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now.”
    She gave a high, raucous hoot. “A spiritual experience? You, Nicholas? So what are you saying? Did you get Born Again, join the Moonies, give up your soul to Lord Krishna?”
    “Please, Beth, I’m serious.”
    “Then fucking tell me what you’re talking about!”
    “I can’t. I want to explain, but I can’t. I do love you. Please just believe that. Please just be –”
    “Are you leaving me, Nicholas?”
    “I just can’t come home yet, I –”
    “Then you know what, Nicholas? Go to hell. Just go to hell!”
    She hung up the phone.
    “This isn’t enough. I want more – everything you can do to me,” Nicholas said to the dominatrix. “I don’t give a damn about pain. I don’t care if you make me bleed. What I want is to go beyond my normal limits, to be outside myself. Whatever it takes, I want you to do it.”
    Madame Yvette was gossamer pale, ethereal-looking with grey eyes like circles cut from glassy envelopes and long hair, braided down her back, a violent shade of red. Her milky, finely freckled skin contrasted vividly with the black leather regalia, the fetish boots and studded wrist bands, the black lipstick and the riding crop that Nicholas had watched her wield with delicate precision against the buttocks of the bound and blindfolded “slave” that he’d just fucked.
    “You’re not one of my regulars,” she said. “I like to move slowly with a new client. I need to determine your tolerance for pain and humiliation. I’ve had clients lose it in the middle of a scene and try to rip my throat out.”
    “My tolerance for pain is high,” snapped Nicholas. “And if I were going to ‘lose it’ in the middle of a sex scene, I’d have done that long ago. What I want –” he hesitated, groped for the right words “– is to be transported mentally, to lose myself so where I end and you begin becomes unclear. Does that make sense? Can you give me an experience that’s so intense it clouds the mind and yet, at the same time, clears it?”
    “Short of killing you, you mean?” said Madame Yvette.
    “Short of killing me.”
    “You don’t mind blood?”
    “Not if bleeding gets me to the place I want to be.”
    Madame Yvette considered this. Finally she said, “I don’t like dealing with crazy and unstable people. They’re dangerous to me and to my business. Neither am I interested in assisting suicide. So tell me, Nicholas: are you one of the crazy, unstable people?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Madame Yvette touched his wrist with her bright, black nails and left a tiny scratch. “Then perhaps we will find out.”
    Her dungeon was considered the priciest and best equipped in Toronto, where Madame and her girls had served the masochistic needs of some of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful for many years. Suitably foreboding, it was a pod of individual cells connected to a central hall. Gloomily, it reminded Nicholas of the time he’d spent behind bars, although the prison accommodation he remembered had been vastly more cheerful and definitely better lit.
    She ordered Nicholas to strip, which he did, then manacled him to a crossbeam, arms above his head, legs splayed. His first instinct, when the manacles were tightened painfully around his wrists, was to try to free himself and fuck her till she screamed. Submissiveness was not his natural inclination. All the more reason then, he figured, that he should experience it. Maybe that was the key, he reasoned. Maybe subservience and suffering would bring him to that transcendent point where Nicholas ceased to exist and something else filled the void.
    And though she whipped and paddled him until he screamed, tortured him with excruciating nippleclamps, choked him till lights blinked on and off in his head and his orgasms were broken up with spaces of unconsciousness, nothing occurred that ever exceeded the realm of the physical, and Nicholas was always Nicholas – more than ever, in fact, when his ego raged at Madame