Coach Carol: The Widow

Carol, book one. Carol is 42. All other characters are above 18.

DISCLAIMER: There's depiction of grief, cheating, a werewolf fantasy, voyeurism, and spanking in this story. Please be warned.

The Wolf

By the third week of October the team was six and one, and people in town had started saying her husband's name the way they said the names of dead presidents. If they remembered his name. Mostly they just called him Coach. They'd called him Coach for so long that half of them couldn't have told you his first name.

There was a banner across Main Street. There was a sandwich named for him at the diner, roast beef and horseradish, which he had never once ordered. At the Safeway the boy bagging her groceries said, "Tell Coach thanks," and she said she would.

They broke down film together in the den every night in the off-season, and in season on Thursday nights, when he came home from the facility at ten.

That was theirs. Her father had done it with her when she was nine, on a projector in the garage. She sat on the arm of the couch with a legal pad on her knee and ran the same six seconds of tape until she could see it with her eyes shut.

"Their nickel bites on every pump fake," she said. "Look at his hips. He's gone before the ball is."

Simmons leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and watched it four more times. Then he wrote it on his own pad, in his square capitals, and underlined it twice.

"You're right," he said. "Goddamn. You always are."

He kissed the top of her head on his way to the kitchen. He was fifty-one, with a thick neck and a linebacker's shoulders, gone mostly gray, and he took the stairs one at a time, leading with the good leg. She watched him go and thought, as she did most Thursdays, that he was a good man, and that she was lucky, and that she was going to have to do something about herself.

---

She had bought the chemise on her phone, in the bleachers, during a JV game.

It was wine-red satin, cut on the bias so that it poured over her and clung wherever it touched. Black lace across the bust, sheer enough to show the dark of her nipples through the flowers. Thin straps. A slit up one side to the hip bone. She put it on in the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She was forty-two. She had played four years of college volleyball and still played twice a week at the Y with Sherry and the other wives, and from August to January, while he lived at the facility, she hiked the ridge trail every morning. Her arms were lean and cut, her legs long and sleek, her thighs strong and harder still, soft only on the insides, and the satin lay so close across her stomach that it traced the faint ridges of muscle underneath. Her lush breasts were heavy enough that she needed a real bra on the trail, and the black lace gathered them up and pressed them together until the plump swells crowded the neckline, the cleft between them deep and soft and running down into shadow under the flowers. It made something of them. She turned. The satin ran down her back and over her ass and lost the fight with it.

Her hair was auburn and down, for once. Her eyes were very blue in that light. She thought she looked like a woman who expected to get fucked.

He was in bed with his reading glasses on and a scouting report on his chest. He looked up.

"Well," said Simmons. "Look at you."

He took the glasses off. That was something. She knelt on the bed beside him, and he ran his palm down the satin at her hip, the way you would smooth a tablecloth.

"That's real pretty, Care."

"It's for you."

"I can tell." He kissed her shoulder. He slid one strap down with a finger, carefully, as if it might tear, and then the other, and the satin slipped and caught on her nipples and dropped.

Her big breasts spilled out of the lace into the lamplight, full, round and firm. They were tanned to a line, with two pale triangles where her volleyball top sat, and the skin inside the triangles was soft and almost white and finely veined. They had weight. They dropped a little when the lace let go and swung once, heavily, and settled. Her nipples were wide and dusky rose, the areolas pebbled, the tips drawn up hard. She heard her own breath.

He kissed each one. He kissed them the way you'd kiss a hand at a wedding. Then he lifted the chemise over her head, folded it in half, and laid it over the back of the chair.

She looked at it on the chair.

He made love to her the way he always had, attentive and kind. When he went down on her he did it thoroughly and politely, the way he did his taxes. She got close. She always got close. He came up before she got there, the way he always did, and settled over her on his elbows, careful of the knee.

His cock was the best thing about him and he had never known what to do with it. It was short and thick, a squat stocky club of a thing, ruddy and smooth, with the skin drawn tight over it and a blunt rounded head the color of a plum. The shaft lay against her thigh, hot and dense. When he fit the head to her and pushed, she felt herself open around the fat crown of him, a familiar stretch, her lips spreading and clinging, and then the stubby girth of him working in by the inch until he was in to the root and she was spread wide around him, stretched tight at the mouth of her, with that broad full ache at her entrance that she loved.

He held there and kissed her and said, "There we go."

Then he moved. Slow. Out half the way, in again, the same depth every time, the same speed. It was good. It had always been good. It was a good warm bath of a fuck and she lay in it and felt the edge of something much bigger, a long way off, that never came any closer.

She dug her heels into the backs of his thighs. The word was right there. She had said it in their first year, and their fifth, and once, years ago, with her nails in his back, and every time he had kissed her and slowed down.

She let her heels slide back down onto the sheet.

He reached across her to the nightstand without missing a stroke and lit the candle.

Vanilla, from the drawer, since Christmas. He settled back over her in the soft new light and went on, even slower, and she looked at the little flame and felt something in her chest go flat.

He came with his face in her neck, a long low groan, and she felt him swell and pulse deep inside her and the warm spread of it. "Love you, Care," he said.

"I love you too."

He kissed her forehead and rolled off her, content, the way he was every time.

He was asleep in four minutes. He slept on his back with one arm thrown over his eyes.

