She pushed her feet back into her boots. A rather intimidating butch who’d just strolled into the room was eying her up, so Max moved away from the wall. She definitely was not looking for a third round. Staying where she was sent a very wrong message. She walked across the room, avoiding the butch’s gaze, and entered the bathrooms.

As she shut the cubicle door behind her, muting the sounds of the music and enthusiastic fucking, a wave of tiredness washed through her. She slumped down on the closed lid of the toilet and shut her eyes as she leaned back against the cistern.

She gave in to her tiredness, and that hold on her emotions, which she had largely held at bay all evening, began to loosen. Unbidden, Sue’s face popped back into her mind’s eye, and the emotions that image engendered brought a sudden sob to the back of Max’s throat. She gripped the sides of the toilet lid with her hands.

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.