Iris and Rosa

*Book six. Iris is 28. All other characters are above the age of 18.*

*This is built on previous chapters and is best read in order.*

## The Name

It was Stu who let it slip, and he knew it the second it was out of his mouth.

They were in the basement, afterward, the four of them, in the loose happy wreckage of a Saturday night. Iris was lying along the couch with her head in Frank's lap and her feet in Ray's, wearing somebody's undershirt. Her wrists were pink from the fleece. There was a bite on her thigh. She felt like a cat on a radiator.

"That thing you did," she said dreamily, to the ceiling. "With the rope between my legs. Where did you even learn that?"

"Internet," said Ray.

"It was good. It was almost mean."

"Mean," Stu said, and laughed. He was on the floor with his back against the desk, eating cold pizza. "You think that's mean, you ought to see Rosa work. Rosa'd have you..."

He stopped.

It was the way he stopped. As if he had stepped on a rake. Iris turned her head. Stu was staring at his pizza. Ray, at the far end of the couch, had gone absolutely still, with his thumb frozen on the arch of her foot, and he was looking at the floor between his boots like a boy in a principal's office.

She had known these men for seven years. She had seen Ray lift the back end of a pickup truck. She had never once seen either of them look like that.

"Who's Rosa?"

Nobody answered.

She looked up. From where her head lay, she could see the underside of Frank's jaw. A muscle moved in it.

"Nobody," said Frank. "Old friend. Stu, there's a work order for that dryer in B wing, you want to tell me why it's still on my desk?"

"Frank."

"She runs a bar. Couple hours east. I haven't seen her in a while."

"Why are they scared of her?"

"We're not *scared*," said Ray, to the floor.

"I'm a little scared," Stu said.

"That's enough," said Frank, in the voice that ended things. His hand came down and smoothed her hair, once, and stayed there, heavy and warm. "Leave it alone, sweetheart."

She left it alone. She was good at seeming to.

But she lay there with her eyes closed and his hand on her hair, and she turned it over and over, like a stone in her pocket. A woman. An *old friend*, in that voice. A woman who made Stu stop talking and Ray look at his boots and Frank Brennan change the subject.

*Rosa would have you...*

Would have her what?

Later, when the men were dressing, she picked Stu's phone up off the desk to check the time. She was not proud of it. It took her nine seconds. *Rosa -- Dry Dock*, and a number with an area code from two counties over.

## The Drive

She told Mark it was a venue walk-through. A vineyard, out east, for a spring wedding, and the owner could only do evenings. He said *drive safe* without looking up from the bath he was running for Nora, and she stood in the doorway for a moment and watched him test the water on his wrist, and loved him, and went to get dressed.

She had told herself she was only going to look.

*Then why,* she asked the mirror, *are you wearing that?*

It was the white one. Her favorite, for the nights she wanted to be stared at: a long-sleeved mini in heavy white jersey, soft as a T-shirt, ruched from the bust to the hem so that it clung to every single curve she had and showed the shape of all of them. The neckline plunged in a deep V nearly to her waist. There was no bra on earth that would go under it, and she hadn't tried.

At twenty-eight, a year and a half after the baby, her body had finished deciding what it was going to be. Her waist was tiny and hard. Under the ruching her stomach was flat as a board. Above it her tits were a full, heavy, natural F cup, teardrop-shaped, with a real slope and a real weight to them, and with nothing to hold them they simply hung in the two soft panels of the dress and moved when she moved. The V showed the whole deep line between them and the inner curve of each. And behind, below the nip of her waist, her ass was what it had been since Nora: big, round, soft, a great deal of it, and the white jersey gripped it like a second skin and ended four inches below.

Underneath, a thong of white lace. A gold coin on a chain between her breasts. Nude heels. The little black bag on its gold chain, and in the zipped inside pocket of the bag, where he always was, Frank Jr.

Her skin looked like cream against the white. She put her hair down.

*Only to look,* she thought, and picked up her keys.

There was one problem, and she felt it start somewhere around the hour mark. She was still nursing Nora, mornings and bedtime. She had skipped tonight's. By the time she passed the second county line her breasts had gone tight and warm and heavy on her ribs, and at a rest stop, under the yellow light, she looked down and saw that the left panel of the dress was faintly damp at the point.

*Of course.* White jersey. No bra.

She pressed the heel of her hand against it until the tingle passed. She thought about turning around.

She thought about Ray's face, looking at the floor.

She took Frank Jr. out of the zipped pocket instead, in the dark of the parked car, with the engine ticking, and pushed the hem of the dress up, and held him against the lace. Ninety seconds. It was like eating one potato chip.

She drove on.

## The Dry Dock

It sat at the end of a gravel lot on a state road, between a boat-repair yard and a great deal of nothing: a low cinderblock building with a tin roof and one neon sign in the window, the D of DOCK burned out. There were pickups in the lot, and two motorcycles. Her white Audi looked like a dropped glove.

She sat for a minute with her hands on the wheel.

Then she got out, and walked across the gravel in her nude heels, and pushed open the door.

It was dim and warm and smelled of beer and fry oil and something older, wood soaked in fifty years of smoke. A jukebox. A pool table under a green-shaded lamp. A dozen men along the bar and at the tables, the kind who worked outdoors, and every one of them turned around and looked, and the room went quiet in a way she was used to.

She barely noticed. She was looking at the woman behind the bar.

She was pulling a beer, with her back half turned. She was tall. That was the first thing: taller than Iris in heels. She wore a black tank top, and the arm working the tap was a thing of beauty, long and hard and cut with muscle from shoulder to wrist, the kind you got from twenty years of lifting kegs, sleeved in tattoos to the elbow. Broad shoulders. A strong back narrowing to a real waist, and then hips, in faded black jeans, and thighs that filled them.

Her hair was short. Dark, cropped close at the sides and the nape, longer on top and pushed straight back off her forehead with her fingers.

She set the beer down and turned around.

*Oh,* Iris thought. Just that.

She had expected someone frightening. She had not expected someone beautiful. Rosa was forty-two and looked every day of it and it suited her down to the ground. A strong-boned face, straight nose, a wide full mouth with lines at the corners. Dark eyes under level brows. A thin white scar that ran through the left one and stopped just short of the lid. The tank top was cut low, and what was in it was not small. There was nothing soft about how she stood and nothing hard about how she looked, and she was looking at Iris.

Once. Top to bottom. It took perhaps two seconds, and Iris felt it go over her like a hand.

"Well, now," Rosa said. Her voice was low and a little rough, unhurried, with a smile somewhere at the back of it. She picked up a bar towel. "You're a long way from home, blondie."

