Iris, the New Mom

*Book five. Iris is 27.*

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

It took Iris ten months to get her body back, and she did it the way she did everything: with purpose.

Six weeks after the birth the doctor cleared her, and she walked out of that office and straight into a pelvic floor physical therapist's. Kegels, first. Ten-second holds, then twenty, then sets of fifty in the car at red lights, in line at the pharmacy, with the baby asleep on her chest at four in the morning. Then Pilates, three mornings a week, on a reformer that looked like something from a dungeon. Then yoga. Then weights. She learned to breathe from the bottom of her ribs and to find muscles she hadn't known she owned.

She was twenty-seven and she was in the best shape of her life.

She could see it in the mirror at the studio. Her waist had come back narrower than before, cinched tight above hips that had stayed wide, because bone doesn't shrink back and she was glad of it. Her stomach was flat and hard, with two faint lines of muscle and a handful of silver marks low down that she wore like medals. Her ass was the one place the baby had left its mark and the gym hadn't taken it back. It was bigger than it had ever been, and softer: a full, round, generous ass, lifted by a year of squats but still plush on top of the muscle, with a jiggle when she walked that she had decided to be proud of. Against that hard little waist it looked almost indecent. The whole of her made an hourglass so extreme it looked drawn: a great deal on top, a great deal below, and a waist between them you could nearly close two hands around. Her thighs were full and strong, thick and smooth, athlete's legs with a woman's softness over them, and they met at the top. Her skin had the glow of somebody who ran outdoors. Her back was strong. She could hold a plank for three minutes and drop into the full splits cold.

And her tits. She was still nursing, and they had never gone back. They had come down from the size they'd been at the end of the pregnancy, when not even Frank's hand could cover one, and settled at a full, glorious F cup, two sizes up from where she'd started. There was nothing sculpted about them, and she wouldn't have had it otherwise. They were all natural: full and heavy and soft, teardrop-shaped, with a real slope from her collarbone and a deep, weighty curve underneath. They hung a little with their own weight. They swayed when she walked and shifted when she turned and settled, warm, against her ribs. On a ribcage strong enough to carry them now, they looked magnificent. The nipples were still that deep rose red. Twice a day they tightened and ached and let down whether she wanted them to or not.

She had built all of it, inch by inch. And nobody was using it.

Mark was a good father. She would have said so to anyone. He did the night feeds on weekends, he knew the pediatrician's number by heart, he looked at their daughter as if she had hung the moon. He also fell asleep at nine. When he did reach for her, it was gentle and brief and apologetic, three or four minutes in the dark, and then he kissed her forehead. He had started calling her *Mama*, even in bed.

She loved him. She loved Nora past all reason. And some days the house felt like the inside of a fist: the monitor, the laundry, the crying, the endless tender grinding work of keeping a small person alive. She would stand at the sink with her hands in the water and think, *I am still in here. Somebody please come and find me.*

## The Trainer

The studio was called Lumen, and it cost more a month than her first car payment.

Mark had bought her the membership as a push present, pleased with himself. It was the kind of place where the towels smelled of eucalyptus and the water had cucumber in it. The clientele were lawyers' wives and surgeons' wives, lean, glossy women in their thirties and forties with tennis bracelets and very good highlights, who came five mornings a week and never seemed to sweat.

It took Iris about a month to understand what else they came for.

The trainers were all men. All young, all beautiful, all built like something off a temple wall. The private rooms had locks on the inside. And there was a line in the membership brochure, under *Our Commitment to Your Privacy*, that she had skimmed past the first time: *Lumen maintains no cameras or recording devices of any kind beyond the reception area.* No cameras in the studios. None in the spa. None in the long quiet corridor between.

Nobody said it out loud. Nobody had to. The upscale ladies were here for a reason: to look good, and to be fucked good, by someone who would never call the house. Management knew it. Management had built the place for it, hired for it, and priced it accordingly.

His name was Chase, and he found her in about six weeks.

He was twenty-five and he ran her Thursday sessions. She had noticed the way the other women looked at him, and the way he looked back: easy, practiced, like a waiter reading a table. She wasn't naive. She just hadn't planned on being one of them.

It happened in Studio Four, after the last class had gone.

Studio Four was mirrors. Three walls of them, floor to ceiling, and a fourth of frosted glass. She had spent ten months looking at herself in those mirrors, and that Thursday she looked better than she ever had.

She was wearing the gray leggings. High-waisted, seamless, a fabric so thin and so tight that it was less a garment than a coat of paint. They gripped her narrow waist and then swelled out over her hips, and from behind they cupped each cheek of her ass separately, high and round and hard, with the seam running deep between. From the front they hid nothing at all. The soft mound, the neat split, every fold of her outlined in gray. When she sweated, it darkened there first.

It was her ass those leggings had been made for. It was bigger and softer than before the baby, and they showed every ounce of it. The fabric pulled so tight across the fullest part that it went a shade paler there, almost sheer, and a ruched seam ran up the middle and drew it in deep between her cheeks, so that each one stood out separately, round as a peach and nearly as soft, wobbling a little with every step. The high waistband made her waist look like something you could close two hands around, and then the flare of her hips below it looked twice as wide. When she bent over, it was indecent. When she squatted, it was worse. She had caught three different husbands staring in the lobby and one of the wives.

Above them, six inches of bare stomach, flat and gleaming, the two lines of muscle catching the light. And then the sports bra: black, zip-fronted, the most serious one she owned, and it was losing. Her tits filled it to the top and bulged over, a deep damp cleft of cleavage that shook when she moved. Milk had soaked through in two dark coins. Her ponytail stuck to her neck.

And Chase had been on it for an hour.

That was how he worked. Not a word out of place, nothing you could ever repeat to anyone. Just his body, all session long, finding reasons. He spotted her squats from behind with his hands on her hip bones, and every time she came down, her ass settled back into his lap. He was hard. He had been hard since the warm-up, a thick ridge down the leg of his thin shorts, and he made no effort to keep it off her. When she hinged over for deadlifts he stood close enough that she backed straight onto it. On the mat he knelt behind her in child's pose, "to open the hips," and leaned his weight forward until the whole length of him was bedded in the seam of her leggings, and he held it there for a slow count of thirty, rocking a little, breathing on her neck.

For the hamstring stretch he put her on her back with one ankle on his shoulder and pressed in, and there was nothing between his cock and her pussy but two thin layers of cloth. He ground against her in small circles. He looked her in the eye while he did it and asked how her week was.

She was a mess. An hour of that, on a body nobody had touched properly in a year. The sweat had started at her waistband and the small of her back, the ordinary way. The other wet had started lower. It had begun as a dark spot the size of a coin, right at the seam, and she had watched it grow in the mirror through every set, creeping up the front and spreading down the insides of both thighs, until the gray between her legs was soaked black to halfway to her knees and shining. The fabric clung to her so wetly that it had drawn up into her, outlining each swollen lip. She could feel it squelch when she walked. She could smell herself, warm and salt-sweet, over the eucalyptus.

There was a damp print on the mat where she'd been sitting. He'd seen it. He had smiled, very slightly, and moved her on to the next exercise.

She was in a bridge, hips high, when he knelt between her feet to correct it. One hand flat under the small of her back. The other on her hip.

"Higher," he said. "Squeeze. There. God, look at that."

She looked. In the mirror on the left her body made one long arc. In the mirror on the right, the same arc from the other side. In the one ahead she could see straight up between her own spread thighs, the gray fabric gone nearly black and clinging to every lip. He was looking at the same place.

His hand slid from her hip to the inside of her thigh.

She didn't stop him. She had known for a week that she wouldn't.

He was good. She could not say he wasn't. He pulled the zip of her bra down in one motion and her tits spilled out, heavy and wet, and he gave them a squeeze each like a man checking fruit. He peeled the leggings down over her ass, and they came away from her with a wet, clinging sound, a thread of her own slick stretching from the soaked gusset and breaking. He left them banded around her thighs, so her legs were pinned together and everything between them was squeezed up plump and offered. "Jesus," he said, almost admiring. "You're drenched. I barely touched you."