She lay there with his cum leaking out of her into the sheet and watched the candle burn.

---

The Kindle was in the nightstand drawer, under the hand cream. The vibrator was under the Kindle.

She read everywhere: the library after her workout, the car outside the facility, the bleachers between series, in bed beside him with the screen turned down to its dimmest. She had been through cowboys and billionaires and Highland lairds and hockey players, and none of them did for her what the wolves did.

She was on the fourth Moonbound book. Vivienne Thorne wrote them, and Carol had pre-ordered this one in March. The back cover said: She has run from the pack all her life. Tonight, she stops running.

She found her place. The heroine was in the woods at night, running, and not very fast. Carol read the page once. Then she closed her eyes and let it go on in her head, where it was better.

She was the one in the woods. Barefoot, the leaves cold and wet under her soles, her breath smoking. She stopped in the clearing because she was tired of pretending to run. He came out of the trees on two legs, a big man, naked, with his shoulders heaving and his chest matted with dark hair, and she watched the change take him. His spine bowed. His back split along the knuckles of it and something came up through the split, black and furred. His face stretched forward with a sound like green wood breaking. His hands hit the ground and were not hands, and when he lifted his head he was eight feet of muscle and pelt with a wet black muzzle and yellow eyes, and the steam came off him into the moonlight, and he smelled of blood and musk and turned earth.

She went down on her hands and knees in the leaves without being told.

The vibrator was already under the sheet, on the low setting, a hum she had learned years ago he would sleep through. She was still slick with Simmons. He had at least left her wet.

The wolf did not ask. It was the whole point of him. He came around behind her and pushed his muzzle into her cunt and breathed her in, a long rough snuffling breath she felt in her spine, and then his tongue, flat and hot and far too long, dragging up through her from her clit to her ass in one stroke. Then his weight came down on her back. His forelegs closed around her waist. His cock slid out of its sheath against the backs of her thighs, red and slick and tapered and much too big, the root of it already beginning to swell. He found her on the first thrust and drove all the way in.

In the dark beside her sleeping husband, Carol pressed the vibrator to her clit, pushed two fingers into herself and bit the inside of her cheek.

He fucked her into the leaves. It was not lovemaking. It was an animal using what it had caught. He rammed into her so hard that her knees slid, his claws raking her hips, his breath roaring hot on her neck, and she could feel the knot at the base of his cock thickening with every stroke, battering at her entrance, too big, far too big, she was going to tear. She pushed back onto it. She wanted it. She wanted to be locked on him in the dirt with no say about any of it. He drove forward with all his weight and the knot forced her open, stretched her past anything, popped through, and swelled inside her, and she was tied to him, stuffed and stretched and stuck, and he threw his head back and howled and began to pump her full, and full, and full...

She thumbed the vibrator up a notch, then another, and ground it hard against her clit. Her fingers were in to the knuckle, curled forward, working the place he had never found. Her hips came off the mattress. The sheet was wet under her. She turned her face into the pillow, got the edge of the blanket between her teeth and bit down hard, and came in long rolling pulls that she felt in her teeth and her toes, silently, her teeth locked in the blanket until her whole face ached.

Simmons snored.

When it stopped she switched it off, wiped it and her hand on the sheet, put it and the Kindle back under the hand cream, and blew out the candle.

The Reckoning

The call came at 1:40 on a Sunday morning, in the small hours after Halloween.

They had won that afternoon on the road, and he had texted her from the facility at ten: film till late, don't wait up. She was asleep with the Kindle under her cheek when the landline rang, and she knew before she reached it.

A state trooper, young, reading off a card. A pickup had run the light at Larkin and Ninth at something over sixty and gone through the driver's side of the university Tahoe he drove in season. The other driver had blown twice the limit. Her husband was alive and on his way to Mercy, and was there someone who could drive her, ma'am. He said nothing about anyone else in the Tahoe, and she didn't think to ask.

She drove herself. She did not remember the drive.

---

He was in a coma for four days.

He lay in a room on the fourth floor with a tube in his mouth and a machine breathing for him in a long patient hiss, and the doctors used the word swelling and then the word activity and then stopped using words and started using her name, gently, a great deal. The athletic director sat with her and cried more than she did.

On the morning of the fifth day they turned the machine off. She was holding his hand. It was still warm, and as big as it had always been, and it did nothing at all.

---

A nurse gave her his things in a clear plastic bag. His watch, stopped at 1:12. His wallet. His wedding ring, which she put on her thumb. His keys. She drove home with the bag on the passenger seat and didn't open it.

---

Two days later a detective she had never met drove out to the house with a manila envelope. The investigation was finished, he said, and the widow had a right to the report. He stood on the porch turning his hat in his hands while she read it.

Larkin and Ninth, 1:12 a. m. Vehicle one, a pickup, the driver intoxicated. Vehicle two, a university-owned Chevrolet Tahoe. Occupants: two.

The second was on page four. Kessler, Brittany A., 22. Front passenger. Treated at scene for minor injuries and released. Her statement ran a page and a half, typed up from her own words. Coach was driving me home from the facility. We've been together since August. I'm telling you because he would want me to be honest. She had seen the headlights coming. She had screamed his name. She had climbed out her own side and run around the Tahoe, and he had not answered her.

Carol sat very still. Then she read it again.

