Iris, the Executive

Iris, the Executive

Book eight. Eight years on. Iris is 29. All other characters are above 18.

DISCLAIMER: There's depiction of breastfeeding, cheating, cucking, and CNC in this story. Please be warned.

Aisle

In March a publishing group in Chicago bought the firm Iris had spent six years building. By June she had an office on the forty-first floor of a tower on Michigan Avenue, with her name on the glass.

The group's flagship was Aisle, the bridal magazine every bride in America leaves open on her coffee table for a year. It needed somebody who knew what brides actually wanted, as opposed to what designers wished they wanted. Iris knew. She had planned four hundred weddings. She had been a bride herself. Once, over one long weekend, she had been a bride in five gowns in a basement, and nobody at Aisle would ever know how much that had taught her about what a dress was for.

They moved the family up in April. A big house in Lake Forest, under old oaks, with a yard for Nora, and the train into the Loop for Mark, who had found work at a firm on Wacker and took all of it the way he took everything: well. Most nights Iris was home for bath time. On the nights she wasn't, he didn't ask.

As it turned out, she knew exactly how to tell everyone to do exactly what she wanted. At the end of May they made her senior vice president. She was twenty-eight. Nobody that young had held the job before. The trade press said so, and her mother framed it.

She liked the power more than she had expected to. She liked walking into rooms where people had been waiting for her. She liked saying no and watching a forty-page feature die on a whiteboard. She liked her office: one wall of glass onto the floor, with blinds that dropped at the touch of a switch, the other all window, with the lake beyond it, gray and enormous. A white leather couch nobody else sat on. Down the hall was the fashion closet, a long cold room of rolling racks hung with every sample gown the magazine shot, and the key to it was on her ring. At the end of the corridor was the executive bathroom, marble and brass, with a lock on the door and usually nobody in it.

She dressed for it. Pencil skirts that held her hips and stopped at the knee. Silk blouses buttoned exactly as far as a senior vice president buttons them, over bras that cost more than her first car and lifted her into a deep, soft cleavage that only showed when she leaned over a layout. Seamed black stockings, and heels she could stand in for twelve hours. She had discovered that junior staff stopped talking when she glared at them.

There was one other thing nobody at Aisle knew. She was still nursing. She had been nearly weaned the year before, and at the very end she had found she didn't want to stop. She told her doctor so. Her doctor had heard stranger things; she put Iris on a hormone supplement and told her to pump. Now she was fuller than she had ever been. By noon her breasts were tight and aching under the silk. By three she was leaking through the pads. There was a pump in her bottom desk drawer and a lock on her office door, and she knew exactly who she was keeping it for. One of these days she'd catch a break long enough to drive two hours south, and be stuffed and milked.

And she looked at women now. It had started with Rosa, last summer, and it hadn't stopped. She caught herself at it in the elevator: an intern's legs, a model's bare back at a fitting, a stylist's ass in black jeans as she bent to a hem. She looked the way men had always looked at her, and she let herself.

In June, they hired Kandice.

---

She was the new assistant market editor on Iris's team. She was young, only twenty-three, but full of grit and determination: from London, with a first from somewhere with spires and two years at a fashion house in Mayfair. They had hired her over a dozen Americans on the strength of a forty-page memo about lace.

The first thing was that she was petite. Five foot one in flats, with a sharp black bob that swung at her chin, a pale oval face, and a mouth she kept very still. She dressed the way London girls dress to be taken seriously: black wool skirt to the knee, white shirt buttoned to the collar, a thin gold chain, black loafers. On the first day she called Iris Iris because she'd been told to. She visibly hated it, and went back to calling her nothing at all.

The second thing took Iris longer to notice. Kandice's body didn't match the way she dressed it. Under the white shirt were a pair of perfect D cups on that frame, pulling the buttons into strained little smiles, and in the gaps between them a glimpse of beige cotton and the shadowed line of her cleavage. A narrow waist. And under the plain black skirt, an ass entirely out of proportion to the rest of her, round, enticing and tight, the wool stretched smooth across it and the back vent pulled open an inch whenever she stood still. When she walked to the printer, men on the floor stopped talking. So did Iris. God, that ass.

She didn't seem to know. Or she knew, and had decided not to.

She was very good at her job. Quick, dry, polite. She had a voice like a radio announcer and said sorry when she meant you're wrong, and she was usually right. Iris liked her at once, and watched her more than she should have, and more than once caught herself picturing Kandice on her knees under the desk, looking up at her with that very still mouth gone wet.

On Kandice's desk there was a photograph in a silver frame. A green English lawn, a white marquee, horses in the background. A tall young man in polo whites and brown riding boots, sunburnt, a mallet over one shoulder and his other arm round Kandice. Kandice in a floral tea dress, a wide straw hat and pearls, holding a glass of something with fruit in it. It looked like an advertisement for the English upper classes.

"Who's that?" Iris asked, the first week.

"Oliver." The faintest flush. "My boyfriend. That's his family's place in Gloucestershire. He's at the bank on LaSalle; they moved him over in the spring, and I followed." A pause. "He's lovely."

"I'm sure he is," said Iris.

She met him that Friday in the lobby, when he came to collect Kandice. He stood up when Iris came out of the elevator, though he had no idea who she was. He shook her hand, called her Mrs. and apologized for not knowing what came after it, asked whether she had far to go, and held the door for both of them. Beautiful manners. A handsome, open face. Kandice, on his arm, never once looked at Iris.

He makes love to her with the lights off, Iris thought, watching them go down the steps to a waiting car. He asks if she's all right.

She knew the look on Kandice's face. She had worn it for years, beside Mark.

---

The Executive Bathroom

A week later. A Thursday, and a long one: a cover meeting that ran through lunch, a designer in tears at three. By four Iris was so full she could feel her pulse in her breasts. She took her key and went down the corridor to the executive bathroom to deal with it in private.

The door wasn't locked.

She pushed it open and stopped.

Kandice was at the far end, by the window, facing the long marble counter and the mirror over it. She was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with her black skirt rucked around her waist, her tights and a pair of plain white cotton panties shoved down around one ankle, her knees wide. Her white shirt hung open, every button undone, and her bra was shoved up into her armpits, a plain beige sensible thing, so that her tits were bare beneath it, and they were heavier than Iris had guessed: full, firm and very white against the beige, a great deal of woman on that small frame.

She was bare between her legs, and wet, and close. Her thighs kept clenching and falling open again, her bare toes, painted a demure pale pink, gripping the tile, her belly jumping. In one hand, buzzing faintly, pressed hard to her clit, was a brushed-silver cylinder the size of a lipstick. With the other she had a nipple between finger and thumb, dark and stiff, and was pinching it, twisting it, harder than Iris would have guessed she dared.

Iris knew it. She had the same one in the zipped inside pocket of her bag, and had for eight years.

Kandice's eyes came up in the mirror and met hers.

Neither of them moved. The vibrator hummed. Kandice's mouth was open, and she had gone red from her hairline down her throat to the tops of her swinging tits. Her thighs were shaking. Iris understood that she was very close, and that being walked in on hadn't stopped it. It had made it worse.

Iris let the door swing shut behind her.

She went to the sink at the near end of the counter and put her bag down. She ran the water and washed her hands with the good soap, taking her time, and dried them on a linen towel. Then she took out her lipstick, leaned in to the mirror, and did her mouth in the true bright red, upper lip and then lower.

A few feet down the counter, in the mirror, Kandice hadn't moved, and neither had her hand. She was too tense, too close. The hum went on. Iris could hear her breathing.

Iris pressed her lips together, checked her teeth, capped the lipstick and picked up her bag. On her way to the door, without looking round, she said, in the voice she used to end meetings:

"Don't stop on my account."

She went out.

She was halfway down the corridor when she heard it through the door. A short, high, strangled cry, and then a thump, like a palm slapped flat on marble.

In her office she dropped the blinds and locked the door. She sat on the white couch with her blouse open and her bra pulled down, and pumped with her eyes shut, and thought about nothing else at all.

