Iris Goes to College

*Book one.*

*All characters are above the age of 18*

## The Brochure

Iris chose her college for the football team.

She never told anyone. Her parents thought it was the business program. Her guidance counselor thought it was the scholarship. Her mother told the neighbors it was "so she can see a bit of the world outside California," and Iris let her.

The truth was a glossy brochure that had come in the mail in the fall of her last year at home. Page six was a double spread of the team running out of a tunnel. Sixty of them. Big, corn-fed, thick-necked boys in navy and gold, steaming in the cold, and she had looked at that photograph for a long time and thought: *one of those is going to know what to do with me.*

She had turned 18 the summer before college. Six weeks later she arrived, with four suitcases and her father's credit card.

She was not what the Midwest expected from California. She was blonde, and that was the end of it. She did not tan. She had never tanned. She had spent her whole childhood beside a pool under a hat, and she was as pale as cream from her forehead to her feet, with a face like a choirgirl's and a body that had arrived all at once and late, and had been causing traffic accidents ever since. Double Ds on a small frame. A waist you could circle. Ten years of dance classes had given her legs, and an ass that was round and high and tight as a drum.

She undressed in front of the mirror on the back of her dorm-room door that first night and took stock, the way you count your money in a strange town.

Her breasts were heavy and high and very white, with a faint blue vein down the side of each, and small nipples the pink of the inside of a shell that drew up tight at the least draft. They moved when she breathed. Under them her waist nipped in so sharply that her hips looked wider than they were. Below that she kept herself bare: a smooth, plump little cleft as pale as the rest of her, which flushed dark rose when she was wet. She was wet a great deal.

She turned around. Two dimples at the base of her spine. An ass like a peach cut in half, which shook when she walked and went on a moment after she stopped. A dancer's thighs, long for her height and soft on the inside as the inside of a wrist. Small feet with a high arch.

She marked like wax. She pressed her thumb into her own hip and watched the print come up pink and stay there.

*What a waste,* she thought, *with nobody to do that.*

She knew exactly what she looked like. She had worked out that if she tipped her head, and let her hair fall forward, and looked up through it, and used a certain small, breathy, slightly lost voice, there was not a man alive who would not do what she wanted.

It was the most useful thing she owned. It took her three years to find out what it couldn't get her.

## Nice Boys

The first one was a tight end named Kyle, one of the senior year stars, the second week of freshman year.

He was six foot five and he had hands like catcher's mitts, and she had picked him off page six of the brochure. She got him back to his room with about as much effort as it takes to call a dog. He kissed her for a long time, very carefully. He asked if he could take off her top. He asked if he could take off her bra. When he finally got a hand between her legs, he looked into her eyes and said, "Is this okay?"

"Yes," said Iris. She had been soaked since the stairwell. His big finger slid into her and he froze, as if he had broken something.

"Tell me if it hurts."

"It's not going to hurt, Kyle."

He was big. That part was as advertised. When he pushed his boxers down it came up out of them long and pale and heavy, flushed dark at the head and bobbing, and her mouth went dry and her cunt clenched on nothing. He got on top of her and eased into her an inch at a time, watching her face as if she were a bomb he was defusing. She felt the fat head of him spread her open, and stop. Spread her a little more, and stop. She lay there under two hundred and forty pounds of anxious tight end with her legs wide and her hips lifting for him, and thought, *well, this is it, this is the thing,* and waited.

He came in four minutes. He said, "Oh my gosh." Then he said, "Thank you."

She stared at the ceiling. There was a poster of a truck on it.

*Thank you,* she thought. *He thanked me.*

She assumed it was Kyle.

She gave him a second chance on the Friday, and this time she did not leave it up to him.

"Kyle," she said, in the small voice, with her back against his door. "Would you do something for me?"

"Anything."

"Lie down. Put your hands up on the headboard." She waited until he had. "Now don't let go. Whatever I do. Promise."

"I promise," said Kyle, hoarsely.

She undressed at the foot of his bed with the desk lamp behind her, and she took her time. She had on a white sundress with a row of small buttons down the front. She undid every one of them singly and let it slide off her shoulders to the floor.

Under it was a set she had bought the week she arrived and never worn for anyone: shell-pink satin, a balconette bra with a narrow edge of cream lace, cut so low that her breasts stood up out of it round and white, and a little pair of panties to match, tied with a bow at each hip. She stood there in it and watched what it did to him.

The headboard creaked. His knuckles had gone white on the rail. He was staring at her as if she were a house on fire, and his cock stood straight up off his stomach, twitching, with nobody touching it.

*I did that,* she thought. *From here.*

She climbed onto the bed on her knees and straddled his thighs. She did not take the bra off. She slipped the straps down her arms and lifted her tits out over the top of the cups, one and then the other, and let them sit there on the pink satin, shoved up and together by the wire, big and white and bare, with the nipples small and pink and drawn up tight. He made a sound like a man being strangled.

His cock was lying up his belly, hard as a bat, with a bead of clear wet welling at the tip. She laid it flat with her palm and sat down on it.

Through the satin. She did not take the panties off either. She settled her weight on him, so that the lips of her pussy spread around the shaft through the thin cloth, and slid. Up, slowly, the whole length of him, until the fat ridge of the head caught against her clit and she shivered. Down again, to the root. Up. She could feel every vein. She could feel him jump under her each time she reached the head. The pink went dark where she rubbed, a wet stain spreading through it and clinging to her, and when she lifted an inch she could see his cock glistening with her through the cloth, and a thin string of it stretching between them.

"Iris. Please."