Iris crossed the room. She was aware of her hips. She slid onto a stool at the empty end of the bar, set her little bag on the wood, and crossed her legs.

"Is it that obvious?"

"That car's worth more than this building." Rosa came down the bar toward her, wiping her hands. She moved slowly, like a big cat that has eaten. "And you didn't come in here for the wings." She put both palms on the bar and leaned on them, and looked at her from two feet away. Iris could smell her: soap, and limes, and clean warm skin. "So you're the one in the glove."

Iris's heart stopped.

"I... what?"

"Frank's baseball glove. Corner of the desk. Little blue stone in the pocket." Rosa's mouth curled. "I was in that office once, four years back, dropping something off. I'm standing at his desk and I look down, and there's a jeweled butt plug sitting in his old first baseman's mitt like an egg in a nest. I said, Francis, what in the hell is that. He went red as a brake light. Wouldn't tell me a thing." She shook her head. "I've been wondering about you ever since."

"How do you know it's me?"

"Honey." Rosa looked at her almost kindly. "You've got a ring on that hand that cost a year of my rent, and you turned it round twice deciding whether to sit down, so he's real and you love him. You've got hands that never washed a floor. You've got about four thousand dollars of Pilates under that dress. You drove two hours on a Thursday in the one outfit you own that you can't wear a bra with, to a bar you've got no business in, and you've been staring at my arms since you came through the door." She tilted her head. "And you sat down like a woman who got fucked hard on Saturday and is still feeling it. Left side. He bite you there?"

Iris opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

"That was Ray," she said faintly.

"Ray bites. I know." Rosa straightened up. "What are you drinking?"

"I... white wine?"

"No, you're not." She took down a bottle without looking and poured two fingers of something brown into a rocks glass and set it in front of her. "You're drinking that. Slow. You've got a long night."

*She's been behind this bar for five minutes,* Iris thought, with her pulse going in her throat. *She has told me my husband, my bank balance, my gym, and where I was bitten. And what I'm drinking.*

*Rosa would have you...*

She picked up the glass. It burned all the way down.

---

There was a second woman behind the bar. Iris hadn't noticed her at first. She was down at the far end, slicing limes with quick, hard strokes: twenty-five, maybe, small and wiry and pretty in a sharp way, with a ring in her nose and a row of them up one ear, black hair in a knot, an apron tied tight around a narrow waist.

She was noticing Iris, though. She had been since Rosa leaned on the bar.

A rack of clean glasses came down on the back counter with a crash. A drawer slammed. When a man at the middle of the bar asked for another round, she delivered it and came on down, uninvited, to the end where Iris sat, and set a bowl of pretzels on the wood hard enough that three of them jumped out.

"We get a lot of tourists this time of year," she said, to nobody. "They come in, they look around, they go home."

Rosa didn't say anything.

She turned her head. That was all. She looked at the girl, with no expression whatever, for about as long as it takes to breathe in and out.

The color went out of the girl's face as if somebody had pulled a plug. Her eyes dropped. Her shoulders came up around her ears.

"Sorry," she mumbled. "Sorry, Rosa." She picked up a rag and discovered a spot on the bar that needed urgent attention, four feet away.

"That's Dani," Rosa said, turning back, pleasant as ever. "She works for me. She's got opinions."

Iris had watched the whole thing with her glass halfway to her mouth.

*Oh,* she thought. *I see. That's what Ray's face was.*

She understood, then, exactly what she had walked into. She did not get up and leave.

---

Rosa worked, and talked to her, and somehow did both without ever seeming to split her attention. She would say half a sentence, go and pull three beers and make change and laugh at somebody's joke, and come back and finish it on the same word. Every man in the place called her by name. Nobody touched the bar without asking.

And in between, a piece at a time, she took Iris apart.

"So tell me how it works," she said, slicing a lemon. "You and my boys."

"Your boys?"

"I've known Frank since he was nineteen. I knew him before he went in and I was the one who picked him up at the gate when he got out. That hole under his collarbone? I had my hands on that for forty minutes in the back of a Buick." She flicked a seed off the knife. "They're mine in every way that counts. So. You turn up. In a costume, I'm guessing. I heard there was a cheerleader."

Iris felt herself go pink. "I just show up. When I need to."

"When you need to."

"When it gets too much. At home. I love my husband, he's a wonderful father, he's just... careful. And I need..." She turned the glass on the bar. It was the whiskey, and it was those eyes. "I need it rough. I always have. I need to be held down and used. They do that for me."

"Mm." Rosa nodded slowly. "And there's a word."

"Red."

"And they stop."

"Of course they stop."

"You ever used it?"

"No."

"Not once. In seven years."

"I've never needed to."

"No," Rosa agreed. "I'll bet you haven't." She set down the knife. "What's the roughest thing they ever did to you? The very worst. Go on, brag. I can see you want to."

So Iris told her. She was proud of it, that was the truth. She told her about the cuffs, and hanging from the eyebolts in a split, and Frank spanking her until she cried, and being tied to a cable machine for a day. She told her about the handprints that lasted a week. She heard her own voice, a little breathless, showing off.

Rosa listened to all of it with her chin on her fist.

"The cuffs," she said, when Iris had finished. "What are they made of?"

"Cotton webbing. With..."

"Fleece."

"... How did you know that?"

"Because I know Frank. He made them himself, didn't he? Sat up at night with a sewing machine. Double seams." She was smiling, with real fondness. "So they wouldn't leave a mark on you. And the rope's cotton, and I'll bet he washed it first. And when he spanked you till you cried, he stopped and asked you your color."

Iris said nothing.

"And he put arnica on it after."

"*Yes*, all right..."

"Honey." Rosa leaned in. Her voice was very gentle, which made it worse. "I'm not laughing at you. I think it's sweet. But I want you to hear what you just told me. You've got three men who are so crazy about you they'd cut off a hand before they'd bruise you somewhere it showed. You ring the bell when you're in the mood. You tell them what you want, and how hard, and where not to mark. They do exactly that, and they check on you the whole time, and then they rub cream on it and feed you chicken." She shook her head. "That's not rough. That's room service."

It landed like a slap. Iris sat up straight.

"You weren't there."

"I don't have to have been." Rosa's eyes moved over her, slow, taking inventory. "Look at you. It's all like that. That waist, that's a trainer and a reformer class at nine a. m. Those arms are yoga. You've never lifted anything heavier than your kid. Your hair costs more than my truck. It's a beautiful body. I'm not saying it isn't. But you built it, in a nice clean room with a mirror, the same way you built yourself a nice safe basement with three big dogs in it who'll never bite down." She picked the knife back up. "You wanted to feel like you were in the dark with something dangerous. So you had one made. To measure." She pointed the knife at her. "You know what you've got? A roller coaster, honey. You get thrown all over the sky and you scream your head off, and you never once think you're going to die. Nothing wrong with a roller coaster."