"The state's filing charges on the other driver," said the detective. "Vehicular manslaughter, now that your husband's passed. The DA's office will be in touch." He turned the hat around once more. "The university asked us to keep the rest of it quiet. The release said he was alone. That's how it went out. I thought you ought to have it anyway."

The paper said alone. The athletic director said alone that afternoon at her kitchen table, and a terrible thing, and the kids are taking it hard, and did not look at her once. The school had sent Brittany Kessler home with a sprained wrist and a counselor's phone number, and the whole town went on believing Coach Simmons had been driving home to his wife.

She told no one. Not the athletic director, who called every morning. Not her brothers, who flew in. She went through the next four days the way she had gone through a five-set match in college with a sprained ankle: one point and then the next, and you do not look down.

At night she lay on her side of the bed and did not read.

The Funeral

They held it in the field house, because no church in the county was big enough.

The team came in jerseys, navy and gold, a hundred and ten of them with their hair wet-combed, and filled the first eight rows shoulder to shoulder. The town came in black. There was a photograph of him on an easel, ten feet tall, in his headset with his arms folded, and under it the casket, closed, with a helmet on the lid.

Carol sat in the front row in a black wool sheath she had bought two days ago without trying it on: sleeveless, high-necked, a size too small across the hips. Under it was whatever black had been in the drawer, an old underwire built for her double D cups, and the black seamed stockings and lace garter belt she had bought for her niece's wedding in June. On a widow they looked obscene. She had seen that in the mirror and put them on anyway. Then she had turned and looked at the back of the sheath.

It wasn't a girl's ass. It was a grown woman's, and it was magnificent, and a lifetime of volleyball had packed hard muscle under every inch of the softness. It started high, right under a waist narrower than anyone expected on a woman her height, and swelled straight out from there like a shelf: two big round cheeks, heavy, pressed close together, soft enough to give under a hand and move when she walked, firm enough that they sat up, proud, instead of hanging. The black wool was losing the fight with it, pulled tight across the curve and up into the cleft, the hem riding on the swell. Under each cheek, where it folded onto the back of her thigh, a deep soft crease shifted every time she moved her weight. It had been stopping conversations since her first season of college volleyball. Today it would stop them at a funeral.

Black lace gloves, to the wrist.

Holly came in late and alone.

Carol had met her that morning, for four minutes. Twenty-two, a bleached-white crop, tattoos running out of her left cuff onto the back of her hand, and his eyes exactly: narrow and gray and missing nothing. She had shaken Carol's hand and said, "Holly," and nothing else. Now she stood against the back wall by the fire door, apart from everyone, looking at the photograph on the easel as though trying to work out who it was. The lawyer had already said the word settlement to Carol twice. Nobody had said it to Holly yet.

The captain, a senior linebacker named Marcus Dade, stood at the podium for a full minute with nothing coming out, and when he finally said, "Coach made me a man," a hundred and ten boys put their faces in their hands.

And somewhere behind her, somebody was sobbing.

Not crying. Everybody was crying. This was a high, wet, hiccupping wail that rose over Marcus Dade and went on rising, the sound you make at a hospital bed. Carol knew whose it was without turning around. Shh, Britt, somebody whispered back there. Shh.

She did not turn around. She sat with her knees together and her hands folded on her purse and her eyes on the photograph, and she counted. It was what she had done on the bench in a fifth set: in for four, out for four, and you do not look at the scoreboard. The sobbing went on through Marcus, and through the chaplain, and she counted through every minute of it.

Afterward they stood her beside the casket and the town came past her in a line while the band played the fight song slow. She shook hands. She said thank you. She said he would have loved this. Old men from the booster club held both her hands and couldn't speak, and their wives hugged her and smelled of hairspray, and she held, and held.

Then a small blonde stepped out of the line in front of her.

Brittany Kessler. Senior, twenty-two, a flyer. Carol had looked her up in the roster. She was in her uniform with a black ribbon in her ponytail and the brace on her wrist, her mascara all down her face, and she had plainly spent the whole service in the sixth row working up her nerve.

"Mrs. Simmons." Her chin was going. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. It's my fault."

Carol slapped her.

Four years of college volleyball, and she put the whole arm into it. The sound went off the steel roof of the field house like a starting gun. The girl's head snapped around, her ponytail swung, and she sat down hard on the floor with her hand to her face, too shocked to cry, with the print of Carol's palm coming up white and then red across her cheek.

Nobody moved. The band had stopped.

In the silence Carol looked up, for no reason, over the girl's head, to the back of the hall.

There was a woman by the far door, near Holly, but not with her. Late twenties. Small, very blonde, pale as cream, in a black coat that had cost more than Carol's car. She had a church-choir face. She was looking straight at Carol down the length of the field house, unhurried, with one eyebrow raised, the way you would look at a player who had done something that was going to be interesting on film.

Carol knew she had never seen her before. She knew, too, without any reason in the world, that the woman knew exactly what this was.

Then it came out of her.

Not a sob. A howl, a raw hoarse sound from somewhere under her ribs that she had never made in her life, and another on top of it, and she was bent double beside her husband's casket, crying so hard she could not get one breath in between. Somebody big had her by the arms from behind and was pulling her away. The edges of the room went gray and closed in.

---

She came to with her face against a shirt.

