No, not now. I can’t deal with it now. Later.

Swallowing back the sob, Max released her deathlike grip and pushed herself up to standing.

She cleaned up again, just enough to be comfortable getting back to her hotel. She needed to leave. Now. She claimed her stuff from the locker and shrugged into her jacket.

“Everything okay?” asked Mandy, perhaps concerned about her newbie.

“Absolutely,” Max said, but her voice held a tremor, and she couldn’t meet Mandy’s warm eyes.

* * *

Oh dear, thought Mandy, watching the woman walk out the door. That was a strange one. When she’d first arrived, there had been a fear in her eyes that Mandy hadn’t been able to decipher. Whatever it was, Mandy wasn’t sure coming here was the right thing for her, and from the look in her eyes as she left, her evening hadn’t been quite what she’d expected.

She turned away from the front door and caught Dee’s gaze as she reached the office door.

Dee tilted her head slightly to one side, watching Mandy. “You okay?” she asked.

Mandy sighed and smiled wanly. “Yeah. Just… Sometimes this place just doesn’t work for everyone. I know it’s not the club, per se, but still.”

Dee nodded but kept silent, and Mandy appreciated that. She knew a lot of women were excited about the thought, the fantasy, of no-strings sex, thinking nothing could be simpler. They craved the freedom and the opportunity to forget everything else in their lives, even for just an hour. For a lot of the women, that was fundamentally true. It was one of the main reasons Mandy had designed the club in the first place. But for others, the emotions involved in such an intimate act interfered.

She suspected the latter was true of the hazel-eyed, curly-haired cutie who’d just walked out of here with a haunted expression on her face.

Mandy stepped up to the desk where Dee was lounging, playing Candy Crush on her phone.

“Bored?” Mandy smirked, thankful for something mundane to focus on.

Dee chuckled. “Just killing ten minutes until Cassie takes her break. Don’t distract me, I just got to level eighty-three.”

Mandy laughed, but her mind immediately drifted back to the sad woman. Even when the bell rang at the front door and she went to see who the next customer was, the woman who had just departed was at the forefront of her mind. She took the new customer’s money, went through her usual spiel, and tried very hard not to worry about what this new woman was looking for in her visit. Not all of them left here looking lost and forlorn. Not all of them came here for the wrong reasons. At the end of the day, she wasn’t actually responsible for any of that. She provided an opportunity to explore. What they did with that and how they reacted was entirely out of her control.

* * *