"That is *not*..."

"Whose idea was the stop word?"

Iris shut her mouth.

"Yours," Rosa said. "First night. You walked in and you told three ex-cons the rules. And they've followed them ever since, because they love you, and because it's your show." She shrugged a hard brown shoulder. "Nothing wrong with it. Most people never even get that. I'm only telling you what it is."

Iris found that her hands were shaking. She was furious. Nobody talked to her like this. And underneath the fury, cold and clear, there was a small voice that sounded a great deal like her own.

*She's right. You know she's right. You have always known.*

"You think you know what rough is?" she said. It came out thinner than she wanted.

Rosa looked at her for a long moment.

"You don't know what that word means, honey," she said, quite kindly, and went to pour a man a beer.

---

Rosa watched her from the far end of the bar, over the tap.

*Sitting there with her back straight and her chin up, mad as a wet hen, and not going anywhere.* She had seen a thousand people on that stool. She could count on one hand the ones who took the truth in the face and stayed put for more.

*And Christ, look at her.* The boys hadn't lied by saying nothing. That face, like something off a Christmas card. That body, in that dress. And she was leaking. Rosa had seen it the minute she sat down: a damp coin, the size of a quarter, darkening the white jersey over the left nipple. Now there was one over the right as well. The girl didn't know. She had no idea she was sitting in a bar full of roughnecks with her milk coming through her dress.

*Frank, you soft old son of a bitch,* she thought. *No wonder.*

She already knew every single thing she was going to do to her. She knew where the edges were. The girl didn't, yet.

*She thinks she came to look.*

---

It went on for two more hours. Iris stopped keeping track of the drinks, because Rosa was keeping track for her: three, in all that time, and a glass of water set down beside each without a word. The room thinned out. The jukebox played to nobody.

She gave as good as she could. She was quick, she had always been quick, and she got a couple of jabs in. She asked whether Rosa had always been this charming or whether it was a prison thing. She said the bar had a lovely atmosphere, very authentic, she'd seen places just like it on television. Rosa laughed out loud at that one, a real laugh, head back, and Iris felt it between her legs.

"There she is," Rosa said. "I knew there was a mouth on you."

"I've been told."

"I'll bet. I'll bet it gets you whatever you want." Rosa was drying a glass. "How's that going tonight?"

Not well. That was the truth. Iris had been using everything she had for two hours, the eyes, the lean, the slow crossing of her legs, and none of it was doing anything. Rosa looked. She openly, lazily looked: at the V of the dress, at the heavy shift of what was in it when Iris reached for her glass. But she looked like a woman reading a menu she already knew by heart. Nothing moved her an inch off her own time.

*Frank made me say it out loud,* Iris thought. *This one isn't even going to ask.*

Around midnight, Dani came hurrying past behind the bar with a full rack of glasses, head down, keeping well clear.

Rosa was in the middle of a sentence. She didn't break it. She didn't look. Her hand simply came round, open, and cracked across the seat of Dani's jeans as she went by, flat and sharp as a dropped book.

Dani jolted.

Iris saw it. She saw it clearly, from three feet away. It wasn't a flinch. It wasn't a jump of surprise. It was a jolt, all the way through that wiry little body, from the hips to the crown of her head. Her eyes closed for half a second. Her lips parted. The glasses chimed in the rack. Then she kept walking, pink to the tips of her ears, with a tiny private hitch in her step.

Iris knew that jolt. She knew it from the inside. She had been making it for seven years.

Her thighs pressed together on the bar stool, hard, without her permission. Her breath went out of her.

"... which is why I don't serve tequila after eleven," Rosa finished. She was looking at Iris's legs. "You all right there, blondie? You look a little warm."

"I'm fine."

"You're soaking through your dress."

Iris looked down.

Two dark wet circles, each the size of her palm now, right over her nipples. In white jersey. The fabric had gone nearly transparent. She could see the rose-red of herself through it.

"Oh, my God." Her arm flew across her chest. Her whole face was burning. "Oh my God. How long has that..."

"Since you sat down."

"And you didn't *say*?"

"I was enjoying it." Rosa set the glass on the shelf. "How old's the baby?"

"Eighteen months," Iris whispered. "I skipped a feed. To come here."

"Did you." Something changed in Rosa's face. It was the first time all night she had looked like she wanted something. "You drove two hours to my bar, full of milk, with nothing on under that. And you're going to tell me you came to look."

Iris couldn't answer.

Rosa glanced up at the clock over the register.

"Last call, gentlemen," she said, not loudly. Every man in the room stood up.

## Last Call

It took ten minutes. Iris sat on her stool with her arm across her chest and her heart slamming while the room emptied around her. Men settled up, said *night, Rosa*, looked at Iris, looked at Rosa, and looked carefully away.

"Dani. Go on home."

Dani stood at the end of the bar with her apron in her hands. She looked at Iris. It wasn't hate, quite. It was closer to pity, and closer still to envy.

"Yes, Rosa," she said, and went out the back.

The door closed. Rosa came out from behind the bar. She crossed the room, without hurry, and turned the sign in the window, and shot the bolt, and flipped three switches on the wall. The overheads went out. There was the green lamp over the pool table, and the neon in the window, red and blue, and the glow of the jukebox.

She came back. She stopped in front of Iris's stool, close. Standing, she was even taller than she'd looked. Iris had to tip her head back.

"Take your arm down."

Iris took it down. The wet jersey clung.

"Frank give you a word?"

"Red."

"Then that's the word. It's the only thing you're going to say tonight that counts for anything. You say it, I stop, I make you a coffee, you drive home. No hard feelings." Rosa's eyes were very dark. "What's the other one? There's another one. There would be, with you."

"Stop." It was barely a breath. "If I say stop, they spank me."

Rosa laughed, low.

"Of course they do. You get a treat for making noise." She shook her head. "Not here. Here, *stop* gets you nothing. *Please* gets you nothing. *Harder* gets you nothing. I'm not going to ask what you want and I'm not going to ask if you're all right. I'll know before you do. You don't steer this, you don't sweeten me up, and you don't get a say in when it's over. It's over when I've had enough of you." She put one finger under Iris's chin. "That's what you drove out here for. You don't have to tell me. Just don't say the word."

Iris's whole body was shaking.

She didn't say the word.

