Page 61 of Brat Baby (Sugar Life #1, #3)

Emery

I am literally trembling with nerves as I smile at the woman who has just taken my things and left me standing in an empty, black-tiled, mirror-walled…

lobby area, in just my lingerie, pantyhose, and suspenders.

I’d opted to give her my heels along with my other belongings, because it hadn’t felt right to keep them on my feet.

The only pieces of furniture in this very echoey room are the big black desk she was standing behind, with its computer and baskets of wristbands, and several red-velvet bench seats that line one wall.

The woman, aged somewhere in her thirties, if I had to guess, clocks my trembling as she comes back from the storage room she’d disappeared into and then reaches over the table to hold my hand.

“No need to be nervous. No one will stop you from leaving. You can pop in and out as quick as you please. And if, at any time, you feel uncomfortable or need help, you…”

“Call for a monitor or say red .”

She nods at me approvingly. “Exactly. You’ve got this. You’ve signed the waiver, we’ve gone over the rules, and Master Derek has a copy of your guest ticket in his email. Would you like me to go and get him for you?”

I swallow around the lump in my throat. “That’s okay. He told me to meet him at the couches, by the bar.”

I cross my fingers behind my back at the little lie. All my hopes for sneaking into the club without the four of them knowing rely on those couches being a permanent fixture of the club.

My nerves settle when she nods again, glancing over my shoulder as the elevator opens behind me before turning to look at me again. “Ah, yes, that is their usual spot. Okay, well, all that is left is for you to enter the club. Take as much time as you need.”

“Thank you,” I reply, but don’t give myself any time.

I am too fucking keyed up to cool my heels in the entryway. I need to see my daddies right now. Excited bubbles war with worried weights in my stomach. Will they be happy to see me? Will they enjoy the surprise? Or is this going to land me in more hot water?

Either way, it’s too late to consider leaving. I’m here now, and I want to see this through. After everything that has happened this week, even if this goes poorly, I deserve to know why they are at the club instead of at the apartment with me.

I grip the giant golden vertical handle and push against the door until it moves. As soon as there is the tiniest gap, I’m hit with a wave of noise.

Music, conversation, laughter, and I think maybe a scream?

The door closes behind me, and the cool air of the lobby is gone, replaced by a warmth that will keep even the most scantily clad people warm.

My cheeks heat as I watch a woman walk a man on a lead like he is a dog, crawling along the ground, naked as the day he was born, except for mittens over his hands and a mask that makes him look like a puppy. And oh my god, is that a butt plug tail?

I avert my eyes, not ready to see the things I have researched in real life.

Forcing a few tentative steps, I go deeper into the club. No one is paying me any attention, which is fine with me. I’m doing my absolute best not to look at them. One of the rules was that staring is unacceptable unless there’s a public demonstration going on.

I’m not risking my curiosity getting me kicked out before I can even find my daddies.

Instinctively, I continue toward the center of the room, hoping that is where I will find the bar, and I am rewarded only a minute later, when it appears like a makeshift wall, breaking up the main area of the club from what looks like the sit-around-and-talk area.

My heart rate through the fucking ceiling, I make my way around the few people that have stopped to chat right in the walkway, feeling light and magical when I spot Derek smiling as he looks down at something in front of him.

The crowd shifts around me, and I see Darcy sitting on the same couch as Derek, a gorgeous woman sitting between them. She is facing Darcy as she holds a piece of rope in her hand while he wraps it around her wrist.

My smile falters, then goes cold as I spot Hudson, leaning down from a barstool and talking to a woman kneeling on the floor by his feet. She is talking animatedly with her hands, and he is nodding, those ice-blue eyes locked on her face, giving her his undivided attention.

Xavier is seated, with a woman sitting on the armrest of his overstuffed armchair as they both speak to two men standing close by.

Everything is tingling, and I can’t hear the music over the rushing noise in my head as I return my attention to Derek. He is staring back at me, features tight and eyes narrowed. My gaze drops to the tray in front of him, held up by a blonde girl, not much older than me.

Dylan.

My hand comes up to cover my mouth, because fuck, I think I’m going to throw up.

Derek stands, almost knocking Dylan over, his sudden movement the trigger I need to get fucking moving, ASAP.

I spin around and fucking charge back to the door, my entire body tingling like I’m about to pass out. I’m not polite. I don’t try to fit through gaps. I push and shove, needing to get back out to the lobby as quick as possible, collect my shit, then get out of here.

If I didn’t need my phone to call a rideshare, I’d leave it all behind.

This was a fucking mistake.

A huge fucking mistake.

All of it.

Not just coming here.

But chasing after them.

My hands slam into the heavy fucking door, and I quickly start pulling until it opens enough for me to slip through. I don’t even realize I’m crying until the cool air of the lobby hits my wet cheeks.

Scrubbing my face, I approach the front desk, the woman who helped me in the process of scanning tickets for a group of people. She glances in my direction, then does a double-take. “I’ll be—oh, honey, what’s wrong?”

She immediately pauses in helping the group and rushes over to me. “What happened?”

“I just wa-want to leave,” I reply, with a hiccupped sob. “You said I can leave, right? I can just collect my things and go?”

