Coach Carol: The Other Woman

Book five. Spring, a year and a half after the funeral. Carol is 44. All other characters are above 18.

DISCLAIMER: There's depiction of breastfeeding, lesbian sex, spanking, strap-on sex, and a stepmother-stepdaughter threesome in this story. Please be warned.

The Invite

The email came in March, on a Tuesday, while Carol was breaking down spring film in her office with her feet on the desk.

The group that owned Aisle wanted her on its September cover. Her season had done it: the camel coat on the sideline, the clip of her tearing into a linebacker that every sports show had played, and the leggings. Vela had signed her in the fall and built the whole legging campaign around her ass, and for six months it had been on the side of every bus in the country, twice life-size, the black gone thin and glossy over every lush inch of it, above the line HOLD THE LINE. The email was signed by a senior vice president, who would take the meeting herself.

Iris.

Carol read the name three times. Then she took her feet off the desk.

She knew the face before she looked it up. A small blonde in black, standing alone at the back of the field house the day Carol buried her husband, who had watched Carol slap a crying cheerleader beside the casket, and had raised one eyebrow. Only the one. That night Carol had found out why.

She had read the first entry in his diary more times than any book she owned: the date in his square capitals, and the night she graduated from college, twenty-one and done with the place, and what she had worn under her gown. Iris, the beginning of all of it. Now she was twenty-nine and ran a floor of a tower on Michigan Avenue.

Carol wrote back: Happy to. Then she went home and opened the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet behind his desk and took out the first bag. White lace, folded small, and a strip of white tape with the date in his hand.

She put it in the zipped pocket of her handbag and went to bed.

---

Chicago was gray and blowing. The young woman who met her at the forty-first-floor elevator was petite and English, with a sharp black bob and a white shirt buttoned to the collar. She said her name was Kandice and walked Carol down a glass corridor half a step ahead of her, and then, the moment a door opened at the end of it, half a step behind somebody else.

"Coach Carol," said Iris. "Thank you for coming."

She was small. Carol had half a head on her in flats and more in the heels she had chosen for exactly that. Pale as cream, blonde hair pinned up, a sweet, innocent face and a mouth painted true bright red. Faint lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn't been there at the funeral. A gray pencil skirt tight over her hips, and a silk blouse buttoned exactly as far as a senior vice president buttons one, and not one button further would have closed over a pair of F cups: the silk pulled across her lush breasts in two smooth curves and caught the light every time she breathed, and in the open collar the soft top of her cleavage showed, a shadowed line that Carol's eyes went down into and had to be dragged back out of. Christ, Carol thought. She looks so incredibly fuckable. And she understood what Liam had meant.

Iris looked her up and down, frankly, the way the players did when they thought she couldn't see. Carol let her. She had grown up with brothers.

"Carol," she said.

"Carol," said Iris. "You're taller than you are on television."

"Everyone says that."

"I'm not everyone," said Iris, and one eyebrow went up.

There you are, Carol thought.

The First Showdown

The look was decided before Carol sat down: a man's suit in midnight navy, with nothing under the jacket but the lingerie.

"Kandice, the fitting room," said Iris. "And tell Tess I'll dress her myself."

The fitting room was at the end of the fashion closet, past racks of white gowns. Three tall mirrors stood angled together so that Carol, stepping into the middle of them, could see herself from three sides at once. On a padded hanger, in tissue, the set.

Iris unfolded the tissue with two fingers and held it up.

Navy silk satin, so dark it was nearly black until it moved. A longline bra, boned from the cups down to the waist, the cups cut low and edged along the top in a deep scallop of gold Leavers lace. A high-cut brief in the same satin, the gold lace laid across the front. Gold suspenders, four of them, hanging from the bottom edge of the longline. Seamed stockings in a sheer smoke.

"Team colors," said Carol.

"I know," said Iris. "Now take everything off."

She did it without hurrying, down to nothing, and Iris did not pretend not to look. In the three mirrors Carol watched her own body appear: tanned from the hikes and the sideline, auburn hair down her back, shoulders a volleyball had built. And what two years of coaching had done. The arms were not what they had been. The thighs had gone softer, still long and smooth and tight but no longer cut, and the hard ridges of her stomach were still there, faintly, when she breathed in, but they had gone soft at the edges, with a softness above each hipbone that had not been there at forty-two.

Iris didn't seem to see any of that. She was looking at Carol's bare ass in the side mirror, and went on looking. It had always been the thing men looked at, before the tits and before the face: tanned all over, a volleyball player's ass that two years on the sideline had only made fuller. Carol felt the look land there and stay, and read in it, plain as a play call, a want to bend her over something and turn it red under that small hand. Iris walked around behind her to see it in the flesh, and for a moment the senior vice president said nothing at all.

"Arms up," she said.

She dressed her like a mannequin, twelve hooks up the back, her knuckles brushing Carol's spine at each one. Then she came around the front and, without asking, reached into the left cup, lifted the warm weight of Carol's breast in her palm and settled it, and did the same with the right. "Thirty-four double D," she said, as if she were reading it off a tag. Her hand was small and warm and perfectly impersonal. Carol's nipple went hard against the satin anyway.

