Iris, the Bride-to-Be

*Book three. Iris is 24. All other characters are above 18.*

Iris planned other people's weddings for a living, and at twenty-four she was good enough at it to be booked eleven deep through October. She could seat two feuding families at one reception. She could find four hundred white peonies in a drought. She could talk a sobbing bride out of a locked bathroom in under six minutes.

Her own wedding was in three weeks, and it was killing her.

The florist had gone bankrupt. Mark's mother had opinions about the napkins. There were a hundred and sixty place cards to hand-letter, a band that wanted a different deposit, a seating chart she had redone nine times. She was working fourteen-hour days on eleven other women's happiest moments and then coming home to her own, and somewhere in there she had stopped sleeping.

She had also stopped being fucked. Not that Mark had ever been the answer to that. Mark was kind and handsome and steady, and he made love to her the way he did everything, considerately. Lately he was too tired even for that. "Let's save it for the honeymoon," he'd said, kissing her forehead, and she had smiled, and gone into the bathroom, and bitten a towel.

It had been seven months since she'd been down to the basement. She thought about it in traffic. She thought about it during cake tastings. She had a vein in her temple that jumped.

She had Frank Jr., at least.

Nobody on earth knew about Frank Jr. Not Mark. Not her maid of honor. Not even the three men in the basement, and she would have died before telling the one he was named for. He was a pocket vibrator about the size of a lipstick, brushed silver, with one button and three speeds, and he had lived in the zipped inside pocket of her purse since the winter of her senior year. She had bought him a month after that first Halloween, when she understood that she was going to be thinking about a maintenance office for the rest of her life and needed something to get her through the weeks in between. The name was a private joke, and a tribute. On that first night Frank had sat down between her knees and eaten her as if it were the whole point, the first man who ever had, and she had come four times on his tongue, screaming a word she had never called any man before or since. A little silver buzz against her clit was the closest she could get to it on her own. It wasn't close. A very small stand-in for a very large man.

He had seen a lot of service that spring. In the car, in the parking structure under the florist's. In the fitting room at the salon, in a gown that wasn't hers, with her skirts in her fist and her teeth in her lip. Twice in the ladies' room at a cake tasting. He took the edge off. He never did more than that. Frank Jr. could make her come in ninety seconds flat, and afterward she always felt exactly as empty as before. He had never once got that word out of her. Nothing had, in three years, but the man himself.

Then, on a Tuesday, three things lined up.

The first was Mark's bachelor party. His brothers were taking him to Scottsdale for golf and God knew what else, and being his brothers, they were taking him for a week. Thursday to Thursday. She had kissed him goodbye at the curb and told him, and meant it, "Have fun. You deserve it. Don't tell me anything."

The second was the rack.

It was the one real perk of her job. The bridal salon she partnered with let her pull samples for clients to try at home, and for her own wedding the owner had waved a hand and said, *Take whatever you like, darling, take all of it.* So there was a rolling rack in her office with eleven gowns on it. And beside it, in tissue-lined boxes, the things that went underneath: longline bustiers, boned corsets, garter belts, silk stockings with seams, a cathedral veil, three pairs of opera gloves, a babydoll you could read a newspaper through. She had not been able to choose. She had tried them on alone, at night, with the door locked, and stood in front of the mirror feeling like a present nobody was going to open.

And whatever happened to it, it would all go back looking untouched. Everything on that rack went back to the salon through the same place every client's gown went: a specialist bridal cleaner run by a tiny, unshockable Polish woman named Mrs. Kowalczyk, who had seen everything a dress could have on it and never once asked. The ticket only ever said the planner's name and *client return*.

The third thing was at the bottom of the lingerie boxes.

There was a blindfold. It had come in a boudoir set from a French house: a band of ivory Chantilly lace backed with silk, wide as her palm, with long satin ribbons to tie. She had put it on once in the stockroom, just to see. The lace was soft as breath. The dark behind it was total. She had stood there for a full minute with her heart going like a rabbit's and her thighs pressed together, and then taken it off and put it in her purse.

And under it, in a little velvet pouch she had assumed was jewelry, there was something else. Polished steel, smooth and heavy and tapered, cool as a river stone. At its base, set like a ring, a faceted crystal the size of a quarter, cut to throw light, the deep clear blue of a sapphire. She had turned it over in her fingers for a long time before she understood what it was for. Then she had put that in her purse too.

*Something blue*, she'd thought, and nearly laughed out loud at her desk.

Iris stood in her office with her hand on a sleeve of duchess satin and saw the whole weekend, start to finish, like a seating chart falling into place.

Nobody would ever know. All she had to do was drop them off on Monday.

## Friday Night

She loaded the car at dusk. Four white gowns in garment bags and one short black one. The lingerie boxes, the hatbox with the veil, a pair of white satin heels. Her decorations kit, because she never went anywhere without it: spools of lace ribbon, rolls of white crepe streamer, a paper banner. From the caterer's tasting crate, two bottles of the champagne she had chosen for her own reception, and from the baker, in a white box tied with string, the six-inch tasting sample of her own wedding cake. She put on a long trench coat over what she had picked for the drive, and her hands shook on the buttons.

Seven months, and nothing down there had changed. She didn't knock. She never did.

They all stopped what they were doing.

Frank was thirty-five that year, solid as a doorframe, no gray at his temples yet. Ray was by the weight rack with a wrench. Stu, clean-shaven then, was eating a sandwich, and stopped.

Iris set the hatbox on the desk. She untied the belt of the trench and let it slide off her shoulders.

Ivory. All of it. A longline bustier in corded lace, boned to the hip, that took her waist in to nothing and pushed her tits up high: double Ds, round and full and firm, big on her small frame, spilling over the scalloped edge in two deep curves with the small pink nipples just showing. A garter belt. Sheer stockings with a seam up the back. Opera gloves to the elbow. Satin heels. A scrap of lace between her legs that was already wet through. On her head, falling to the backs of her knees, twelve feet of cathedral veil. Her mouth was painted the bright, true red she was going to wear down the aisle.

On her left hand, over the glove, Mark's diamond.

Nobody spoke.

"Well," said Iris. Her voice only shook a little. "I told my fiancé to have fun this week. He deserves it." She looked each of them in the eye, one at a time. "His wife-to-be is out here begging to be gang raped."

Stu put down his sandwich.

---

*Three years,* Frank thought. *Three years of this girl walking through my door, and every single time she finds a way to stop my heart.*

He looked at the ring. He looked at the veil. He was going to hell, and he had made his peace with that a long time ago.

*Some poor bastard in Arizona thinks he's marrying a nice girl,* he thought. *And he is. That's the hell of it. She's the nicest girl I ever met. She just needs this like other people need air.*

---

"You're getting married," Ray said slowly.

"In three weeks."

"And you came here."

"I've got until Monday morning." She swallowed. "I have five dresses in the car and a box of things to wear under them, and they all have to go to the cleaners anyway. I want you to ruin every one. I'm here to be used. The whole weekend. Whenever you want, however you want, whoever's around. I don't want to be asked."

Frank came around the desk.

"Rules," he said.

"Same word as always. Red, and it all stops." She drew a line with one gloved finger across the top of her breasts. "Nothing that shows in a strapless dress. No marks on my arms, my shoulders, or my back above here. Below that, I don't care. My ass is yours."

"You want tying?"

"I brought my own."

She opened the decorations kit on his desk. White crepe streamers. Spools of lace ribbon, two inches wide. A paper banner in silver letters: JUST MARRIED.

Ray picked up a roll of streamer and pulled a length between his hands. It tore like tissue.