---

The next morning Kandice brought the proofs in at nine, the way she did every morning, and stopped a step inside the door.

Iris's bag stood open on the desk. Beside it on the blotter, where anyone could see it, lay a brushed-silver cylinder the size of a lipstick.

Kandice looked at it. Then at Iris. She went red to the throat.

Iris didn't look up from the layout she was marking. "Does yours have a name?"

Kandice opened her mouth, and closed it. "No," she said at last. "Does yours?"

"Frank Jr." Iris picked it up, turned it once in her fingers, and zipped it back into the inside pocket of her bag. "Proofs."

Kandice put the proofs on the desk and went out without a word. Iris watched her through the glass all the way back to her desk, and didn't get a single thing done until lunch.

---

Red Pen

She started with the work.

Kandice's layouts came to her every evening for sign-off, and Iris began sending them back. Not with notes. With a red pen, straight through the page. Sloppy. No. Again. Is this what they let you do in London? Kandice redid every one of them. They came back better. Iris sent them back anyway. Once she wrote Do it properly or don't bother sending it to me. Once she drew a single red line across a whole spread and wrote nothing at all.

Kandice never complained. When she was summoned she came in, stood in front of the desk with her hands clasped behind her, and took it. Iris spoke to her the way she spoke to nobody else on the floor. Quietly. Cruelly. I don't know what you think you're for. I don't pay you to be pretty. Kandice stood with her chin up while the color climbed out of her collar, and said sorry, Iris, and didn't move.

Afterward, Kandice always disappeared for a while. Ten minutes, sometimes twenty. Iris would look up from a layout and find her desk empty, her cardigan on the back of her chair, and then she would be back as if nothing had happened, a little pink, very composed. Iris had a fair idea where she went. She had walked in on it once.

It was the third week, and nearly ten at night, before Iris noticed what she'd been looking at. The floor was empty except for the two of them. The cleaners had been and gone. When Iris called her in over the April spread and took it apart page by page, there was nowhere for Kandice to disappear to afterward, and nobody to hide it from.

Kandice's thighs. Squeezed together under the black wool skirt, the tights whispering as they rubbed, and squeezed tighter every time Iris said something worse. Her weight shifting from one loafer to the other. Her breathing.

Oh, Iris thought. Look at you.

She put down her pen.

"Come here."

Kandice came round the desk. Iris stayed in her chair and looked her over, head to foot, the way she'd look at a gown on a rail. Then she took the hem of the black skirt between finger and thumb and lifted it, inch by inch, until she could see the tops of Kandice's thighs above her tights, and the dark wet patch spreading across the gusset.

Kandice whimpered. She didn't move.

"Look at the state of you," Iris said softly. "Every time I tell you you're useless. Every single time." She let the skirt drop. "Go back to your desk. And next time you come in here, I don't want to see tights."

She didn't. The next morning Kandice came in bare-legged under the black skirt, with the air conditioning on high. Iris called her in twice before lunch for nothing, and watched her stand there shivering and wet, gooseflesh up her bare shins.

---

The fashion closet came next. Technically it was work.

The January issue had a lingerie feature, "What's Under the Gown," and Kandice was producing it. Twenty sample sets had come in from the houses and hung in tissue on a rack at the end of the closet, and somebody had to check the fit on a body before the shoot.

"You're about a sample size," Iris said. "Up top, anyway. Go and put the Chantal on."

Kandice stared at her.

"Now."

Iris waited outside the curtain with her arms folded. When Kandice pulled it back, Iris didn't say anything.

The set was ivory. A balconette of Leavers lace over nude tulle, so fine the lace looked drawn on her skin. It was cut low, and it pressed her together into a soft, shadowed cleft Iris could look straight down into, the scalloped edge sitting just above her nipples, and the nipples showing through the tulle as two hard dark points. A high-cut brief in the same lace, sheer at the front, the smooth bare mound of her showing through the flowers. A narrow garter belt, its suspenders hanging loose against her thighs with nothing to clip to.

Kandice stood very straight, hands at her sides, the way she stood in front of Iris's desk.

Iris walked round her. Years ago she had watched a corsetière in Barcelona circle a bride like this, as if the woman were a dress form. She lifted the left strap with one finger and let it settle. She ran a knuckle along the scalloped edge of the cup, over the plump swell above it, and felt Kandice stop breathing. She put a palm on the small of Kandice's back and pushed until she arched. Then she stood behind her and studied her ass in the brief: the lace pulled tight across the curve of each cheek and biting in at the crease beneath, where they met her thighs.

"The back's wrong," she said at last. "It's riding up."

It wasn't. She hooked a finger into the leg of the brief anyway and drew it down along the crease, until her knuckle rested against the hot wet place underneath. Then she tapped her, right on top of her clit, twice.

Kandice shut her eyes.

"Oh dear," Iris murmured in her ear. "You've ruined the sample."

She took her hand away and went to the door. From there she looked back: Kandice in ivory lace in the middle of the closet, among the racks of white gowns, shaking, her mouth open.

"Take it off. Put it in my desk drawer. I'll have it charged to your department."

She stayed in the doorway long enough to watch Kandice reach behind her with shaking hands for the hooks, and the lace peel away from her skin, and then she went.

That night the ivory brief lay folded in tissue in her drawer, beside the pump. The gusset was still damp.

---

Proofs

The January issue closed on a Thursday. By half past nine the floor was dark and the cleaners had gone. Kandice brought in the last of the proofs. Iris told her to shut the door, and dropped the blinds.

"Put them on the desk."

Kandice did. Iris got up and came round to stand in front of her. In heels she was a head taller.

"Up." She gestured at the desk.

"Sorry?"

Iris took her by the waist and lifted her onto the edge of the desk, on top of the proofs. She weighed almost nothing. Kandice's palms came down flat on the glossy pages, and under the black skirt her knees pressed together.

"Open them."

Kandice looked up at her, eyes black and enormous. She opened her knees.

The skirt rode up her bare thighs. There was nothing under it.

Iris looked at what she'd been given. A smooth bare cunt, plump and pink, already swollen, the lips parted and glistening, a slick of wet down the soft inside of each thigh. She had come to work like that. She had sat at her desk all day like that, walked past the printer, stood in the elevator.

Then the smell reached her. It rose off Kandice the moment her knees parted, a whole day of it, sharp and sweet and salty, filling the space between them. Iris had been catching it across the desk for an hour. Now she bent down. She didn't touch. She put her nose an inch from that swollen cunt, shut her eyes and breathed in, deep, the way you'd breathe in a rose, and above her Kandice whimpered.

"You stink," Iris said. "Do you know that? You've sat out there all day smelling like this. Everyone who walked past your desk." Another breath. "Like a bitch in heat."

She straightened up.

"You came to work with no knickers on."

"You said..."

"I said no tights. I didn't say come in here and spread your cunt on my proofs like a whore." Two fingers under Kandice's chin, tilting it up. "Did I?"

Kandice's breath shuddered out of her. "No."

"No, what?"

"No, Iris."

"Look at you." Iris let go of her chin. She slid her hands past Kandice's smooth, silky thighs and pushed, and Kandice let them fall open until her knee touched the edge of the desk. "A senior VP's office. Your boyfriend's photo on your desk out there. And you're dripping on my January issue."

She pushed two fingers into her.

No warning. Kandice was so wet they slid in to the knuckle at once. Her whole body jerked, and she clapped a hand over her mouth.

Iris kept them there and felt her clench, hot and fluttering. Over the top of the hand she watched her face: cheeks blazing, eyes squeezed shut, the black bob stuck to one temple.

"Take your hand off your mouth."

She did.

"Now tell me what you are."

"I don't..."

Iris curled her fingers and dragged them along the front wall of her. Kandice's back came off the desk.

"Tell me what you are, Kandice."

"A... I'm a slut." A whisper, in that cut-glass accent, and her cunt clamped down so hard that Iris felt it to the wrist. "A filthy, disgusting slut. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

There it is, Iris thought.

