Iris, the Witch

*Book two. Iris is 21.*

The football team had won five straight, and it was ruining Iris's sex life.

She was twenty-one, a senior, co-captain of the cheer squad, and for most of that fall she had been sleeping with Coach Simmons. Not the head coach. The defensive coordinator, forty-four, thick through the neck, with a wedding ring he took off and put in the cup holder. It had started in August, in the weight room, and he had been good: a grown man who took his time and knew his way around a woman. She had thought that was the answer. Then came September, and three straight losses, the last of them by sixty-two points at home. He had come off the field white with rage, and she had followed him into the equipment room on a dare she'd made with herself, and he had bent her over a stack of tackling dummies and fucked her as if she'd personally blown the coverage.

She had walked back to her dorm on shaking legs, with fingerprints on her hips, feeling as though somebody had finally turned the lights on.

That was what she had been missing. She had only ever had it on a laptop screen before, at one in the morning, with her own hand. She'd had plenty of sex. She was a blonde with a cheerleader's body, double Ds and a waist you could circle and an ass that had its own following in the student section, and boys had been falling over themselves to be nice to her since she was eighteen. That was the whole trouble. They were *nice*. They asked if she was okay. They said *is this all right* and *tell me if it hurts*, and came in four minutes, and thanked her.

Simmons hadn't asked anything. He had put a hand on the back of her neck and held her down. He had spanked her until she came from that alone, and pulled her hair, and called her things, in a low furious voice, that she had waited her whole life to be called.

She went back for more on the Monday.

But the team had won on the Saturday, and it kept on winning. A winning Coach Simmons was a different animal. He was cheerful. He whistled. He said *hey, sweetheart* and stroked her hair. He said he was sorry about that day in the equipment room; he'd been in a bad place, and it wasn't like him. One terrible Tuesday he lit a candle. He did not know how to be rough with her. He only knew how to be angry, and he wasn't angry any more. And lying under him that night, being made love to, Iris understood something that made her cold all over.

He had never been doing it for her. He'd been rough because he was angry. She had just happened to be standing where the anger landed. She'd taken it for something he was giving her, and it had only ever been his mood.

*I can't keep losing football games to get laid properly,* she thought, staring at the ceiling. *That's not a plan.*

She tried the other thing she knew how to do, which was manage him. She was good at managing men. It was most of what being pretty had taught her. She sulked. She provoked him. She showed up late, in his wife's parking spot. She told him the offensive line coach had better hands. He only laughed, and kissed her forehead, and said she was a firecracker.

By the last week of October she was climbing the walls. She was wet all the time, a low stupid ache that never went away. She caught herself staring at men's hands in lecture halls.

And three evenings a week, on the treadmill in the campus gym, she watched the maintenance crew lift.

There were three of them. They looked after her dorm and the two beside it, and they came in at six, when the place was nearly empty, and took over the free weights in the corner. She had started timing her runs for it without admitting to herself that she was.

They were not boys. That was the first thing. They were grown men who worked with their bodies all day and then came here and worked them some more.

And they were not from her world. That was the second thing, and everybody in the dorm knew it. Buildings and Grounds hired through a county re-entry program. *Second Chance*, it said on a plaque in the housing office. The girls on her floor said it more plainly: the janitors were ex-cons, all three, and you didn't go down to the basement alone.

You could see it on them. They were inked, every one. Not the neat little tattoos boys got on spring break. Old work, blue-black and blurred, done with whatever had been to hand. Ray had something crawling up the side of his neck out of his collar. Stu had letters across the knuckles of both hands. Frank's forearms were sleeved from wrist to elbow, and when he spotted the bar, a faded line of script flexed along the tendon. Their skin was like nothing she had ever touched: rough, tanned, weathered by years of outdoor work, nicked and scarred, the hands cracked and callused hard as boot leather. They were thick with a kind of muscle you didn't get from a meal plan. They lifted in silence, no mirrors, no posing, like men who had learned to do it in a yard.

She learned them from the treadmill, one at a time. Ray was the tallest man she had ever seen up close, six and a half feet of him, long-boned and roped, all tendon and reach, with arms that went on and on and big knuckly hands at the ends of them. He lifted in a gray T-shirt that went black under the arms and down the spine within ten minutes. Stu was the shortest and the widest: a barrel of a chest, a neck as thick as her thigh, forearms furred dark and heavy as hams, a hard round belly like a keg that he did not care about at all. And Frank was neither the tallest nor the widest. He was the densest. Heavy through the shoulders and the chest, thick at the wrist, built low and solid, like something poured. When he sat down on a bench it creaked.

She caught herself in the mirror beside them once: a little white blonde thing in pink running shorts, five foot four, all curves and no edges, her ponytail swinging. She looked like a different species.

They kept their eyes down around students. All of them. They stepped aside in hallways. They called the eighteen-year-olds *miss*. She had never seen men so large work so hard at taking up no room.

Iris had grown up with a pool and a pony. She was pale and blonde and soft-handed, with skin like cream that had never seen a day's real work, and she had never been in any real trouble in her life. She looked at those three hard, marked, careful men in the mirror, and something low in her belly turned over. The youngest, a tall one the others called Ray, had shoulders like a door lintel. The stocky one, Stu, laughed a lot and benched more than the linebackers. And the oldest, the one who ran the crew. Frank. She knew his name from the work orders taped to the shower doors: *Lock replaced. F. Brennan, B&G.*

Frank was maybe thirty-two. He wasn't the biggest of them, and he was the one she couldn't stop looking at. He spotted the other two, and he did it with one hand held an inch under the bar, never touching it, ready. When he spoke, which wasn't often, the young ones shut up and listened. Once, Ray had said something with his eyes on a girl walking past, and Frank had only looked at him. Just looked. Ray had dropped his eyes to the floor.

Iris, running, had felt that look go straight between her legs.

*That one,* she thought. *That one doesn't do anything he hasn't decided to do.*

She had no idea yet how right she was, or how much trouble it was going to cause her.

## The Costume

Halloween fell on a Saturday. The team won again. There was a party at the Kappa Sig house, the kind that people would still be lying about in ten years.

Iris loved dressing up, and she had a simple rule about costumes: the less there was of it, the better it worked. This year she was a witch.

She laid it out on the bed and put it on slowly, the way you'd load a gun.

A bodice of black satin, boned and laced up the front, cut so low and pulled so tight that it didn't so much hold her tits as present them. They rode high on her chest in two deep, firm, pale curves, pushed together into a line of cleavage a man could lose a hand in, and when she breathed, the whole shelf of them rose and fell. A skirt that was mostly an idea: three layers of black net over a strip of velvet, standing out stiff from her hips and ending before her ass did. From behind, standing straight, you could see the lower curve of both cheeks. Bending, you could see everything.

Under that, a thong of black mesh so sheer it was only a shadow. Black hold-up stockings with a wide band of lace at the top of each thigh. Black patent heels, six inches, with a strap around the ankle. And the hat: tall, pointed, wide-brimmed, tipped over one eye.