"Hands," said Iris.

His hands stayed where they were.

She hooked the soaked satin to one side with two fingers. Her cunt was swollen and slick and dark pink. She held him up by the root, fitted the head of him into her, and stayed there, with just the head in her and her lips stretched around it, and looked at his face.

Then she sank.

Slowly. At exactly the speed she liked. She felt every inch of him go in: the thick head forcing her open, the long hard shaft following it, her walls parting around him and clinging, the stretch climbing up inside her until she was sure there couldn't be any more of him, and there was more. She sat down on the last of it with a little grunt and her mouth open. He was so deep she could feel him behind her navel.

It was a different thing altogether. She could tilt her hips and put him exactly where she wanted him. She found the slow grind that pressed her clit down into the root of him, forward and down, forward and down, and the wet sound of it was loud in the little room. She rode him with her hands flat on his chest and her tits swinging over his face, the wire still shoving them up, slapping softly together on every stroke. He lifted his head for one and she let him have it. He sucked the nipple as if it were the only thing keeping him alive.

A flush had come up in her throat and spread down over her chest in a pink stain, all the way to the nipples. She could see him watching it spread.

She learned him in ten minutes. His breath went high and thin before he came, and his stomach tightened like a board. The first time she felt it, she stopped dead, sitting on the whole length of him, and felt his cock throb inside her, once, twice, straining, and held still until it stopped.

"Not yet."

"Oh my gosh. Oh, gosh, Iris..."

"Not yet, Kyle."

She did it to him four times. By the fourth his cock was so hard inside her that it ached, jerking every time she stopped, and he was shaking from his wrists to his feet, sweat running into his ears, begging her in a whisper. It was the begging that did it. Two hundred and forty pounds of tight end, flat on his back, hanging off a headboard because a girl half his size had asked him nicely. She put her fingers on her clit and rode him hard, bouncing on him now, his cock sliding out of her slick and slamming back up into her, and came with her head thrown back, her cunt clamping down on him in long hard pulls and her thighs clamped on his ribs. It was the first time she had ever come with a man inside her.

She waited until it was completely finished. Then she leaned down and put her lips against his ear.

"Now."

He went off like a dropped piano. She felt it: his cock swelling and kicking deep inside her, hot pulse after hot pulse, so much of it that it ran back out of her around him and down over his balls. The headboard came half out of the wall.

"Thank you," he gasped, afterward. "Oh my gosh. Thank you."

This time she laughed. She walked home at midnight in the white sundress with the pink satin balled in her fist, feeling ten feet tall.

*There,* she thought. *It only wanted managing.*

It wanted managing every time, with every one of them. She went through that team, over three years, like a girl working down a menu, and the food was always the same unless she cooked it herself. There was a linebacker who stopped in the middle to ask if she was comfortable. There was a very sweet defensive end who made a playlist. There was a kicker who was actually rather good, and then apologized for it.

They were so *nice*. That was the whole trouble. They were big and strong and beautiful and they handled her as if she might come apart in their hands. They looked at that face and they could not do it. She would get one of them worked up to the point where she thought, *now, now he's going to stop asking*, and he would brush the hair off her forehead and say, "You're so pretty."

She got good at it anyway. It was hard not to. She learned what every one of them liked and how to hurry him along and how to slow him down, which noise did what, where to put her hands. By the middle of sophomore year she could run a boy from his first kiss to his last gasp without his ever suspecting he hadn't been driving. She could do it from across a room. She came, always, by arranging it herself. She was popular. She was never, ever satisfied.

The rest she did alone.

She had found it in her first month, with a laptop and a door that locked. Not the soft things, the candlelit couples. She went past those in a week. She typed words into the search bar that she would not have said aloud to a priest. *Rough. Forced. Held down. Used.*

They were all the same video, and she never tired of it. A girl about her size, on a couch or a casting-room floor or bent over the hood of a car. A hand over her mouth. A fist in her hair. A man who did not ask her one single thing, who turned her over when he was ready and spread her and shoved into her, and put her where he wanted her, and called her names while he did it. Sometimes there were two men, or three: one in her mouth and one behind her, and the girl's tits swinging between them. The girl said *no, please, don't*, with spit on her chin and her eyes rolling back, and came like a train.

Iris knew they were actresses. You could catch them hiding a smile, and one of them always waved at the camera at the end. It made no difference at all. She watched the hand on the back of the neck, and the wrists held together in one big fist, and the little stumble when the girl was pulled up by her hair, and she watched them again.

She did it every day. Most days she did it three times: when she woke, and between her last class and practice, and at night to get to sleep. She lay face down on her narrow bed with the laptop on the pillow and her ass in the air, one arm twisted up behind her own back as if somebody had it, her cheek mashed into the sheet, and her other hand working between her legs until her wrist cramped. Two fingers in to the knuckle, then three, the heel of her palm grinding on her clit, and her cunt making wet, greedy, sucking sounds she could hear over the laptop. She was loud. She learned to bite the pillow. The sheet under her hips was never dry.

In her head it was never the actress. It was her. The man had no face. He had hands, and a voice, and he never once said *please* or *thank you* or *is this okay*, and whatever she said to him, he did not stop.

She came harder like that, alone, than she ever had with a boy inside her.

More than once she ran out of time to shower. She dragged the uniform on over it and ran to the field with her fingers still smelling of herself, her thong soaked through and the insides of her thighs tacky, and stood in line with twenty girls in the sun, flushed to the chest, reeking faintly and unmistakably of sex. The girl who based her stunts wrinkled her nose. The players had no idea what it was they were smelling. They drifted toward the sideline anyway, like dogs toward a kitchen door.