"This won't hold a cat."

"It's not supposed to hold me. I'm supposed to hold it." Her color was high. "You tie me up in paper and lace, like a present. If I tear it, I wasn't trying. I'm not here to be made to. I'm here because I'm staying put."

There was a short silence while three men worked that through.

"God almighty," Stu said softly.

"And the talk," said Frank.

"All of it. The worst you've got." Her face was scarlet, and her chin was up. "I'm cheating on a good man three weeks before my wedding. I want to hear about it. I want you to call it what it is."

Frank looked at her for a long moment. Then he took her left hand, lifted it, and turned the diamond to the light.

"Keep this on," he said. "I want to see it on my cock."

Her knees actually gave. Ray caught her by the veil.

It was not gentle, that first time, and it was not slow. Seven months was a long time for all four of them. Ray wound twelve feet of tulle around his fist like a leash and hauled her head back, and she moaned from the bottom of her lungs. They bent her over Frank's desk in her bustier and her seamed stockings, and Frank stood back and looked.

She still had the panties on. They were hardly anything: a little triangle of ivory Chantilly on two silk ribbons, tied in a bow at each hip, the lace gone dark and transparent down the middle where she had soaked it. He laid his thumb on that dark place and pressed. The lace was hot. He drew his thumb slowly up the length of her, through it, and she pushed back at him with a whimper.

"Wore these down the stairs," he said. "Wore them in the car. Thinking about it the whole way."

"Yes..."

"Stu."

Stu took one of the bows in his fingers, considered it, and then didn't bother. He tore the whole thing off her with one hand, and held it up, and put it in his shirt pocket.

She had a cheerleader's body in those days: small-waisted, athletic, with curves that didn't quit. Her ass was a beauty, round and high and firm, two full handfuls framed by the white straps of the garters. Between them, her pussy was a pale, tidy pink, bare and delicate, the lips barely parted and shining wet, her clit a hard little bead. Above it the tight pink pucker of her ass winked at him.

"Bride's dripping," Stu reported, with two fingers in her. He held them up. "Look at that. She's been thinking about this all day."

"All *month*," Iris gasped into the blotter.

"While you were picking out his cake?"

"Yes..."

"While he was kissing you goodbye?"

"*Yes.* I was wet when I kissed him. I had this in my purse."

Frank laughed, short and dark, and opened his belt.

He took her first. He always did. The broad head of his cock split those neat pink lips and stretched them white, and he sank into her to the root in one long, thick shove, and she screamed into the desk. He was too big for her. He always had been. That was the point of him. She could feel every inch of him forcing her open, the fat ridge of the head dragging along her walls, the deep bruising nudge at the very end of her that Mark had never once reached.

"That's it," Frank said through his teeth. "That's where he doesn't go, isn't it? Right there."

"No! No, he never, oh God, *Frank*..."

"Say thank you."

"Thank you! Thank you, thank you..."

Stu came around the desk. He tipped her face up by the chin, veil and all, and laid his cock across her painted mouth, heavy and hot and smelling of clean sweat and musk.

"Open up, Mrs. Somebody."

She opened. He slid across her tongue, thick and ridged with veins, and at the back of her mouth he pushed, and she let her throat give. It stretched around him, tight as a ring, and swallowed him down, inch after inch, until the whole length of his cock was sheathed in her neck and her lips were pressed to the root. Her eyes ran. Her mascara ran. She moaned, and with him that deep the moan went straight into him, and Stu said "*Fuck*" like a prayer. When he drew out, there was a perfect ring of bridal red around the base of him.

They used her like that across the desk, one at each end, until her legs shook in their white stockings. Her tits had worked their way out of the bustier and hung under her, big and round and heavy, bouncing hard with every thrust and slapping together. Stu reached down and filled his hand with one, and it filled his hand right back, warm and heavy, to the edges of his fingers. Her ass was firm enough to take Frank's hips with a flat hard smack that echoed, and round enough that a quick tight ripple ran across it each time, and when his palm cracked across it the print came up scarlet on the white skin, perfectly shaped.

"First mark," he said. "Something new."

She came on the fourth one. She came again when he did, deep in her, in long hot pulses she could feel. And while his cock was still jerking inside her, Iris tore her mouth off Stu and said the thing she had been saving all the way down the stairs.

"More. All three of you. I want it in me all weekend." Her voice cracked. "Rape a baby into me. Send me up that aisle full of it."

The room went dead quiet.

"Iris," Frank said carefully, still inside her. "You on the pill?"

"I've got an IUD. It's good for five years." She twisted to look back at him, flushed and wild and half laughing. "It's a *game*, Frank. I want to play it. I want to pretend that for one weekend I'm not careful, and I'm not sensible, and three men are going to take turns trying to knock up another man's bride. Tell me you will. Just say it."

He looked down at her. Then he gathered the veil in his fist, pulled her head back until her spine bowed, and put his mouth against her ear.

"We're going to breed you, sweetheart," he said, low. "All weekend. One after another. We're going to pump you so full you slosh when you walk. And in three weeks you're going to stand up in front of God and your mother in a white dress with our cum still running down your leg, and say *I do*, and wonder whose it is."

She came from the words alone, clenching on him so hard he swore.

Ray took her next, right there, with Frank's load still in her. Then Stu. By midnight the ivory bustier was soaked and the veil was torn in two places, and she was lying on her back on the desk with her stockinged knees pushed up to her shoulders, and thick white cum was running out of her in a slow, steady stream and pooling on Frank's work orders.

"Don't waste it," she mumbled, and Ray, grinning, pushed it back into her with two fingers.

It was Stu who found the lipstick. It had rolled out of her purse onto the desk: a gold tube, bright bridal red. He uncapped it, looked at it, and looked at her.

"Hold still," he said.

She felt the waxy tip drag across the inside of her left thigh, just above the stocking top. Four short strokes, side by side.

"What are you..."

"Keeping count." He showed her. Four neat red tally marks on the white skin. "Three of us, and Frank went twice. That's how many loads the bride's taken. I figure by Monday we fill the leg."

Iris looked at the four red lines on her thigh, an inch from her leaking cunt, and felt her whole body flush hot. Red on white. It looked obscene. It looked like graffiti on a church.

"Give me that," Ray said. He took the lipstick, considered her for a moment like a man with a blank wall, and wrote, in careful capitals, low across her belly, just above her bare mound:

**SOMETHING BORROWED**

Frank laughed until he had to sit down.

## One in the Morning

It was nearly one in the morning when her stomach growled, loudly enough that all three of them heard it.

She sat up on the desk. She had eaten a yogurt at eleven that morning and nothing since. She was suddenly, violently starving.

"What have you got to eat?"

The men looked at each other.

"There's half my sandwich," Stu offered.

Iris stared at them. She was wearing a cum-soaked bustier, one stocking, a torn veil, and the words SOMETHING BORROWED in lipstick.

"I'm here for sixty hours," she said. "Somebody order a pizza."

Ray ordered two larges from the place by the stadium that delivered until two, and went up to meet the kid at the loading dock. They ate it on the floor with their backs against the desk, straight out of the box, like anybody at one in the morning. Iris sat cross-legged on a blanket with Ray's shirt around her shoulders and the veil still pinned in her hair, and put away four slices without stopping to talk.

Then she licked her thumb and looked at the mini fridge, which had a jar of mustard in it.

"Frank. Get a pen. You're writing a shopping list."

He got a pen.

*She'll be something as somebody's wife,* Ray thought, watching her fold a fifth slice in half. *God help the man. He'll never go hungry and he'll never win an argument.*

"I've got a boiler call at seven," Frank said, when she'd finished dictating. "I'll go straight after."