So she fucked her with her fingers. Hard, deep, the heel of her hand grinding on the swollen clit. And she talked the whole time. Disgrace. Office slut. You'll spread your legs for anyone who's mean to you, won't you? Look at the mess. That's going to the printer like that. Every word went into Kandice like another finger. She came drumming her heels against the side of the desk, both fists tearing at the proofs, her mouth wide open on a silent scream. She gushed. It spilled hot over Iris's wrist and onto the glossy pages.

Iris drew her fingers out and held them up, shining, in front of Kandice's face.

"Clean them."

Kandice sucked them clean to the knuckle, eyes on Iris's, moaning round them.

Then Iris picked up the red pen. She opened the white shirt button by button and shoved the beige bra up, and Kandice's tits tumbled out over the cotton, flushed pink across the tops from coming, the nipples dark and so hard they looked painful. Across the soft skin above them she wrote, in capitals:

SLOPPY.

And underneath, smaller:

See me.

"Button up," she said. "Go home to Oliver."

---

After that, things moved quickly.

Every morning Kandice left her knickers in Iris's desk drawer. She wore them in, took them off in the executive bathroom at nine, and brought them to Iris's office still warm. At six she came back for them and said thank you. Before handing them over, Iris lifted them out of the drawer, held the gusset to her face and breathed in, watching Kandice over the cotton for as long as she liked. "Put them on," she'd say. "Here. In front of me." And Kandice stepped into them, damp and cold and smelling of herself, and went home to Oliver.

Kandice's silver vibrator, it turned out, came with a remote. Iris made her wear it through the Monday editorial meeting. She sat at the head of the table with her thumb on the remote in her jacket pocket, talking about the March cover, while halfway down the table Kandice took notes with a face like stone and pressed her knees together until her pen went through the paper. When someone asked Kandice a question, Iris turned it up. Kandice answered. Her voice cracked on the last word, and only there.

And Iris wrote on her. Every time. Lipstick now, not pen. Across her tits, down her belly, high on the inside of her thigh where the skirt would hide it. OFFICE SLUT. SVP'S PROPERTY. SORRY IRIS. An arrow pointing down. Kandice wore it under her buttoned shirt through meetings, through lunch with the accessories editors, through Oliver collecting her at six on Friday. On Monday it was still there, faded. She hadn't washed it off all weekend.

Iris got meaner, and found she had a gift for it. For eight years three men had called her every name there was. She knew them all, and she knew which ones went deepest. She tried them on Kandice one at a time, like going through a rack of dresses, and watched what each one did.

Slut made her wet. Whore made her shake. Useless filled her eyes. And disgrace, said very low, with Kandice's face pressed to the window and forty-one floors of air below her, made her come without being touched.

---

Full

On Wednesday Iris was in back-to-back meetings from eight o'clock and never got a minute to pump.

By four she was in agony. Her breasts were swollen and full of milk inside her bra, so hard it was almost painful, hot and aching up into her armpits. On the walk back to her office she felt the pads give, and when she glanced down there were two dark round stains spreading through the pale blue silk of her blouse.

Kandice looked up from her desk and saw.

Iris stopped. She looked at the stains, then at Kandice. She thought about the pump in her drawer, and then she thought about something else.

"My office. Now."

She dropped the blinds, locked the door and sat down on the white couch. Kandice stood in front of her with her hands behind her back. Iris unbuttoned the blouse. It had stuck to her where she'd leaked, and she peeled it away. Then the bra: ivory silk with a front clasp, soaked through at both tips. She unhooked it and drew the cups away one at a time, the wet silk clinging before it let go.

Kandice had never seen her tits. Iris watched her see them now.

They were bigger than they had ever been: full, heavy and creamy, filled with milk she kept specifically for depravities such as this, resting their weight on her ribs. The skin was stretched shiny, threaded with blue. The nipples were wide and rose red and standing out stiff, with white beads already welling at the tips. While Kandice stared, one bead swelled, broke, and ran down the under-curve of the left one in a thin white line.

Kandice's lips had come apart, and Iris obliged.

"I've been full since lunch," Iris said. "I need emptying. Come here."

She pulled Kandice down across her lap by the wrist, so that she lay on her back on the couch with her head in the crook of Iris's left arm. Then she cupped one of her swollen and heavy breasts in her palm, lifted it, and brought the nipple to Kandice's mouth.

"Drink."

Kandice's lips closed round it, and she pulled.

The relief was so sudden Iris gasped out loud. A deep, hot, aching draw from behind her breastbone, and then the let-down, a rush she could feel, and Kandice's throat working. She drank in long, desperate swallows. Milk ran from the corner of her mouth and down her cheek into her hair. Her eyes were closed. Both her hands had come up to pull that ripe milky pillow against her face, as if someone might take it away.

"Good," Iris said softly. "That's it. All of it."

She slid her free hand under the black skirt, and Kandice's thighs fell open at once. She was soaked. Iris pushed two fingers into her and set her thumb on her clit and rubbed in time with the pull at her nipple. The milk went out of her, and the ache with it, and she watched Kandice's face. She had never seen anyone so happy.

When the left was empty she moved Kandice to the right. Kandice whimpered as the nipple left her mouth, then latched onto the other like someone drowning and drank harder. Her hips were working against Iris's fingers now, and she moaned round the nipple, high and broken and continuous.

She came while she was busy sucking and nursing. She arched clean off Iris's lap. Her cunt locked on Iris's fingers, her mouth came off the nipple with a gasp, milk spattered across her face, and a word escaped her before she could stop it.

"Mommy..."

Iris went still.

Kandice's eyes flew open. She looked horrified. Her face was wet with milk and tears, she was still coming, still pulsing round Iris's fingers, and she had heard herself. Her mouth opened to take it back.

Iris didn't let her. She took her hand out from between Kandice's legs, took her chin instead, and held her face close, and studied it.

Then she put the nipple back in her mouth.

"Again," she said. "Say it again."

Kandice drank, and came again, and said it again.

Afterward Iris uncapped the lipstick and wrote one word across her belly, where the white shirt would cover it in the morning. MOMMY'S. Kandice lay in her lap and read it upside down, and didn't say anything at all, and didn't need to.

---

Under the Desk

The following week, the fashion closet again. Iris in a cream silk blouse and the gray pencil skirt, with nothing under the skirt. Kandice in the Chantal, the ivory lace, which Iris had bought outright from the house and which now lived in her drawer.

Iris had her kneel on the hard floor between two racks of wedding gowns, hands behind her back, white skirts brushing her shoulders on both sides. Then she hitched the gray skirt up over her hips and stood over her.

Kandice looked up into Iris's cunt, bare and swollen and wet, a foot from her face. On the inside of Iris's thigh were red letters she had written on herself that morning. SIT ON IT.

"On your back," said Iris.

Kandice lay down among the hems of a hundred thousand dollars of couture, the Chantal's lace rising and falling fast over her chest, her nipples dark through the tulle. Iris stepped over her and lowered herself onto her face.

She rode her face. One hand on a rack of gowns for balance, she ground down on Kandice's open mouth, heavy, rocking from chin to nose and back, and felt that clever tongue scramble to keep up. She wasn't gentle. She sat her full weight down. She heard Kandice choke and gasp and keep licking. Reaching back without looking, she found Kandice's hand already busy between her own legs, and slapped it away.

"Did I say you could? You don't touch it. You don't come. You're a chair."

A muffled sob, and Kandice licked harder.

Iris came with her head thrown back into a cloud of tulle, grinding down, thighs clamped over Kandice's ears. Afterward she didn't get up. She stayed sitting there until Kandice's face was red and smeared to the eyebrows and her obedient hands lay trembling at her sides on the floor.

Then she let her up, looked at her, and laughed.

"Go and wash your face. You look like what you are."

---

But it was the call she thought about for weeks.

Every other Thursday at five the group's CEO rang each title for a numbers call, and it always ran long. Iris took it on speaker at her desk with the blinds down, because she liked to walk while she talked. That Thursday she didn't walk.

She sat in her big leather chair with her skirt round her waist and her heels braced on the edge of the desk drawer. Kandice was underneath.

