“What’s with the broody face?” Declan asked as he took his seat in the booth across from Mason.

Mason lifted his eyes to his friend and shrugged. “I have a new neighbour.”

Declan nodded in understanding. “Noisy? Keeping you awake during the day when all good vampires should be sleeping?”

“Ha ha fucking ha,” Mason retorted, “And no, she seems to be a bit of a nocturnalist like me.”

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s a word.”

“It’s a hell of a lot better than referring to myself as a fucking vampire.”

“That would be sucking vampire and what are we talking about?” Hunter slid into the booth beside Mason and looked between him and Declan.

“Mason has a girlfriend,” Declan said and Mason kicked him under the table.

“What are you, five?” Mason shook his head and then turned to Hunter. “I have a new neighbour who also happens to work at night and sleep during the day… well, I think she sleeps during the day, I don’t actually know that for a fact, but I could surmise, since she is—”

Hunter held up his hands, “We get it. So it’s a woman, then?”

“Abby. Her name’s Abby.”

“You’ve met her? Talked to her?” Mason could understand Hunter’s surprise, he very rarely went out of his way to talk to new people. He had enough people in his life to talk to, he didn’t need another one.

“Talked to who?” The fourth member of their group arrived taking the seat beside Declan.

Mason looked over at Jonathon and sighed. He would have to recite the whole story again, hopefully without interruption this time.

“Okay, I’m only going to say this once so listen up and no interrupting.” He waited for their nods, they were used to his quirks which was why they were still his friends and the only people he socialised with. “I have a new neighbour, her name is Abby. She works at night, well, I assume she’s working. The gist of it is that she is a nocturnalist, like me—” he shot Declan a narrow glare when he opened his mouth to comment on the word again, “Yes, I met her. Yes, I spoke to her. She is a blogger, does write-ups and reviews on thriller and mystery novels and she is very strange. Twice I’ve caught her taking some rather unsettlingly suspicious items out of her apartment in the dead of night.”

“What ‘unsettlingly suspicious’ items are we talking about?” Jonathon asked.

“The first time it was a black garbage bag that looked heavy and made a weird sluicing sound when it moved. The second was a genuine Persian rug, that she denied being genuine and her excuse was that she’d spilt red wine on it.”

“I don’t know that any of that sounds ‘unsettlingly suspicious’,” Declan said, “The first was probably just really wet kitchen scraps or perhaps a stew or casserole that she had made and didn’t like—”

“A whole garbage bag full of it?”

Declan held up his hand to forestall Mason’s objections. “The second one sounds completely reasonable, even if it was a genuine Persian rug. Woman are fickle like that. My mother threw away an entire dining room suite that had been hand-crafted especially for their New York apartment because the colour was two shades too dark.”

Mason rolled his eyes. “Abby is hardly any comparison to your mother,” he said and Declan grinned.

“Who is Abby?” Brooks, the fifth and final person to make up their tight group arrived, taking the single chair on the end of the table.

“I am not going to repeat myself again,” Mason said, folding his arms and leaning back against the booth.

Hunter sighed and turned to Brooks. “I’ll give you the condensed version.” At Brooks’ nod, he continued. “Mason has a new neighbour, a woman named Abby who seems to work at night and who Mason thinks might be a serial killer.”

“I said nothing of the sort,” Mason protested to the squawks of laughter from his friends, “I just said that she had been removing suspicious things from her apartment in the middle of the night.”

“‘Unsettlingly suspicious’ were the exact words,” Jonathon said.

“Yes and don’t forget the whole ‘nocturnalist’ thing,” Declan added unhelpfully.

Mason ground his teeth together, but kept silent. These were his friends and they didn’t think they were doing their civic duty until they had teased him enough. Although to be fair, they each had a turn at being the one who was picked on. They were equal opportunistic bullies.

“I don’t think that’s a word,” Brooks’ said.

“See!” Declan exclaimed, “That’s what I said.”

“So is she pretty?” this from Jonathon, the resident playboy lothario.