*You've been rubbing your cock on me for an hour,* she thought. *We both know exactly what you did.* He turned her onto her hands and knees on the mat.

And there she was, three times over. On her left: a woman on all fours in profile, back arched, big breasts swinging, a strong young man kneeling up behind her. On her right, the same. Dead ahead, her own flushed face, mouth open, and his body rising over her shoulders. And because the mirrors faced each other, behind each reflection was another, and another, a whole corridor of Irises about to be fucked, getting smaller into the distance.

*Look at you*, she thought, and for one moment it was the hottest thing she had ever seen. *Look what you made.*

He was thick and hard and he put it in her without ceremony. He was strong, his hands closing all the way around her waist, and he gave it to her rough. She watched it happen from every side at once: the thick shaft appearing and disappearing between her cheeks, her tits slapping together, the ripple that went through her ass every time his hips hit. He slapped it. He got a fist in her ponytail and pulled her head up so she had to watch. He said the things.

"You like that? You like that big cock? Yeah. Take it."

She came. A real one, sharp and quick, her new muscles clamping down hard enough to make him grunt.

And in three mirrors at once, she saw that he was watching himself.

That was the thing. His eyes kept sliding off her to his own shoulders, his own abs, the flex of his own ass. He turned a few degrees to get a better angle on his obliques. He fucked the way he trained people: correct form, good tempo, an eye on the clock. The dirty talk came out of him in exactly the voice he used to count reps. When he finished, he pulled out, patted her hip twice, and handed her a towel from the stack.

"Recovery's included," he said. "Come on."

The spa was down the quiet corridor. A cedar sauna, dim and amber, and beyond it a stone room with a heated table.

He put her in the sauna first, naked on a towel, and sat on the bench above her in nothing but a pair of shorts. The heat was dry and enormous. Sweat sprang out all over her. He ladled water on the stones and, while the steam rose, he leaned down and went over her with his hands: her shoulders, her arms, the long muscles of her thighs. Idle. Thorough. He lifted one of her breasts on his palm and let it drop to watch it move. He rolled a nipple in his fingers until milk ran down and hissed on the hot cedar, and he did not even blink.

"Happens with all the new moms," he said. "Don't be embarrassed."

*All the new moms*, Iris thought.

Then the table. Face down first, warm oil poured in a line down her spine. His hands were magnificent, she had to give him that, strong and slow and knowing, kneading her ass in deep circles and spreading it, his thumbs sliding closer on every pass. He turned her over. He oiled her tits until they shone like glass and played with them for a long time, weighing them, pressing them together, circling the big rose-red nipples with his thumbs. He stroked down her flat belly. He parted her with two slippery fingers and slid them in, and set his thumb on her clit.

He was excellent at it. He found the place inside her on the first try and worked it with exactly the right pressure in exactly the right rhythm, like a man dialing a combination he had dialed five hundred times. Her back arched off the table. She came again, long and wet and loud, in about ninety seconds flat.

When she opened her eyes he was looking at the clock on the wall.

"I've got a six-thirty," he said, wiping his hands. "You're good to shower. Same time Tuesday?"

She lay there, oiled and gleaming and twice satisfied, and felt absolutely nothing.

He wasn't hungry. That was what was missing. He was strong, he was rough, he had hands like a surgeon, and there was nothing behind any of it. No want. No history. Nothing carnal at all. He was a man performing a service, to a schedule, for a tip. A whore, was the plain word. A very expensive whore with good hair, and she was the four-fifteen.

"No," Iris said, sitting up. "I don't think so."

She sat in the car for a long time afterward with her hands on the wheel. She had been fucked hard and fingered expertly inside the last hour, and she ached, still, as if she hadn't been touched in a year.

She unzipped the inside pocket of her bag. It was a diaper bag now, but the pocket was the same, and so was what lived in it. Frank Jr. Six years old, brushed silver worn dull at the tip, on his third set of batteries this month. He had got her through the engagement and the pregnancy and every two a. m. feed since. Nobody knew he existed.

She pressed him against herself through the damp gray leggings, right there in the parking lot, and came in under a minute, quick and thin and useless.

"It's not you," she told him, dropping him back in the pocket. "It's never been you."

She knew exactly what she wanted. She had known all along. She had only been pretending there might be a version of it closer to home.

## The Uniform

The witch costume was gone, ruined that last time. But at the back of the same closet, in a garment bag, hung her senior-year cheer uniform.

Navy and gold. A sleeveless shell top, a pleated skirt, and the matching briefs that went under it, all cut for the body she'd had at twenty-one, before the baby, before her hips. She took it out on a Saturday when Mark had taken Nora to his mother's for the night, and she laid it on the bed and laughed out loud.

She got it on. Barely.

The shell top zipped up the side as far as her bottom rib and stopped dead. It had been made for double Ds, and it had been snug on those. What she had now would not go in it. The hem rode up to sit across the middle of her breasts like a too-tight bandeau, so that the whole heavy underside of them hung out bare beneath it and the gold lettering stretched unreadable across the top. Every seam was pulled white. Her nipples made two hard points in the fabric, and around each one a damp circle was already spreading.

The briefs were worse. Navy stretch knit, full-cut, the kind every cheerleader wears so the crowd sees team colors when she kicks. They had fit a tight little college ass. She had to lie on the bed and fight them up over her hips an inch at a time, and when she stood, they were stretched so thin over that big soft swell that they shone. The leg holes cut into her. The seat rode up between her cheeks. She could hear the stitching creak when she bent.

Under them, where nobody would see until somebody went looking, she had put on the other thing she'd bought that week: a thong of black French lace, three little straps and a triangle you could cover with a playing card.

The skirt had fit her waist then and fit it now. It was her ass it couldn't manage. The pleats flared straight out over it and ended there, and when she turned in the mirror she could see the whole lower curve of both cheeks, squeezed into shining navy. She put her hair up in a high ponytail and tied it with the gold ribbon. She found the socks at the bottom of the bag: white, knee-high, two navy stripes at the top. They fit perfectly. Feet don't change. She laced up her old white sneakers.

She looked at herself. Flat belly, bare between the two strips of navy. Strong legs. Tits spilling out of the bottom of a top three sizes too small. She did not look like a cheerleader. She looked like a grown woman who had squeezed herself into a memory, and it was the most obscene thing she had ever seen.

One more thing. She had nursed Nora at six that morning and nothing since. No pump. By the time she pulled into the lot behind the dorm, her breasts were as hard as two melons and so full they throbbed with her pulse.

*Good*, she thought. *Let them deal with it.*

She brought the pom-poms.

And for the first time in six years, she had broken her own rule. She had let them know she was coming.

It was nine days ago, from the car outside Lumen, with her hands still shaking. Frank's number had been in her phone since the night he told her it was the one call she was allowed to make. She had never once used it.

*saturday after next*, she typed. *is that ok*

It took him four minutes. Frank typed with one finger.

*Door's open. You know that.*

*you said it would keep*

Three dots. Gone. Three dots again.

*It kept.*

Her thumbs hovered. Her face was hot.

*all of it? the way it used to be. the things I used to say*

*All of it.*

*I can't have anything show. I have mom friends now. we go to the pool*

*Understood. Same word as always?*

*same word.* She looked at that for a second, and then, because it was true and there was nobody else alive she could say it to: *I'm losing my mind frank. everybody's so careful with me. plan something*

This time the dots went on for a long while.

*Eat first*, said Frank.

She had been wet for nine days.

The pipes were ticking all down the corridor. She didn't knock.

---

Frank looked up from the desk and felt his heart turn over like an engine.

He was thirty-eight. He had a bad knee now and reading glasses he couldn't find half the time. He had read those few little messages so often in nine days that he could have recited them. *Everybody's so careful with me.* He had winced at that, because everybody included him. Last time they had handled her like a cracked egg, because she'd been carrying, and it had been the right thing to do, and he had given her his word that the rest would keep.

