Mirage Vol. 2 : The Sisters-in-Law

Mirage, book two. Emily is 34 and Sabrina is 32. All other characters are above 18.

DISCLAIMER: There's depiction of breeding, gangbangs, cheating, lesbian sex, and CNC in this story. Please be warned.

Mirage is an organization that grants wishes. A woman provides what she desires most and Mirage builds it for her: the place, the cast, the script, sometimes on a night she chooses and sometimes as a surprise. Everything looks real. It's a mirage.

The Intake

Black. A breath, close to a microphone.

A screen turns on.

MIRAGE

INTAKE · FILE 0463

Two gray chairs. A blinding window. Against it, a shape in a gray suit, two long, still hands. A microphone with a red light.

Nobody in the library has ever seen her face. Everybody in the library knows her voice.

Two women sit down in the gray chairs and look into the camera.

The one on the left is thirty-four, with dark hair pinned up and a pale, serious face. She's still in court clothes: a navy suit, and under it a cream sweater a size too big that hides nothing at all. The soft knit shifts over her enormous breasts every time she breathes. There's a legal pad on her knee, and under it a twelve-page contract covered in red pen.

The one on the right is thirty-two, blonde, fair and fine-boned, with a runner's legs in a fitted black dress and a small, sharp, pretty face that always looks about to do something it shouldn't. She crosses her legs.

The red light comes on.

"State your names."

"Emily Prescott."

"Sabrina Prescott." A small smile. "Not sisters. We married brothers."

"What do you do?"

"I'm an assistant state's attorney," says Emily. "Cook County."

"Leveraged finance," says Sabrina.

"What do you want?"

Emily opens her mouth, and Sabrina gets there first.

"We've been married ten years," she says. "Neither of us has had a good fuck at home in nine of them." Beside her, Emily shuts her eyes. "They're kind men. They're also both infertile, and so is their father, though nobody in that family will say it out loud. We've done four rounds of IVF between us, mostly on our own, because their mother thinks it's playing God. So. One weekend. Both of us at the very peak of our cycles, on the same days, on whatever it takes to get us there."

"We want to be filled," says Emily. Her voice is perfectly steady and her face is scarlet. "Over and over, all weekend. Every drop goes in one of us. Nowhere else." She swallows. "Nothing wasted. We want to come home pregnant."

"The men."

"Four," says Sabrina. "On whatever it takes too. With the best numbers you've got."

"Four won't keep up with two of you for a whole weekend," says the voice. "Six."

Sabrina laughs out loud. Emily writes it down.

"Your limits."

Emily reads them off the legal pad like a list of charges. "Never: anything that marks the face. Nobody finishes anywhere but inside one of us. Nothing in my ass. Nobody hits me."

"You can ask me about my ass," says Sabrina. "And spanking. In the moment."

"And each other?"

The two of them look at each other, and away.

"Ask us in the moment," says Emily.

"Where do you want to be pushed?"

Sabrina doesn't need to think. "Hands. Being held down for it. Being told we're good girls for keeping it in."

"Being kept on our backs after," says Emily, to the legal pad.

"Your word."

"Pantry," they say together.

One long hand writes something very short on the page.

"Long story," says Sabrina. "Thanksgiving."

"And if your mouth is full?"

"Two taps," says Emily. "On whoever's nearest."

The window waits. Then Sabrina leans forward, and Emily goes still beside her.

"One more thing," Sabrina says, to the red light. "I want a strong and healthy baby. The strongest and healthiest baby I can make. I don't trust a petri dish to pick for me, and I sure as hell don't trust the Prescotts' genes. So on the day it counts, I want every one of them to finish in me, one right after the other, so they have to fight it out." Her voice has gone very quiet. "Let the best seed win."

"Put that in," says Emily, without turning her head. "Exactly like that."

"And you?" says the voice. "Do you want them to 'fight it out'?"

Emily looks down at her legal pad. There is nothing on it for this.

"No," she chuckles. "That's hers. I just want a baby. I've wanted one my whole life." Her voice does something she hasn't planned. "I'm only sitting in this chair because she's with me."

Sabrina reaches over without looking and takes her hand.

"Where?"

"Somewhere warm, with a clinic," says Sabrina. "Our husbands are going to think we flew to the Caribbean for IVF."

"We'd like that to be true enough to hold," says Emily.

"How much of you do we keep?"

"Mosaic," says Emily. "Both of us. But I'd like to see exactly what the mosaic covers."

One long hand turns the monitor around.

"This is what one client chose to release," says the voice. "I think you'll like it."

On the screen a lawyer is defending a rapist, her face a soft blur of squares. Not guilty. Behind her, the victim's family are on their feet, outraged. She turns around and gives her client a thumbs-up.

He smiles at her. Then he pulls her in, tears her clothes off, and rapes her, then and there, over the defense table. The family crowd around her, phones out, ready to ruin her life. She screams, and then she comes.

Emily watches every second of it. She has put men like that in prison. Her knees are pressed tight together, and her pen has stopped moving.

When it finishes she says, "Can I see it again?"

The hand presses play.

She watches it twice. Then she looks down at the next line on her legal pad. "The mosaic is very good," she says. "I didn't see any edge artifacts at all."

"Thank you." For a moment the long hands are not quite still.

The hand makes one last note. "Two of your red-pen changes are good, counselor," says the voice. "You'll have them."

Then the hands fold on the desk, and the voice says what it says at the end of every file.

"Last question. Nothing that happens will be real. Do you understand?"

"Yes," says Emily. "It's in the agreement. Page four."

Sabrina squeezes her hand and grins at the camera. "Shame," she says.

"Then it's granted."

The red light goes off.

The screen goes dark.

APPROVED

Thanksgiving

They had met over a turkey, eleven years ago, at the Prescotts' house in Winnetka.

Emily had been dating Nathan for four months. She wore a gray cashmere sweater with a high round neck and the longest skirt she owned, and still felt the eyes of every man at the door go to her chest and stop there, the way they always had. Nathan's father looked at her sweater and asked where she'd gone to law school; his mother looked at it and asked her nothing.

Sabrina had been dating Ryan for six weeks, and she wore a green silk dress that stopped mid-thigh and didn't have a back.

They were seated together at the girlfriends' end of the long table, and were very polite until Margaret Prescott said grace for four full minutes. As everyone lifted their heads, Sabrina said very quietly, without moving her lips, "Does he say it like that in bed too?"

Emily choked on her water.

By the pie they had found the walk-in pantry, and Sabrina had pulled a four-hundred-dollar bottle off the wine rack. They drank it out of coffee mugs on the floor, and talked about Nathan and Ryan, and then about men in general, and then about men in particular.

"Do they always look?" Sabrina asked at one point, nodding down at Emily's sweater. Not unkind. Curious.