“She’s…” Mason paused to conjure up her face, an easy feat considering she had rarely been far from his thoughts especially after hearing a very ‘suspicious’ moan coming from what he believed to be her bedroom the other night. “Pretty,” he finally said, not sure else how to describe her. “It’s hard to tell under the glasses and frumpy clothes she wears.”

Jonathon nodded. “Ugly duckling, then,” he said.

A flash of irritation at Jonathon’s dismissal of Abby took him by surprise. Since when had he developed protective feelings for her? He shook the thought away, it wasn’t that, it couldn’t be that. It was probably just irritation at Jonathon’s flippancy. He did have a way of discarding people who were of little or no interest to him.

“Shall we order?” he said to change the subject and redirect the attention on to something else, anything else other than himself.

Brooks looked at his watch. “I only have time for one drink tonight,” he said, “Piper has been refusing to go to bed unless I tuck her in and Harper is about pulling her hair out over it.”

Piper was Brooks’ five year old daughter from his first marriage and Harper was his new fiancée.

“Yeah,” Hunter said, “Me too. Bailey wants us to have another ‘wedding talk’.” He grimaced, but Mason knew that he was head over heels in love with his fiancée and would probably crawl over broken glass without complaint if she asked.

“Man,” Declan said with a shake of his head, “You guys are under the thumb.”

“It’s a tragedy,” Jonathon said soberly.

“Harper and Bailey are to Alpha Pi Tau as Yoko was to the Beatles,” Mason added.

“Don’t you dare let Bailey hear you say that,” Hunter said, “She will tear you a new one.”

Mason grinned at his friend, imagining the red-haired spitfire yelling at him. In all truth, Mason liked his friends’ fiancées and even had a soft spot for little Piper and her dog Freddie, not that he would ever admit that, of course.

“Well, let’s get this party started then,” Declan said with a sigh, “Before the old married men have to go home to their wives.”

“You’re just jealous because we’re the ones getting regular sex,” Brooks said and then he and Hunter high-fived each other.

Mason stepped out of the elevator and then headed for the curved staircase that led to his apartment. It was still relatively early and he was hoping to make some progress on the new code for the vigilante game he was trying to fix. He still couldn’t work out why the glitch was appearing, but he had nailed down what the threshold was, the next thing would be too find what it was about that specific number of kills that triggered the glitch. It was a bitch.

He climbed the last stair and paused, listening. He hoped that he might accidentally run into Abby tonight, it had been too long since he’d last seen her. Which was completely irrational, but nonetheless true. He needed to get laid, it was the only way to rid himself of the sexual tension that hummed under his skin. Jacking off in the shower would only do so much to relieve the need inside him and living in such close proximity to the only ‘normal’ woman who had ever stoked his sexual desires was stretching his nerves to the limit.

But getting laid wasn’t as simple as it sounded. There was a whole lot of checks and balances that he needed in place before he could relax enough to be intimate with someone and it was why he used a discreet service. They knew his proclivities and adhered to his strict directions.

It wasn’t that Mason was a deviant, he just liked things a certain way. He hated having anybody touch him, so his sexual partners all had to be restrained, which wasn’t too off-beat but it was something he could only guarantee when he was with a professional. ‘Normal’ women always wanted to cuddle afterwards or run their hands over his skin or complained that he kept them tied up during the entire act. But it was a non-negotiable hard limit for him. The feel of someone’s hands on his skin made him nauseous and impossible for him to continue during intercourse. It was the quickest way to kill his erection.

After much deliberation and no small amount of investigation he had joined a BDSM club, a very private BDSM club. He knew he was a Dom, but the thought of trying to find a suitable sub always put him off. Instead he played with a different sub each time, all carefully vetted and never in his own home. He had joined a private chatroom to further delve into the lifestyle, but was yet to meet someone he really clicked with. But maybe that would be enough for him tonight and tomorrow he could decide whether he needed a more physical interaction.

He unlocked his door and entered the dark apartment, keeping the lights off. There was enough ambient light from his various electronic equipment for him to see. Sebastian, the cat who had adopted him when he moved into the apartment, wound through his legs, reminding him that he needed to fill the bowl on the windowsill. He did that and then grabbed a beer for himself before heading into his office and taking a seat at his desk.

