Bad Crowd

Excerpt

Bad Crowd
Chloe B. Young © 2023
All Rights Reserved

Pink light dripped over the speckled sidewalk like a tongue, alive and coiling with the flickering of the sign. Gideon Orchard’s eyes had the letters burned into them, but he couldn’t look away, despite having read them every day for the past year.

They were brighter on this side of the street. The lurid neon tubes were weeping. Salivating.

He shivered, his skin buzzing. And buzzing again. And again—

“Hello?” The phone was cold against his ear, soothing the strange evening heat of the desert. “Evan?”

“Yeah, hi, sorry. We can’t come. Beth got too drunk, and she yacked everywhere.”

“Oh. That’s fine. Is she okay?”

On the other end of the line, something rubbed over the microphone, and then Gideon heard a pitiful moan and a hacking cough.

“Yeeeeeah, she’ll be good. She just has to sleep it off. Have a good time, though!”

Terror ripped through him. “No, I can’t—”

“Bye!”

The beep in his ear signaled Evan’s exit, leaving Gideon alone on a street that wasn’t quite abandoned. At the traffic light, someone got off the bus Gideon took to and from work every day. They disappeared around the corner before he could think to hide in shame.

Gideon squeezed his eyes shut, his phone biting into his hand. That pain he could handle. It was familiar, useful for clearing his head. The ache in his chest was harder to shake.

Tonight was supposed to be fun. The culmination of weeks of teasing after he’d mentioned this place—Bad Co.—in passing in the lunchroom. His palms got sweaty when he remembered their mirth at his naivete.

“A bar,” Beth had crowed. “How cute are you?”

Beth and Evan were supposed to be here with him, laughing together like they always did, not letting Gideon in on the joke. He still wasn’t sure they’d ever intended to come here with him. He’d replay the sound of Beth’s retching in his head later, trying to discern if it was real or if they’d purposefully abandoned him outside a den of sin.

The light up at the intersection changed, and a little car with wings on the back buzzed past, buffeting Gideon with warm wind even as he reeled from the return of old habits.

There were no dens of sin. And if there were, they wouldn’t be located ten minutes from Gideon’s apartment, on a not-quite main street in Tucson.

Someone laughed, high-pitched and attention-seeking. Gideon turned around, stumbling over his feet in his haste not to be standing outside a place like that.

It was only when the laugh echoed away that Gideon stopped himself.

This couldn’t go on. The wondering. For months, it had built up in his gut every time he walked past, ever since Beth had told him it wasn’t a “normal” bar, but a place for freaks and perverts. On the way here, he’d stopped a dozen times and nearly turned around.

The sign was different in this light. Usually, it was off when he went by or dimmed by the morning light when he came home from the night shift.

He’d turned around to face it, he realized, without noticing. A moth to a lantern.

He couldn’t go on like this. Maybe—hopefully—it would be awful, and he wouldn’t get the release he worried he’d find, but at least he’d know.

The door swung open smoothly, then fell heavily behind him as he walked into a wall of sound. His eyes, sore from staring at the sign, watered at the change in light. There was none now that the haze of pink was gone, only a dim purple glow that grew brighter the longer he blinked.

“Good evening.”

A shape materialized from the darkness, and he almost went right back out the door he’d come in. But he stopped himself at the last moment, standing straight and unmoving except for the shaking of his tightly clenched fists.

Idle hands, his mother’s voice hissed in his ear. Two years out of her reach, and he still couldn’t break the habit of keeping them still. He’d considered trying, just to prove he could, but the risk was too great that he’d become addicted to the ridges of his scars passing under his fingertips. No. His hands would stay still at his sides as long as he could stand it.

“Hello,” he said, his voice steadier than he felt.

The bouncer’s voice rumbled through the blackness. “One?”

“Please.”

Their clothing matched. Gideon had to suppress a manic laugh as he yanked some bills out of his wallet. Their black T-shirts and jeans could have been purchased from the same store, if in very different sizes.

That was where the similarities ended.

Tall and short, dark skin and light, short-buzzed and stubbornly wavy hair, they were as different as they could be, but they’d both ended up here.

Probably for very different reasons.

“Through there,” the bouncer said, handing back a few bills.

Gideon would count them later when he could see the number and had time to worry about his budget. For now, he was too busy worrying about where there would lead him.

