Almost as soon as I hit send, my phone rings. “You do realize Darren and I have been dating for two years. I think you’d know by now if he chained me up and kept me in a cage,” I say by way of greeting.

“Alex said the living room looked a BDSM porn set.”

“It was just a few toys and some lingerie.” I’m downplaying it, by a lot, but Violet is prone to exaggeration, and those two are pretty vanilla—apart from the costumes she makes for Alex’s penis, anyway.

“Lies. Go wash Darren’s pearl necklace off your chest and get your ass in your car. I need to know exactly how much you’ve been keeping from me so I know how angry I’m supposed to pretend to be when the rest of the girls get here. Oh, and pick me up a dairy-free latte on the way over.” With that she hangs up.

I’m relieved that she doesn’t seem nearly as upset as I expected. I take a quick shower, not because there’s jizz on my chest—although there might be some in my hair—but because there was a lot of sweating between last night and this morning, and I’m a little ripe. I also smell like I bathed in sex perfume.

I put on my dress from yesterday since my bag with extra clothes is still in the car. I have an extra outfit or two in the trunk of my car at all times. And an emergency escape kit, just in case. I think it might be a PTSD thing from the whole fleeing The Ranch when I was a teenager, but I’m not willing to unload it on a therapist, so all I can do is hypothesize.

For years after we left, my mom and I always had a bag of essentials packed: three changes of clothes, hair dye, toiletries, Miss Flopsy (I will love that stuffed bunny forever), five thousand dollars in cash—obviously small bills, a burner phone and new identification, and a few other essentials. Was it overkill? Probably. But then my mom isn’t playing with a full deck. She’s missing pretty much every face card there is. But I still love her.

I’m on my way downstairs when I hear a code being punched into the front door. I freeze on the stairs. It can’t be Darren coming back; he has practice. The front door opens, and the warning alarm beeps.

“Mr. Westinghouse! It’s Gertrude. I am here for the housekeeping!”

I let out a relieved sigh. Gertrude has been Darren’s housekeeper for years. I take the rest of the stairs at a light jog, my calves tight from last night’s awkward, but fun, sex positions. Gertrude appears in the hallway as I reach the bottom of the stairs.

Now here’s something interesting about my relationship with Darren: we don’t have a lot of sleepovers. He’s a light sleeper, and I’m a flailer, so I feel bad when I wake him up with my acrobatics routine in the middle of the night—at least this is the excuse I usually give him.

I mean, I do feel bad when I accidentally elbow him in the face, and once I charlie-horsed him with my knee, but sleeping beside someone else is . . . strange. You really need to trust someone to be unconscious next to them for a lot of hours in a row. Waking up the way I did this morning, with Darren wrapped around me, makes me feel vulnerable, and also protected, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there it is.

“Hey, Trudes!”

Gertrude startles and nearly drops her cleaning gear. “Oh! Miss Hoar! I am sorry to surprise you!” She looks past me, up the stairs. “I can come back later if now is a bad time.”

I wish she would just call me Charlene. She always forgets the H in my last name – Hoar –is silent. “You’re good,” I sigh. “Darren’s at the arena, and I’m on my way out.”

She smiles, looking a little relieved. I don’t think she likes cleaning when Darren’s home. He makes her nervous. He makes a lot of people nervous because he’s so quiet and intense, sometimes even me. But it’s the good kind of nervous.

“I will get started right away then.” She heads for the living room. Two seconds later, she shrieks.

I rush to find out what happened and cringe. The remains of the kinky sex toy wheel of fortune are still scattered around the living room. The dragon dick stands majestically in the middle of it all, right beside the ball gag and the latex body suit. I don’t know what I was thinking when I pulled all that stuff out yesterday, other than I wanted to erase my fear and make Darren happy.

I scramble for a reason all of this stuff to be here. “I’m so sorry! We had a party last night.”