"And chocolate," said Iris. "Good chocolate. Write that twice."

There was a cot in the storeroom. They put her on it. Frank covered her with his coat.

## Saturday

She woke to the smell of bad coffee and the sound of someone moving weights.

"Up," Ray said. He handed her a granola bar and a banana from his own lunch pail, and stood over her until she had eaten both. "Frank's on the boiler and then the store. Stu's doing lines at the stadium till ten. I've got you first. Which one of these?"

She chose the corset. It was the most serious thing in the collection: white silk coutil, steel-boned, twenty-four hooks down the front and laces at the back. Ray laced her into it himself, with his knee in the small of her back, frowning, pulling until her waist was the span of his two hands and she could only breathe from the top of her chest. It ended under her breasts and left them entirely bare, lifted on a shelf of silk, high and round and tight. Fresh stockings. The gloves. The heels.

And the blindfold.

She took it out of her purse and held it out to him on both palms.

"I've been carrying this around for two weeks," she said. "I put it on once, at work. I nearly came standing up."

He turned it over. Ivory lace. Silk backing. Long satin ties.

"You want it all day?"

"I want to not know who it is." Her breath was already short. "I want to be left somewhere. On display. And have you come and go, and use me when you feel like it, and not say a word to me."

Ray looked over at the corner by the boiler.

The cable machine had come out of the old gym the same year as the benches: a tall steel frame with a pulley at the top. He dragged the flat bench into the middle of it, endways on, and sat her down on the very end with her knees apart. Then he went and got her decorations kit.

He did it properly. He took his time. He put her gloved wrists together, lifted them over her head, and tied them to the high pulley with a length of white lace ribbon, finished in a bow, so that her arms rose to a point above her like the two sides of a steeple. He wound crepe streamer around her waist and her thighs in loose white loops and ran the ends out to the uprights, soft as nothing, so that she sat in the middle of a web of paper and lace like something being unwrapped. Last of all he strung the banner across the top of the frame, right above her head.

JUST MARRIED.

She sat there, straight-backed, because the corset gave her no choice. Arms drawn up into a peak. Knees wide on the end of the bench. Corseted, stockinged, bare-breasted, bare between the thighs, with her mouth at exactly the height of a standing man's belt. She flexed her wrists, very slightly, and heard the paper whisper. One good pull and the whole thing would come down in ribbons.

"You tear one," Ray said, "and I take it you've had enough, and we stop for an hour. That's the deal. You want to be used, you hold still for it."

"I'll hold."

"We'll see."

He tied the blindfold on last. The lace settled over her eyes, cool and weightless. He knotted the ribbons behind her head, under her hair.

The world went away.

She heard his boots walk off. The door opened, and closed, and the bolt went across.

Nothing.

She had never in her life been so aware of her own skin. The cool air of the basement on her nipples, drawing them up into two hard points. The warm seep of last night still leaking out of her, a slow trickle down the inside of one thigh. The bite of the corset. The pull in her shoulders, which she had to hold up herself, because nothing else was going to. The boiler ticking. Her own pulse in her clit.

*This is insane*, she thought, with total clarity. *I have a hundred and sixty place cards to letter. I am tied to a piece of gym equipment with party streamers, in a wedding corset, waiting to be raped by the maintenance staff.* And then, on the heels of it, in a rush of pure happiness: *And nobody can ask me a single question about napkins.*

It was the roller coaster ride with her eyes shut.

She didn't know how long it was. Ten minutes. An hour.

The bolt slid back.

Footsteps. Unhurried. She turned her blind face toward them. "Ray?"

No answer.

A hand closed on her left breast. Big, rough, warm. It squeezed, testing the firmness of her, and a thumb dragged over the nipple. Then a mouth. Hot and wet, sucking hard, teeth. She cried out. A second hand slid down the front of the corset, over the silk, and cupped her whole pussy in its palm, and the heel of it ground against her clit.

"Who is it? Please. Who..."

A zipper. A fist closed in her hair and pulled her head down and forward, until her tied arms stretched and the ribbon creaked, and something thick and hot was pushed against her lips. She opened. He filled her mouth. Not Ray. Thicker than Ray. He used it for a dozen strokes, no more, the way a man tests a thing before he buys it, and let her head come back up.

Then two hands went under her knees and lifted.

Her legs came up over his forearms. She tipped back on the end of the bench with a cry, and every instinct she had said *grab something, pull, hang on*, and she could not. She had to keep her arms soft and her wrists still in their lace bow and hold herself up by her own stomach, laced tight in white silk, while he fitted himself to her and shoved in.

She screamed. He fucked her right there on the end of the bench, with her stockinged legs in the air and her satin heels bobbing by his ears, hard, flat strokes that jolted her whole body and set the streamers rustling and shivering all around her. She couldn't see. She couldn't hold. She could only feel: the stretch, the slick slide, the coarse hair grinding on her clit, the buttons of a work shirt scraping the insides of her thighs. She caught his smell when he bent over her. Sweat and cut grass and line chalk. Stu. He'd come straight from the stadium.

He didn't say one word. He grunted, drove into her to the hilt, and came. She felt it, hot, deep, pulse after pulse. Then he pulled out, set her feet back on the floor, and wiped himself on her stocking top. There was a pause. The small click of a lipstick cap. The waxy drag across her thigh: a fifth stroke, slashed diagonally through the first four.

He zipped up and left. The bolt slid home.

She sat there shaking, with a fresh load running out of her onto the bench and not one streamer torn, and understood what she had asked for.

---

Frank came down the basement stairs at half past ten with four bags of groceries and a whole roast chicken, still warm, under his arm.

He heard it before he saw it. A high, broken, rhythmic wail, and under it a wet slapping, and two men breathing like they were running.

He shouldered the door open.

They had her in the cable machine. She was still tied at the wrists, her arms drawn up to their point, the JUST MARRIED banner trembling over her head. But she was no longer sitting on the bench. Ray was. He had got astride it behind her, and she was sitting in his lap, and Stu stood in front of her with her stockinged legs hooked over his arms, and she was packed between the two of them like the filling in a sandwich, corset and all, with both their cocks buried in her to the root.

Frank stood there with the groceries.

He could see everything. Stu's thick shaft pistoning up into her stretched pink cunt, shining, frothed white at the base. And an inch behind it, Ray's, sawing in and out of her ass, the tight little ring of it pulled taut around him. They had found their rhythm. One in, one out. Her whole body rocked between them. Her tits were crushed against Stu's chest, and somebody had written on them: a big red **BRIDE** across the upper slopes, in lipstick, already smeared with sweat. Her blind face was thrown back on Ray's shoulder with her painted mouth wide open.

"Both of you," she was sobbing, "both of you, oh God, it's too much, it's too *much*, don't you dare stop..."

She was. That was all she could think about. Two of them, crammed inside her with one thin hot wall of herself between, and every time they moved she felt them drag against each other through her. The fat ridge of Ray's cockhead scraping the whole length of Stu. Stu shoving up and grinding Ray against her spine. Vein against vein. She was so full her belly was tight with it, and they still found room to move.

And the streamers at her wrists had not torn. She was getting double-fucked on a weight bench and keeping her arms as loose as a dancer's.

*Look at that,* Frank thought. His mouth had gone dry. *Would you look at that.* *I leave for three hours to buy the woman eggs.*

"Morning," he said.

Stu's head snapped around. "Frank! We were, uh..."