She never brought the two things together. One was a screen at one in the morning. The other was Kyle, and the linebacker, and the boy with the playlist, and she had only to look at those kind, worried faces to know what would happen if she said one word of it aloud.

*Are you okay?* they would say. *Did somebody hurt you?*

She made the cheer squad the first week, on merit. Ten years of dance will do that. By junior year she was the best tumbler they had, and that spring they went to nationals and she did a toe-touch in front of nine thousand people and landed it like a nail.

She also, it was generally agreed, cost the team a running back.

It was a Tuesday practice in her junior fall. The squad drilled on the sideline while the team ran plays, and Iris had been late, for the usual reason, and had not had time to find her briefs. Every cheerleader wears them: navy stretch knit, full cut, so that when she kicks the crowd sees team colors. Under her pleated skirt that afternoon she had on a white lace thong the size of a postage stamp.

She did not think about it until the first high kick.

Her leg went up past her ear. The pleated skirt fell back to her waist. For one long second the whole offense had an unobstructed view of a white thigh from hip to ankle, and the round bare cheeks of her ass with a string of lace between them, and the small plump mound that the lace very nearly covered.

Forty yards away, two running backs who should have been looking at the ball were looking at something else. They met at full speed in the middle of the field with a noise like a car door. One of them was out for three weeks.

Nobody said it was her fault. Nobody had to. The offensive coordinator screamed for a while. The boys were delighted.

Iris stood on the sideline with her pom-poms on her hips and looked at the two of them lying in the grass. Forty yards. She had not touched either one.

The quarterback came to her room that night to speak to her about it.

His name was Tanner. He was a senior and a captain, and he had plainly rehearsed in the stairwell. He stood on her rug with his cap in his hands and said that the guys had talked, and it was a safety issue, and he was asking her, respectfully, as a leader on this team, to wear the correct undergarment to practice.

"Which one was incorrect?" said Iris, in the small voice.

She was sitting on the edge of her desk. She had not changed. She lifted the front of the pleated skirt and showed him.

It was white lace, a triangle no bigger than his palm, on two thin straps that rode high over her hips. It was sheer enough to show him that she was bare underneath it: smooth and pale and plump, with a dark wet line already drawn down the middle of the lace. She had been at the laptop until ten minutes before he knocked. The room smelled of it.

Tanner stopped in the middle of a word.

"Is it this one?"

"Uh," said the captain.

"I can't hear you from there. Come and look properly." She pointed at the floor between her feet. "Down here."

He knelt. Six foot three, all-conference, on his knees on a dorm-room rug with his cap still in his hand. She had kicked off her sneakers. She put one bare foot on his shoulder and pushed him down another few inches, and let her knees fall open.

"Through it," she said. "Don't take it off."

He put his mouth on her through the lace. He was eager and hopeless. He licked at her like a dog at a plate, everywhere at once, slobbering, his breath hot through the wet cloth. She took a handful of his hair.

"Slower."

He slowed.

"Flat. Lower. No. Up." She steered him by the hair until his tongue was dragging the wet lace back and forth across her clit, with a fine rough scrape that went all the way up her spine. "There. Stay there. Don't you dare do anything else."

He stayed there.

She leaned back on one hand and looked down the length of her own body at the top of the starting quarterback's head, working between her thighs. She could hear him: the wet lapping, the little sucking noises when he caught her lips through the lace. His ears were scarlet. His eyes were shut. He was moaning into her, and he had one hand pressed hard against the front of his jeans.

"Did I say you could?"

The hand came away as if the denim were hot.

She kept him at it for a long time, because she could. The lace was soaked through, with him and with her. When she was close she pulled it aside herself and held his face against her bare cunt, swollen and dripping, the lips spread open and flushed rose, and got both feet up on his shoulders, and ground herself on his mouth, on his tongue, on his nose and chin, smearing him with her, her toes curling against the back of his neck. She came hard, with a cry she let the whole corridor hear.

She gave herself a minute. Then she let him sit up as far as his knees.

"Take it out."

He did. It came out of his jeans long and curved and flushed dark, the head shining wet, so hard that it stood up against his stomach and bobbed with his pulse.

"Go on, then. But not until I tell you."

She watched him stroke himself, with her foot resting on his thigh. It took about a dozen pulls before his face began to crumple.

"Wait."

He waited. A sound came out of him like a kettle. She counted ten in her head, slowly, looking him in the eye.

"Now."

He came across her ankle and the top of her foot in long thick ropes, hot, the first one striking her shin, then over her toes, and all over the rug. Then he put his forehead down on her knee and burst into tears.

"Thank you," he said, into her skirt. "I'm sorry. Thank you."

She patted his hair. She had just come on the face of the starting quarterback, and she had done every bit of it herself.

She wore the thong to practice whenever she felt like it, after that. Nobody on the offense raised it again.

She did not know that up in the tower that Tuesday, with a clipboard, a man she had never particularly noticed had lowered his sunglasses and looked at her for the first time.

---

Simmons had the defense, and the defense did not run into each other.

He was forty-three that year. He had played linebacker at a school nobody remembered until a knee ended it, and he had been coaching other men's sons ever since. He still lifted like a player. He had a neck like a fire hydrant, a wife named Carol, and a temper that his players spoke about in the past tense, the way people talk about weather that has blown through.

He had watched the blonde walk back to her line with her skirt swinging and no idea in the world what she had just done to his colleague's depth chart.