"Good girl," Rosa said softly. "Up."

## The Bar

She was lifted. That was the first shock. Rosa took her by the waist, two hard hands, and picked her up off the stool as easily as Frank ever had, and sat her on the bar. The wood was cool and sticky under her thighs. Rosa stepped in between her knees.

And kissed her.

Iris had never been kissed by a woman. It was nothing like she'd imagined. It was slow. Rosa's mouth was soft, softer than any man's, and tasted of lime, and it was in no hurry at all. A hand slid up the back of her neck into her hair and simply held her head where it was wanted. The kiss went on and on, deep and lazy and thorough, Rosa's tongue stroking hers, until Iris heard herself whimper and felt her spine go out of her like a pulled thread.

*Oh. Oh, that's not fair. She's gentle. Nobody said she'd be gentle.*

It wasn't for her, though. She understood that even through the haze. Rosa was kissing her the way you'd eat a peach. Because she felt like it. Because Iris tasted good.

The mouth left hers. It moved along her jaw, down the side of her throat. The hand in her hair tightened, and turned her head, and gathered the whole blonde weight of it up and to one side, baring the back of her neck.

Lips, low, where her neck met her shoulder. Just under the hairline. A warm breath.

Then Rosa bit her.

Not like Ray. Ray nipped; Ray left neat little ovals. This was a whole mouthful of the thick muscle that ran up into her neck, taken between strong teeth and clamped. Hard. Harder than Iris had ever been bitten in her life, hard enough that her vision went white, hard enough that her mouth fell open and nothing came out.

It should have hurt. Every nerve said it should hurt. And it went through her like a bolt of lightning, straight down her spine and into her cunt. Her thighs clamped on Rosa's hips. A long broken cry tore out of her, and her milk let down in both breasts at once, in a hot rush, soaking the front of the dress. She was going to come. Fully dressed, on a bar, from a bite. She was right there, she was tipping, one more second...

The teeth let go.

One second short. Exactly one. She hung there on the lip of it with her mouth open and her whole body clenched around nothing, and it slid away from her like water down a drain.

A tongue passed over the place, once, soothing.

"Not yet," Rosa said, against her neck. "I'll tell you when."

Iris was gasping. She couldn't understand what had just happened. "How did you... I almost... nobody's ever..."

"No. They wouldn't. One of the boys bites you that hard, he puts you in the emergency room." Rosa drew back and looked at her, pleased, the way a mechanic looks at an engine turning over. "It's not how hard. It's where. Quarter inch either side and you'd have screamed blue murder. You've got a spot there, like a cat." She thumbed Iris's wet lower lip. "You didn't know that about yourself. I knew it when you walked in. Same as I knew just when to let go."

*She knew. Before me. She knows where my edges are and I don't.*

It was the most frightening thing anyone had ever said to her. She was so wet she could feel it on the bar.

Rosa looked down at the dress. The whole front of it was soaked through and clinging, transparent, both breasts showing clear as if she wore nothing, the nipples standing up dark through the wet white.

"Would you look at that," she murmured. "What a waste."

She took hold of the two edges of the plunging V, and spread them. The jersey stretched. Iris's tits came out, heavy and full and tight with a missed feed, pale as cream, blue-veined, the big rose-red nipples beaded with milk and dripping.

Rosa hefted one in her palm. Her hands were a surprise: strong and hard, a bartender's hands, but smooth, a woman's, with short clean nails. She weighed it. She squeezed, slowly, from the root, with total competence, and a fan of fine white jets sprang from the nipple and pattered across the bar.

"That's real," she said. "That's the one thing on you that isn't out of a catalogue." She bent her head. "I'm having that."

She didn't ask. She closed her mouth over the nipple and drew, deep and strong, and Iris felt the pull of it behind her breastbone, down through her belly, and moaned out loud.

And as she drank, Rosa's other hand slid up the inside of Iris's thigh, hooked the wet lace aside with a thumb, and put two fingers into her.

No preamble. A woman's fingers, longer than she expected, and they knew where they were going. They went straight to the place on her front wall, the place Frank could find in about a minute and Ray found by accident. They hooked, and pressed, and began to work it with a slow, heavy, rolling stroke, as if Rosa had been given a map.

Iris's head fell back. *Oh, thank God. Oh, yes. Yes.*

Mouth and fingers together. The deep draw on her nipple and the deep stroke inside her, in the same slow rhythm, pull and press, pull and press, until she could not tell which one she was feeling. It was so good it was stupid. Twenty seconds. Thirty. It rose in her fast, she was primed, she was more than ready, she was *there*...

The fingers stopped.

They didn't leave. They just went still inside her, exactly at the instant, with the pad of each one resting on that spot and not moving at all. The mouth went on swallowing.

"No," Iris gasped. "No, no, don't stop, I was..."

Nothing. Long, calm, steady swallows. Rosa's eyes were closed.

The edge receded. Iris sagged, shaking. And the moment she had come far enough back, not a breath sooner, the fingers began again.

*Oh, no,* she thought. *Oh, she's not going to...*

She was.

It built again. Faster this time. Right up to the very last hair's breadth, so close she could taste it, so close her toes were curling in her shoes. Stop. Stillness. The patient pull at her breast.

Again.

Again.

Iris had been teased before. The men had made her wait; Frank liked to make her wait. But they were guessing. They would stop a little too early, and it was only frustrating, or a little too late, and she'd tip over and laugh at them. Rosa was not guessing. Rosa took her to the precise, exact, razor edge every single time, one heartbeat from the drop, and held her there on two motionless fingertips for as long as it suited her. She never misjudged it by the width of a thread. She seemed to feel it coming before Iris did.

*How does she know? I don't even know. How can she feel it before I do?*

She tried everything. She was a woman who had been getting her own way for twenty-eight years, and she threw the whole box of tricks at it. She rocked her hips, trying to ride the fingers; a hard hand on the small of her back pinned her still. She clenched, with every muscle ten months of physical therapy had given her, trying to grind herself over on her own. The fingers simply opened, flat, and gave her nothing to grip. She moaned the way that made Stu lose his mind. She held her breath, hoping to sneak up on it. Rosa stopped two seconds earlier that time, as if to say *I saw that*.

Then she begged.

"Please. Please, Rosa. Just let me. I'll do anything. Oh, God, *please*, I'm so close, I'm right there, one more, just one more second..."

*Please gets you nothing.* She had been told. She couldn't stop.

The left breast ran dry. Rosa let the nipple slide from her lips with a soft wet sound, glanced up at her wrecked face with mild approval, and moved to the right. The fingers never left.

It began all over again.

