Who Wants to Lock Down a Billionaire - Jamie Knight Page 0,3

had struck. Every member got their own run of the cutting-edge equipment. And an army of staff was deployed with masks, gloves and spray bottles of specially formulated cleaner to wipe everything down for the next user.

I always tried to leave them something. Such as a clip of bills under the treadmill that I must have ‘forgotten.’ Occasionally, I would be surprised by the reappearance of the cash the next time I checked in. The custom made, monogrammed shamrock money clips clearly marked them as mine.

Slowly, I got into the zone. The thump of my feet on the treadmill matched almost exactly the drums beats on my earbuds and the thumping of my heart. Things can really fall into sync when you’re focused enough, especially if you are willing to take the risk of not being ‘normal.’

The greatest accomplishment of my life, in my own tally of things, was that I was never in the strictest sense normal. Even my mother described me as an ‘odd duck’ by the time I was ten. Even the circumstances of my arrival, the only child of a nominally Catholic single mother, fit clearly in the abnormal column. Nurture had very little to do with it, anyway.

Ours was the kind of happy town where people would sit out on the front porch with frosty lemonade on a hot day and converse with passersby. Everybody knew everybody else, and their business, for generations running. Skeletons were displayed out on the yard as opposed to hidden in the closet. No one was safe from an entertainment’s worth of judgement.

Instead of becoming embittered about this fact of life, or oppressed by it, I decided to give them all something worth talking about. Rather than running with the herds of kids seen about the town, playing football or roving on their bikes in search of the perfect flavor of ice cream, I was more of a loner. It was a point of pride rather than shame.

My conspicuous absence at Sunday Mass was the first point of conflict between myself and traditional society. As it would be a scandal to have gentlemen turn up at my mother’s door, a deputation of the parish’s most upstanding lady members came to redress the issue.

“Adam wasn’t at church today,” I had heard Mrs. Walpole say, as though announcing a tragic death.

“That’s true,” my mother answered. “He preferred to stay home and read.”

“And you approve of this?” Mrs. Brown injected.

“It makes little difference to me either way. Though he does seem to know the Bible better than even Father Drone.”

I was known locally as ‘the little heathen’ as long as I remained in the town, a moniker that took some years to top.

I never thought much about my proclivities. They seemed as natural to me as my height or hair color. Most people think that BDSM is about violence or at least pain, and that could well be true for some. There were a lot of fetishes that required significant amounts of pain, which was perfectly fine if that was what both parties wanted.

It was about getting pleasure from hurting someone. It was a mutual erotic behavior, involving people who get off on hurting people who want to be hurt.

For me, it was about having complete control over those who wanted to be controlled, who got a thrill out of being entirely under the power of another whom they trusted not to actually harm them. The distinction between ‘hurt’ and ‘harm’ was extremely important for people like me.

The ads were running everywhere. My online show was getting coverage in traditional media. It was a coup if there ever was one. But I had a history of doing the impossible. The only way to know the limits of the possible is to go past them. It was the secret of my success, as they say.

I was skeptical at first. The studio had come to me rather than the other way around. Basically, their number crunchers had realized I would draw ratings by name alone and my kinks had been an open secret for years, which gave the whole thing a whiff of sex and scandal. A whiff turned into a stench when it came down to the actual format and promotion.

Still, I went with it. The studio tried to pay me, but I turned them down flat. The last thing I needed was more money. It wasn’t even the sex that was the seller. I liked sex quite a bit and wasn’t about to