She looked at herself in the long mirror on the closet door. Blonde hair loose down her back. That sweet, wide-eyed, church-choir face that had been getting her out of trouble her whole life, on top of a body dressed like that.

Her pulse was already between her legs. She pressed her thighs together and felt how wet she was, just from looking. Her hand drifted down the front of the little skirt.

*No.* She made a fist and put it behind her back. *Save it. Tonight somebody else does that.*

She picked up her keys. She had a plan, more or less. The plan was the Kappa Sig house, and two hundred drunk boys, and at least one of them, surely, statistically, who would know what to do with her.

## The Party

The house was a wall of noise and heat. Bass coming up through the floor. Fog machine, strobe, somebody's plastic skeleton hanging from the chandelier in a jockstrap. Every boy in the place was dressed as a football player or a pirate, and every one of them turned around when she walked in.

She gave it an hour. She danced. She drank one cup of something red and poured the second into a plant. She let herself be passed from hand to hand across the dance floor, grinding back against whatever was behind her, and felt them get hard against her ass one after another, and waited to feel something.

She found two of them around midnight. Or they found her. Brody and somebody. Brody was a tight end, twenty-two, six foot four, dressed as a gladiator in a plastic breastplate. The other one was a lacrosse player in a toga. They were both very large and very drunk and they both had their hands on her before she'd finished saying hello.

*Fine,* she thought. *Two. Two could work. Two is at least a start.*

She took them upstairs herself. That should have been her first clue.

It was somebody's bedroom, with a lava lamp and a flag on the wall. The gladiator kicked the door shut. And for about ninety seconds it was good. It was really good. They were big, and eager, and there were four hands on her at once, pulling at the laces, hauling her tits out of the bodice. The toga got his mouth on one and sucked like he meant it. The gladiator shoved the little skirt up from behind and groaned out loud at what he found.

"Holy shit. Holy *shit*, dude, look at her ass."

"I know, bro. I *know*."

She was bent over the desk. The thong was yanked aside. A thick, blunt cock pushed against her, missed, pushed again, and slid in, and she gasped, because he was big, and for one second she thought, *yes, okay, here we go*.

"Oh my God," the gladiator said. "Oh my God, you're so tight. Is this okay? Are you good?"

Her heart sank like a stone in a pond.

"I'm good," she said. "Harder."

"Yeah? You sure?"

"*Harder.* Pull my hair."

He took hold of her hair the way you'd hold a hamster. He gave it a little tug. "Like that?"

*Oh, for God's sake.*

She tried. She really did. She reached back and put his hand on her hip and dug his fingers in herself. She pushed back onto him, hard, setting the pace, doing the work. She got the toga's cock out, and it was a nice one, and she went down on it with real enthusiasm, slurping, moaning, trying to drag the two of them up to where she was by sheer force of will.

"Fuck," said the toga, weaving on his feet. "Fuck, that's, I'm gonna..."

"Not yet!"

Too late. He came in her mouth with a startled yelp, about a minute and a half in, sat down heavily on the bed, and said, "Sorry. Sorry. That was awesome. You're awesome."

Behind her the gladiator had found a rhythm at last, a fast, shallow, jackrabbit thing with no weight behind it. He was saying *oh yeah, oh yeah* in a voice she was fairly sure he'd learned from a video. She gritted her teeth and worked her clit with her own fingers and chased it, and got close, got *so* close...

He pulled out, came across her ass in three hot stripes, and high-fived his friend.

She actually heard the slap of it. Over her back. While she was still bent over the desk.

"Dude."

"*Dude.*"

"That was so hot," the gladiator told her sincerely, patting her hip. "You're, like, the hottest girl here. Do you want a water? I'm gonna get a water."

Iris stayed where she was for a moment, with her forehead on somebody's chemistry textbook and a stranger's cum cooling on her skin, throbbing, unfinished, so frustrated she could have screamed.

They hadn't done anything wrong. That was the maddening part. They were sweet. They'd been as rough as they knew how to be, which was not at all. They were two big friendly puppies who had been handed something they had no idea what to do with.

*They're boys,* she thought. *That's all. They're just boys. I could have run that whole thing from start to finish with my eyes closed. I* did *run it.*

And then, clear as a bell, the thought she had been walking around for a month:

*I don't want to run it.*

She cleaned herself up with somebody's T-shirt. She laced her bodice. She put her hat back on, straightened it in the mirror, and walked down the stairs and out the front door of the Kappa Sig house without saying goodbye to anyone.

The night air hit her sweaty skin like a slap. It was one in the morning. She stood on the lawn among the crushed cups, in her ridiculous heels, with her whole body humming like a struck wire.

Her dorm was six minutes away. So was its basement.

They worked late on game nights. She knew, because she'd seen the light under the door.

## The Basement

The maintenance office was past the laundry room, at the end of a corridor of pipes. It smelled of floor wax and burnt coffee. There was a line of yellow light under the door, and a radio playing low.

She stood outside it for almost a minute. Her mouth was dry.

*What exactly are you going to say?*

She didn't know. That was the truth. She had never in her life had to ask for it. Boys came to her. Simmons she had provoked. Her whole method with men was to arrange things so that what she wanted looked like their idea, and she was very, very good at it. She didn't have the words for the other way. *Please take me apart* wasn't a sentence she knew how to say out loud to a stranger.

*So don't say it. Make them do it. You know how.*

She tipped her hat, licked her lips, and opened the door without knocking.

Three heads came up.

It was a low room, crowded and warm. A steel desk heaped with work orders. A cracked vinyl couch. Shelves of parts. Ray was by the door with a ring of keys in his hand, and he forgot to put it down. Stu was half out of his coveralls, the sleeves knotted at his waist, his undershirt dark at the collar. Frank sat behind the desk with a pencil in his hand.

"This is staff only," Frank said. He didn't get up. "You need something fixed, you put in a ticket."

She did the voice. It had never once failed her: small, breathy, a little lost.

"I'm so sorry. I didn't know." She crossed the room, slowly, hips swinging, and perched on the corner of his desk so the little skirt rode up to the lace of her stockings. "I think there's somebody in my room. I heard a noise. I'm too scared to go up by myself." She looked at him from under the brim of the hat. "Couldn't one of you big strong men come and check?"

Nobody moved. Through the wall, a dryer turned.

Ray's eyes went down her legs, came all the way back up, and went to Frank.

Frank looked at her for a long moment. Not at the bodice. At her face.

"Nobody's in your room," he said.

It was like stepping on a stair that wasn't there.

"I... yes, there is, I heard..."

"No, miss." He said it mildly. "I've seen scared. That's not what scared looks like."

That was all. He didn't argue it. He just didn't buy it, and went back to his paperwork.

Heat climbed her throat. Nobody had ever done that to her. Nobody had ever simply declined to be handled.

*Oh,* something in her said, very quietly. *Oh, I like him.*

"Go on up to bed, miss," Frank said, not unkindly, and picked up his pencil.

She didn't go.