"I can see what you were." He walked past them to the mini fridge. He put the eggs away. He put the butter away, and the strawberries, and a can of whipped cream he had been told to buy and had not asked about, and lined up the water bottles, all without hurrying, with the sound of her getting it from both ends six feet behind him. He set the chicken on the desk. "Don't stop on my account. She had breakfast?"

"Granola bar," Ray grunted. "Banana."

"That's not breakfast."

"Frank?" Iris turned her blindfolded face toward his voice. She was grinning, wrecked, drooling a little. "Did you get the chocolate?"

"I got the chocolate."

"Then get over here," said the bride, "and put something in my mouth."

He did. He broke a square off the bar and laid it on her tongue.

She burst out laughing, blind, with her mouth full of chocolate and two men inside her.

"That's not what I meant..."

"I know what you meant. Swallow that first."

She swallowed it. Then he dragged a stack of plates over with his boot, stepped up beside her, took her chin in his hand, and turned her face to him, and she opened for him by feel alone and took him as deep as the angle would let her. All three. She took it without tearing a single ribbon, and when she came, it went through her like a seizure, and she felt both of them go off inside her at once, front and back, flooding her.

Afterward they untied her, and Frank sat her on his knee with a blanket around her and fed her scrambled eggs and buttered toast and half the strawberries with his own fingers, and made her drink a whole bottle of the blue stuff. He would not let anyone touch her until the plate was clean.

"Better?"

"Much." She leaned on his chest. "You're forgiven."

Then he tied her back up himself, bow by bow, and put the blindfold on.

It went on all afternoon.

She lost count. She lost time. The door would open and she would never know: one man or two, which one, what he wanted. Sometimes a cock was simply pushed into her and emptied, three minutes, no touch anywhere else, a man using a hole on his coffee break. Sometimes she was played with for half an hour: fingered, licked until she was sobbing, brought to the edge and left there when a radio crackled and he had to go. Every hour somebody held a water bottle to her lips, or put a square of chocolate on her tongue, or a slice of orange, and waited while she swallowed. Then used her.

She learned them in the dark. Stu was the thickest, and tasted the saltiest when he made her suck him clean. Ray was long, with a curve that hit the front of her, and he always bit. Frank was the biggest and the quietest, and he was the only one who touched her face.

And after every one, the click of the cap. The lipstick. She couldn't see what they wrote. She could only feel it: the cool waxy tip dragging over her skin, slow, deliberate, in places that made her squirm. Tally strokes marching up her thigh. Letters on her belly. Something long, across both cheeks of her ass, one of the times they stood her up to stretch her arms. An arrow, she was almost sure, pointing down.

They talked, too. Not to her. That was the worst and the best of it. They stood in front of her, two of them, with her sitting there dripping, and discussed her.

"How many's that?"

"Fourteen. Read the leg."

"Look at the state of her. It's coming out faster than we can put it in."

"Three weeks from the altar. You see the ring?"

"I see it. Poor son of a bitch. Thinks she's home writing place cards."

"She's so wet from being raped, she's dripped a puddle. Look. Right there on the floor. In her wedding shoes."

A finger scooped up the inside of her thigh and was pushed into her mouth. She sucked it, moaning. Somebody laughed.

"Good little bride."

Around four in the afternoon, her phone rang.

She knew the ringtone. Her whole body went rigid, and the streamers hissed. It was in her purse, on the desk.

"It's him," she whispered. "It's Mark. Don't. Please, don't..."

Footsteps. The purse. The ringing got closer. Somebody was holding it right in front of her blindfolded face.

Frank's voice, very quiet, against her ear. "Color."

She was trembling from head to foot. Stu was inside her, to the root. She could feel him throbbing.

"... Green," she breathed. "Oh God. Green. Do it."

The ringing stopped. A click.

"Hey, babe!" Tinny. Cheerful. Wind and laughter behind him. "Just got off the back nine. Can you hear me?"

The phone was laid against her ear. Stu began, very slowly, to move.

"Hi," Iris said. It came out an octave too high. "Hi, honey. I can hear you."

"You sound out of breath."

"I'm... I was carrying boxes. The favors came." Stu drew all the way out, until only the fat head of him was holding her open, and eased all the way back in. Her eyes rolled behind the lace. "How's the golf?"

"Terrible. Danny's cheating. Listen, I just wanted to say I miss you. You're working too hard. Take a night off, okay? Put your feet up."

Ray closed his teeth on her nipple.

"I will," she said, and her voice shook. "I am. I'm... taking the whole weekend, actually. For myself."

"Good. Good girl. You deserve it."

"So do you. Have fun, Mark. Really. Have... so much fun."

Stu ground himself against her clit in a slow, tight circle. Frank's thumb pressed, slick, against her asshole, and slid in.

"Love you," said Mark.

"Love you too," said his bride, and came, silently, with her mouth wide open and three men's hands on her, clenching so hard on Stu's cock that he had to bite his own fist.

The call ended. For a second there was no sound but her sobbing for breath.

"Jesus Christ almighty," Ray said reverently.

"'Take a night off,'" Stu said. He was shaking. "'Put your feet up.'"

"He told her she deserved it," said Frank. "You heard the man."

When they finally untied her and took the blindfold off, Frank turned her by the shoulders to face the long mirror on the wall by the weight rack.

She stood and looked at herself for a long time.

White corset. White stockings. White gloves. And everywhere between, on her bare white skin, bright wet red.

**BRIDE**, smeared, across the tops of her breasts. A ring drawn around each nipple like a target. **SOMETHING BORROWED** on her belly, and beneath it, new: **PROPERTY OF BLDGS & GROUNDS**. An arrow down her mound, and beside it **INSERT HERE**. On the inside of her left thigh, a ladder of tally marks in fives, climbing from the stocking top almost to her hip. Nineteen. On her right thigh, in Ray's capitals: **3 HOLES -- NO WAITING**.

She turned around and looked over her shoulder. On her left cheek, **MARK'S WIFE**. On her right, **OUR WHORE**. Across the small of her back, just above, a single line with an arrow pointing down to the crack of her ass:

**JUST RAPED.**

Red on white. Filth on lace. She looked like a wedding cake somebody had scrawled on with a marker.

Her knees went. She put a gloved hand on the mirror to hold herself up, and her cunt clenched, empty, hard enough to hurt.

"Oh," said Iris faintly. "Oh, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

## The Rehearsal Dinner

"Every wedding has a rehearsal dinner," she said, when she could talk. "I brought a dress for it."

It was the only black thing in the car. She had pulled it from the bridesmaids' rack on a whim: a little cocktail dress in soft black jersey, with straps as thin as shoelaces and a neckline that wrapped and plunged almost to her waist. It had no structure at all. It breathed and stretched and moved with her like water, which was exactly what she liked in a dress. And it was short. The skirt flared from a high waist and stopped, on her, about one inch below the crease of her ass. Standing still, it covered her. Walking, it showed the bottom curve of both cheeks with every step. Bending, it covered nothing.

She wore it with the heels and nothing else. Below the hem, on the insides of her thighs, the red tally marks showed. In the V of the neckline, the top of the word BRIDE.

Frank cooked. He had a two-ring hot plate in the storeroom and he turned out to be good with it: a pound of spaghetti, a pan of sausage and peppers, garlic bread done on the radiator. He put the roast chicken in the middle of the desk and carved it with his pocketknife. Ray laid out paper plates. Stu, after some thought, lit the emergency candles from the supply cabinet.

"Bride sits at the head," Frank said.