Six years he had known this woman. He knew just how filthy she got. He knew the game she begged for, and the names she called herself, and the look on her face when somebody finally took her at her word. They all did. He had told her no, twice, on the night she was seven months gone, and had not enjoyed one second of it. She had gone without for the better part of two years, and it had left a debt.

He had spent the week paying it down. He made her cuffs himself, four of them, on the shop's old sewing machine after hours: wide soft cotton webbing, lined with fleece, a welded steel ring on each. He sewed every seam twice. They would hold a grown woman's whole weight and not leave a line on her wrists. Forty feet of new cotton rope, washed twice. Two steel eyebolts sunk into the joist above the pull-up bar, tested with his own two hundred and thirty pounds. Ray, who had always done the tying, had spent his lunch breaks learning three new harnesses, frowning at his phone like a man studying for the bar exam. Stu had been useless with excitement since Monday.

And there she stood in the doorway with a coat over her arm and two gold pom-poms in her fist, dressed in about a third of a cheerleading uniform, grinning at him.

*She gets better,* he thought. *Every goddamn time. How does she keep getting better.*

---

"Jesus Christ on a bicycle," Stu said.

Ray was already walking to the door. The bolt went home.

Iris dropped the coat. She walked to the middle of the floor, where there was room. She planted her sneakers shoulder-width apart, put her fists on her hips, pom-poms and all, and lifted her chin exactly the way she had on the sidelines at twenty-one.

"Ready?" she called. "O-*kay!*"

"Oh, no," said Ray. "Oh, she's not."

She was.

She snapped both arms up in a high V, and the pom-poms hissed. She clapped. She hit every mark, crisp as a drill sergeant, and she bellowed it at the ceiling pipes in her brightest game-day voice:

"Gimme an **R!**" Punch. "Gimme an **A!**" Punch. "Gimme a **P!** Gimme an **E!**"

Stu had both hands over his face.

"What's that spell?" Iris demanded, bouncing on her toes. Her tits, fourteen hours full and packed into a top made for a girl two sizes smaller, bounced with her, enormously, a beat behind. "I can't *hear* you! What's that spell?"

"Iris," Frank said, in a strangled voice.

"**RAPE ME!**" She kicked, a full high kick, sneaker past her ear, and the little skirt flew up over shining navy. "**RAPE ME!** Goooooo, janitors!"

Ray lost it first. He folded over the weight rack, wheezing. Then Stu went, a high helpless giggle, tears running down his face. Frank held out for three more seconds on sheer dignity and then put his forehead down on the desk and shook.

It was the stupidest thing any of them had ever seen. A twenty-seven-year-old mother in a child's size of cheer uniform, doing a pep rally for her own gangbang in a boiler room. She knew exactly how silly it was. She was laughing so hard she could barely get the words out, and she did it anyway, the whole routine, because six years ago she had been the girl in this uniform who was too embarrassed to say out loud what she wanted, and she was never going to be that girl again.

"Who do we want?"

"You, you lunatic," Ray gasped.

"I said *who do we want?* Three! Big! Men! When do we want 'em?"

"Jesus, *now*..."

"One more time! R! A! P! E! Rape me, rape me, one-two-*three!*"

She went for the big finish. A toe-touch jump: straight up, legs flung wide in a split, arms out, the way she'd done it at nationals.

The uniform had held for six years in a garment bag. It did not survive the landing.

There was a sound like a sheet being torn in half. The side seam of the shell top let go from armpit to hem, the zipper burst, and the whole front of it sprang open and flapped loose on one shoulder. Her tits came out of it like something escaping. They dropped, and bounced, hard, once, twice, and settled: heavy, full, enormous, their natural softness gone tight as drums with a day's milk, the skin stretched shining and a faint blue tracery of veins running to the big rose-red nipples. The jolt of the landing had started them. Milk was running from both, in thin quick drops, down onto her belly.

Nobody was laughing anymore.

Iris stood there panting, pom-poms hanging at her sides, pink in the face, with half a cheer top dangling off her and her chest heaving.

"Go team," she said, a little breathless.

Stu made a noise like a kicked dog.

Frank stood up slowly. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. Then he looked at her stomach. "How's the baby?"

"Perfect. Loud. With her grandmother until tomorrow noon." She held his gaze. "And I don't want to hear another word about her for the next three hours. Tonight I'm not anybody's mother."

Frank nodded once. Something in his face eased, and something else came up behind it, dark and glad.

"Well, I was going to ask if you still wanted the old talk," he said. "I guess that's my answer."

"That's your answer."

"Same word?"

"Red." Her pulse was hammering in her throat. "I won't need it."

"You'd better not be shy about it if you do." He pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk. Four wide cuffs of soft webbing, lined with fleece. Steel rings. A thick white coil of cotton rope. He laid them out on the blotter one at a time and let her look.

Beside the blotter, on the corner of the desk, sat the old baseball glove. From where she stood she could see straight down into the pocket. Three years on, and the little blue gem was still nested in the dark leather, with a folded scrap of velvet beside it.

Frank saw her see it. He didn't say anything. The corner of his mouth moved.

She picked one up. She turned it over, and saw the double row of stitching, slightly crooked, done by a big man's hands.

"Frank. Did you *make* these?"

"Shop's got a machine," he said gruffly, not looking at her.

Her knees went loose.

"Well then," said Frank. "Come here."

She had taken two steps when Ray caught her from behind. His fist closed around the base of her ponytail, ribbon and all, and hauled her head back, and her whole body lit up like a struck match. *There. There it is.* His other arm came around her waist and found it half the size he remembered.

"Look at this," he said, low, against her ear. "Look what she did." His palm slid down over the hard flat of her belly, up over her ribs. "You could bounce a quarter off her."

*She worked for this,* Ray thought. *Months. And then she put it in a bag and drove it over here to us.* His cock was already a bar against her ass. *Any man alive. And she brings it to a basement.*

His hand went on down, under the pleats, and stopped.

"What the hell is this?"

"They're called spankies," Iris said, with her head pulled back and her throat bare. "They go under the skirt."

"They're cutting you in half." He ran his palm over her ass, over the navy knit stretched thin and shining across all that soft new flesh, the leg bands biting in, the seat pulled up tight between her cheeks. "Stu. Look at this. She's poured two pounds of ass into a one-pound bag."

Stu came around behind her and looked, and whistled.

"That's not coming off," he said. "Not over those hips."

"No," Ray agreed. "It isn't."

He let go of her hair. He took the back seam of the briefs in both fists, right at the top of her cleft.

"Ray, don't you dare, those are original..."

He tore them open.

The seam went all the way down, with a long ripping purr, and the tight knit sprang apart to either side like a split fruit. Her ass came out of it, round and full and bare, quivering with relief, red-lined where the leg bands had bitten.

And between her cheeks, where they had expected nothing, a thin black strap of lace.

There was a pause.

"Well, now," Ray said softly.

He hooked a finger under it and drew it out, slowly. Black French lace. Three straps and a scrap. The little triangle at the front was soaked through and clinging to her, every fold of her showing dark and wet through the pattern.

"Cheerleader on the outside," said Stu, crouching to look. He sounded almost reverent. "And that underneath."

"Mama bought herself something pretty," Ray said. He snapped the strap, lightly, against her hip. "For us. Went to a shop, picked it out, thinking about getting raped in it."

"Yes," Iris whispered.

"And put the team panties over the top so nobody'd know."

"*Yes.*"

Frank had come around the desk. He looked at the torn navy hanging in two flaps off her hips, and the black lace, and the wet. He looked at her face.

"Leave the lace on her," he said. "I want to pull it to one side."

Stu straightened up. He wasn't looking at her ass anymore. He was looking at what the jump had done.

He cupped one breast from below, very gently. It was hot. It was hard as a fist. Milk ran over his thumb.