A curtain separated the dark-walled, boxy front area he’d been in, and the source of the purple light emanated from behind it.

Sumptuous was the word that first came to mind when he drew the drape back, revealing a foyer that belonged in a mansion, but an abandoned one without the warmth of a crackling fire in the next room.

Sinful was the next, but he swept it away, leaving it—and the person he’d been before this very moment—on the other side of the curtain.

The music was clearer here but still too loud and throbbing to be distinct.

Two women stood by a long, elegant bureau, a study in contrasts just like Gideon and the door man.

One was tall and rail thin, dressed for an office job. Splotches of blue and pink from the lights bounced off her dark, smooth cheekbones.

The other woman…

She was exactly what Gideon had pictured when Beth and Evan had described the place in detail, thinking to shock and educate the naive country boy. This woman was small, and she wore next to nothing except strips of black and so many spikes.

His tongue was thick in his mouth, and he nearly choked on it when those spikes glinted as she glided toward him.

“Hello,” she purred. “First time?”

Only the courtesy beaten into him allowed him to answer. “Yes.”

“Fun! What are you here for? It’s an open play night. No formal demos, just free reign on the floor equipment. The private rooms are all booked, but you can always hang around and see if someone wants to invite you in.”

Her lips glistened as if freshly moistened with something unspeakable, pursing as she waited for an answer he couldn’t give.

A clipboard appeared in her hand from somewhere, the edge flashing sharper than the shards of metal on her shoulders, and she tapped it with the daggers of her fingers. “So? It’s a bit of a maze back there, so I should really show you where you’re going. What are you looking for?”

“I need—”

His throat closed up, keeping the secrets inside. They were comfortable there, had made a home for themselves in a lonely, sunless part of his soul. Buried too deep, even here, where the promise of warmed skin and aching release was so close.

Need was too soft a word for how he yearned.

“I’ve got this one.”

It was the other woman, the tall one in a slim pencil skirt that wouldn’t look out of place at the old church. It fell obediently over her knees as she crossed the space.

“Whatever you say, Lenore.” The spiked woman went back to her clipboard.

“Welcome,” Lenore greeted him, coming to a stop milliseconds before Gideon would have backed up out of her reaching presence. From an invisible pocket in her blazer, she pulled three slim bands. “Which one do you want?”

He stared at them, draped over her hand innocuously. They all looked the same to him, except for their bright colors. He looked and looked, trying to interpret the right answer from her silent insistence, but had to admit, “I don’t know.”

She nodded as if he’d passed some kind of test he hadn’t studied for. “They let other people know what you’re looking for. Like a stoplight, see?” She flattened them out on her palm, pointing at each one. “Green, if you want to play. Yellow, if you’re not sure but wouldn’t mind being asked. Red, if you’re not interested in playing.”

He searched her face for humor, a joke he was missing to explain the repeated use of the word “play.” The spiky woman had used it too.

He’d seen pictures. He’d never been able to make himself read the words that went along with them—typing in keywords letter by letter had been hard enough with shaking hands—but nothing he’d ever seen was close to “playing.”

“Plaything,” maybe. A toy to be used and discarded. Not fun for anyone other than the capricious player. Something to be endured.

Dreadful want shuddered down his back, and he used its momentum to take the green bracelet from Lenore’s hand. He’d come this far. He wasn’t leaving until he’d been cleansed of the demons that kept him up at night.

Lenore watched him struggle with the piece of plastic for a few moments before seeming to take pity on him and fastening it around his wrist while he held still like a child.

“You can change your mind.”

Gideon’s fingers, already still and silent on the edge of the plastic, went tense. He looked to Lenore, who’d tilted her head, studying him.

“At any time, if you’d like a different wristband,” she said. “Just ask someone with a name tag.”

Surprise made his eyebrows furrow. It sounded so…clinical. He hadn’t expected the shadowy world he was entering to have name tags. It didn’t matter. They could dress it up, but this was still a place of sordid pleasure and pain inflicted on those who couldn’t stop craving it.

Lenore’s heels clicked as she stepped away, leaving room for her next question. “Are you ready?”

No. Never. Ready for what? Pain?

“Yes.” Finally.

“Follow me.”