*All right,* she thought. *All right. You want to do it the hard way.*

She slid off the desk. And she set about making herself the most enormous nuisance that basement had ever seen.

She started with Stu, because he was closest and he was the one whose eyes kept dropping to her chest. He'd turned back to the workbench and was pretending, badly, to sort a coffee can of washers. She came up beside him and leaned on her elbows on the bench, which did things to the bodice that she was fully aware of.

"What are those?"

"Washers."

"What do they do?"

"They, uh." He swallowed. "They go under a nut."

"Under a nut," Iris repeated gravely. She picked one up and looked through the hole in it at him. "Show me."

"Miss, I really can't..."

She reached across him for another one. It meant pressing the whole length of her body along his arm. Her tit flattened, warm and firm, against his bicep, and stayed there. She felt him stop breathing.

"Sorry," she said. "It's so crowded in here."

It was not remotely crowded in there.

"Stu," said Frank, without looking up.

Stu took a large step sideways. He was red to the ears.

She moved on. She found the radio and turned the dial to a different station. She opened a cabinet and took things out and asked what they were. She picked up Frank's coffee mug, sniffed it, made a face, and set it down on the far side of the desk from where he'd had it. She sat on the couch, and crossed her legs, and uncrossed them, and bounced a little to test the springs, and got up again.

When none of that got a rise, she went after what she'd heard upstairs.

"Is it true?" she asked the room, swinging her foot. "What they say about you three?"

Nobody answered.

"The girls on my floor say you've all been to prison." She let her eyes go wide. "They say you're *dangerous*. I'm not supposed to come down here by myself." She picked up Stu's hand off the workbench, before he could move it, and turned it over and read his knuckles aloud, one letter at a time, tracing each with a fingertip. "What did you do, Stu? Was it bad?"

"Miss, put my hand down," Stu said, in a strangled voice. "Please."

"You don't look dangerous." She dropped it and wandered toward Ray, looking him up and down, six and a half feet of him. "None of you do. You look scared to death. Three great big jailbirds, hiding in a basement from a cheerleader." She clicked her tongue. "I thought convicts were supposed to be tough."

She saw it land. Ray's jaw bunched. A dull flush came up his neck, under the ink.

"Ray," Frank said quietly.

"I heard her."

"Then you heard nothing. She's a kid running her mouth."

*Oh, I am not a kid,* Iris thought, and went for the key cabinet.

Ray was trying to get past her to it. She happened to be standing right in front of it. He went left. She drifted left. He went right.

"Excuse me," Ray said, through his teeth.

"Oh! Am I in the way?"

She turned around, as if to move, and backed up instead. Straight into him. The top of her head came to the middle of his chest. Her ass fit against the front of his work pants, both cheeks, bare under the net, and she rolled her hips once, slow, exactly the way she'd done it on the dance floor an hour before.

He was hard. He was already very hard. She felt the length of it, a thick bar lying along the cleft of her ass through the canvas, and it jumped.

"Hmm," she said, over her shoulder. "Guess not."

Ray's hands had come up on their own. They hovered an inch off her hips, shaking.

"Frank," he said hoarsely. "Come *on*, man."

"No."

"She's doing it on purpose!"

"I know she's doing it on purpose." Frank had put the pencil down again. He was watching her now with his arms folded, and there was something in his face that hadn't been there before. Patience. A kind of grim interest. Like a man watching a kid try every key on the ring. "Hands down, Ray."

Ray put his hands down. He looked like he might cry.

---

Frank had done four years in a state facility for something he'd done at twenty-two and did not discuss. Ray had done two. Stu, eighteen months. This job was the only door that had opened for any of them afterward, and Frank had exactly one rule that mattered: you do not touch the students. You don't look at them too long. You don't joke with them. You fix the lock and you go. He had seen two men on this crew violated straight back inside on nothing but a girl's say-so, one of them for something he hadn't even done. Nobody takes an ex-con's word over a tuition check.

None of them was ever going back. That was the whole of their religion.

When it got bad, and it did get bad, there was a stretch of Delancey Avenue down by the bus depot, and forty dollars, and a tired woman who knew the score and couldn't cost a man his freedom. That was how the three of them managed. It wasn't much. It was safe.

They knew how to be rough. All three. They had learned it in places this girl could not have imagined, and they had spent every day since keeping it locked down. That was what she was poking at with her little painted fingernail, without the first idea what it was.

And this one. He'd clocked her weeks ago, on the treadmill, pretending not to stare. A cheerleader. Somebody's rich blonde daughter, bored on a Saturday night, come slumming in a Halloween costume to see if she could get the help in trouble.

That was what he had assumed, for about the first five minutes.

He wasn't so sure now. He had been watching her face. She was working too hard. A girl who only wanted to tease would've had her fun and flounced out by now, laughing. This one kept coming back. Trying one thing and then another. And under the pout and the wiggle there was something almost frantic, a look he knew from the far side of a lot of locked bathroom doors: *somebody please figure out what's wrong with me, because I can't say it.*

*She's not playing with us,* he thought slowly. *She's asking. She just doesn't know how.*

He was going to make her do it properly, or not at all.

---

Iris ran out of things to pick up.

She stood in the middle of the room, breathing a little hard. She had used everything. The voice, the eyes, the lean, the brush, the grind. Every trick that had worked on every man since she was eighteen. Two of them were ready to come out of their skins. And the one who counted was sitting behind his desk with his arms crossed, calm as a brick wall, *waiting*.

She was furious. She was also wetter than she had ever been in her life. It was running down the inside of her thigh, under the stocking top.

*He's not going to let me do it my way.* The understanding came up through her slowly, like cold water. *I can't maneuver him. I can't make it his idea. He's just going to sit there until I walk out, or until I open my mouth and say it.*

And then, right behind it, so sharp it took her breath: *That's what I came for. Somebody I can't run.*

Her knees weren't quite steady. She walked around the desk.

Frank watched her come. He didn't move his chair back. She put one hand on his shoulder and felt how solid he was, warm through the work shirt, and she swung a leg over and sat down astride his lap, facing him, with the net of her skirt foaming around them both. Her tits were at the level of his chin. He kept his eyes on hers.

She took off her hat and set it on his desk.

The top two buttons of his work shirt were undone. Below the left collarbone, in the tanned skin, there was a mark she had never been close enough to see. A puckered disc the size of a dime, paler than the rest of him, drawn tight at the center like a knot in wood.

She knew what it was. She had never seen one, and she knew.

She touched it. She couldn't help herself. One soft white fingertip, with its pink polish, laid on that hard little ruin of a scar. It was smooth and oddly cool. She felt his heart going under it, slow and heavy, not nearly as calm as his face.

"Somebody shot you," she whispered.

"Long time ago."

"Did it hurt?"

"Yes."

He didn't move her hand. She traced the edge of it, once around, and felt him breathe in. It was the first thing she had done all night that got through to him, and she hadn't even meant it as a move.

*He's real,* she thought. *All the way down. Nothing about him is for show.*

She bent until her lips were against his ear. He smelled of soap and machine oil and coffee. She had to try twice before her voice would work.