"Iris." His voice cracked. "When did you last..."

"Six this morning."

"That's fourteen *hours*."

"I know," she said. "They hurt. Somebody do something about it."

## The Milking

They put her on the incline bench, but not the way they had before.

Frank dropped the backrest flat, threw the moving blanket over it, and they set her on it on her hands and knees, crossways, so that her tits hung straight down off the side like two full udders. The skirt stood up over her ass in a stiff little fan and hid nothing: the two torn flaps of navy hanging off her hips, and between her cheeks the thin black strap of lace. The ruined top hung from one shoulder. Her ponytail swung.

Frank took her wrists and set her hands on the steel upright under the bench, one above the other.

"Hold that," he said. "You let go, the milking stops. You let go twice, everything stops."

That was all. Nobody tied anything. The cuffs lay on the desk where he'd put them. She could have stood up and walked out.

She wrapped her fingers around cold steel, and felt her whole body go hot and loose.

*Oh*, she thought. *He isn't going to tie me. He's going to make me do it myself.*

"Ray. Mugs."

There were three clean coffee mugs on the shelf above the pot. Ray set two on the floor under her, one beneath each breast. Iris looked down between her arms, saw them there, white china on the gray concrete, and a hot bolt of shame and delight went through her so hard her arms shook.

*Oh, you filthy, wonderful men.*

Stu knelt on one side of her. Ray knelt on the other. Frank stood behind.

"Slow," Frank said. "She's sore. Do it right."

Stu took her left breast in both hands, high up, near her ribs, where it was hardest. He squeezed and drew down, a long firm stroke from the root to the nipple, the way you'd strip a rope. Milk shot out of her in six thin jets at once and rang in the bottom of the mug.

Iris cried out. It wasn't pain. It was the opposite of pain: a hot, drawing, dissolving relief that started behind her breastbone and poured straight down through her belly into her cunt.

Ray did the same on the right. Another hiss, another ringing in the china.

They found a rhythm. Left, right. Squeeze and pull. Their big rough hands slid on her wet skin, and with every stroke the terrible tightness eased a little more and the pleasure climbed a little higher. She could hear it. The fine streams drumming into the mugs. Her own breath sobbing in and out. She had pumped a thousand times this year, hooked to a machine at the kitchen table, and felt nothing but tired. This was two men on their knees, milking her by hand like something precious, and she was going to come from it. She actually was.

"Look at her," Stu whispered. "She's shaking."

"She's dripping, is what she is," Frank said, behind her.

He had hooked the black lace to one side and spread her with his thumbs. She felt his breath, and then his tongue, broad and hot, one slow lick from her clit all the way up, and she wailed. He ate her like that, unhurried, his stubbled face buried between her cheeks, while the other two worked her tits. When he sucked her clit between his lips she came, hard and sudden, and both breasts let down at once in a rush that overflowed Stu's fingers.

"There she goes. There she goes. Good girl."

Frank stood. His zipper. He held the wet scrap of lace aside with one thumb, the way he'd said he would, and the broad head of him slid through her. Then he took hold of that tiny waist in both hands and sank in.

And stopped.

"The hell," he said.

Iris, hanging her head, started to laugh.

He pulled back an inch and pushed in again, and she did it on purpose this time: gathered every one of those muscles she'd spent ten months building and clamped down on him, top to bottom, like a hand closing.

"*Fuck!*" Frank's fingers dug into her hips. "What is that? What the hell is that?"

"Physical therapy," Iris said, sweetly, over her shoulder. "Fifty reps a day."

She did it again. Squeeze, ripple, release. She felt him swell.

*I had a baby ten months ago,* she thought, fierce and glad, *and I am tighter than the day you met me, and I can do it whenever I like.*

---

Frank had been inside this woman at twenty-one and at twenty-six and seven months gone, and he had thought he knew every inch of her. He had never felt anything like this. She was gripping him like a fist in a wet silk glove, and then letting go, and then gripping again, in a slow rolling wave that ran from the root of his cock to the head. He was not moving. She was fucking him without either of them moving at all.

*Every time,* he thought, through the roar in his ears. *Every time she finds a new way to bring me to my knees.*

He was not going to last, and he was damned if he'd go out standing still.

---

He pulled her ponytail tight in one fist, drew back, and gave her every inch.

After that there was no more laughing. He fucked her deep and hard, her hips slapping back into him, the bench legs scraping on the concrete.

She could feel all of him. That was the gift of the last ten months: she had so much more feeling in there than she'd ever had. The flared rim of the head dragging back along her walls on every outstroke. The fat vein up the underside, a ridge she could have traced with a fingertip. The blunt, heavy nudge at the very end of her when he bottomed out, a deep bruised sweetness that made her toes curl in her sneakers. Wet sounds. Obscene ones. Her own slick ran down the insides of her thighs and dripped off her knees onto the blanket.

Her tits swung with it. They hung straight down off the side of the bench, huge and full, and every thrust sent them lurching forward and slapping back, so that Stu and Ray had to catch them on the swing like men milking in a storm. When they pulled, the streams went wide and wet the floor. His free hand came down on her ass, *crack*, and all that soft flesh jumped and shook under his palm. He did it again, harder, to watch it move. And again. Not the warm, measured swats of last year. Full-arm, open-handed blows that landed like a board and drove her forward on the bench, each one leaving a print she could feel rising. She shrieked, and her knuckles went white, and her hands stayed exactly where he had put them, and her cunt clenched around him so hard he laughed out loud.

"That's what you wanted? That?" *Crack.* "You'll be sitting on those all week."

"Yes! God, yes..." And then it was out of her, the thing she had typed with her face on fire nine days ago. "Use me. Use me as your rape slut, Frank, *please*..."

For half a second all three of them went still. They had laughed until they cried when she chanted it with pom-poms. Nobody was laughing now. It was a different word in this voice, the sweet, wrecked one they had not heard in two years, coming from a woman on all fours on a weight bench, holding on because she'd been told to, with her tits in their hands. They had honestly forgotten what it did to them.

Then Frank laughed, low, and it was not a kind laugh, and it went through her like current.

"There she is," he said. "Hear that, boys? There's our girl. I was starting to think we'd lost her." He drove into her, slow and deep, and held. "Listen to it. Go on, listen." In the quiet she could hear exactly what he meant: the wet, sucking sound of her own cunt around him. "You're so wet from being raped it's running down your legs. Nothing holding you to that bench but my say-so, and dripping on my floor. What kind of woman does that?"

"Me," she sobbed, shaking with it, the shame so hot and sweet she could hardly breathe. "I do. I do."

That bigger, softer ass of hers moved for him like nothing she'd had at twenty-one. Each time his hips drove home, a deep wave rolled out from the point of impact across both cheeks and back again, plush flesh quaking over the firm muscle underneath, and the red handprints jumped. He watched it happen, again and again, his cock sliding out glazed white to the rim and plunging back, her stretched pink lips clinging to him on the way out as if they hated to let go.

He bent over her back and sank his teeth into the soft flesh just under her shoulder blade, where a swimsuit would hide it, and held on while he fucked her. On either side of her the milking never stopped, long steady pulls in time with his thrusts, so that every stroke of his cock was answered by a stroke on her tits, and she could not tell anymore which one she was coming from.

She came twice more before he did, and both times it was his cock that took her there, and both times the word came with it. "*Daddy!*" The first one she screamed. The second she could only mouth, with her forehead on the blanket.

"Six years," Frank said through his teeth, "and it still goes through me like a knife."

That second time she clamped down and held, deliberately, and Frank made a sound she had never heard from him and emptied himself into her in long, shuddering pulses, his forehead dropping between her shoulder blades. She said it once more, for that, very softly.

When they finally let her up, the two mugs were nearly full. Warm, white, faintly blue at the edges.

Ray picked his up, looked her in the eye, and drank it down.