It smelled of laundry and cologne and a man. She was being carried, one arm under her knees and one around her back, and her shoes were gone. A door banged open: a storeroom off the lobby, stacked chairs. He kicked it shut behind him.

"You're okay," said a voice, close above her. "Mrs. Simmons. Carol. You're okay. You were out for about twenty seconds. Just breathe."

She looked up.

She knew him. He had been a wide receiver, in the class that graduated six or seven years back: more highlight reel than playbook, a different girl at every home game. Simmons had called him the most talented kid he ever had who didn't want it. He played for a minor-league team now, somewhere in the middle of the standings.

Liam.

She remembered him because he had looked at her. All the boys looked; she had grown up among athletes with three brothers and had long since stopped noticing eyes that followed her ass across a room and came guiltily back up. Liam's never came back up guiltily. At the team cookout, a sophomore with a paper plate, he had watched her ass all the way across her own kitchen and back, slowly, openly, as if it were the only thing in the room, and grinned when she caught him, and gone on doing it. She had been thirty-three and it had made her laugh out loud.

He was late twenties now. Bigger through the chest than he'd been, and harder in the face. Dark hair cut short. A suit that fit him. He sat down on a stack of chairs with her still in his arms, as if she weighed nothing, and she let him.

She tried to say something and sobbed instead, and he held on.

He held her across his lap with one hand spread over her back and let her cry into his collar until it was wet through and the sobs came further apart and stopped. She could hear the band start again through the wall.

"I hit that girl," she said at last, into his shirt.

"Yeah. You did."

"In front of everyone."

"Yeah." She felt him breathe out, nearly a laugh. "Hell of a swing, though."

She lifted her head. He was looking at her. Not at her face. He was looking where he always had, down the length of her across his lap to where the black wool was stretched tight over the shelf of her ass, and his hand had come to rest on the curve of it. When he saw her see him doing it he didn't look away, and he didn't move the hand. She could read it in him like a blitz coming: he wanted her over his knee, that ass red under his hand. He looked back up at her eyes without hurrying, and something in her that had been gray and flat for a week sat up.

"Can you stand?"

She could, just. He found her shoes, walked her out the side door with his arm around her waist, and drove her home. He waited on the step while she found her keys.

"I'm going to come back tonight," he said. "Check on you. That okay?"

She looked at him. Her eyes were raw.

"Okay," she said.

The Office

The house was full of flowers and nobody was in it.

Her brothers had flown home that afternoon. The casseroles were stacked three deep in the fridge with their owners' names on masking tape. She stood in the kitchen in her stockings and listened to the refrigerator hum, and then she went down the hall to his office for the first time since he died.

It was his: a desk, a leather chair, a wall of game balls with the scores painted on them. It smelled of old coffee and his cologne. She sat in his chair and took his keys out of the hospital bag and looked at them properly for the first time. House, truck, facility, boat. And a small brass key she had never seen, worn bright at the teeth.

It fit the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet behind the desk.

She had always thought that drawer held tax returns.

---

There was a notebook. A thick black ledger, the kind he bought by the box for game plans, its spine cracked white and its pages swollen with use. Under it, a hard drive the size of a deck of cards, with a cable wound around it. And under those, filling the drawer from front to back, lying flat and neat as files, were plastic zip bags.

Dozens of them. Each one held a pair of panties, folded. Each bag had a strip of white tape across the top with a name and a date on it, in his square capitals.

She took out the one at the very back.

White lace. A thong, a scrap of a thing, sheer, on two fine strings. She opened the bag and smelled it before she knew she was going to. It smelled of plastic and time. The tape said IRIS, and a date in May six years ago.

She opened the ledger.

He had written the first entry carefully, on the first page, with a ruler under the date.

Graduation night. She came to my office in the gown and nothing under it but this. The one from that Tuesday practice, the day Davis got hurt. I told her it was the last time and she said she knew. She sat on my desk. After, she put this in my hand and said a graduation present ought to go both ways.

Going to write it all down. From the start. So I don't lose any of it.

And then he had gone back to the beginning and written all of it. A cheerleader, twenty-one, a senior, in the weight room in August, counting pom-poms. She had me on the bench inside five minutes. His truck at lunch in the stadium lot. I put my ring in the cup holder. Christ forgive me, every time. Oh and three, and seventy-six to fourteen, and the equipment room. I put my hand on her throat. I didn't know what I was doing. I hit her so hard I could see my hand on her a week later. She came twice. I have never in my life. And under that, pressed so hard the pen had torn the paper: Never again. She deserves better than that.

Carol turned the pages. Her hands were very steady.

The entries went on into the spring, shorter, gentler. Truck. My office. Then the date in May, and a line under it. Then a whole summer of almost nothing. Missed her. Missed her. Saw a girl at the mall with her hair.

And then September.

New girl on the squad. Kayla. Junior, twenty-one. She looked at me during the walk-through.

The next pair of panties in the drawer said KAYLA. Pink cotton.

---

There was one most seasons. He gave each a page like a scouting report: Junior, 21. Senior, 22. Senior, 21, transfer. And somewhere in the third year the entries changed.

She asked me to hold her down. I did it right this time. Hand on the back of the neck, not the throat.

Belt. She asked. Twelve. Counted them herself.

Hair. Over the desk. She wanted to be called names. Called her every one I know.

She said harder. I didn't stop till she cried and then she said don't you dare stop and I didn't.