Lenore’s pace was quick, leading him through open double doors at the end of the hallway into an open space filled with people. The lighting was brighter in here, but not by much, none of it white and fluorescent. Sickly green and temptress red joined the purple, pooling on the floor and illuminating bodies.

Gideon had never seen so much skin.

“This is the lounge.” Lenore raised her voice over the pounding music. “It’s the only place you can get a drink, but you can take them with you anywhere. We aren’t selling any…”

She kept going, but her words turned to static in his ears as they wove through the groups of people. Gideon couldn’t let his eyes linger on anyone too long, afraid he’d see something that would haunt him, joining all the rest of the terrifying pictures he’d seen on the internet.

“This way.”

Lenore led him into a hallway. The unsettling colors they’d left behind seemed almost cheerful when compared to this. Unending red against the black of the walls. He could barely see, following Lenore by sound alone, but the longer he waded slowly through his fear, the harder her footsteps were to hear.

It wasn’t a straight path. Twists, turns, and forks had him turned around. Openings he thought were more pathways revealed tiny rooms and deep corners, all of them filled with the rounded shadows of people.

He turned the next corner and faced the longest hallway yet.

It was empty.

Heart spasming in his chest, he squinted and tried to call out, missing Lenore’s intimidating, comforting presence, but he saw movement.

At the end of the hall, in a crevice marked by its lack of shadow, someone stood, broken but upright. A man. His back faced Gideon, its whiteness marred by trails of something dark, liquid, and shining. Red.

A grating scream pierced the throbbing music.

Tripped up by feet of ice, he fell backward, scrabbling at the rough concrete floor for purchase. The last thing he saw before he heaved himself up on unsteady legs was Lenore. As he ran away, he got a glimpse of her and a phone pressed to her ear.

He shouldn’t be here. It was bad enough to desire the things he did, but to come here, where sex and torment spilled so freely for him to drink, to become intoxicated by it—

The hallways seemed to twist as he ran maddeningly slow, as if in a dream. He nearly knocked over someone coming around another godforsaken corner. He tried to follow the way he’d come, but he couldn’t find it, kept landing in the laps of newer, more depraved corners.

His lungs burned. He could see only red, everywhere he looked, on the walls, from the lights, the blood dripping down that man’s back.

Red, like an exit sign of chillingly clinical plastic in the midst of a leather and velvet sea.

Skidding around a bend, he followed where it pointed. He saw another sign and followed that, too, and then darkness of a different kind, inky black and suffocating, surrounded him, the belly of the beast after the long trip down its throat.

“Whoa.”

Brackets closed around his waist and he struggled, scrabbling at the pale shapes of hands on his body. “Let me go!”

A voice came from over his shoulder. “Calm down, I’m here to help. You’re safe.”

There was no space in his lungs to laugh, but he could wheeze out, “No, I’m not.”

The bars around his torso loosened, but again, the deep voice of the devil murmured in his ear. “What do you have to be afraid of?”

Myself. The part of me that wants to be hurt.

A moan escaped his lips as he crumpled into the restraining hold. He could’ve been sick right there from the disgust that roiled in him. He wanted the power of another person over him, even after being controlled for so long. He was free, but he yearned for chains.

“I shouldn’t be here.” Gideon’s voice echoed back to his ears from far away. “I need to go; I’m wrong. I have to—”

“Listen to me.” The command snapped through the air like static. “You need to slow down, or you’re going to pass out.”

A fuzzier black was already creeping into the corners of his eyes. “I can’t—”

“Breathe here.”

A hand pressed into his stomach, the weight of the individual fingers heavy as he sucked in a few short breaths.

“No. Once, slow.”

Gideon shook his head but tried still, to calm the flow through the one-way valve of his lungs.

“Good,” the voice soothed. The weight in Gideon’s stomach eased but didn’t release. “And out. That’s right. In again.”

Laboring through another breath, he listened carefully for each new instruction.

“No, from here.” The man’s hands shifted again, and this time, his body came with them as he stood in front of Gideon, using more insistent compression on his belly. “That’s better. And out. Again. Good.”

Without the fog of Gideon’s panic, it wasn’t as dark. He could see the floor, the thick emergency exit door, the end of the hallway where a white light shone from an unknown source. He could see the man’s eyes.

What he couldn’t do was look away.