Stu dipped two fingers in his and painted her lips with it. She licked them clean. Then he set the mug on the weight rack, carefully, where it wouldn't get knocked over. She noticed that. She didn't think to wonder why.

Frank, breathing hard, took the third mug off the shelf and poured himself a coffee from the pot. He held it out to Stu without a word. Stu topped it up to the brim.

Frank sipped. Considered.

"Better than the powdered stuff," he said.

Iris laughed so hard she had to sit down on the bench.

## The Bar

She was lighter now. Her breasts were soft again, still big, still heavy, but swaying and easy, and she felt as if somebody had taken ten pounds of stones off her chest. Her whole body hummed.

Stu was looking at the pull-up bar over the weight rack, and then at her arms.

"Can you hang?"

"Long as you need," Iris said, and her mouth went dry saying it.

Frank brought the cuffs from the desk. He wrapped one around each wrist: the fleece soft, the webbing under it without an inch of give. Ray lifted her by the waist, Frank clipped her to the two new eyebolts in the joist, and the steel snapped shut, and that was that. Toes a foot off the floor. The torn top slid off her shoulder at last. Stu pulled the gold ribbon from her hair and tied it around her throat in a fat bow, like a present.

She hung there with her toes off the floor and her heart going, the way it went at the top of a roller coaster, and was happier than she had been in a year.

Ray took her behind the knees and lifted, and she let her legs open, and because she could, she kept opening them, until she hung in a full side split with her ankles level with her hips.

"God *damn*," said Stu, reverently.

"Senior year," Iris said. "National finals."

Ray wasn't looking at the split. He was looking higher, at her arms stretched straight up to the joist and the soft bare hollows they left open. He stepped in, took her ribs in both hands, and put his face into one. A long slow breath. A long slow lick. She jerked in the cuffs and squealed.

"Missed that," he said, muffled.

Ray walked into her. He was hard as a hammer and she was soaked with herself and with Frank, and he went in to the hilt on one stroke, his hands under her ass. Spread that wide, there was nothing of her left closed. She could look down the length of her own body and watch him go in: the thick dark shaft, shining wet, splitting her open, her clit standing stiff and red above it and getting a hard nudge from his pubic bone at the end of every stroke. Her tits flew toward her chin and dropped, heavy, slapping wetly together. Drops of milk spattered his chest.

He dipped his head and bit the soft underside of her breast, not gently, and sucked until the blood came up dark. Then the other one. Two plum-colored marks the size of quarters, where only she would ever see them.

Stu came up behind her, hot and furred and slick against her back. One hand filled itself with her tit. The other reached past her to the weight rack and came back with a white china mug.

His mug. Still half full. Still warm.

"Been saving this," he said in her ear.

She didn't understand until he tipped it.

A thin warm stream touched the small of her back and ran. Down between her cheeks, slow as honey. It slid over the tight pucker of her asshole and she felt every drop go by: blood-warm, silky, hers. It trickled on down the stretched rim where Ray's cock was moving in her, and dripped off them both onto the concrete.

Her own milk. Milked out of her by hand an hour ago, into a coffee cup, and now being poured down the crack of her ass so a man could fuck it.

Something in her head simply went. It was the filthiest thing anyone had ever done to her, and the most tender, and she could not hold the two together. She thrashed in the cuffs, bucking on Ray's cock so wildly he had to tighten his grip to keep her on it.

"Easy. *Easy*," Ray laughed, breathless. "Christ, look at her go."

Stu smeared it into her with his thumb, round and round the clenched little ring, milk-slick, pressing, until the tip slid in. Then a real palmful from the bottle on top of it, cool over the warm, because he was not a fool and he wasn't going to hurt her.

"Can I?"

"*Yes!*" It came out as a scream. "Put it in me, hurry *up*..."

He worked her open with two fingers, patient and thorough, while Ray fucked her. Then the blunt head of his cock was there, thicker than Frank's, pressing. She breathed out, the way the therapist had taught her, and let every one of those muscles go soft.

He pushed. Her ring gave around the head of him all at once, milk-slick and soft, and swallowed it, and clenched shut behind the ridge, and she made a sound like a sob. He held there with just the head in her. She could feel how thick it was. She could feel Ray's cock in her cunt underneath, and Stu's sitting against it, and her whole body waiting.

Then Stu took her hips and slid into her ass like he belonged there.

Slowly, all the way. She felt every inch of it open her: the stretch climbing up inside her, her ring burning tight around the shaft, his cock pressing past Ray's through her, the two of them crowding into her until she could feel the shape of each. Ray long and curved in her cunt. Stu short and fat in her ass. Nothing between them but her.

Two of them. For the first time in a year.

She got six strokes of it. Ray drawing back while Stu shoved in, Stu dragging out while Ray drove up, so that one of them was always sinking into her. The wet slap of hips on her ass from behind and her thighs from the front. Her tits jolting between them, leaking milk down her ribs. Six, swinging between them with her head thrown back on Stu's shoulder and her mouth open and no sound coming out of it, before Frank's voice cut across the room.

"Her hands. Get her down."

She hadn't felt them going numb. He had seen it from ten feet away. He reached up and unclipped her, and her arms dropped like dead weight, and she wailed, because Ray had slipped out of her.

"We're not done, sweetheart," Frank said. "We're just moving."

## The Chair

Stu never left her ass. He locked an arm around her waist and walked backward with her, three steps, still buried, and sat down hard in Frank's desk chair with Iris in his lap.

The drop drove him in to the root. She saw white.

He kicked the lever and the seat hissed up as high as it went. Then he took her behind the knees, one in each hand, and hauled her legs up and apart, back toward her own shoulders, until her feet were in the air on either side of her head and her whole weight sat on his cock.

Frank drew her tingling arms up and back, behind Stu's neck, and clipped her two cuffs to each other. Tied to the man she was sitting on. She couldn't have climbed off him if the building were burning.

"There," Frank said. "Now look at yourself."

There was a dark window in the boiler room door. In it she could see a blonde in a gold bow and a cheerleader's skirt, folded in half in a janitor's lap, held open by two big tanned hands: her cunt spread and wet and empty, and right below it her own asshole stretched in a tight pale ring around the base of a thick cock. She moaned at the sight of it.

*Look at her,* she thought. *Somebody's wife.*

Ray stepped in between her feet. He didn't hurry now. He laid his cock along her slit and looked down at where Stu was already in her, and then he pressed it down with his thumb and pushed.

And then she felt it. The thing she had been dreaming about for a year, and this time nobody was holding her up.

Packed, front and back, with nothing between them but one thin, hot, slippery wall of herself. She could feel the shape of each one separately: Ray long and curved in her cunt, Stu shorter and so thick in her ass that her ring burned around him. And she could feel them feel each other. When Ray drew back, the ridge of his cockhead dragged the whole length of Stu's shaft through her. When he drove in, he squeezed Stu against her back wall and ground himself over that swollen spot behind her pubic bone until she saw sparks.

They were rubbing against each other inside her. Two thick cocks sliding past one another, vein against vein, with her in between, feeling every inch of it twice.

"Christ," Ray said hoarsely. "Stu. Slow down or I'm done."

"I know. Jesus. I know."

Stu couldn't thrust, sitting. He didn't have to. Every time Ray slammed into her, the chair rocked back on its springs and bounced her on Stu's cock, so that one man fucked her and she got both. The chair squealed. Her tits, lifted high by her raised arms, jumped and rolled and leaked, and Ray took her ankles out of Stu's hands so that Stu could finally have what he wanted. Two fistfuls of them. He squeezed, and milk ran through his fingers and down her belly to where Ray was going in.

*Carnal,* she thought, wildly. *That's the word. This is what he didn't have. They aren't doing this to me. They can't help it.*

Frank had come around behind the chair. He was hard again. At thirty-eight, twenty minutes after he'd come. He tipped the backrest until it met the edge of the desk, and her head fell back off Stu's shoulder and hung there, upside down, and she was looking straight up the length of him.

