Recovered Entry C-1

A pineapple, small and lit orange, glowed in a window boarded up on either side. It looked misplaced. A party light in a row of broken glass. The forums had been specific about the address, and the forums were rarely wrong about anything else. The light merely a gesture of acknowledgement and hidden meaning.

I checked the mask in my compact mirror one more time. Red, to match the dress. My reflection held steady even though my hands did not.

This wasn't my first private event. It was the most daring. I'd left a marriage built on years of watching myself from the outside, and the vetting process for nights like this—the encrypted messages, the screening, the poetic little password in the invitation—gave me something my old life never had: a process I could trust and the rewards plentiful.

I knocked three times, a pause between each. 

"When the rose cannot bloom, who is to blame?" a man’s voice called from behind the door.

"The spider's silk is used to catch its prey," I said, and the shake in my own voice surprised me. I knew I was nervous. Had been nervous the whole drive. Started the weeks prior.

I had not really explored my new found single life. Romantically that is. Sure I have filled my time with self improvement, proving my worth at the firm, and even picked up a few hobbies on the side. When it came to men, that was a different story altogether.

A girlfriend of mine told me about this exclusive party. I knew she practiced unconventional forms of dating and relationships. It was no surprise when she brought this event up weeks ago at a dinner. I had been complaining about my lack of intimacy over one too many margaritas. When I am drunk, especially on tequila, I have no filter and share way too much. Usually my mouth gets me in trouble, but that night it opened up a window of possibility I didn’t realize I longed for. 

There was a vetting process of course. Nothing overly complex unlike the men's. I liked that. It made the numerous statements about following and asking for consent feel truthful and not just as a means to get pretty women through the door. Everything felt very professional, clean, respectful, and a bit mysterious. My nerves had nothing to do with my safety and all to do with the insane idea that I would break my three-quarters of a year dry spell at an exclusive event.

The door opened a second or two after I completed the riddle. A man in a fox mask, dressed in white, looked me over and stepped aside without a word.

The hallway beyond ran red-lit and narrow, ending at another metal door. A slit opened at eye level.

"The symbol of pleasurable consent?"

"Pineapple."

The slit shut. The hallway lights cut out entirely—a full second, maybe two, of nothing—before the ceiling lights stuttered back on and the door slid open onto an auditorium gone to ruin. Moonlight came down through cracked glass overhead, dust turning in streaks that refracted and glistened the lunar shine.

The door slammed shut behind me hard enough that I felt it in my sternum. I quickly realized I was alone and whoever let me in had disappeared. I felt my heart drop to my stomach. Fear and panic quickly spiking my already present anxiety.

Four seconds in. Hold for four. Out for four. I'd practiced this until it became automatic at the onset of panic. With eyes closed, I told myself the same thing I always told myself at the start of an episode like this: I have the control.

A red light appeared and marked a door at the far end. I crossed the empty ballroom breathing in fours and entered the door. From the other side I could hear noise as I stood in yet another hallway. A string trio somewhere ahead, conversation layered over it, warm light spilling from a door at the end. I grabbed my small black masquerade mask from my bag, put it on, and went through the door.

This new ballroom I entered was too large for the building I'd walked through to reach it. Chandeliers ran the length of the ceiling in diamond rows. A violinist, a harpist, a pianist, playing something that belonged in a different century. I found myself doing the math anyway—how a room this size fit inside this same building I entered, stumped me .

"A wine, madam?"

A man startled me from my thoughts. He wore a white dinner suit. His mask color to match. Blank and smooth with no eye holes I could find. I took the red and thanked him.

"Good choice. Better year than the white."

A man in a Zorro mask, one boot braced behind him as he leaned against a marble pillar, watching me over his own glass of the same red.

"A wine connoisseur I presume?" I tried to act posh and fancy. Play it cool to this man of mystery. Truth is I knew nothing about wine and began to question if I knew anything about flirting.

He nodded at the waiter's tray as it passed, the labels turned just so. "To some possibly. To others I would be called out for not knowing enough. Now you, madam,” the man leaned away from the pillar. The thump of his boot vibrated the floor beneath him. Running through the floorboards and up my leg. A brief moment of his cologne on my nose. Cedar and leather, and beneath it something low and warm that settled and pulsed on my inner thighs, “appear to be a vodka woman."

For a moment I could not respond. Even as the man took his step forward. His musk now drowning my senses. My pupils widened as thoughts of his naked body on top of me flooded my vision.

“Did I guess correctly?” 

A strand of hair fell over my right cheek. Before I could react, the man had assisted. I closed my eyes as I felt his hand brush the hair to the side and back behind my ear. 