"Always," said Emily.

"Do you mind?"

Emily thought about it longer than she should have. "I don't know," she said finally. "I've never known."

Sabrina smiled over her mug, all tight runner's muscle and bare fair back under the green silk.

"I'd mind if they didn't," she said.

Ryan found them there at ten o'clock, the bottle empty, the two of them lying on the pantry floor laughing so hard they couldn't get up.

---

After that there were double dates: a Cubs game where Emily wore a hoodie in July, and a weekend in Door County where the two of them shared a bottle of gin on the dock at two in the morning. Sabrina confessed she'd once slept with her boss's boss at a client dinner. Emily confessed that she'd liked it when a man in a bar told her exactly what he wanted to do to her tits. "Did you want to do anything about it?" said Sabrina, and when Emily didn't answer she laughed so hard she nearly went into the lake.

They were best friends before they were family. Nathan married Emily the next summer, in a church Margaret chose; Ryan married Sabrina the summer after, with Emily as matron of honor.

The wedding nights were fine. That was the word they both used, separately. Fine.

---

It took a few years to say the rest out loud: on Emily's thirtieth birthday, three martinis in, in a hotel bar on Rush Street.

"Ten minutes," Sabrina said. "Missionary. Lights off. Then he asks me if it was good for me, like he's asking if I want the receipt."

"Nathan doesn't ask," said Emily. "He just falls asleep. I lie there."

"And do what?"

Emily looked very hard at the olive in her glass, and Sabrina stared at her in delight. "Oh my God. You've never owned a toy."

It came three days later in a plain brown box. Emily hid it in her nightstand under a stack of case law, and used it that night, and most nights after.

The babies didn't come. The doctors ran tests on the brothers, and the brothers went very quiet. Margaret Prescott found out about the clinic and told the Sunday table that some things were in God's hands, not a doctor's; by Christmas she was wondering aloud why either girl needed to work at all.

Emily and Sabrina did the shots in their own bathrooms, alone, and texted each other pictures of the bruises.

Objection

Courtroom 506 at 26th and California was full by nine in the morning.

Emily stood at the State's table in a gray suit jacket buttoned over the loosest crew neck she owned, and read the charges. Aggravated criminal sexual abuse. Unlawful restraint. The defendant sat ten feet away in an orange jumpsuit, and he did not look at her face once.

She could feel exactly where he was looking. She always could.

She had worn big, loose, high-necked sweaters all her adult life, and they had never worked. Under the soft knit her magnificent breasts shifted and settled with every page she turned and every breath she drew, and when she walked quickly they went on moving for a moment after she had stopped.

"Objection," said the public defender, and she turned to answer him, and the turn did what it always did. The judge, who was sixty-eight and had known her for six years, asked the witness to repeat his answer, although the witness hadn't said anything yet.

Emily felt the heat climb her throat, kept her voice exactly where it was, and won the point.

On the way out, past the lockup, somebody whistled, long and low. "Damn, counselor," said a voice through the grille, and three others laughed. "You can charge me with whatever you want."

She walked faster. At the elevator they went on moving after she'd stopped, and she pressed her files to her chest and pretended to read the floor numbers.

---

"So he whistled," said Sabrina at lunch, at a place on Monroe where nobody from either of their offices ever went. "That's a compliment, Em."

"He's charged with aggravated criminal sexual abuse."

"Sure. And he has eyes." Sabrina pointed her fork at the sweater. "You know you're the only woman in the Loop who can make a crew neck look like a crime scene?"

"Stop it."

"I'm just saying. If I had those, I'd never wear a shirt again." She glanced down at her own fitted white blouse, where there was a good deal less to work with, and didn't seem to mind. "I'd charge admission."

Emily laughed, hid it in her water glass, and didn't tell her about the nights. About the files.

She had started bringing them home in the second year of the toy. Never the photographs; just the paperwork. Subject is described as six foot three, two hundred and forty pounds. Subject is described as having held the complainant down. She read them in bed with Nathan asleep by ten, his back to her, then put the file down open on the comforter and reached into the nightstand.

She never pictured the victims. Never once. She pictured the men: the big one in the orange jumpsuit who hadn't looked at her face, the voices through the grille. You can charge me with whatever you want. She pictured herself in that courtroom with the sweater gone and her hands on the State's table.

She came biting her own wrist so as not to wake her husband. Then she lay in the dark with the toy still buzzing against her thigh and the file open beside her, disgusted with herself and slick to the knees, and sometimes she did it again.

The Closing

The deal closed at four in the afternoon on the forty-first floor, after nineteen hours, and by five there was champagne in the big conference room.

Sabrina stood by the window in a black sheath dress that fit her the way her running tights fit her, and counted.

Five men in that room were watching her legs. One of them was Daniel. He was thirty-three, newly divorced, with good shoulders and a sad mouth, and he had spent the whole nineteen hours trying not to stand next to her and failing.

She finished her glass, caught his eye and held it, and walked out to the small meeting room at the end of the corridor, the one with no window in the door.

He was there inside two minutes.

She didn't let him talk. She sat on the edge of the table and pulled him in by his tie, and hiked the dress up over her hips herself, and he made a sound into her mouth as if he were in pain. He fucked her standing up, with her heels locked behind his back and her shoulders against the whiteboard, and he was big, bigger than Ryan, bigger than anything she'd had in months, and she came with her teeth in his shoulder and the closing party going on forty feet away through two walls. Then she sent him back first, fixed her lipstick in the dark window, and went back out ten minutes later with a fresh glass of champagne, flushed and glowing, and nobody looked twice.

It wasn't the first time. It was the fourth, at this bank. She picked them the way she picked deals, from across a crowded room, and the part she liked best was always the walk back in.

---

The after-party was at a hotel bar off Michigan Avenue, and by eleven the bank had gone home.

Sabrina ended up at the bar beside a woman she didn't know: very blonde, very fair, in a sharp charcoal suit, with a silk blouse under the open jacket that was losing a long, quiet war with a pair of breasts as big as Emily's. Some kind of senior executive; Sabrina never did get the company straight. A few drinks past where they should have been, they started talking about husbands.

"Ten years," Sabrina heard herself saying, "and he still asks me if I'm in the mood. Like he's booking a conference room."

The blonde woman laughed, low and wicked, and turned on her stool to face her, and the blouse lost a little more of the war.

"Have you ever," she said, "heard of a place called Mirage?"

---

Sabrina woke the next morning with her shoes still on, and decided that she had dreamed it: the low voice, the hand on her wrist. They'll give you anything. Anything you can write down. A cream card pressed into her palm, with nothing on it but a web address and a code.

Then she found the card in her purse.

The Library

She put the code in that night, in the guest room, and didn't sleep.

