Chapter One

Clipped by Destiny

At the door, in the windowless corridor before the windowless expanse of the floor of The Lodge, the option is given of buying a bracelet or a collar. Paul must have gone ten times in the span of a couple of months before he had the courage to spend the extra ten dollars. The doorman handed over the leather strap with a silver metal loop in the middle without much of a reaction, though Paul had his eyes cast down as he received it. He fit the collar snug around his neck.

He grabbed the handle of the door into the main room. Bass pounded from inside. The force vibrated in his hand, up his arm, through his body. He opened and stepped in. A conspicuous feeling still struck him when he first stepped into a club for the clear, sole purpose of viewing women naked, but with the collar on, every person in the room seemed to look over. He imagined as his eyes slowly adjusted to the dim lighting a filled club of patrons and entertainers enjoying the spectacle of him finally arriving with the collar on he’d been fantasizing about wearing since the change at The Lodge. Even the dancer on stage looked up, seemed to notice the collar, and smiled before unsnapping her bikini top and letting it fall.

Whether it had been a month or a day, the first glimpse of a pair of pink nipples upturned on fleshy mounds of tan softness was a glorious sight. The dancers offstage, moving among the room, were showing plenty of skin in their bikinis, but the treasures of pink were the reason for paying the price of admission. Paul went straight to the stage and pulled two bills from the wad of singles in his front pocket. He would give every dancer two for a stage show and some of his favorites he gave five. There was no way he would offer a hard working dancer the same dollar exotic entertainers have been getting for the last twenty years when she gave him ten seconds of her time. Inflation had occurred. They seemed to appreciate it and grant him extra attention. They knew him.

The dancer, Selena—he’d bought a couple of private dances with her in the past—tiptoed straight over and knelt. Her proximity immediately thrilled him. She leaned over with a hand on his shoulder and, cupping a breast with her other hand, caressed her nipple between her finger and thumb inches from his gaze. She spun on all fours and slammed her heels against the solid stage floor and gyrated her hips up and down, shaking her ass. She turned back around and sat at the rim of the stage and lifted the garter around her thigh, already loaded with money. Her brief dance lulled Paul into such a trance, he nearly forgot about the collar,