The bra was very good. It took her tanned breasts, which had always been a generous handful and were now a little heavier and a little lower than they had been at thirty, and lifted them and pushed them together so that they rose out of the gold scallops in two tanned swells, full, soft and warm, crushed together into a deep cleft that ran down into shadow behind the lace. The scallop sat just above her nipples, and when she turned, the dark edge of one slipped into view. Every breath swelled them up against the lace, and Carol watched Iris watch them. Below the cups the boning ran down and gripped her waist, and where it stopped it bit, a little, into the softness above her hips, and Iris ran a thumb along the edge as if she were smoothing a seam. "It's cut for the woman you were in January. I'll have it let out a quarter inch."

Then the brief. Iris drew it up Carol's legs, over the softer thighs, and settled it high on her hips. The cut was so high at the sides that the satin rode above her hipbones and left the whole round curve of her ass bare except for a narrow strip that pulled up between her cheeks. In front, the gold lace lay over her mound. Since California she had been waxed bare, and the lace hid nothing. Iris knelt in front of her and rolled the smoke stockings up one long leg and then the other, over the firm curve of each calf, and ran a thumb up each seam to the soft back of the knee before she fastened them to the suspenders, and was, for a moment, eye level with it, and looked at it, and did not hurry.

Then she walked around behind her and looked at the rest, in all three mirrors at once. It wasn't a girl's ass. It was a grown woman's, and it was magnificent: two big cheeks, round, heavy and pressed close, a little softer at forty-four than they were on the side of the buses, and still sitting up proud on the muscle underneath, swelling straight out from that narrow waist in a shelf. The navy strip was lost in the cleft. The plump undersides of both cheeks hung bare, and under each one, where it folded onto the thigh, the deep crease shifted when Carol moved her weight. Iris looked at it the way she looked at a gown that needed nothing done to it.

Then she came back around and stepped away. "Well," she said. "You do get to fuck a different athlete every night, don't you."

She said it lightly, adjusting the left strap, her fingertip lifting it a hair and letting it settle.

Carol looked at her in the mirror. Then she reached for her handbag on the chair, unzipped the inside pocket, and took out the bag.

"Oh," she said. "I think you left this at my place."

She held it up. White lace, folded small behind the plastic. The strip of tape. The date, in his square capitals.

Iris looked at it.

And blushed. It came up out of the silk collar and went all the way to her hairline, a deep, startled rose on that cream skin, and for one second the senior vice president of everything was a girl of twenty-one standing on a sideline with her skirt over her head. Carol watched it happen in three mirrors at once. She had not known it was possible.

It lasted a second. Then Iris reached out, took the bag from Carol's hand, opened the seal with one red nail and shook the thong out into her palm.

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Cost us a playoff run that year, didn't I?"

She turned to the mirror and held it up against herself, the tiny white triangle at her hips, and tipped her head.

"I was smaller then," she said.

Then she laid it over the back of the chair and stepped in behind Carol.

Carol felt her before she saw her. The heat of her down her back. The press of those heavy breasts into her back through the silk, two warm pillows of them, spreading below her shoulder blades as Iris leaned in, and Carol's breath caught. In the mirror Iris's face appeared at Carol's shoulder, half hidden behind it, and she rose on her toes, and her red mouth found the edge of Carol's ear and closed on the lobe. Took it between her teeth. Bit down, gently, and drew back, and let it go.

A shiver went down Carol from the ear to the backs of her knees.

Iris's hands came around her waist and slid up, flat, over the boning to the underside of the cups, and over the gold scallop, and across the bare tops of her tits where they swelled out of the lace, and down again, over the satin at her waist, over her hips, and around behind. They found her firm ass and filled themselves with it, a cheek in each small palm and far more of each than a palm could hold, and squeezed until the bare flesh swelled out hot around the satin strip, and held on. Carol felt her own pussy clench, hard, on nothing at all, so suddenly she had to lock her knees.

"There she is," said Iris against her ear.

Someone knocked.

"Iris?" Kandice's voice, very English, through the door. "Sorry. The photographer's here. And Legal."

"Two minutes," Iris called. Then she stepped away, folded the white thong back into its bag, sealed it, and dropped it into Carol's handbag.

"Keep it for me," she said. "You've had it longer than I did."

Room 3104

She texted at nine. Room 3104. I owe you a drink.

She did not think about it before she sent it. That was how she had pulled Liam through a doorway on the day of the funeral, and how she had caught a quarterback's eye from the bench and walked away so that he would follow. She was very good at the first move. With men, the first move was all there was.

Iris knocked at ten, still in the gray pencil skirt, with a long ivory wool coat belted tight at the waist over it and her hair coming down. Carol had a bottle of bourbon open on the desk and two hotel glasses.

"I had you down as a wine woman," said Iris.

"I was married to a football coach."

They sat on the bed with their shoes off and the city lit up in the window. Iris drank the way she seemed to do everything, neatly, and more than you'd expect. By the second glass Carol had her handbag in her lap.

"I want to show you something," she said. "Since you've shown me yours."

Iris's mouth twitched.

Carol took out the ledger.

Iris knew what it was before it was open. Carol watched her know. The black cover, the spine cracked white, the kind he had bought by the box for game plans. Iris took it in both hands and opened it at the first page and read the date in his square capitals, with the ruler line under it.

She didn't say anything for a long time. She read the night of her college graduation. She read on through the weight room, and the truck, and the equipment room. Her face did nothing at all.

Then she turned the pages forward. Kayla. Morgan. Jess. Season after season, a page each, like scouting reports. Brittany, the last of his. And then his handwriting stopped, and Carol's started, and kept on going. Liam. Twenty-nine. Against the front door, and over the desk. Marcus Dade. Tyler Brandt. Otis Brenner. Three times. Him, not me. Liam again. A page with four names on it and nothing else but Lost count. A handprint across two pages, margin to margin.