He cupped her jaw in one big hand and looked at her, just looked, for a long second.

"Rape my face," Iris whispered. Her lips were swollen. Her eyes were shining. "Go on. I can't stop you."

A muscle jumped in his jaw.

"No," Frank agreed softly. "You can't. Sat on a cock in my own chair, with another one in your cunt, and still begging for a third. Greedy little whore. Open up."

She opened. She tasted herself on him, and him, and the faint sweetness of her own milk from his fingers.

He was the biggest of the three and he fed it to her slowly. The broad, spongy head first, filling her mouth. Then the shaft, thick as her wrist and hot as a fever, laid heavy along her tongue, with that one fat vein she could feel beating. With her head tipped back, her mouth and her throat made one straight line. She had learned something on the Pilates reformer, about letting go of a muscle on purpose. She breathed out through her nose, and let go.

He slid in.

It was like swallowing something alive. Her throat stretched around him in a tight, slick ring and kept stretching, taking the head, taking the thick inches after it, all the way down, until his balls lay warm and heavy over her eyes and she could smell nothing in the world but him.

"Holy shit," Stu said, an inch from her ear. "Boss. I can see you in there."

He could. A long thick ridge down the front of her white throat, under the gold bow, moving.

She swallowed. Her throat rippled along him, a long wet clench from the head to the base.

"*Fuck!*" Frank's hand slapped down on the desk. "Oh, sweetheart. Oh, you beautiful girl."

She did it again. And she moaned, because she could not have stopped herself for money, and with him lodged that deep the sound had nowhere to go but straight into his cock. He began to move: long slow withdrawals, back up through that tight ring until she could snatch a breath, and then down again, all the way, her throat closing around every vein. Spit ran out of the corners of her mouth and up her cheeks into her hair. Her eyes streamed. She had never felt so thoroughly, magnificently used.

Airtight. She couldn't thrust or pull away or even brace. All she could do was squeeze, and so she squeezed, both of them at once, in long rolling waves, and felt two grown men come apart.

"I can't... she's... *fuck*, Ray, she's milking me..."

"I know. I know. Hold on."

They didn't hold on. Stu went first, crushing her tits in both hands, flooding her ass, groaning into her neck. The clench of her orgasm took Ray a second later. He drove in and stayed, shaking, and she felt it, hot and deep, and came again on top of the first one. Frank pulled out of her throat at the last instant and striped her tits with it over her upturned face, thick and white across the rose-red nipples, where it ran and mingled with her milk and dripped from both peaks into Stu's lap.

The chair creaked. Nobody said anything for a while.

Frank unclipped her wrists and lifted her arms down from around Stu's neck, one at a time, and rubbed them.

## The Desk

She didn't get up.

She sat in Stu's lap in the big chair with her arms hanging, wrecked, sticky from her chin to her navel, and watched Frank. He had stepped back. He was wiping himself off with a shop towel, slow, with his back half to her, the way he always did when he had let go of something and was putting it away again. His shoulders were still heaving. His jaw was tight. She could see the pulse going in his neck from across the room.

There was a thing she had never said to him. Not in six years. Not on the desk the first night, not in the wedding gown, not seven months gone in the bath. She had said it to the ceiling of her bedroom with her hand between her legs, more times than she could count, since the spring; she had said it into her pillow at four in the morning. She had never said it out loud to a living soul.

"Frank," she said.

He looked round.

"I want you to do something." Her voice was hoarse from his cock. "And I don't want you to be careful about it. I want you to do it like it isn't my choice."

Stu, under her, went very still. On the couch, Ray sat up.

Frank put the towel down on the desk. "Say it."

She said it.

It came out of her in a whisper, and it was filthy, and she felt her whole body go hot with it, scalp to soles, the way it had not gone hot at anything in years. She watched it land on him. She watched his face, which she knew better than her own, go completely still, and then change.

Nobody in the room breathed.

"Color," said Frank. His voice was very quiet.

"Green." She held his eyes. "Green, Frank. Green. I've wanted it since the spring. Please."

He crossed the room in three steps.

---

He lifted her out of Stu's lap by the waist as if she weighed nothing. He did not set her down. He carried her to the steel desk and with one arm swept it clean, work orders and coffee mugs and the little brass bell and the old baseball glove, all of it, onto the floor in a crash that made Stu flinch. He put her down on her back on the bare cold steel. Then he took her by the backs of her knees and folded her in half, her knees to her shoulders, her ass lifted up off the desk and her cunt turned up to him, open and swollen and still dripping from Ray, and pinned her there with his weight.

She had never seen his face like that. Not once. Not in six years.

He did not ease into her. He drove into her in one stroke to the root, all of him, thick as her wrist, and she screamed, and the desk skidded a foot on the concrete floor.

"That what you want?" he said, through his teeth.

"*Yes*..."

"Say it again. Say what you asked me for."

She said it again. He fucked her through it, every word, hard, so hard the steel boomed under her like a drum, and she lost the end of the sentence somewhere and only screamed.

"You want a baby," said Frank. He was holding her folded with one forearm across the backs of her thighs and his other hand round her throat, not squeezing, just there, and he was looking straight down into her eyes from six inches away. "You want me to put one in you. Not ask you. Not wait. Just do it."

"*Yes.*"

"I'm going to rape a baby in you," said Frank Brennan, slowly, every word, in a voice she had never heard come out of him in her life. "Right here. On this desk. I'm going to fill you so full it's got nowhere to go but up. And you're going to lie there and take it like you begged me to."

She came on that. On the words. She came so hard her vision went white at the edges and her milk let go in two hot jets that hit his chest and ran down his belly, and she heard herself making a sound like an animal, and he did not slow down at all.

---

On the couch, Ray had his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands and was watching through his fingers.

Years. Years he had known that man. He had seen him take a knife off a drunk in the laundry room without raising his voice. He had seen him pull Ray himself off this same woman on this same desk with one hand flat on his chest and a single word. He had seen him with her a hundred times since, every way there was, and every single time, however hard, however filthy, there had been a part of Frank Brennan standing a little way off, watching, holding the rope.

There was nobody holding the rope.

Frank was fucking her like a man drowning. His face was dark. His teeth were bared. The cords stood out in his neck and his forearms and the sweat was running off him onto her, and he was saying things to her, low and steady and filthy, that Ray had never heard him say to anyone, and she was taking every word of it and screaming for more.

*Christ,* thought Ray. *She's the only one. The only person alive who can make him do that.*

He looked sideways at Stu. Stu, still in the big chair, naked, with his hands hanging between his knees, was staring at the desk with his mouth open.

"Never seen him like that," said Stu hoarsely. "Never. Not once."

"No," said Ray.

"Only her," said Stu. "Only she can do that to him."

---

On the desk, Iris had stopped counting.

There was nothing in her but him. The weight of him folding her, the steel cold under her shoulders and booming with every stroke, his hand on her throat, his voice. Every time he drove into her he bottomed out against the very end of her, where nobody else reached, and held there, and ground, and said it again. *Taking it. That's it. Taking it like you begged for it. Gonna fill you up. Gonna put it so deep it takes.* She was crying. She was laughing. She was coming, in long rolling waves now that did not seem to have gaps between them, her milk running down her own ribs and pooling on the steel, and she could not have said her own name.

She did not say *Daddy.* It was not that word. It was a different one, and it was his name, over and over, *Frank, Frank, Frank*, as if she had never said it before.

He came with a roar.

He drove into her as deep as he could go and held her folded under him with both arms, so she could not move an inch, and she felt it. She felt every pulse. Hot and thick and so far up inside her that she felt it land, and keep landing, and he did not pull out after. He stayed. He stayed buried in her with her ass tipped up on the desk and his weight holding her there and his forehead dropping, at last, onto hers.

"Don't you move," he said, breathing like a bellows. "Not an inch. Keep it in."

She didn't move.