While he mostly worked on his couch in front of his big screen television, which was ideal for testing finished games, he liked the more intimate space of his office for the more private and delicate investigations he’d been doing. He took a swig of his beer and booted up his computer, reassuring himself that he wasn’t a criminal or touched in the head. Although most people thought it distasteful, he had been accessing various pornographic sites in his quest to find a sub that might suit him. Being the private man that he was, he had so many firewalls and rerouting traps in place that anyone who tried to track his internet usage would be left wandering in a maze of hard-core Online Multiplayer Roleplaying Gaming sites. He wasn’t into violent sex or inflicting pain, he didn’t want to humiliate his partner or diminish them in anyway, he just wanted to be in control and he really needed them not to touch him. In the grand scheme of things, his sexual appetites were reasonably vanilla - maybe Madagascan Vanilla with a Salted Caramel Ripple, but still mostly vanilla.

He navigated to the chat room that he had been frequenting lately and activated his avatar. The chat room was built a bit like ‘Second Life’ in that it was a virtual reality room in which the participants appeared as their computer generated avatars. The room was set out like a sex club would be, with couches, a bar serving virtual drinks, private rooms where you could go to have a private conversation with another person and around the perimeter of the room were stages set with various equipment that could be used for scenes. There was a St Andrew’s Cross and a spanking bench and various other equipment that had no interest for him.

He took up a position on a barstool and listened to the conversations going on around him. It was a public space and all the conversations in this room were public. He never interacted or spoke, he just sat and listened. He recognised a few of the regular avatars and acknowledged them with a nod. There was a conversation going on next to him about different floggers, but it held no interest for him, neither did the scenes being played out on the various equipment. Simulated, computer generated avatars having sex really did nothing for him, he came here for information more than anything and to perhaps meet someone who might help him further explore the dark side of himself.

He was about to log out, having found nothing or no one that garnered his interest, when a new avatar entered. As with most avatars, their human counterparts generally built them to some esteemed ideal of what they considered beautiful or sexy. Big busts that were barely contained by skimpy outfits were the norm for the woman and naked chests with too-big-to-be-real muscles and tight pants for the guys. He had remained conservative with his avatar, but not wanting to stand out too much had leant towards what was the expected. The newcomer had not. Her hair was long and dark and she wore glasses. The school-girl outfit she wore was short and tight and showed cleavage and just the subtle crease where her arse met the top of her thigh, but it wasn’t the practically non-existent bikinis that some of the others wore. Her call-sign appeared above her head in a little bubble as she looked around the room, NewGrl549 and Mason knew he had to talk to her.

He directed his avatar to approach her.

DomMPF: Hello NewGRL549

NewGRL549: Hello DomMPF

DomMPF: I take it this is your first time?

NewGRL549: Am I that obvious?

DomMPF: The name kind of gives it away.

NewGRL549: *Laughs*

DomMPF: So what brings you here?

NewGRL549: Curiosity

DomMPF: Your bedroom play not as exciting as you would like it?

NewGRL549: Not that there’s been much in the way of bedroom play lately, but in the past there has always been something missing.

DomMPF: See anything you like?

He gestured to the scenes going on around them.

NewGRL549: No, not really.

DomMPF: So what exactly are you looking for?

NewGRL549: I don’t really know, I suppose. Someone to take charge, someone who can tell me what I need instead of me having to tell him.

DomMPF: So you’re a sub looking for a Dom… have you ever had anyone dominate you in bed before? Tie you up? Hold you down?

Abby shivered with desire as she read the words on the screen. How did DomMPF know what she secretly desired?

NewGRL549: Not in real life, but I’ve fantasised about it.

DomMPF: Sometimes reality doesn’t live up to the fantasy.

She knew all about that, she created fantasy for a living.

NewGRL549: True. But would you have me discount it out of hand without even trying it?

