Iris, the Barmaid

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

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

## The Call

Rosa did not text. Rosa telephoned, like a person from another century, and she telephoned Frank.

Iris was in the basement when it rang. It was a Tuesday in October, a plain weekday visit, jeans and coffee. Frank looked at the screen, and his face did something complicated, and he answered standing up.

"Rosa." A pause. "Yes." A longer pause. "All three?... No, I'm not asking them, I'm asking you what for." He listened. His eyes moved to Iris, sitting on the corner of his desk beside the baseball glove. "She's right here."

He held the phone out to her at arm's length, as if it might go off.

"Blondie," said the low, lazy voice in her ear, and every hair on Iris's arms stood up. Four months. She had been back to the Dry Dock once since June, in August, and had not been able to sit down for a week. "What are you doing on the thirty-first?"

"Taking my daughter trick-or-treating. She's going as a bee."

"What are you doing after the bee's in bed?"

Iris looked at Frank. Frank looked at the ceiling.

"I don't know," she said. "What am I doing?"

"Halloween's my big night. I put on a show. I bring in a few dancers from the city, the regulars pay a cover, and I let things get out of hand, on purpose, once a year." A match scraped; Rosa was lighting something. "I'm short a girl on the floor. Dani can't carry it alone. I want you in an apron, carrying a tray."

"You want me to *waitress*?"

"I want you to work my floor, on Halloween, under house rules." The smile was audible. "Ask Francis what the house rules are. I'll wait."

Iris lowered the phone. "She says to ask you what the house rules are."

Frank shut his eyes.

"One night a year," he said, like a man reading out a charge sheet, "the girls who work the floor at the Dry Dock have volunteered for it. Every customer in the room knows that. Hands are allowed. Anywhere. Whenever they like. That's all a customer gets: hands. Anything more than hands goes through Rosa, and Rosa says no to everybody except people she invited personally." He opened his eyes. "She sits at the end of the bar all night and watches. Any girl says the word, the lights come up and the man's out in the gravel. She's never had to do it twice to the same crowd."

Iris sat very still. Her pulse had gone into her throat.

*Hands. Anywhere. All night. A room full of strangers.*

*And her, watching.*

She put the phone back to her ear.

"Who did you invite personally?"

"Well, now," said Rosa. "That's why I called Frank."

## The Costume

It took her two weeks to find the right one, and when she found it she nearly cried.

Seven years to the night. She had worked it out on the calendar. Seven years since a bored cheerleader had laced herself into a black satin bodice and walked down a corridor of pipes. She was not going to turn up in just anything.

She had it made. That was the difference between twenty-one and twenty-eight: she knew a seamstress now. Nothing stiff, nothing that wouldn't breathe. A witch's dress in soft black stretch velvet, cut like the little black dresses she loved, with straps as thin as bootlaces and a neckline that wrapped and plunged to the bottom of her breastbone. At twenty-one she'd had double Ds, and satin had pushed them up like fruit on a shelf. Now she had an F cup of her own, heavy and natural and full, and the velvet didn't push them anywhere. It simply held on. They filled the two soft triangles to overflowing and swayed in them when she walked, with a long deep line of cleavage between, and the inner slope of each one bare almost to the nipple.

The skirt was three layers of black tulle over nothing. It flared from her tight little waist, stood out stiff over her hips, and stopped where her ass was at its fullest. That ass. Bigger and softer than it had ever been at twenty-one, round and plush, and the tulle sat on top of it like frosting and covered the upper half. The lower half showed. Every step, it showed.

Black lace thong. Black hold-ups with a wide lace top, as before. Black heels, lower than before, because she was going to be on her feet with a tray. And the hat: tall, pointed, wide-brimmed. She tipped it over one eye in the mirror.

The same face looked back at her. That sweet, wide-eyed, church-choir face. There were faint lines at the corners of the eyes now, and she liked them.

*Hello,* she thought. *It's you again. Look how far we got.*

In the zipped pocket of her bag, Frank Jr. She told Mark she was running an all-night Halloween event out east and would be back Sunday. He said, "Don't work too hard." She kissed him, and the bee, and went.

## The Dry Dock, Halloween

She heard it from the gravel lot. Bass, and voices, and somebody's laugh going up over the top.

The lot was full. There was a man on the door, which there had not been in June: the size of a refrigerator, with a clipboard. He looked at her, and at the hat, and his eyes went to her left wrist.

"Working or drinking?"

"Working."

He snapped a band around her wrist. Red satin ribbon, with a little brass bell on it. "Floor staff. Red means hands are welcome. You want it to stop, you take it off, or you say the word to anybody with a black band, and they come get me." He tapped the black band on his own thick wrist. "Rosa's rules. Have a good night, miss."

Inside, the Dry Dock had been turned into something else.

Black crepe over the lamps. Candles in jars down the length of the bar. Orange lights strung through the rafters and a fog machine breathing in the corner. The pool table had been pushed against the wall and draped in black, and there was a small plywood stage where the jukebox usually stood, with a brass pole bolted floor to ceiling that she was fairly sure was not there the rest of the year. The place was packed. Sixty, seventy people, shoulder to shoulder, in masks and capes and plastic fangs, and the roar of them hit her like heat from an oven.

On the stage a tall redhead in a devil's horns and very little else was upside down on the pole. Two more dancers were working the floor: a nurse, and a girl in cat ears and a tail. They had red ribbons on their wrists. As Iris watched, a man in a cowboy hat slid his hand up the back of the nurse's skirt, casually, the way you'd pat a dog, and she laughed and leaned into it and went on taking his order.

*Oh, my God.*

"You're late, tourist."

She turned around.

Dani was a pirate. It was barely a costume. A white off-the-shoulder blouse cropped under her small high breasts and tied in a knot, so thin the dark rings of her nipples showed, and the glint of the little silver bars through them. A red sash for a skirt, slung low on her narrow hips, split to the waist on one side. Fishnets. Boots. A tricorn hat on her black hair, and a plastic cutlass through the sash, and kohl around her sharp dark eyes. There was a ring in her nose and a red ribbon on her wrist.

She looked Iris up and down, slowly. It was not the look from June.

"That's a lot of dress," she said. "For about a foot of fabric."

"That's a lot of pirate."

Dani's mouth twitched. She shoved an apron into Iris's hands, a scrap of black the size of a napkin, and a round tray.

"Tables six through fourteen are yours. Drinks go on the tab, tips go in your stocking. Somebody gets a hand somewhere you like, you let him. Somebody gets a hand somewhere you don't, you take off the ribbon. Somebody tries for more than a hand..." She jerked her chin toward the end of the bar. "You won't have to do anything. She'll already be on her way."

Iris looked.

Rosa was not behind the bar tonight. Rosa was sitting at the end of it, on the last stool, with her back to the wall and one boot on the rail, where she could see every inch of the room. She was wearing a man's black suit, cut close, with no shirt under the waistcoat, so that the tattoos ran down her arms and a long bare V of brown skin showed to the top button. Her short dark hair was slicked straight back. She had a bottle and a glass in front of her, and she was not doing a thing. She was watching.

Her eyes found Iris across sixty people. They went over the hat, the velvet, the tulle. One corner of that wide mouth lifted.

She raised her glass a quarter inch, and went back to watching the room.

Iris's knees turned to water.

"Yeah," Dani said, dryly, beside her. "She does that." And then, lower, almost grudging: "You look good. Go on. Table nine's been yelling for ten minutes."

## The Floor

The first hand came about ninety seconds in.

She was bending to set down a pitcher at table nine. Four men, in rubber masks, big and loud and cheerful. She felt it on the back of her thigh, just above the lace of her stocking: a warm, rough palm, sliding up under the tulle, and closing, unhurried, on a whole bare handful of her ass.