She lost count somewhere past the tenth. She lost a great deal. The begging stopped being words. She cursed her. She called her a bitch, a sadist, things she had never said to anyone, and a second later she was sobbing that she was sorry, she was sorry, she'd be good, she'd do whatever Rosa wanted for the rest of her life. She offered her money. She actually did that. She heard herself say *I'll pay you*, in a high cracked voice, and Rosa laughed through her nose without lifting her mouth.

Her whole body was one screaming nerve. Sweat ran down her spine. Her thighs shook without stopping. Every edge left her higher than the last; she never came all the way back down anymore, she only hung a little lower on the cliff and was hauled up again. She was dripping onto the bar. She could hear the wet sound of those fingers. She was being milked from one end and wound like a watch from the other, by a woman who was simply having a drink.

*I'm going to lose my mind. This is how it happens. I'm going to go crazy on a bar in a town I can't name.*

She had no idea how long. The jukebox had changed songs many times.

At last the right breast gave up its final thin mouthful. Rosa swallowed. She lifted her head, unhurried, and licked her lips, and looked at Iris.

Iris was a ruin. Her hair was stuck to her face. Her mouth hung open. She had gone past begging into a kind of glassy, trembling silence, and her eyes were enormous.

"There," Rosa said softly. "Now you're ready. Now you know what wanting something is."

Her free hand came up from the small of Iris's back. It slid around, and up between her breasts, over the gold coin, and settled around her throat.

Iris went very still.

It had been done to her before, badly, by men who weren't looking. Frank had forbidden it the first night. *Nobody puts a hand on that girl's throat.* In seven years none of them had, and she had never quite dared to ask.

Rosa hadn't asked either. Her hand was big enough to span it. The fingers and thumb lay along the sides of her neck, under the hinge of her jaw, and they pressed. Not on the front. On the sides, firm and even and exact. Iris could breathe. It came thin, as if through a straw. Her pulse was suddenly enormous, thudding against that palm. The room drew in at the edges, the green lamp and the neon going soft and far away, and everything left in the world was the hand, and the fingers inside her, and two dark eyes six inches from her own.

"Frank never let them," Rosa said quietly. "Did he. Good. He was right. They don't know how."

*She does. She knows exactly how. Oh God, she's got me by the throat and I've never felt so safe in my life.*

"Now," said Rosa.

She bent, took the emptied nipple between her teeth, and bit. Hard. The same bright, impossible, perfectly placed bite that turned inside out as it landed. And in the same instant the two fingers, which had spent the better part of an hour learning precisely what she needed, gave it to her: pressed, and stroked, and did not stop.

Iris went off like a bomb.

There was no build. There was no edge left to go over; she had been standing on it for an hour. It simply detonated, from the nipple and the throat and the cunt all at once, and blew her to pieces. Her back snapped into an arch. Her scream came out thin and strange around the hand on her neck. Something hot gushed out of her over Rosa's wrist and ran off the edge of the bar.

And it didn't end.

That was what she could never explain afterward. An orgasm ends. That is the nature of one. This did not. The fingers kept on, the same rolling stroke, relentless, right through the peak and out the other side, and instead of coming down she was thrown straight into a second, bigger than the first. And a third on top of it. Rosa let go of the nipple and bit the other one, and that set off another. The hand on her throat eased a fraction, let a rush of air and blood back into her head, and the rush itself tipped her over again; then it tightened, and the world narrowed, and that did it too.

They ran together. She couldn't find the gaps between them. It was a chain, a string of explosions going off one after another down a long dark fuse, each one lit by the one before, and she was not having them so much as being carried along in them like something in a flood. She was aware of her heels drumming on the bar. Of her own hands, clutching Rosa's shoulders, hard as oak. Of a voice, hers, that had stopped screaming and was only making a long hoarse rhythmic sound, over and over.

Of Rosa's face, close, calm, intent, watching her the whole time. Reading every second. Easing the throat. Tightening it. Slowing the fingers a hair to let her get one breath, and then taking her up again.

*It's not stopping. It's not going to stop. Why isn't it stopping.*

*I don't want it to stop.*

She didn't know how long it lasted. She truly did not. Time had gone somewhere. It could have been two minutes or an hour. The jukebox finished a song, and played another, and another, and she was still coming. Her vision went gray and came back. At one point she was fairly sure she was crying, and at another that she was laughing, and it made no difference to anything.

At last, slowly, the way you bring a car down through the gears, Rosa brought her down. The fingers gentled. The hand on her throat opened and lay flat on her breastbone, warm, feeling her heart. The explosions came further apart, and smaller, and were shudders, and were only trembling.

Iris fell forward against her. She could not hold up her own head. She lay with her face in the hollow of that hard shoulder, smelling limes and sweat, twitching all over like a dreaming dog, and Rosa slid her fingers out and held her, one arm around her back, quite gently, until she could breathe.

"Eighteen minutes," Rosa remarked, somewhere above her. "By the Budweiser clock. I wondered how long you'd run."

*Eighteen...*

She tried to say it. Her mouth wouldn't make the word.

"Mm-hm," said Rosa, and wiped her wet hand on the white dress. "Thought so."

## What the Word Means

She lost the dress somewhere. She didn't know when. She was on her back along the bar, on the wet wood, in a white lace thong and her heels and a gold coin on a chain, and Rosa was standing over her with one hand flat on her belly, holding her down like a paperweight, looking.

"Pilates," Rosa said, and patted the hard flat stomach, twice, like a horse. "Very nice. You get your money's worth." Her hand slid down. One finger hooked in the lace. "And this. White. For me, or for you?"

"I don't... for..."

"Doesn't matter."

She didn't take it off. She twisted her fist in it and pulled, upward, so the wet lace drew tight into Iris and sawed, once, across her clit. Iris's hips came off the bar.

"No," she whimpered. She had nothing left. She was wrung out like a rag. "No more. I can't. Not after that. Rosa, I can't."

"Yes, you can."

"*Stop*," she sobbed, and meant it, and it was not the word, and both of them knew it.

"No," said Rosa.

With the men there was always a breath, a pause, a hand on her back. *There she goes. Good girl.* Somebody always let her come down, and stay down, and rest.

Nobody was going to let her rest.

Rosa's head went down between her thighs.

Her mouth was as good as Frank's. It was better. It was a thing Iris would never have believed. It was softer, and it was more exact; she didn't devour, she *placed*, the flat of her tongue laid precisely where the nerves were thickest and worked in a slow, heavy, merciless circle while those two fingers slid back in and took up their stroke. Iris had thought she was empty. She came again. She was crying. Her heels were skidding on the bar.