They breathed together, the stranger’s unyielding encouragement unstitching the tightness in Gideon’s chest until he could think again. The panic had leached out of him, leaving the jitters of adrenaline and an uncomfortable awareness of bodily contact.

“I know you wanted to leave,” the man said, his breath hissing across Gideon’s heated ear. “But you should sit for a while, make sure you’re okay.”

Gideon tried to shake his head, the walls beginning to shrink again, but his wrist became the focus of his attention as a tight grip clasped it.

The stranger spoke again. “I know somewhere quiet. Well lit. Come and sit, just for a while.”

The weakness in his legs made it hard to refuse, so Gideon didn’t even try. He nodded, and then he was pulled by the wrist down yet another hallway.

This one was different. Narrower but unadorned. The walls were utilitarian corrugated steel, a stark contrast from the lavish red they’d left behind.

They didn’t go far, stopping next to a box mounted on the wall at waist height covered in complicated buttons. With a few jabs of a finger and short, sharp beeps, the door swung open, and the stranger started to lead him through, but Gideon dug his heels in.

He’d been stupid to come here, but it would be even more stupid to go into a locked room with a man capable of restraining him. Quiet and light had sounded so nice, but…

The man seemed to notice his resistance. The glow from the room beyond lit up first his frown and then a smoothing out of his shadowed features into determination.

The door fell closed, with the pair of them on the outside of it.

The man produced a phone and typed into it one-handed, the other still clasped around Gideon’s wrist. Gideon could hear it ring and then the click of static as it was answered.

“Lenore? It’s Mal. Yes, I found him. I’m taking him to the office. Check in with me again in a half hour?”

The familiar name loosened a knot in Gideon’s gut. Lenore was a stranger to him, but she was obviously important around here. That didn’t make him completely safe, but she at least had something to lose.

He would have gone through the door at that, but the man—Mal—wasn’t finished. He dialed another number on his phone, his eyes glittering in the dim light as he waited for someone to pick up.

“Hey, Chuck. Do me a favor? Stop by the office before your shift is over. I have a guest in there, and he might need to be walked to the main road. Appreciate it.”

The glow of the phone screen went out, but it was soon replaced by a slice of light from the office door as it opened for a second time. Gideon’s first steps were slow, but he was quickly propelled by the barely-there press of a hand at his back.

As soon as they stepped through and the door thumped shut, the constant pounding of the music was simply gone, as though this office was on another plane of existence, not just behind a wall.

“Sit,” Mal said, pointing to a set of black arm chairs across from an angular black couch. The hand at Gideon’s back made refusing as easy as swimming upstream, so he didn’t try. Instead, he followed Mal’s urging and sank deep into the cushioned couch.

He shivered, his sweat-damp shirt pulling away from his back with every slight movement.

The room was almost as large as Gideon’s whole apartment, though that wasn’t saying much. His eyes smarted from the change in lighting, but as he focused more, he could make out the damask pattern in the rich burgundy wallpaper. The longer he looked, the more detailed it became, swirling with touchable texture.

“Room temp or chilled?”

Gideon started and turned to Mal’s voice. “What?”

Mal stood at a long wooden table topped with a computer and a set of gleaming black pens in holders like at the bank. Smooth, dark cabinets lined the wall opposite the couch, and one of them opened to reveal the contents of a fridge.

“Water,” Mal said, holding a bottle misted with condensation, looking to Gideon as if the answer were life or death. “You want it cold?”

Gideon looked down at his knees, his fingers flexing on cheap fabric gone gray. “Doesn’t matter.”

The fridge door closed with a puff of air, and moments later, Mal was sitting in the chair next to him.

“My name’s Mal Brannon,” he said, cracking the plastic top and pressing the bottle into Gideon’s hands. “What’s yours?”

“Gideon.” He took a sip, careful not to spill on his shirt or the thick charcoal carpet underfoot. When he chanced a glance up, Mal was still right there, expectancy written on his face. “Orchard,” he finished clumsily.

“Nice to meet you, Gideon Orchard. How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

One straight, dark brow arched at him. “You nearly passed out.”

Gideon shook his head, jostling the nearly full bottle. “I’m okay now.”

The chair Mal sat in was too new and expensive to squeak as he leaned back, but it seemed to sigh as it accepted more of Mal’s weight.

