Free Fever Dream by Annabel Joseph

big was this Ironclad security company Liam owned?
    Petra shrank back as Liam walked by in a button down shirt and jeans, but his attention was on his wife and her group of friends. That crisis averted, she scanned the room, but she didn’t recognize anyone else. Either Rubio wasn’t in attendance, or he was downstairs. She asked for one more shot, for courage, downed it in one gulp, and skirted the outside of the crowds until she reached the wide marble staircase that led below.
    What would she find down there? How hard did this sexy crowd party? She lifted her chin, prepared to see just about anything as she moved into view of the lower floor. She heard the sounds of impact first, thuds and smacks and screams, but they were happy screams. As she neared the landing, the play room opened before her in a series of erotic tableaux.
    Wow. Just wow.
    The Wilders’ entire basement was set up in her image of the classic sex dungeon. There were intricate racks and solid wooden benches, crosses and cages, chains and pulleys and other equipment she’d read about in her investigation into the BDSM “lifestyle.” Almost all of it was in use. From the stairs she could see the whole room, but she didn’t dare stand there and gawk. She continued down and moved off to the side.
    The music was softer down here, so she could hear the pervasive sounds of lust and arousal. The lighting was minimal, which suited her purposes—lots of shadows to hide in. The walls, floors, and ceiling were all black, lit by candelabras that flickered even though the candles were fake. From her vantage point, she could see that the back and side walls were loaded with whips, handcuffs, sex toys, and some stuff she didn’t recognize. Aside from the decor and the extensive selection of BDSM toys, the whole room was alive with people, real people doing really intimate and perverted stuff, freely, in public.
    Petra watched all of this with a sense of wonder. She wasn’t a prude by any means, but...wow. These people were going at it full throttle, with no self-consciousness, at least none that she could see. There were crawling women on leashes, slave men decked out in complex body harnesses, Dom-types with leather floggers and cuffs clipped to their belts. In one corner, a burly man decorated a curvy girl with knotted rope, while his female assistant stroked and teased her between the legs.
    Nearby, a man walloped a bent-over, voluptuous woman with a thick strap. The woman cried out at each blow, but she was clearly enjoying it. The woman’s ass was scarlet red beneath her sheer pink panties, and her entire body seemed to tremble in fear at the same time she accepted each stroke. As for her partner, his face lit up in a smile at each of her cries and groans. It was so freaky and weird and...hot. The sound of the strap and the impact turned Petra on, even though she didn’t want anything like that to happen to her. It was impossible not to react to the intensity of interplay between the couple.
    Petra closed her eyes. No. No, she didn’t want to be that girl. Did she?
    No. She was only getting turned on because it had been so long since she’d had sex. It had been too long since anything raunchy or intense happened in her bedroom, unless she counted her sex dreams about Rubio, and they weren’t real.
    Rubio. Where was he? She searched the room as well as she could, but other scenes caught her attention. A twenty-something girl with long stripey socks clutched a teddy bear while an older couple played with her breasts. A super hot, barely-legal guy knelt in front of a latex clad woman, alternately licking and polishing her boots, while a girl in skin-tight leather writhed and screamed as her Dom paddled her.
    If she was that girl, would she scream like that? She wondered what it felt like, to be spanked while screaming her lungs out, powerless to get away. She’d fantasized about it, but these men and women were really living it.
    “Hey, Ashleigh!”