Iris turned them one after another, all the way to the end. Then she closed the book, turned it on its edge, and looked at the thickness of the back half against the front. Then she looked up at Carol over the top of it, with one eyebrow raised, exactly the way she had looked at her from the back of a field house.

"Well," said Iris.

"Don't."

"Two seasons?"

"Don't you dare."

Iris put the book down on the bed between them and laughed so hard she spilled bourbon on the duvet.

---

It was the bourbon that said it. Carol knew that even while it was coming out.

"I was jealous of you." She was looking at the ledger, not at Iris. "Do you know that? I read that page about the equipment room a hundred times. His hand on your throat. I asked him for years, and he lit a candle. And you got it in a closet full of pads on a Saturday."

Iris stopped laughing. She looked at Carol.

"It was once," she said. "Once, Carol." She tipped her head back against the headboard. "And honestly? He was kind of bad at it."

Carol stared at her.

"He was. He didn't know what he was doing. He was angry, he got lucky, and he was sorry for a year. After that it was tea lights. A tea light in the weight room, every single time, like he was apologizing to a church."

"Tea lights," said Carol faintly. "I got a whole marriage of tea lights."

"If you want to be jealous of somebody," said Iris, "be jealous of me at twenty-one." She held out her glass, and Carol filled it. "There's a basement under my old dorm. Three men on the maintenance crew who had been doing it for years before I ever walked down the stairs. A glove on a desk. One word that meant stop, and nothing else I said counted." She smiled at something Carol couldn't see. "That's where I learned what it was supposed to be."

"Three."

"Three." Iris drank. "And then there's Rosa."

"Who's Rosa?"

"A bar on a state road, two hours east. She owns it." Iris turned the glass in her fingers. "She took me apart on her pool table. Afterward I did something to her she liked, and she asked me where in the hell a country-club girl learned to do that. I said Frank." The smile came back. "She said, I taught him."

Carol lay back on the pillows and looked at the ceiling and laughed until her stomach hurt. She reached for the bottle and missed it, and found it.

"Oh, to think," she said, to the ceiling, "I thought you were just a dumb whore with big fat tits."

Iris put her glass down on the nightstand. She leaned over, close, until Carol could smell the bourbon on her and the perfume underneath, and said very softly into her ear:

"Well, I am a dumb whore with big fat tits." She drew back an inch and looked at her. "And I know you can afford me."

Carol kissed her.

---

She did it the way she did it with her boys: Iris's face in both hands, her whole weight behind it, pushing her down into the pillows until Iris's hair spilled across them. Iris's mouth tasted of bourbon and lipstick. Carol rolled on top of her and came down along the length of her, and pinned her, the way she pinned her boys.

And then did not know what to do.

With a man there was nothing to know. She climbed on, or she bent over, and he took it from there. With Holly she had never had to lead. She had her hand on Iris's blouse, and she could not think what came next, where her mouth went, whether you undid the buttons or the skirt first, and she just stayed there on top of her with her hand flat on the silk, frozen, like a linebacker who has read the play wrong and knows it.

Under her, Iris laughed.

Then she reached up, took a handful of Carol's hair at the back of her head, near the root, and pulled.

Not down. Back. Carol's head went back until she was looking straight up at the ceiling, her throat stretched long and bare, her breath stopped in it. There was something in that small hand, in how hard and how calmly it held her, that was not entirely kind, and Carol felt it go straight between her legs.

Iris's other hand came up. Carol felt a single nail settle in the hollow of her throat. The thumb. Sharp. Iris drew it down the side of her neck, along the vein, pressing just enough. It didn't break the skin. Carol knew, without knowing how she knew it, that it never would. She loved it anyway. She lay there over her with her head hauled back and her eyes on the ceiling and that one nail on her throat, and felt every inch of her body turn toward it.

From the corner of her eye she could see the hand. The thumbnail was long and polished, a glossy pale pink. So was the nail on the little finger. The three in between were bare and filed down to nothing.

She remembered Holly on the den couch, holding up her own short-nailed hand. Think about it.

"Oh," said Carol, to the ceiling.

"Mm," said Iris. She let go of her hair. "Now. Let's teach you something."

---

She steered from underneath, and Carol let her.

"Skirt first," Iris said, and took Carol's hand off the silk and put it on the zipper at her hip. Carol drew it down. Iris lifted her hips, and Carol peeled the gray wool off her and threw it somewhere, and the blouse after it, and sat back on her heels on the bed to look.

Pale blue satin, the silvery blue of ice, against black. A balconette bra embroidered over the cups with black flowers and edged in black. And it was losing. Iris's breasts were glorious, natural F cups with real weight to them, creamy, soft and pushed together into a long, warm cleavage that smelled of her perfume, of lilac, bridal gowns and being a busty whore. They swelled up out of the cups so full that the skin shone, threaded at the sides with faint blue veins, heavy enough that even lying on her back they sloped toward her arms and pressed the cups out of shape. A garter belt in the same blue sat high at her waist, the front a smooth panel embroidered like the bra, and at the hips it gave way to a cage of thin black straps fanning down over the white flesh and meeting at small gold rings. Sheer black stockings. A black string thong underneath the suspenders, so small it was hardly there, and through it the shape of her: bare, plump, already dark at the center.

"Jesus," said Carol. "Look at that rack."

"That's the general idea. Now go down. Slowly. I'll tell you."