Outside, fear had kept Gideon from noticing anything about Mal other than his bracing arms, but here, Mal was all he could see. He was made up of angles, it seemed. From his clean-shaven jawline to his nose and blocky, short haircut, no curves softened him.

Except his eyes.

They were the same warm liquid brown of the first Coca-Cola Gideon ever bought for himself, and the way they bore into him made his skin fizz like his tongue had that day.

Mal shifted, leaning back as he created space between his legs. The lazy posture made his crisp trousers bunch up in strange places and his suit jacket gape, but he didn’t look any less like a king presiding over a dispute.

“You should drink more of that.”

Automatically, Gideon pressed the bottle to his lips. Another few sips went down easy, but it started getting harder to swallow as Mal’s gaze compelled him to something he didn’t know.

Should he go? He should go; it was obvious. He’d sat down; he felt fine; he was only getting in the way now. It made sense, but somehow, he couldn’t force his legs to propel him up and away.

Smoothly, Mal propped one foot on his opposite knee. “You can take as long as you want to get your feet under you.”

The bottle cracked under his fingers. “I won’t bother you for long.”

“You’re not bothering me at all.”

“I’m keeping you from your job.”

“They can manage without me for a while.” Mal must have seen Gideon’s disbelief over the top of the water bottle because his mouth quirked at the side, softening the hard lines of his face with amusement. “Truly, I don’t mind. It’s not every day I get someone as sweet-looking as you on my couch.”

Sweet.

Mal wasn’t the first person to call him that. He’d gotten it from Beth, who always looked like she wanted to pinch his cheek and pat him on the head when he revealed some supposed lack of pop culture.

He’d heard it in the mouths of greedy men during his few trips to gay bars, including the one responsible for his disastrous attempt at sex with another person.

It’d been patronizing then, but from Mal…

It was still patronizing, but it was also a surprising disclosure of Mal’s taste and a clue about the one thing they had in common.

Gideon realized he’d been silent for a long time when Mal cleared his throat, uncrossing his leg.

“Sorry,” Mal said, the smirk entirely gone. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“You’re not.” He meant to stop there, but the worried crease between Mal’s eyebrows made Gideon blurt, “I’m not stupid.”

The crease disappeared, but it was replaced with wide, blinking eyes. “I didn’t think you were. It’s just a bad time for me to be hitting on a—”

“I know what goes on here.”

There was a beat where neither of them spoke, absorbing the impact of Gideon’s bravado-induced admission, and then Mal leaned forward in his chair.

“So you knew what kind of place this was before you came in?”

With those rich velvet eyes unmoving on his face, Gideon couldn’t attempt to lie. “Yes.”

Mal’s head tipped slowly to the side. “Why did you come?”

Alarm flooded Gideon’s system again, and his stomach dropped to his knees as he finally found the impetus to stand. “I should go.” He spilled water over his fingers in his rush to leave the bottle on a side table.

“Gideon, wait.”

He’d nearly made it to the door when a splay of fingers grasped the inside of his elbow. They were warm, almost burning against skin clammy from fear and sweat.

Gideon said nothing but didn’t pull away, focusing on the safe, subtle pattern of the carpet.

“I want to help you,” Mal murmured, his grip gentling immediately.

Gideon closed his eyes at the wave of regret that Mal wouldn’t hold tighter. “How?”

“I’ve seen a lot of people walk through these doors in ten years. Sometimes it’s for a dare or an excuse to laugh at the freaks. Or it’s simple curiosity, before people go back to their everyday lives, satisfied they’re not missing anything. I don’t think that’s why you’re here.”

“Ten years?”

Mal didn’t look so old. Older than Gideon, certainly, but in his thirties.

“Yes.”

“Such a long time.” Time enough to be absolutely soaked in sin. It’s what Gideon would have thought if he still thought those things. But he didn’t.

“I guess I must like it a lot.” A smirk lifted the corner of Mal’s mouth. “I’d have to if I wanted to put in so many hours.”

There was something in Mal’s face…the pride as he looked around as if he could see through the walls, straight into the rooms Gideon had run away from. It was more than simple enjoyment. It was possession.

“Do you own this place?” Gideon asked in a rush.

A laugh rumbled out of Mal’s chest. “No, but close enough. I run it day to day. But in all that time, I’ve never seen anyone as lost and in need of finding as you.”