⚠️ Mature Readers (18+) Only ⚠️
CHAPTER TEN
The ice cube in my Negroni was a perfect, crystal-clear sphere. It cost eighteen dollars, and I was going to savor every pretentiously chilled drop of it.
“You have the hands of a pianist, Dante.” Julian said, his voice low and smooth, like expensive bourbon sliding over gravel.
I preened, just a little. I’d spent a while on my nails before leaving the apartment, buffing them until they looked like they’d never touched a dirty dish or a subway pole in their life. “Architect, actually,” I lied, the falsehood slipping out as easily as a breath. “But I dabble in the keys when the inspiration strikes. It helps with the ... spatial reasoning.”
Julian smiled, but I wasn’t sure it reached his eyes. He wasn’t here to learn about my life. He was handsome in that generic, higher tax bracket way: silver at the temples, a jawline that could cut glass, and a bespoke charcoal suit that probably cost more than several months of my rent, which I just barely scraped together month-to-month washing dishes at an Italian restaurant within walking distance of the apartment. My real, unimpressive job. A job that would probably mark me as less than this guy would even consider for a one night stand.
“Architecture,” he mused, swirling his scotch. “I can see that. You have an eye for structure. For lines.”
“I like things to be orderly,” I purred, leaning forward just enough so the ambient lighting of the steakhouse bar caught the highlight on my cheekbones. “I like knowing exactly where everything fits.”
Julian reached for his glass, and the dim gold light caught the pale band of skin on his ring finger. The tan line was stark against his manicured hand.
He must have saw me looking.
“She’s in Ohio,” he said, taking a sip. “Visiting her mother. She hates the city in the autumn. Says the air smells like decay.”
“Does it?” I asked, arching a brow.
“I think it smells like opportunity,” he countered, his gaze dropping to my lips. “Filthy opportunity, but opportunity nonetheless.”
“Filthy opportunities are what I’m all about.” I whispered, taking a sip of my drink, letting the bitterness coat my tongue.
He stared at me for a long beat—then finished his scotch in one swallow.
“Check, please,” he signaled the bartender without looking away from me.
He didn’t ask if I was done, didn’t ask if I wanted dessert. “The restroom downstairs,” he whispered, leaning close to my ear. “It’s private, with a lock, and at this hour ... empty.”
My heart hammered a traitorous rhythm against my ribs. This was the part I was supposed to love. “Lead the way,” I said, sliding off the barstool with a dancer’s grace.
***
The bathroom was nicer than anywhere I’d ever lived. Floor-to-ceiling black marble, gold fixtures, and the smell of lemongrass and cedar. Julian locked the main door behind us, flipping the latch with a heavy click.
He didn’t kiss me, just grabbed me by the lapels of my vintage jacket and shoved me against the cold marble counter.
“Turn around,” he commanded. No romance. Just an order.
I obeyed, and gripped the edge of the sink, staring at myself in the massive mirror. My reflection stared back—impeccable hair, flushed cheeks, eyes bright and manic.
Julian’s hands were rougher than I expected. He didn’t bother undressing me fully, just unbuckled my belt and yanked my pants down to my knees. The air was cool against my skin, but his body heat was a furnace behind me.
“You like it rough, filthy, don’t you?” he growled, spitting into his hand. The sound was wet and sharp in the quiet room. “You’re just a hole for me, huh?”
“Yes,” I gasped, then jolted as I felt the slap of his calloused hand against my bare ass.
“Say it! You’re just a hole for me. Nothing else.”
An electric thrill shot down my spine at the dominance—sending me into a familiar submission. “I’m just a hole for you to use, sir!” I shouted.
“Thats a good little slut,” He responded, griping my left ass cheek with brutal force.
The wet sound of Julian spitting in his palm bounced off the marble walls, the only sign of things escalating I would receive before he plowed into me. He didn’t prep me. He didn’t care. He was big, insistent, and he took what he wanted with the arrogance of a man who owned everything else in his life.
I watched myself in the mirror as he fucked me. I watched my own head snap back, my mouth fall open in a silent moan. I watched the way his suit jacket bunched at the shoulders as he gripped my hips, bruising the skin.
It felt good. Of course it felt good; my body was wired for this, trained to find pleasure in the surrender. But my mind was drifting.
I wondered what Evan and Milo were doing right now. Were they watching a movie? Were they ordering takeout? Were they sitting on that shitty thrift-store couch, knees touching, laughing about something stupid Chris did?
A sharp slap to my ass snapped me back to the present.
“Look at me, slut.” Julian hissed.
I met his eyes in the mirror. He looked angry. Or maybe just hungry.
“Tell me you belong to me,” he demanded, thrusting harder, driving me into the edge of the sink.
“I’m yours,” I moaned, performing the line with award-winning conviction. “I’m yours, Julian. Use me.”
“I own you, slave.” He spat.
That was the trigger. He groaned, a guttural, ugly sound, and pounded into me with a frantic, desperate rhythm. He came quickly, violently, gripping my hair and forcing my face toward the glass.
For a moment, silence reigned, broken only by our ragged breathing and the hum of the ventilation.