By four in the morning she had found the breeding ones. Woman after woman saying the same three words in different ways: in me, fill me, don't pull out. One of them, thirty-six and husky-voiced, said in her interview that she'd gone to a hotel in the Caribbean and come home with twins, as calmly as a weather report.

Sabrina lay in the gray light with her hand between her legs and thought about a ski lodge in Colorado, at twenty: two men in one night, and lying awake afterward with both of them still warm inside her. If I got pregnant now, I wouldn't know whose it was. But my body would.

She'd never told anybody that. Not Ryan, God, not anybody.

She had one completely clear thought before she fell asleep. Emily.

---

She played it for her in the hotel bar on Rush Street, one earbud each, their heads close together.

She chose the twins, and watched the color come up from the crew neck of Emily's sweater all the way to her ears, and stay there.

When it ended Emily set the earbud down on the table very carefully, and looked at it.

"Play it again," she said.

The second time, she left it in, her eyes on the table.

"You're going to do it," she said.

"I'm thinking about it," said Sabrina.

"Can I come with you?" Emily looked up. "Then we can have babies at the same time." Her voice went small. "I can't do this alone."

Casting

The six files came by hand: a first name, a photograph, a page of numbers. Sabrina read hers on the guest bed, kicking her bare feet in the air, and texted Emily every few minutes.

em. EM. look at the rower.

Emily only really looked at two. Graham, fifty-two, silver-haired and quiet, with thirty-one pregnancies to his name. And Wade, off a dairy farm in Wisconsin, with hands that took up half the photograph and one line under his numbers that Sabrina read three times. Note: very large. Clients are advised.

which one do you want first, she wrote.

The answer took four minutes. Graham. He looks like he'll be nice to me.

and second?

The three dots came and went for a long time.

Wade.

---

The shots started in September. They had done it all before. This time, standing at the sink in the morning with the pen in her hand and her nightshirt pulled up over her soft stomach, Emily was so turned on her hand shook.

The husbands drove them to O'Hare at the end of the month. "Good luck in there," Ryan said at the curb, and meant it. Margaret Prescott had not been told about this clinic; Margaret had been told the girls needed a vacation, and thought that was very sensible.

On the plane Sabrina held Emily's hand in her lap, and neither of them said anything for an hour.

Coral House

Coral House was a long low white house on a small green island, with a string of villas along the cove.

Celeste met the car herself. Forty-five, maybe, tall and tanned, black hair pulled back from a strong, laughing face, in a loose white linen dress that the sea wind kept pressing flat against her, so that it was perfectly plain there was nothing at all underneath.

"Welcome," she said, and kissed them both. "I'm Celeste. I'll be looking after you. We have the best doctors, the best nurses and the best equipment in the world, and every one of them is here for one thing: to keep the two of you at your peak. Fed, rested, watered. All you have to do is drink what I give you and lie where I put you."

"Does it work?" said Sabrina.

Celeste smiled. "I have three children from this service. The youngest has the most beautiful red hair. I never did find out where it came from." She put a cold green glass in each of their hands. "Drink, chérie. You're going to need it."

Their villa had a bed wider than a bed had any business being, piled with pillows and hard foam wedges, and one wall that folded back to the sea. On the nightstand, in a little glass dish, lay half a dozen smooth glass plugs, graded by size.

Sabrina picked up the biggest and held it to the light. "Oh," she said, delighted. "They've thought of everything."

There were cameras too, for the mosaic, high in the corners of the ceiling. Emily noticed them at once. By Friday night she had forgotten they were there.

The trigger shots came on Thursday night at nine. "Thirty-six hours," said the doctor. "Saturday morning, both of you. Friday night is good. Saturday is perfect. My advice is not to waste Friday."

"We don't intend to waste anything," said Emily, and Celeste laughed out loud.

Friday

The men came up from the beach at sunset, two at a time, the way Celeste had arranged it.

Emily was on the terrace with a glass of water, in a loose white cotton dress that buttoned all the way up.

The first two came up out of the sea laughing. Lars, a former rower, so tall and fair he blocked the sun; and Finn, a young Irish rugby player, blond and broken-nosed and grinning, wet to the waist. "Twenty minutes," Sabrina whispered. "His file says he can go again in twenty minutes."

Then Cole and Adrian, walking slower. Cole was a Milwaukee firefighter, solid and dark-bearded, with a slow easy smile. Adrian was a surgeon, spare and gray at the temples, and beside Cole he looked like a racing dog beside a draft horse. "Best numbers on the roster," said Emily, before she could stop herself.

And last, Graham and Wade. Graham walked a little apart, tall and silver and quiet, with his hands in his pockets. Wade was broad as a barn door, sandy-haired and sunburnt, in an old gray T-shirt that strained across his chest, and when he came up the steps he reached out to steady himself on the rail, and she saw his hand.

God, she thought. His hands.

Beside her, Sabrina had gone completely still. She was looking at Wade too, but lower, at the long, thick shape in the front of his old faded shorts. Her mouth had come a little open.

---

Celeste made the introductions on the terrace, with drinks, as if it were a dinner party, and for half an hour it was.

Then Sabrina put her glass down with a click, and everybody stopped talking.

"Okay," she said. "Rules."

She stood to give them like the terms of a deal, one hand on her hip, in a short silk slip dress the color of champagne that showed every lean line of her. She'd rehearsed it. Emily could tell.

"Each other," said Emily quietly, from her chair, and then looked hard at her glass.

Sabrina looked at her for a long second. Then she smiled.

"Each other," she agreed. "If we want. And afterward, every time, hips up. Pillows. Legs in the air. Nobody gets up to shower. Nobody wipes anything off." She lifted her chin. "Questions?"

Graham, who hadn't said a word all night, put his glass down.

"Just one," he said, in a low, gentle voice, faintly English. "Who's first?"

---

Emily was first. Sabrina insisted.

They took her to the big bed with the doors open to the darkening sea and the candles lit, and they took it slowly, and she was so grateful she could have cried.

Graham undressed her. He stood her at the foot of the bed with the others sitting back to watch, and undid the white dress one button at a time from the throat down, while she looked at the floor. She hadn't worn a bra. She'd thought about it for an hour and then she hadn't. When the last button came undone he drew the dress back off her shoulders and let it fall.

The room went quiet.

She had never stood in front of men like this. Not even Nathan, not in the light. She kept her arms at her sides and her eyes on the floor, her face on fire, and didn't cover herself, because she'd promised Sabrina in the car that she wouldn't.