"I've been with boys," she whispered. "I was with two of them an hour ago. And I've been with a man twice my age who only got rough when he was angry at somebody else." She swallowed. "I'm looking for something the students can't give me. I don't want to be asked if I'm okay. I want to be held down and used, hard, by somebody who's doing it because I want it. I've wanted it so long I'm going out of my mind." Her breath shook against his neck. "If I say *red*, you stop. Everything stops. If I say *stop*," and she felt him go very still, "you spank my ass."

She drew back far enough to see his face.

Something had happened in it. The wall was gone.

His hand came up the back of her neck, slid into her hair at the root, and closed. Hard. A whole fistful, wound once around his knuckles. He pulled her head back until her throat was bared and her spine arched over his arm and she was looking at the pipes on the ceiling.

It hurt. It was the first time all night anybody had hurt her on purpose, and her whole body sang with it like a struck bell. A gasp tore out of her. Her thighs clamped on his hips.

"Out loud," Frank said. His voice had dropped half an octave. He wasn't calling her *miss* anymore. "You came down here and called three men on parole a bunch of jailbirds. You rubbed that ass on my crew. Now you whisper in my ear like it's a secret?" His fist tightened, and she whimpered. "No. You say it out loud. To them."

"Frank, please..."

"I've got two men in this room who go back inside on one word from you upstairs. That's what you've been playing with. They get to hear what they're agreeing to. Every word. Go on."

It was the hardest thing she had ever done. Harder than nationals. He didn't let go of her hair. He turned her head with it, like turning a horse, until she was looking at Ray and then at Stu, and she said it with her throat stretched tight and her scalp burning, in her own voice, the real one, lower and not sweet at all.

"I want all three of you. I want it rough. Pull my hair, spank me, hold me down, call me whatever you want. Put me where you want me. I'm not going to tell anybody, ever, and I'm not going to change my mind tomorrow." Her face was on fire. "*Red* means stop. *Stop* doesn't mean anything. If I say *stop*, I want you to spank me for it."

Total silence. The radio was playing something with a saxophone.

"Lock the door," said Frank.

Ray was across the room before the words were out.

Frank let go of her hair. His hand settled on the small of her back. The other took her chin, thumb and finger, and turned her face back to his. His eyes were dark brown, and they were not kind anymore, and they were looking all the way into her.

"You came down here to work us," he said. "Like you work everybody. Didn't you."

"Yes," she whispered.

"That's done now. You don't steer this. You don't manage it. You asked for it, and you'll get it, and how you get it isn't up to you." His thumb pressed her lower lip. "We know how to be rough. Better than you want to think about. What we're going to do is be rough *for you*, and that's a different thing, and I'll be watching to see it stays that way. The only thing you've got is that one word. Use it the second you need it. Understood?"

"*Yes.*"

"Good girl," said Frank, and stood up with her in his arms, and handed her to Ray like a parcel.

## Ray and Stu

Ray's fist closed in her hair before her feet touched the floor.

Not the way the gladiator had done it. A real grip, at the root, his whole hand, and he *pulled*. Her head went back. Her spine bowed. A sound came out of her that she had never made in her life, low and shocked and grateful.

*There. Oh God. There it is.*

"That's for the key cabinet," he said against her ear. He was shaking with how long he'd held off. "You know what you did to me? Standing there rubbing that ass on me with Frank watching?"

"I know," she gasped. "I meant to."

"I know you meant to."

He walked her backward by the hair until the edge of the desk hit the tops of her thighs. Stu was in front of her. He'd been staring at the bodice for half an hour, and he went at the laces with both hands.

"Slow," said Frank. "She did all that up for us. Have the manners to look at it."

Stu looked at it. Black satin, boned, drawn so tight that the laces had bitten a pale crisscross into the swell of her on either side. Every breath she took strained the top eyelets. He put one thick finger under the bow and pulled, and it slid apart. Then the next cross, and the next, working down, the satin easing open a half inch at a time, her tits pressing out through the widening gap like something rising. He got four crosses down before his patience went. He took hold of the two edges and dragged them apart.

Her tits came out with a bounce. They were the best thing about her and she knew it: double Ds, big and round and high, pale and smooth, firm as fruit, with small pale-pink nipples drawn up tight in the cool air. Each one was exactly as much as a grown man's hand could hold. Stu found that out. He filled both hands and squeezed, and his whole face changed. She looked down and saw it: his hands on her. Broad, brown, scarred, the knuckles lettered in blue, the palms rough as sandpaper, sunk into flesh so pale and soft it looked like something that had never been outdoors. The sight of it made her knees go.

"Oh, Jesus," he said, like a man seeing the ocean. "Oh, look at these. Frank. Are you seeing these?"

"I see them."

He bent and got his mouth on one. Not politely. He sucked the whole nipple in, hard, and bit, and the sting shot straight down to her clit like a pulled thread. His other hand was mauling the other one, rolling the nipple between a callused finger and thumb.

She was pinned. A fist in her hair, a mouth on her tit, the desk against her legs. She couldn't have moved if she'd wanted to. She tested it, just a little twist of her shoulders, and Ray's grip tightened and held, and the relief of that, of pushing against something that *did not give*, nearly made her cry.

*That's the difference,* she thought, dazed. *Right there. The boys would have let go. They'd have said sorry.*

Ray let go of her hair just long enough to take both her wrists in one big hand and haul them up over her head. Her armpits were bare to the desk lamp, damp from three hours of dancing. He put his face into the left one. She felt his nose, his breath, and then his tongue, one slow flat lick up the hollow, and she squirmed and gasped and laughed out loud, scandalized. He held her wrists and did it again, and the laugh came out of her as a moan.

"Ray," Frank said mildly.

Ray lifted his head, flushed to the ears, and let her arms down, and took her hair again. He did not look sorry.

Frank had sat back down. He'd pulled his chair out from behind the desk to where he could see, and he was sitting in it with his knees apart and his forearms on the armrests, watching.

"Bring her here," he said.

Ray walked her over by the hair. Four steps, on six-inch heels, with her tits bare and wet from Stu's mouth and the bodice hanging open at her waist. He stopped her between Frank's boots.

"Down."

Ray's fist pushed. Her knees folded, and she went down onto cold concrete in her stockings, and she was kneeling between a seated man's thighs with her face a foot from his belt.

Frank opened it. He did it without hurry, the buckle, the button, the zip, looking at her the whole time.

She had thought the gladiator was big. She had thought Simmons was. They were boys' things next to this. It stood up out of his work pants heavy and dark with blood, with a fat vein up the underside, and the smell of him came up warm into her face: soap, and skin, and something underneath that was only him. Her mouth flooded. She actually swayed toward it.

And something came out of her that she had not planned at all. It came out in the little voice, the breathy one, the one she'd been lying to him in for five weeks.

"No. Please. Please don't make me suck it."

Ray's fist went still in her hair. Stu looked at Frank.

Frank looked at her. At her wet mouth, an inch from the head of his cock, already open. At her eyes, which were not frightened in the least.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth.