There was only one chair. He sat in it, and pulled her down onto his lap. She was halfway down before she understood, and by then he had the little black skirt flipped up and his cock in his hand, and she sank onto it with a long low groan and sat there, impaled, at the head of the table.

"Eat," he said in her ear. "All of it."

She ate her dinner with him inside her. He didn't thrust. He just stayed, thick and hard and patient, and fed her from his own fork, and when she squirmed he put a hand flat on her belly and held her still. She twirled spaghetti. She clenched on him. She tore garlic bread with her teeth and felt him twitch. Halfway through the chicken, Stu got under the desk and put his mouth on her clit, and she finished her plate with tears of pleasure running down her face and sauce on her chin.

"Clean plate," Frank observed. "Good girl. Now you get dessert."

Dessert was Ray bending her over the desk between the dishes, the black skirt flipped onto her back, and taking her from behind while Frank fed her strawberries dipped in chocolate, one at a time, and Stu wrote a twentieth tally on her thigh.

She was fed. She was watered. She had come twice with her mouth full of garlic bread.

"Now," said Iris, licking chocolate from Frank's thumb, "I believe somebody's getting married."

## The Ceremony

They got the bride ready.

She stood in the middle of the floor and let them. Off came the black dress. On went a clean garter belt, the last pair of stockings, the gloves, the heels. The veil, torn, pinned back in her hair. Stu touched up the writing where it had smeared, tongue between his teeth, retracing every letter in fresh bright red until she gleamed with it. He painted her mouth again, last, very carefully.

Then she fetched the little velvet pouch from her purse and put it in Frank's hand.

He tipped it out onto his palm. Polished steel, heavy, tapered. A faceted crystal at the base, blue as a summer sky, flashing in the candlelight.

"Something blue," Iris said.

Frank looked at it. He looked at her.

"Bend over," he said, in a voice that had gone to gravel.

She bent over the desk. He warmed it in his fist. He slicked it. She felt the cool, blunt, perfectly smooth tip touch the tight pink pucker of her ass, and press. It was nothing like a cock. It was hard and exact and it widened, relentlessly, the ring of her stretching around polished steel, wider, to the very fattest part, until she whimpered. Then her body swallowed it all at once, and closed tight around the narrow neck, and it was in. Heavy. Unmistakable. Seated deep, with only the jewel showing.

Frank stood back.

Between the two red words on her cheeks, MARK'S WIFE and OUR WHORE, right in the cleft where JUST RAPED pointed, a blue gem the size of a quarter winked at him.

"Well, that's the prettiest thing I ever saw in my life," he said.

Ray made the leash. A yard and a half of the two-inch lace ribbon, tied around her throat in a soft bow.

He didn't keep the other end. He held it out to Frank.

"Somebody's got to give her away," Ray said. "And it's not going to be me. I'm doing the talking."

Frank looked at the ribbon. He looked at her. Something went across his face that she had never seen there, and then he took it, and wound it once around his fist.

"Down," he said gently.

Iris got down on her hands and knees on the concrete.

The aisle was the strip of bare floor between the weight rack and the boiler. Stu had run crepe streamers along both sides and set the emergency candles down it in pairs. At the far end, behind the desk, with the JUST MARRIED banner tacked to the wall behind him and a boiler manual open in his hands like a prayer book, stood Ray. Stu gathered up the end of her veil like a train.

Frank walked. The lace drew tight. And the bride crawled to her wedding, on all fours, at the heel of the man who was giving her away.

She had never felt anything like it. The cold grit of the floor under her gloved palms and stockinged knees. The lace tugging softly at her throat, and his boots beside her, slow, keeping to her pace. Her tits hung beneath her, big and round and heavy, swaying in time with her crawl, the pink nipples drawn so hard they ached, each one ringed in red like a bullseye and swinging left, right, left. And with every movement of her hips, the plug shifted inside her, heavy and solid, and the jewel flashed between her cheeks for the man behind her. She heard Stu groan.

Candle by candle. Written on like a wall. Leaking down both thighs past twenty red tally marks.

*This is my real wedding,* she thought, and it was the most shameful and the most honest thought of her life. *The other one is for my mother.*

She reached the desk. Frank drew the leash up short, and she knelt back on her heels beside his boot with her hands on her thighs and her face tilted up.

"Dearly beloved," Ray said. His reading of the boiler manual was grave. "We are gathered here in the sight of the furnace to join this woman to these three men in a state of unholy matrimony. If any man knows cause why she should not be fucked senseless, let him speak now."

"He's in Scottsdale," said the bride.

"Then he forfeits. Who gives this woman?"

There was a pause.

"I do," said Frank. His voice was not quite steady. "And I'm taking her straight back."

"So noted. Iris. Do you take these three cocks, to have and to hold, in your mouth, your cunt and your ass, in sickness and in health, on your knees and on your back, forsaking your lawful husband as often as you can get away?"

"I do."

"Do you promise to come when you're called, swallow what you're given, and walk up the aisle in three weeks with our seed still inside you?"

"I do." She was laughing and crying at once. "Oh, I do."

"The ring."

She held up her left hand. Nobody took off the diamond. Frank, standing over her with the leash in his fist, unzipped and took himself out, heavy and half hard, and she understood. She wrapped her gloved hand around him, Mark's ring and all, and stroked. The diamond flashed, sliding up and down the thick shaft. He grew in her fist until her fingers couldn't close.

"With this ring," said Ray, hoarsely, watching it. "By the power vested in me by the Department of Buildings and Grounds. I now pronounce you ours." He closed the manual. "You may rape the bride."

Frank gave the leash one soft pull, and she went forward onto her hands, and all three of them came down on her at once.

It was Stu behind, in her cunt, to the hilt on the first stroke, and with the plug in her she was so tight he shouted. She could feel him sliding along the hard steel inside her, cock against plug, the jewel knocking against his belly at the bottom of every thrust. Frank knelt at her face and she took him down her throat. Ray lay under her and sucked her swinging tits into his mouth, lipstick and all, and came up with red on his lips.

Then Frank said, "Give me that," and went around behind her.

They changed places around her like men who had done it before. Stu pulled out, slid underneath her on his back, and drew her down onto him, and she sank onto that thick cock with a groan. Ray came out from under and knelt up at her head.

Frank took hold of the jewel. He turned it, slowly, a quarter turn each way, and she howled. He drew it out. The fat part stretched her wide for one long moment, and then it was gone, and she felt herself gaping, empty, clenching on air.

He set the plug, gleaming, on the corner of the desk, in the first place that came to hand: the pocket of the old baseball glove that had sat there since before she knew him, oiled and cracked, a relic of some summer league. The blue gem winked once from the dark leather and went still. And he fed his cock into the hole it had left.

The head first. Her ring was still loose from the plug, and it took the broad head of him with one slow, wet give, and closed tight behind the ridge, and she gasped and clenched on both of them. He held there. Then he pushed, and kept pushing, an inch, another, with Stu's thick cock already packed in her cunt below him, so that every inch of Frank had to shove its way in past Stu through that one thin wall. She felt it happen. She felt Stu get pressed aside inside her to make room. She felt Frank's cock drag the whole length of Stu's on the way in, vein over vein, until his hips sat against her ass and his balls lay heavy on Stu's, and she was stuffed so full that she could not breathe in all the way.

Both of them. Then they moved, and it was worse: Stu bucking up as Frank drew back, Frank driving in as Stu sank, the two of them grinding together inside her, rubbing against one another through her until she could not tell which was where. The wet sounds came from everywhere at once. Ray gathered the lace leash and the veil together in one fist and filled her mouth.

"Whose bride are you?"

He pulled out so she could answer.