Her bare breasts were bigger than any sweater had ever let on: full, heavy F cups on a slim frame, sitting low and swaying with every breath, pressed together in a deep, soft cleft, the skin there pale and fine and never once touched by the sun. Wide pink nipples, drawn up tight in the sea air. Faint red lines underneath, where a lifetime of bra elastic had bitten in. Her waist was narrow, her stomach soft, her hips slim, and below them was a neat dark strip she had trimmed that morning with the bathroom door locked, shaking.

"Jesus," said somebody under his breath. Finn, she thought.

Graham didn't say anything. He looked at her with those kind gray eyes for so long that she finally lifted her own eyes to his face. He was smiling.

"There," he said gently. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

She laughed. It came out wet. And Sabrina, watching from the daybed, saw her best friend's whole body let go at once.

---

Graham laid her on her back in the middle of the bed, and Sabrina knelt on the pillows by her head and took her hand.

He undressed without hurry: long-limbed and silver-haired all over, a little soft at the waist but strong, an older man's body, unashamed. His cock, when it came free, was thick, veined and dark, the head broad and swollen. He'd been abstaining for three days, and his balls hung full and low with it.

He knelt between her thighs and pushed them apart.

She'd been wet since the terrace, since the hands. Her pussy had swollen and flushed dark, shining in the candlelight, and when he put his thumb on her clit, very lightly, she arched off the bed so hard her big tits swung and slapped together, and every man in the room made a sound.

"Please," Emily said.

It was the only thing she'd said since the dress. Graham rested the broad head of his cock at her entrance, so lightly that all she could feel was the heat of him against her slick, and waited until she looked at him.

Then he pushed into her.

Slowly. All the way. The thick head spread her wide, a slow burn that made her gasp, and the rest of him slid in after it, heavy and endless, more than Nathan, more than the toy, until he was pressed up hard against the very end of her, as deep as a man could go, and his balls lay warm against her ass.

She cried out. Sabrina's hand closed on hers so hard it hurt.

"There you are," said Graham softly, and began to move.

He fucked her slowly and deeply for a long time, all the way out and all the way back, and every time he bottomed out her soft tits rolled up toward her chin and back.

"Ohh--ohhh--oh, God--"

The men watched, and the sea came and went outside the open doors. She came once, quietly, eyes shut and toes curling in the sheets, and he held still in her through it while she shook. Then he began again, harder.

He came with a long low sound, his hips pressed tight to hers. She felt him swell inside her and kick, and then the heat, flooding deep into her right where it needed to be, wave after wave, three days' worth, until she could feel the warm weight of it low in her belly.

He didn't pull out until the candle beside the bed had burned down an inch.

When he did, she felt it start to follow him, and before she could move Sabrina had scrambled down the bed with pillows and a hard foam wedge, pushing them under Emily's hips and tipping her pelvis up toward the ceiling. Then she took Emily by both ankles and lifted her legs straight up and held them there.

"Keep it in," Sabrina said fiercely. Her eyes were very bright. "Keep it in, Em. Not one drop."

Emily lay with her legs in Sabrina's hands and Graham's cum warm and heavy inside her, and started to laugh, and laughed until the bed shook.

---

Sabrina was second, and Sabrina did not want slow.

She'd been watching for forty minutes and was so worked up she was shaking. She stripped the champagne slip off over her head in one movement and threw it at the doors.

Emily had seen her in a bikini a hundred times, and this was a different animal altogether: fair and taut, a runner's body pared down to nothing, long hard thighs, a flat stomach ridged with muscle, and a tight, round ass she'd spent a thousand hours on and was proud of. Her firm C cups sat pert and upturned on her slim, athletic frame, the coral-pink nipples already hard. She was waxed completely bare, and her pussy was swollen and glistening, wet all the way down the insides of her thighs.

Cole looked at her as if he wanted to eat her alive.

She chose Lars and Cole, both at once, and didn't let them be gentle. Lars pulled her onto her hands and knees beside Emily, facing the headboard, and Cole knelt behind her. His cock was short, enormously thick and dark-veined, the head fat and blunt. He drove into her in one hard stroke and she screamed into the sheets with pure joy.

He fucked her hard and fast, the slap of his hips on her tight ass loud in the candlelit room, her small tits swinging under her, her back bowed. Lars knelt up against the headboard in front of her. His cock was long and pale, rearing hard against his flat stomach, and he held her by her blonde hair and fed himself into her mouth and fucked her face, and she gagged and moaned and took it, eyes streaming, down on one elbow, her free hand reaching blind across the sheet until it found Emily's. Emily held on.

When Lars got close he pulled out of her mouth, as he'd been told, with a groan that sounded like it physically hurt him, and waited, gasping. Cole came inside her with his fingers digging into her hips, and Sabrina came with him, howling into the mattress. Then Cole pulled out, and Lars rolled her onto her back and pushed straight into her, into Cole's cum, and fucked her through the squelching slick of it, long, hard strokes that shoved her up the bed, until he came too, buried in her, and she wrapped her legs around his back and held him there.

Then Celeste was there with the pillows, and the two of them lay side by side, hips up, legs in the air, full.

Celeste looked down at them both with enormous satisfaction, and wrote something on her clipboard.

"Three," she said. "Very good. Drink your water."

Then she went out to the terrace and left them to rest.

---

It was one in the morning, and the candles had burned low, when Celeste opened the door and called softly down the garden, and Wade came up out of the dark. Sabrina had fallen asleep on the daybed with her hips still propped on a pillow, and the others had gone down to swim.

Wade stood at the foot of the bed and pulled the old gray T-shirt over his head.

He was big everywhere, thick through the chest and belly and thighs, a farm body and not a gym body, sunburnt at the neck and forearms and milk-white everywhere else, with a fuzz of sandy hair across his chest. He pushed his shorts down, and Emily, who had read the line in his file and not believed it, believed it.

His cock hung heavy between his thighs, pale and roped with blue veins, so thick her fingers would never have met around him and longer than anything in her nightstand at home by a margin she didn't care to estimate, the head swollen dark and shining, his balls hanging low and full. As she looked, he began to rise.

"You can tell me no," he said. His voice was slow and soft, pure Wisconsin, almost shy. "Lots of ladies do, first time they see it."

Emily looked at him for a long moment. Then she lay back on the pillows, lifted both arms over her head, and crossed her wrists.

"Hold me down," she said. It came out a whisper. "Please. Like you mean it."

Courtroom 506.

Wade knelt over her and pinned both her wrists to the pillow with one huge hand, and she couldn't have moved them if she'd tried. With the other he pushed her thighs apart. He was gentle about it, and it didn't matter; his weight was the point. She lay under him, held and opened, her pale breasts spilling to either side, and she had never been so frightened or so wet in her life.

He set the swollen head of his cock against her and pushed, and nothing happened. He pushed harder, and she felt herself start to give, a hot spreading burn wider than anything, so wide she cried out and arched under his hand. He stopped.

