I'm putting this is in the BDSM section, so if you want ice cold dehumanization and extreme humiliation you only need to hit back to browse through hundreds of stories about that kind of thing. If you're looking for a romance flavoured with frequent missteps, D/S, and lots of light BDSM (gradually getting a little bit heavier as the chapters go on), then get yourself some snacks or a cold drink, sit back and relax. This is the story for you.
Also I wrote this to appeal to both men and women, so both characters get nearly equal first person POV time, and I think you'll find they both seem fun and identifiable.
Will
The young Asian woman was silent as she gazed out the airplane's plastic window at the sprawling city of neon, technicolored lights that lay twinkling in the desert below us. I quietly leaned over my seat and peered past her. Just a few miles away, I could see the hotels and casinos of the Strip, tall and modern and garishly beautiful. Las Vegas was the only city I had ever visited that looked more alive at night than during the day.
"Impressed, Saki? Don't be. It's the tackiest city on Earth."
Saki looked over her shoulder at me with an amused little half-smile.
"Oh is that so? And what makes you so sure of that Will, when we both know you haven't visited every city in the world yet?" She pushed me lightly on my shoulder, and I sat back down in my seat with my usual shit-eating grin plastered across my face.
I cuffed her lightly on side of her head, "Don't get smart with me, young lady."
She stuck out at her tongue, and made an en-garde gesture with her plastic fork, "Explain yourself then sir, lest I be forced to chastise you for your foppish lies!"
I laughed and held up my hands in defeat.
"Well, here's how I see it. Las Vegas has almost no culture of its own, so it just imports ideas from other places, and fucks them up super badly. Just wait until you see Caesar's Palace. It's this big casino on the Strip that's literally done in the style of ancient Rome. Statues, fountains, little busts of the Emperors. It's so stupid it's kind of charming."
Saki had dropped her guard, so I plucked the fork from her fingers, and put it in the seat pocket in front of me. "Oh come on, that was too easy. You're such an amateur."
Saki leaned back in her seat and rolled her eyes at me, as if the fork was suddenly of no more interest to her than all of the possible new boyfriends I'd teasingly pointed out for her over the course of the flight. "You're kidding about that Caesar's Palace place, right?"
"You don't believe me?"
Saki laughed. "No I do, but it just sounds so ridiculous." She glanced out the window one more time before sliding it shut. "I guess you have to take me there to prove it."
I ruffled her hair because I knew it would annoy her. "It's a deal."
The PA system on the airplane soon booted up with a chime, and a flight attendant announced that we were beginning descent into the Las Vegas area, and that they were coming down the aisle to collect garbage, and if we would please return our seat tables to their upright and locked position and stay in our seats they would be much obliged.
I glanced at my watch. It was 5:30. That meant we were right on time. The sun would rise in a few hours. I'd slept yesterday afternoon, but Saki had taken a short nap on the plane. It hadn't really been necessary for us to take overnight flight to Las Vegas from Toronto but I'd wanted a day to spend hitting the Strip before the reunion got me down.
Saki returned her seat table to its upright and locked position, and drained her little plastic cup of Sprite, handing it to me. "When is your family reunion again?"
I handed the cup off to a flight attendant who was coming down the aisle with an open garbage bag. "It's tomorrow at three, and I don't want to be there a second earlier."
Saki was looking at me with a concerned expression. "You really hate them, huh?" I sighed in exasperation and nodded. "Are you sure you don't want to talk about it?"
"I'm sure." I flashed her a quick smile.
"Okay," Saki shrugged. She didn't like to probe. "I suppose you can at least be grateful your grandparents are paying for this flight and the hotel and stuff."
I let out a breath, "No. I owe them fuck all. Think of it like a business transaction. I'm doing them a favour by coming down, and they're doing me a favour by paying for it. "
She hit me, but it was half-hearted, "Oh come on. That's disrespectful."
I had to give it to her, she didn't know how funny she sounded. I suppose I hadn't told her how or why they were so fucking rich. It wasn't something you bragged about.
I suppose it might seem strange that I was travelling with a friend to a city she had never visited for an event she wasn't going to attend, so to briefly explain, my grandmother had arranged for all the family to fly down to Vegas for a family reunion at her expense, and I, being the slick son of a bitch that I was, had told her I had been planning on spending the break with my girlfriend Tammy, and I wouldn't come if she couldn't come as well. I'd ended up conning her out of a room at a nice hotel on the Strip and two business class tickets. Then to nobody's surprise but my own apparently, I'd broken up with Tammy three days later, and I'd decided that rather than letting my extra ticket go to waste, I'd go ahead and offer it to Saki, my best friend from high school, whom I hadn't seen since Christmas.