Carol went down. She hooked the thong with two fingers and drew it down under the suspenders, over the black stocking tops and the soft white band of thigh above them, down the long sleek stockinged legs and off over Iris's small high-arched feet, the toes painted the same red as her mouth through the sheer black. Then she looked back up, and there she was.

She had never looked at another woman's cunt from here, with a choice to make. Iris was bare and smooth and swollen, the outer lips plump and pale, the inner ones a deep rose red and parted, glossy wet, the clit standing out of its hood. She smelled of salt and something sweeter, a whole day of it, and it went straight through Carol and lodged between her own legs.

She put her mouth on her and licked, the way she'd want it done to her. Hard and fast, straight at the clit.

"Lower," said Iris.

Carol went lower.

"Slower. Flat. Use the flat of it." A hand came down into Carol's hair. It didn't pull, this time. It rested there. "Slower than that."

Carol slowed. She laid her tongue flat and drew it up the whole length of her, from the bottom to the top, and tasted her properly for the first time: thick and salty, a little sour, slick coating her tongue and her lips and her chin. She did it again. Iris's soft, supple thighs opened wider against her ears.

"Mm. Now the top. Circle it. Don't touch it yet."

Carol circled. She could feel Iris's clit hard under the hood, and she went around it and around it and didn't touch it, and above her Iris's breathing changed. She made a small sound, high and breathy. Carol felt that sound in her own cunt.

"Two fingers," said Iris. "In. Turn them up. Toward you. There."

There. Carol felt it under her fingertips, a soft ridged place on the front wall, and pressed, and Iris's hips came off the bed and the satin cage dug pink lines into her skin.

"Don't move," said Iris, in a voice that wasn't steering anything anymore. "Stay there."

Carol stayed. She sucked the clit into her mouth at last and held it, and stroked with her fingers inside, and reached up the length of Iris's body with her free hand, past the garter belt and the soft white belly, and pushed the satin cup down, and one heavy breast rolled free of it into her hand. She couldn't hold it all; the warm weight of it spilled over between her fingers. She kneaded it, slowly, the way she was stroking inside her, and found the wide nipple with her thumb, felt it swell hard under it, and rolled it.

Iris's breath caught, hard.

Under Carol's thumb something warm welled up and ran. Carol lifted her head an inch, startled. A bead of white at the nipple, and another, sliding down over her knuckle.

"It doesn't do that anymore," said Iris, breathless, staring at the ceiling. "Not since the winter. Only when..." She swallowed. "Only when it's very, very good. So don't stop."

Carol didn't stop. She put her mouth back where it had been and her fingers back where they'd been told, and worked the nipple under her thumb, and felt the milk come warm over her hand every time Iris's hips lifted. Iris's thighs began to shake. Her hand closed in Carol's hair at last and held her face down into her. She came with a long rising cry, clenching around Carol's fingers in hard pulses that Carol felt to the wrist, her stockinged heels drumming on the bed, her thighs clamped tight around Carol's ears, her swollen breast leaking warm into Carol's palm.

Carol didn't stop until Iris pushed her face away with both hands, laughing and shaking.

She looked up the length of her. The small blonde sprawled on the white duvet, flushed from her throat to her nipples, the cage twisted on her hips, her thighs still trembling, a thin white trickle running down her ribs.

Carol wiped her chin with the back of her wrist.

"You know," she said, perfectly deadpan, "I'd cheat on myself too."

A week later, at home, she made Holly squirt all over her sheets. Who knew the girl had that much in her.

The Rematch

The spring game was the second Saturday in April, and Iris drove down for it.

She stood on the sideline in white jeans and sunglasses while Carol coached the scrimmage like a bowl game. Carol grabbed a player by the facemask after a terrible play and said four sentences into it that turned him white, and when she looked up, Iris had pushed her sunglasses into her hair and was watching her the way she watched a bride step out of the fitting room in exactly the right dress.

The booster gala was that night. Carol wore red silk, high at the throat and with no back at all, bare to the dimples above her ass, the silk below them losing the fight with the lush curve of it, and caught Iris looking at the dimples twice before the salad. By midnight she was still wired. In the elevator she pinned Iris to the mirrored wall with her forearm across her collarbone and kissed her until the doors opened, and walked her down the corridor by the wrist.

This time she didn't stop to think.

She had the dress off Iris in the doorway. Under it was black lace, a plunge bra cut so low that Iris was close to spilling out of it, the lace straining at every breath and a sheen of sweat from the dance floor gathered in the soft hollow between her pale breasts. Carol pushed her down onto the bed and climbed on after her. Iris tried to sit up. Carol put a hand flat on her breastbone and put her back.

"You stay right there."

Iris's eyebrow went up. She stayed.

Carol stood at the foot of the bed and let the red silk go. It slid down her body in one long fall and puddled at her feet. Under it was a bodysuit she had bought in Newport Beach and never worn: sheer black flowers over nude mesh, a V cut nearly to her navel so that her full double D cups were held only at the sides, the soft inner curves bare and the warm tanned line between them open almost to her navel, the dark nipples showing through the flowers. It ran down tight over her belly, over the softness she had learned to stop sucking in, and cut high over her hips into a thong back that left her round ass bare. Three small snaps held it closed between her legs. She had felt them all night, every time she sat down.

Iris looked at it, at the open V. "Come here," she said.