"Print's up eleven for Q3," Iris said, "and digital's where we want it. I'll send you the deck tonight."

Under the desk, Kandice was eating her. Wet and careful, palms flat on the carpet because she'd been told not to use her hands. Long strokes from bottom to top, then circling, then sucking, exactly as Iris had taught her that week. Which was to say, exactly as Frank did it.

"No, the March cover's fine. We shot it last week."

Without looking down, Iris wound her fingers into Kandice's hair and held her mouth against her clit.

The CEO talked about paper costs for six minutes. Iris said mm and right and that's fair, and kept hold of the hair. The tongue never stopped. She felt the orgasm climb through the ad revenue and the subscriber churn, and when it came she sat perfectly still, face composed, eyes on the speakerphone, while it pulsed through her in long silent waves and her toes curled in her shoes. When the CEO paused she said:

"Absolutely. You'll have it by morning."

She hung up and pushed her chair back. Kandice crawled out from under the desk on her hands and knees, mouth and chin shining, her bob a ruin.

"Good," said Iris. "Now get on the desk. Your turn."

---

The Harness

She ordered it from the shop Rosa used. She knew the name because she had asked, last summer, lying across Rosa's bed with her throat still marked. Rosa had told her, amused, as if she'd always known that one day Iris would want the address.

It came to the office in a plain box marked samples. Black, with wide soft straps that sat high on the hips and buckled at each side, and an O-ring at the front. And the cock that went in it. Iris took it out of its tissue at her desk with the door locked and sat holding it. Thick and heavy, a rich dark brown, veined like a real one, with a curve she knew from experience would drag over exactly the right place. It was nearly Frank's size.

She waited for a Friday. Oliver was in New York, and the floor was empty by seven.

She called Kandice in, dropped the blinds and locked the door. She didn't say anything. She unzipped the gray pencil skirt beside the desk, let it fall and stepped out of it. Blouse, seamed black stockings on a black lace garter belt, heels. Nothing else. While Kandice watched, she picked the harness up off the couch, stepped into it and drew it up her thighs. She buckled it tight at each hip and settled the cock in the ring. It stood out from her, thick and dark and curved against the white of her belly.

Kandice was staring at it. She didn't seem able to look at anything else.

"Skirt off," said Iris. "Shirt open. Bend over the desk."

Kandice folded herself over the edge with her cheek on the glass. The open shirt fell away to either side, and her tits pressed flat and spilled out sideways against the cold surface. Six inches from her face stood the photograph of Oliver in his polo whites. Iris had carried it in from Kandice's desk that afternoon and set it beside the phone.

Iris stood behind her and took her time.

That ass, bare now and arched up for her, so pale it nearly glowed under the desk lamp. The cheeks parted just enough to show the tight dark pucker and, below it, the pink split of her cunt, swollen and already a little open. Iris took a cheek in each hand and spread them. Kandice's cunt opened wider, and a drop of wet gathered and fell to the carpet.

"Look at Oliver," Iris said.

Kandice turned her face to the photograph.

Iris took the cock in her fist and dragged the fat head of it through her, clit to hole and back, painting it. Kandice pushed back for it. Iris slapped her ass hard and watched the print come up red.

"Did I say you could move?"

"No, Iris."

Then she spanked her properly.

Frank had spanked her for eight years, and she knew how it was done. Fingers together, palm a little cupped, the swing from the shoulder and not the wrist. Right cheek. Left. Right. Steady and unhurried, while Kandice lay over the desk beside the photograph and took it. Her soft, plump ass jumped under every blow and shook after it. It went pink, then red, then a deep hot scarlet, handprint over handprint, until Iris could feel the heat coming off it before her palm landed. Kandice counted without being told. At twelve she was crying. By twenty she was up on her toes in her stockinged feet, pushing back for it, dripping onto the carpet.

"Does he do this?" Crack. "Your Oliver?"

"No..."

"Does he know you want it?" Crack. "Does he know what you are?" Crack.

"No..."

"No," Iris agreed, and set the head of the strap to her hole and pressed.

Only pressed. Kandice's lips spread around it, stretching, the pink going white at the rim, and stopped. She was gasping. Iris leaned there and let her feel the size of it. Then she took Kandice's hips in both hands and pushed in, inch by inch, until the harness sat flat against that scarlet ass and Kandice was full to the root and keening against the glass.

So this is what Rosa felt.

It went through Iris like a drink. She had been fucked a thousand times. She had never been the one doing it, with a woman's whole body open and stretched around her, the one who decided. She drew back and watched the dark shaft come out shining, Kandice's cunt clinging to it, trying to keep it. Then she drove it home. Kandice slid forward on the desk, her hard nipples dragging on the glass.

She found she knew how. Three experts had been doing it to her for eight years, and she gave it to Kandice the way it had been given to her. Long, hard, deliberate strokes, all the way out and all the way in, her hips cracking into that ass so it rippled. One hand pinned Kandice's neck down beside the photograph. The other was wound in the black bob, pulling.

"Look at him," she said. "Look at him while I fuck you. Tell him."

"Oliver..." Kandice gasped at the photograph. "Oliver, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..."

"Tell him what you are."

"I'm a slut. I'm her slut. I'm getting fucked over her desk like a slut and I love it, I love it, I'm sorry..."

She came screaming. Iris felt it even through the harness, the clench and shove of her, and didn't slow down. She fucked her straight through it into a second one. On the third Kandice gushed so hard it ran down both their thighs and spattered Iris's shoes.

Iris pulled out. Kandice sagged across the desk, shaking, her cheek in a puddle of her own drool beside the silver frame.

Iris unbuckled the harness, stepped out of it and left it lying on the couch. Then she reached past Kandice, uncapped the lipstick and drew one small red heart on the glass of the photograph, over Oliver's smiling face.

She left it there for Kandice to find in the morning, and to decide what to do about.

---

The bathroom, a week later, was her own idea, and she thought it was her best.

Late afternoon. She caught Kandice in the corridor, steered her into the executive bathroom with a palm at the small of her back, locked the door and turned her to face the long mirror over the marble.

"You remember this room," Iris said in her ear.

In the mirror, Kandice's eyes said she did.

Iris took out the lipstick, leaned past her and wrote across the glass, over Kandice's reflection, in big backward letters that read true in the mirror:

WHAT ARE YOU?

"You'll answer that," she said. "When you can."

Then she put her on her back on the counter.

It ran the length of the wall, long and wide and cold, and Kandice fitted on it with room to spare. Iris laid her out with her head at the window end and pushed the black skirt up round her waist. She opened the white shirt, pulled the knickers down over her shoes and dropped them in the sink. Then she hitched up her own gray skirt. There was nothing under it. There had been nothing under it all afternoon, through two meetings. Kandice saw that, and saw how wet she was, and moaned.

Iris climbed onto the marble and knelt astride her face, looking down the length of her body.

And sat.

Not the way she had in the fashion closet. All the way down, all her weight, her thighs closing round Kandice's head, her cunt sealing over mouth and nose. Kandice's body jolted under her. Iris ground down and rode her rough and heavy, chin to the bridge of the nose and back. She felt the nose bump over her clit and the mouth working beneath her, licking because there was nothing else it could do.

She leaned forward, her heavy tits swinging inside her blouse, and pushed Kandice's knees apart.

"Wider."

Blind, Kandice spread them.

Iris spanked her cunt. Flat fingers on the bare swollen lips, a wet sharp crack. Kandice bucked so hard that Iris had to grab the edge of the counter. Then the secret skin high on the inside of the left thigh. The right. The cunt again. Kandice screamed into her at each one, and each scream went straight up into Iris and made her grind harder. The pale insides of the thighs striped pink with finger marks. The cunt went red and fat and hot.

Then three fingers, with no warning. To the knuckle, hooked. She fucked her with them hard and fast, the wet noise loud in the marble room, her palm smacking the swollen lips on every stroke. And all the while she sat on Kandice's face and didn't let her breathe.

She counted. She always counted. At ten she lifted her hips an inch.

