Dance of Madness: Chapter 11

Four years ago:

This is a super fucked-up way to lose your virginity.

I’ve thought that from the second I agreed to meet him in this empty warehouse converted to an artist’s loft that smells like old paint and sawdust.

At night, and…alone.

But here I am.

My shoes scuff against the hardwood floor as I move through the open space. It’s quiet—or would be, if my pulse would only stop pounding in my ears.

It’s colder than I thought it would be. I’m dressed in black, as agreed, but despite the clothes I feel exposed. Hyperaware of every breath I take as it mists the inside of the plastic mask covering my face.

That was the plan: no identities. We’ve never had them, so why start now?

Just this meeting in the real world, face-to-face…so to speak. One night to explore everything we’ve talked about. Every sick fantasy. Every twisted desire. Everything I’ve told him, despite never telling another soul in my entire life.

I don’t even know his name. Or his voice.

Just the ‘voice’ that comes out on paper. For almost a year now.

The first time I read The Sorrows of Young Werther, I was fifteen.

Mom had just died.

It was only three weeks since the funeral, and nothing made sense yet. I’d gone back to school because that’s what you do when the world ends—you pretend it hasn’t. You smile and nod when people tell you they’re sorry and then go back to your life like you’re not drowning.

I remember the whole class groaning when our English teacher assigned the book. Most people didn’t make it past chapter one.

I read the whole thing in a single night.

Then I read it again the next day. And again the day after that.

It was messy and emotional and wildly dramatic, filled with yearning and idealism and a crushing, aching sadness that felt like it had been carved out of my own chest. Werther was self-absorbed and ridiculous, but I loved him.

Not because he was admirable. Because he made me realize the ache I’d been carrying didn’t have to be my entire world, head, and heart.

I clung to that.

It was the first time I felt understood by something written on a page. Like somewhere, a dead German author from three hundred years ago had felt what I was feeling and found a way to write it down.

I didn’t tell anyone how much it meant to me. It felt too personal.

A couple of years later, I was killing time at the New York Public Library while waiting for rehearsal to start. On a whim, I looked it up in the catalog. Crazily enough, they had a rare edition, one of the oldest English translations—and in circulation, too, which felt insane. What kind of idiot would check that out?

Apparently, one like me.

Scratch that.

Two idiots. The book was already checked out—by someone named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Or rather, my guess was, someone with a nerdy sense of humor who’d put that name on their library card application.

I placed a request to be notified when it was returned, and a few days later, I got an email.

It wasn’t until after I brought it home—with my own fake-name library card: Fräulein von B, a character from the book—that I found the note tucked inside: hand-written, folded twice, wedged between two pages like a secret.

Apologies for hanging onto this. I didn’t realize there were other Goethe masochists in the city. You have questionable taste, but I respect it.

Cocky. Casual. Just irreverent enough to make me roll my eyes.

But it did make me smile.

So much so, that when I returned it three days later, I left my own note in response.

The next time I took the book out, there was another note.

That’s how it started.

We started leaving each other notes tucked between the pages of that rare edition. Sometimes we’d take the book home for a weekend, sometimes we’d sneak our notes into it on the shelf.

A month in he admitted he was a guy, though I’d already guessed.

He was smart. Funny in a dry, mocking way that made me want to reciprocate. A few years older. He never signed his name or told me much of anything that identifiable about himself, but his voice came through as clearly as if we were speaking face-to-face.

He made me laugh. He asked real questions. More—he listened to my answers.

After a few months, he suggested we stop checking the book out altogether. Said it’d be safer to hide it somewhere in the stacks.

He chose the location: a shelf in the back corner of the philosophy section, hidden behind a row of dusty encyclopedias. We moved locations a few times.

And that’s how we communicated, letter after letter, note after note.

We wrote to each other for a year, staying totally anonymous.

At first, the letters were about literature. Music. Family. Grief. The way the world could make you feel invisible, even when everyone was looking right at you.

But slowly, they…changed. We started telling each other the stuff we couldn’t tell anyone else.

The dark stuff.

He confessed he had violent dreams. That sometimes he woke up breathless, itching for carnage, and that although it scared him, he couldn’t ignore it.

I told him things I still can’t believe I shared with anyone. I told him my fantasies about being held down. Chased. Taken against my will.

He never judged me. He said he understood.

The letters got longer. Rawer. More intimate. At one point, we even made a plan to meet. I suggested the time and place. But then I panicked.

I told him my family was…complicated. Powerful. Dangerous. That they wouldn’t understand, and that they might hurt him if they found out.

He told me his family was dangerous, too.