*Somebody,* he had thought, *ought to do something about that girl.*

He had not thought it would be him. He was a married man. He had put his sunglasses back on.

It took her another ten months to get to him.

## The Weight Room

By the August before her senior year, Iris had run out of team.

She had not exactly planned to go looking among the coaches. But she was twenty-one, co-captain, back on campus two weeks early for camp, and bored out of her mind. And the weight room was on the way back from the equipment cage, where she had been sent to count pom-poms.

He was in there alone. It was after eight, the building empty, the lights half off. He was on the bench with his shirt off and a bar across his chest that had more plates on it than she had ever seen a person lift, and she stopped in the doorway and watched him do it six times.

He was not a boy. That was what she noticed. He was thick. His chest was furred with gray-black hair and slick with sweat, and the muscles under it did not look like the ones on the players, which were smooth and new. These looked used. He racked the bar with a clang and sat up, breathing like a bull, and saw her.

"Building's closed, miss."

"I'm sorry, Coach." The voice came out by itself. Small, breathy, a little lost. "I was counting pom-poms. I got turned around."

"The door's behind you."

She did not go to the door. She came in. She was wearing what she'd practiced in: a pair of tiny navy cotton shorts, rolled at the waist, and a white ribbed tank top, cropped, gone a little transparent with the heat of the day. Under it was a sports bra that was not winning. She saw his eyes go there, and stay, and come up again with some effort.

"I've never seen anybody lift that much," she said. She trailed one fingertip along the bar. "Doesn't it hurt?"

"That's the idea."

"Could you teach me?"

"No."

She looked up at him through her hair.

He was looking back. And she saw it happen, the thing she had watched happen to every man she had ever tried it on: the little slackening around the eyes, the breath going shallow. He was wearing gray compression shorts and nothing else, and they hid nothing at all. A thick ridge had begun to rise down the inside of his thigh.

*Oh,* she thought, with a small familiar disappointment. *You too. That was easy.*

"Coach," she said, very softly, looking right at it. "I think you've got a cramp."

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

"You're that cheerleader," he said. "You put Davis on the injury list."

"I didn't mean to."

"The hell you didn't."

She went down on her knees between his feet, on the rubber matting, and put her hands on his thighs. They were like tree trunks, and they were shaking, very slightly. Right in front of her face the gray cloth was stretched over him: the long thick ridge of his cock lying down the inside of his thigh, the fat knob of the head plain at the end of it, a dark spot of wet soaking through. She leaned in and pressed her open mouth to it through the cloth. He was hot. He smelled of iron and sweat and something sharper, a grown man's smell, salt and musk, nothing like the boys. She breathed it in. She ran her tongue up the whole length of the ridge, slowly, from the root to the wet spot, and felt it jump against her lips.

"Christ," said Simmons. "Lock the door."

"It locks from the inside," said Iris. "I checked."

She peeled the shorts down. His cock sprang free and slapped up against his belly with a sound like a hand clap.

She looked at it for a long moment.

It was not a boy's cock. It was thick, thicker than her wrist, and dark, darker than the rest of him, a dusky red-brown, with a heavy vein that ran down the whole length of one side like a cord and branched under the skin. The head was broad and blunt and swollen tight, flushed almost purple, and the slit was already beading clear. It stood up out of a nest of grizzled hair over a pair of heavy, low-hanging balls. It was not the longest she had seen. It was the heaviest. When it twitched, it moved like something with weight in it.

She wrapped both hands around it. Her fingers did not meet. It was as hot as a stove and as hard as the bar, and she could feel his pulse beating in it. She looked up at him, put out her tongue, and licked the clear drop off the tip, and tasted salt. Then she took the head into her mouth.

It filled her mouth on its own. She had to open her jaw wide for it, then wider, her lips stretched tight around the thick ridge behind the head. She worked down slowly, tongue flat along the underside, feeling the big vein slide across it, a little deeper every time, with spit beginning to run out of the corners of her mouth and down his shaft over her fingers. She was very good at this. She had made a study of it. She waited for the hands fluttering at her hair, and the high thin breath, and the apology.

None of it came. He let her work, breathing slow and deep through his nose, his cock throbbing on her tongue. Then he put two fingers under her chin and lifted her off him. It came out of her mouth with a wet pop, glistening, with a string of spit still joining it to her lip.

"That's real nice," he said. "But I'm forty-four, honey. I only get the one. Stand up and let me look at you."

She stood up. Nobody had ever taken it out of her mouth before.

He looked. He took his time over it, sitting on the end of the bench with his knees apart, the way he might look over a recruit. Then he hooked his fingers in the hem of the damp tank top and drew it off over her head, and considered the sports bra: plain white, doing its best to flatten her, with a deep line of cleavage squeezed up over the top of it.

"That thing's losing," he said.

"It always does."

He hooked his thumbs under the band and pushed it up, slowly. It dragged over her, and caught, and then her tits dropped out from under it.

They fell, and swung, and settled. They were big for her size, too big: full and round and so white that the blue veins showed at the sides, high on her chest but with real weight in them, so that they swayed when she breathed and quivered with her heartbeat. The elastic had left a red line pressed into the soft undersides. Her areolas were small and pale pink, puffed up a little from the sweat and the cool air, and the nipples in the middle of them had already drawn up hard.

Simmons looked at them for a long time.

Then he took one in each hand. He lifted them from underneath as if he were guessing their weight, and let them settle into his palms and spill over the sides. He did not grab. His palms were as rough as a rasp from the bar, and his thumbs went around her nipples in slow circles, around and around, dragging over the puckered pink, never quite on the tips, until they stood up so hard they ached and she heard her own breath catch. Then he caught them between finger and thumb and rolled them, once, slowly, and pulled, and let go, and watched her tits bounce.