The handwriting stayed the same. The man in it didn't.

The hard drive had folders named for them. The first, IRIS, was empty. Everything after it was full.

She plugged it into his laptop on the floor, because she could not sit in his chair for this, and opened the most recent folder. BRITTANY. There were nineteen files. She opened the last one.

His office at the facility, where she had brought him dinner a hundred times. The camera must have been on the bookshelf. The blonde from the sixth row was bent over his desk on her elbows in her practice uniform with her skirt flipped up, and Carol's husband was standing behind her with his fist wound in her ponytail, pulling her head back until her throat was a long white curve, and fucking her.

Not the way he had ever fucked his wife. Every stroke was the whole of him, out to the head, in to the root, so hard the desk walked across the floor in little jolts. Carol could hear it through the laptop speaker: the wet slap, the girl's high broken cries, the papers sliding off the desk. He brought his free hand down on the girl's pale ass, hard and full-armed, and the girl screamed, and her cheeks shook, and a red handprint came up on the white of them, and he did it again.

"Is that what you wanted?" said her husband's voice, low and ugly, a voice she had never once heard from him. "Is that what you came in here for, you greedy little slut?"

"Yes. Yes, Coach. Harder."

He gave it to her harder.

Carol sat on the floor in her funeral dress and watched it. She was so angry she could taste metal. She wanted to dig him up and hit him.

And she was wet. She was wetter than she had been in years. She could feel it, slippery and hot, soaking the black lace between her legs, and her neglected tits swelled and ached in the mesh, the nipples drawn up so hard that the lace hurt them.

No, she thought. Not this. Not to this.

Her hand was already under the hem of the dress.

She shoved it up over her thighs. The stockings came to the tops of them, sheer black with a seam up the back and a wide welt of lace, the garter straps pulled taut over the muscle, and above the lace her thighs were bare and tanned, hard on top from the trail and soft on the insides, trembling. The panties were black lace, cut high at the hips, and when she looked down she could see the dark wet patch spreading through the middle of them. She pressed her palm over it and her hips jerked up off the rug on their own.

On the screen he had the girl's wrists in one fist at the small of her back.

Carol hooked the lace aside with a gloved finger. She was swollen and slick and so sensitive she flinched at her own fingertips. She slid two fingers into herself and they went in to the knuckle with a sound she could hear over the laptop. She worked them. She ground the heel of her hand on her clit. She was crying again, she noticed, without any sound, tears just running down her face and dripping off her chin onto the black wool, and she did not stop.

You bastard, she thought. You gave it to them. Her fingers curled forward and found the place and she gasped. You had it the whole time and you gave it to them.

On the screen the girl was coming, sobbing Coach, Coach, and her husband was holding her by the hair and grinding into her, and Carol's thighs clamped down on her own wrist and she came on the floor of his office, hard and ugly, with her teeth bared, her swollen cunt pulsing around her fingers, her heels drumming the rug, hating every second of it, and it went on and on.

Afterward she lay on her back on the rug with her dress around her waist and stared at the game balls on the wall.

Somebody knocked at the front door.

Liam

She pushed the dress down. She did not wipe her face or her hand. She opened the front door, and it was Liam in his suit pants and the white shirt, collar open, with a bag from the Thai place.

"Hey," he said. "I figured you hadn't eaten. I just wanted to see how you're..."

She took him by the shirt and pulled him into the house.

He came. He dropped the bag on the hall floor. She kicked the door shut and turned him and shoved him back against it, and it banged in its frame, and she got her mouth on his before he'd caught his breath.

He tasted of beer and mint. He was startled for one second. Then he kissed her back hard, and one hand went into her hair and the other went down her back and took a handful of her firm ass through the wool, his fingers sinking deep into the warm give of the cheek, the way a man takes hold of something he has been looking at for nine years. Then the hand in her hair came down to join it. He kneaded her through the tight dress, both cheeks, hauling her up onto her toes against him and spreading her, and kept on kissing her, deep and slow, his tongue in her mouth while his fingers dug in. Her knees nearly went. She moaned into his mouth and pushed her ass back into his hands for more, and would happily have stood there doing only that until morning.

He got his mouth free. He didn't let go of her. He held her by both cheeks against him and looked her over, all of her, and didn't pretend he wasn't. "Carol. I know it's been a rough day. Are you sure you want to keep going?"

"Don't you ask me. Don't you dare."

The grin came back, the same insolent grin he'd had in her kitchen with a paper plate.

"Okay," said Liam.

He turned them.

Her back hit the door. Her head knocked against the wood and she didn't care. He had a fist in the high neck of the black dress and he hauled the zipper down her back in one rip, and dragged the dress off her shoulders to her elbows, and pinned her arms in it. Then he stepped back half a pace and looked at her.

The bra was black, a balconette, old, bought for nothing in particular: a stiff underwire, cups of black mesh with a scalloped edge of lace across the top, cut so low it barely did more than shelve her. The wire shoved her generous breasts up and together and the scalloped edge bit into them, so that they swelled full over it into one long shadowed cleft with a bead of sweat gathered at the bottom, and she watched Liam's eyes go straight down into it and stay. They were tanned to the line of her volleyball top, and the pale skin above the cups was flushed blotchy pink from crying and from the floor of the office. You could see her nipples through the black mesh, dark and hard, pressing at it.