She froze, with the pitcher an inch off the table.

Seven years. Seven years of three men and nobody else, in a locked basement, in the dark. Nobody else had ever touched her. And this was a stranger, in a werewolf mask, in a crowded bar, squeezing her ass like he was testing a melon, while his friends watched.

*Take off the ribbon,* said a small prim voice. *You can. Right now.*

She looked down the length of the bar.

Rosa was looking straight at her. Not at the man. At her. Her eyebrows went up, very slightly: *Well?*

Iris set the pitcher down. She let out her breath. She pushed her hips back, an inch, into the stranger's hand.

"That'll be eighteen dollars," she said. Her voice shook. "Gentlemen."

The table roared. The hand squeezed, approvingly, and gave her a pat, and a twenty and a five were tucked into the top of her stocking by somebody else's fingers, which lingered there.

Down the bar, Rosa smiled into her glass.

After that it didn't stop.

She had never known anything like it. It was not sex, quite. It was weather. She moved through that crowded room with her tray held high, and hands came out of the dark like branches on a path. A palm slid up the back of her leg as she squeezed between two chairs. Fingers trailed over her bare hip. She leaned across a table and somebody cupped her breast through the velvet, weighing it, his thumb finding the nipple, and she went on counting change with her eyes half shut. A man in a vampire cape took her by the waist and sat her on his knee while he ordered, and his hand lay on the inside of her thigh the whole time, an inch from the lace, stroking.

Nobody grabbed. Nobody hurt. They had the manner of men who had been doing this once a year for a long time and knew exactly what the rules were, and exactly who was sitting at the end of the bar. It was almost courtly. A hand, a squeeze, a murmur, *Happy Halloween, sweetheart*, a bill in her stocking.

Within half an hour both lace tops were stuffed with money, and she was so wet it was running down her thigh.

*I am a married woman,* she thought, dizzy, carrying four beers. *I organize charity galas. I am being felt up by an entire bar and I have never been so turned on in my life.*

The first one to do more than squeeze was an older man, sixty maybe, gray-bearded, dressed as a sea captain. She was standing beside his table writing an order on her pad. His hand went up the inside of her leg, calmly, and didn't stop at the stocking. One thick finger hooked the lace aside. It slid through her, slow, bottom to top.

"Lord," he said mildly, to his companion. "This one's soaked."

And he pushed it into her. Right there. Standing at his table with her pen in her hand.

She made a noise. Her knees bent. The finger moved in her, slow and deep, a second one joining it, his thumb settling on her clit and rubbing in a small, steady, expert circle. He was looking at the menu.

"And the onion rings," he said.

"On... onion rings," Iris gasped, and wrote something that was not a word.

She did not come. He didn't let her. He worked her for a long, shameless minute, in full view of four tables, until she was gripping the back of his chair and her hips were moving on their own, and then he took his hand away and wiped it on a napkin and tucked a ten into her cleavage.

"Go on, honey," he said. "Somebody else'll finish that for you."

She walked back to the bar on legs that barely worked. Dani was there, loading a tray, flushed to the collarbones. A big hand was just withdrawing from the slit in her sash. She caught Iris's eye, and for the first time, grinned.

"First Halloween," she said. "Wait till midnight."

On the stage the cat was on her hands and knees. The nurse was sitting in a man's lap by the window with her uniform open to the waist. The air was thick with smoke and sweat and beer, and something else, hot and animal, that Iris could taste.

"Table three wants you," said Dani. "Corner. By the pool table." Her grin turned sly. "They asked for the witch."

## Table Three

She knew before she got there. She knew by the shape of them.

It was the darkest corner of the room. Three big men at a small round table, with their backs to the wall, and they had been watching her for an hour.

Stu had come as a convict. Black-and-white stripes, a little pillbox cap, a plastic ball and chain. He thought it was the funniest thing he had ever done. Ray was a pirate too, or had started as one: an eyepatch pushed up on his forehead, a shirt open to the waist, the old ink crawling up his neck. He had not been able to look away from Dani all night, and he looked embarrassed about it.

Frank was not in costume. Frank was wearing a clean work shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and his name on the pocket.

"What are you supposed to be?" Iris said. Her voice came out soft.

"Janitor," said Frank.

He looked at her. Top to bottom, slow, the hat and the velvet and the stockings full of other men's money. She saw his eyes go to her thigh, to the wet shine on the inside of it. She saw him take that in.

It was the first time in seven years that he had seen her anywhere but that basement. He was thirty-nine. There was gray at his temples and a furrow between his brows, and his forearms on the table were the same forearms, sleeved in old blue ink.

"Seven years tonight," he said.

"I know. I counted."

"That's a better hat."

"I had it made."

"Come here."

She came around the table. He turned his chair out. She stood in front of him with her tray held against her stomach like a schoolgirl, and he put one hand on the back of her knee.

It was different from all the others. Every stranger's hand that night had been a stranger's hand, warm and anonymous, a thrill because it was no one's. This was Frank's. She would have known it blind: the width of the palm, the callus at the base of each finger. It slid up the back of her thigh, over the lace, over a wad of dollar bills, and took hold of her ass, and she swayed.

"Been watching you," he said, low. "All night. Every son of a bitch in this bar's had his hand up your skirt."

"Yes."

"You like it."

"*Yes.*"

"I know you do. I could see it from here." His other hand came up the front of her leg. "That old boy with the beard. He had his fingers in you. At the table."

"He didn't let me finish," Iris whispered. "None of them have. I've been like this for an hour, Frank, I'm going out of my mind."

"Mm."

He pulled the lace aside. In front of Ray, and Stu, and anybody in that corner who cared to turn his head. Two fingers, thick and blunt, slid up into her to the knuckle, and she grabbed his shoulder to keep from falling.

"Put the tray down, sweetheart."

She put it on the table. Ray moved a glass out of the way.

Frank's thumb found her clit. He knew it better than she did. He knew exactly what an hour of strangers had done to it, and he pressed, and rolled, and those two fingers curled forward inside her and began to stroke.

"Look at me."

She looked. His eyes were dark brown, steady as a level. Watching her face. Checking, the way he had from a chair in a basement seven years ago.

"You go on and take it from every man in this room," he said quietly. "Hands. That's all they get. And then you come back here and get it finished by us. That's how tonight goes. You understand?"

"Yes. Yes. Oh, God, Frank, *please*..."

"Now," said Frank.

She came standing up. In a witch's hat, in the corner of a crowded bar, on his hand, with her forehead against his shoulder and her teeth in his shirt. It ripped through her, an hour's worth, her knees buckling, and he held her up by the ass and worked her through every second of it. She heard the little brass bell on her wrist ringing and ringing.

Stu was laughing softly. "Happy anniversary," he said.

Ray's hand was already on her other thigh.

She looked up, panting, across the smoke.

At the end of the bar, Rosa had turned on her stool to face that corner. She had her glass in her hand. She was watching the four of them with her head a little on one side, and on her face was an expression Iris had never seen there before.

It took her a moment to place it.

It was fond.

## Midnight

At midnight Rosa stood up.

She didn't say anything. She rapped twice on the bar with her knuckles, and the whole room went quiet as a church.

"Cover's done," she said. "House only."

It was a ritual; Iris could see that. Half the crowd got to its feet without complaint, found coats, settled up, filed out past the refrigerator on the door with a *night, Rosa* and a last look back. It took ten minutes. What was left was perhaps twenty people: the hard core of the regulars, the gray-bearded sea captain among them. The three dancers. Dani. And table three.

The refrigerator shot the bolt from the outside. Rosa turned down the lamps until there was nothing but candles.