Kandice dragged in air like a sob.

"Look in the mirror," said Iris. "Read it."

Kandice rolled her eyes sideways to the glass, wet to the brows, mouth smeared, Iris's thighs either side of her face. "What are..." she gasped. "What are you..."

Iris sat back down.

Again. And again. Ten, up, a breath, read it, down. Her fingers never stopped, and every few strokes her other hand came down flat and wet on Kandice's clit. Kandice's legs shook. Her heels skidded on the marble. Her hips came up off the counter to meet the fingers, and her mouth had given up licking. It was just open now, sucking and moaning, and Iris felt every sound go up through her own body.

The third time Iris sat down, Kandice came. She bowed up off the marble and locked tight round Iris's fingers, and squirted, a hot hard gush over Iris's wrist and forearm and onto the counter. She screamed straight up into Iris with nowhere for it to go.

Iris came on that. Grinding down on the screaming mouth, both hands braced on the marble, head up, she watched herself in the long mirror. Flushed face. Hair coming down. Blouse soaking where the milk had let down. And her girl beneath her, pinned and spread and dripping between her thighs. Iris watched herself come and held it as long as it lasted, and a breath longer, and lifted off.

Kandice lay gasping on the marble, soaked from hairline to throat, eyes streaming.

"Answer it," said Iris.

Kandice's mouth opened. Only breath came out.

So Iris uncapped the lipstick again, leaned over her, and wrote the answer on the mirror underneath:

IRIS'S.

---

Barcelona

Bridal fashion week was in the middle of September, and Aisle sent four people. Kandice booked the travel. When Iris looked at the itinerary, she saw one hotel room between the two of them.

She said nothing about it. Neither did Kandice.

They flew overnight. The hotel was on the Passeig de Gràcia, old and grand, its balconies hanging over the plane trees. The room had one enormous bed and a floor-to-ceiling window looking down the avenue toward the old city. Kandice stood just inside the door with her bag still in her hand. She looked at the bed, then at Iris, and said nothing at all.

"Pronovias is at three," said Iris. "Before that, there's someone I want you to meet."

---

Montse's atelier was in El Born, up two flights of worn stone stairs: a long white room under a skylight. Silk and lace in bolts to the ceiling. A cutting table. A row of dress forms in half-finished things. In the middle of the floor, under the light, stood a round fitting box like a little stage, with a tall mirror on a stand beside it.

Iris had known Montse six years. Montse was the corsetière she'd watched circle a bride as if the woman were a dress form. Montserrat Vidal made lingerie for half the brides in Catalonia and a fair number in New York, all by hand and to measure. She was forty-six, tall and lean, her short dark hair silver at the temples. Linen trousers, a black shirt with the sleeves rolled, a yellow tape round her neck and a row of pins in her lapel. She kissed Iris on both cheeks and held her at arm's length to look at her. Then she looked past her at Kandice in the doorway, and smiled.

"So this is the one."

"This is the one," said Iris. "She needs something made."

"For what?"

"Tonight."

Montse raised an eyebrow and looked Kandice up and down, the way Iris had in the fashion closet. "Then I had better measure her properly. Undress, please."

Kandice looked at Iris.

"You heard her," Iris said. Then, more quietly, because this was new and Kandice hadn't asked for it: "Do you want her to?"

Kandice looked at Montse. At the long hands, the tape, the pins. She swallowed.

"Yes."

She undressed in the middle of the white room under the skylight while the two older women watched. Blouse. Skirt. The sensible beige bra, which made Montse wince. Knickers. Then she stood naked with her hands at her sides, and Iris saw her through Montse's eyes. Petite and firm, too busty for her frame, round-hipped. That ass. That bare smooth cunt. And across her belly, the faded red ghost of MOMMY'S. Montse read it, glanced at Iris, and the corner of her mouth went up.

"Up," she said, pointing at the box.

Kandice stepped onto it.

Montse unhooked the tape from her neck. "Arms up. Hold still. If you move, I will prick you. I'm not careful with pins, with girls who move."

She measured her the slow way.

Round the ribs first, under the arms, the tape cool and snug, Montse's knuckles grazing the sides of her breasts. Then under them, where the band would sit, drawn up tight into the soft crease so their weight rested on it. Then over the fullest part, straight across both nipples. Montse pulled it a fraction tighter than it needed to be and held it there to read the number. The yellow tape pressed into two stiff dark points. Kandice's breath stuttered.

"Thirty-four D. Very firm. So perky! Look at that, Iris. Those won't need much holding."

"No," said Iris, at Montse's shoulder. "They're perfect. She hides them."

"Of course she does. In that bra." Montse let the tape go and brushed the backs of her fingers over the left nipple, as if testing a fabric. Kandice whimpered.

Waist. Hips. The fullest part of the ass took longer. Montse turned her to face the mirror and stood behind her, tape round the highest curve of her ass, both hands resting there. She studied it in the glass, then said something in Catalan that made Iris laugh.

"What did she say?" Kandice asked faintly.

"That you've got a backside like a peach in August," said Iris, "and it's wasted on the English."

The top of each thigh. Montse knelt for that. She passed the tape between Kandice's legs, round the left thigh, and drew it snug right up into the crease. While she read the number her knuckles lay against the bare lips of Kandice's cunt. She left them there.

"She's wet," Montse remarked to Iris, as she might mention rain. "Through my tape."

"She's always wet," said Iris. "She's a slut. Aren't you."

"Yes," Kandice whispered, arms in the air.

Then the muslin, and a length of black Leavers lace with a scalloped edge. Montse draped and pinned them straight onto her body. A cup shaped round each breast, pinned in a line beneath, every pin going in half an inch from her skin. Kandice stood rigid through it, trembling, eyes on Montse's hands. A brief pinned at each hip. Montse knelt again to shape the front, pinned it, then laid her fingers flat on the muslin over Kandice's mound and pressed.

"Here," she said, "will be open. No fabric. You understand? For tonight."

"Yes."

Montse's fingers went through the place where the fabric wouldn't be, and into her.

Kandice jerked. A pin bit her and she cried out.

"Still," said Montse calmly. "I told you."

Iris stepped onto the edge of the box behind her and slid two fingers into her mouth, deep, over the tongue.

"Shh," she said in her ear. "Hold still for her. There's a good slut."

So she held still. Arms raised, stuck all over with pins, two of Iris's fingers in her mouth. Two of Montse's worked in and out of her through the gap in the muslin, and Montse's thumb made small expert circles on her clit while she discussed seams with Iris in Catalan. Kandice sucked Iris's fingers and moaned round them and didn't move. In the mirror Iris watched the muslin, the black lace, the pins, the red letters, the tears on Kandice's face, and the stillness most of all. She had never seen anything so beautiful.

Kandice came standing up, every muscle locked, sucking so hard it hurt. She came on Montse's hand, and Montse held her through it, watching her face. "Mira," she murmured. "Mira, qué bonita."

Then Montse took her hand back, stood, and wiped her fingers on her linen trousers.

"Seven o'clock," she said to Iris. "Your hotel." And to Kandice, as she started unpinning her: "Next time you'll come on your own. Without her. I think you will."

---

The set arrived at ten to seven in a flat box, wrapped in black tissue and tied with silk.

Black Leavers lace over oxblood silk, so dark it read as black until the light caught it and turned it the color of old wine. A wired quarter-cup bra that lifted her breasts from underneath, crushed them together into a deep, plump cleavage, and left them bare from the nipple up, sitting high on the scalloped lace. A high-waisted brief that cinched her to the navel and curved down over her hips. And at the front, where it should have covered her, an oval of nothing, edged in silk, framing her bare cunt. A narrow oxblood garter belt. Seamed black stockings.

Iris dressed her in it herself. She fastened the bra and lifted each one into its cup by hand, feeling the weight settle into her palm, and arranged it. She clipped the stockings. Then she turned Kandice round and looked: the ass cinched and framed in lace, the open oval at the front, the dark nipples standing up out of the scallops. For a moment she couldn't speak.