"Look at you," said Liam, and took his time doing it. "All those years you had these girls hiding under a staff polo. That rack. Somebody should've arrested you."

He put his hands over the cups. He didn't take her out of them. He squeezed her through the mesh, his palms flat, and dragged his thumbs over the hard points, back and forth across the scratch of the lace, until she arched off the door into his hands with her teeth in her lip. Then he hooked one finger in the lace of a cup and pulled it down, and her ripe breast tumbled out over the wire into his hand, and he lifted it and felt its warm weight settle, the nipple swollen dark and standing straight out at him, and she ached for his mouth before he bent his head and took it in.

He bit. Not hard. Hard enough. She cried out.

She got her arms free of the dress and went for his belt.

He stood there with her nipple in his mouth, sucking, while she tore at his buckle and shoved his pants and boxers down his hips, and his cock came up into her hand.

She looked down at him.

Long. Longer than her husband's, and not as thick; she could close her fingers around it, just, and still have half of it standing out of her fist. Smooth and straight and flushed a deep pink-brown, hotter than her palm, with a slight upward curve. The head was big and flared, darker than the shaft, shiny tight, and a bead of clear wet was already welling at the slit and running down over her knuckle. His balls hung heavy beneath it, shaved smooth, drawing up tight as she watched. He smelled of soap and cologne and, under it, a young man's musk, salt and heat. He throbbed in her hand. Black lace on her fingers, wrapped around him. She had buried her husband in these gloves that morning.

She stroked him once, root to tip, and felt the whole shaft jump.

"There you go," he said into her neck. "You want that?"

"Yes."

He dropped to his heels in front of her.

He took the hem of the dress in both hands and shoved it up, all the way, over her hips, and bunched it at her waist. He looked at what was underneath: the black garter belt riding low on her hips, the straps running down taut to the stockings, the wide lace welts biting gently into the tanned muscle high on her thighs; the bare stretch of thigh above the lace, long and strong and trembling; and the black lace panties, cut high, and the wet. She had soaked them through on the office floor. The dark patch ran from her mound to the crotch, and the lace clung to her, and through it he could see the shape of her: the full swollen lips, the neat trimmed auburn hair above, the shine.

"Fuck," said Liam. "You're dripping."

He took her by the hips and turned her around to face the door.

She put her gloved palms flat on the wood and let him look. The garter belt sat low on her waist, a band of black lace, and the straps ran down from it over the swell of her ass, two on each side, pulled taut, framing it. The panties were cut high and narrow and had ridden up into the cleft, so that most of each cheek sat bare above the stocking tops. The straps pressed faint grooves into the shelf of it, and the skin rose plush around them over the muscle the volleyball had left hard underneath; and below, the deep crease where each cheek met her thigh. She arched her back for him, slowly, pushing it out at him, and felt the cool air of the hall on her skin and the heat of his stare, and heard him stop breathing, and went wetter.

Liam didn't say anything for a while. He ran both palms up the backs of her thighs, over the welts and the straps, and filled his hands with her, more than they could hold, and squeezed, and she could feel it in the grip: he wanted her right here, against her own front door. She pushed back into his hands and heard him let out a ragged breath.

"You have no idea what you do to a room," he said, low, "walking out of it."

Then he turned her around again.

He put his face against the lace and breathed in, a long breath, and she felt it in her clit. He pressed his open mouth to her through the wet cloth, once, hot. Then he stood up again, and hooked his thumb in the side of the panties, and dragged them down to her knees, and there was nothing else.

He picked her up.

He did it by the backs of her thighs, one in each hand, the way you would heave a sack of feed onto a tailgate, and her back went flat against the door and her long legs went around his hips and the dress was bunched at her waist and her one bare breast was mashed soft against his shirt. She could feel the head of his cock against her, sliding in her wet, sliding up over her clit and down again, hot and slick. She reached down between them and caught his cock, and set the flared head at her entrance, and looked into his face.

He held her there.

One second. She could feel the fat head of him pressing at her, spreading her, not in. She could feel her pulse in it.

"Liam."

He let go of her thighs.

Her own weight dropped her onto him. The whole of him went up into her in one long sliding plunge, the big head forcing her open, the stretch rising up and up inside her, his shaft dragging along her front wall with that curve and pressing deeper than anything had been for years, until she was sitting on the root of him with her long stockinged legs locked behind his back, ankles crossed, impaled, her mouth wide open against his collar. He was in her to the end. She could feel the head of him lodged right up against the top of her, a deep hard nudge she felt behind her navel.

"Oh," she said, into his neck. "Oh, God."

He didn't wait for her to get used to it. He hiked her up the door by two big handfuls of ass and dropped her on him again.

He fucked her against her own front door, and there was nothing slow in it and nothing kind. He lifted her up the whole shaft of him until only the head was in her and let her fall back onto it, again, again, and every time she landed the door slammed in its frame and a thick wet smack came up from between them. Her free breast bounced against his chest and slapped back, and he grunted at the feel of it. The other was still caged in its cup and she felt it dragging against the lace with every stroke, the nipple scraping. She was so wet she could hear it running out of her around him, she could feel it on the soft insides of her thighs, soaking into the lace tops of her stockings.

