Open Doors (Suncoast Society #27)(41)

Marcia led her friend into the living room, where they settled on the couch.

“I…I don’t know who to talk to,” Amelia said. “I’m sorry to bother you like this.”

“No, no bother.” A slight inconvenience, because unfortunately this Saturday afternoon she had to be at the club in two hours to open up, but she always tried to make time for her friends when she could. The stuff she’d planned to get done today before going in to the club, like bookkeeping, would have to wait until tomorrow afternoon.

Amelia looked troubled, dark circles under her hazel eyes. And today her friend, who usually looked put-together but not in that fake, self-absorbed kind of way, hadn’t even worn makeup. Her shoulder-length dark blonde hair was pulled back with an elastic band.

Amelia took a deep breath. When she finally met Marcia’s gaze, there were tears in her eyes. “I think Mike and I are in real trouble.”

“Trouble, how?” Marcia’s mind flashed back to their tax returns, which had just been filed a few weeks ago.

“Our marriage.”

A record screech sounded in Marcia’s brain as she dropped the bookkeeping train of thought. “Why don’t you back up?”

“It’s…” She let out a five-ton sigh. “I’ve felt like we’ve been losing us. For a long time now. I’ve tried a bunch of things, and he’s just not interested. I even suggested maybe he should go to the doctor to see if everything was okay, and he blew me off like he was upset I even suggested it.”

“You mean…sex?”

“I mean everything. It’s like all he wants to do is come home from work and sit in front of the TV. Or on the weekends work around the house.”

“Not to make light of your situation, but there are women who’d kill for that kind of guy.”

“Yeah, to the exclusion of no sex or physical intimacy? I even thought okay, maybe I just need hobbies. I joined that book group you told me about and some of the books I read were about BDSM. I thought ooh, okay, maybe this is how I can get him interested in bed.”

Marcia hoped her face wasn’t flaming red at that point. Amelia was one of their strictly vanilla friends. Or, at least, she had been. Amelia had no idea what Marcia and Derrick did behind the scenes in their spare time.

“What happened?” Marcia asked.

Amelia burst into tears and Marcia reached for a box of tissues to hand her. “He looked at me like he was disgusted by me for even thinking it. He told me I shouldn’t be reading ‘that kind of crap,’ and that if I didn’t like the way things were, I should buy a vibrator to take care of myself.”

Marcia blinked. “Um, wow. No offense, but that’s pretty damn cold of him.”

Amelia blew her nose. “No shit. I asked him if he wanted a divorce since he obviously wasn’t interested in me anymore, and he told me no, but once people were married for a while they weren’t supposed to have to ‘perform’ unless they felt like it. And that if I wasn’t happy, I could file for divorce, but he was fine with the way things are.”

Marcia’s heart broke for her friend. “How about counseling?”

“I suggested that, too. He told me that there was nothing wrong with him, but if I thought those ‘trashy books’ I was reading were exciting that I was the ‘sick’ one and should probably get help.”

Marcia tried to look back to what she knew about Mike, what she’d seen about her friends.

Nothing like this would ever have blipped her radar about the two of them.

“I thought you two were so good together.”

“It’s been sliding for a while. I haven’t said anything about it. I thought maybe if I didn’t, maybe I could get it worked out between us. Or maybe things would get better. But it’s obvious he has no desire to work things out between us.” She blew her nose. “Hey, what’s that?” She pointed at Marcia’s laptop.

Marcia swore. She’d been updating the schedule on the club’s website. “Um…”

Before Marcia could reach over and close the lid on her laptop, Amelia pulled it over and looked at it. “Hey, is this that club here in Sarasota? I read about that.”

Fuck f*ck f*ck! “Um…”

Amelia’s eyes widened as she looked at Marcia. “Are you guys into BDSM?”

Marcia swallowed hard. “Um…”

“Please, are you?”

Marcia took a long, deep breath. “Just like what you tell me in confidence, I don’t tell anyone. What I tell you, I’m going to ask for your confidence.”

Amelia nodded, but the hope now shining in her friend’s eyes broke Marcia’s heart even more.

“Derrick and I are a Master/slave couple, and have been for years. Yes, we run Venture, the BDSM club here in town.”

“It’s real? I mean, really really real? I thought maybe it was just a fictional thing for those magazine articles I read. It’s really real? There are really people who do this in real life? And you run it?”

She suspected the articles Amelia meant were the one’s Shay had written a couple of years earlier. “Yes, but—”

“Can you take me? Please?”

Ironically, Marcia was running the Introduction to BDSM class that very afternoon. And her friend looked so blatantly miserable that Marcia couldn’t refuse her. “What are you doing today?”