Then, Julian pulled out, stepped back, zipping up his fly and adjusting his cuffs before I could even pull my pants up.
“Good,” he said, checking his reflection. He didn’t look at me. He looked at his tie. “That was ... necessary.”
He washed his hands thoroughly, drying them on a cloth towel which he tossed into a hamper.
The word sat uncomfortably in my bones. Slave. Was this all some weird fantasy because of my dark skin? The idea of a slave kink didn’t have to be racial, but … with this rich older white man … it felt dumb to give him the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t dwell on it for long. Couldn’t. This shit was already sad enough.
“I left cash on the bar for your cab,” he said, turning to the door. “My driver is waiting.”
Then he was gone.
I stood alone in the black marble bathroom, the silence ringing in my ears. My ass throbbed, and I could feel the sticky slide of him leaking out of me. Turning back to the mirror, the “Sophisticated Slut” looked back—hair slightly mussed, lips swollen, eyes empty.
“Well,” I whispered to the reflection, smoothing down my jacket. “One down.”
I rummaged through the duffel bag I’d stashed here at my friend Betty’s studio apartment before date number one, and pulled out the costume for the next performance: a vintage flannel shirt—soft, worn, and smelling of cedar a pair of ripped black skinny jeans, and beat-up Converse. Pulling them on, the denim was tight in all the right places but far less restricting than the slacks. Gone was the Architect. In his place stood the Indie Dream Boy. The kind of guy who read poetry in parks, drank black coffee, and talked about “energy.”
I gazed into Betty’s full body mirror. He looked younger. Softer. But his eyes ... the eyes were the same. Still hollow.
My phone buzzed on the counter. A text from River.
River: hey man, got a booth in the back. vibes are immaculate. ordered u a pbr.
Vibes. God, I hated that word.
I took a deep breath, forcing a lopsided, easy-going grin onto my face. I practiced it in the mirror. It looked genuine enough.
“Showtime,” I muttered.
I headed back downstairs, tossing the keys to Betty as I passed the bar she worked at on the floor level of the complex. She caught them without looking.
“Better,” she commented, glancing at the flannel. “Less ... corporate villain.”
“That’s the goal,” I said. “Wish me luck.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she called out. “Which leaves you plenty of options.”
I made my way to the back of the bar, where the lighting was dimmer and the booths were deeply upholstered in cracked red vinyl. River was waiting.
He looked exactly like his Tinder profile. He was in his early thirties but clinging desperately to 2014. He wore a beanie despite the heat of the bar, a thick mustache that curled at the ends, and a t-shirt for a band that hadn’t released an album in a decade. My chosen costume was perfect.
“Dante!” He beamed when he saw me, standing up to offer a hug rather than a handshake. He smelled like clove cigarettes and beard oil. “Man, you made it. The energy in here is wild tonight, right?”
“Wild,” I agreed, melting into the hug. He felt soft, unthreatening. “Sorry I’m late. The universe was working against me. Subway delays.”
“Mercury is in retrograde,” River said solemnly, as if that explained the MTA’s incompetence. “I totally get it. Sit, sit.”
We slid into the booth. A lukewarm can of PBR sat sweating on the table.
“So,” River said, leaning in, his eyes wide and earnest. “I was thinking about what you said in your messages. About ... connection. And how rare it is to find someone who vibrates on the same frequency.”
“It is,” I said, dropping my voice to a hush, leaning in to mirror his posture. “Most people ... they’re just skimming the surface, you know? They’re afraid of the deep end.”
River nodded vigorously. “Exactly! They’re afraid of the raw stuff. The vulnerability.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, crumpled ziplock bag. Inside were a few dried, shriveled caps and stems.
“Speaking of opening up,” he whispered with a conspiratorial wink. “I brought a little something to help us ... tune in. Just a microdose. To loosen the ego.”
I looked at the mushrooms. I looked at River’s hopeful face.
Julian had offered me money and expensive scotch to use my body. River was offering me fungi and pseudo-philosophy.
“Why not?” I grinned, plucking a stem from the bag. “Let’s dissolve the ego.”
We chewed the dry, earthy mushrooms, washing them down with the metallic taste of cheap beer.
“So,” River said, settling back as we waited for the buzz. “Tell me about your art. You said you’re a ... multimedia installationist?”
“Yeah,” I lied, spinning the narrative I’d crafted for him. “I work with ... binding. Tension. Using rope to explore the constraints of the human condition.” Technically not a lie. Just ... recontextualized.
“Wow,” River breathed. “That’s so powerful. Binding ... it’s like, we’re all bound, right? By society. By expectations.”
“Exactly,” I said, letting my gaze drift to the middle distance, looking tortured. “I just try to make the invisible visible.”
As the mushrooms began to tickle the edges of my perception, making the neon signs blur and the bass feel like a heartbeat in the floor, River reached across the table. His hand covered mine. His palm was warm, slightly clammy.
“I feel like I’ve known you for a long time, Dante,” he said softly. “Your aura ... it’s really purple. Very spiritual.”
I looked at our hands. I thought about Evan’s hand, how it looked when he ruffled Milo’s hair this morning.