Then she put a black slip dress over it, knee-length, and took her to dinner.

---

The Word

They ate late, as everyone does in Barcelona, side by side on high stools at a marble bar near the cathedral. Kandice hardly touched her food. She sat with her knees pressed together under the slip dress, knowing what she had on beneath it and what wasn't there at the front, and every time she shifted on the stool she colored.

Halfway down the second glass of wine, she started to talk.

About the videos, first. Eyes on her plate, voice careful, she told Iris what she'd typed into the search bar at nineteen, at twenty, at twenty-two, alone in her flat in Clapham with the curtains drawn. The rough ones. The ones where nobody asked. Then the books: a whole shelf that Oliver took for historical romances, the bookmarks always falling open at the same pages. Then the executive bathroom, before Iris ever walked in on her. Three times a day, since her second week. Ever since Iris had said sloppy to her in a meeting and she'd had to go and kneel on the bathroom floor.

And then Oliver.

"He's lovely," she said. "He's so lovely. He holds me afterwards and asks if it was all right. He has never once..." She stopped. "I asked him to pull my hair once. Once. He was so upset. He thought someone had hurt me."

Iris didn't answer. She was eighteen again on a narrow dorm bed, a laptop on the pillow, a poster of a truck on the ceiling.

"I want what's in the videos," Kandice said to her plate, almost too quietly to hear. "I want you to... I want to be raped. Not really. You know. I want you to do it like you mean it, and call it that. I want to be used like a thing, like a doll, like I'm nothing. I want someone to say it to my face. I've never said that out loud to anyone in my life."

Under the bar, Iris put a hand on her knee and kept it there.

"Then listen," she said. "This is the only thing I'm going to say nicely to you tonight. There's a word. Red. You say red, I stop. Whatever I'm doing, instantly. No questions, no sulking. And I will never be angry that you said it. Anything else, no, stop, please don't, I'll take as part of it, and I won't stop. Do you understand?"

Kandice looked up. Her pupils had swallowed her eyes.

"Red," she repeated.

"Say it back properly."

"If I say red, you stop."

"Good." Iris took her hand away and signaled for the check. "Now finish your wine."

---

The room was dark when they came in, but the window was full of the street: lamps along the Passeig, the plane trees, the lit balconies opposite, people still strolling below at midnight.

Iris left the lights off. She locked the door, took Kandice by the nape, walked her across the room and pushed her face-first into the glass.

"Hands on the window."

Kandice raised them flat on either side of her face.

Iris dragged the slip dress up over her head and dropped it. There she was in Montse's oxblood and black lace, against the window, the city under her. Her bare tits squashed against the cold glass, spilling out over the lace. The open oval at the front pressed to the pane. Anyone on a balcony across the way, anyone glancing up from the pavement, could see her.

Iris went to her case, stepped out of her own dress, buckled on the harness and came back.

No warming up. She set the strap to her from behind, gripped her hips and drove it in to the root in one long brutal push. Kandice hit the window and the glass rattled in its frame.

"That's what you wanted," Iris said behind her. "Isn't it, you filthy slut? Your face on a window in the middle of Barcelona and a cock in your cunt. Look down. Look at them. Any one of them could look up."

She fucked her against the glass. Every stroke lifted Kandice onto her toes and slapped her tits against the pane with a soft wet smack, leaving two smears where her nipples dragged. Her breath fogged the glass, cleared, fogged again. Iris had her by the hair. She spat once on the back of her neck and watched it run, and Kandice cried out as if she'd been stabbed and came.

Behind them, on the bed, Kandice's phone lit up and started to buzz.

Iris glanced back. OLIVER, over a photo of the polo lawn.

She pulled out, fetched it, and held it up beside Kandice's face.

"Answer it."

Kandice stared at her.

"Answer it," said Iris, "or I will."

Kandice took it and swiped. She held it to her ear, her other palm still flat on the glass, and out came her voice, bright and steady and perfectly London.

"Darling. Hi."

Iris slid the strap back in. Slowly this time, an inch at a time, while Kandice said yes, it was brilliant, Pronovias was brilliant, and no, she's fine, she's actually rather nice once you know her. Her voice never wavered. Her cunt gripped the strap so hard Iris felt it in her own hips. Iris began to move: long, deep, silent strokes, all the way out, all the way back. Kandice, eyes shut and mouth open against the window, said:

"Love you too. Sleep well, darling. I'll ring you tomorrow."

She hung up. The phone slid out of her fingers onto the carpet.

"Good slut," said Iris. "Now get on the bed."

---

On the bed she folded her in half.

On her back, ankles in their seamed stockings pushed up and back beside her ears, toes pointed at the headboard, so her ass lifted off the sheet and the open oval faced the ceiling. Her cunt sat at the top of her, swollen and running.

Iris knelt over her and drove the strap straight down with her whole weight behind it. Kandice cried out.

"No," she gasped. "No, please. Please don't. It's too deep. Please."

Iris didn't stop. She slapped one bare breast, open-handed, and watched it jump and redden, then the other. Then she reached back and spanked what was turned up to her. The backs of the thighs above the stocking tops. The underside of each cheek. Fast, hard, over and over, until Kandice was scarlet from the lace to the backs of her knees and every slap made her clench on the strap. Iris spat in her open mouth. She fucked her straight down into the mattress and talked the whole time, every word she'd been saving:

"No? You don't get to say no. You signed up for this at dinner. You're not a person tonight. You're a hole. My hole. You're a worthless, slutty rape toy I brought to Barcelona to use, and I'm going to rape you till you can't walk to the show tomorrow, and you're going to thank me for it."

"Please..."

"Please what?"

"Please don't stop. Please don't stop, please, please, don't ever stop..."

She came screaming, folded under Iris with her ankles by her ears, her tits red from the slaps, spit on her chin. In the middle of it the word tore out of her again.

"Mommy..."

Iris stopped dead.

She held perfectly still with the strap buried to the root. She leaned down until her tits hung heavy, nearly brushing Kandice's face, took her chin in one hand, and from two inches away asked, very quietly:

"What are you?"

Kandice was wrecked and crying, still pulsing round the strap. She looked up and said it.

"I'm Mommy's rapedoll."

Something went through Iris then that she had no name for. She knew only that she had once heard Frank's voice change the same way, on a steel desk, when a word came out of her she hadn't chosen. She bent and kissed Kandice on the mouth. Then she started moving again, and kept on until the window had gone dark across the street.

Somewhere in it she let down, untouched, from nothing but that. Milk ran from both nipples onto Kandice's tits. Kandice turned her face up into it, blind and open-mouthed, like a flower turning to rain.

---

Afterward Iris took Montse's set off her piece by piece: the garter belt unhooked, the seamed stockings rolled down one leg at a time to the pale pink toes, the bra unclasped and lifted away, the brief peeled down sticky over her hips. Then she wrote on her with the lipstick until it was a stub. MOMMY'S RAPEDOLL across her tits. On the inside of each thigh, a row of tally marks, one for every time.

When she'd finished, Kandice took the lipstick out of her hand and, without asking, wrote MOMMY across the tops of Iris's breasts in shaky capitals, the last letter dipping into her cleavage.

Iris let her.

They lay in the wreck of the bed, sticky and written on, smelling of sex and milk, while the street went quiet. Kandice was curled against her with her cheek on Iris's breast. Iris stroked her hair.

"There's something I want to tell you about," Iris said. "In Chicago. Well, two hours south of it."

"What?"

"A basement. And three men in it." She looked at the ceiling. "It's a long story. It starts on Halloween."

Kandice lifted her head.

"Tell me," she said.

So Iris told her.

---

Front Row

Iris woke at seven to the noise of the street and something warm between her legs.

She lay still. The light was gray. Cool air came in round the half-open shutters, and the bed was a ruin, and she ached everywhere, her hips from the strap and her shoulders, and under the sheet her breasts were heavy with milk again. Beneath the sheet, between her thighs, Kandice was licking her. Very softly.

Nobody had told her to. Iris lifted the edge of the sheet. The black bob. Last night's lipstick smudged pink across Kandice's breasts. Her cheek on the inside of Iris's thigh, her eyes closed.