"You all know how this goes," she said. "My girls have been carrying trays for four hours with your paws all over them, and they've earned something. So." She looked down the room. "The dancers are here because they like it, and they'll tell you what they're in the mood for. Ask nicely. Dani's mine. You can look."

Her eyes came to rest on Iris.

"And the witch," said Rosa, "belongs to those three in the corner. Has done for seven years tonight. Nobody else lays a hand on her from here on. But they've come a long way, and I told Francis he could have my bar." She picked up her bottle, and her glass, and sat back down on her stool with her boot on the rail. "So you can all watch how it's done."

There was a low rumble around the room, like a pleased animal.

Frank had come out of the corner. He walked across the floor in his work shirt, unhurried. He stopped in front of Iris. Behind him came Ray, and Stu, with his ball and chain over his shoulder.

He looked down at her for a moment. Then he took her by the waist, in both hands, exactly as Rosa had in June, and lifted her, and sat her on the bar among the candles.

"Seven years ago," Frank said, loud enough for the room, "this girl sat on my desk in a witch's hat and told me a pack of lies in a little baby voice." A laugh went round. "I didn't believe a word. And then she told me the truth, and I've been believing that ever since." He reached up and tipped the brim of her hat back with one finger. "What do you want, Iris? Out loud. So they can hear you."

She was shaking. Twenty strangers. Rosa. Dani, leaning on the end of the bar with her chin on her fists.

She had needed a fist in her hair to say it, the first time.

"I want all three of you," Iris said, clearly. "Right here. I want it rough. Red means stop." She drew a breath. "And *stop* gets my ass spanked."

The room howled.

"That's my girl," said Frank.

His hand went up the back of her neck, into her hair under the hat, and closed.

It was the best they had ever been. She thought so afterward. Perhaps it was the audience; perhaps it was seven years; perhaps it was Rosa, sitting ten feet away with a drink, who had told them to their faces in August that they fucked like room service. They had something to prove.

Ray tore the velvet. He took the two soft triangles of the bodice and simply pulled them apart to her waist, and her tits fell out, full and heavy and pale in the candlelight, swaying, the big rose-red nipples already hard. A noise went up from the room. Stu got his face between them before they had stopped moving.

"Oh, there they are," he said, muffled, reverent. "There's my girls."

She was laid back along the bar on her elbows. The tulle was flipped up. The lace was dragged down her legs and off over one shoe, and Stu held it up, soaked, for the room to see, and threw it. The sea captain caught it.

And Frank, in his work shirt with his name on the pocket, pulled up a bar stool between her knees, and sat down.

Like a man sitting down to dinner.

She knew what was coming. She started to cry before he touched her, from pure happiness.

He ate her in front of twenty people. He put his whole face into it, the way he had at a steel desk when she was twenty-one, one long slow flat lick from the bottom to the top and then his tongue up inside her, and his stubble on her thighs, and his lips closing around her clit and drawing, steady and strong. His tattooed forearms were locked around her legs. She had her hands in his hair. Her hat fell off. She could hear herself, high and broken, over the dead silence of the room.

"That," she heard Rosa say, conversationally, to someone, "I taught him."

She came twice. The first time, the word tore out of her the way it always had, the way it had on a steel desk seven years ago to the night, and this time twenty strangers heard it.

"*Daddy!*"

The room made a sound, low, all together. Frank growled into her and held her thighs tighter. He didn't lift his head.

Down the bar, a glass stopped halfway to a mouth.

"And that," said Rosa, more quietly, "I did not."

Then Stu climbed onto the bar. He knelt astride her chest with his knees on the wood, and laid his cock between her tits. She gathered them up in both arms, great soft slippery armfuls of herself, and folded them over him, and they swallowed him whole. He fucked that deep warm cleft with his head thrown back, the swollen head of his cock breaking the surface under her chin on every stroke and going under again. She put out her tongue for it.

Ray came round to the side and took her mouth, standing at the bar. Long and salt and familiar, curving over her tongue. She opened her throat for him, breathing out through her nose the way she'd learned, and he slid down it to the root, and she felt herself stretch around every vein. Her moans hummed into him.

Frank stood up from the stool. He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. He opened his belt.

He took her on the bar, standing, with her thighs over his forearms, in one long thick stroke to the hilt. She was so wet he went in like a hand into a glove. She felt the fat ridge of him drag along her walls, the deep bruising nudge at the end, the place only he had ever reached, and she screamed around Stu.

He fucked her straight through one orgasm and into the next, and at the top of the second she twisted her mouth free just long enough to scream. Somebody at the back of the room whistled. Ray turned her head back by the hair, laughing.

They did not check on her. Not once. That was what was different. There was no *color*. Frank's eyes were on her face the whole time, he never stopped watching, but he didn't ask; he read it, and trusted what he read, and drove. He fucked her hard enough that the candles jumped in their jars. Ray had pulled out of her mouth and pinned her wrists over her head on the wood, and he put his face into the bare hollow of her arm, where four hours of carrying trays in a velvet corset had left her salt, and licked it, slow, in front of everybody, while she shrieked and squirmed and could not get away. Stu's hand came down on her tit, a flat stinging slap that made it shake, and then the other one. When she got her mouth free and sobbed "*Stop*, oh God, *stop*," Frank flipped her over on the bar like a pancake, face down among the candles, ass in the air, and spanked her in front of the whole room: eight full-arm cracks on that big soft ass, the flesh jumping and quaking under his palm, while twenty people counted along.

*That's not room service,* she thought, wailing, delirious, with a stranger's dollar bill stuck to her cheek. *Rosa. Look. Look at them. That is not room service.*

*And it's still the roller coaster ride,* she thought, and did not care. *It's just the biggest one in the park.*

They put her on the pool table for the last of it, on the black drape. Stu underneath, thick in her cunt. Frank behind, working into her ass an inch at a time, enormous, with a palmful of something from behind the bar. She felt them press together inside her, cock against cock, grinding, the old impossible fullness. Ray knelt on the felt at her head and filled her throat.

Airtight. In front of an audience. With money falling out of her stockings.

She came so hard she saw nothing at all. She felt them go, one, two, three, deep in her, down her throat, flooding her. Somebody in the room was applauding. Somebody was whistling.

When she could lift her head, she looked for Rosa.

Rosa had put her glass down. She was sitting forward on her stool, with her elbows on her knees and her hands hanging loose between them, looking at the three sweating, wrecked, grinning men on her pool table.

"Well, I'll be damned," she said. "Room service got an upgrade." She looked at Frank, and nodded, slowly, once. From Rosa it was a medal. "Francis. I take it back."

Frank, on his knees on the felt with his shirt stuck to his back, went red to the roots of his hair.

After that, the night came apart, in the best way. Iris only kept pieces of it. The redheaded devil on the bar with the sea captain. The nurse and the cat in a tangle on the stage. Rosa crooking one finger at Dani, and Dani going to her on her knees across the floor. A bottle going round. Stu asleep under the pool table with his ball and chain for a pillow.

Somebody carried her up the stairs. She thought it was Ray.

## Morning

She woke in the wide low bed under the skylight, and she was not alone in it.

There was a small warm body curled against her back. A thin arm lay over her waist. A nose with a ring in it was pressed between her shoulder blades.

Iris lay still. Gray morning light. Her mouth tasted of whiskey. Every muscle hummed.

The arm tightened, sleepily. Then it stopped. She felt the exact moment Dani woke up and realized whose waist she was holding.

A long pause.

"If you tell anybody I was spooning you," said a hoarse voice behind her, "I'll put a lime knife in your tire."

Iris started to laugh. She couldn't help it. She rolled over.