"Breathe for me," he said. "That's all you got to do."

She breathed. He sank in another inch. She breathed again, and he gave her another, and another, slow and patient and relentless, the stretch burning and easing and burning again, until she could feel him somewhere under her navel, until his hips finally settled against hers and she lay pinned and stuffed and shaking, mouth open, no sound coming out.

Then he fucked her. Slowly, with her wrists in his fist and his big body blotting out the candle. Every stroke dragged the whole of her with it; every time he sank back in, the shock of it ran up through her heavy tits and out along her arms to her pinned wrists. She came inside a minute, astonished, helpless, her thighs locked around his waist. She thought about the man in the orange jumpsuit and came again, harder, and was ashamed of it for about one second, and then wasn't.

"Good girl," Wade said into her hair. "Good girl. Keep it in."

When he came, it went on so long she lost track, a deep, hot flooding in her belly, pulse on pulse, until she was sure she couldn't hold any more and then held it anyway. He stayed buried in her afterward, breathing hard against her neck, and let go of her wrists, and she left them where they were.

On the daybed, Sabrina was awake. She'd been awake for a while.

"Em," she said, very softly, in the dark. "Oh my God. Em."

They did not sleep much on Friday.

Saturday

At seven in the morning the doctor scanned them in the clinic wing, one table each and a curtain between.

"Well," he said, peering at the screen. "Look at that."

"What?" said Emily. "What is it?"

"It's today." He turned the screen so she could see. "Right now. You're ovulating. Both sides." He pulled the curtain back. "And so is she."

On the other table Sabrina had both hands pressed over her mouth.

---

Sabrina and Celeste had planned it in the car from the airport, to the minute, like a closing, with Emily listening and pretending not to.

At nine o'clock, after breakfast and a liter of water each, the six men came into the white room and stood around the bed, and Sabrina lay down in the middle of it, naked, with two pillows under her hips.

"All of you," she said. Her voice wasn't quite steady. "One after the other. As fast as you can. No breaks." She looked up at them. "Don't be nice."

Emily sat against the headboard with Sabrina's head in her lap, stroking her damp blonde hair off her forehead, and watched.

Finn went first, because Finn was always ready. He knelt between her thighs with his cock already up, long, blunt and flushed dark red at the head, and pushed her knees wide and slid into her with a grunt. He talked the whole time. "Ah, God, look at you. Look at you take it. I've been thinking about this since breakfast, I'm going to fill you right up--" He fucked her fast and greedy and grinning, like a man let off a leash, and in four minutes he was coming, buried in her, his thick neck corded, and Sabrina was gasping and laughing at once.

"One," she said, as he pulled out. "Somebody get back in me."

"Four minutes," said Cole, already climbing onto the bed. "Christ, kid. Watch and learn."

Cole was rough. He shoved into her through Finn's cum, short and thick and stretching, and the wet sound it made was obscene in the bright morning room. Sabrina's back arched and her tits bounced with every hard slam of his hips. He held her down by the hips and talked to her low and steady through his beard, as if nobody else were in the room: "Feel that? That's him in there. I'm going to bury him. Squeeze it, sweetheart. Squeeze it out of me." When he came he did it with a roar, pinning her to the bed, pumping himself into her until he was done.

Under Sabrina's cheek, Emily's thighs had pressed tight together, and she knew Sabrina could feel it.

"Two," Sabrina said into Emily's thigh. She was crying a little. "God. God. Whoever's next, do it harder."

"You heard her," said Lars.

He took her by the hips and pulled her down the bed, out of Emily's lap, and Emily came after her on her knees and kept hold of her hand. Then Lars took her by the backs of the knees and folded her in half, her knees by her shoulders and her ankles by her ears, her ass up off the sheet, and came down on top of her with his whole weight and drove into her straight down, through the cream of two other men. He fucked her into the bed. He did it the way he must once have rowed, long and hard and dead on the beat. The frame hit the wall; every stroke slammed her flat and pushed what was in her deeper, and Sabrina, bent double under him with her face red and her mouth open, howled with joy. "All of it," Lars said, low, between strokes. "Take all of it." She came with her teeth in her own lip, folded up under him, and he came inside her while she was still coming, and she screamed.

"Three."

Emily realized she was holding Sabrina's hand hard enough to hurt, and that she was soaking wet, and that she didn't care who knew it.

Then Adrian, who did it the way he did everything, precisely. His cock was slim and curved upward, and he angled her hips with his long clever fingers and slid into her at exactly the angle that found the swollen place inside her. "That's the spot," he said, as if reading it off a scan. "I'm not going to leave it." He rocked there, short and deep and unhurried, until she was sobbing his name. Then he came, deep, without a sound.

"Four," whispered Sabrina. "Four. Oh my God. I can feel them. Em, I can feel them all in there."

Emily could see it: under her friend's flat stomach, low down, the faintest swell. Every time one of them pulled out, a little more cum welled up out of Sabrina's swollen pussy, white and thick, and each time Celeste was there with two gloved fingers, pushing it back inside her, gently, firmly, and then making a small neat mark on her clipboard.

Graham was fifth. He pushed into her with the same infinite patience he'd had with Emily the night before, and Sabrina moaned at the weight of him. He fucked her long and deep and steady, watching her face the whole time, and once he said quietly, "That's it. Every drop," and Sabrina came so hard on the words that she nearly threw him off.

When he came, he pressed himself deep and held there, and Emily, remembering exactly how that felt, clenched in sympathy.

"Five," said Sabrina, barely audible.

And then Wade.

He'd been waiting at the foot of the bed the whole time, watching, slowly stroking himself. He climbed onto the bed and the whole frame of it dipped under him.

"Oh," said Sabrina, looking up at him. "Oh, fuck. Yes."

He lifted her hips off the sheet by the thighs and pushed into her.

She screamed, high and long, and Emily held her hand in both of hers and felt her whole body go rigid. He barely fit, even through the slick of five men, even on the morning she was open wider than she'd ever been, and the stretch went on and on and the cum squeezed out around him in a thick white ring, until all of him was inside her and she was so full she couldn't breathe.

He held still. He looked down at her.

Then he fucked her: deep, merciless strokes that rocked the whole bed and drove the breath out of her, that shoved her back up the sheet an inch at a time until her head bumped Emily's knees, and Emily gathered it into her lap and took her face between her hands. Every stroke made her small tight body jolt from her heels to her throat. Sabrina came on the third one and didn't stop coming, wailing, her thighs locked around his huge waist, her fingers clawing at the sheet. When Wade finally came, with a long, low, shaking groan, buried to the hilt and driving her into the mattress, she screamed his name, and the sound went out the open doors and across the cove.

"Six," said Celeste, very softly, and wrote it down.