Carol came, on her own terms. She had a body that had been built for hitting a ball as hard as it could be hit, and she used it. She caught both of Iris's wrists and pinned them over her head in one hand, and with the other she dragged the black lace bra down under those voluptuous tits, and they tumbled out over it and swung apart, sliding to either side of Iris's chest under their own weight, the rose-red nipples already beaded at the tips. Carol pressed her mouth to one and sucked, and Iris gasped, and something warm and sweet touched Carol's tongue and she drew back, startled, and licked her lips.

"Later," said Iris, breathless. "Not that yet."

Carol pushed her knee between Iris's thighs, then her whole thigh, and pressed up into the wet heat of her through the thong, and ground. She had all her weight behind it. She had at least thirty pounds on her and four inches of reach, and she felt Iris notice both. She hooked one of Iris's legs over her own hip and got her own cunt down against Iris's thigh, the black lace snaps pressed into soft white skin, and they rocked like that, scissored, clit against thigh and thigh against clit, until the lace between Carol's legs was soaked and she could hear it. Her own tanned tits swung loose out of the deep V and dragged back and forth across Iris's, hot skin sliding on hot skin. Their nipples caught and slid. Iris's milk was smearing between them, warm and slick.

Carol was close and climbing, rocking down into her with her teeth in Iris's shoulder, and she thought, there, I have her, I've got her pinned.

Then Iris moved.

Carol never saw how. One moment she had both small wrists in her fist. The next her hand was empty, a heel had hooked behind her knee, and the bed went over, and she was on her back with Iris on top of her. Iris's knees were planted on either side of her ribs and Iris's small hand was flat in the middle of her chest, exactly where Carol's had been.

"My turn," said Iris.

Carol pushed up against the hand. It didn't move. It wasn't strong. It was certain.

Then Iris lay down along her and kissed her, slow and deep, and slid both hands under her and took hold of all that ass, and lifted. Carol felt herself hauled up off the sheets by it, cool air on her bare cheeks around the thong back, those small fingers sunk through the softness to the muscle and spreading her, and she moaned into Iris's mouth and arched up into her hands.

Iris took her apart. She went slowly where Carol had gone fast. She ran her mouth over the black lace without taking any of it off, over the plump sides of Carol's tits through the mesh, and found each nipple through the lace and bit it, gently, and then not gently, until Carol's back came off the bed. She hooked a finger in the deep V and drew the lace aside from one tanned breast, and the cool air got to the dark nipple before her mouth did and drew it tight. She looked at it until Carol was aching for her, and then she sucked it in.

She worked down the lace to the snaps between Carol's legs and unfastened them one at a time. Pop. Pop. Pop. Each one went through Carol like a slap. She peeled the soaked mesh up onto Carol's belly and spread her open with two fingers and looked: the bare mound, still tanned from the waxer's chair to the lips, the lips themselves swollen dark and slick and parted, the clit hard and red and twitching in the cool air, a string of wet stretching from her to the lace. "Look at that," said Iris softly, and Carol had never in her life wanted so badly to close her legs or to open them wider.

Then Iris's fingers went into her, two, curled and certain, straight to the place Carol hadn't known how to find on her, as though she had a map. Her mouth came down on Carol's clit. She didn't circle. She knew. She sucked it in and held it against the flat of her tongue and stroked the front wall of Carol's dripping cunt in long pulls, and Carol heard herself make a noise she had only ever made for Holly.

"There it is," said Iris against her, and didn't stop.

Carol came with both hands fisted in the sheets and her heels skidding on them, her toes curling, clenching around Iris's fingers so hard she felt each knuckle, a long, rolling, open-mouthed thing that went on far past the point she'd have stopped it herself. Iris rode it out with her, and when it was done she went on, softer, and took her over again.

When she finally lifted her head, her chin was shining. She wiped it with the back of her wrist the way Carol had, a month before in Chicago, and grinned.

"Lower," she said. "Slower. There."

Carol stared at her. Then she put both hands over her face and laughed until she cried.

Him

It was May before Iris came to the house. Holly was at Dot's till close. She knew.

Carol cooked steak the way he had liked it, without thinking. They took the bottle into the den, where the big screen still had an Ohio offense paused on it, and Iris stood in front of it for a whole minute with her glass in her hand.

"Every night we were married," said Carol. "It was the only part that was ours."

They talked until the windows went gray. Not about the equipment room this time. The small things. The ring in the cup holder. The booster sticker on the back of his truck, the year they went to the bowl game, SIMMONS FOR GOVERNOR, which he had pretended to hate and never taken off. Iris had seen it every lunch hour for a semester. Carol had driven behind it for a decade. They laughed until they were nearly sick, and then sat a while not laughing. One of them had gotten the man who was rough, once, when he was angry. The other had gotten the one who lit candles. Nobody else alive had known both.

Somewhere near five Carol went upstairs and came back with her handbag, and took out the bag of white lace, and put it in Iris's lap.

"It's yours," she said. "It was always yours."

Iris held it in both hands, and didn't open it.

"Show me what he did to you," said Carol.

---

They did it in his office, over his desk. Carol asked for that.

She bent over it in the gray dawn in what she'd been wearing all night, a cream silk blouse and a tight black skirt, with her palms flat on the blotter where he had written the diary. Iris came up behind her. She did not say anything. She put one small hand on the back of Carol's neck and pressed, and Carol's cheek went down onto the leather.

That was all it took. Carol felt everything in her let go at once, from the neck down.