"That's not the word that stops me," he said. "And it's not the one that gets you spanked. So I guess you'd better get on with it."

Ray pushed her head down.

She took him in like a starving woman. She couldn't get her lips around him at first; she had to stretch her jaw and work for it, and then the broad hot head was in her mouth, salt and smooth, and she groaned out loud around it and sucked. Greedily. Sloppily. She bobbed on him as far as she could go and came up gasping, with a rope of spit from her lip to his cock, and said it again.

"Please, no. Don't make me. I don't want to..." and dove back down before the sentence was finished.

It was the most delicious lie she had ever told. She could feel what it did to her, to say *no* with her mouth full of exactly what she wanted and have nobody believe her for a second. Every *please don't* sent a hot clench through her cunt. She licked up the whole underside of him, along that thick vein, moaning. She tongued the slit and tasted him. "No," she whimpered, kissing it, "no, no, it's too big, please," and swallowed him again, as deep as her throat would let her, until her eyes ran.

"Doesn't sound like she means it," Stu said hoarsely.

"She doesn't mean a word of it," said Frank. His voice had roughened. "Do you, sweetheart?"

She shook her head, with her mouth full, and kept sucking.

He never laid a hand on her. That was the obscene part. Ray's fist moved her head. Frank sat in his chair like a man being served, with his forearms on the armrests and his eyes on her face, and let a cheerleader beg not to and choke herself on him anyway.

When he had seen enough, he said, "Up." Ray drew her off by the hair. She actually tried to follow it with her mouth.

"That isn't where I'm finishing," Frank said. He didn't put himself away. "Turn her around."

They turned her. They bent her over the desk with her cheek on a stack of work orders, ink and paper under her nose. Her tits were crushed against the cool steel. Somebody flipped the scrap of skirt up onto her back.

She heard them stop.

She knew what they were looking at. Her ass, round and high and tight, a cheerleader's ass, with the black lace of the stocking tops stark against her thighs. Three faint red stripes where the gladiator had finished, not quite wiped away. And the sheer black thong, soaked through, pulled into her, hiding nothing: the neat pale-pink lips, puffy and wet, and her clit standing up hard.

"Somebody's already been at this tonight," Ray said.

"Two of them," she said into the desk. "Frat boys."

"Yeah? They take care of you?"

"No." It came out as a whimper. "They *high-fived*."

There was a beat of silence. Then Stu started to laugh, helplessly, and Ray did, and even Frank made a short sound through his nose.

"Poor thing," Ray said. "Came all the way down here to have it done right."

A thick finger slid over her, bottom to top, on the outside of the mesh. She jerked. The fabric was so fine and so wet that it was hardly there, and still it was there: a slick, faintly rough skin between his fingertip and her clit. He circled it, once, slow, through the mesh, and she moaned out loud.

"Christ, she's soaked. Feel that. It's gone right through. She's dripping down her leg."

"Take them off," she begged.

"No," Ray said. "I like them."

A zipper. He hooked one finger under the wet strip between her legs and drew it over to the side, and held it there, stretched tight across her cheek. The gladiator had yanked it out of his way like a man in a hurry. This was something else. She was still wearing them. He had only moved them, exactly as far as he needed.

The blunt, hot head of a cock dragged through her, up and down, bumped her clit, slicked itself in her. She pushed back at it, shameless.

She expected slow. Every boy she'd ever been with had gone in an inch at a time, watching her face.

Ray took her hips in both hands and gave her all of it in one stroke.

She screamed. She was stuffed, split, full to the back of her throat. He was long, longer than Simmons, with a curve that dragged across the front of her on the way in and hit something deep that made her toes curl in her shoes. It hurt, and the hurt was so sweet that her whole head went white.

He didn't wait for her. He fucked her. Long, hard, deliberate strokes, all the way out and all the way in, his hips cracking against her ass, the stretched edge of the thong sawing against the side of her clit on every one. Her tits slid back and forth on the steel desk. The work orders scattered. She could feel every inch of him leave and every inch come back, could hear herself, wet and loud and filthy.

"Stu," she heard herself say. "Please. My mouth."

"You don't give the orders," said Frank, from his chair.

"I'm *asking*..."

"Then ask him properly."

"Please, Stu." Her eyes were wet. "Please fuck my mouth."

Stu came around the desk. He tipped her chin up with two fingers. His cock was out, thick and flushed and already wet at the tip, shorter than Ray's and so much fatter that she wasn't sure she could get her lips around it. It smelled of clean sweat and something darker, warm and animal, and her mouth watered.

He laid the head against her lips and pushed. She opened wide. He filled her mouth, heavy and hot on her tongue, salt and skin, and his hand settled on the back of her head and he fed her more.

Ray drove her forward onto Stu. Stu pushed her back onto Ray. She stopped being able to tell whose rhythm it was. She was caught between them, fucked from both ends, held, used, with nothing to decide and nothing to manage, and it was bliss. It was the purest relief she had ever felt.

Her eyes rolled toward the chair.

Frank was watching her face. Only her face. Steady as a level.

*He's checking,* she understood, somewhere far away. *The whole time. He's not just watching. He's keeping watch.*

She came the first time like that, with no warning at all, on Ray's cock with Stu in her mouth and Frank's eyes on her. Her cunt clamped down. Her knees buckled. She wailed around a mouthful of cock, and Stu swore and pulled out so she could breathe.

"Stop," she gasped, laughing, wrecked, hanging over the desk. "Oh my God, stop, wait, I can't..."

The room went quiet.

Ray had frozen inside her. She looked back over her shoulder. He was staring at Frank.

Frank raised one eyebrow at her.

It took her a second. Then she remembered what she'd said, sitting in his lap, and her whole body went hot from her scalp to her heels.

"... I said *stop*," Iris whispered, and bit her lip.

"You did," Frank agreed. "Ray."

Ray's palm came down across her ass with a crack like a board breaking.

She shrieked. The sting bloomed, bright and enormous, and before it had faded he did it again, the other cheek, harder. Her ass was firm enough to take it with a flat hard smack, and round enough to shake. She felt the print come up, hot, in the shape of his whole hand, scarlet on white.

"That what you wanted?"

"*Yes!*"

*Crack.* "You going to say it again?"

"Stop," she moaned, deliberately, squirming back onto him. "Stop, stop, *stop*..."

He spanked her six more times, with his cock buried in her to the hilt, and she came again on the last one, clenching and sobbing, with her face in the paperwork.

## Too Far

That was when it nearly went wrong.

Ray was twenty-four years old. He had been hard for forty-five minutes. He had a girl out of a magazine bent over his boss's desk, begging to be hurt, and coming every time he did it, and something in him slipped its leash.

He hauled her up off the desk by the hair, turned her around, and shoved her down onto her knees on the concrete. Hard. Her kneecaps cracked on the floor and she gasped.

"Open your mouth."

She opened it. He rammed his cock into it, straight to the back, and she gagged. She hadn't been ready. He had both hands locked behind her skull and he was driving into her throat, fast, no rhythm to it, and she couldn't get a breath. Her eyes flooded. Her hands came up against his thighs.