---

Afterward Celeste and Emily turned her end to end, hips first, very carefully, so that she lay on her back with her hips up on three pillows and her legs propped straight up against the headboard, and she didn't move for an hour. She lay with her eyes closed and both hands spread on her stomach, smiling.

"Can you feel it?" said Emily, lying beside her.

"Yes."

"What does it feel like?"

Sabrina was quiet for a while.

"Like they're fighting," she said. "And I know the strongest seed will win."

"Who do you think it'll be?"

"I don't care," said Sabrina. "I'll never know." She opened her eyes and turned her head on the pillow to look at Emily. "It's mine."

---

The trouble was the men.

Six of them had just come in under an hour, and it showed. Finn was stretched out on the daybed with an arm over his eyes. Cole and Lars were on the terrace drinking coconut water from the carton. Adrian sat on the end of the bed looking pleased and empty, Graham was smiling at the ceiling, and Wade had lain down on the cool tiles by the doors like a dog in the heat. Sabrina was done. "Don't look at me," she said, without opening her eyes. "I'm closed for business. I'm incubating. Ask me again at four."

And it was Emily's turn, and Emily didn't know what to do.

She sat at the head of the bed in a white robe and looked at six spent men, and tried. She went to Finn first, because he was the youngest. She sat on the edge of the daybed and put her hand on his thigh, and then, after a while, on his soft cock, and stroked him carefully, the way she'd have stroked Nathan's on a Saturday morning if Nathan had ever wanted her to. Finn smiled at her very kindly from under his arm. Nothing much happened.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not very good at this."

That was when Celeste came in from the terrace with a jug of juice, and stopped in the doorway, and looked at the room: at Sabrina, legs up and glowing; at six big men lying around like the end of a battle; at Emily, in her robe, with her hand on a rugby player's cock and nothing happening.

"Well," said Celeste. "Nothing like a little fun."

She set the jug down. She pulled the pins from her hair and shook it out, long and black and heavy. Then she pulled the white linen dress over her head, dropped it on the tiles, and walked into the room naked, brown, ripe and magnificent, her full breasts rolling and her round hips swinging, faint silver stretch marks across her belly, three children and forty-five years and not one second of shame.

Every man in the villa turned to look at her. Wade sat up.

"Don't mind me," she said. "I'm only here to help."

She sat down on the daybed beside Emily, took Emily's hand off Finn's cock, kindly, and kept hold of it.

"Watch how I do it," she said. "It's easy. They like to be wanted. That's all." And she leaned down and took Finn in her mouth.

She did it slowly and very wetly, humming, her eyes on his face, and he went from soft to rock-hard against her tongue in about a minute, and groaned. Celeste let him go with a wet pop, smiled at Emily, and turned him by the hip and pointed him, firmly, at the bed.

"In her," she said. "Not me. Go on."

Then she stood, drew Emily up off the daybed by the hand she was still holding, and walked her to the bed. She untied the white robe herself and slid it off Emily's shoulders, and kissed her on the mouth, slow and deep and tasting of the sea, one hand on Emily's cheek and her heavy breasts pressed warm against Emily's own; and Emily, who had never kissed a woman in her life, stood there with her hands not knowing where to go, and then kissed her back.

"There," said Celeste, against her lips. "Your turn now, chérie."

Emily lay back across the edge of the bed, and Finn took her standing, her knees hooked over his forearms, talking to her all through it, sweet and filthy and breathless, the way he had to Sabrina. Past him Emily watched Celeste go around the room. Adrian, on the end of the bed, with her hand, while she murmured something in his ear in French that made him laugh. Lars out on the terrace, Celeste on her knees on the warm tiles with her black hair in his fist and her mouth working him, wet and unhurried, while Cole leaned on the rail and watched and got hard on his own. Then Wade, still sitting on the tiles by the doors: she knelt between his thighs and took him in both hands, one above the other, and the broad head still stood clear of her fists, and she laughed out loud, delighted, and bent her head. One by one she brought them back, hard and aching, and sent them to the bed.

Finn came inside her before Celeste was done with Wade, with a happy shout, and kissed her on the nose. Emily had hardly taken her eyes off Celeste's mouth.

---

Celeste sent her Adrian and Lars next, and they didn't do what Emily expected.

She lay back on the pillows with her knees up, ready. Adrian turned her gently onto her stomach instead. Lars poured oil into his cupped hands and rubbed them together until it was warm.

"There's no hurry," said Adrian. "You've got all day."

They started at her shoulders, four hands, slow and heavy, working out the knots of a lifetime of hunching over files, and Emily felt her whole body go loose under them. Down her spine, over the dip at her waist, and then lower, onto the soft, plump curves of her ass that she had hidden under long skirts for years, and they stayed there.

Lars's oiled hands sank into her and kneaded, long and firm, so that her ass rolled and shivered under his hands. Adrian traced the crease where cheek met thigh with one long finger, and the dimples at the small of her back with his thumbs. Lars bent and kissed one of them. The oil ran warm down between her cheeks. Emily heard herself moan into the pillow and didn't care, and pushed back into their hands for more.

Then they turned her over, and each of them took one of her big breasts.

They took turns. Adrian lifted one in his long surgeon's fingers as if he were weighing it, and took the stiff nipple into his mouth and sucked, slow and hard, while Lars rolled the other under his tongue and groaned there, breathing her in. Then they changed places. Lars's mouth was hot and greedy; Adrian's was patient and very precise. Lars buried his face in her tits and stayed so long she laughed, and stroked his fair hair, and held him there. Adrian's fingers slid down between her oiled thighs and found her clit, and circled it while they took turns at her nipples, and Emily came under them, softly and for a long time, arching up into their mouths.

She lay there afterward in the sea light with their hands still moving on her, slow, adoring, and for half an hour she forgot all of it: the follicles, the trigger shot, the clipboard, the husbands.

"Chérie," said Celeste, from the daybed, laughing softly. "Don't forget why you came."

Emily opened her eyes. Lars lifted his head from her cleavage with a sheepish grin, his cock standing hard and dripping against her thigh, and she remembered.

She opened her legs for him.

Lars came up over her slowly, all that fair weight braced on his forearms, and looked down at her as if he couldn't quite believe his luck. He was slick from the oil on her thighs. He set himself to her and pushed, and she was so loose and warm from their hands that he slid in to the root in one long stroke, and she heard herself make a sound she had never made in her life, low and astonished.

"Christ," said Lars into her hair. "You're soft all the way in."

Adrian hadn't gone anywhere. He lay along her side with one soft breast still cupped in his hand, thumbing the wet nipple, while Lars moved in her with long, slow, rolling strokes that slid her oiled body up the sheet and drew it back and set her tits swaying against Adrian's mouth. Emily put a hand in each man's hair and held on. She came again the slow way, the way they'd shown her, and Lars felt it and lost his rhythm.