Iris flipped the black skirt up over her back. Under it Carol had on the navy satin brief from the fitting, gold lace across the front, the cut so high that her ass was bare from the hip in, the strip of satin pulled up between her cheeks. Bent over the desk like that, she pushed the whole shelf of it up into the gray light. Iris ran her palm over the warm curve of one cheek, slowly, all the way around, and gave it one light pat, testing, and watched it jiggle and settle. Then she wound her other hand into Carol's auburn hair, near the root, and pulled her head back off the desk.

"He hit like a linebacker," said Iris. "Fingers together. Whole arm."

She spanked her.

The first one cracked off the walls of that small room, and Carol cried out more from shock than pain, and then the pain arrived, hot and bright, a small handprint blooming on her tanned ass. The second landed on the other side. The third back on the first. Iris didn't hurry and she didn't stop. She had learned it from somebody who knew how, and Carol could feel the difference: the cupped palm, the swing from the shoulder, each blow driving her hips into the edge of his desk and landing before the last one had stopped burning. Her big ass jumped and shook under it, each cheek rippling out from the blow and settling heavy again, the deep crease where it met her thigh flushing red. She could feel the heat climb, and spread, and sink through her until each blow seemed to land on her clit. Iris kept her head up by the hair so that she was looking straight at the shelf of his game balls and the framed photograph of the bowl team.

The satin between her legs went dark. She could feel it cling. She heard herself begin to sob, and then to push back for it.

"Look at you," said Iris, behind her, low. "All those years asking."

"Harder," said Carol.

Iris gave it to her harder. Low, where her ass met her thighs, full swing, again, and again, and Carol came over his desk with her face hauled up by the hair and nobody touching her aching cunt at all. It wrenched up out of her in a howl, her hips grinding helplessly into the wood, her nails tearing at his blotter. Iris held her by the neck and the hair and let her shake.

When it was over Iris let go of her hair and laid her palm flat on the burning skin, and kept it there.

"Stay just like that," she said.

Carol stayed, bent over his desk with her cheek on his blotter, and heard Iris's heels cross the room to her bag. A buckle. Then another.

When Iris came back around the end of the desk, Carol turned her head and looked, and forgot to breathe.

Black harness, wide soft straps buckled high on those pale hips above the stockings, and in the ring at the front, the cock. Thick and heavy and a rich dark brown, veined like a real one, with a curve to it. It stood out from that small soft body absurdly, obscenely, nearly the length of Carol's forearm.

Iris stroked it once, root to tip.

Holly's had been a polite thing next to this. Carol looked at it and her greedy cunt clenched on nothing.

Iris stepped in behind her. She hooked her thumbs in the soaked satin and peeled it down over the red welts, down the backs of Carol's thighs, until it caught around her knees, and dragged the head of the cock through all that wet, from clit to hole and back, again and again, until Carol was pushing back to chase it. Then she took Carol's hips in both small hands and pushed.

The stretch came up through her. The fat head forced her open, and then the thick shaft followed it in by the inch, the curve dragging along her front wall and finding the place on the way in and staying on it, until the harness sat flat against her stinging ass and Iris's hips pressed into the fresh handprints and lit them up all over again. Carol groaned into the leather.

Then Iris fucked her over his desk.

She wound her hand back into Carol's hair and hauled her head up off the blotter, and drove into her in long full strokes, out to the head and in to the root, her hips smacking into that burning ass so that it bounced back plump against her and every thrust stung and filled at once. The desk shifted on the rug. Game balls rattled on the shelf. The curve found that place on every stroke and dragged over it, and Carol, who had come once already with nobody touching her, came again within minutes, harder, sobbing into his blotter, and Iris didn't slow down at all and fucked her straight into a third.

When Iris finally pulled out, Carol felt every inch of it leave her, and slid down onto her knees on his rug, shaking.

Chapter Nineteen

After that, Iris drove down on Thursdays when she could. Carol drove up to Chicago on Sundays, two hours with the radio on and her hand between her legs for the last twenty miles.

"I haven't read a book since August," said Carol, one night at the end of May.

She was propped against the headboard of the Chicago bed, naked, with Iris across her thighs. "Now it's film and scouting reports and contracts."

Iris reached for her handbag and came up with a hardcover, still crisp in its glossy jacket. Carol saw the cover and made a sound.

A full moon. A huge red-furred shape with its back to the reader. And in its arms, held straight up off the ground and wrapped around it, her head thrown back and her auburn hair flying, a tall tanned woman who looked strangely, specifically like Carol, being taken in midair like a rag doll.

"Vivienne Thorne," said Iris. "Moonbound, book six. Out on Tuesday. I called in some favors and got a review copy." She looked at the cover, and then at Carol, and raised one eyebrow. "Read it to me."

"Out loud."

"Out loud. Chapter nineteen. The one in the river."

So Carol read, with the book open in one hand and Iris settled astride her thigh. She read about a woman in a cold mountain river and a wolf on the bank who was not, entirely, a wolf. Iris began to move on her thigh. Slow and wet, grinding down, rocking her clit along the long smooth muscle of Carol's thigh and leaving it slick, and Carol's voice snagged on a sentence and went on.

Iris took her free hand and studied it as if it were lace on a rail: the long fingers, the volleyball knuckles, the short nails Carol kept for the sideline. She kissed the palm. Then she drew two of Carol's fingers into her mouth to the knuckle, and sucked, and her eyes closed.

"Oh, Christ," said Carol.

"Keep reading," said Iris, around her fingers.

