Playing with Fire

Erin’s roommate had been given the flyer from a friend of a friend, or so she said. Lucy’s claim was eyebrow-raising, but Erin sighed at the story and didn’t press. “My friend’s friend gave it to her who gave it to me.” A game of telephone, Lucy wanted her to believe, brandishing the wrinkled piece of paper with its four torn corners, no doubt still stapled to whatever light pole she’d torn it from. It was all so immature, and Erin thought Lucy could have just admitted she wanted to go in her own right instead of claiming simple and abject curiosity. “I’m not saying we should go,” she had said when floating the idea for the first time, hands held up in mock preparation for appeasement. “I’m just saying, can you believe there are parties like that?”

They had been sitting at the kitchen table, and Erin shrugged and took a convenient bite of toast. Lucy let it drop, but brought it up a few days later, the slight strain in her voice betraying eagerness. “What do you think people do at those parties?”

“I’m guessing people dress up in fetish gear and show off,” Erin replied, before slipping her phone out of her back pocket and busying herself with her empty inbox. When Lucy got up to refill her coffee, and when Erin was sure her back was turned, she glanced again at the wrinkled flyer laid out on the table. She knew the venue; she had been to a concert there the year before and a rave once back in college. The memory was hazy and tinted by the ruminated judgments that her twenties were at times a blur of brazen, stupid whims. She could still feel the phantom rush and heat of the crowd, bass thumping in her chest as she exchanged wanton grinding for mystery pills that made the air shimmer and the lights trail. She remembered, late into the night, making out in some corner with a woman and her boyfriend. The woman’s lips had been so soft and so warm, and Erin had wanted to stay in the moment forever, kissing her while his stubble scratched against her neck and someone tangled their fist in her hair and pulled until she gasped. She had come down after dawn, sipping on orange juice from concentrate in a stranger’s living room, a dull ache of desire pulsing lazily between her thighs.

“I think I’m going to go,” Lucy said, sitting down again and pulling the flyer toward her. “Do you want to come? It’ll be fun.”

“I don’t know,” Erin let the memory fade, swallowed against the lapping heat in her stomach. “I haven’t done anything like that in a long time. I might be too old.”

Lucy laughed, her mouth turning down in a skeptical challenge. “Since when is thirty old? Come on, girl, come with me. Please? I’ll even buy your ticket! I know you wanna go,” Lucy teased. Erin sighed and clicked off her phone screen, pressing it face down into the wood of the table, and let her curiosity get the better of her. Lucy rejoiced. There was a lot of jumping and hugging and thanking. Erin didn’t correct her. “Do you want to pregame? Do you need to borrow something to wear?”

“I’d quite prefer to be sober,” Erin laughed. “And I know you think I’m a prude, but I do know how to dress up.”

Lucy let out a polite but disbelieving bark of laughter and said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

In the end, Erin settled on a peach satin bralette with black and peach floral lace and a black miniskirt that was tight against the curve of her waist and hips. As she turned to admire herself in the mirror, she tugged the bralette and took a deep breath, feeling the softness of her stomach. She could see the faint definition of her abdominal muscles, shifting with her as she twisted side to side, and the lines of her hamstrings and calves. Her dark brown hair was down, in waves that brushed her shoulders, framing her face.

Lucy had tied her hair back into a shining, golden braid, and donned a sapphire-blue corset that created enviable cleavage. A distressed, denim mini-skirt clung to her hips over fishnets and heels.

“Wow,” Lucy breathed. “You look hot.”

Looking in the mirror, Erin took in the woman staring back: her slightly flushed cheeks, the freckles dotting her chest, and the slight movement of her belly when she breathed. A prickling sensation started up in her fingertips, tingling all the way up her arms and into her chest as she imagined strangers taking her in. What would they think of her? Would they look long enough to notice the pink that started at the base of her throat when she felt shy or flustered? Would they look closely enough at her top’s lace appliqué to make out the silhouette of her pebbled, hard nipples? Would they see through the outfit, imagining what she looked like out of it, using the fantasy of her body for whatever lewd, wicked fantasies they could hide behind their private thoughts? Suddenly her cheeks felt warm, and her throat felt very dry, and she had to look away from the mirror and clear it several times to steady herself against the racing thoughts.

