Page 121 of What We Bury

“Copy. Walking it.”

I do a circuit. Check the alcoves. Scan the main floor. Check in with the others through my earpiece—Ed in command monitoring the camera feeds, the rest of us moving like a slow tide through the rooms. I pass Micah behind the bar. He’s in his element, mixing drinks and reading the crowd, making everyone feel like they’re the most interesting person he’s ever met. His mask is black like mine, like all the staff.

The members wear different colors—gold, silver, emerald, sapphire, ruby—each with a different meaning. It’s my job to know which is which on sight. Gold members come for the spectacle and rarely engage. Silver are couples. Emerald are exploring. Sapphire are submissives advertising availability. Ruby are dominants seeking subs. The mask system runs the social grammar of the room.

Micah and I make eye contact and I know he’s silently asking about Sage. I give him a nod that I hope communicatesshe’s doing fine.Then I head toward the back corridor.

The private rooms run along the back wall. Red light above the door means occupied. Green means open. I walk the corridor, listening. Most of what I hear is what I should—breath,laughter, the rhythmic percussion of bodies, the occasional command. One room has gone quiet in a way that prickles the back of my neck. I stop. Count to ten.

I tap my radio. “Ed—twelve, eyes on?”

“Camera’s clean,” Ed says in my ear. “She’s restrained but breathing fine. Nothing flagged.”

No footage leaves the building. No recordings unless a panic protocol triggers. Every member signs off on safety monitoring before they ever get a mask.

“Holding.”

Then, through the door: “Yellow.Yellow!”

I’m through it before she can say it a third time. The scene is simple—a man, a woman, restraints. He’s got her wrists bound above her head, frozen mid-motion, face flushed, confused.

“She called yellow,” I say. Flat. Just a fact.

“I heard her. Thanks for checking.” He’s already stepping back, loosening the cuffs. “Babe, you okay? What do you need?”

She’s fine. I can see it. Not distressed, just hitting an edge she wasn’t ready for. She smiles at him, touches his jaw, says something I don’t stay to hear. I step out, close the door, radio Ed.

“All clear. Yellow held.”

“Copy.”

The system works. Yellow means pause. Red means stop. Both words activate an alert. We’re the failsafe, not the judge.

Back on the main floor, the shibari demonstration has ended. The rigger is lowering his partner with the same care he used to bind her, unwinding each rope like he’s peeling back something sacred. She’s limp, glowing, somewhere between sleep and bliss. He wraps her in a blanket and carries her to a couch. Aftercare. The part most people don’t see, and the part that matters most.

I lean against the wall near the bar and watch the room breathe. This is the rhythm of the night—scenes that build andcrest and dissolve, bodies that come together and apart, desire that ebbs and flows like a tide. I’ve been the fixed point in this current more times than I can count. Unmoved. Untempted. Separating desire from the job.

But tonight.

A woman catches my eye from across the floor. Dark hair, red lips, a corset that leaves her breasts exposed, jeweled pasties covering her nipples. Ruby mask. She keeps her eyes on me—an invitation. I’ve seen that look a hundred times in this room. Said yes to it once or twice, never on shift, but enough. Bodies and want and the clean simplicity of two people who needed something and found it without pretending it was more.

Tonight I look away.

Because the only thing I want is a girl in a diner apron holding a coffee pot. I want to see the flush that crept up her neck when I offered her pie. The tip of her tongue sliding along her lips when she took it. Her cunt closing around my two fingers as she fell apart against the brick.

I work in a place where people are bound and suspended and fucked and worshipped in plain sight. Where a woman can kneel at a man’s feet and call it freedom. Where bodies are given and taken and shared with a kind of honesty that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

And none of it—not a single second of it—has ever hit as hard as Sage wrapping her hand around two of my fingers and pulling me up a set of stairs.

“You look like a man who’s thinking too hard.” Micah materializes at my elbow, two drinks in hand—one for a member he’s delivering to, one he holds out to me. Water. He knows I don’t drink on shift. “Everything okay?”

“Holden wants to recon the Hudson mark Sunday.”

He nods. “You want backup?”

“I’m enough.”

He nods again, delivers the other drink, circles back.