Carol kept going. Iris slid the fingers out wet, and guided them down between her own legs and into herself, and rode them, and Carol read about the wolf taking the woman in the shallows with her own voice gone hoarse and two fingers buried in Iris's slick cunt, Iris's hand over hers, pressing, the heel of her palm on Iris's clit. Iris loved her hands. She said so, once, with her forehead on Carol's shoulder. These. God, these hands.

Then Iris slid down and began to kiss her stomach.

Carol stopped reading. She looked down at the blonde head moving over her belly, kissing a line from one hipbone to the other across the soft place where the ridges used to be, and she heard herself say:

"I used to have abs, you know."

Iris kept kissing.

"Real ones. And arms. You should have seen my arms at forty." She laughed, a little. "Now look at it. It's all gone soft."

Iris lifted her head and looked at her stomach, and then up at her.

"Read me the river," she said, and put her mouth back where it had been.

Carol read. She got four more sentences. Then Iris's mouth went lower and the book slid off the bed, and nobody picked it up, and the wolf finished in the river without them.

---

It was June when Carol asked.

They were in the hotel bed in the afternoon, the curtains half shut, Iris in nothing but the white lace thong, which she had started wearing again and which was entirely too small for her now, the strings biting into the soft curve of her hips.

"I never had children," Carol said. "He didn't want them, and then it was too late to argue about it." She was looking at Iris's bare breasts, and couldn't stop. "Can I?"

Iris lay back on the pillows and opened her arms.

Carol lay down along her side with her head in the crook of Iris's arm, and looked.

They were heavenly. From this close she could feel the warmth coming off the nearest one, and smell it, faintly sweet, and watch the slope of it rise and fall a hand's width from her face with every breath Iris took. The nipple was a deep rose, with a faint blue vein running in toward it from the side.

"There won't be much yet," said Iris. "I went back on the pills last month, and they're slow. Only when..." She smiled. "You know when."

"I know when," said Carol, and slid her hand down between Iris's legs, and took her time.

By the time Iris was rocking on her fingers and breathing in short high catches, a bead of white had come up at the tip of the nipple nearest Carol's mouth, and swelled, and run down the curve.

Iris cupped it from underneath and lifted it to her.

Carol took the swollen nipple in her mouth.

She didn't know how. Iris showed her, with a hand on the back of her head: wider, more of it, the tongue under. Carol drew, and kept her fingers moving. For a second nothing, and then it came, not much, a thin warm thread across her tongue, sweet and thin, faintly like vanilla, and Iris let out a long breath above her that was almost a moan. Carol swallowed. She drew again, and it came again, and she shut her eyes.

For a long time she just drank, slowly, what little there was, her hand spread under the weight of it and sinking into the warm softness, her other hand still working between Iris's legs to keep it coming. Iris stroked her hair. Neither of them said anything. Carol felt something she had no name for come up from very deep in her chest and catch in her throat, and tears ran out of the corners of her eyes and into Iris's skin, and Iris didn't ask and didn't stop stroking her hair.

When the first one gave nothing more, Iris turned her gently to the other. Carol latched on without being shown. And this time, while she drank, Iris's hand left her hair and went down between Carol's legs, and found her wet, very wet, and stayed there.

Carol came with her mouth full of milk, holding on. Then she rolled Iris onto her back and pulled the ridiculous white thong down her legs with her teeth, and took her time over everything else, and it was evening before either of them got up.

His Eyes

In the middle of June Iris drove down on a Friday, and for once Holly didn't go to Dot's.

It took some doing. She was at the front door at seven in her leather jacket with her keys in her hand when Carol caught her by the sleeve.

"Stay for dinner."

"Hard pass."

"Holly."

"I've been hearing her through the wall for a month, Carol. I don't need to meet her."

Carol leaned on the doorframe. "There's steak," she said. "And pussy. And big fat titties."

Holly looked at her for a long moment. Then she hung her keys back on the hook.

---

Iris came at eight in the ivory coat, with a bottle of something French, and kissed Carol in the hall for longer than was strictly polite. Holly watched it from the kitchen doorway with her arms folded.

They ate in the dining room. Holly sat at the far end of the table with her boots planted and her eyes on Iris, narrow and gray and missing nothing, the whole of the first course.

"You're the stepdaughter," said Iris, over the salad.

"I'm the one who lives here."

Iris smiled at her, and Holly's eyes narrowed further.

The steak was very good. Nobody tasted it.

After the pie Iris stood up, took Carol by the hand, and led her upstairs without a word to anybody. Holly sat alone at the table for exactly four minutes.

Then there were boots on the stairs, and the bedroom door opened, and Holly stood in it and looked: at Iris, small and blonde and naked but for her stockings, kneeling up between Carol's legs with her mouth wet; at Carol, sprawled across the sheets, flushed and breathing hard.

Holly stood there a moment with her thumbs in her pockets. Then she looked at Carol.

"And you," she said. "Don't think I've forgotten what you did to my sheets."

Carol, flat on her back with Iris's hand still between her legs, laughed out loud.

That did it. Holly shrugged off the jacket and pulled the black T-shirt over her head. Under it she was all long wiry muscle and ink, the snake and the peonies running up her left arm from the back of her hand to her shoulder, the swallow under her collarbone, her small C cups pert and freckled, the silver bar through one nipple catching the lamp. She went to the closet without a word and came back buckling on the soft black harness from Velvet Hammer, the plum-colored cock bobbing in its silver ring, and climbed onto the bed.

"Move over," she said to Iris. "She's mine."

Iris didn't move. Holly reached for her wrist to move her.