"You like that? Huh? That's what you came for, you spoiled little bitch, you take it..."

And his hand left her hair and came around to the front of her throat, and closed.

It wasn't the roughness. She wanted the roughness. It was something else, something she felt before she could have explained it: he wasn't with her anymore. He'd gone somewhere on his own. His eyes were glazed. He wasn't doing it *to her*, he was just doing it, and she happened to be there.

*Simmons,* she thought, in a white flash of panic. *This is Simmons. This is the equipment room. I'm standing where the anger lands.*

She couldn't say red. Her mouth was full.

"Ray."

Frank hadn't raised his voice. He was simply there, out of the chair, with one big hand flat on the middle of Ray's chest.

"Off."

"She *said*..."

"I heard what she said. Take your hand off her neck and step back. Now."

Ray stepped back. His cock slid out of her mouth. She folded forward onto her hands, coughing, dragging air, with spit hanging from her lips.

Frank crouched down in front of her. He didn't touch her. He waited until she lifted her head, and then he looked into her eyes, one and then the other, the way you'd check somebody who had taken a knock.

He didn't say a word. He just raised his eyebrows.

*You all right? You want to stop? It's up to you. Say it and it's over.*

All of that, without a sound. And she understood, kneeling there with her throat burning, that this was the thing. This, right here. Not the hair or the spanking. Simmons had never once looked at her like this. The boys had asked *are you okay* every thirty seconds because they were scared, and it had meant nothing. This man hadn't asked all night. He had watched. And the one time it mattered, he had been out of that chair before she knew she needed him.

*He was never going to let it go wrong. That's why I can let go. That's what makes it safe to want this.*

She held his eyes. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. And she nodded: slowly, once, and then again, harder.

*I'm all right. Don't you dare stop.*

Frank looked at her a moment longer. Then he nodded back, and stood.

"She's here to be used," he said to Ray, quite calmly. "She's not here for you to lose your temper on. You know what it looks like when a man goes off in his own head with his hands on somebody. You've seen it. So have I. We don't bring that in here. Not ever. There's a difference, and you'll learn it tonight or you'll go sit in the truck. You keep your eyes on her. You don't go off in your own head. And nobody puts a hand on that girl's throat." He looked down at her. "Unless she asks."

"Not yet," Iris croaked.

"Not yet. You hear her?"

"I hear her." Ray had gone gray. He dropped to one knee beside her, awkward, enormous, and put a hand on her shoulder, very carefully. "Hey. Hey. I'm sorry. I got... I lost it. I'm sorry."

She looked at him. Twenty-four, and mortified, and trying.

"Do it again," she said, hoarse. "The hair. The mouth. All of it. Just *look* at me while you do."

Frank took a cushion off the couch and dropped it on the concrete in front of her.

"On that," he said. "You've got pretty knees. Keep them."

She shuffled onto it. Ray did it again.

This time he gathered her hair up slowly, in one fist, and waited until she met his eyes. He fed his cock into her mouth an inch at a time, and when he reached the back and paused, she breathed out through her nose and let her throat open for him, and he slid down it. All the way. She felt her throat stretch tight around him, a hot ring, and then the whole long veined length of his cock was in her neck, and her nose was in the coarse hair at the root, breathing sweat and musk. He held her there. He was looking right at her. She moaned, and it had nowhere to go but into him.

"*Fuck*," Ray whispered. "Oh, fuck, that's so much better."

It was just as rough as before. He fucked her face until her mascara ran and spit poured down her chin onto her tits. But he was *there*. And she came a third time with her own hand between her legs and his cock down her throat, and when he pulled out and groaned and striped her face with it, hot across her cheek and her lips and her lashes, she laughed out loud for the sheer joy of it.

## Frank

"My turn," said Frank.

He picked her up off the floor, face dripping, and sat her on the edge of his desk. He put a hand on her breastbone and pressed her down flat on her back among the work orders. The thong was still on her, twisted to one side, wet as a rag. He drew it down. Over her hips, down her thighs, the mesh clinging and letting go, over the lace of her stocking tops, off over one patent heel and then the other. He looked at the little black scrap in his fist for a moment, and dropped it under the desk.

Then he took a stockinged ankle in each hand and opened her, wide, and put her heels up on the edge of the desk.

And then he pulled his chair in between her knees, and sat down, like a man sitting down to dinner.

She lifted her head, confused. She'd thought he was going to fuck her.

"What are you..."

"Hush."

He looked at her. Just looked, for a long moment, from a foot away, with the desk lamp on her. She had never been looked at like that. Her pussy was bare and flushed, the pale-pink lips swollen from Ray and slick to the thighs, her clit standing up stiff and shining. She could feel her own pulse in it. She could feel his breath.

"Pretty," Frank said, almost to himself. "Prettiest one I ever saw."

Then he put his mouth on her, and Iris found out she had never had this done to her before in her life.

She'd thought she had. Boys went down on her. They did it the way they did a chore, thirty seconds of vague wet flapping in the general area, glancing up to see if it was enough yet. Simmons had never bothered.

Frank ate her like he was starving. He put his whole face into it. One long, slow, flat lick first, from the very bottom of her all the way up, his tongue broad and hot and rough, taking everything she'd leaked. She arched off the desk with a cry. He did it again. Then he spread her open with both thumbs and went in: his tongue pushing up inside her, deep, curling, fucking her with it, his nose pressed to her clit, his stubble rasping the insides of her thighs raw. He growled into her. She felt it in her spine.

"Oh my God. Oh my *God*, Frank..."

He found her clit. He didn't flick at it. He closed his lips around the whole hard little bud and sucked, steady and strong, and laid the flat of his tongue against the underside and rubbed, slow, heavy, relentless, exactly where she needed it, as if he'd known her body for years. Two thick fingers slid up into her and hooked.

Her hands were in his hair. Her heels were drumming on the steel. She was making noises she didn't recognize, high and broken, and he just kept on, unhurried, tireless, his forearms locked around her thighs to hold her still while she bucked: tanned, corded, sleeved in old ink, dark against the soft white insides of her legs. He wasn't doing it to get her ready for something else. He wasn't doing it to be nice. He was doing it because he wanted to, and he was going to do it until he was finished, and she had no say in when that was.

She came on his tongue so hard that her vision went black at the edges. It ripped up through her and she screamed, and what she screamed was not his name.

"*Daddy!*"

It was out before she knew it was in her. She had never called a man that in her life. She had rolled her eyes at girls who did. And here it was, torn out of her at the top of her voice on a janitor's desk, with her thighs clamped around his ears.

Frank's arms tightened on her legs. He growled into her, a sound she felt in her teeth, and she gushed, and he drank it. He didn't stop. He eased off her clit for exactly as long as it took her to stop shaking, and then he went back, softer, and built her up again, and took her over a second time, and a third, until she was sobbing and limp and pushing weakly at his head.

"Stop, stop, I can't, it's too much..."