“Get ready for some stares,” Lucy said, elongating the last word with a wink and a hip shimmy, oblivious to Erin’s affect as she turned to the mirror to apply eyeliner.

Half an hour later, they sat in relative silence in the back of a cab. Erin rubbed the cuff of her coat between her fingers. The same thoughts kept coming back to her in waves: how strangers would perceive her and what they might do with those thoughts. It made her heart pound. She toyed with the thoughts, struggling to either push them away or pull them in closer, afraid of what she might find out about herself if she allowed them to take over.

The building was a large and unimposing venue on the east side, near the river. A large billboard advertised the night’s event in chipboard letters, and Erin found herself surprised at the unceremonious presentation. At the door, a bouncer checked their IDs and ran them through a list of rules as he pressed a piece of masking tape over the cameras on their phones. For a brief moment, she thought she saw his gaze flicker over her chest before he quickly looked away, but she couldn’t be sure.

Inside, the pair went up two sets of stairs and emerged into a slowly filling, high-ceilinged hall. Lucy went to freshen up and Erin shrugged off her coat, glancing around the room to see if anyone was watching her. She felt exposed, acutely aware of the way the air settled on her skin, and had an itch in the back of her mind to shrug her jacket back on, or cover herself with her hands. Instead she willed herself to keep her arms still, with her jacket draped over one, and forced herself to give it to the coat rack attendant in exchange for a ticket that she pushed into the shallow pocket at the front of her skirt.

The hall was a large, almost rectangular room divided into two parts: a large, center square area with gleaming wood floors and a curtained stage against the back wall, and a smaller, rectangular hallway that surrounded it, carpeted and lined with partial walls and pillars that held up the balcony on the third floor. Four stations were set up in the center of the main room: two sturdy-looking, thin tables made from gleaming wood; a large, wooden X with steel rings at each corner and a center hourglass shape cut from leather; and a wooden chair positioned over a board. The four stations were arranged in a circle in the center of the room, each spaced out enough from one another that a small audience could gather around and watch each scene unfold.

As Erin watched people mill in, she quickly realized that no one was really looking at her. Everyone was dressed in a similar fashion to herself: tight leather, or revealing mesh, or various styles of glorified underwear. Two women walked by, each clad in sparkling gold hot shorts and black pasties. A man on the far side of the room wore tight leather pants, and Erin could see the barbell in one of his nipples gleam in the room’s light.

Leaning against a beam, Erin’s eye was caught by a man with a black bag over one shoulder, holding hands with an underwear-clad woman as he led her toward one of the stationed tables. The man was dressed in dark slacks and a dress shirt, with halfway rolled up sleeves. The woman was shorter than Erin, with thicker hips and softer, fuller curves. Getting her seated up on the table, the man lifted her fingers to his mouth and kissed them before laying her back. He let the bag drop from his shoulder to the floor and he knelt to rummage through it. A moment later, he pulled out a black and silver rectangular case. Opening it, he held up what looked like a thin glass tube at the end of a thick, purple and black handle.

Erin had seen a toy like that once before, she thought, but never in person. The memory itched at the back of her mind — tugging at her to remember how her fingers had stopped scrolling to hover while her throat ran dry. It felt wrong to stand there, transfixed, unable to take her eyes away from the man’s hands as he plugged the cord into the socket. When he stood, he held the toy in one hand, held his other palm flat out, and touched the glass tip to its center. The woman watched him with a lazy, warm expression, one corner of her mouth turned up. Erin watched her gaze trail from the man up toward the people looking down from the balcony above them.

Then the man pulled a piece of black fabric from the bag and tied it around the woman’s head. The woman’s chest rose in anticipation, the muscles of her shoulders and neck tensing before they relaxed down into the table. Erin felt the skin on her arms prickle. For a moment — the briefest flash, gone before she’d even let out the breath she realized she was holding — Erin imagined herself on the table, blindfolded, about to be shocked.

He started slowly, touching just the very tip of the glass tube to the back of one of the woman’s arms. Sometimes he would break his contact with the woman’s skin and hover it above her, and she would inhale sharply, or her stomach would brace, or her lips would part in a gasp or a pant. At times — when he dragged the tip over the inside of her leg; when he held it slightly away from her and ran just the very point over her skin — the woman would tense, as if trying to keep very still. She seemed almost restless, her muscles taut, coiled and ready to jump each time he seemed to re-engage the toy.