"Where do you want it?" he said, grinning into her neck.

"Where it counts," said Emily.

He came with his forehead pressed to hers, and she felt every pulse of it, warm and deep, and she kept her legs wrapped around him long after he'd finished, so that none of it could go anywhere at all.

---

After lunch, Wade had her on top of him, riding him, which she had never in her life done in the light. She'd been nervous of being looked at from below, and he had just lifted her and set her down on his cock and let her sink, inch by inch, until she was sitting on his hips so full she couldn't speak.

And then he'd looked up at her.

He lay back with his huge hands on her hips and watched her heavy breasts sway above him with every slow roll of her hips, and his whole face changed. He looked at them as though he wanted to stay under them for the rest of his life: to have them hanging in his face, swinging, slapping his cheeks while she rode him, filling his mouth, smothering him.

She leaned down and let them fall into his face, and he groaned into the warm cleft between them and took a nipple in his mouth and sucked so hard she cried out. She rode him like that, braced on her hands above his head, grinding down on him with his face lost in her swinging tits and her own mouth open, and came on him, and kept riding, and came again.

When he finished in her she climbed off him herself and lay on her back and lifted her own hips onto the pillows without being asked.

"I want another one," she said.

Finn was back, of course. She wrapped her arms around his thick young neck and held him while he fucked her, and he came inside her in three minutes, and she said, "And another."

Cole had been watching from the foot of the bed with his arms folded and his cock standing thick against his belly.

"You were rough with her this morning," Emily said. She heard her own voice, the courtroom voice, perfectly steady. "I'd like the same."

Cole grinned slowly through his beard. "Yes, ma'am."

He didn't fold her. He took her by the ankles and dragged her down the bed to him, sheet and all, and knelt up between her thighs and hooked her knees over his forearms and drove into her. It was nothing like Wade. It was all at the mouth of her, a thick hot ring of stretch, and the wet sound when he bottomed out was so loud that across the bed Sabrina opened one eye.

"Hear that?" said Cole. "That's four loads in there already, counselor."

She could hear it. Every short hard slam of his hips squelched and sent a ripple up through her soft belly and set her tits swinging, and she heard herself say, "Harder than you gave her," and he gave her harder. He held her down by the hips with the whole bed rocking, grunting every time he hit bottom, and when he came he did it with his teeth bared and his fingers printing her hips, and she came with him, her hands knotted in the wet sheet, saying his name like an accusation.

After that, Adrian at last. Lars again. Graham. Cole a second time, when he could. She lost count somewhere around the middle of the afternoon. Emily Prescott, who counted everything, who had argued for three weeks over a definition in a twelve-page contract, lost count and didn't care.

At one point Graham, kneeling between her legs, said gently, "Would you like a break?"

"No," said Emily. She was flat on her back with her hips up on two pillows, her breasts slick with sweat and fallen wide across her ribs, flushed pink, cum running out of her down the crease of her ass onto the sheet, her hair everywhere. "No. Keep me on my back. Don't let me up." She looked up at him. "I want to stay full."

---

At four o'clock Sabrina opened for business again, and they lay side by side on the bed with the doors open to the sea, hips up, their inside legs hooked together, Emily's right over Sabrina's left, so that a man kneeling between Emily's thighs had only to shift a foot to his left to be between Sabrina's.

The men worked out what that was for very quickly.

Graham was in Emily first, the way he'd been on Friday, and when he got close he stopped and looked across at Sabrina, and Emily felt him ask.

"Give it to her," she said. "She wants it more than I do."

"Liar," said Sabrina, and held out her arms.

He slid out of her, wet and shining, shifted across on his knees, and pushed into Sabrina right beside her, so close Emily could hear the wet sound of it and feel the bed tilt with every stroke. Sabrina's hand found hers.

"Tell me," Sabrina whispered. Her eyes were shut. "Em, tell me."

"He's all the way in," said Emily. Her own voice astonished her. "He was in me a second ago, and now he's going to fill you up. He's close. He's--" Graham groaned, and Sabrina's fingers crushed hers, and Emily said, "That's it. That's all in you now."

After that it went both ways. Wade went from Sabrina to Emily. Finn went from Emily to Sabrina and back again and had to be sent off by Celeste. They held hands the whole time and talked each other through it.

And once, late in the afternoon, when Cole pulled out of Emily and a thick slow trickle of white welled up out of her and started to run, Sabrina came up on one elbow and looked at it, and then at her.

"Em," she said. "Can I?"

"Bri, you don't have to--"

"Yes I do," said Sabrina. "Nothing wasted." She didn't move. "I'm asking."

Emily looked at her.

"Yes," she said.

Sabrina slid down the bed and knelt between Emily's legs with her hands on Emily's knees. Emily lay rigid on her back and stared at the ceiling, and then, very slowly, let her knees fall open. Sabrina put her mouth on her, gently, her tongue soft and careful, gathering it all up from the swollen lips of Emily's pussy and pushing it back in where it belonged.

"Oh," said Emily. "Oh, Bri."

Behind Sabrina, Wade knelt up on the bed, took her by the hips, and sank into her from behind. Sabrina moaned into Emily's pussy and didn't stop. Every heavy stroke pushed her tongue deeper, and Emily felt each one land in both of them.

Sabrina lifted her head. Her chin was shining. She was smiling.

"See?" she said. "Each other."

Emily reached down and took her face in both hands.

"My turn to ask," she said. Her voice wasn't steady at all. "Can I?"

For the first time in eleven years, Sabrina didn't have anything to say. She nodded, and came up the bed on her hands, and Wade came with her, still buried in her, shuffling forward on his knees between Emily's spread legs, so that when Sabrina's mouth found Emily's he was still moving in her, and every stroke rocked her down onto Emily's soft, full breasts.

It wasn't like kissing Celeste. Sabrina kissed the way she did everything, too fast and then not fast enough, and she tasted of salt and of the men and of Emily herself, and she moaned into Emily's mouth every time Wade hit bottom. Emily held her face and kissed her through all of it, through the slap of his hips and the bed rocking and Sabrina's firm tits dragging across hers. When Wade came, Sabrina came with him, her forehead pressed to Emily's and her eyes open, and neither of them looked away.

Sunday

By Sunday they were sore and slow and greedy, and none of them cared.

The nurse came at eight with an IV and coconut water, Celeste came at nine with eggs and gossip from the other villas, and at ten Finn came in already hard and grinning, and it started again.

Slower now. Lazier. Emily woke up with Graham pushing into her from behind, the two of them on their sides in the morning light, his warm hand cupping one heavy breast, and she didn't open her eyes for the whole of it.