She nods, eyes filled with worry. “Yes, but it’ll take me a minute. I just put your things in a locker. Can I call Master Derek for you?”

“No!” I all but scream it at her.

Her eyes widen, but she nods, giving my arm a pat. “Okay, it’s all okay. Go and take a seat over on the benches. I’ll grab your things, and you can be out of here.”

I nod and trudge over in that direction, aiming for the corner closest to the elevators and a little hidden from the club’s door.

Unfortunately, I don’t make it to the benches before the lobby is flooded with the noise of the club and my name is being shouted across the room.

“Emery!”

My entire body burns with shame and rejection.

Fuck it, I’m leaving without my shit. I’ll figure it out when I get back to campus, even if I have to walk the whole way there. I march up to the elevator and hit the call button.

Footsteps thunder toward me, slapping against the tiles as I desperately jab the button over and over again.

“Emery.” A hand wraps around my bicep and tugs, forcing me to turn. “Emery, wait.”

I rip my arm from Derek’s grip and glare up at him. “Don’t touch me.”

Darcy, Hudson, and Xavier appear on either of his sides, all of them breathing heavily as they stare at me.

Déjà vu hits like a fucking tsunami as they surround me with my back to the elevator doors.

Tears burn my throat. Fuck, I was so goddamn stupid.

They broke it off with me weeks ago.

I pursued them.

They continually turned me down.

But I didn’t give up.

Goddamn. I was a stage-five clinger, like those women in the rom-coms who annoy the fuck out of me.

Every muscle in my body hurts as I wrap my arms around myself.

“Emery, what—” Darcy starts to ask, but I cut him off.

“This is never going to work, is it?” I ask, already knowing the answer to the question.

Hudson tries to answer, anyway. “Kitten, no, you have it—"

“Wrong?” I say on a laugh, hurt that he thinks I’m that fucking stupid. “You had the choice of meeting me at the apartment tonight or coming here. You came here. You didn’t even tell me you were coming here. Just left me, alone, in the apartment, again. Not much wrong to get about that.”

Behind me, the whir of the elevator starts up, and my heart thumps in my chest painfully.

They look at each other, trying to come up with a plan, I’m sure, but then the woman from the front desk suddenly appears behind them, carrying my things.

“Excuse me, Masters, could I please get through?”

She doesn’t give them the option of moving out of the way, just forces herself through until she stands between me and them, and gives me my things. No smile, nothing. Just waits for me to gather everything.

As though the kink gods are looking down on me right now, the elevator doors open. I immediately take two steps backward, not wanting to turn my back on them, and enter the elevator.

The woman tries to block their path, but Derek manages to make his way around her, using his hand to block the door from automatically shutting.

“Emery, wait. We were meeting with Thayne, he is Newton’s dean.

Once we all agreed that we wanted to talk to him, we had to take a step back from you so that we didn’t cross anymore lines.

I didn’t want to get your hopes up that he could possibly say yes, because we weren’t sure of what his decision would be.

But baby, he said yes. There is some paperwork we must fill in, then you can be ours again. ”

The smile on his face is so filled with hope that I feel sick, because all I see is the fucking betrayal.

“You came up with that plan?” I ask him, before focusing my attention on the other three. “And you all went along with it?”

If this wasn’t such a serious situation, I would laugh at the way they all nervously shift and glance at each other.

Hudson nods, with a tentative smile. “Yes, that’s what happened.”

I face Derek again. “No, I can’t be yours.”

His mouth drops open and the hope drains away. “Emery—"

I hold up my hand, palm out. “No. No more Emery or baby. No more keeping important information from me. You kept me on the goddamn hook this entire time by sending me the rewards. And paying me! All the stupid mind games. How the hell was that not getting my hopes up? I deserved to know. I deserved to fucking know!”

My chest is heaving as I yell that last part.

Derek flinches back from me, but I keep going, driving in my point.

“Just like in the chat when you told me to go try some of the easier dates and didn’t trust me to know myself.

You didn’t trust me to be able to manage my own emotions and actions. You took my choices away.”

“It wasn’t like that. We were trying to protect you.”

I straighten my spine and glare at him, because I see it now. I see the truth. “Trying to protect me? Or protect your careers?”

He stares back at me, a shattered look on his handsome face, like the math isn’t mathing for him. Good. Now he knows how I felt when they abandoned me behind Grinder. At least I’m giving them an explanation.

Oakley was right.

These men are just clients. They don’t actually give a fuck about me. If they did, they wouldn’t have left me at the apartment, waiting for them alone, without an explanation as to why they didn’t show. They wouldn’t have put me through the last three weeks of torture.

I am so done with humiliating myself for them, over and over.

I step deeper into the elevator, look at him through my watery eyes, and say a single word I’ve never said to him before. “Red.”

Shock registers on his face, his hand falls away, and the metal doors close.

I press the button that will take me back up to the ground floor, then press my back into the cool metal wall. Throat on fire, tears streaming down my cheeks, and the vicious urge to throw up everything I have consumed today.

Such a fucking idiot.

I am no one’s forever home.