"There she is," said Simmons.

He turned her around by the hips. The little rolled shorts had ridden up into the crease of her ass, and the cheeks hung out of the bottom of them, round and white and full, with the print of the rubber matting pressed into the backs of her thighs. He put one big palm on each cheek and squeezed, and watched the flesh swell up between his fingers, and let go, and watched it shiver and settle. He did it again. He spread them a little with his thumbs, through the cotton, and she felt the air on her, and how wet she was there, and her knees went weak.

"Lord," he said, mostly to himself. He turned her back.

He knew what he was doing. She kept noticing it, with a small astonishment. He peeled the navy shorts down her legs and found the thong under them, a scrap of white cotton gone gray with sweat and dark through the crotch with her. It was stuck to her. He could see the shape of her through it, the plump lips and the line between them. He did not fumble at it. He cupped her through it with his whole hand, and held still, and let her feel the heat. Then one thick finger stroked up the wet cloth, slowly, found her clit at the first try, and pressed.

Her knees dipped.

"Twenty-two years married," he said. "I can find it."

She put her hand flat on his chest and pushed. He let her. He lay back along the bench with his feet on the floor either side of it and that thick cock lying up his belly, and laced his hands behind his head.

"Go on, then," he said. "Show me what all the fuss is about."

She stepped over the bench. It was the right height. She stood astride him with her feet flat on the rubber, pulled the wet cotton to one side, took his cock in her hand, and fitted the blunt head of it against her.

She had to work for it. He was so thick. She pressed down and the head would not go. She pressed harder and felt herself stretching, her lips spreading around him, wider, wider, a hot burning stretch that made her gasp, and then the ridge of it slipped through into her and she cried out. She stopped there with only the head in her, trembling, her thighs shaking. He did not move. He lay there with his hands behind his head and watched her.

She sank another inch. Another. Every one of them was a fight. He opened her as he went in and filled her so full she could feel the big vein dragging along the inside of her, and her cunt fluttered and clung and squeezed at him and could not get used to him. She looked down between her own thighs and watched it happen: her pussy stretched pink and shining around that thick dark shaft, taking it a little at a time, her wet running down it.

When she was sitting on all of him she could not breathe. He was in her to the top. She could feel him at the very back of her, pressing on something deep, a dull sweet ache. He took one long breath through his nose, and that was all.

She began to ride him the way she rode all of them. Slow, and tight, with the little twist at the bottom, watching his face for the signs.

There were no signs.

Five minutes. Ten. Her thighs were burning. He lay under her like part of the equipment, as hard as the bar, breathing evenly, and at some point his hands came out from behind his head and settled on her hips. They did not steer her. They took a little of her weight on the way up.

"You're in a hurry," he said. "Take your time, honey. I'm not going anywhere."

It had never occurred to her that she could. She had never once had the time.

She stopped managing him. There was nothing to manage. She leaned back with her hands on his thighs and found the angle that dragged the head of him along the front wall of her on every stroke, and she stayed on it. Every time she rose he dragged at her on the way out, and her cunt made a soft wet sucking sound letting him go, and every time she sat down he forced her open again. Her ass spread and flattened on his thighs at the bottom of every stroke. The flush had come up over her whole chest. The sports bra was still rucked up under her arms, and her tits swung under it, heavy, slapping softly together.

He watched them for a while. Then his hands left her hips and came up and caught them.

He did not hurry that either. He let them drop into his palms on every downstroke and took the weight, and lifted, and let them go. He pushed them together and ran his thumb down the damp crease between. He squeezed, slow and deep, the way you'd work a cramp out of a muscle, until the white flesh swelled between his fingers, and when she moaned he did it again. His hands were so rough she could feel every callus. He rolled the nipples between finger and thumb, not hard, and kept on rolling them, in time with her hips, and each turn went through her like a plucked string and landed where he was buried in her.

"Prettiest pair I ever saw," he said. "And I've been looking a long time."

Then he sat half up, with one arm braced behind him, and took one in his mouth. It was hot and wet and unhurried. He sucked as much of it in as he could get, and worked the nipple against the roof of his mouth with the flat of his tongue, and his stubble scraped the soft underside. She held his head there with both hands and rode him harder. Sweat ran down between her shoulder blades, the bench creaked under them, and it built in her slowly, from a long way down, the way it only ever had under her own fingers.

He lay back. He kept one breast in his hand, kneading, the nipple caught between two knuckles. He laid the thumb of the other flat against her clit. He didn't rub. He held it there, steady, and let her grind against it.

"Oh," said Iris, in her own voice. "Oh, God. Don't move that."

"Wasn't going to."

She came on him. It rolled up through her and she shook with it, head back, nails in his thighs, her breast crushed in his fist, clenching on that thick unhurried cock. For the first time in her life she had not touched herself to get there.

He let her finish. Then he sat up under her, put one arm around her waist, and moved her on him himself, a dozen long deep strokes, and came with his face in her neck and a groan from the bottom of his chest. She felt him swell and kick inside her, deep, and the hot flood of him, and then it was running back out of her around his cock and down over his balls onto the bench.

They sat there, breathing.

"Well," said Simmons. He looked pleased, and slightly stunned, like a man who has found a twenty in an old coat. He handed her his towel. "Aren't you something. Go on home, now. And mind who you tell."

She walked back to her dorm in the warm dark with her legs trembling and his cum soaking slowly into the cotton between them.