Dani without the kohl and the hat looked about nineteen and was twenty-five. Sharp little face, black hair in a tangle, a pillow crease on her cheek. She was naked. She was all wire and angles, narrow hips, small high breasts with a silver bar through each dark nipple, a snake tattooed around one thigh. She scowled.

"What."

"Nothing. You're cute in the morning."

"I will end you."

"You hated me in June."

"I still hate you. Look at you." Dani's eyes traveled, resentfully, down the length of her: the tumble of blonde hair, the heavy soft tits lying sideways on the sheet, the dip of the waist, the great pale curve of hip. "You walk in here with all *that*, and she looks at you like... " She stopped. She chewed her lip. "She doesn't look at anybody like that."

"She looks at you."

"Not like that."

"Dani." Iris propped herself on an elbow. "I'm here a few times a year. I've got a husband and a toddler and three janitors. You're the one she wakes up with." She reached out and tucked a strand of black hair behind an ear with four rings in it. "I watched her crook one finger at you last night. You crossed that floor on your knees like it was the only place on earth you wanted to be. She watched you every inch of the way. You didn't see her face. I did."

Dani stared at her.

"... Yeah?"

"Yeah."

A slow, unwilling flush came up over the sharp little cheekbones.

"You're still a tourist," Dani muttered.

"I know."

"With stupid perfect tits."

"Thank you."

And then, because it was that kind of morning, and because they were both naked and sore and had been through the same fire, Dani leaned in and kissed her.

It was nothing like Rosa. It was quick and fierce and a little clumsy, a nip more than a kiss, tasting of sleep. Iris kissed her back. A small hard hand closed on her breast and squeezed, with frank curiosity, and a thumb ran over the nipple.

A bead of milk came up.

"Huh," Dani said, against her mouth, looking down. "She said you did that."

"Only a little, now. Mornings."

"Can I..."

"*Good*," said a voice from the doorway. "You've made friends."

They sprang apart like teenagers.

Rosa was leaning in the door frame with a mug of coffee. She was wearing a black tank top and nothing else, long brown muscled legs bare, her short hair still wet from the shower. She had been there for some time. She was looking at the two of them, tangled in her sheets, with enormous satisfaction.

"Don't stop on my account," she said. "I'll get to you both in a minute."

## Collared

She made them wait while she finished her coffee.

She sat in the armchair by the bed, one ankle on her knee, and drank it, and looked at them. They knelt side by side on the mattress, where she had told them to kneel: the blonde and the dark one, the soft one and the sharp one, with their hands on their thighs. Iris could feel Dani's shoulder against hers. It was trembling, very slightly.

Rosa set the mug down. She opened the drawer of the bedside table.

The first thing she took out was old. A collar of black leather, an inch wide, soft and dark with wear, with a steel ring at the front and a buckle rubbed bright.

Dani made a small sound. Her chin came up, by itself, baring her throat.

Rosa buckled it on. She did it without hurry, slid two fingers under it to check, turned the ring to the front. Dani's eyes had closed. Something went out of her whole body, some tightness that was always there, and she sank an inch onto her heels and let out a long breath, and was still.

*Oh,* Iris thought, watching. *That's what it is to her. That's home.*

"There's my good girl," Rosa murmured, and Dani shivered all over.

Then she reached into the drawer again.

Iris's stomach tightened. She had never worn a collar for anyone.

The thing in Rosa's hand was not like Dani's.

It was soft black cotton webbing, an inch wide, lined on the inside with a strip of pale fleece. There was a welded steel ring at the front. The stitching ran in a double row down each edge, small and careful and very slightly crooked.

Iris knew that stitching. She had four cuffs at home in the bottom of Frank's desk with that stitching.

"Frank," she whispered.

"Brought it with him. Had it in his jacket pocket all night, the old fool. Handed it to me at three in the morning and couldn't look me in the eye." Rosa turned it over in her fingers. "Said if I was going to put a collar on you, and he figured I was, it'd be one he made." She shook her head. "Twenty years I've known that man. He sat up over a sewing machine making a dog collar for another man's wife so a third party could put it on her."

"That's the most romantic thing I ever heard," said Dani, in a small voice, with her eyes still shut.

"Hush, you."

Rosa leaned forward. The webbing went around Iris's throat. The fleece was soft as breath. The buckle closed at the nape, under her hair, right over the place where there had once been a bite. Two fingers slid underneath, checked, withdrew. The ring was turned to the front. It lay cool in the hollow of her collarbones.

She had worn cuffs. She had been tied with rope and ribbon and paper streamers. She had never worn this.

It was so light. It barely touched her. And it was the heaviest thing she had ever had on.

"Now," said Rosa, sitting back. "Dani knows how this goes. You don't. When that's on, you're not a wedding planner and you're not somebody's mama. You're mine till I take it off. You go on your hands and knees unless I say different. And you don't talk." Her eyes glinted. "Dogs don't talk."

Iris's face went hot. "Rosa..."

"What do dogs do, Dani?"

Dani, without opening her eyes, without a flicker of shame, barked. Once. A sharp, clear, happy little yap.

"Good girl. Blondie?"

Iris stared at her.

She was twenty-eight years old. She had a master's degree in hospitality management. She had been spit-roasted on a pool table in front of twenty strangers eight hours ago and had not blushed like this.

"I can't," she said.

"No?"

"I'll do anything else. Anything. I can't do *that*."

Rosa didn't argue. She simply looked at her, pleasantly, and waited. She had all day.

It was the edging, all over again. That bottomless patience. Iris knelt there with a collar on her throat and her whole body on fire with embarrassment, and understood that she was not going to be touched, kissed, fucked, or spoken to again until she had done it. Dani had cracked one eye open and was watching, sidelong, with wicked interest.

*She knows I will. She knew before I did. She always does.*

*It's a game. Like red. Like all of it. It's a thing we pick up together.*

*Oh, God.*

"... Woof," said Iris, in a tiny, strangled voice.

Dani dissolved. She fell sideways onto the mattress, clutching her stomach.

"That," Rosa said, with her mouth twitching, "was the saddest thing I ever heard. That was a poodle with a head cold. Again. Like you mean it."

"*Rosa*..."

"Like a good bitch. Come on. You howled loud enough for Frank last night."

Iris shut her eyes. She thought: *in for a penny*. She filled her lungs.

She barked. Properly. Loud and sharp, from the belly, twice.

Something happened when she did it. It was the strangest thing. The shame peaked, a hot blinding wave of it, and then it simply broke, and went out, and left her floating. She had done the most undignified thing she could think of, in front of two people, and the sky had not fallen. There was nothing left to protect. She was on her knees in a collar and she had barked like a dog, and she felt as light as air.

Her cunt clenched, hard, on nothing.

"*There*," Rosa said softly. Her eyes had gone dark. "There she is. Good bitch. Good girl." She put out her hand, and Iris, without being told, leaned her cheek into the palm. "Felt that go, didn't you? All that money and manners. Right out the window."

Iris nodded against her hand. She didn't speak. Dogs didn't talk.

"Now you two get down here," said Rosa, opening her thighs, "and say good morning properly."

## Two

They went down off the bed on their hands and knees, side by side.

Iris had done this once, alone, on a pool table in June, with everything Frank ever taught her. She had not done it with somebody else's cheek against hers. They got in each other's way at first. Their noses bumped. Dani giggled. Then Dani, who knew this body the way a pianist knows a keyboard, took the left and nudged Iris to the right, and they found it.

Two tongues. Iris low, pushing deep, drinking; Dani high, quick and precise on the clit, a fast light flutter that Iris would never have thought of. They changed places without a word. Their tongues met in the middle, over hot slick flesh, and slid together, and they were kissing each other and licking Rosa in the same motion, and it was the filthiest, sweetest thing Iris had ever done.