I could have melted to a puddle of sweat and desire right then and there, but the moment needed an answer.

"Whiskey." I said with a trembling voice.

"Even better," He pulled a red pocket square from his jacket, turned it once between two fingers like it was a question he expected me to answer. My hand went to my forehead without my telling it to.

"Nerves?"

"It's warm in here,” I lied. It was only half the truth.

"Warm?" he turned the glass in his hand once, "I noticed."

Before either of us could say more, or be given the time to embarrass myself even more, the speakers mounted on the pillars carried a voice through the room, flat and certain:

"Let the night commence and the bodies sin!"

The room gave itself over. Dresses fell. Suits followed. I watched fabric go down all around me before I understood the sound underneath it was bodies, not conversation.

They crossed through a room gone entirely to a sea of naked flesh. Couples folded into each other, groups tangled past telling where one ended and the next began. I watched faces turn to expressions of deep and fulfilling pleasure. 

My mystery man grabbed my hand and gestured to me to follow him through a path of flesh. I did not resist. I only wanted to rip his clothes off and participate. He did not allow me the moment. Every time I slowed, his hand pulled mine forward again. Not knowing where we were headed did more to me than anything I could see. The idea that this man would give up an endless pool of woman, naked and wet and ready for him, to be with me alone was enough for my feet to keep moving. 

There was a stage that was opposite my entrance and was now right in front of me. I had spaced the walk over. Lost in thoughts of intimacy. On the stage, men sat bound to white dining chairs, wire biting deep enough at wrist and throat to draw thin dark lines. Their masks were black latex, dark and wet under the light. Women in bright half-masks climbed onto them one by one, drawing the wire tighter as they moved. What came off the stage were sounds of pain and pleasure, indistinguishable as to which was experienced. I shuddered and didn't look away fast enough.

Then the ballroom fell silent. Behind a metal door I did not realize we entered. The man pulled me on, into a hallway lined with shut doors, each one carrying its own noise through the wood—some of it painful, most of them moans.

The last door stood open. Silk sheets. A bed shaped like a heart, which struck me even then as a strange thing for a room like that in a location like this. I had no time to think before the mans lips locked onto mine. 

Every wrestle of our tongues and deep sighs of pleasure from our breath, loosened the stress and fear and bullshit I had been carrying for months. Every thought that I was not good enough, or that the marriage was indeed my fault, that I was the reason he cheated, and that he never was attracted to me at all; washed away as I was led to the bed. 

My head fell to the pillow that the man aligned with precision. He brought his weight down over me. My palm found his chest and stayed there.

"I don't even know your name," I said.

"Does this moment require one?"

I did not respond and instead grabbed the man’s belt. He pulled up my dress.

What happened next I'll keep for myself—my own record, not needed to be told. I'll say only that what I felt during those minutes was nothing short of spectacular. Erotic. A fantasy I had only seen on video. At the moments before my first climax I opened my eyes and looked toward the door.

A shape stood there. Black. Hooded.

It smiled—or something under the hood produced the shape of a smile—and lifted one finger to where its mouth would be.

Silence.

I blinked as the whisper crossed my mind, and the doorway was empty.

I don't know at what number of orgasms I had before the length of his first I started to question. I closed my eyes in hopes that he was almost finished.

Behind my eyelids, the dark went red. Not imagined—I could feel it, a warmth pressing through from the inside, the way bright light reads through your palm when you hold your hand up to it. I opened my eyes to let him know I was growing impatient and I was no longer looking at the man who I thought was on top of me.

Above me: a column of pale, ridged skin rising too far to belong to anything I understood as a body. Three heads on one stalk of neck, hair swaying against a breeze that was not present. One mouth open in a sound I felt more than heard. Long limbs bent the wrong direction at every joint, planted around me like trees rooted.

A third arm at the entity's groin, stretched the length of its towering body, and attached to mine. 

I understood, in the same instant, two things that should not have fit together: that this was what had been over me since the door closed on the two of us, and that I was still—impossibly, wrongly—connected to it. Not touching. Connected.

I should have screamed. I waited for my chest to seize, my throat to close, the old chemistry of fear to come and do what it always did. It didn't come. I searched for the grief next, the emotion I'd walked in here still carrying, and found the space where it used to sit standing empty, swept clean.

What was left, underneath all of it, was silence. Whole. A kind of stillness I didn't have a word for because I'd never been offered it before. That stillness replaced by bouts of intense pleasure in increments I could not find a pattern. 

I closed my eyes one final time and gave into the eternity of pleasures.