John Gold Spankless (Spanky to his friends) is always on the search for something new. He's still a student, but it seems like he's done everything already. When he meets a new Master online, he's sure he'll try something he's never done before; but...
In case it isn't clear, this chapter was originally the start of the third book, The Other Side. On Kindle, this part will be The Other Chick. I hope you don't mind a little extra exposition here, so that new readers can understand what's going on without having read the earlier parts.
This chapter is dedicated to Killian; with many thanks for helping to support me on Patreon so that I can afford to keep on writing.
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The theatre was almost crowded, but not quite. There was an empty chair or two between each group of friends in the audience, but more often one vacant seat than two. They were watching a movie that, two years before, John Gold Spankless would have expected could only attract a dozen fans. At most.
That just went to show how wrong he'd been. Spanky didn't mind being proved wrong though, because he wasn't particularly attached to his opinion or to his reputation. He was the kind of free-spirited fox who didn't care what others thought, and he'd found that having some of his opinions turned upside down was worth it if he found something new to occupy his time. He couldn't really understand the movie, but he was lucky because he had Dawn to explain it to him. Sometimes, her words felt like they were opening his head up, and he was experiencing something wonderful. Spanky really liked being introduced to new experiences.
That was how he'd ended up entangled with both a tiger and a leopard at the same time. And that was how he'd started dating Dawn too, although she didn't know about the others. That was how he'd started calling a man he met online 'Master', and found himself hypnotised, unable to disobey. And that was how he found himself in a situation where he couldn't lie to his girlfriends any longer.
Dawn would be the hardest, he'd known that from the start. He wasn't sure if he was actually in love with her, or what precisely his feelings were. He knew he enjoyed the sex, and he loved a lot of the things they'd done together. When they spent an afternoon at the movies, or an evening listening to some esoteric philosopher at an open-mic night, he was often surprised to notice how much he'd actually had a good time. But he didn't know if that added up to 'love', whatever normal people meant by the term. He'd said he loved her often enough, but that was when he'd been Spanky the habitual liar, saying whatever seemed like a good idea at the time.
It would be hard to tell her the truth, because then she'd know just how many lies he'd told. Maybe she would leave him, and he wouldn't blame her. Or maybe she'd turn around and claw his eyes out. He wouldn't have been entirely surprised; and he would have proved several of his friends right. When they told him never to date a falcon, he'd somehow just assumed that his experience wouldn't go the same as everyone else's. Notoriously short-tempered, they said, a hawk had no emotional control when they were angry. He'd asked Dawn about that once, when they were both too comfortable to move much and talking seemed to be the only option. She'd said that was why she sank herself into philosophy, so that the things that might make her angry were just abstract questions, that could only be attacked by thinking about them.
