The Strip - Max

32 / Therapy

No part of this story should be considered as medical advice. 

The Naughty Kitten seemed like the last place anyone might find the answers to life's problems. It was a place people went to play. To explore their perversions and watch displays of "depravity" while sipping on a glass of wine or beer. It was a sex club, and sex is where many find their troubles, not their answers. At least, that's what gentle folk might say. I was keeping an open mind.

I had been back to full duty at work for almost a full week. Dan had returned to the playrooms at the kitten, and our lives seemed to be back on track. But were they? We hadn't actually known each other while I worked, and he played. To say we were back on track might be misleading. The track we were on had never been traveled before. Brand new rails, extending into a future I still couldn't see.

Dan had never managed to keep a girlfriend while he explored his kinky side. Having a boyfriend that spent some of his spare time in a sex club might have seemed novel and exciting to some. Even girls he met at the club couldn't stick around. In the end, each of his girlfriends wanted to change him. Wanted him to trade that time he spent with others for something exclusive with them. Ultimately, when he stepped away from the club to please them, the girls stepped away from him. Why? I could not understand why they would leave but I was grateful.

I had never had a boyfriend. Never been on a real date. Ever. There were a few dates that I had forced, like my time with Nick. And a few 'paid arrangements' that, on the surface, looked like dates but were nothing more than sexless privates with established clients. Sex followed but only when it wouldn't run me afoul with the law.

For Dan, our arrangement looked similar to the relationships that followed him home from The Naughty Kitten, abandoned tracks that faded into the prairie dirt. I was sure he hoped things would be different. For me, it was unfamiliar territory. Being loved as I was. Being allowed to continue my chosen career without question. It all seemed contrary to what I had imagined a relationship could or should be.

I walked into the club and introduced myself to the hostess. She welcomed me and guided me towards the bar where I would meet Marley for our second session. We passed through a lobby lounge where comfy looking sofas and tables allowed couples to meet, fully dressed, with no sexual activity surrounding them. A man in a business suite sat with a girl, no more than half his age, in a stunning dress and a matching leather collar. A chrome chain draped between her neck and his hand hinted at the dynamic of that relationship. A small group engaged in conversation in another corner. One might have thought they were guests waiting in a hotel lobby, just by looking at it. Except perhaps the young girl on a leash.

Beyond the lobby we entered a corridor where painted and sculpted art surrounded a living display. A nude male, perhaps in his early forties and bound in ropes, was tethered by his left hand to a small, tarnished gold ring on one side of the corridor. He reached towards the opposite side with his right hand. There, opposite him, a nude woman, similarly bound and tethered reached for him. Between their outstretched hands a red ribbon, spanning the width of the corridor, joined them. It was art. The rope work. Composition. Lighting. Everything came together to tell a story. I slowed my pace to take it in completely.

The rings that held them were bolted to the wall, only barely visible in the dark lighting. The man's penis was bound and tethered to the ring that symbolized his marriage. Similarly, a golden hook, buried within the woman's vagina, was tied back to the ring behind her. Barbed collars around their necks and iron cuffs on their ankles, all shackled to those horrid rings in the dark. But the red ribbon between them glowed in bright light in the center of the corridor that extending across to paint their faces.

"Wow, that's beautiful," I said to the hostess.

"It's symbolic of two would be lovers, separated and bound to other people by failing marriages," she said. I had understood the display without her commentary, but she added context, "They are celebrating their divorces by being in this display today."