Then Rosa pushed back the hood of her clit with one thumb, and took the bare, swollen bead between her teeth.

*No, not there, not* there*, she can't...*

She bit.

It was not gentle. It was a real bite, on the most sensitive part of her body, a clean hard pinch of teeth held for one long second.

Something inside Iris's head went out, like a bulb.

She did not know how long it lasted. She knew that she was arched like a bow with only her shoulders and her heels on the wood. She knew she was making a sound she had never heard before, a long high wail with no breath in it. She knew something hot was gushing out of her, over Rosa's chin, over the edge of the bar and onto the floor. It went on and on. It was not like coming. It was like being struck by something.

When she could see again she was looking up at tin ceiling tiles, with tears running into her ears, and every muscle she owned was twitching.

Rosa was wiping her face with a bar towel.

"Don't try and count them," she said. "You lost the count an hour ago, and I haven't started on you yet."

*Haven't started.* Iris stared at the ceiling. *She drank me dry and held me by the throat for eighteen minutes and bit my... and she hasn't started.*

*I don't know what that word means.*

*I didn't. I didn't know.*

---

The harness was black leather, and it hung on a hook on the inside of the office door, where it had clearly hung for years.

Iris watched her put it on. She was lying where she had been left, face down over the end of the pool table with the green felt under her cheek, too boneless to lift her head. Rosa had stripped off the tank top. She was wearing a black bra and the black jeans, and she stepped out of the jeans and buckled the harness over her hips with the dull practiced movements of a woman putting on a tool belt. Broad straps, soft and dark with wear. Steel rings. Her thighs were heavy with muscle. There was a tattoo on her ribs, and a long pale scar on her hip.

The thing she fitted into it was black too, and thick, and curved.

She could not take her eyes off it.

"You like that," Rosa observed.

"Yes."

"I wasn't asking."

A hand in her hair. Her head was lifted off the felt and turned. A thumb pressed her mouth open, and the tip of it was laid on her tongue.

"Get it wet. You'll want it wet."

She sucked it. She looked up the length of that strong, scarred, beautiful body as she did, and Rosa looked down at her with her head a little on one side.

Then Rosa walked around behind her.

A boot nudged her ankles apart. The thong was pulled to one side. The blunt head of it touched her, slid through the flood of her once, and pressed in.

Iris had been fucked by three men at once. She had been fucked in every way she had been able to imagine, and some they had imagined for her. She thought, as that thick curved length went into her, slow, steady, all the way to the root: *This is the same. I know this.*

It was not the same.

It took her about a minute to understand why. Rosa began to move, a long deep roll of her hips, unhurried, the curve of the thing dragging over that place on her front wall on every stroke. It was good. It was very good. And Iris, without thinking, did what she always did. She pushed back. She tightened. She gave the low hungry moan that made Stu lose his rhythm and Ray start to swear.

Nothing happened.

She squeezed, with all ten months of physical therapy. The trick that had made Frank Brennan shout out loud.

Nothing. Of course nothing. There was nothing there to feel it.

*Oh,* she thought, and her stomach dropped. *Oh, no.*

Every man she had ever been with, she could work. Even tied. Even gagged. Her body was a set of reins, and she had been using them since she was eighteen without ever once admitting it. Clench, and he came sooner. Moan, and he went harder. Arch, cry, go soft, and he'd ease off. Even Frank. *Especially* Frank. Her whole body was a language, and all three of them were fluent in it, and loved her, and listened.

Rosa wasn't listening. There was no nerve in that thing for her to speak to. It would not swell. It would not jerk. It would never, ever finish.

"Figured it out, have you?" said Rosa's voice above her, quite conversational. She hadn't changed pace. "That's right. It doesn't get tired, and it doesn't come. So there's no clock on this, blondie, except me. And I close at two and I open at eleven."

"Harder," Iris begged. Her last card. "Please. Fuck me harder."

"No."

The same slow roll. In. Out. In.

"Then stop, then *stop*, I can't..."

"No."

It was unbearable. It was so slow. She could feel an orgasm gathering, and she could not hurry it by one second; it came when the pace brought it and not before, a great heavy wave lifting her off the felt and setting her down, and the hips behind her never altered, and the next one was already starting.

She clawed at the table. She bit the felt. She heard herself saying *please, please, please*, to nobody, for nothing.

Then, when she had stopped expecting anything, Rosa wound her hair twice around one fist, set the other hand on her hip, and changed.

There was no warning. It was like a door slamming. The whole strength of that back and those thighs came down on her, and Iris was driven up the table until her hip bones hit the rail. Hard. Brutal. Rougher than Frank had ever dared be, each stroke landing like a fist, her big soft ass shaking and rippling under it, her tits dragged back and forth on the felt. Her head was hauled back by the hair until she was staring at the green lamp. A hand cracked across her ass, and it was not a spanking, it was a blow, and then again on the same place, and again.

She came screaming. She came so hard she bit her tongue.

And in the middle of it, the pace dropped away to nothing. Rosa let go of her hair. She leaned down over her, all that warm strong weight along her back, and kissed the nape of her neck, on the bite. She stroked the hair off Iris's wet face with two fingers, very tenderly, and began to move again, as slow and soft as a boat rocking.

"Shh," she said. "Shh, now. There you are."

Iris wept. She couldn't follow it. She couldn't brace for either one. Gentle and then savage and then gentle, with no pattern she could find, and each time she thought she had her footing it was taken away.

*She's doing it on purpose. I can't get ready. I can't... I can't be anything. She won't let me be anything.*

It went on.

It went on.

She was turned over, at some point. She was on her back on the felt with her knees pushed up to her shoulders. She was looking up at Rosa's face, calm, a little flushed, a bead of sweat at her temple, entirely absorbed in what she was doing.

At some point a hand took her ankle and pulled off her shoe.

"Pretty feet." Rosa turned her bare foot in the lamplight, like something in a shop. She ran her tongue up the arch and closed her mouth on the toes, while the strap sat deep and still inside her, and Iris moaned and curled them against her tongue.

"She likes that," Rosa noted. "The boys know?"

"Ray," Iris moaned. "Ray knows..."

"Good for Ray." A bite, on the ball of her foot, exact as a needle.

And then, a while later, or a long while, there was one that was bigger than the rest. It came up from underneath like a wave under a boat, and a word came up her throat with it.

It stopped behind her teeth. She felt the shape of it sitting there. It would not come out. It had never once come out for anybody else, and it did not come now, with a woman's strap buried in her and her whole body shaking itself apart.

Rosa missed nothing. She held still, deep, and looked down.

