Chapter 1: The Debt Comes Due

My name is Erica, and three hours ago I was sitting on my couch in yoga pants watching a baking show. Now I'm standing in the middle of a biker clubhouse with my hands zip-tied behind my back, trying to figure out how my life turned into a made-for-TV movie without anyone asking my opinion first.

It started with the knock. Not a polite knock either. The kind that makes your front door rattle in its frame and sends your husband's face three shades paler. Derek opened it, and two guys pushed past him like he was furniture. One was huge, bald, with a neck like a fire hydrant. The other was older, grey at the temples, wearing a cut with patches I didn't recognize. They didn't even look at me at first. They just walked straight to Derek and asked about money.

Forty-seven thousand dollars.

I didn't even know we owed forty-seven thousand dollars. I didn't know Derek had been borrowing from people who ride motorcycles and wear skull rings. I didn't know a lot of things, apparently.

"She's coming with us," the older one said, jerking his chin toward me. "Until you figure out how to make your problem go away."

Derek sputtered. He tried to negotiate. He offered our car, our TV, his watch. The bald guy just laughed and said the car was worth maybe eight grand and they weren't running a pawn shop. Then he grabbed my arm and walked me out the door.

I didn't scream. I don't know why. Maybe because part of me was so furious at Derek that I couldn't make a sound. Maybe because something about the certainty in the man's grip told me screaming wouldn't help. They put me in the back of a black SUV, and we drove for about forty minutes down roads I didn't recognize, past trees and nothing and more trees, until we pulled up to a compound. A big metal building with motorcycles lined up outside like soldiers. Music thumping from inside. A neon sign over the door that just said "THE CLUB."

The older one's name was Max. I learned that when the bald guy called him "Prez" and he corrected him. "Not tonight. Tonight I'm just Max." He had a white beard, neatly trimmed, and eyes that had that particular kind of calm that only comes from having seen enough chaos to stop being impressed by it. He was maybe fifty. Maybe older. Hard to tell with bikers. They either look sixty at forty or forty at sixty.

He walked me inside himself. The music was loud, some southern rock thing, and the room was full of men drinking and smoking and playing pool. About twenty of them, maybe more. They all looked up when we came in. They all looked at me.

"Fresh collateral," Max announced, like he was introducing a new piece of furniture. "Derek owes forty-seven. She stays until he pays."

A few guys whistled. One raised his beer. Nobody seemed surprised.

Max cut the zip ties off my wrists and steered me toward a back room. It had a bed, a couch, and a bathroom. It smelled like cigarettes and leather.

"Nobody touches you tonight," he said. "You get one night to understand where you are. Tomorrow, the arrangement starts."

"What arrangement?" I asked, my voice steadier than I expected.

He looked at me, and something in his expression softened just slightly. "You're a free-use toy for the club until your husband pays his debt. Every member, any time, any way they want. Those are the rules. I didn't make them, but I enforce them."

My stomach dropped. I sat on the bed because my legs decided they were done.

"Is there a way out of this?" I asked.

"Tell your husband to pay his bill."

He left. I sat there for a long time, staring at the wall, running scenarios. Call the police? With what phone? They'd taken mine. Run? Into the woods, at night, with twenty bikers between me and the road? I'm not an athlete. I'm a Pilates instructor with good glutes and decent cardio. That's not the same as being a survivalist.

I didn't sleep. I lay on that bed listening to the music and the voices and trying to convince myself this wasn't real. At some point I cried. Then I got angry. Then I cried again. Then I got angry at myself for crying.

Morning came. Someone knocked and brought me a plate of eggs and toast and a bottle of water. I ate because my body didn't care about my feelings. Then Max came back.

"Today's the day," he said. He had two women with him. Both wearing club cuts over tank tops. One had dark hair and tattoos running up both arms. The other was redheaded, compact, with the kind of resting smirk that said she'd seen everything and found most of it funny.

"This is Shay and Candy," Max said. "They'll get you ready."

"Ready for what?" I asked, though I already knew.

"Ready for the club," Shay said. "Strip."

I didn't move. Candy stepped forward and took my chin in her hand, not roughly, but firmly. "Listen, princess. You can do this the easy way or the hard way. Easy way, you take your clothes off, you get showered, you come out and meet the boys. Hard way, we take them off for you, and Max tells them you're a fighter, and fighters get it rougher."