*So that's all it was,* she thought. *I only needed a grown man.*

It went on like that into September. His truck, mostly, in the far corner of the stadium lot, at lunch, with the seat run all the way back. He took his wedding ring off and put it in the cup holder first, which she thought was a nice touch. He could go half an hour. He had patient hands and he never hurried her, and she rode him in that front seat four days a week and came every time.

She was on top every time. He seemed to like it that way.

It was the best sex she had ever had. He said *is that all right* and *watch your head, honey*, and afterward he checked his watch.

She still went home to the laptop.

She could not have said what was wrong with it.

## Oh and Three

The season opened on the first Saturday of September. They lost by ten.

Nobody panicked. It was a road game. The next week they lost at home, on a field goal with four seconds left, and Simmons threw his headset thirty yards.

She watched it happen to him a week at a time. He stopped shaving. He stopped talking at lunch. In the truck he was the same careful man, only quieter, and on the Monday after the field goal he took hold of her hip, just once, hard enough to hurt.

"Sorry, honey," he said at once, and let go.

She thought about that hand for three days.

The third game was at home, against a school they were supposed to beat by three touchdowns.

They lost by sixty-two.

Iris had never seen anything like it. Nobody had. By the third quarter the student section had emptied out and the band had stopped playing, and the squad was still on the sideline doing the fight song for forty thousand empty seats, with fixed smiles, while the other team's second string ran through the defense like water through a fence.

Through *his* defense. She watched him the whole second half. He started the game red and shouting. By the end he had gone white, and quiet, and he was not saying anything to anyone at all. He stood at the forty with his arms folded and his headset around his neck, and the players gave him ten feet of room in every direction, the way you'd walk around a dog on a chain.

Seventy-six to fourteen. He walked off the field alone.

She was supposed to go back with the squad. She stood in the tunnel in her uniform with her pom-poms in her hand and watched him go the other way, down the service corridor, past the training room, and through the steel door of the equipment room. It slammed behind him so hard that dust came off the ceiling.

*Don't,* said the sensible part of her. *Not today. Look at him.*

She was looking at him. That was the trouble. She had been looking at him for two hours, at that white, locked, furious face, and she was so wet that she could feel it in her shoes.

*He isn't going to say sorry today,* she thought.

It was a dare. She took it.

---

The equipment room was long and low and smelled of rubber and cut grass. Wire cages of helmets. Racks of pads. Against the far wall, a waist-high stack of blue tackling dummies, and Simmons, with his back to her and both fists on a steel shelf and his head down between his arms.

She pushed the door shut behind her. She turned the bolt. He heard it.

"Get out."

He did not turn around. It was a voice she had never heard from him: low, and flat, and scraped.

"No," said Iris.

"I'm not telling you again."

"Good. I didn't like the sound of it the first time."

He turned around.

She had thought she knew what an angry man looked like. She had not. His face was the color of putty and his eyes had gone small. There was a vein standing in his forehead. He looked at her, the blonde hair, the gold ribbon, the little navy shell top with the school's name across her tits, as if she were something that had been left on his doorstep.

"You think this is funny."

"A little."

"You think today's a good day to come down here and wiggle your ass at me."

"I think you're oh and three. I think you gave up five hundred yards to a team that can barely run," said Iris. Her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her teeth. She did not use the voice. She used her own, which was lower, and not sweet. "I think their third-string tailback walked into the end zone backwards. I think you stood there with your arms folded and watched it. And now you're going to stand in a closet and sulk."

Something moved behind his eyes.

"Watch your mouth."

"Or what? You'll say *sorry, honey*?" She took a step toward him. Her legs were shaking. "Five weeks I've been getting in that truck. You know what you are? You're considerate. You take your time. You ask if I'm comfortable. You have never left one mark on me. I've been fucked by somebody's very good husband since August, Coach, and if I wanted one of those I'd get married."

"Shut up."

"Make me."

He didn't move. His hands had closed.

So she said it. Plainly, the whole thing, the way she had never in her life said it to anybody, because it was this or walk back out that door and be thanked until she died.

"You're angry," Iris said. "You've got nowhere to put it. Put it here." She dropped the pom-poms on the concrete. "I'm not going to break and I'm not going to cry to anybody. I walked in here and I locked that door myself. I don't want you to be careful. I don't want you to ask. I want you to take that whole miserable month out on me, as hard as you like, and I want you to do it right now, before you remember you're a gentleman."

Total silence. A helmet shifted in a cage.

"Unless you can't," she said. "Unless that's the defense's problem all the way down."

He crossed the room in two strides.

His hand closed around her throat.

It slammed her back against the cage door, and the whole wall of helmets rattled, and her feet nearly left the floor. It was a huge hand. It went most of the way around. The heel of it was under her chin and his fingers dug in at the side of her neck, and for one second he squeezed, clumsy and far too hard, and the light went strange. Her hands flew up to his wrist. Something cold shot through her, down the middle of all that heat.

Then it eased. Not gone. He held her there, pinned by the neck, his face an inch from hers, breathing through his nose like a horse.

Her pulse was slamming against his palm. She could breathe. She found that out and took the breath, and it shook going in.

"You spoiled," he said, very low, "mouthy, cock-teasing little bitch."

*There,* she thought. Her knees had gone to water. *Oh, God. There you are.*

"Yes," she whispered.

"You came down here for this."

"*Yes.*"

"You want to be treated like a whore? Is that it?"

"I want you to stop *talking* about it..."

His other hand hit the hem of her shell top and shoved it up to her collarbones.