"What was that? You swallowed something."

"Nothing."

"Mm." One slow stroke. "There's a thing you call him. Isn't there. I can see it in your mouth."

Iris turned her face into the felt.

"I could get it out of you." It wasn't a boast. They both knew she probably could. "Keep you on this table till Tuesday. I'd have it."

"Please don't."

It was the first thing she had asked for all night that wasn't *more*.

Rosa studied her. Something in the hard, handsome face went almost gentle.

"No," she said. "That one's his. I had that man at twenty, honey, and I never got one of those out of him or anybody." She hooked Iris's knees over her forearms. "Everything else is mine."

More.

She was

there was the hand on her throat again, pressing, and the room going soft, and she went into it like going under warm water

teeth in the inside of her thigh

*how many is*

a mouth on hers, soft, for a long time, somebody kissing her and kissing her and she was crying into it

the strap again. from behind. her face in the felt. chalk dust. slow

*I can't*

fast

*I can't I can't I*

"Yes, you can," said the voice. "One more. I'll tell you when you can't."

and she could. That was the terrible thing. Every time. The voice knew. The voice was right. There was always one more, and the voice knew where it was before she did, and went and got it

*Mark,* she thought once, from very far away. *Nora. The... the place cards. The*

no

there wasn't any Mark. There was the lamp. Green

there was her

*Rosa*

she didn't have a name herself anymore. She'd put it down somewhere. It was all right. She didn't need it

good

so good

*more*

## The Pool Table

She came back to herself in pieces.

Felt under her knees. She was kneeling on the floor beside the pool table. Her head was resting against something warm and solid, and a hand was moving in her hair, idly, the way you'd pet a dog. She didn't know how long she had been there.

The thing she was leaning on was Rosa's thigh.

Rosa was sitting on the edge of the table with her feet on the rail. She had unbuckled the harness; it lay on the felt beside her, shining. She had a glass in her other hand. She was drinking whiskey and looking at nothing, loose and easy, a woman at the end of a good shift.

"You back?" she said, without looking down.

Iris tried to speak. It took two attempts.

"... I think so."

"Good. I'm not done." Rosa finished the glass and set it down. Her hand closed in Iris's hair. "I've been working all night. Time you did something for me."

She shifted forward on the edge of the table and opened her thighs. She tipped Iris's face up and put it where she wanted it, with no more ceremony than a man pulling a chair in to a table.

"Go on. See if that smart mouth's good for anything."

It was the first thing all night that Iris had been given to *do*.

Something woke up in her. Dimly, down in the wreckage, a small bright ember of herself. She was exhausted past anything she had ever known. Her jaw trembled. She could barely hold her head up.

And she was good at this.

She had never done it to a woman. But she knew, in her body, exactly how it ought to be done. Seven years ago a man had sat down between her knees at a steel desk like a man sitting down to dinner, and shown her what it was to be eaten by someone who meant it. She had thought about that night a thousand times. She had named a vibrator after it. She remembered every single thing he had done.

*All right,* thought Iris. *All right, you smug, gorgeous bitch. Let's see.*

She didn't flick. She didn't tease. She put her whole face into it, the way he had. One long, slow, flat lick first, from the bottom to the top, taking everything. Rosa was soaked. She tasted of salt and heat and something dark, and Iris groaned into her from the chest.

The hand in her hair went still.

She spread her with both thumbs and went in. Her tongue pushed up inside, deep, curling. Her nose pressed to the hard swollen bud above. She found it, and she closed her lips around the whole thing and sucked, steady and strong, and laid the flat of her tongue against the underside and rubbed. Slow. Heavy. Relentless. Exactly where she herself would have needed it.

"... Huh," said Rosa, above her. It didn't sound quite as lazy as before.

Iris slid two fingers into her and hooked them.

The thigh under her hand jumped.

"Easy," Rosa said. Her voice had dropped. "Easy, blondie, I'll tell you when..."

Iris did not ease.

*You don't steer this,* she thought, and for the first time in six hours she was grinning, with her mouth full. *You don't get a say in when it's over.*

She locked her free arm around that big hard thigh and held on. She worked her fingers the way Rosa's had been worked in her, that rolling stroke she'd had done to her so many times tonight she could have drawn it. She sucked. She did not let up for breath. She felt the muscles in Rosa's stomach start to jump under her forehead.

"Hey. *Hey.* I said..." The fist tightened in her hair, pulling, trying to lift her off. Iris growled and went harder. "Oh, you little... oh, fuck. Oh, *fuck*..."

It was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.

Rosa's back hit the felt. She had gone over backward, flat on the table, and her thighs clamped shut around Iris's head like a vise, and her heels dug into Iris's shoulder blades. All that strength, all that iron control, and it was bucking against her mouth, shaking, completely out of hand. Rosa was swearing, in English and then in Spanish, a low torn stream of it. One fist was pounding the table.

She came like a building going down. Iris felt it clench around her fingers, flood her chin, go on and on. She held on through every second of it. And when the thighs started to loosen, when the hand in her hair pushed weakly at her forehead, she didn't stop. She eased off for exactly as long as it took, the way she had been taught, and went back in, softer, and built it, and took her straight over into a second one that tore a shout out of her that rattled the bottles behind the bar.

Then she sat back on her heels, and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and waited.

For a long moment there was no sound but breathing.

Rosa lay flat on her back on her own pool table with one arm flung over her eyes and her chest heaving. A flush had come up over her throat and her collarbones. Her short hair was stuck to her forehead.

She started to laugh.

It began low, in her belly, and it built, until she was shaking with it, helpless, staring at the lamp.

"Well, shit," she said, when she could. "Well, *shit*. Look at you." She lifted her head and stared down the length of herself at the blonde wreck kneeling on her floor. There was something new in her face. It looked, of all things, like respect. "Where in the hell did a country-club girl learn to do that?"

"Frank," said Iris hoarsely.

Rosa stared at her. Then she put her head back down and laughed harder.

"Frank. Of course. Of course it was Frank. I taught *him*." She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "Twenty years. Twenty years, and it comes back around and bites me on my own table." She sat up, slowly, and pushed her hair back with her fingers. She looked at Iris for a long, long moment.

"That was real," she said. "That wasn't Pilates. That, you earned." She reached down and ran her thumb over Iris's swollen mouth. "You're not a tourist. I take it back."

It was the proudest Iris had been of anything since her daughter was born.

Then Rosa smiled. It was a slow smile, and it went all the way to her eyes, and every hair on Iris's body stood up.

"Now," said Rosa, picking the harness up off the felt. "Do you know what it costs, in my bar, to not ease up when I say *easy*?"