Sabrina didn't want slow, Sunday or any day. Wade and Cole took her on the floor pillows by the open doors and took turns folding her in half, pounding her down into the cushions so hard they skidded across the tiles, each trying to make her scream louder than the last. Between the two of them she looked up, flushed and grinning, and told them both they were amateurs.

Cole looked at Wade. Wade looked at Cole.

They made her pay for it. Cole folded her and held her there, both her ankles in one fist up by her ears, while Wade fed himself into her an inch at a time and then stopped, buried to the root, and didn't move.

"Take it back," said Cole, "and he'll move."

She held out for a full minute, squirming on Wade, swearing at the pair of them. Then she took it back, loudly, and Wade gave her what she'd asked for at nine o'clock on Saturday, hard and merciless, and the pillows went skidding toward the sea, and when she screamed it was louder than anything she'd managed all weekend. Then they swapped.

By noon the bed was a wreck, and Celeste's clipboard had three pages of neat columns, a little tick for each one.

Celeste was in the room most of Sunday, naked as often as not, cross-legged at the end of the bed with her clipboard on her knee like a referee. She kept them hard. She kept every drop where it belonged. When Finn pulled out of Sabrina and a thick white bead welled up after him, Celeste's tongue was there before it touched the sheet and pushed it back inside her, and Sabrina, who had sworn she was done until lunch, arched off the pillows and swore at her in French she didn't know she had. When Wade pulled out of Emily and a white trickle started down her thigh, Celeste caught it on two fingers and pushed it back in, and kissed Emily's knee.

"Forty-four," she said dreamily, at one point, to nobody, and made another little tick.

---

At six, Celeste came in with the little glass dish of plugs.

She chose for them herself, by eye, like a jeweler. She knelt between Emily's raised thighs, and then Sabrina's, and slid them into their pussies, smooth and cool and heavy, and pressed each one home with the heel of her hand.

"Until you land," she said. "Not one minute before."

The Interview

They recorded it on the terrace on Sunday evening, with the sea going pink and a little microphone on the table between the glasses.

Celeste ran it. The six men sat in a loose half circle, sunburnt and wrecked and very pleased with themselves, and the two women sat across from them in white robes, gingerly, on cushions.

Celeste asked how it was.

"I'd like to know," said Emily, "the exact number of times each of you finished. In each of us. Broken down by day."

Celeste looked at her clipboard, and then at Emily, with enormous respect.

"Fifty-eight," said Celeste. "Total. Shall I go through it?"

"Yes, please," said Emily, and took out her phone to write it down, and the whole terrace fell about.

"And Friday?" Celeste said to Emily, more gently. "The dress."

Emily looked down at her hands.

"I've worn sweaters my whole adult life," she said. "And Graham undid one button at a time, and everybody looked, and nothing bad happened." She swallowed. "He said there."

Graham looked out at the sea and didn't say anything.

"And Wade," said Sabrina wickedly.

"I'm not discussing Wade on the record."

"She held her wrists up over her head," Sabrina told the microphone. "Crossed. Like this. I watched the whole thing."

Wade turned as red as his sunburn and hid his face in his huge hands.

"Fine." Emily lifted her chin. "Wade was the best night of my life. I have prosecuted men for less than what I asked him to do to me, and I have never been so happy." The terrace roared.

"And you, chérie?"

"Saturday morning," said Sabrina at once. "Six of them in an hour, and Em holding my head." She closed her eyes. "I've spent my whole life being the one in the room who wants it most. For one hour I didn't have to want anything. I just got it. Over and over, until I couldn't count." She opened one eye. "Celeste counted."

"I always count," said Celeste.

"Anything you didn't like?"

Emily considered the question with great care. "The foam wedges," she said. "My hips will never be the same."

"The flight home," said Sabrina. "It's tomorrow."

They talked until the sea went dark.

At the end, Sabrina put her glass down.

"Which one of you," she said, "do you think won?"

There was a short silence. Then Graham leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

"I've been asked that at every one of these," he said. "Thirty-one pregnancies, the file says, and I've never once known which were mine." He smiled at her. "None of us gets a vote. You do. You already have."

Sabrina looked at him for a long moment. Then she put both hands on her belly under the white robe, closed her eyes, and smiled.

"This goes in the library, you know," said Celeste. "Your voices. Every word."

"Good," said Emily. She'd been very quiet. Sabrina opened her eyes. "Some woman's going to find a cream card in her purse one morning," said Emily, "and not believe it." She looked straight at the microphone. "I want her to hear this one."

Celeste reached over and switched the microphone off, smiling.

Two Weeks

The group chat was called Thanksgiving Planning, in case anybody ever looked.

Nobody did. Ryan never looked at Sabrina's phone; Nathan never looked at anything after ten. So for fourteen days, through depositions and closings and Sunday lunch in Winnetka, two women sent each other the same nine messages, over and over.

anything?

no. you?

no. sore boobs

that's the progesterone

I KNOW it's the progesterone

how do you feel

like I want to go back

me too

every day

On the fourteenth morning Emily woke at five, got up very quietly so as not to wake Nathan, and locked herself in the bathroom.

At 5:07 her phone buzzed on the edge of the sink. It was a photograph of a pregnancy test on a white tile floor in Lincoln Park. Two lines. Dark ones.

Emily sat on the edge of the bathtub with her own test in her hand, the one she hadn't looked at yet, until the light under the door turned gray. Then she looked.

She took a picture of it and sent it, and sat in the dark bathroom with her swollen breasts aching under her nightshirt and the tears running down her face, laughing without a sound so as not to wake her husband.

Grace

The Prescotts did Thanksgiving in Winnetka, as they always did, with Margaret at one end of the long table and Richard at the other, and the girls at the girls' end below the cousins.

Emily wore a dark green sweater with a high round neck, and nobody could take their eyes off it. She was ten weeks along, she had already gone up a cup size, and she had stopped apologizing for it. Sabrina wore a cream knit dress that clung to every inch of her, and if you knew where to look there was a small new curve below her navel, and she was eating everything in reach.

They had told the family that morning, both couples together, before the cousins came.

Margaret said grace for a long time. At the end of it, while everyone was lifting their heads, she got up, came all the way down to the girls' end, and took one of their hands in each of hers.

"I told you," she said. Her eyes were wet. "Didn't I tell you? All you girls ever needed was a holiday." She squeezed. "God's time. Not some doctor's. And now, of course, you'll both stay at home and raise a family."

Sabrina rolled her eyes.

Down the table, Nathan and Ryan looked at each other across the turkey, and Nathan mouthed one word: clinic. Richard said something about the sea air. Ryan carved.

Nobody at the table was right.

Under the table, in the dark, a stockinged foot found Emily's ankle and pressed against it, and stayed there.