A hand settled on each of their heads. Fingers in blonde hair, fingers in black.

"That's it," Rosa said, above them. Her voice had dropped. "That's it, my good girls. Share."

She tasted of salt and soap and heat. Her thighs were hard as oak on either side of their faces. Iris felt them start to tighten. She slid two fingers in under Dani's chin and hooked them, and felt Dani's small sharp teeth graze the hood of Rosa's clit at the same instant, by pure luck.

Rosa swore, softly, in Spanish. Her head went back against the chair.

She came quietly, that time, with a long shuddering breath and her fists closed in their hair. She let them lick her through it. Then she pushed them both back by the forehead, gently, like puppies off a plate.

"Enough. Up on the bed. Face to face. I want to watch you."

They kissed for her. They knelt up on the mattress, collar to collar, and kissed, and Rosa sat in her chair with her fresh coffee and watched as you would watch a fire.

Dani kissed like she did everything, fast and fierce, biting. Iris slowed her down. She put a hand on that sharp little jaw and held it and kissed her deep and lazy, the way she'd been kissed on a bar, until the wiry body went loose against her. Her tits were crushed against Dani's small ones. She felt the cold of the two silver bars against her own soft skin, and Dani's nipples hard as pebbles behind them.

Dani broke away, panting. She looked down. She looked at Rosa.

"Go on," said Rosa. "You've been wanting to since she walked in."

Dani bent her head and closed her mouth on Iris's nipple and sucked.

It let down. Not the flood of June; she was nearly weaned now. A slow sweet trickle. Dani's eyes went wide, and then closed, and she moaned in her throat and drew harder, and her small hand kneaded the big soft weight of it like a kitten. Iris held the dark head to her breast and stroked it and looked over it at Rosa. Rosa's eyes were half shut.

"Now turn around," Rosa said. "Top and tail. Dani on top, she weighs nothing."

It was the first time Iris had ever done that with anyone. She lay on her back. Dani swung a leg over her head, facing her feet, and lowered herself, and Iris was looking up at a neat dark split, shaved bare, glistening, with a tiny gold ring through the hood. She had a moment to think *of course she has*. Then that sharp little tongue landed on her own clit like a spark, and she pulled Dani's hips down and went to work.

They were not gentle with each other. There was a score to settle, and they settled it. Dani ate like she kissed, quick and mean and devastatingly accurate, and she had clever fingers. Iris gave her everything she'd given Rosa on the pool table. She got the little gold ring between her lips and tugged, and Dani shrieked into her cunt. They rolled. Iris was on top, her big soft ass in the air, her tits swinging and dragging on Dani's flat stomach. Then they were on their sides, each with a thigh over the other's head, rocking, sweating, the collars' rings chiming against wet skin.

It was Rosa who gave her away.

"Dani," she said lazily, from the chair. "Her feet."

"What about her..."

"Just try it."

Dani, upside down, turned her head. Iris's bare foot was right beside her cheek. She gave it a suspicious look, and ran the tip of her tongue up the arch, and took the toes in her mouth.

Iris moaned out loud and lost her place entirely. She lay there with her mouth open against Dani's thigh while a warm sharp little tongue went between her toes, one at a time.

"Oh, that's *useful*," Dani said, delighted, around her big toe. "She stops dead."

"She likes it. Don't let her loaf," said Rosa. "Blondie. Back to work."

"Slower," Rosa said. They slowed. "Dani. Fingers out. Tongue only. Blondie, you're a greedy thing, let her breathe."

She was conducting them. She was sitting in her chair, with her coffee, conducting them like an orchestra, and neither of them had come, because she had not said they could.

"Stop."

They stopped. They lay tangled, panting, mouths shining, staring at her.

Rosa stood up. She put down her mug. She went to the door, and took what was hanging on the back of it down off its hook.

## The Edge

She buckled it on over nothing. Black leather straps on brown skin, the steel rings, the thick black curve of it standing up from her hips. She still had the tank top on. She looked like something out of a dream Iris hadn't known she'd been having all her life.

"On your knees, both of you. Get it wet."

They knelt up on the bed, shoulder to shoulder. Rosa stood at the edge of the mattress with her hands on her hips.

Iris took the tip. Dani took the side. They looked at each other along the length of it, blue eyes and brown. Then they went at it together: two tongues sliding up either side of that thick black shaft, meeting at the head, kissing around it, mouths open, messy, spit running down. Iris took it into her throat, all of it, the way the men had taught her, and held it there with her nose against leather while Dani licked what was left and then licked her stretched lips. She came off it gasping. Dani swallowed it down in her turn, eyes watering, glaring up at Rosa through her lashes like a challenge.

"Christ," Rosa said softly. She put a hand on each head. "Look at the pair of you."

When it was dripping, she had them lie down. Side by side on their backs, hips at the edge of the bed, knees drawn up and apart. Blonde and dark. Soft and sharp. Two collars.

She knelt up between them on one knee.

"Here's how this goes," she said. "One of you gets this." She laid the strap, heavy and wet, along Iris's slit. "And one of you gets this." She held up her right hand and turned it, two long fingers. "And I switch whenever I feel like it. And neither one of you comes. Not until I say. First one that does, without leave, sleeps on the floor."

Dani whimpered. She had clearly played this game before.

Rosa pushed into Iris. The whole thick curved length, slow, to the root, dragging over that place on her front wall. In the same moment her right hand slid between Dani's thighs, and two fingers went in, and hooked.

Two cries, at once.

She fucked them both. That was the only way to put it. Her hips rolled into Iris, long and deep and steady, and her hand worked in Dani at the same pace, exactly, as if the two of them were one instrument. She was looking at neither. She was looking at the wall, with her head cocked, listening.

She could feel it, somehow. Through the strap, which had no nerve in it. Through her fingertips. She could feel both of them climbing at once, at different speeds, and she adjusted. A little faster for Dani, who was slower to start. A little shallower for Iris, who had been primed since yesterday. She brought them up together, side by side, like two pots coming to the boil on one stove.

Iris turned her head on the mattress. Dani's face was six inches from hers, flushed, mouth open, eyes huge. Their hands found each other on the sheet and gripped.

"I'm..." Dani gasped. "Rosa, I'm gonna..."

"No, you're not."

The fingers stopped. The hips stopped. Dead still, both, at the very same instant, with each of them one breath from the edge.

They wailed. Together, in harmony, like a pair of cats.

Rosa laughed. She pulled out of Iris with a long wet slide. She shifted her weight, and the strap went into Dani, to the hilt, in one stroke. Dani's back came off the bed. And Rosa's left hand, cool and fresh, came down between Iris's legs and put two fingers where the strap had been.

It began again.

It went on for the better part of an hour. Iris lost all track. Strap, then fingers, then strap. Filled, emptied, filled. Each of them taken to the brink and held there, with terrifying accuracy, again and again and again, while the other one got it. They were never both in the same state. One was always a little ahead, hanging over the drop, begging, and Rosa would hold that one perfectly still on her fingertips while she brought the other up alongside.

They stopped being rivals somewhere in it. There was no room left for that. They clung to each other. They kissed, frantically, between sobs. Dani bit Iris's shoulder to keep from coming. Iris held Dani's face in both hands and said *breathe, breathe with me, she'll let us, she'll let us in a minute*, and realized she had spoken, and that Rosa had heard, and let it pass.

"Please," Dani was chanting. "Please, please, please, Rosa, *please*..."

Iris didn't beg. She had learned that in June. She did the only thing she had been told she was allowed to do.

She barked.

Once. High and desperate and cracked, a pleading little yelp, with tears running into her hair.

Rosa went still. She looked down at her. Something in that strong calm face gave way entirely.