I didn’t think he understood. Eventually I outright said that my family was mafia.

He didn’t flinch.

Mine too, he wrote.

After that, things shifted again.

The letters got sharper. The edges more honest as we careened toward something real and reckless.

He gave me words for things I didn’t know how to explain. I gave him every piece of myself I could through pen and paper.

And now, I’m here to give him the rest.

Tonight we’re meeting not to have a friendly chat or to see each other’s faces. We’re meeting specifically so that I can live out my fantasy. He’s going to show me that dark side. He’s going to let me explore it with him.

And I’m going to give him my virginity.

My sanity.

My stomach twists, but I’m not afraid. Not of him, or what’s coming. If anything, I’m scared of how much I want it, and him. Whoever he is.

It’s probably stupid. Dramatic. A little pathetic.

Maybe I’ve confused connection with obsession. Maybe I’ve built something up in my head that won’t exist after this night. But I don’t think so.

Either way, it’s too late now.

I pull the note from my pocket again. It’s folded and refolded, worn at the creases. His last words to me burn into my eyes:

My throat is dry as I tuck it away.

I want the chase. That’s the scariest part.

I want the roughness. The hands that don’t ask permission. The game that feels like it might not quite be one.

I want to give it all away to someone who knows exactly how to take it.

The presence hits me suddenly.

I never hear a door open. I don’t hear footsteps. I just sense a shift in the air behind me, like a storm sliding into the room.

Then I turn—and he’s there.

Tall. I know that, because we’ve already talked about how I’m on the taller side, but he looms a full foot over me.

Dressed in black and masked, like me. He says nothing at first, just watches me, his breath low and steady, waiting to see if I’ll bolt.

I don’t.

Not yet.

He steps closer, and I feel the heat of his body before he even touches me. His fingers graze along my jaw, then slide down under my chin to tilt my face up. His mask, like mine, is plain. No features, just blankness to hide the boy behind it.

“You’re sure about this?” he asks.

I shiver, realizing it’s the first words I’ve ever heard him speak. I like his voice.

A lot.

I nod. He pauses before tilting his head to the side slightly.

“I’m only going to ask once.”

“I’m sure,” I whisper.

His fingers tighten slightly. “Your safe word is green.”

I nod again. We’ve talked about safe words.

Then he lets go and slowly backs away into the dark.

I don’t move.

For a second, I think that’s it. That maybe this was a test, and I’ve already failed.

Then I hear the scrape of his boots behind me. My pulse skips, and my skin erupts in tingles and shivers.

“If you’re waiting to start,” he growls from the shadows. “We already have.”

I hear the flat smack of his shoes against the hardwood floor, and the rough intake of his breath, like he’s eager for this.

I turn, and I run.

The warehouse is huge, full of overlapping, crawling shadows. I sprint through the dark, lungs burning. The sound of his footsteps follows close behind.

Closer, closer, so fucking close.

I don’t want to stop. I’ve never felt this alive.

It’s not just fear. It’s adrenaline. It’s the heat from being wanted in a way that isn’t restrained or polite.

I dart around a pillar. Then another. I can’t see him, but I can feel him, like static crackling over my skin: his breath first, then the whisper of his hand almost catching my sleeve. Then nothing.

Then—everything.

He slams into me from behind, and I go down hard—knees scraping against concrete, palms breaking my fall. His weight crashes down on me, one hand fisting my hair, the other clamping down on my hip.

I scream, but not in panic. It’s a cathartic release.

He tears at my clothes. My leggings are yanked down, my shirt shoved up. The cold air hits my skin and I don’t fight it.

I don’t want to.

I hear him panting. Hear his zipper lowering, the low growl that rumbles from his throat when he shoves my thighs apart. Feel the hot, fucking huge, heavy dick against my ass as he pulls my leggings further down and roughly pushes my legs even wider.

The swollen head sliding down, parting my slick, eager lips.

He thrusts in brutally, viciously, so hard that tears spring to my eyes and the wind is knocked from my lungs. I’m barely aware of what’s happening until he’s on his tenth thrust.

And I’m loving. It.

Loving the way it feels like he’s breaking me in half. Like he’s tearing me apart and putting me back together with every glorious, rough pound of his big cock.

My cheek is against the floor. My mouth is open. My body is splitting open and falling apart and giving in all at once.

Honestly, I thought it would hurt more.

I thought I’d cry.

But after that first ram into me, it doesn’t, and I don’t.

I let go.

In that moment, he’s not a stranger.

He’s the only person who’s ever truly seen me.

“You know, I lost a bet with myself tonight.”