She had dressed for the game, not for him. Under the top was her good navy bra, satin, with a scalloped edge of gold lace: team colors, her own private joke, a half-cup that held her up like two scoops on a shelf. He looked at it for exactly as long as it took him to get his fist in the middle of it. He didn't unhook it. He dragged both cups down under her tits and left them there. The underwire shoved them up and out at him, and they spilled over the satin, big and pale and bare and pressed together, quivering with her breathing, the gold lace crushed underneath. Her nipples were small and pink and already hard as beads, pointing up at him.

He let go of her throat to do it. She felt the absence of that hand like a missed step.

He mauled her. There was no other word. He took a whole tit in each hand and squeezed until the white flesh bulged out between his fingers, and twisted. He slapped one, then the other, and watched them jump and redden. He pinched both nipples between finger and thumb and pulled them out long, stretching her tits up off her chest by the tips, and let them snap back and bounce. He did it again. It hurt. It hurt, and the hurt went straight down her body like a wire, and she heard a noise come out of her mouth that she had never made for any of those careful boys, or for him: low, and ragged, and shocked.

"Look at that," said Simmons, through his teeth. "Look at that. She likes it."

She reached for his belt. It was what came next, and she was the one who always knew what came next.

He knocked her hand away so hard that it stung to the elbow.

"Did I tell you to touch me?"

He spun her by the arm and threw her face down over the tackling dummies.

They were stacked three deep and came to the top of her thighs. The vinyl was cold on her bare tits, and it stank of rubber and old sweat. Her cheek hit it. Before she could get her hands under her, his was on the back of her neck, the whole weight of his arm behind it, and he held her down.

That was the moment. She would be able to find it afterward to the second. A hand on the back of her neck, holding her down, and nobody asking her anything.

Every muscle she had let go at once.

*Oh,* she thought, with her eyes wide open against blue vinyl. *It's this. It's real. Somebody can actually do it.*

He flipped the pleated skirt up over her back.

Navy briefs, tight and shining over her ass. He took the waistband in his fist and dragged them down to her knees, and under them was the thing she had put on that morning for nobody: a thong, navy lace to match the bra, a thin dark strap between two round pale cheeks. It was a hell of an ass. It stood up off the top of the dummies, white as milk and trembling, with the dimples above it and the lace disappearing down the cleft, and the plump bare lips of her cunt pushed out between her thighs below, shining wet. Even in the state he was in, he stopped and looked. He grunted.

"For the game," he said. "You wore that for the *game*."

His hand came down on her ass.

It was the first time in her life anybody had hit her. It sounded like a gunshot in that concrete room. She screamed, more from surprise than pain, and then the pain arrived, a hot bright bloom the exact shape of his palm, and her whole body arched against the hand on her neck.

"That's for Davis." Again, the other side. "That's for the opener." Again. "That's for the goddamn field goal."

He did not stop at three. He had a month of it in his arm. He hit her the way he must once have hit running backs: full swing, flat-handed, one cheek and then the other, each one driving her hips into the dummies and landing before the last had finished burning. Her ass jumped under his palm. She could feel it shake, and go on shaking. On that white skin every blow came up at once, the whole hand, fingers and all, pink and then red and then a dark hot scarlet laid one print over another. Every blow shoved her cunt down into the vinyl, and every time it pressed and parted she could hear how wet it was. The thin strap of the thong was no cover at all. By the tenth she was sobbing out loud, with her mascara running onto the vinyl, and she had stopped trying to twist away. She was pushing up to meet his hand.

"Seventy-six points." Crack. "At home." Crack.

The heat had gone all the way through her. They had stopped being separate blows. It was one deep red throb, and every time his palm landed it jolted straight through to her clit, as if he were striking that. Nothing was touching her there. Nothing had. She could feel the lace clinging to her, and her thighs sliding wet against each other, and something winding tight in her belly that she recognized and did not believe.

*Not from this,* she thought. *I can't. Not just from...*

He hit her once more, low, with the whole weight of his shoulder, where her ass met her thighs.

She came. It tore out of her with a wail she did not know she had, her back bowing against his hand, her feet kicking off the floor, her cunt clenching on nothing at all. It went on through two more blows. He had not laid a finger between her legs.

It was the first one in her life that she had not arranged.

He stopped. She heard him breathing.

"Did you just..."

He hooked the thong aside with his thumb. Two thick fingers went into her, to the knuckle, with no warning at all. She was so wet they made a sound. He twisted them. He pulled them out and looked at them, wet to the palm, and shoved them back in, and she heard herself: a wet sucking squelch, loud in that room.

"Jesus Christ," he said. It was the first thing all month that had surprised him. "You're running down your legs. You sick little bitch. You've been like this since the third quarter, haven't you?"

"Since the *first*..."

She heard his belt. She heard his zipper.

He took his cock in his fist and dragged the head of it up and down through her, through all that wet, from her clit to her hole and back, slowly, painting her with it. She could feel how hot it was. She could feel how thick. She pushed back for it and he slapped her ass, hard, and she stopped.

He held the strip of lace out of his way with his thumb. He put the head of his cock against her hole and pressed, just enough that she felt herself begin to open around it. He took a better grip on the back of her neck.

He held her there.

One second. Two. The fat head of him notched into her, stretching her lips around it, not going in. She could feel her own heartbeat in it. She could feel him looking at it.

Then he drove it in to the root.

All of it, in one long, merciless shove. It forced her open from the head to the hilt in one go, no stopping, no waiting, every inch of him packed up into her at once, until his hips hit her burning ass and his balls slapped against her clit and the head of him was jammed against the very end of her.