There was a bump as the plane got lower and it was buffeted by the wind. Saki looked at me excitedly, "Wow! Did you feel that? It went crazy there for a second!"
I laughed at her enthusiasm. "I felt it, yeah, the same as I've felt every other bump, twist, and gut-wrenching fall this plane has gone through over the past four hours."
Saki frowned at me, "Oh sorry Columbus, I forgot you're such a jaded traveller." I have to say she sounded just a little bit more sarcastic than apologetic. I was in no way a travel expert, but when I was a kid, I'd used to fly from Toronto to Las Vegas every Christmas to visit my grandparents who had big house in a local gated community.
Eventually we descended into the Airport. The plane connected with the tarmac after a few partial thuds, and came rolling to a stop a few minutes later. We unbuckled our seatbelts and got our carry-on luggage from the overhead compartment. Thanks to our excellent seats, we ended up being two of the first people off the plane.
We didn't have to go through Customs here because the because the United States and Canada were still friendly enough that we'd been able to do it because back in Toronto before take-off, which was a plus in my opinion. Luckily we hadn't been stopped.
I led Saki through the terminal down to the road. Even here, there were people using slot machines in separate, cordoned off sections of the Airport. The way Las Vegas seemed to embrace its own image as the gambling capital of the world had always fascinated me. Every mall, every corner shop, every grocery store, even some of the fancy restaurants had their own slot machines, and almost always enough people to use them.
There was a taxi already waiting for us in the parking lot outside the Airport. The driver was a nice Swedish guy with a really thick accent and bulging muscles who took all our bags to the back in one trip. I wondered to myself why a Swede was working a minimum wage job in Las Vegas, but when I decided to ask him, his response was vague and lead me to believe he wasn't welcome by the government in his home country.
I talked with Saki for the rest of the ride. More than anything, she was fascinated by the palm trees that seemed to grow every few metres by the side of the road.
"They really aren't that unusual, you know. From what I've seen, they grow them all over the southern United States." She looked at me and scratched her nose unconsciously, and I knew her well enough to know that meant she wanted to hear more.
I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to think of anything I could add.
"There isn't much else to say. They aren't coconut trees or anything...Did you know in Hawaii they have to hire people to keep coconut trees trimmed because otherwise a ripe coconut can fall off like a bowling ball and crack someone's head wide open?"
"No," Saki shook her head, "I've never been outside Canada before."
"Not even to Japan? I thought you had family down there."
Saki looked at me for a minute, perhaps a little hurt. "No, I thought I already told you this. I almost went when we were kids, but when my mother told her parents she probably wasn't ever going to move back to Tokyo, they called the whole thing off."
I hit myself upside the head as the memory came to me.
"Oh right,
that
summer." When we'd been kids, Saki had spent every summer playing video games with me on my N64 at my house until I went to Vegas. Once when I was nine, she'd told me two weeks in advance that she wouldn't be able to come over again that year, but then abruptly showed up anyway. "I can't believe I forgot."
A faint smile touched the corners of Saki's lips as she stared out the window, "That's okay, it's totally understandable. It was a long time ago. Hey look, a mirage!"
I turned around to see what she was pointing at. "Oh yeah, that."
In the summer, patches of Las Vegas sometimes get so hot that the air shimmers, kind of like when a kid presses his finger down on an LCD display and the screen goes all warped and colourful. That's what Saki was seeing now. In the outdoor malls, they sometimes have steel poles that look a lot like street lights and spray mist into the air, which enhances the illusion wherever the little roaming droplets of water happen to touch. When I was a little kid, I used to love standing underneath the polls and basking in the sun.
When we arrived at the Casino and stepped out into the street, the heat hit us like a stifling polyester blanket had been suddenly tossed over our heads, and practically ripping our luggage out of the trunk, we sprinted for the sliding glass doors like lunatics.
I'd never stayed in a Casino before, so I was kind of excited to see what kind of accommodation we would be getting as I checked in at the front desk. I'd seen the price my grandmother was paying for just three nights in this place, so I expected the room to be damned nice. I have to admit I was far from disappointed. It was pretty