It was nothing like the desk, or the closet, or the bathroom. Kandice licked her the way you'd stroke a sleeping animal you didn't want to wake. First the flat of her tongue, simply resting there, warm, barely moving. Then the tip, tracing up one side and down the other, light as breath. Then the soft hood over her clit, circled and circled, never quite touching. Then once, so lightly Iris barely felt it, on the clit itself, and away. Her hands lay open on Iris's thighs, not holding. She wasn't trying to make her come. She was just there, unhurried, as if she had all morning.

Iris let her. She put a hand on Kandice's hair. Not a fist. A hand.

It took a while. The light came up. Down in the street a shutter rattled and a café began setting out its chairs. Iris lay with her eyes shut and felt it gather from very far down, like a bath filling. Her milk let down on its own and ran warm down her ribs into the sheet, and she let that go too. When she came it was the quietest she'd come in years. One long rolling wave, out to her fingers and toes, that kept on and on. She made a single soft sound in her throat, and that was all. Kandice didn't stop. She went softer still and stayed with her through all of it, until Iris's thighs were quiet and Iris touched her cheek and eased her away.

Kandice laid her head on Iris's thigh and stayed.

Neither of them spoke. In two hours Iris would be cruel to her again, they both knew it, and that was part of it too.

Pronovias was at eleven. Iris didn't let her shower.

"You'll go as you are," she said from the bed.

Kandice stood in the gray light, looking down at herself. The lipstick was still on her under the dress she'd wear. Her thighs were tacky. Her hair was something a comb could fix and nothing else. She smelled of all of it: Iris's cunt and her own, silicone, sweat and spit and milk. So did Iris. She buttoned a cream silk blouse one button higher than usual over MOMMY, tucked in fresh nursing pads, put on her best gray suit and far too much perfume, which did nothing.

They sat in the second row. The tent was warm and close, and the smell rose off them in the heat like something uncorked. Iris felt it reach the seats either side. Two places down, a stylist from Vogue Spain raised her head and sniffed. She looked at Kandice, then at Iris, and smiled to herself and turned back to the runway. The Saks buyer on Kandice's other side shifted an inch away and didn't look at either of them for an hour.

Backstage afterward, the designer kissed Iris on both cheeks and held her by the arms and breathed in. "Darling," she said in English, close to her ear. "You've had a good night." She looked past Iris at Kandice, scarlet, clutching the notebook, and laughed.

Nobody said anything else. Nobody ever would.

---

After Barcelona it was like that everywhere.

New York the next week for market: two rooms booked, one slept in. A Paris showroom ten days later, where they turned up forty minutes late for a nine o'clock, Kandice walking very carefully, Iris's lipstick not quite where it belonged. They came into rooms together and the rooms knew. They smelled of each other. Kandice stood half a step behind Iris's shoulder, fetched her coffee, held her bag. When Iris steered her through a door with a palm at the small of her back, people watched where the hand went and what it did to Kandice's face.

At Aisle the whole floor knew by the end of the month. The photo editor. The CEO's assistant, who started waving Kandice's expenses through unread. The interns, gossiping in the kitchen in voices that died when Kandice walked in. Someone found the ivory Chantal in the returns log, charged to Iris's own budget, and passed it round, then filed it again and never mentioned it.

None of it went anywhere. That was fashion. The business had run on exactly this for a hundred years: a powerful woman, and the girl at her shoulder who carried the bag, blushed when spoken to, and went up to the hotel room after. Everyone had seen it. Everyone had a story about someone. It wasn't a scandal, it was a type. People lowered their eyes, turned the page, and let the senior vice president keep her girl.

Kandice worked it out before Iris did. She came in one evening after lunch with the accessories team, shut the door and stood in front of the desk the way she always stood.

"They know," she said.

"Who knows?"

"Everyone." She was crimson, thighs pressed tight under the black skirt. "Lauren in accessories asked me, in front of everybody, if I was Iris's. Just like that. Are you Iris's? As if I were a handbag."

Iris put down her pen.

"And what did you say?"

Kandice looked at the floor. Then at Iris.

"I said yes."

---

Glass

Iris kept her late that night.

They worked until ten, Kandice at the little table by the door proofing the February spreads, and neither of them mentioned Lauren in accessories. The floor went dark around them one pod at a time. The last of the night desk left at half past nine. Somewhere past the photo studio a vacuum started up, droned, drifted away and stopped.

At ten Iris capped her pen.

"Come here."

Kandice came and stood where she always stood.

Iris didn't drop the blinds. She glanced at the switch on the wall, then at Kandice, and left them up. The whole glass wall of her office stayed open to the dark floor: the empty desks, the green exit signs, the long black corridor down to the fashion closet. Kandice watched her not do it. Her eyes went to the glass and came back.

"Everyone knows," said Iris. "You said so yourself. So let's give them something to know."

She opened the bottom drawer, past the pump and the ivory Chantal in its tissue, and took out a band of lace.

It was old. Ivory Chantilly backed with silk, the width of her palm, on long satin ribbons. It had come in a boudoir set from a French house nine years ago, when she was planning other women's weddings and her own, and it had been over her eyes in a basement for most of a weekend. She'd never told Kandice that. She didn't now.

"Shirt off. Skirt off. Shoes. Everything."

Kandice undressed with the blinds up. She did it fast, face burning, eyes on the dark glass as if someone might step out from between the desks. White shirt, beige bra, black skirt, white knickers, folded on the couch. Then she stood naked on the carpet in front of a wall of glass, pale and shaking. Her tits rose and fell fast with her breathing, the nipples drawn tight. Her bare cunt was already swollen. Her arms were rigid at her sides, because she badly wanted to cover herself and hadn't been told she could.

Iris went behind her and tied the lace over her eyes. The ribbons under the black bob, a double knot. She felt Kandice's breathing stop as the dark came down.

"Can you see?"

"No."

"Good. Then you don't know who's out there." A hand on the back of her neck, and a push.

She walked her blind across the office to the other wall. Forty-one floors of glass, carpet to ceiling. The whole city at night beyond it: the towers across Michigan Avenue lit floor by floor in white and gold, and past them the lake, black and empty. Iris turned her to face it, set a palm between her shoulder blades, and pushed her into the window.

Kandice gasped. October, forty-one floors up, the wind off the lake: the glass was as cold as the side of a fridge. Her tits met it first and spread under their own weight, and her hard nipples crushed against it and went harder. Then her belly, her thighs, her cheek. Her breath fogged the pane in front of her mouth.

"Hands up. On the glass."

She spread them flat on either side of her head.

"Feet apart."

She moved them. Iris kicked them wider.

Then Iris stepped back to look. A naked woman spread on a window forty-one floors up, face turned sideways, white lace over her eyes. Her chest flattened against the glass, her supple swells spilling out past her ribs, that big round peachy ass pushed out behind her like a pale, glowing moon in the dark, her bare cunt showing between her open thighs. And the whole lit city in front of her.

"There's a man in the building across the street," Iris said, as if remarking on the weather. "Thirty-eighth floor, I'd say. Corner office. Lamp on, sitting at his desk." She came up close behind. "He's stopped typing."

Kandice whimpered.

"And there's someone out on the floor behind us." Iris let that sit. "I won't tell you who."

"Iris..."

"Shh. They can see everything." Her mouth at Kandice's ear. "Your tits squashed on the window. You dripping down your leg. What you are. Everyone at Aisle knows what you are. Now everyone in Chicago does too."

She slid a hand between Kandice's legs.

Soaked. Wetter than Iris had ever felt her, slick from the hood of her clit halfway to her knees, hot and open, the lips fat and slippery under her fingers. Iris eased two fingers all the way in and felt her grip them.

"Oh," said Iris softly. "Oh, look at that. You like being looked at."

She fingered her against the glass. Deep, curling, the heel of her hand grinding the clit, her other hand holding Kandice's face to the window by the nape. She felt Kandice start to climb. She knew this body better than her own by now. The breath going short and high. The hips pushing back. The little catch in the throat. The flutter beginning round her fingers in quick hard pulses, the whole petite frame stiffening on the glass, right there, right there...