"His," she choked. "Mark's."

"And whose whore?"

"*Yours.* All of yours. Don't stop raping me, don't ever stop, fill me up..."

They did. Stu first, bucking up under her with a shout, and she felt him swell against Frank inside her and then the hot flood of him in her cunt, so much of it that it squeezed back out around him every time Frank drove in. Then Ray, across her tongue, salt and thick, then over her lips and her chin and down the torn veil onto the red letters on her tits. Frank was last. He drove into her ass to the root and held, with his hand flat between her shoulder blades, and she felt his cock jerk, and jerk again, and felt him go off, deep, in long hot pulses she could count.

Her mouth was free. And the word came.

"*Daddy,*" she sobbed, into Stu's shoulder. "Oh, Daddy..."

Frank went rigid over her back. For a long moment he didn't move or speak. Then he put his forehead down between her shoulders, and stayed there.

Stu wrote the tally himself, with a hand that shook. Twenty-three.

## The Wedding Night

"A bride ought to have a dress on for her wedding night," Ray said afterward, "so there's something to take off her."

She went and freshened up first: a quick shower, a clean face, fresh lipstick.

It took two of them to carry the dress in.

It was the kind of dress little girls draw: a strapless bodice of duchess satin, tight as a glove, and below it a skirt like a cloud, eleven layers of silk tulle over a crinoline, a full five feet across at the hem. Forty covered buttons down the back. Stu did up every one of them, swearing.

She had put two last things on underneath it, from the bottom of the lingerie box, while their backs were turned. A lace garter with a blue ribbon threaded through it, high on her right thigh. And a pair of French knickers in ivory silk satin, cut loose in the leg and edged with lace, the kind of thing a bride wears for exactly one hour.

When he was done she stood in the candlelight in six thousand dollars of white silk, and not one red letter showed. Not a tally mark. Not a word. She looked like every bride in every magazine: pure, shining, untouched. Only the four of them knew what was written under it, from her breasts to her thighs, and what had been running down the inside of her legs an hour before.

"That," Frank said quietly, "is the filthiest thing you've worn all weekend."

Ray swept her up, eleven layers of tulle and all, and carried her over the threshold of the storeroom to the pile of blue gym mats, and threw her down on them.

The garter came first. Frank went under the skirt for it, as the groom does. He vanished up to the shoulders in tulle, and she felt his mouth on the inside of her thigh, his teeth closing on the lace band, dragging it slowly down her stocking, over her knee, her calf, her satin shoe. He came up with it in his teeth. He went back under without it.

There was a silence, under there, while he found the knickers.

"Oh, now," she heard him say, muffled, with real respect.

He didn't take them off. Not for a long time. He put his mouth on her through them. She felt the heat of his breath come through the silk, and then his tongue, broad and wet, pressing the satin flat against her, licking it into her, until the cloth was soaked through from both sides and clung to every fold. He sucked her clit through it. He slid one thick finger up the loose leg, under the lace, and stroked her where she was bare, while his mouth worked her through the silk an inch away. She had fistfuls of her own skirt. She was begging.

Only then did he hook his fingers in the waist and draw them down, over her hips, her knees, her shoes, and she heard him breathe in.

She lay there in a sea of white with a man's head between her legs, invisible, and his tongue found her clit and his whole mouth closed over her, and she grabbed fistfuls of her own skirt and howled. He ate her like the wedding breakfast, and went back for more.

Then the dress was simply in the way, and they used that too. They knelt her up and threw the whole skirt forward over her head, so that she was buried to the waist in a white cloud, blind again, and behind her nothing showed but garters, stockings, and her bare ass sticking out of six thousand dollars of couture, with MARK'S WIFE on one cheek and OUR WHORE on the other. Frank took her that way, hard, with both hands full of tulle for reins. Every thrust drove her face into the silk. The crinoline creaked. His hips smacked her ass, flat and loud.

"Look at that," he said. "Look at this pretty thing getting raped in her wedding dress." *Crack.* "What's the groom doing right now, you think?"

"Golf," she sobbed, muffled, from inside the skirt.

"Golf. And where's his bride?"

"On her knees! On a gym mat! Getting bred!"

"By who?"

"By the *janitors*, oh God, by three *janitors*, harder..."

They turned her over and unbuttoned the bodice, all forty buttons, Stu cursing every one, and peeled it down to her waist. Her tits came out big and round and white, with BRIDE across them in red and a target around each hard pink nipple. Ray knelt across her ribs and laid his cock between them. She had always had the tits for this. She pushed them together with both gloved hands, the diamond winking, and they closed around him completely, a deep, firm, warm channel that swallowed his whole shaft, and he fucked that, the head of his cock nudging her chin on every stroke, until he came in long ropes across her throat and the satin and the torn veil.

"There's a cake," Iris said, when she could talk. "It's a wedding. There has to be a cake."

It was in the mini fridge, in its white box: six inches across, vanilla sponge and raspberry, white buttercream piped in pearls. A tasting sample of her own. Beside it stood the can of whipped cream.

Frank cut it with his pocketknife. He did the first slice properly. He broke off a piece with his fingers and fed it to her, and she fed him one back, and got buttercream on his lip, and licked it off.

"That's the last polite thing that happens to this cake," said Ray, and shook the can.

A cold white rosette on each nipple. She yelped. A line of it down between her breasts, across the red letters, into her navel. Then three mouths. They ate it off her like men at a trough, tongues sliding through cold cream to hot skin, sucking her nipples clean, licking her navel out, and she lay back in the wreck of her bodice and laughed and arched and held their heads.

"My turn," she said, and took the can away from him.

She did Frank first. A long cold stripe up the underside of his cock, from root to tip, and a swirl on the head like a sundae. She looked up at him and licked it off slowly, the whole length, sweet cream and hot salt skin, and sucked the head clean, and swallowed. She did Ray. She put a dab on the end of Stu's nose before she did Stu, and then made up for it, taking him to the back of her mouth with cream running out at the corners of her lips.

"Now," Stu said, when he could. "Custom is, the bride gets cake in the face."

"Not her face," said Frank.

They laid her back and threw the skirts up, all eleven layers. Frank took what was left of the cake in his bare hand, the whole soft crumbling weight of it, and pressed it between her legs.

It was cold. Buttercream and sponge packed against her hot swollen cunt, raspberry running, crumbs in the lace of her stocking tops. She shrieked. He worked it into her with the heel of his hand, slowly, and pushed a piece of it up inside her with two fingers, and Ray crowned the whole mess with whipped cream.

"Dig in," Frank said.

Ray and Stu went down on her together, shoulder to shoulder under six thousand dollars of tulle. They ate her wedding cake out of her. Two tongues. One lapping buttercream off her clit in broad greedy strokes, one pushing deep into her after the sponge, sucking, swallowing, their stubble and their noses and their chins all in it, growling at each other for room. She could feel frosting melting and running down between her cheeks, and a tongue following it. Her heels drummed on the mat.

Frank knelt at her head with frosting on his fingers and fed it to her, one finger at a time, and kissed her with her mouth full of sugar while the other two licked her clean. She came into both their mouths, wailing into his.

Ray came up with buttercream to the eyebrows.

"Best wedding I ever went to," he said.

Stu took her on her back with the skirts foaming around them both, and that was when Ray remembered her feet.

She had her legs up over Stu's shoulders. White silk stockings, seamed up the back, and the heels: ivory satin, four inches, with a tiny pearl buckle at the ankle, the most beautiful shoes she had ever owned. They bobbed in the air on either side of Stu's head with every thrust. Ray, kneeling beside them, caught one ankle to steady it. He looked at the shoe for a moment. Then he undid the little pearl buckle with his thumbnail and slid it off.