“Purple,” I repeated, forcing a smile. “That’s ... good, right?” For some reason I didn’t act like I knew already. Maybe the mushrooms were getting the real me to slip out.
“It’s the best,” River assured me. “It means you have a big heart. A heart that’s ready to receive.”
I took a long pull of my beer and let my smile soften, it was starting to hurt my face. The mushrooms were amplifying everything—the noise, the heat, and the sudden, crushing realization that I was sitting across from a stranger, playing a character, desperately hoping that if I pretended hard enough, I might actually feel something.
“Receiving,” I murmured. “Yeah. I’m ready to receive.”
The sad part was, I wasn’t even lying about that.
Feeling a gradual tilt of the horizon, the red vinyl of the booth started to breathe, inhaling and exhaling against my back. The neon Miller Lite sign in the corner wasn’t just buzzing; it was vibrating with a frequency that felt oddly significant, like it was trying to tell me a secret code.
River was murmuring something about “soul tethers” I couldn’t quite pay attention to.
“...and I really think that when two people meet,” he was saying, his eyes blown wide and glassy, “it’s because their atoms were next to each other in the Big Bang. We’re just ... finding our way back to the original collision.”
Under normal circumstances, I would have rolled my eyes so hard I’d see my own brain stem. But the psilocybin had stripped away my cynicism, leaving my chest cracked open and raw. “That’s beautiful,” I whispered, and god help me, I meant it.
I looked at River—really looked at him. The way the candlelight softened his pretentious mustache. The way his hand was still resting over mine, warm and grounding. For a second, just a split second, I let myself believe the lie. Maybe I wasn’t performing. Maybe this was the real Dante. Maybe I was an Indie Dream Boy who vibed with strangers in dive bars and found cosmic connections over PBR.
“I feel it too,” I said, leaning in, the world shrinking down to just the two of us. “Finding my way back to the collision. Back to when we were just atoms floating next to each other.”
River smiled, a soft, dopey expression that made my heart squeeze. He leaned forward, closing the distance, his eyes fluttering shut.
I tilted my head, ready to receive. Ready to be seen.
“River?”
The voice cracked through the moment like a gunshot. It wasn’t soft. It wasn’t cosmic. It was sharp, familiar, and furious.
River froze. His eyes snapped open, terror replacing the zen instantly. He yanked his hand away from mine as if I were radioactive. I blinked, the tracers in my vision slowly coalescing into a shape looming over our booth. A man. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a soaking wet raincoat and a scowl that could curdle milk.
“Seth,” River squeaked. His voice went up three octaves. “Babe. What ... what are you doing here?”
Babe. Well … fuck.
I sat back, the vinyl booth screeching against my jacket. The “soul tether” snapped violently, whipping back to slap me in the face.
“I tracked your phone,” Seth said, his voice trembling with rage. He held up an iPhone, the screen glowing accusingly. “You turned off your location, but you forgot the ‘Find My’ on the iPad. You said you were at your mom’s, River.”
Seth’s eyes finally landed on me. He looked me up and down.
“Who the hell is this?” Seth spat. “Is this him? Is this the ‘energy healer’ you’ve been DMing?”
I opened my mouth to speak. To say, No, I’m Dante. I’m an installation artist who likes ropes. We just met. I didn’t know you existed. But River beat me to it.
“No!” River scrambled out of the booth, hands raised in surrender. “No, Seth, baby, listen—he’s nobody! He’s literally just some guy I met at the bar ten minutes ago. He was sitting alone and looked sad, so I bought him a drink. That’s it! I swear!”
Yup, nobody, thats me. Nobody at all.
“He looked sad?” Seth scoffed, glaring at me. “He looks high as a kite.”
“I am,” I said, my voice sounding distant to my own ears. I stood up. The floor tilted dangerously, but I locked my knees. “I am extremely high. And extremely over this fucking bullshit!”
I looked at River. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He was clutching Seth’s arm, whispering frantic apologies, shrinking into himself.
“Your aura is shit, by the way,” I added, but didn’t wait for a response. I turned on my heel and walked.
Bursting out onto the sidewalk, the cold night air hitting me like a slap.
It was raining now. Of course it was.
I started walking. I didn’t know where at first, just away. The mushrooms were starting to turn on me. The shadows stretched too long under the streetlights. The city felt hostile, a labyrinth of concrete designed to keep people apart.
I turned the corner onto our street. My building loomed ahead, a beacon of yellow brick. I stopped in the vestibule, shivering. I caught my reflection in the glass of the inner door.
“Pull it together, Dante,” I whispered. My voice shook.
I shook out my hair, running my fingers through the wet tangles until they looked intentionally wild. I stood up straight, forcing my shoulders back, lifting my chin. I inhaled deeply, pushing the sadness down, down, down, locking it into a little box in the pit of my stomach. I plastered on the smirk—the one that said I knew secrets, the one that said I was untouchable.
I wasn’t Dante the Rejected. I wasn’t Dante the Other Man. I was Dante the Chaos. Dante the Hurricane.
I grabbed the doorknob. My hand trembled, just once. I stilled it.
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