I took my clothes off.

The shower was hot, which I hadn't expected. Shay washed my back. Her hands were surprisingly gentle. "First time?" she asked.

"First time being collateral for a drug debt, yes."

She laughed. "You'd be surprised how many girls say that."

They toweled me off and didn't give me clothes back. Just a pair of heels. Black, strappy, four inches. I stood in that bathroom naked except for heels, looking at myself in the mirror. Blonde hair still damp. Body that I worked hard for, every day, Pilates and spin and clean eating. It occurred to me that my body was the thing they wanted, and that all that work had basically prepared me to be a very high-quality sex toy. That thought should have made me sick. Instead, something flickered at the edge of it. Something I didn't want to name.

They walked me out to the main room. It was different in daylight. Still smoky, still rough, but quieter. About a dozen guys were there, sitting around, drinking coffee and beer, playing cards. They all stopped when I came out.

Max was leaning against the bar. He looked me over slowly, head to toe, and I watched his jaw tighten just a fraction. "On your knees," he said.

I sank down. The floor was cold concrete. My knees pressed against it, and I felt every guy in the room shift in his seat.

Max came first. He unzipped his jeans and pulled himself out. He was thick, bigger than Derek, bigger than anyone I'd been with. He held it in front of my face and I could smell him, musk and leather and something like cedar.

"Open," he said.

I opened my mouth.

He pushed in slowly, filling me, stretching my jaw. I gagged and he pulled back, then pushed in again, deeper this time. His hand found the back of my head and he held me there, his cock pressing against my throat, and I felt my eyes water and my body try to reject it and then something shifted and my throat opened and he slid all the way in.

"Good girl," he said, and the words hit me somewhere I wasn't expecting.

He fucked my mouth with long, deliberate strokes. Not cruel, but not gentle either. The room was silent except for the wet sounds and my breathing through my nose. I looked up at him and he was watching me with those calm eyes, and I realized my nipples were hard. That furious, confusing flicker from the bathroom was back, stronger now.

He pulled out and came on my face. Hot, thick streaks across my cheek and lips. I felt it dripping off my chin onto my chest. Someone behind me whistled.

"Who's next?" Max said, tucking himself back in.

A big guy with a ponytail stepped up. Then another. Then another.

The third one made me swallow. He grabbed my hair and held my head still and pumped into my mouth until he was deep, and then he groaned and I felt it, hot and pulsing against the back of my throat. I swallowed because there was nowhere else for it to go, and when he pulled out I gasped and coughed and a string of cum and spit connected my lips to the head of his cock.

"Fuck, she's good," he said, and I felt a wave of something that was either shame or heat or both.

By the fifth cock, my jaw was sore and my knees ached and my face was a mess. I had cum on my chin, on my tits, in my hair. Someone had taken photos. I didn't care anymore. The thing that had flickered in the bathroom was now a full flame, and I hated myself for it, and I couldn't stop it.

Then they moved me to a table. A padded one, like a massage table, set up in the middle of the room. They positioned me on my back and someone spread my legs. I didn't fight it.

The first guy to fuck me was younger, maybe thirty, with a shaved head and a tattoo of a snake on his neck. He pushed into me and I was wet. I was soaking wet, and that fact hit me like a slap. My body had decided something my brain hadn't caught up to.

He fucked me hard and fast, hands gripping my hips, and I bit my lip to keep from making noise. Then someone else stepped up to my head and turned my face toward him and pushed his cock into my mouth, and I was being used from both ends, and the room was watching, and I moaned around the cock in my mouth and the guy fucking me said, "She's fucking loving it," and I wanted to scream that I wasn't, but I was, and he was right.

They rotated. One in my mouth, one in my pussy, switching out, fresh ones taking their place. I lost count. Six? Eight? The sensations blurred together. Hands on my tits, squeezing and pulling. A mouth on my nipple, teeth grazing. Cock in my throat, cock in my cunt, the rhythm of it like a piston, two men using me in sync, and then the first orgasm hit me like a freight train.