She never had to ask. He braced his feet and drove up into her, and her shoulders banged the wood. His mouth was on her throat, open, his teeth at the cord of her neck. She got both hands in his hair and pulled, and he grunted and fucked her harder for it.

It came up out of her so fast she wasn't ready. She had waited her whole marriage for it and it took him three minutes. She locked down around him in a long hard squeeze, and she came with her head knocking back against the door and a yell that would have carried to the street, her heels drumming on the backs of his thighs, her toes curled tight in the black nylon, clenching and clenching on that long curved cock while he kept on driving up through it.

"Fuck, Carol. Fuck, you're squeezing me..."

"Do it. Inside me. Do it."

He slammed her down on him one last time and held her there, and she felt him swell inside her and kick, hard, and then the heat of it, his cum pumping into her in thick jerking pulses, so deep it felt like he'd put it straight into her belly. He groaned into her hair. His knees nearly went.

They stayed there against the door, breathing. She could feel him softening inside her and the warm wet beginning to slide out of her around him and drip.

Then he let her down, carefully, onto her feet, and held her by the elbows until she had them. She looked down. His cum was running down the inside of her thigh in a white line to the dark lace top of her stocking, and soaking in. Her panties were around one ankle.

Liam looked at her, and at the dress around her waist, and the one breast hanging out of the bra, and the Thai food upside down on the hall floor, and started to laugh.

After a moment, so did she.

He reached around her and unhooked the bra one-handed, on the first try, and drew it down her arms. Her other tanned breast dropped free of the cup and the pair of them swung loose against her ribs, flushed, a red crease pressed into the soft undersides where the wire had been and the nipples still swollen dark. He looked at them the way he had looked at her in her kitchen.

"Nine years," he said, and bent and kissed each one, and not at all the way her husband had.

---

She freshened up. When she came out of the bathroom in his white shirt and her stockings and nothing else he had found the office, and was standing in the doorway of it, looking at the drawer.

She did not say anything. She sat down on the rug and pulled the ledger into her lap and patted the floor beside her, and after a moment he sat.

They ate pad see ew out of the carton with their fingers and read her husband's diary.

She read it aloud, flat and fast, the way she read out a scouting report: the weight room, the truck, the equipment room. When she got to the throat Liam stopped chewing.

"Iris," he said. "Iris was at the funeral today, too."

Carol looked up from the page. The small blonde by the far door, pale as cream, one eyebrow raised. He didn't need to describe her.

"You knew her."

"Everybody knew her. She put Davis on the injury list with one high kick, and she never touched him." He took another bite. "Oh yeah. Her tits and her voice. No one could ever say no to her. Coach didn't stand a chance."

"You knew about them."

He stopped chewing again. "Everybody on the team knew," he said, more carefully. "Kind of. Nobody said it out loud."

Carol looked down at the page. A whole team of boys she had fed at her own cookouts, and every one of them had known.

"Did you?" she said. "With her."

"Once. Senior year." He was quiet a moment. "She wanted it rougher than I knew how to give. Guess Coach did."

She read on. Kayla. A girl called Morgan, senior, twenty-two. Jess, junior, twenty-one, a transfer. She read him the line about the belt. She read him the line about harder. She took the bags out of the drawer one at a time and laid them on the rug in a row, the white lace, the pink cotton, red satin, a little leopard-print thing with a bow, and Liam lay propped on one elbow and looked at them.

Carol turned the page, and the next, and did not say anything.

He was lying on her husband's rug with his shirt off, because she had it: a broad smooth chest, a dark line of hair from his navel into his waistband, a tattoo over one hip. After a while he put two fingers on her ankle.

"Carol." His voice had gone careful. "You think you'll ever forgive him?"

"Don't. Talk. About him." Through her teeth. "Ever."

It came out like a slap. He took his hand back.

She sat looking at the page. She said harder. I didn't stop till she cried.

She shut the ledger.

"Actually," she said, "I want it too."

He sat up.

"Want what?"

She looked down at the ledger. "He never asked me." It came out quiet. "He never bothered. All he did was cum and go to bed." She put her hand flat on its cover. "I want what they got."

He looked at her for a long moment, sitting on the floor in his shirt with her legs folded under her and the stockings still on.

"If you want me to stop," he said, "say stop. Any time. I'll stop."

"I won't."

"I know. Say it anyway, if you do."

"Fine." She lifted her chin. "Now get up and do it."

He got up.

He hauled the shirt off her by the collar, and she was naked on the floor but for the garter belt and the black stockings, and he looked: the long tanned body, the faint ridges of her stomach, the paler band across her hips, her bare double D cups hanging heavy, the pale triangles over them lifting with every breath she took under his eyes.

He reached down and took her by the hair.

All of it, at the root, in one fist. He pulled her up by it, steadily, so that she had to come up onto her knees and then her feet to follow, her scalp burning, and walked her three steps to her husband's desk. He swept it clear with his other arm. The pen cup, the game plan, the framed photo of the two of them on the boat.

He bent her over it.

The leather blotter was cool against her hot breasts. They flattened under her weight and bulged soft at the sides, her nipples drawing up tight at the chill, and she felt the edge of the desk under her hip bones, and her stockinged feet slide on the rug, the soles finding no grip. He held her down with his fist in her hair and her cheek on the leather, exactly where her husband had put his coffee every morning, and she looked sideways along the desktop at the game balls on the wall, and her soaked cunt clenched so hard on nothing that she gasped.