She screamed into the vinyl.

He stayed there. Buried. He ground in deeper, as if there were more of her to have, and she felt it everywhere: the ring of her entrance clamped round the root of him, the whole thick length of him crammed inside her, the heavy throb of him at the end of her that she felt in her belly and in her teeth. She could not move. She could not breathe around it. Her cunt pulsed on him, helpless, again and again, trying to get used to him and failing.

Then he pulled back, all the way, so slowly she felt every inch drag out of her, until only the head was left in her and she was empty and open and clutching at nothing.

And slammed it home again.

And again.

He fucked her like he hated her. She understood, dimly, that it had nothing to do with her; he was fucking a scoreboard. Every stroke was the whole of him: out to the head, in to the root. The wet smack of his hips into her beaten ass. Her ass jolting and rippling up her back from it. The squelch of her cunt around him, filthy and loud, louder than the dummies banging against the wall. Her tits crushed under her, dragging back and forth on the cold rubber, the nipples scraping. Her toes barely touching the floor. He was thick, and he was hitting something deep inside her that none of the boys had ever been rough enough to find, a low bruising sweetness at the very end of her, over and over.

She tried to help. She could not stop herself. She pushed back at him, to set the stroke, and there was nowhere to push; he had her pinned flat, and the stroke was his. She worked one hand down underneath her, between the vinyl and her belly, to get her fingers on her clit the way she had with every one of them.

He let go of her neck. He caught that wrist, and then the other, and folded them both into the small of her back in one fist.

"You'll get what you're given."

She pulled. She might as well have pulled at the building.

There was nothing for her to do. She lay there with her arms locked behind her and her face in the rubber and understood that for the first time in her life there was nothing whatever for her to do, and a sound came up out of her chest that was half a sob and half a laugh.

His other hand got into her hair. All of it, ribbon and all, wound around his fist. He hauled her head back until her spine bowed and she was staring at the pipes.

"Seventy-six," he said, in time with it. "To fourteen. At home. At *home*."

"Harder," she sobbed. "Is that it? Is that all you've got?"

He snarled. He let go of her hair and that hand came around the front of her, under her jaw, and found her throat again.

She felt it close, and this time she was ready for it and it was worse, and better. He was not careful. He had no idea what he was doing. It was a big, blunt, angry grip, a little too far forward, tightening and slackening with his thrusts as if he'd forgotten it was there. The room swam and came back. And all the while he was slamming into her from behind, and she had never been so frightened or so wet.

It was nothing like the videos. Nobody in the videos had been afraid.

*He could really hurt me,* she thought, quite clearly. *He isn't even looking.*

It should have stopped her. It tipped her over.

She came again, and it was like nothing she had known was possible. It started at the base of her spine and went off through her whole body like a flashbulb, her cunt clamping down on him, her legs locking, her vision going white at the edges and then all the way in. She could not scream. There was no air for it. Her mouth was wide open against his hand and nothing came out, and it went on, and on, wave after wave, every one bigger than the one over his hand, bigger than anything she had ever managed for herself in a boy's narrow bed or on a weight bench. Her wrists were still shut in his fist.

Three years, and five good weeks. Nobody had ever got her within sight of this.

He felt it. She heard him swear. He let go of her throat, seized her hips in both hands, and hammered into her, ten, twelve more strokes, and then he drove in as deep as he could go and held there, grinding, with a long harsh groan through his teeth. She felt his cock swell in her, the thick vein pulsing against her walls, and then the hot flood of him, pulse after pulse, so deep that she felt it land.

She had been on the pill since she was eighteen. She had time to be glad of that.

He stayed in her for a few breaths, leaning on his hands on either side of her, sweat dripping from his chin onto her back. Then he pulled out. Her cunt stayed open after him, and she felt the cool air on it, and then the slow thick slide of his cum leaving her: over her clit, down the inside of her thigh, a drop on the floor between her feet.

She lay over the tackling dummies with her skirt on her back and her briefs around her knees. She could not have stood up for money.

---

Simmons did up his belt.

He felt better. That was the plain fact, and he noted it. For three weeks he'd had a thing in his chest like a swallowed coal, and it was gone. He looked at her: a blonde draped over a stack of his dummies with her ass beaten scarlet and his fingermarks coming up dark on her hips, his cum running out of her, breathing in long shudders.

It occurred to him that he ought to ask if she was all right.

He picked up his clipboard instead. He had film in twenty minutes, and she had asked for it. She'd told him so in so many words.

"Bolt that after me," he said, and went out.

---

It was almost a minute before she moved.

She got her feet under her. She pulled the bra back up over tits that ached to the root, and tugged the thong straight, and worked the briefs back up over an ass that flinched at the touch of them. Her hands were shaking so badly she dropped the gold ribbon twice.

There was a square of polished steel on the wall by the door, for the players to check their eye black. She looked into it.

Her mascara was on her cheeks. Her hair was a ruin. There were red marks on her throat that were going to need a scarf, and when she twisted to look, his handprints stood out on the backs of her thighs below the hem of the skirt, as clear as if they'd been painted.

She looked like she had been in an accident. She was smiling so hard it hurt her face.

She walked back to her dorm on shaking legs, in the last of the light, past the emptying parking lots and the kids carrying their folding chairs home. Every step, she could feel him. His fingerprints were on her hips. She pressed her own fingers into them as she walked, one after another, to make them ache.

She felt as though somebody had finally turned the lights on.

The next Saturday, the team won.