Her foot was small and high-arched, flushed pink through the white silk. Her toes curled.

"I never forgot this," he said. "Halloween. You went red as a stop sign."

"I did not."

He bent his head and ran his tongue up the sole of it, slowly, from heel to toe, through the stocking. She went red as a stop sign.

"Oh, that's not *fair*..."

He closed his mouth over her toes, all five, silk and all, and sucked. It was as good as she remembered. Warm and wet and shameless, a slow sweet pull that went up the inside of her leg and settled, purring, right where Stu was moving in her. Ray drew on her toes in long lazy pulls, his tongue sliding between them, the stocking going transparent, and then he bit a hole in the toe of it, tore it open, and took her bare big toe into his mouth and sucked it like a cock.

"Other one," she moaned. "Somebody do the other one, please..."

Frank already had the other shoe off. He was laughing. He peeled the stocking down her calf and took her whole bare foot in his big hands, pressed his thumbs into the arch, and put his tongue between her toes one at a time.

A man pounding her cunt and a man on each foot, sucking, licking, their stubble rasping her soles, and the bride lay back in eleven layers of tulle like a girl having her hands kissed, giggling and groaning by turns. She came with her wet toes curling against Frank's lips. Stu emptied himself into her a moment after.

"Write it on her," Stu panted.

Ray wrote it. Along the top of her bare right foot, in red, in small neat capitals: **SUCK ME**.

Frank took her on her side. Ray took her ass with her face in the bouquet. Sometime after two in the morning they laid her on Stu, and Frank mounted her from behind, and Ray knelt at her head, and they consummated it all three together, slowly, deep in the ruins of the dress, while she said *I do, I do, I do* around the cock in her throat.

The tulle was gray with floor dust and stiff with buttercream. There was a red handprint on the bodice, and it was lipstick. The lining of the skirt was stiff.

"Mrs. Kowalczyk," Iris said dreamily, staring at the ceiling pipes, "is going to earn her money."

## Sunday

She slept until noon, between two of them, on the mats.

Frank had breakfast waiting: eggs, toast, the last of the chicken, orange slices, real coffee. He stood over her with his arms folded until she had finished all of it. Then he ran the big steel tub in the old training room and sat on the rim while she soaked, and washed her hair with dish soap because it was all he had.

He was barefoot, with his trousers rolled, and that was how it started.

She had never looked at his feet before. They were like the rest of him: big, square, heavy-boned, a working man's feet. There was dark hair across the top of each one, and a tuft on every toe. She was kneeling on a folded towel, drying her hair, and she found she couldn't stop looking.

"What?" Frank said.

She didn't answer. She was too embarrassed to say it. She just shuffled forward on her knees until she was straddling his right foot, and lowered herself, and sat.

The top of his foot fit between her legs like it was made to. Warm. Solid. And the hair. Coarse and springy, against the soft wet split of her, against her clit, which was swollen and tender from two days of use. She rocked her hips once, just to see, and the rasp of it went through her like a shock.

"Oh," she breathed.

Frank had gone very still.

Frank opened his trousers. He was sitting on the rim of the tub, and his cock stood up right in front of her face, thick and heavy, the head already wet.

"Go on, then," he said softly. "Show me."

She took him in her mouth. And she began to ride his foot.

She couldn't help it. Once she had started there was no stopping. She ground down on him, long slow drags, her wet lips spread open over the broad bony top of his foot, her clit rubbing back and forth through that coarse dark hair. Each stroke lit her up. He flexed his ankle, lifting, pressing up into her, and she moaned around his cock. He curled his toes and she felt his big toe nudge behind, at the mouth of her cunt, blunt and callused, and slip just inside.

"Look at this," Frank said to the others. His voice was thick. "Would you look at this. Three weeks to her wedding. On her knees, cock down her throat, humping a janitor's foot like a bitch in heat."

It was true. It was all true. She was on her knees on a bathroom floor, rutting on a man's hairy foot, and she had never been so wet. She could hear it. A slick, sticky, shameless sound every time she slid. Her tits bounced, tight and high. She had her hands on his thighs to hold on. She sucked him deeper, down into her throat, and her hips went faster, shorter, frantic, her clit dragging over hair and bone and the hard ridge of his instep.

"That's it. Rub that little clit. You going to come on my foot? You going to make a mess on me?"

She tried to say *yes*. It came out as a wail around his shaft.

It hit her all at once. Her whole body locked, her nails digging into his thighs, and something inside her let go that had never let go before. She gushed. A hot, sudden, helpless flood, pouring out of her, soaking his foot, running between his toes and spreading across the tile in a pool. She screamed into his cock and kept grinding, and it kept coming, in spurts, with every clench.

Frank looked down at his drenched foot. He made a noise like a man who'd been hit, grabbed her wet hair in both hands, and came down her throat.

Nobody said anything for a while.

"I didn't know I could do that," Iris whispered. Her face was burning. She couldn't look at any of them.

Frank lifted his foot, dripping, and looked at it with something like awe.

"Sweetheart," he said, "I've had boots I was less proud of."

She laughed until she fell over sideways on the towel.

The rest of Sunday was quieter. It had to be. She could barely walk, and she walked like it. They made her eat again at three: pasta, cold, straight from the pan, and the rest of the strawberries.

After that Frank lay down on the mats on his back and pulled her over him the other way round, her knees either side of his head and her mouth over his cock. They did nothing else for most of an hour. His face was buried in her, his big hands spread over her ass holding her open and down on his mouth, his tongue slow and broad and in no hurry at all; and she had him in her mouth, heavy and thick, and took her time too. Whenever she got close he stopped and kissed the inside of her thigh until she had calmed down, and started again. She came on his face twice, moaning around his cock, with Stu and Ray sitting against the wall eating strawberries and watching like men at a ballgame. The third time he let himself go with her, and she swallowed every drop and lay there with her cheek on his thigh, too happy to move.

But she had brought four white gowns, and she meant to use them.

In the afternoon she put on the slip dress: bias-cut silk charmeuse, the color of cream, thin as water, held up by two threads. It showed everything. Her nipples, the dip of her navel, the shadow between her legs, the ghost of red letters on her belly. Ray sat her on the edge of the incline bench and simply pushed the hem up to her waist and knelt and ate her for an hour, lazily, with no intention of stopping, while Stu sat behind her and held her wrists and kissed the back of her neck. The silk went transparent where she sweated. When she had come four times, Ray stood, wiped his chin, and slid into her standing, and she wrapped her stockinged legs around him and rode it out with her face in his throat.

Toward evening it was the mermaid gown, lace over nude lining, so tight to the knee she could only hobble. They liked that. They liked that she couldn't open her legs. Frank laid her face down over the arm of the couch, worked the tight lace up over her ass an inch at a time until it was a band around her waist, and took her like that, her thighs clamped together by the dress, so that she was tighter than she had ever been and felt every vein of him.

"You know what I think?" he said, moving in her, slow. His hand was flat on the small of her back. "I think you're going to be a good wife. I mean it. You'll love him and you'll look after him. And every so often you're going to put on something pretty and come down those stairs and get what he can't give you. And you'll go home sweeter for it."

"Yes," she whispered.

"And he'll never know why his wife is so happy."

"No."

"That's our wedding present. A happy wife."

She came with her face in the cushion, quietly, the tears running sideways into her hair.

