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I opened my mouth to tell him to relax, but of course that’s when he decided to shrug out of his shirt.

Instead of a snarky remark, my mouth immediately turned drier than the Atacama, and all that came out of it was a dehydrated wheeze.

Beneath the button-down , Junior wore a muscle top, and goddamn , he looked good in it.

The white fabric made the dark tattoos sleeving his arms pop, and the way it was pulled taut across his broad chest had me wondering how much ink was hid—

“Are you bleeding ?” I asked, staring at the red spot staining his side.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

I highly doubted that, but I held my response in check because I didn’t want to seem like I cared by pressing the issue, nor did I really want to know what had happened to him, because I worried it might implicate me after the fact in one of his crimes.

He lifted a hand, offering his shirt to me.

Part of me wanted to say no, to put some much-needed space back between us.

Another part of me wanted to wrap myself up in his scent and live out my high school fantasies of Junior publicly claiming me with clothing like a quarterback giving out his letterman jacket.

Yet another, larger part of me was fricking freezing, so I took the damn shirt and tried to tell myself I was just being practical.

“Thank you,” I said, sliding my arms into the sleeves.

He settled it around my shoulders, and yup, this was a mistake. Because it was warm from his body heat and smelled divine, like his sinful cologne and a hint of masculine musk I’d always found oddly alluring.

I lifted the collar to my nose and took a deep breath. “Is that brimstone I detect?”

Instead of looking amused or firing something back at me, Junior hooked a finger beneath my chin and tilted my face up.

Our gazes caught and held while a long, silent moment passed between us.

I could see the thoughts swirling behind his eyes, but when he spoke, it was only to say, “Enjoy the rest of your night, Lo.”

“What do you mean, he’s raising the rent again?” Taylor asked.

She, Ryan, and I stood together amongst six other people in Sylvia’s third-floor office. Antique sconces lit the room, casting the space in warm light. A plush rug was spread beneath our feet, and while the velvet couches and chairs dotting it were soft and inviting, none of us were sitting.

“Just what I said,” Sylvia replied, the black fabric of her bodycon dress pulling tight as she paced on the other side of her desk. “The bastard knows we have nowhere else to go and is trying to milk us for all we’re worth.”

Behind her, the curtains were tied open to reveal the lights of the city.

Their glow backlit her, casting her Brown skin in neon blues and fluorescent whites.

I knew she was truly stressed, because she lifted a hand and rubbed it over her buzzed hair, a habit she’d picked up when she first cut her curls off and was still trying to break.

“How much does he want this time?” someone else asked.

Sylvia stopped pacing and turned to face us, bracing her knuckles on the desk. “He wants fifty dollars per square foot per year.”

I did some quick math in my head.

“We can’t afford that,” Ryan said. “Can we?”

Sylvia shook her head.

“I can cover us the first month at least,” I said.

“I’ll cover the next,” Taylor added.

“No,” Sylvia said. “I appreciate the offer, but if we capitulate too easily, he’ll try to milk us for even more. I think it’s smarter to make it look like we’re scrambling. Besides, if we end up staying, we need to find a way to make the rent sustainable in the long-term .”

We spent the next fifteen minutes brainstorming ways to come up with the extra cash, not just to cover rent for the next few months, but so we’d have some savings on hand if we were able to move and needed to make serious renovations.

Expanding ownership was mentioned, as well as creating a Kickstarter, limiting how many floors we rented, and threatening our landlord with death and dismemberment (Taylor’s suggestion, though I was tempted to second it).

The trouble was, we were limited in our options.

This city still had a handful of vice laws on the books, meant to govern the moral behavior of its citizens.

Because of them, we were only allowed to operate by being a private, members-only club.

We could never own property, and were instead forced to rent out buildings like the one currently housing Velvet.

That way, we weren’t facilitating sex and therefore couldn’t be accused of prostitution; we were only facilitating the space for sex to maybe or maybe not take place in.

We couldn’t even sell liquor. Instead, we had bartenders who were available to mix and pour whatever drinks our patrons brought in themselves.

Our asshole landlord, a shady, aging man named Patrick McKinney, knew all this and used it against us.

This was the third rent spike we’d faced in less than a year, and it was so steep that I worried Sylvia was right, and it would only get worse.

Fifty dollars per square foot was an astronomical price.

It was as much as what the big buildings charged downtown, and way too costly for a space this size, especially given its location.

Was this McKinney’s way of forcing us out?

It didn’t make sense from a business perspective.

We were the only people willing to pay the current rent on this place, let alone what he was threatening to raise it to.

This wasn’t exactly a nice part of town, and the only reason the interior looked as good as it did was because of our renovations.

Once we were gone, the building would likely sit empty for god knew how long before McKinney finally came to his senses and dropped the rent back to a reasonable price.

Or was he just such a greedy bastard that he didn’t realize he’d finally pushed us far enough that we were ready to look elsewhere?

I’d only met him once, but that had been enough to get a good read on the man: slimy, misogynistic, bigoted, and stingy.

Those types of people didn’t tend to look at the big picture.

They just took and took until there was nothing left or the people you preyed upon finally had enough and snapped (I really should have seconded Taylor’s suggestion).

We ended the meeting with a game plan going forward, each of us taking on our own tasks.

Ryan, Taylor, and I had volunteered to scope out other venues, research current rental standards for large spaces, and see if there were other, more progressive landlords in the city willing to take a look at our books and realize there was cash to be made from play clubs like ours.

I’d stop at nothing until I found a new home for Velvet.

I loved this place with my whole heart, and not just because I had a stake in it.

Velvet was the only play club in the city, a place for people to safely explore their kinks, own their sexuality, and discover their true selves.

And that meant almost as much to me as my advocacy work.

I’d do anything to save it, and no one—not even gross old Patrick McKinney—was going to take it away from us.