He hasn’t rolled off me yet. What started as me face down on the ground turned into him pulling me onto my hands and knees and railing the absolute shit out of me. Then we switched so that I was on my back, with him on top of me, between my thighs, his hand around my throat as he fucked me into oblivion.

Even with a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you how many times I orgasmed over the last hour.

We’re still lying like that: his body over mine, my legs around his muscled hips, his hands on either side of my face. Through our masks, I can see his eyes.

Bright, venomous green.

And he’s still inside me.

It’s only now that we’ve stopped moving that I realize just how raw I am. The delicious bruises covering my body and the ache between my thighs. The hardwood under me presses into my spine where my shirt’s pushed up, and I suddenly feel how bare I still am.

Yet it doesn’t bother me at all. Not just because as a dancer I’m pretty used to my own nudity.

It’s deeper than that.

I chide myself, shoving the thought into a little corner in the back of my mind.

We never agreed to that. We never talked about that at all. That’s not what this is.

Tonight was about release. Sex, and just sex. He knew I was a virgin. We’ve spent months talking about kinks and desires and fantasies. And he finally flat out asked me if I wanted to experience mine, which happen to be his, too.

Needless to say, I said yes.

But that’s all this is: sex. An exploration of our dark sides. It is not anything more, no matter how much intimacy we’ve built through our letters.

So, while this feels like…everything…I refuse to let myself go to that place where I start getting all starry-eyed and emotional about it. Thinking about “the beat of his heart against mine” or anything nauseatingly romance-y like that.

Nope.

Even as I’m thinking that, though, I’m caught off guard by the way his green eyes pierce my blue ones. They’re looking through me, flaying open what few parts of myself I’ve never shared with him. In other words…not much.

“So,” he smirks. “Still think this was the worst way to lose your virginity?”

I huff. “In the top five, easy. Top five worst, that is.”

“Thanks for clarifying.”

I giggle under my mask.

“You bit me, by the way.”

“Did not.”

“Did so. My shoulder,” he grunts, glancing down at his muscle, where there are—whoops—teeth marks. “Definitely.”

“Well part of it was that I was supposed to fight you.”

“Yeah, I was expecting a knee to the nuts, not a wolverine gnawing my arm.”

“Well,” I laugh, “maybe you deserved it.”

For a moment, it’s weirdly normal. Two strangers, wearing masks, naked and entwined on a warehouse floor, catching their breath after an hour of hardcore consensual non-consent play, like this is just…something people do.

I want to take my mask off. I want to take his off, and look at each other without anything between us.

I’m trying to work up the courage, trying to push past the voice that says I’m being an idiot, that I’m letting my friend Evelina’s peachy-pink happy-ever-after princess perma-vibe influence me, when the sharp staccato crack of gunfire sprays the side of the building and blows out one of the windows.

I scream, my body clenching in on itself both from the gunshots and the sudden absence of his body as he disentangles himself and rolls away from me.

“Get dressed!” he roars at me, his muscles tight as he reaches for his discarded jacket and yanks a gun out. “Now!” he yells.

I scramble, heart jackhammering as I crash back to reality and grab my clothes.

“What’s happening?!” I scream.

He pulls on his pants and double-checks the magazine of his gun with practiced hands before ramming it back in.

“Go out the back.”

His voice is pure steel, devoid of emotion.

“What the fuck!?”

“I told you I was mafia!” he barks at me as I pull my shirt over my head.

“So am I!” I blurt. “But this is⁠—”

“Not what you’re used to?” He checks the safety on his gun and then cocks it. “Well, welcome to my world.”

I shove my hair back from my face, when suddenly, I notice something, and my heart drops.

The pair of Louis Monte Noir diamond earrings, which were a gift from my mother on the last birthday of mine that I had with her.

One’s missing.

I start to scrabble on the ground to find it. Then I’m screaming as another window blows, and bullets slam into the wall behind me. I gasp as he suddenly yanks me to my feet and drags me toward the rear of the loft.

“Go out the back. Be quiet, stay low, don’t stop.”

He shoves me toward the hallway. I whirl just as he’s about to let go of me.

“Wait!” I shout. ”What about you?!”

The mask makes it impossible to read his expression, but his green eyes stab into me with an intensity that makes me shudder.

“Don’t worry about me. Not my first gunfight rodeo.”

We stay like that, barely a foot apart, both of us—well, me—shaking as fresh gunfire slams against the outside of the building, shattering more windows. Yelling men draw closer.

“I don’t know who you are,” I hiss. “What if⁠—”

His head tips to the side. “Sure you do. And If I die…”

He lifts a shoulder.

“Then I’ll haunt the fuck out of you.”