*I've watched her go from a college kid to somebody's bride,* Frank thought, with his cock buried in her and a pain in his chest he had no name for. *God help me. I'd have married her myself.*

## The Toast

For the last, she washed up and went into the storeroom alone, and came out in the thing she had been saving.

The babydoll. White silk chiffon, sheer as smoke, open down the front from a single ribbon between her breasts. It hid nothing and it wasn't meant to. Through it they could see every mark of the weekend: Frank's handprints, layered, across her ass. Ray's bite on the inside of her thigh. The faint red lines the corset had left around her ribs. Thirty-one tally marks up her left leg, in lipstick, the last few crowded in at the hip. Her lips were swollen. Her pussy was swollen, puffy and dark pink and tender, and still seeping.

Above the bust line, on her arms, her shoulders, her back, there was not one mark on her. They had kept their word.

She had put the ivory satin heels back on, bare-legged, the little pearl buckles done up.

She was carrying the two bottles of champagne.

"These are from my reception," she said. "It's what we're serving. I thought you should be the first to taste it."

Frank took one. He peeled the foil, worked the cork with his thumbs, and it went off like a shot and ricocheted off a pipe.

"No glasses," Stu said.

"You don't need glasses," said the bride.

She lay down on the desk, on her back, on Frank's work orders, where the whole weekend had started. She untied the ribbon and let the chiffon fall open.

Frank stood over her with the bottle.

"To the bride," he said.

He tipped it. A thin, cold, fizzing stream hit the hollow of her throat and ran down between her breasts, and she arched off the desk with a shriek. It was ice cold. It prickled like needles. He poured it over one breast and then the other, and it sheeted down the firm curves and ran off the hard pink points, and Stu and Ray bent their heads and drank it off her. Two hot mouths chasing a cold stream. Tongues lapping the undersides of her tits, sucking the wine from her nipples, the bubbles bursting on her skin.

"To the groom," Ray said, with champagne on his chin. "Poor lucky bastard."

"To the bridesmaids," said Stu, who had hold of her ankle.

He unbuckled the satin heel and slipped it off. He held the shoe up, upright, by the heel, like a glass. Frank, straight-faced, filled it. Champagne fizzed in the ivory satin, an inch deep in the toe.

"Old custom," Stu said. "Drinking from the bride's slipper." And he tipped it up and drank it off, and passed the shoe to Ray, who held it out for a refill.

Then Frank poured it straight onto her. A cold sparkling stream down her shin, over the top of her bare foot, washing across the faded red letters there and running off her toes. She shrieked and tried to pull away, and Stu held her fast and put his mouth to her arch and drank from the hollow of it. He licked the wine off her instep. He took her toes one at a time, cold and wet and fizzing, into the heat of his mouth, and sucked each one clean.

"Other foot," Ray said hoarsely. "I'm not being left out of this."

They each had one. Two grown men bent over the end of a desk, drinking champagne off a bride's feet, tongues between her toes, and she lay on the work orders with her head thrown back and her hands in her own hair, coming apart at the seams.

"I'm adding it to the vows," she gasped. "To have, and to hold, and to suck my toes..."

"So noted," said Frank.

Frank poured lower. Into her navel, and they drank from that. Lower. He spread her with two fingers and trickled it, slow, directly onto her clit.

The cold. The fizz, on that swollen, overworked little bud, a thousand tiny bubbles breaking against it. She screamed and bucked, and Stu pinned her hips and put his mouth there and drank. He sucked champagne off her clit, and it ran down through her puffy lips, mixing with everything they had left in her, and he licked that up too, moaning into her, his tongue pushing deep.

"Turn her over."

They rolled her onto her stomach, knees drawn up, ass in the air. Ray spread her cheeks with his thumbs. She was pink and soft and well used there.

"To a long and happy marriage," said Frank, and poured the last of the bottle into the top of her cleft.

It ran down over her asshole, cold and sparkling, pooling for a second in the tight little dimple before it spilled on. She felt every bubble. And then a mouth, Ray's, hot against the cold. His tongue lapped the wine out of the crease of her, flat and slow, and then circled the ring itself and licked it clean, and pushed, and went in.

She came with a man's tongue in her ass and champagne dripping off her clit onto the desk, long and shuddering and nearly silent, with her cheek on a work order and Mark's diamond clenched in her fist.

They opened the second bottle and passed it around. They drank the rest of it properly, from the neck, all four of them, sitting on the floor with their backs against the desk, and finished the chocolate. Iris sat between Frank's knees in the open babydoll with his coat around her.

"Will you come?" she asked, after a while. "To the wedding. You could sit at the back."

"No," Frank said gently. "That day's his."

She nodded. She leaned her head back against his chest.

"This one was ours," he said.

When she was dressed and gathering her things, she went to the desk for the last of them. The plug was still where he had dropped it on Saturday night, nested in the pocket of his baseball glove. From the door you couldn't see it at all. You had to be standing right in front of the glove, looking down into it, and then there it was: a point of clear blue, like an eye.

She reached for it. Frank's hand came down gently over hers.

"Leave it."

"Frank, it's..."

"I know what it is." He turned the glove a little, so the pocket faced his chair. "It stays right there. Where I can see it and nobody else can. And every time you come down those stairs, you'll know where to look."

She looked at him. Then she took the empty velvet pouch out of her purse, folded it small, and tucked it into the glove beside the gem, like tucking something in for the night.

## Monday

At nine o'clock on Monday morning, Iris carried five garment bags and three flat white boxes into a small shop that smelled of steam.

She was wearing a gray suit and a silk blouse buttoned to the collar. Her hair was smooth. Her makeup was perfect, and her lipstick was a quiet pink. She had not one mark on her that anyone could see, and she was sitting down very carefully.

Mrs. Kowalczyk unzipped the first bag. The ball gown. She looked at the hem, gray with dust. She looked at the red handprint on the bodice, and touched it, and rubbed her fingers together. Lipstick. She turned back the skirt and looked for a long moment at the lining. She unzipped the next. She held up a very small black dress and regarded its hem. She opened a box and lifted out, between two fingers, a white silk corset with a great deal on it, a tangle of lace ribbon and crepe paper, and a lace blindfold with its ties in a knot.

She looked up at Iris over her glasses. Her face showed nothing whatsoever.

"Client?" said Mrs. Kowalczyk.

"Client," said Iris.

"Big wedding."

"Very."

The old woman wrote out the ticket. *I. -- client return -- 5 gowns, lingerie, misc.* She tore it off and held it out, and for one instant, as Iris took it, something in the lined face moved that might almost have been a wink.

"She had a good time, this bride," said Mrs. Kowalczyk.

"The best of her life," Iris said.

She walked out into the sunshine. She had a hundred and sixty place cards to letter and a florist to replace and a mother-in-law to call about the napkins, and none of it weighed anything at all.

In her purse, folded in tissue, was the one thing she hadn't handed over: a band of ivory lace, washed in a basement sink, still faintly damp. And in the zipped inside pocket, where he always was, Frank Jr.

Three weeks later, twenty minutes before the music started, the bride asked for a moment alone. She locked the door of the bridal suite. She gathered up four thousand dollars of duchess satin in one fist, leaned her shoulders against the wall, and took a small silver thing out of her beaded clutch. She thought about a boiler manual, and a lace leash, and a blue stone. It took about ninety seconds. She fixed her lipstick.

Then she walked up the aisle on her father's arm, radiant, with something old, something new, something borrowed.

Her something blue was a ribbon stitched inside her hem, and her mother cried when she saw it.

The real one was four miles away, on the corner of a desk in a basement, in the pocket of an old baseball glove, where only one man could see it.