The room was very quiet. Out in the corridor a pipe ticked. Somewhere upstairs a door banged and footsteps went away. Frank lay over her on the steel desk with his forehead on hers, and slowly, slowly, she watched his face come back. The dark went out of it. The teeth went away. The steady brown eyes came back into them, one and then the other, and looked at her the way they had looked at her on this desk six years ago: checking.

"All right?" he said. Rough.

"Frank." She put her hands on his face. She could not stop smiling. "You lost it."

"I know." He closed his eyes. "Don't tell anybody."

"Too late," said Ray, from the couch.

Frank did not even look round. But Iris, with her hands on his face, felt the corner of his mouth move under her palm.

She lay there on the bare steel with her knees still at her shoulders and him still inside her, holding it in, the way he'd told her. And she thought, with total clarity, staring at the pipes on the ceiling over his shoulder: *Six years, and that is the first time I've ever seen the bottom of him.*

She had never been so happy in her life.

## The Mat

She thought they were finished after that. She should have known better.

They carried her to the exercise mats in the corner, the thick blue kind, and laid her down on her back. The first time in over a year that anyone had put her flat on her back and meant it. The rubber was cool under her shoulders. Her legs wouldn't close.

Her arms were jelly. Her thighs were trembling. She was sticky with sweat and milk and all three of them, the skirt a crumpled band at her waist, the black lace thong long since snapped and lost somewhere under the bench. Her ass stung. Her jaw ached. She felt magnificent.

"Look at you," Frank said, standing over her. Not dirty. Quiet. "Just look at you."

*Yes,* she thought. *Look. I made this. Look at it.*

Ray came down over her, braced on his arms, and she felt the whole weight of him settle onto her body. A man's weight. His chest on her tits, his hips between her thighs, all two hundred and twenty pounds pressing her into the mat. She had forgotten. A year and a half of careful, of *watch the belly*, of *are you okay*. She wrapped her arms and legs around him and held on.

"Please," she said. It was the first time all night she had begged for it straight. "Rape my mommy pussy. Hard. Like you mean it."

Ray's whole body jerked.

"Jesus, Iris." He stared down at her. Then he got his hand in her hair and pinned her head to the mat, and his voice dropped into the game. "That's what you are tonight? Somebody's mama, flat on her back on a gym floor, getting raped by the janitors? And look at you. Look at your face. You're loving it."

"Yes..."

"Your husband know his wife comes like this? Know she soaks through her pants for it?"

"No. *No.* Nobody knows. Just you."

He meant it.

He fucked her into the floor. Long, heavy, pounding strokes, the mat squeaking under her, her tits crushed slippery between them. When he reared up on his arms to go harder they came loose and rolled, shuddering in great soft circles on her chest, each jolt of his hips sending a wave through them from underneath. Milk leaked from both nipples and ran down the outer curves into her armpits. She could feel his balls, heavy and tight, slapping wet against her ass on every stroke, and the hot stretched ache of her entrance gripping the base of him. She locked her ankles behind his back and met him. Stu knelt by her head and she turned and took him in her mouth, and Frank took her hand and wrapped it around his cock, and she stroked him in time, her wrist already tired, not caring.

She knew them all by taste now, with her eyes shut. Stu was the saltiest, thick on her tongue, with that heavy warm musk at the root that made her head swim. Ray was cleaner, sharper, a tang like metal. Frank tasted of coffee and of her. She had missed each of them separately. She had not understood that until this minute.

Ray's sweat dripped from his chin onto her throat. She licked it off her own lip.

"Turn her over," Frank said. "I want that ass in the air."

"Rope first," said Ray. He sounded almost shy about it. "I learned you a new one."

He had. He sat her up and drew her arms behind her, forearm to forearm, and bound them in a neat ladder of white cotton from wrist to elbow. Then around her chest: three turns above her breasts, three below, cinched between, so that her tits were squeezed out from her body and stood there, round and taut and shining, the rose-red nipples forced forward. He ran a line down between her legs, snug against her clit, and tied it off at her wrists. Every time she moved her arms, the rope moved there.

*Nine days*, she thought, half out of her mind. *He spent nine days learning this for me.*

"Too tight anywhere?"

"No." She could hardly speak. "It's perfect."

They flipped her like she weighed nothing. Knees wide, chest down on the mat, cheek on the cool rubber, her bound arms behind her and her back bowed in a curve the yoga had given her. Frank knelt behind her and looked for a long moment at it: bigger than he'd ever seen it, soft and round and heavy, already printed scarlet with his hands. Then his palm came down, flat and full, and the crack of it filled the basement.

"That's for a whole year." *Crack.* "That's for the trainer."

"How did you..."

"You've got an old yellow bruise on your hip the exact size of a man's thumb, sweetheart." *Crack.* "I'm not blind. And his are going to be gone under mine before you leave this room."

He was as good as his word. He spanked her until she was sobbing and writhing against the rope, until both cheeks were a deep, even, burning red from the small of her back to the tops of her thighs and she could feel her own heartbeat in them. Stu crouched down, took a mouthful of her hot, tender ass in his teeth, and bit until she screamed. He left a perfect oval. He admired it, and then he did the other side.

"Look at this," Stu said, wondering, with his cheek against her burning skin. He ran two fingers up her slit and held them in front of her face, webbed and shining. "Tied up. Spanked purple. Bitten. And she's leaking like a tap. You filthy thing. You'd let us do anything to you, wouldn't you?"

"Anything," she moaned, and sucked his fingers clean.

"Color," Frank said.

"Green," she wept. "Green. Don't you dare stop."

He wound her loose hair around his fist, hauled her head back off the mat, and took her from behind while she moaned at the ceiling, every thrust slapping into flesh so sore that pain and pleasure had stopped being different things.

With her head pulled up and her arms roped behind her, her tits hung free under her, bound at the root by Ray's harness so they stood out tight and round and swollen, darker than the rest of her. They swung like bells. Forward on the thrust, back on the pull, colliding, the long rose-red nipples dragging over the rubber mat at the bottom of every arc and leaving two wet tracks. And her spanked ass shook for him. It was a lot of ass, and soft, and it showed. Every thrust sent a slow heavy wobble through it, a rolling wave that ran up from where his hips struck, over the scarlet handprints and the two rings of teeth, to the dimples above. The rope between her legs sawed at her clit with every stroke.

Stu lay down on the mat in front of her and slid underneath. She understood, and sank onto him with a sob, and Frank pulled out of her cunt and pressed, slick and enormous, against her ass.

"Breathe out, sweetheart."

She breathed out. He was bigger than Stu. Much bigger. The stretch went on and on, her ring burning, her eyes rolling, and then he was in, and she had both of them again, the two biggest this time, and they did not hold still. They sawed in and out of her in opposite strokes, and she could feel the heads of their cocks pass each other inside her like two fists in a silk sleeve, grinding, dragging, pressing everything she had between them. Ray knelt at her face and filled her throat. She came so hard, bound and plugged in every hole, that her vision went white and she felt herself gush, hot, all down Stu's balls.

They rolled her onto her back at last, her roped arms under her and her harnessed tits pointing at the ceiling, and Ray picked up one of her feet.

She was still wearing the sneakers. He unlaced it and pulled it off, and there was her foot in its white knee sock, damp with sweat, toes wriggling.

"Don't," Iris said weakly. "I've been in those for four hours. Ray. They're..."

He buried his nose in the sole of her sock and breathed in, and groaned.

"Six years," he said, muffled, "I've known you like this. You think I'm skipping it?"

He took the toe of the sock in his teeth and peeled it down her calf and off. Her bare foot was pink and hot and creased from the cotton. He licked it. One long stripe up the arch, salt and warmth. Then he took her toes into his mouth, all of them, and sucked, and she groaned from the bottom of her chest and went limp against the rope.

"God, I'd forgotten," she said. "I'd forgotten how good that is."

It was better than good. She was wrung out and sore and every nerve she had was at the surface, and here was a man kneeling at her feet, sucking her toes as if they were something precious. She squirmed with it. The rope sawed between her legs every time she did, and between the two she tipped over again, a soft one, laughing.