"Oh, you good girl," she breathed. "Oh, you clever, clever bitch. *Yes.* That's how you ask."

She reared up. The strap went into Iris, hard. Her right hand drove into Dani. And she leaned down between them, and put her mouth on Iris's throat, just above the collar, and her teeth closed.

"Now," she said, through them. "Both of you. Together. *Now.*"

It hit them at the same instant, like two halves of one thing. Iris felt Dani's hand crush hers. She heard two voices screaming and did not know which was her own. She came so hard that her legs locked around Rosa's waist and lifted her own hips clear off the bed, and beside her Dani was arched like a bow, thrashing. Rosa rode them both through it, strap and hand, relentless, taking them up again, and again, a chain of it, the way she had on the bar in June, until the two of them were one sobbing, shuddering, sweat-slick tangle and neither could have said whose limbs were whose.

When it was over, Dani was lying half across Iris's chest with her face in her neck. They were both crying, and laughing, and holding on.

Rosa unbuckled the harness and let it drop. She sat down on the edge of the bed. She put one hand on a blonde head and one on a black.

"Good girls," she said quietly. "My good girls."

She let them lie there a long time.

## The Leash

It started as a thought, lying there with Rosa's hand in her hair.

*She's never had this.*

Iris turned it over, slowly, the way she had turned over a name on a couch in June. Four months she had been watching this woman. She had watched her read a room. She had watched her wait people out. She had been taken apart by her, three times now, with a patience and an accuracy that still frightened her, and all the while some quiet part of her had been doing what it had done since she was eighteen years old: paying attention. Taking notes.

*She knows everybody's limits before they do. That's her whole trick. She knew Frank would like the strap before he did.*

*How did she know?*

There was only one way to know a thing like that so surely. You had to want it yourself.

Iris lifted her head off Dani's shoulder. She looked up at Rosa, sitting on the edge of the bed, naked now but for the tank top, relaxed and satisfied and in charge of the world.

Rosa looked back. One eyebrow went up.

"That's a look," she said. "What are you cooking, blondie?"

Iris sat up. She reached behind her own neck, under her hair, and found the buckle.

"Hey," Dani said sharply. "You don't take that off. *She* takes that off."

"I know the rule."

She undid it. The soft webbing slid away from her throat. She held it in her two hands, Frank's crooked double stitching, the fleece still warm from her skin, the steel ring.

Rosa's eyes had narrowed, very slightly. She hadn't moved.

"That's mine to take off," she said. Mildly. It was the mild voice, the one that turned people white.

"You told me a rule this morning," said Iris. Her heart was going like a hammer. She kept her voice sweet. "You said, when this is on, you're not a wedding planner and you're not anybody's mama. You're a dog. You go on your hands and knees and you don't talk." She turned the collar so the ring caught the light. "You didn't say whose neck."

There was a silence.

Dani had stopped breathing.

Rosa began to smile. It was the slow one, the dangerous one, the one that had made every hair on Iris's body stand up on a pool table.

"Oh, honey," she said softly. "No. That's cute. You've had a big night, and you're feeling your oats. Put it back on and come here."

Four months ago Iris would have. Four months ago that voice would have folded her like a napkin.

She didn't put it back on. She didn't argue, either. She had been taught better than that, by an expert, at great length. She simply knelt there on the bed with the collar held open in her hands, looked Rosa pleasantly in the eye, and waited.

She had all day.

She watched Rosa register it. She actually saw it land: the recognition. *That's mine. That's my move. She's doing me.*

"You don't have the stomach for this," Rosa said.

Iris said nothing.

"You're a nice girl from a nice house. You don't know the first thing about being mean."

Nothing. Iris was looking at her throat. There was a pulse beating in the side of it, in the brown skin just above the collarbone. It was going fast. Much too fast for a woman who was only amused.

*There,* she thought, with a hot fierce rush of joy. *There's her tell. She showed me where mine were, and all the time she had one. Nobody ever looked.*

"Your heart's going," she said gently. "Right there. I can see it from here."

Rosa's hand started toward her own neck, and stopped.

"You read me in two seconds, the day I walked in," Iris said. "The ring, the car, the Pilates. You were right about every bit of it. You said I built myself a nice safe basement with three big dogs who'd never bite down." She smiled. "What did you build, Rosa? A bar, two hours from anywhere. A stool at the end with your back to the wall. A girl who barks when you tell her. Twenty years, and nobody gets behind you. Nobody gets to hold anything of yours." She tilted her head, the way Rosa did. "You knew Frank would like it. You've never been wrong about that. How'd you know?"

Rosa didn't answer.

"Dani," said Iris, without looking round. "Does she ever let you?"

A very long pause.

"... No," Dani whispered. "Never. I asked once."

"What did she say?"

"She said nobody's good enough."

"Mm," said Iris. She held the collar a little higher. "What's your word, Rosa? I know you've got one."

Something went across that strong, scarred, beautiful face. It was there and gone. It looked, for one instant, like a woman standing at the edge of a high board.

"Francis," Rosa said. Her voice had dropped. It was rough at the edges.

"Then say it. Say *Francis*, and I put this back on my own neck and we never mention it." Iris leaned forward on her knees. She was close enough to smell limes. "Or don't say it."

She waited. It was the hardest thing she had ever done, harder than saying it out loud in Frank's lap. Every nerve she had was screaming at her to fill the silence, to soften it, to make a joke. She held still. She let the quiet do the work, the way it had been done to her.

Ten seconds. Twenty.

Rosa's chin came up.

It was barely an inch. She was looking at the far wall, with her jaw set like a woman facing a firing squad. But it came up, and her throat was bare.

Dani made a sound like she'd been punched.

Iris's hands were shaking. She put the collar around that strong brown neck. Frank's collar. The fleece against the tattoos. She drew it snug, and buckled it at the nape, where the cropped hair was soft as a boy's. She slid two fingers underneath, to check, exactly as it had been done to her, and felt that racing pulse against her knuckles. She turned the ring to the front.

"There," she said.

Rosa let out a breath. It shook all the way down.

"Dani. There's a lead in that drawer. I've seen it."

Dani scrambled for it: six feet of soft black braided cord with a brass clip. She put it in Iris's hand as if it were on fire. Her eyes were the size of saucers.

Iris clipped it to the ring. She wound the other end once around her fist.

"Floor," she said.

"Blondie..."

"Dogs don't talk."

It came out of her mouth so cool and so sure that she startled herself. Rosa's mouth snapped shut. A dark flush was climbing out of the collar, up her throat, into her face. Iris had never seen her blush. She would not have believed it was possible.

Rosa went down off the bed onto her hands and knees.

All that height, all that muscle, folded down onto a worn rug. The long scarred back. The hard round ass in the air. The cropped dark head, bent. She was shaking, a fine constant tremor, like a horse.

*Oh, my God,* Iris thought. *Oh my God, oh my God. Don't lose it now. Don't you dare giggle. What would she do? What would Rosa do?*

She knew exactly what Rosa would do.

"What do dogs do, Dani?"

Dani barked. It came out as a hysterical squeak.

"Good girl. Rosa?"

Silence. Rosa's fists had closed on the rug.

Iris gave the lead one small, soft tug. The way Ray had tugged a lace ribbon, once, down a candlelit aisle.

"I'll wait," she said.

It took a full minute. She counted it. Then a sound came out of Rosa, low, grudging, through her teeth. It was technically a bark.

Iris looked down at her. She let her mouth twitch.

"That," she said, "was a poodle with a head cold."

Dani fell off the bed.

"Again. Like you mean it. Like a good bitch." Iris crouched down, tulle and velvet long gone, naked and blonde and merciless, and put her lips right against a burning ear. "Come on. You howled loud enough for me on that pool table."