He lifted his face. His mouth and chin were shining with her. He raised an eyebrow.

"... Oh no," Iris whispered.

His open hand cracked across the side of her ass, and his mouth came back down, and the fourth one was the biggest of all. She said it again. She couldn't not. She sobbed it at the ceiling, over and over, *Daddy, Daddy, oh, Daddy*, while it shook her to pieces.

When he finally sat back, she was flat on the desk staring at the pipes, with tears in her ears and her legs twitching.

*Nobody,* she thought, in a daze. *Not once. Not one of them ever did it like he meant it.*

And then, hot in the face: *What did I just call him?*

Nobody laughed. Ray and Stu had gone very quiet. Frank was looking at her with an expression she couldn't read.

"Huh," he said softly. That was all.

She would remember it for the rest of her life: the first man who ever ate her as if it were the whole point. Everything she did by herself afterward was only a small, sad imitation of that tongue.

Frank wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist.

"Couch," he said.

She was past walking. Stu carried her. He sat down on the cracked vinyl and pulled her onto his lap with her back to his chest. He had lost his shirt somewhere. His chest was hot and furred against her bare back and so broad that her shoulders did not reach its edges, and his forearms came around her belly brown and hairy and as thick as her calves, two logs crossed over her white skin. She sank down onto that thick, blunt cock with a groan that came from the bottom of her belly. He stretched her wider than Ray had. Her cunt clung to him. She could feel her own slick running down over his balls.

"There you go," Stu said against her shoulder. His hands came around and filled themselves with her tits again, as if he'd been thinking about nothing else. "There you go, beautiful. Ride it."

She rode it. She found the angle, tipped her hips, ground her clit against the root of him. Her tits bounced in his hands, heavy and firm, slapping softly when he let them go to watch. Ray knelt on the cushions beside her, already hard again, and she turned her head and took him in, and tasted herself all over him.

Her heels had stayed on through all of it. Six inches of black patent, with the lace tops of her stockings stark against her thighs. Ray, catching his breath, looked down at one of them braced on the floor. On an impulse he could not have explained, he slid off the couch, lifted her ankle, slipped the shoe off, and pressed his mouth to the arch of her stockinged foot.

Iris gasped, and then laughed, surprised.

He ran his tongue up the sole, through the black nylon, and closed his lips over her toes. It tickled, and then it didn't. It was warm and wet and oddly, shamelessly good, like having a secret found. Her cunt squeezed down on Stu, and he grunted.

"She likes that," Stu reported.

"I like that," Iris agreed, breathless, and wriggled her toes against Ray's tongue.

Ray grinned up at her, kissed her ankle, and put the shoe back on. He filed it away. He was a man who filed things away.

She came again, slower, deeper, with her head back on Stu's shoulder.

And through it she watched Frank.

He was standing by the desk with the taste of her still on him. He was unbuttoning his cuffs. That was all: one, and then the other, folding them back twice over thick inked forearms, without hurry, looking at her. Her stomach turned over.

Then the shirt. He pulled it off over his head and dropped it on the desk, and she saw him for the first time. He was broad and deep through the chest, furred with dark hair that was going gray down the middle, and thick through the belly the way men who work are thick, not soft, only heavy. The ink stopped at his elbows. Above it his skin was pale where the sun never got to it, and there was the scar, the puckered dime under his collarbone. His shoulders rounded straight down into his arms with no line between them. He looked like he could put his shoulder to the building and move it.

She looked down at herself, sitting on Stu with her white thighs spread over his dark ones, pale and small and soft everywhere they were hard, and she had never in her life been so much smaller than a room.

He had never done his belt back up.

She'd had that in her mouth. It was different, knowing where it was going now. It stood up against his stomach, heavy and dark, still shining a little from her, and she looked at it and felt her mouth go dry and her cunt clench on Stu.

"Turn her to face you," Frank said.

Stu lifted her off him, turned her in his hands like something that weighed nothing, and sat her back down astride his lap with her tits in his face. She sank onto him again with a groan. He looked like a man who had been given a present.

"Lean her forward."

Stu's hand pressed between her shoulder blades. She tipped forward onto his chest, still impaled on him, her cheek against his neck, her ass lifted and spread toward the room.

She heard a drawer. A cap. Then Frank's hand, broad and warm, flat on the small of her back, and a slick thumb sliding down between her cheeks.

It found the tight pink pucker of her ass, and circled it.

Her whole body went rigid.

"Easy," Frank said.

"I've never..." Her voice came out very small. "Nobody's ever. Not there."

The thumb stopped. It didn't leave.

"You want me to?"

Nobody had asked her a real question all night. She understood that this one was real.

She thought about the gladiator's hamster grip. She thought about Simmons and his candle. She thought about the fact that she had been circling this man for five weeks, and that the one thing she had learned about him tonight was that he did not do anything he hadn't decided to do, and did not let anything happen that he wasn't watching.

"Yes," she said. "You. I want it to be you."

"Then you breathe out. And you tell me."

"Don't be gentle with me."

"I'll be what I am," said Frank. "Breathe."

The thumb circled. Round and round, slow, patient, slick, until the clenched little ring began to soften under it in spite of her. It pressed. It slid in to the first knuckle, and she made a noise like a kicked puppy, and Stu kissed her shoulder and held still.

Then the thumb was gone, and something much bigger was there. Blunt. Hot. Pressing.

"Out."

She breathed out. He pushed.

It burned. God, it burned, a hot wide stretch that made her eyes sting and her fingers dig into Stu's knees. The ring of her fought him, fluttered, and then gave, all at once, and the thick head of him popped through. She cried out.

He stopped. He waited. His hand stroked the small of her back.

"Color."

It was the first time anyone had ever asked her that. She knew at once what it meant.

"Green," she gasped. "Green. Keep going."

He kept going. An inch. A pause. An inch. He was endless. And all the way in she could feel him sliding along the other cock inside her, Stu's, with nothing between the two of them but one thin hot wall of herself. She could feel the shape of both. She could feel them press together.

His hips met her ass. He was in her to the root.

She had never been so full. She hadn't known a body could hold this much. Two men, packed inside her, front and back, and when Stu shifted under her she felt him rub against Frank *through* her, vein against vein, and a sound came out of her that was barely human.

"I can feel him," she sobbed. "I can feel you both, I can feel you *touching*..."

"I know you can," Frank said, low, right behind her ear. His chest was against her back, solid as a wall. "That's all of us. You've got all of it now. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to manage one damn thing. You just take it."

Ray stepped up onto the cushions and stood at Stu's shoulder. He cupped her jaw, gently this time, and turned her face to him, and looked at her until she looked back.

"Open," he said.

She opened.

## All Three

They moved.

She had no words for it afterward. Stu thrusting up from underneath, short and thick, grinding the root of himself against her clit. Frank driving down from behind, long and heavy, his hands clamped on her hips, every stroke pressing the two of them together inside her. Ray in her mouth, in her throat, his thumb stroking her cheekbone while he fucked her face. Three rhythms that weren't hers. Three men's breath, three men's sweat dripping onto her skin.

