The waiter bowed slightly. “But please do not feel any pressure.”

At ten, the lights in the hallway illuminated a warm gold. Other patrons around the main room shifted, finished their drinks, stood slowly. But Sara grabbed my hand and jerked me out of my chair.

The hall was at least twenty feet wide, with seats and tables near the windows looking in on the rooms. In Room One, the first room on the left, a young, muscular man stood in the corner wearing jeans and no shirt. On the floor, on all fours, was another dark-haired man with a horse tail extending from an anal plug. The man standing in the corner lifted a whip and cracked it loudly in the air.

Sara’s hand flew to her mouth, as I pulled her farther down the hall, murmuring, “Pony play, darling. Not for everyone.”

Room Two had a beautiful woman, alone and naked on the couch, just beginning to masturbate to pornography being projected across the expansive wall opposite her.

Room Three had an enormous, pale man in the tragic Melpomene mask, preparing to take a gagged woman from behind. Beside me, I could sense Sara grow more tense.

“This looks . . .” She gestured vaguely to the strangely fascinating scene.

“Adventurous?” I suggested. “You have to understand that people pay a lot of money to come here. They don’t want to see things they can see on the telly.”

I put my hand to the small of her back and reminded her, “Another thing you can’t see on the telly is real intimacy.”

She looked up at me and then her attention dropped to my mouth. “Do you think we’re really intimate?”

“Do you?”

She nodded. “When did that happen?”

“When has it been anything other than intimate? You just wanted to ignore it.”

She blinked away, but leaned into my side and we started walking again.

Room Four had three women, kissing and laughing as they undressed each other on a gigantic white bed.

Room Five had a man binding a woman up with rope, while a bound and gagged cuckolded man watched from the corner.

“We’re going to be boring,” she whispered, eyes wide.

“You really think so?”

She didn’t answer, because we’d arrived at Room Six, which stood empty. Without even looking to me, she slipped around the end of the hall to where we could enter the rooms from the rear.

The door handle to Six turned easily, and Sara stepped inside.

After a few moments, our eyes adjusted, and I could make out a bar in the corner and a huge leather couch with a low coffee table in front. Even in the darkness, the room felt very much like a corner of my own living room, and I suspected with a jolt that it was a replica of that space.

Without thinking to ask Sara first, I flipped on the light. I was right. Cream walls with deep walnut trim, a wide black couch, and the same plush area rug I had picked up in Dubai. Tiffany lamps decorated the two small end tables. The room was far smaller than my living room, which I used for large events, but the similarity was undeniable. The giant window through which people could observe us was framed by drapes, just like those at my flat, but from where we stood, it just looked like a window looking out upon a blank darkness.