"More! The other one, please, somebody..."

Ray had the other shoe off before she had finished asking. He left the sock on that one. He liked it. He sucked her toes through the white cotton until it was soaked, and bit the ball of her foot.

Frank knelt up between her spread knees, hard again, impossibly, his cock standing dark and wet against his stomach.

"Feet," he said.

She understood. She had done this for him before. She drew her knees up and set her soles on either side of his shaft: one bare and wet from Ray's mouth, one in a damp white sock. She closed them around him. And she stroked. Slowly, the whole thick length of him, the fat vein sliding under her bare arch, the soft cotton dragging up the other side. Her toes curled over the head on every upstroke and came away slick.

"Look at that," Frank breathed. He had his hands around her ankles. "Look at those pretty feet."

Ray and Stu had stopped to watch. Then they had stopped watching. They knelt up on either side of Frank, shoulder to shoulder, three big tanned bodies in a wall over her, and each of them had his cock in his fist. Stu's, short and thick, the head purple and shining. Ray's, long and curved, slapping wet against his palm. All of it aimed at the same place.

"Hold them still, boss," Stu said hoarsely.

Frank tightened his grip on her ankles and held her feet together, soles up, like a plate.

*Oh,* Iris thought. *Oh, all three.* Her cunt clenched on nothing.

"Do it," she said. "Rape my feet. Cover them."

Stu went first, with a grunt, and it landed hot across her bare toes and ran down between them. The heat of it on her skin made her gasp and curl her toes into it, while Ray groaned and striped her arch, her ankle, the white sock, thick ropes of it soaking into the cotton. Frank was last. He fucked the slick channel between her soles three more times, through the mess the other two had made, and came with his teeth bared, pulse after pulse over the tops of her feet and down her shins.

She lay there panting. Her feet were dripping. She could feel it cooling, sliding slowly toward her heels.

"Well," Ray said. "Look at the state of you."

"Somebody ought to clean that up," Stu said.

Nobody moved. They were all looking at her.

Iris smiled. Her arms were still roped under her. She didn't need them.

She folded. Her knees came back past her shoulders, her ass rolled up off the mat, and her bare foot came down to her own mouth as easily as lifting a spoon. She heard Stu say "Jesus Christ," very quietly.

*Pilates,* she thought. *Worth every penny.*

She looked up at the three of them between her own ankles, and licked. One long slow stripe from heel to toe, the way Ray had done it, salt and bleach and her own sweat under it. She took her big toe into her mouth and sucked it clean. Then the next. She worked her tongue between each one and moaned around them, because it was filthy, and because three men were watching her do it with their mouths open. She took her time, folded in half, with her wet open pussy tipped up at the ceiling for all of them to see.

Frank brought the other foot to her himself. He held it for her by the ankle, and she sucked the cum out of the soaked cotton, toe by toe, and peeled the sock off with her teeth and licked what was underneath. When she was done she showed them her tongue, and swallowed, and showed them again.

"Clean," she said.

*Six years,* Frank thought, *and she can still find something I've never seen.*

It went on until she lost track of who was where. They traded. Stu between her legs, pinning her knees to her shoulders because she bent that way now, grinding deep. Frank turning her onto her side and sliding into her from behind with one leg held high, his mouth at her ear, telling her in a low voice exactly how good she was. Ray standing over her, his hand in her hair. Somebody's fingers always on her clit. Somebody's mouth always on a nipple. She squeezed for every one of them, and every one of them swore.

*Look at her,* Stu thought, watching her take all of it, flushed and laughing and insatiable. *I want to be doing this when we're both too old to stand.*

When she had nothing left, Ray pulled the knots loose, one by one, and rubbed the feeling back into her arms. The rope had printed her. Neat braided lines above and below her breasts, down her forearms, pink and deep. Those would be gone by morning. The rest would not.

The last time, it was Frank. On top of her, face to face, his gray-flecked head above hers and his weight on his elbows. He moved slow and deep, right to the end of her, and looked at her the whole time.

"You come back," he said. "You hear me? I don't care if it's a year. You come back."

"I'll always come back." She had her hands on his face. She was surprised to find she was crying again. "Don't you know that by now?"

She came with her eyes open, clenching around him in long hard pulses.

"Daddy," she said, with her hands on his face. Not a scream this time. She said it the way you say a true thing.

He shut his eyes. She watched it take him too.

## After

Nobody could stand up for quite a while.

They lay on the blue mats in a heap, all four of them, sweat cooling. Stu's head was on her stomach. Ray had her foot in his lap and was rubbing the arch with his thumb, out of pure habit. Frank lay on his back beside her with one arm over his eyes.

"I slept with my trainer," Iris said to the ceiling.

A pause.

"Any good?" Ray asked.

"He was fine. He was *correct*." She thought about it. "He kept looking at himself in the mirror."

Stu started laughing against her belly, and then Ray, and then Frank, a deep helpless wheeze, and then she was laughing too, so hard her sore stomach muscles cramped.

"Never again," she said. "I mean it. I don't know why I thought I could get this anywhere else."

"You can't," Frank said, from under his arm. He didn't sound proud. He sounded certain.

They ran the big steel tub for her afterward, hot this time, as hot as she liked. Before Ray would let her in he lifted her arms, one and then the other, and licked her armpits clean, slow and thorough, with his eyes shut, while she giggled and squirmed and Frank told him to get on with it. Then they put her in the water and washed her hair.

She floated with her head on the rim and her eyes shut and took stock. Her shoulders ached from the bar. Her inner thighs ached from the split. Her jaw would be stiff tomorrow.

And she was marked, everywhere a swimsuit would cover and nowhere it wouldn't. Frank's handprints, overlapping, across the whole of her ass, already darkening at the edges. Two ovals of teeth, one on each cheek. Ray's plum-colored bruises under her breasts. Frank's bite under her shoulder blade. The rope lines, fading already. Four blue thumbprints on her hips where they had held her up. Her wrists, when she lifted them out of the water, were perfectly clean.

Frank knelt by the tub with a jar of arnica and worked it into every one of them, slowly, with his thumbs.

"Too much?" he asked. He actually sounded worried. "The hands. Or the talk. That word."

"Exactly enough. All of it." She meant it. Out here, in the warm water, the word was just a word again, a thing they had picked up together and put down together. "I wanted somebody I trusted enough to say it to. That's you."

"You know none of us think..."

"I know exactly what you think of me, Frank. That's why it works." She caught his hand and kissed the palm that had done most of it. "You paid attention. All three of you. I asked for one thing and you spent a week on it."

Every mark was a place where somebody had wanted her too much to be polite about it. She would find them for days, in the shower, getting dressed, and each one would be a secret she got to keep.

*I'll go home,* she thought. *I'll pick up my daughter at noon and kiss my husband and make dinner, and I'll be glad to. I'll be better at all of it. Because for three hours somebody found me.*

It didn't feel like a betrayal. It never had. It felt like going to the well.

Stu untied the gold ribbon from her throat and used it to tie her ponytail back up, badly, and she left it the way he'd done it.

When she was dressed, coat buttoned over the wreck of the uniform, Frank went to the desk drawer and came back with something wrapped in brown paper.

"For the kid," he said gruffly. "Now that you're somebody's mother again."

It was a rattle. Hand-turned maple, sanded smooth as an egg, with three wooden rings on it. He had made it on the lathe in the shop.

"One from each of us," Ray said. "Stu did the rings."

"I did two rings," Stu said. "Frank fixed the third."

Iris stood there holding it. She had been spanked and strung up and filled from every direction for three hours and had not once felt as undone as she did right then.

"She'll love it," she managed. She kissed each of them, on the mouth, slowly. Frank last.

"See you in a year," he said.

Iris tucked the rattle into her coat pocket, next to her car keys. She picked up her pom-poms.

"Six months," she said. "I've got a nurse's outfit."