Rosa's whole body jerked.

She barked. Properly. Loud and sharp and furious, from the belly.

And Iris, with her hand on that bowed back, felt it happen. The exact thing that had happened to her. The peak of the shame, like a wave, and then the break. Rosa's spine, which had been iron, went soft all at once under her palm. Her head dropped. A long, ragged breath went out of her, and it had a sob in it.

Iris slid her hand down, over the hard curve of her ass, and between her legs.

She was drenched. It was running down the inside of her thighs.

"Oh, *Rosa*," Iris said softly, and held up her shining fingers where Dani could see. "Look at that. Humiliated on your own bedroom floor, in a dog collar, and you're so wet it's dripping on the rug." She had heard those very words, near enough, in a basement, in her own wedding corset. She had never understood until this second what a pleasure it was to say them. "Twenty years of reading everybody else. And nobody ever read you."

Rosa moaned. It was a helpless, astonished sound. Her hips pushed back against Iris's hand.

"Not yet," said Iris. "I'll tell you when."

She had been taught by the best. She did not have Rosa's accuracy; she knew that. But she had Dani, who had spent three years studying that body like scripture.

"Tell me when she's close," Iris said. "You'll know before I do."

"She holds her breath," Dani whispered. She had crawled over. She was kneeling at Rosa's head, stroking the short damp hair, with tears of joy standing in her eyes. "Right before. Every time. And her left foot curls."

"Thank you."

Two fingers, the rolling stroke, the one she'd had done to her on a bar for the better part of an hour. She watched the left foot. She felt the breath catch.

She stopped. Dead still. Fingertips resting.

Rosa made a noise that was pure outrage.

"I know," Iris said kindly. "It's awful, isn't it."

Again. And again. Six times, seven, with Dani calling it like a spotter, *now, now, stop*, until that great strong body was drenched in sweat and trembling from the shoulders to the knees, and the sounds coming out of the bowed dark head were not outrage anymore.

Then Iris moved her hand. Higher. Her thumb, slick, found the tight dark ring between those hard cheeks, and circled it.

Rosa went rigid from head to foot.

"Nobody's ever," Iris said. It wasn't a question. "Not once. You never met one you trusted not to make a hash of it." Round and round. Slow. Patient. The way a broad careful thumb had once done it to her, on a cracked vinyl couch, when she was twenty-one and terrified. "I remember what that's like. Somebody was very kind to me about it. Breathe out."

A furious shake of the head.

"Breathe out, Rosa."

She breathed out. Iris pressed. Her thumb slid in to the first knuckle, into heat, and Rosa cried out into the rug.

Iris took her time. She had the lube from the drawer, and Dani to stroke Rosa's hair and murmur to her, and all the morning. A thumb. Then a finger. Then two, slowly, turning, with her other hand working the lead just enough to keep that head up. She talked the whole time, low and sweet and filthy, every word of it learned at somebody's knee. She felt that tight, clenched, untouched ring begin to soften. To give. To open for her.

By the time she had three fingers moving easily in Rosa's ass, Rosa had stopped fighting altogether. She was rocking back onto them. She was whimpering.

"There," Iris said. She kissed the small of that scarred back. "There you are. You're ready. I just don't have anything big enough."

Somebody knocked on the door frame.

## Turnabout

All three of them looked round.

Frank stood on the landing. He had found a clean undershirt somewhere. He was carrying a tray, with a coffee pot and six mugs and a plate of toast. Behind him, looming, were Ray and Stu, unshaven and sheepish, Stu still in half a convict suit.

Frank took in the room.

Dani, kneeling, in a leather collar. The harness on the floor. Iris, naked, flushed, her hair wild, crouched on the rug with a black cord wound around her fist.

And at the other end of the cord, on her hands and knees, with her head down and her ass in the air and Iris's fingers buried in it: Rosa.

Wearing his collar.

The tray tilted. A mug slid off it and broke on the floor. Nobody looked at it.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," Stu said, in a whisper.

Ray had backed into the wall. He was staring at Iris as if she had sprouted wings.

Rosa had turned her face away, toward the bed. The back of her neck was scarlet. Every muscle in her was locked. This was worse than barking. These were the three men she had kept in line with a glance for twenty years.

She did not get up. She did not say *Francis*.

And Iris, with her fingers inside her, felt her clench, hard, and felt a fresh hot trickle run down over her wrist.

*Oh, you love it,* she thought, with a tenderness that nearly undid her. *You love it. You're dying of shame and you've never been so turned on in your life. I know. I know exactly.*

"Good morning," she said brightly. "You're just in time. Put the tray down, Frank."

Frank put the tray down. He did it on the dresser, without taking his eyes off the rug.

"Iris," he said. His voice was not quite steady. "What did you do?"

"I asked. Out loud." She smiled at him, the sweet wide church-choir smile. "And then I waited. Somebody taught me that."

"That's my collar."

"I know. It suits her."

A sound came from the direction of the rug that might have been a growl.

"Hush," said Iris, and gave the lead a little shake. It hushed. Stu grabbed Ray's arm.

Iris slid her fingers out, gently. She stood up. She was a head shorter than every other adult in that room and had not a stitch on, and she walked across to Frank with the lead in her hand, paying out behind her, and looked up at him.

"Twenty years she's had something over you," she said quietly. "I think she always knew you'd get it back one day. I think she's been waiting for somebody to make her." She put her free hand flat on his chest, over the scar. "She's never let anyone. Not one man. She's open, and she's wet, and she's ready, and she won't ask. I got her this far. I haven't got what it takes to finish it." She glanced down, and up again, and her eyes were dancing. "You do."

Frank looked over her head at the long brown back on the rug.

"Rosa," he said.

Nothing.

"She can't talk," Dani said helpfully. "Collar's on. House rules."

"She can answer one question," said Iris. She walked back, winding the lead in, and crouched, and put two fingers under that proud chin, and turned Rosa's face toward the door. Dark eyes, wet and blazing. A face on fire. "Frank's going to ask you your color. You can say one word. Or you can say his name, and it all stops, and nobody in this room will ever speak of it. That's a promise." She stroked a thumb along the cheekbone, under the scar. "It's up to you. It always was."

Frank had pulled his undershirt off. The sleeved forearms. The puckered scar under his collarbone, that she had kept her hands on for forty minutes in the back of a Buick when they were both kids.

He knelt down on the rug behind her. He laid one broad hand flat on the small of her back.

"Color," he said.

Rosa shut her eyes.

"Green," she said, hoarse, through her teeth. "*Green*, you son of a bitch. God help me."

"Good girl," said Iris, and felt her shudder.

Ray found the bottle in Frank's jacket. Frank was slow. Iris had never seen him so slow. But there was not much left for him to do; she had done it. She knelt at Rosa's head with the lead short in her fist, holding that face up, and watched it.

She saw the moment he pressed in. Rosa's eyes flew open. Her mouth fell wide. The thick head of him, forcing that ring, which fought, and fluttered, and then gave, because it had been taught to, an hour of patient teaching. A sound came out of her like nothing she had ever made: low, shocked, and helpless.

"Breathe," Iris whispered. "Look at me. I've got you. Breathe out."

An inch. A pause. An inch. Frank's hand never left the small of her back. Dani had crept in on the other side and was holding one of Rosa's hands in both of hers, kissing the knuckles.

His hips met her ass.

"Oh," Rosa said. Quite a different voice. Small. Surprised. "Oh. Well. *Shit.*"

"Dogs don't talk," said Iris, and had the unspeakable pleasure of watching Rosa glare at her with tears running down her face.

Frank began to move.