BigCock16: I’ll be happy to show you the ropes

Ugh. This was the problem with public chat rooms. She’d almost forgotten that the conversation she was having with DomMPF was open for all and sundry to hear.

NewGRL549: No thanks BigCock16. I don’t think I’m ready for your brand of ropes.

DomMPF: Do you want to take this conversation somewhere more private?

Did she? Abby had been toying with the idea of finding an experienced Dom for a while now but she always chickened out. Having Mason living next door had made the desire even stronger and she had finally stumbled into this chat room just to slake her curiosity about the BDSM lifestyle. She didn’t think she would ever like some of the more hardcore things, but to find someone who knew how to dominate her, who would know how to take care of her and make her feel safe, that was what she sought. And DomMPF made her feel safe, which was a really idiotic thing to feel with an anonymous person who you knew nothing about.

NewGRL549: Okay

She let DomMPF take control of the private room to the side of where they were standing. The new room was lit by medieval candles attached to the walls and there was some rather barbaric looking equipment to one side which she looked at nervously.

NewGRL549: We’re not going to be doing anything with that, are we?

DomMPF: No, not my style.

Abby sighed with relief. She had no desire to try out the equipment, either in this simulated world nor in real life.

DomMPF: So, tell be a little bit about yourself.

Abby exhaled, what to reveal about herself? She spent her life wearing different personalities like cloaks. Her online personality was loud and brash and unapologetic, but her real self was was nothing like that. Her business personality was focussed and straight, but who was this girl who had found her way into a BDSM chat room? She could be anyone.

NewGRL549: I’m an introvert

She surprised herself with that little bit of honesty.

NewGRL549: And despite it being very old-fashioned of me, I actually want a man to look after me.

DomMPF: Be careful, they might revoke your feminist card

NewGRL549: Don’t misunderstand. I like my job and I like my independence, to a point. But sometimes, when things get tough, it would be nice to have someone else to lean on.

DomMPF: And what about in the bedroom, what do you want there?

NewGRL549: I want someone who can take complete control. I don’t want to have to make decisions or explain what I want, I want my partner to just know what I need and give it to me.

DomMPF: That’s a tall order. Doms aren’t mind readers.

NewGRL549: True, but a good Dom knows how to read their sub and that’s all I want. Someone who cares enough to want to get to know me.

Abby was embarrassed by how absolutely honest she was being. There was something seductive about the anonymity of the online world, she had experienced it with her other personality. It drew out her most inner secret desires and made her unafraid to voice them. She could never have had this conversation in real life with one of her sexual partners, she would have ended up an embarrassed mess on the floor, but DomMPF made it easy to voice those most private of desires.

DomMPF: You are an intriguing woman, NewGRL549 and I think I’d like to get to know you better.

NewGRL549: IRL?

Abby fretted. It was one thing to have a relationship online with someone, it was a completely different story to have one in real life with a guy you have never met.

DomMPF: No, not yet. I don’t think either of us are ready to take that step.

Abby sighed with relief. There was no way she was ready to meet this guy, no matter how nice he seemed online. The internet was full of perverts and deviants just waiting for some unsuspecting sap to fall into their trap. Serial killers were real and more prevalent than the average person might expect and she should know. She knew serial killers intimately and had made a career out of it.

DomMPF: Let’s make a standing date to meet here once a week… what do you think?

NewGRL549: I like it. The same time as tonight?

DomMPF: Perfect. Until next week.

DomMPF’s avatar leaned down and kissed the knuckles of her avatar before disappearing from the screen. Abby logged out and then sat back in her chair thinking back over the conversation. She didn’t know whether to feel thrilled or terrified. She had just made a date with a virtual stranger who she had met in a BDSM chat room, her aunt would be rolling over in her grave. It was the most bizarre thing she had ever done, and that was saying something. Her alter-ego was always up to some mischief or other, but Abby couldn’t blame her for this. NewGRL549 was all her, every honest inch of her and that was both scary and freeing at the same time.

She switched off the light in her study and crawled into bed, still thinking about DomMPF. She dreamed of him and the things she wanted him to do to her, except he had Mason’s face which only made it even more of a fantasy.