He kicked her feet apart, wide, and her long legs spread for him, the seams twisting up the backs of her calves.

"Look at this ass," said Liam, behind her. His voice had dropped. "You have no idea. I used to watch you walk down to the bleachers in those shorts. Every home game. Every guy on the bench did. You'd go up the steps and we'd all stop talking." His palm went over one cheek, flat, and squeezed, and the flesh swelled between his fingers, hard muscle under soft skin. "Nine years I've thought about all that ass."

He hit it.

The crack of it filled the little office. She jolted on the desk. The sting arrived after it, a bright hot print of his hand on her right cheek, and she felt both cheeks shudder and settle.

"Do that again," she said into the leather.

He did it again, the other side, and found a rhythm, full-armed and flat, one cheek and then the other, every one driving her hips into the edge of the desk and dragging the supple swells of her across the blotter and making her reddening ass jump and ripple under his palm. She lost count at nine. The heat had gone through her and down; every blow went straight to her clit as though he had struck it there, and she was pushing back for his hand, wet running down the insides of her thighs, and she heard herself sobbing yes, yes, like that, harder, and didn't recognize her own voice.

He stopped. He laid his hand on her burning skin and held it there.

"You good?" he said, low and rough.

"Don't you stop."

She heard his belt. She heard him laugh, low and breathless, behind her.

He didn't pull her up. He kept her flat on the desk by the hair and fed his cock into her from behind, the big head first, spreading her, and then the long curved shaft, slow this time, the whole slide of it, so that she felt every inch go up into her and drag along the front wall of her, the curve finding that place on the way in and pressing, pressing, until his hips were flush against her stinging cheeks and the heat of her skin was against the cool of his. She moaned into the leather. He was so deep. He stayed there and ground, and she could feel him at the end of her.

"Fuck," he said, and pulled out to the head, and slammed back in.

He fucked her over her husband's desk. The desk was heavy oak and he moved it anyway, an inch at a time across the rug, every thrust a hard wet smack of his hips into the shelf of her ass and the scrape of the legs on the floor. He pulled her head back by the hair until her back bowed and her heavy tits came up off the leather and swung under her, slapping together, the nipples dragging on the blotter on every forward stroke. Her cheeks rippled against him, bounced back, rippled again. His free hand came down on them again, mid-stroke, and she clamped around him and he swore.

"You like that? You like being bent over his desk?"

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I like being fucked over his desk. I like it. Harder. Use me."

He used her. He got his other hand flat on the back of her neck, the weight of his arm behind it, and held her down while he pounded her, and something in her let go all at once, every muscle. There was nothing at all for her to do, and she had never in her life felt so fed. The wet sound of it was obscene, a thick sucking squelch every time he drew back, and she could feel herself running down her thighs into the lace tops of the stockings, and the edge of the desk bruising her hips, and his cock, long and hard and curved, sawing into her deep, dragging that place over and over and over.

She came without warning. It went through her like a dropped tray, sudden and loud, her whole body seizing on the desk, her hands slapping flat on the leather, a cry torn out of her that went on longer than she had breath for. He kept fucking her through it. He did not slow down at all, and the second came up out of the first before the first was done, bigger, deeper, from the very bottom of her belly, and she sobbed into the blotter with her mouth open and her eyes shut and her drenched cunt clutching at him, helpless, again and again.

"Carol. Carol. I'm going to..."

"In me," she gasped. "Fill me up."

He drove in to the root and held her there by the neck and the hair, and she felt him come. Deep, a hard jerk of him at the very end of her, and the heat of it spilling into her, pulse after pulse, and his groan in her ear as he folded down over her back, his chest slick with sweat against her shoulder blades, his breath ragged.

They lay like that on the desk, him on her, for a long time.

When he pulled out she felt it go, and the cold air, and then the thick run of him out of her and down the inside of her thigh, warm, into the lace of her stocking, and a drop on the rug. Her red ass throbbed with his hand. Her scalp burned. Her legs would not have held her.

He turned her over, gently, and sat her up on the edge of the desk, and stood between her knees with his forehead against hers, both of them breathing.

"You okay?" he said. "For real."

She thought about it. She looked over his shoulder at the drawer still standing open behind him, and the panties in their bags laid out in a row on the rug, and the ledger.

"For real," said Carol.

She was smiling. It hurt her face.

---

At a quarter to midnight she found a voicemail on her phone, and played it with Liam asleep on her husband's rug.

"Carol, it's Jim. Sorry to call so late." The athletic director, hoarse. "I know this is... I know. But the boys had a team meeting tonight, on their own, and they voted. They want to dedicate the playoff run to him. All of it. And they asked if you'd travel with them. Sit on the bench. Be there." A pause, and a breath. "Marcus said, quote, she knows more football than the staff anyway. You don't have to decide now. Call me."

Carol put the phone down.

She looked at the drawer for a while. Then she got up, stiff and sore and leaking, unhooked the garter belt and peeled the stockings down her legs one at a time, the seams gone crooked and the lace tops stiff with him, and left them on the rug beside the bags. She found a pen, and on the first blank page at the back of her husband's ledger she wrote the date in her own hand.

Liam, she wrote. Twenty-nine. Against the front door, and over the desk.

She looked at it. She underlined it twice.