It was the most beautiful thing Iris had ever seen. Rosa, the unreadable, the unmovable, on her hands and knees on her own rug in a dog collar, being taken, slowly and deeply and thoroughly, by a man who had waited half his life. That hard high ass flexing against his hips. Her elbows giving, so that she went down onto her forearms with her cheek on the floor. The lead taut in Iris's hand. Ray and Stu, at last, coming closer, drawn like men to a fire, half terrified, cocks standing.

"You like it," Frank said, wonderingly.

A bark. Furious.

"That's a yes," Iris translated. "Harder, Frank. She can take it. She's just mad."

He gave her harder. Rosa yelled into the rug. Iris reached under and found her clit, swollen hard as a marble, and rubbed it, and felt that whole long body start to shake.

"Now, Dani?"

"She's holding her breath," Dani said. "Her foot's curling. *Now.*"

"You can come," said Iris. "Go on. Good girl."

Rosa came with Frank Brennan buried in her ass and a leash on her neck, in front of the two men who had been afraid of her since they were boys, and she howled. There was no other word. It went on and on. Stu had both hands over his mouth.

After that the rules, such as they were, came apart. They got her up onto the bed. Frank lay back and drew her down onto him, her back to his chest, still deep in her ass, and her long thighs fell open. Stu stood between them, looked at Iris as if for permission, got a nod, and slid his thick cock up into Rosa's cunt.

Her head went back on Frank's shoulder. Her eyes rolled.

"Unclip her," Frank said. "Let her talk. I want to hear it."

Iris unclipped the lead. She left the collar.

"Jesus *Christ*," Rosa said at once, reverently, to the skylight. "Is that what that's like? Both? Blondie. You've been getting this for seven years, and you came to me for *more*?"

"I'm greedy," said Iris. "Dani. Go."

Dani scrambled up the bed. She swung her leg over Rosa's face, facing down the length of her, and settled. There was a muffled, indignant noise. Then Dani's eyes crossed, and her mouth fell open, and her hands went to her own small breasts.

"Oh, she's *good* at this," Dani said faintly. "Even now. Even with... oh. Oh."

Iris lay across one of Rosa's arms, to hold it, and Ray knelt and pinned the other with one hand and stroked himself with the free one, staring. Stu drove into her from the front. Frank from beneath. Rosa's whole long body was shaking between them, every muscle standing out, and she was coming again, in great rolling waves, with her mouth too full to say so.

"Swap," Dani gasped, tumbling off sideways, limp as a rag. "Your turn. Quick."

Iris climbed on. She lowered herself, facing those dark eyes. Rosa looked up at her from between her thighs, flushed, wrecked, collared, two cocks moving in her.

For a second neither of them moved.

Then Rosa winked.

Her tongue came up, and Iris grabbed the headboard with both hands.

She rode that wide clever mouth until she saw stars. Ray knelt up beside her and she took him in her throat, and Dani crawled in on the other side to help, and for a long, long time there were six people on that bed and not one of them could have said where they stopped.

Rosa came last, and loudest. Stu had gone, and Ray had taken his place. It was Frank, underneath, his arms locked around her waist, his mouth at her ear, saying something low that nobody else could hear.

She tore her mouth free of Iris.

"*Francis!*" she roared, at the skylight.

Everything stopped. Every one of them froze.

There was a second of perfect silence.

"... Not the word," Rosa panted. "Didn't mean it as the word. Meant it as... oh, hell. Don't stop. *Don't stop.*"

Frank laughed until he had to stop anyway.

Afterward, when the men had gone down to see about more coffee and Dani was asleep in a ball at the foot of the bed, Iris reached over and undid the buckle herself. The soft webbing came away from that strong brown throat. There was a faint line where it had been.

Rosa lay on her back with one arm behind her head, looking at the ceiling. She had not said a word in some time.

"Who in the hell," she said at last, quietly, "taught you to be that mean?"

"You did. In June." Iris turned the collar over in her hands. "I took notes."

"I noticed." A long breath. "The waiting. That was mine."

"Yes."

"And the pulse. You read my damn pulse."

"You've got a tell. Right here." She touched the side of Rosa's neck. "You showed me where all mine were. I thought it was only fair to look."

Rosa turned her head on the pillow. She looked at her for a long moment: the blonde hair, the sweet face, the soft heavy body, the collar in her lap.

"I had you wrong," she said. "That first night. I said it was all bought. The body, the basement, all of it." She shook her head slowly. "You've got something that isn't. You pay attention. Most people only look at themselves." Her mouth curled, tired and rueful and proud. "Twenty years, nobody got behind me. And it's a wedding planner."

"Are you angry?"

"I'm forty-two years old and I just found out something about myself on my own bedroom floor." Rosa closed her eyes. "No, honey. I'm not angry."

She held out her hand. Iris put the collar in it.

Rosa sat up, with a wince she tried to hide. She put the collar back around Iris's throat, and buckled it, and slid two fingers under it, and turned the ring to the front.

"That's so you don't get ideas," she said. "Once. You get that once. Next time you're on the pool table and I'm not going to be nice about it."

"Yes, Rosa," said Iris, meekly, and leaned her cheek into the palm.

"... Maybe twice," Rosa said, after a while.

## Breakfast

They ate at the bar, at noon, in whatever clothes they could find. The chairs were still up on the tables. The plywood stage was coming down. Somebody had swept up the candle wax.

Rosa made eggs. She did it in her black tank top, standing very carefully, and she sat down on her stool more carefully still.

Nobody said a word.

Stu's shoulders had begun to shake.

"Don't," said Rosa, without turning around.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was only going to ask," Stu said, in a small strangled voice, "if you needed a cushion. Or a bowl of water."

Ray put his head down on the bar.

Rosa turned around. She gave Stu the look: the full two seconds, the one that had turned Dani white in June.

Stu held her eye. His lips were pressed together. Tears were starting out of him.

"Francis," he squeaked.

It worked. It actually worked. The look cracked straight down the middle. Rosa put the spatula down and covered her face with one hand, and her shoulders went.

"Twenty years," she said, into her palm. "Twenty years I had it. And I got outplayed by a blonde with a dog lead."

"I learned from the best," Iris said demurely.

"Don't you start."

"Woof," said Iris.

Rosa threw a dish towel at her. "Twenty years, and I threw it away for a piece of ass."

"Your own," Dani pointed out, with her mouth full of toast.

"I'm aware whose, thank you."

Iris sat at the end of the bar between Frank and Dani, with a plate of eggs and a coffee she hadn't had to pour. She was wearing Ray's pirate shirt. The collar was off. Rosa had unbuckled it at last, upstairs, and kissed her forehead, and put it in her hand, and said, "You keep that. It's been on both of us now."

It was in her bag now. In the zipped inside pocket. Frank Jr. had company.

She looked down the bar. Rosa, laughing in spite of herself. Ray, red-eyed with it. Stu, wheezing. Dani, who had hated her in June, absently holding her hand under the bar and not seeming to notice she was doing it.

And Frank, beside her, in a clean undershirt, with his coffee. Looking very much like a man who had waited twenty years for something and found it worth the wait.

"Seven years," she said to him, quietly.

"Seven years."

"I walked into your basement to get fucked by three janitors. That was the whole plan."

"I remember."

"How did I end up with all this?"

Frank looked at the room for a while.

"You asked," he said. "Out loud. Most people never do."

He put his hand over hers, on the bar, where anyone could see.

And after that it was a thing among the six of them, for good. Any time Frank got too stern, somebody said "Rosa." And any time Rosa got too sure of herself, any time she turned that look on somebody and held it a beat too long, there was always a voice from somewhere down the bar. Usually Stu's. Sometimes Dani's. Once in a while, sweet as a church choir, Iris's.

"Francis."

She hated it. It never once failed.