I screamed. The cock in my mouth muffled it, but my whole body convulsed, back arching, legs shaking, and the guy inside me felt it and pounded harder and came deep inside me. I felt it, hot and thick, flooding me, and that triggered another wave, smaller but still real.

"Damn," someone said. "Collateral's a squirter."

I wasn't. I don't think. But there was definitely a wet spot on that table that wasn't there before.

They flipped me over. Doggy style. Someone entered me from behind while another stood in front of me and I sucked him with cum still dripping out of me. The table was wet. My thighs were wet. Everything was wet.

A guy named Tiny, who was not tiny at all, fucked me so deep I felt him in my stomach. He came inside me too. Then another took his place. Then another. The cum was leaking out of me, running down my inner thighs, and nobody cared. They just kept going.

At some point Shay and Candy appeared. Candy knelt under the table and I felt her tongue on my pussy, lapping at the cum dripping out of me. Her mouth was warm and soft and entirely different from the cocks, and I shuddered. She licked me clean, swirling her tongue around my clit, and then she stood up and grabbed my jaw and kissed me. I felt the cum pass from her mouth to mine. Warm, salty, thick. I swallowed.

"See?" she said, smirking. "Not so bad."

Shay took a turn next. She pushed me onto my back again and buried her face between my legs, and she was better than any man who'd been on me all day. She knew exactly where to press, where to flick, how to build. She ate the cum out of me like it was dessert, then crawled up and spat it into my mouth, a long, slow string of it falling from her lips to mine.

"Swallow," she said, and I did.

Then one of the guys pushed into Shay from behind while she was still between my legs, and the motion of him fucking her pressed her mouth against my pussy in a rhythm, and I came again, and she came, and he came, and we were all just a tangle of bodies and fluids and noise.

They made me eat pussy too. Candy sat on my face while two guys took turns fucking me, and I licked her because there was nothing else to do, and she tasted like salt and leather and something sweet, and she ground against my mouth and came on my tongue and I felt another cock pulse inside me and more cum filling me up.

By evening I was a wreck. Cum in my hair, on my face, on my tits, between my legs, inside me, everywhere. My jaw ached. My pussy was swollen and sensitive. My knees had rug burn. I'd been fucked by more men in one day than in my entire life combined. I'd swallowed more cum than I thought possible. I'd been spit-roasted, Eiffel-Towered, face-fucked, and used in ways I didn't have names for.

And the worst part, the part I couldn't stop thinking about as Max carried me back to that back room and laid me on the bed and put a blanket over me, was that some part of me, some deep, traitorous, undeniable part, had loved it.

"You did good," Max said. He brushed hair out of my face with a gentleness that seemed impossible from a man who'd been balls-deep in my throat six hours ago.

"I hate you," I said.

"No you don't," he said. He was right.

Day two was worse. Or better. I still can't decide. More men. Different positions. They tied me to a bench at one point, wrists and ankles, and took turns. I came four times. By day three I stopped pretending I wasn't into it. By day five I was initiating. By day eight I asked Max to stay after the others left and he fucked me slow, face to face, and I looked into his eyes and came so hard I cried.

Derek came to get me on day fourteen. He stood in the doorway of the clubhouse with an envelope full of cash, looking at me like I was something damaged. I was wearing one of Max's shirts and nothing else, drinking coffee at the bar, surrounded by men who'd been inside me every which way for two weeks.

"Let's go," Derek said.

I looked at Max. Max looked at me. He shrugged, just barely.

"Erica," Derek said. "Let's go home."

I stood up. I walked past Derek. I kept walking. I got in the passenger seat of his car and didn't say a word the entire drive home.

Two days later I went back. Not because Derek owed more money. He'd paid it. I went back because I wanted to. I walked into that clubhouse in jeans and a t-shirt, found Max at the bar, and kissed him.

"I'm not collateral anymore," I said.

"I know," he said.

"So what are you calling me?"

He smiled behind that white beard. "My girl."

Derek filed for divorce a month later. I didn't contest it. I kept the house. He kept his debt problems. Last I heard he moved in with his mother.

I live at the clubhouse now. I teach Pilates to the old ladies on weekends. On weeknights, I'm still free-use, but only because I like it. Max says I'm the best thing Derek ever lost. I say I'm the best thing that ever happened to this club.

We're probably both right.