, the two girls stared into one another's eyes. Then the little latex blonde offered an almost imperceptible nod to the raven-haired slave already in flight, and moved on.

At the foot of the basement stairway leading to the dungeon, she paused to check her coat under a large sign listing the rules: boilerplate public play guidelines, the words "Safe, Sane, and Consensual" in bold red. Dungeon Etiquette. Scene negotiation. Safewords. No smoking, no alcohol, no drugs, no blood, no sex. She didn't look up; she knew them all by rote.

The thudding pulse of the club above muted down to a remote beat more palpable than audible; she listened, head cocked: for long seconds, to tingling silence... then a popping crack, mingling quickly with a garbled wail; both sounds subdued by distance, and still her heart skipped into high gear, pumping adrenaline into her bloodstream.

Turning the corner, she stepped into the underground maze of wide corridors, flanked by spotlit alcoves sheltering benches, racks, chains, rope, standard cuff attachments; each occupied recess playing to a small ring of mostly respectfully silent spectators standing just outside the pooled light, and all patrolled by a couple of beefy enforcers in geek masks, the only ones to look at her as she passed.

At the end of the hall she stopped: the alcove to her left had no audience and a single male occupant: jet hair and eyes, broad shoulders tilted against the back wall, tattooed arms crossed over a well-muscled bare chest, hips cocked forward in de rigueur tight black leather pants. Cute, but not her type; she would have passed, assuming he preferred smooth-skinned cherubic boys, but in this case she knew better. He gazed at her silently, appraisingly; when she met his eyes, he smiled.

"Hey, chere. Are you playing tonight, or just teasing us all with that sexy little ballerina bod?"

His voice was soft, and she returned the smile, but she was already planning her courteous getaway: he was pushing limits with the first words out of his mouth, bending her anonymity by referring to her day job. Okay, former day job. She still didn't like it; she'd seen him around, shared a few laughs, watched him wield a whip. She'd never scened with him.

As if reading her thoughts, he purred his homesick cajun drawl at her again, in a deep, seductively confidential undertone. "Don't worry chere, they can't hear us." He took a step forward, offering his hand to her, inviting her to step up onto the low platform and join him. "Come, sweetheart. A little beauty like you shouldn't have to wait in line." She hesitated...he smiled again.

And just like that, after a rather perfunctory negotiation, she was slowly, tauntingly stripping the latex skin from her body for him, rolling her hips in sinuous figure-eights, caressing and cupping her tits, offering to his eyes her tight little pink nipples, her silver captive-bead nipple rings standing out blatantly. He was right, she didn't want to wait. A small crowd of silent watchers gathered in the shadows beyond the perimeter of light; she acknowledged their presence with flashing smile before turning back to him. She was on.

When she was naked but for her black leather pumps, he stepped around behind her, drew her wrists back, and buckled cuffs around them, lightly pressing a hard leatherclad lump into her ass before stepping back to link them together. 'Amateur, hard already,' she thought, suppressing a smile. Most guys wouldn't be thinking sex until she was welted and tearstained and screaming through the gag.

Like a partner in a pas de deux, he bent her gracefully over the spanking horse, cuffing her ankles and guiding her legs with gentle hands into a spread-wide position, anchored to the benchposts, before slipping a hook into the links between her wrists. He cranked the strappado chain slowly, watching her face, letting her roll her shoulders and adjust. At her small head-nod, he stopped.

The gag he offered was a rubber bit, still packaged in transparent cellophane, intended more for her benefit than anything else: no aching jaw from a ball gag, no humiliating ring gag drool, just something to bite into. He slipped it into her open jaws and buckled it securely.

Then he disappeared.

Her body thrummed, vibrating to an electric current of excitement that danced up her spine like heat lightning. She heard a soft cough from the small assembled group in the darkness, but kept her face resolutely forward, refusing to track his choice of implements. And wondered for the millionth time why her pussy insisted on translating fear as arousal.

The first touch was a languorous long-fingered fondle; she recognized the multistranded tickle of the thuddy rubber flogger's caress and relaxed. He worked her ass slowly, methodically building intensity from feather-light strokes to medium lashes to hard punishing snake-strikes, covering every inch of skin from just above the crease to her upper thighs, in an easy, predictable rhythm. When he finally broke for a pause, she savored the burn, taking slow, controlled breaths, more confident in his professionalism after a very deft and thorough warm-up.

The initial shocking crack of the rattan cane into her rosily glowing ass made her jump and squeal; the chain from her wrists tinkled melodically overhead. The audience seemed to let out a collective sigh with the next sharp whack, even harsher than the first; she whipped her head around and shot him a heated glance over her shoulder, her eyes stinging with furious tears. He responded with a wink, puckering his grin into an air kiss, waiting for her to face forward again. She buried her teeth in the gag and turned away.

Then he went to work in earnest. He rained blows on her; as far as she was concerned, he opened the floor below her feet and dumped her ass-first into a hurricane. His rhythm felt erratic; there was no way to work with the white-hot agony, no way to breathe through it, no way control her wriggling.

Or her helpless, rageful tears.

Or her sporadic, high-pitched, guttural shrieks.

At some indefinable but familiar point of sensory overload, she simply surrendered. She let the pain in, and it blotted out all thinking, all anticipating, all fear, all sound and sight. When he finally stopped, she was in a tight, trembling arch, her welted backside straining toward the cane, striped with it's thin red double tracks, each pair sandwiching a bruise.

Beautiful. Probably the best performance art of her brilliant career.

She stopped in the ladies room upstairs after wriggling back into her latex and politely blowing him and his hard-on off, and not in the way he'd clearly hoped for; his phone number, scrawled on a matchbook cover, had been flushed after she admired his handiwork in the full-length facing mirrors.

She leaned against a sink and fished out her cell phone. The music was giving her a headache, and she needed a shower and a leisurely cigarette.

The taxi stand under the awning was blocked by an ugly Lexus; the double-parked cars extended down the block in both directions. A cab cruised by; she raised her arm, signaling; though it slowed, it also continued to creep away. 'Shit,' she muttered, kicking off her heels and giving chase, shouting "Hey!" as the cab rounded the corner into a alley, easing to a full stop, idling. She sprinted up to the driver's door; her heart sank as the lighted sign on its roof flicked off.

The driver's door opened; she stepped back as he climbed out. She smiled as engagingly as she could, considering her throbbing ass and freezing bare feet, recognizing the same well-tipped cabbie who'd deposited her under Mandrake's awning a few hours earlier.

She heard the hollow metallic thunk of the trunk latch opening at exactly the same moment she heard a crackling buzz near the junction of her neck and shoulder; she caught a glimpse of blue electricity dancing between two prongs in her peripheral vision.

The next coherent image was of his face, dimly lit by the trunk lights. Her body was curled, head cradled on the spare tire; a length of duct tape circled her face, covering her mouth, and her wrists were cuffed behind her for the second time that night. He just looked at her, the way he had watched her in the rearview mirror.

He didn't smile.

Then the hatch slammed shut, and it was dark.