It happened very fast. Carol saw Iris's hand turn under Holly's and close on it, and a knee hook behind a knee, and the bed bounced, and Holly was flat on her back in the middle of it with both wrists pinned over her head in one small white hand and Iris sitting astride her hips. Nobody, least of all Holly, could have said how.

Holly bucked. Iris rode it. She was a head shorter than Holly and she didn't budge.

"Oh, honey," said Iris. "No."

She reached down with her free hand and unbuckled Holly's harness, one side and then the other, without looking, and pulled it out from under her and dropped it off the side of the bed. Holly's mouth fell open.

Iris leaned down until her blonde hair fell around both their faces.

"Should I stop?" she said quietly. Not for the room. For Holly.

Holly glared up at her, flushed and furious, her freckled tits heaving, nipples gone hard.

"Hurumph," she said.

And let her knees fall open.

"Good girl," said Iris, and Holly's whole face went scarlet.

Iris got off her and went to her bag. When she came back she was buckling on her own harness, and Holly saw what was in it and said, "Oh, fuck you."

"Carol," said Iris pleasantly. "Hold her for me."

Carol knelt up at the head of the bed and took Holly's wrists, and drew her up by them until Holly's head was in her lap, and held them there, crossed, against her own thighs. Holly looked up at her, upside down. Betrayed. Gray-eyed. And wet; Carol could see it from there, shining on the insides of her thighs.

"Traitor," said Holly.

"Mm-hm," said Carol, and bent down and kissed her upside down, and felt her mouth open under hers.

Iris spread Holly's thighs with her knees. She looked at her for a while, the way she'd looked at Carol in the fitting room, like something on a rail she was deciding whether to buy. Then she dragged the head of that dark curved cock up through Holly's cunt, clit to hole, and Holly jerked under Carol's hands and swore into her mouth.

"Oh, she's soaked," said Iris. "For all that."

She pushed in.

Holly made a sound Carol had never heard her make, a low torn groan that came up from somewhere under her ribs, and her long legs splayed and her heels dug into the sheets. Iris didn't stop. She fed the cock into her by the inch, the curve dragging along the front of her, until the harness met Holly's narrow hips and Holly was full of it, stretched around the thick dark shaft, her mouth open against Carol's and her eyes shut tight.

"There," said Iris. "Not so bad."

"I hate y... mmmFFFFFFF..."

Iris had tilted her hips up, just slightly, and the curve of the cock drove straight into her G-spot, and the rest of the sentence went out of Holly through her nose.

Iris pulled out to the head and drove back in, and Holly's back came off the bed.

Then she plowed her. She held Holly's knees apart and fucked her with long, deep, unhurried strokes, all her weight in her hips, every one landing hard enough to shove Holly up the bed into Carol's lap, the slap of it loud in the room, Holly's small tits jolting, the silver bar winking. Holly swore at her. She swore at Carol. She called Iris every name she knew, and then she stopped, because she was too busy pushing her hips up to meet her, her lean ass clenching and coming clean off the sheets on every stroke.

"Oh, she likes it," said Iris to Carol, over Holly's head, delighted.

"I do not," said Holly, and came.

It took her completely by surprise. Carol felt it go through her wrists, a long shuddering clench that bowed her up off the sheets, and Holly turned her face into Carol's thigh and cried out into it, furious and helpless and gone, clenching around that cock so hard Iris had to hold still. Then Iris started again, and Holly said "No, oh God, oh fuck," and didn't mean the first word, and came again inside a minute.

Afterward Holly lay across both of them with her head on Carol's stomach and her legs over Iris's lap, breathing like she'd run the stairs, and didn't say anything.

Iris was looking at her face. She reached out and pushed the silver extension back off Holly's forehead, and it fell straight back down.

"You've got his eyes," she said.

Holly opened them. "Everybody says that."

"I know them." Iris's mouth tilted. "I watched them over a clipboard for a whole season. He used to look at an offense like that. Like he'd already worked out how it ended."

Holly didn't say anything. But she didn't look away either.

Iris looked her over from the white crop to her long bare legs. "You know," she said, "you'd make a great model."

"Fuck off."

"No, really. The cheekbones. The legs. And next to us, you've got no tits at all."

Carol laughed so hard Holly bounced on her stomach. Holly reached for a pillow to throw, and never got there. Iris caught her by the wrist, and Carol caught her by the other, and between them they pulled her up the bed and down between them, and that was the end of Holly's evening.

She lay on her back with her face smothered from both sides: Carol's gorgeous double D cups pressed against one cheek and Iris's F cups spilling over the other, tan on one side of her face and cream on the other, drowned in so much titflesh that for a second there was nothing of Holly visible above the chin but the silver extension. Iris was still flushed from all of it, and a thin bead of white was running down from her nipple. She guided it to Holly's mouth.

Holly hesitated for exactly one second. Then she drank, slowly, her eyes closing, her hand coming up to hold the weight of it, and made a small low sound into Iris's skin that she would deny for the rest of her life.

"What was that?" said Carol.

"Milf titty heaven," said Holly, muffled.

Iris settled back against the headboard with Holly at her milky breast, very pleased with herself.

"I'm going to Paris in July," she said. "Couture week. Aisle has the front row." She looked at the two of them, tangled across her. "Do y'all want to come?" She said it in a fair imitation of Carol. "We're taking the Hermès jet."

There was a silence.

"Is there an open bar," said Holly, around a nipple.

"Honey," said Iris, "we have a suite with its own bar in the room."