She was airtight. She was filled in every place a woman could be filled. Her tits swung under her, slapping together, and Stu caught one in his mouth. Her ass shook each time Frank's hips struck it, a quick ripple across the handprints. She could smell all of them, soap and sweat and sex. She could taste Ray, salt and herself. She could hear the couch creaking, and the wet sounds of her own body, and somebody saying *oh God, oh God*, and after a while she understood that it was her, muffled, around a cock.

And for the first time since she was eighteen years old, there was nothing she had to do.

She wasn't arranging anything. She wasn't reading anyone, steering anyone, making it look like their idea. She had said what she wanted, out loud, once, and three men had taken her at her word, and now all there was left to do in the whole world was feel it.

*This is what I thought Simmons was,* she thought, in the last moment she could think. *This is what I was trying to drag out of those boys. It was never about being hurt. It's about being* had*. By somebody strong enough that I can stop holding the wheel.*

"Harder," she begged, when Ray let her breathe. "Please. Don't stop. Use me."

"You said *stop*," Stu pointed out, breathless, grinning into her tit.

Frank's hand came down on her ass like a thunderclap, and she screamed, and came.

It was not like the others. The others had been sharp, quick things she'd had to chase. This one took her. It came up from the base of her spine like something rising through water, and it didn't crest, it just kept rising, until her whole body was one long convulsion between the three of them. Her cunt clamped on Stu. Her ass clenched on Frank. Her throat closed around Ray.

She felt them go, one after another, and she felt every one.

Ray first, with a shout. He pulled back at the last second, and it hit her tongue, hot and thick, and then her lips and her chin, and ran down her throat onto her tits. Stu dragged her hips down and bucked up into her, groaning into her breast, and she felt him pulse, deep, flooding her cunt. And Frank. Frank drove into her ass to the hilt, once, twice, and held, with his forehead pressed between her shoulder blades and his arm locked around her waist as if she might otherwise come apart. She felt him jerk inside her, hot, deep, where nobody had ever been.

Her mouth was free, and it happened again.

"Daddy," she whimpered. "Oh, Daddy, yes, in me, *in* me..."

"That's right," Frank said, very low, into her hair. "I've got you. I've got you, sweetheart."

She might have come apart. It was a near thing.

## After

For a while nobody moved. The radio was playing something slow.

Frank eased out of her first, with a care that made her throat go tight. Then Stu. She felt it running out of her, both places at once, warm, down the insides of her thighs and into the lace tops of her stockings. She was a ruin. Her bodice was around her waist. Her face was a mess. Her ass was on fire and her jaw ached and her knees were skinned.

She had never felt so good in her entire life.

Somebody put her on the couch. A clean shop towel appeared, and a bottle of water with the cap already off. Stu found her thong under the desk, looked at it, and tactfully put it in her hat. Ray crouched down in front of her with a tube of something from the first-aid kit and dabbed it on her knees, frowning, his big fingers very light.

"I really am sorry," he said, not looking up. "About before."

"I know." She touched his hair. "You stopped when he told you. And the second time was perfect."

Frank had done up his belt. He was sitting on the edge of his desk with his sleeves still rolled, drinking cold coffee, watching her over the rim of the mug. Checking, still. She could tell, now.

"You all right?" he said. Out loud, this time.

"I'm..." She tried to find a word, and couldn't, and started to laugh, and then somehow she was crying a little too, which mortified her. "Sorry. I'm fine. I'm so much better than fine. I just didn't know. I didn't know it could be like that."

"Like what?"

"Like somebody was *driving*." She wiped her eyes with the towel. "I'm always driving. Every boy, every time. I'm so tired of it. I came down here to drive you three, and you wouldn't let me."

"No," Frank agreed.

"Thank you."

He looked into his coffee. Something moved at the corner of his mouth.

"You're a piece of work, you know that?" he said. "You nearly got Stu fired over a can of washers."

"I'd have fixed it."

"I believe you would." He set the mug down. "What's your name? I've got your room number and your running schedule, and I never did get your name."

"Iris."

"Iris." He said it as if he were putting it away somewhere safe.

She reached out, shyly, and touched the inside of his forearm, where the faded script ran along the tendon. She couldn't read it.

"Is it true? What they say upstairs?"

"Most of it."

"I'm sorry I said that. Jailbirds. That was a cheap thing to say."

"It was." He didn't move his arm away. "We're not those men anymore. Took a lot of years. But we remember how, and tonight that was some use to you, so maybe it was good for something." He looked at her hand on his ink. "You weren't scared of us."

"No," Iris said. "I was scared you'd say no." "Well, Iris. Here's how it is. You don't owe us anything. You never have to come back down here. You see us in the hall, you don't have to know us. Nobody in this room is ever going to say a word. That's a promise."

*He means it,* she thought. *He'd let me walk out and never mention it again.*

She stood up. Her legs held, just. She laced the bodice as best she could, and smoothed the wreck of her skirt, and picked up her hat, with her underwear in it, off his desk.

"What if I want to come back?"

All three of them went still.

"Then don't call," said Frank, after a moment. "Don't write. Don't put anything on paper, don't say anything upstairs. You want to come down, you come down. The door's open or it isn't." He held her eyes. "Same rules. Same word."

"Red."

"Red."

She set the hat on her head and tipped it over one eye.

"And *stop*?"

"Stop gets your ass spanked," said Frank.

She hesitated in the doorway. Her face was burning again.

"And the other thing. That I said."

"What about it?"

"I didn't mean to. I don't know where it came from. I'm not going to go around calling you that."

"No," Frank agreed. He picked up his coffee. "I don't expect you could if you tried. That one's not yours to hand out, sweetheart. That one I have to earn." He looked at her over the rim of the mug, and for the first time all night she saw him smile properly. "I'll take it every time I do. Now go to bed, before I earn it again."

She went. She walked the length of the corridor barefoot, with her heels in one hand, past the pipes and the laundry room and the dryer that had finally gone quiet. Every step, she could feel them: the hot prints of Ray's hand on her ass, the ache in her throat, the deep, sweet, bruised soreness in the two places they had filled.

It was almost three in the morning. Across the quad, the Kappa Sig house was still thumping.

*Boys,* thought Iris, and smiled all the way up the stairs.

---

In the basement, Stu had collapsed full length on the couch with his arm over his eyes. Ray was sitting on the floor with his back against the desk, looking at his own hand.

"Frank," he said. "What the hell just happened?"

Frank didn't answer right away. He was picking work orders up off the floor, one at a time, and squaring them on the blotter. One of them had a lipstick print on it. He looked at it for a while. Then he opened the top drawer of his desk and put it in.

"She'll be back," he said.

"You think?"

"I know." He sat down in his chair. It was still warm. "Six months, a year. She'll get engaged to some nice fella. She'll get a job, a house. And every so often she'll turn up at that door without a word, in some fool costume, and we'll take care of her." He shook his head slowly. "For as long as she wants. God help the three of us."

He was right about every bit of it.