"... No," Iris whispered.

"You're about to."

## Upstairs

She paid for it for two hours. She paid for it over the pool table and against the office door and bent forward on the stairs up to the flat, with her hands on a higher step and her cheek on the worn carpet. She paid for it, at last, in a wide low bed under a slanted ceiling, face down, with a pillow under her hips and a woman's weight along her back and a strong arm around her waist.

She did not have one thought in her head the whole time. Not one. She was a thing that came, and wept, and came. She was held by the hair and bitten and kissed and turned over like a page. Once she heard somebody saying *thank you, thank you, thank you*, and it was her.

It ended when Rosa had had enough. Not before.

The last thing she knew was a hand pulling a quilt up over her shoulder, and a kiss, quite soft, on the back of her neck.

Right on the bite.

## Morning

She woke to sun through a skylight and the smell of coffee.

She lay still for a long time, taking stock. She had never been so sore. Not after the wedding weekend. Not after the cuffs. It was in places she hadn't known could be sore. Her scalp hurt. Her feet hurt. There was a deep throbbing ring of teeth at the back of her neck, and when she reached up and touched it, under her hair, she had to close her eyes.

There were marks. She checked, with a sinking feeling. Thighs. Hips. The undersides of her breasts. The inside of one ankle.

Not one of them was anywhere that a dress would not cover. Not one. She had been bitten and beaten for seven hours by a woman who was pleasing nobody but herself, and every mark on her had been placed.

*She knew that, too. She knew where I can't be touched better than I've ever said it.*

Her dress was over the back of a chair. Somebody had rinsed the milk out of it and hung it up to dry. Her shoes were side by side underneath. Her bag was on the seat, zipped.

She went down the stairs on legs like a newborn calf's.

The bar looked different by daylight: smaller, shabbier, kinder. The chairs were up on the tables. Rosa sat at the end of the bar in a clean gray T-shirt, with a ledger and a calculator and a pair of reading glasses on her nose. She didn't look up.

"Coffee's on the burner. There's eggs if you can face them."

Dani was restocking the beer cooler. She glanced at Iris as she came in, saw how she was walking, and looked very quickly back into the cooler. She did not look at either of them again.

Iris poured herself a coffee with both hands. She drank it standing. She didn't trust herself to sit.

Nobody fussed. Nobody asked how she was. Nobody put cream on anything. She had been used, thoroughly, for someone else's pleasure, and it was over because that someone had been satisfied, and now it was morning and there were books to do.

It was the cleanest feeling she had ever had in her life.

"I should go," she said. "I told Mark I'd stayed over at the venue."

"Mm."

She picked up her bag. She got as far as the door.

"Rosa."

"Yeah."

"Can I ask you something?"

"You can ask."

"Why are Ray and Stu scared of you? They wouldn't even say your name." She hesitated. "And Frank. Frank does whatever you tell him. I've never seen Frank do what anybody tells him."

Rosa turned a page. She still hadn't looked up. But the corner of that wide mouth had begun to curl.

She lifted one hand off the ledger, and pointed, without turning her head, at the open door of the office. At the hook on the inside of it. At what was hanging there, black and gleaming in the morning sun.

"Ask Frank," she said, "how he likes it."

Iris looked at the harness.

She looked at Rosa.

Her mouth fell open.

"*No.*"

"Drive safe, blondie."

"He... *Frank?* You...?"

"Once," said Rosa, tapping the calculator. "Nineteen years ago. He swore up and down he'd hate it." She glanced up at last, over the reading glasses, and her eyes were dancing. "I knew he wouldn't. I'm never wrong about that. Go on home."

Iris drove two hours with all the windows down, and laughed, out loud, alone in the car, most of the way.

## The Basement

She waited two weeks, until she could sit.

It was a Tuesday. She came down in jeans and a sweater, for once, at the end of the afternoon. Somebody had the radio on low. She didn't knock.

Stu took one look at her and put his sandwich down.

"Oh, no," he said.

Ray had gone pale. He was staring at the way she was holding her neck.

"She went," he said to Frank, in a hollow voice. "Frank. She went out there."

Frank didn't say anything. He looked at her for a long moment, top to toe, the way he always did. Checking. He saw something that satisfied him. He got up, and went to the pot, and poured a mug of coffee, and put it in her hands.

"Sit down," he said. "Slow."

She sat on the edge of his desk. Beside her, in the corner, was the old baseball glove. She looked down into the pocket. A wink of blue.

"So," Stu said, carefully. "How was it?"

Iris thought about it. She sipped her coffee.

"I don't know what the word *rough* means," she said. "Apparently. I've been informed."

Ray closed his eyes like a man in pain.

"She tell you it was room service?" Stu asked. "She told *me* I fuck like a golden retriever."

"She said you were good boys. She said you'd cut off a hand before you'd bruise me."

"Well," Frank said gruffly, sitting back down. "That's true."

"I know it is." She reached over and touched his sleeve. "I told her I wouldn't trade it. I meant that. She's a holiday, Frank. This is home." She lowered her voice, so it was only for him. "She didn't get the word. She came close, and she saw it, and she left it alone. She said that one's yours."

Something went out of his shoulders that she hadn't known was in them.

"All right, then," he said.

"I did have one question."

"Mm."

She set her coffee down. She folded her hands in her lap. She gave him the look, the wide, sweet, church-choir look that she had walked in with seven years ago in a witch's hat.

"Rosa said to ask you," Iris said, "how you like it."

The silence was absolute.

Then Stu made a noise like a kettle. He got halfway to his feet, clutching his stomach, and had to leave the room. They could hear him in the corridor, howling.

Ray had slid slowly down the wall beside the key cabinet until he was sitting on the floor with his face in his knees, and his enormous shoulders were shaking.

Frank Brennan sat perfectly still. A dull red was climbing out of his collar, past the scar, up his throat and over his jaw to the roots of his hair.

He picked up his own mug. He drank from it.

"That," he said, with tremendous dignity, "was a long time ago. I was twenty years old. And I don't see what's so goddamn funny."

"*Once*," Ray wheezed, from the floor. "She says, just *once*..."

"She said you swore you'd hate it," Iris offered.

"I did hate it."

"She said she's never wrong."

Frank looked at her over the rim of his coffee. He looked at the baseball glove. He looked, briefly, at the ceiling.

"She isn't," he said.

It was a long time before any of them could speak.

And after that it was a thing among the four of them, for good. Any time Frank got too stern, any time he folded his arms and used the voice that ended things, somebody only had to say it, softly, from across the room.

"Rosa."

It worked every time.