Iris took her hand away.

Kandice cried out, high and raw and disbelieving. Her hips chased the hand and found nothing.

Iris spanked her, open-handed across both cheeks at once, a crack like a ruler on a desk. Kandice slammed into the glass.

"No," said Iris. "Not yet."

She took the lipstick from her pocket and drew one short red line on the glass beside Kandice's left hand, at the height of her eyes if she'd been able to see.

"That's one."

She waited for Kandice's breathing to settle. Then she put her fingers back.

Again. And again. Each time a little longer, a little closer. Two fingers, then three. Long strokes, then fast ones, then her thumb on the clit and her fingertips pressing hard on that spot on the front wall, Kandice rising onto her toes with it. And then nothing. The hand gone. Cold glass, dark, the city, and Iris's voice in her ear, low and even and cruel. Not yet. You come when I'm finished with you. Look at the state of you, on my window, in front of everyone. What do you think he's doing over there in his corner office? What do you think he's got in his hand?

Every time she took her hand away, she spanked her. Right cheek. Left. The crease where ass met thigh. The backs of the thighs. One slap for the first edge, then two, then three, until both cheeks glowed scarlet against the dark glass and the finger marks lay one over the next. Blind, Kandice never knew which was coming, the fingers or the palm.

Two. Three. Four. Five red lines on the glass.

By six Kandice was sobbing. By seven she was begging in a steady broken stream, please, Iris, please let me, I can't, I'll do anything, I'm so close, please, her forehead bumping the window, her hands sliding down and being put back. Her own wet ran down both inner thighs to the knees and left a dark spot on the carpet. Iris was leaking too. Her blouse stuck to her where the milk had come through. She ached with it, and didn't care.

At eight Kandice stopped using words.

Iris drew a fat diagonal stroke through the eight lines.

Then she stepped back and unzipped her skirt.

---

It wasn't the harness. It was the other thing she'd ordered from the shop Rosa used, in the same plain box, and hadn't yet tried. A double. One end short and thick, swelling into a bulb and curved to sit inside the woman wearing it. The other end long and heavy, curved the opposite way, for the woman in front of her. Between them a fat ridge that rested on the wearer's clit, and a thin black strap round the hips to keep everything where it belonged.

She'd put it in at seven, in the executive bathroom, while Kandice was out fetching dinner. Then she'd sat through three hours of proofs with it inside her. Whenever she shifted in her chair the bulb nudged her front wall and the ridge rocked on her clit. She'd gone on initialing spreads with a steady hand while her thighs went slick to the stocking tops. By the eighth edge she was nearly as far gone as Kandice.

Now she let the skirt fall. Stockings, blouse, and the thick dark cock jutting from her. She took it in her fist and felt the other end shift inside her as she did.

"Don't move," she said.

Kandice couldn't have.

Iris came up behind her. She pinned one of Kandice's hands to the window under her own, and with the other guided the head of the cock between her thighs and dragged it through all that wet, clit to hole. Kandice shuddered against the glass.

"Ask me."

"Please..."

"Ask me properly."

"Please fuck me. Please. Fuck me against the window. Let them watch. Please, Iris..."

Iris drove it in.

All of it, in one long push, to the root, and it went into her too: the bulb shoved deep, the ridge crushed on her clit. They gasped together. She pushed until her hips were flush with that hot red ass and Kandice was trapped between the cold in front and the cock behind, lifted onto her toes, mouth wide on the window, a long high wail fogging the glass from chin to brow.

Then Iris fucked her.

She held her by both hips and gave it to her deep and hard and steady. Each stroke slammed Kandice into the window. Each stroke drove the other end into Iris. She felt it from both sides at once: Kandice giving round the shaft, her own body clenching on the bulb, the ridge grinding her clit against that spanked ass every time she bottomed out. She spanked her on the downstroke, so every crack of her palm landed with the strap buried. The glass took it with a low dull thud, the whole pane shivering in its frame. Kandice's tits dragged up and down the cold glass with each thrust, nipples squeaking. Her palms slid and Iris put them back. Her face was smeared sideways in the fog of her own breath, the lace knocked crooked over one eye. Forty-one floors below, the traffic ran up and down Michigan Avenue in two streams, red and white.

"Look at you," Iris said through her teeth. "That's what they're seeing. A naked slut pinned to a window, getting fucked by her boss. Do you know how many people can see you right now? Do you?"

"Yes..."

"Say it."

"Everybody. Everybody can see me. Everybody can see what I am..."

It took about a minute. After eight edges Kandice had nothing left to hold it back with, and Iris had little more. Iris felt it start deep inside her, a clench so hard it almost pushed the cock out and drove the other end up into Iris like a fist. She shoved back in through it and held there, buried, grinding, and Kandice came.

She came screaming against the window, and she squirted. It burst out round the cock in a hot spattering gush, over the glass, her thighs, Iris's stockings, the carpet. Iris pulled out fast and it came again, a second jet straight onto the window, splashing, running down the pane in long bright streaks. Then a third, smaller. Kandice slid down the glass to her knees, sobbing, face pressed to it, palms squeaking, jerking with every pulse.

"Mommy..."

It tore out of her, mouth open against the glass.

That was what finished Iris. She'd been holding on since seven. She heard the word, drove the strap back into Kandice one last time, ground down, and came. The bulb inside her, the ridge crushed on her clit, the word in her ears, all at once. She clamped round the toy so hard it shook in Kandice. One hand flat on the cold window beside Kandice's head. Forehead dropping onto Kandice's shoulder, teeth closing on it. Her milk let down in a rush and soaked the front of her blouse. Against Kandice's skin she heard herself make a sound she had only ever made under Frank. It went on and on, and when it finally let her go, her knees nearly went with it.

She stood over Kandice, shaking, the wet cock in her hand and the other end still inside her, breathing. Then she looked at the window.

The whole lower half of the pane was streaming. Long bright runs and spatters from hip height to the sill, the city lights shining through them, pooling on the ledge and dripping onto a dark stain spreading across the carpet. Two smeared prints where Kandice's tits had been. Two handprints. A fogged oval where her mouth had been, with a smear of spit in it. And above everything, at eye level, eight red lines and a slash.

Iris bent and untied the lace.

Kandice blinked at the city. Then she turned her head and looked back through the glass wall at the floor.

Empty. All of it. The desks, the exit signs, the long black corridor. No one.

Iris watched her take that in. Then she looked out at the tower across the street, the thirty-eighth floor, the corner office. A lamp on. No one at the desk. Or someone. It was too far to tell.

"Was there anyone?" Kandice whispered.

"You'll never know." Iris put a hand in her hair. "Now clean it up."

Kandice looked at the window.

"With your mouth," said Iris.

---

She did it on her knees. She started with the sill, where it had pooled, bending her face to the ledge and lapping it up. Iris watched her tongue go flat and pink across the cold stone and come away wet. Then the glass. She licked each run from the bottom up, the way she licked Iris, tongue squeaking on the pane, breath fogging it again as she worked. She took the spatters one by one. She licked off the two round prints her tits had left. She licked the oval where her mouth had been.

Iris sat on the arm of the white couch in her stockings, the double still in her, the long end resting on her thigh. Now and then she pointed, without a word, at a place Kandice had missed.

When the glass was clean, she tossed Kandice her white shirt.

"The carpet."

Kandice looked at the shirt in her hands. At the dark stain. At Iris.

Iris looked back.

Kandice knelt and pressed the shirt into the stain, blotting and pressing until the cotton was soaked through and the carpet was only damp. Then, because she knew, she stood up and put it on, cold and wet and smelling of herself, and buttoned it to the collar. She wore it home in the car beside Oliver.

Iris left the eight red lines on the window. On Thursday morning the cleaners came as they always did. The woman on the platform outside stopped and studied them for a moment, eye to eye with them from the far side of the glass. Then she lifted her squeegee and wiped them away.