Chapter 8: Taylor's Turn
Jim lay on the office floor, cheek pressed to the cold tile, for a long moment after the last steel-toed kick landed. The office hummed with the quiet of a building still half-awake, fluorescents buzzing overhead, the distant clank of a maintenance cart somewhere down the corridor. His stomach had stopped heaving, but the taste of bile and copper stayed thick in his throat. Each breath pushed at ribs that felt loose in their sockets. Between his legs, a dull, oceanic throb rolled outward through his hips, his lower back, the tender roots of his thighs.
He opened his eyes. Grey light bled through the blinds, striping the floor. A pair of black Doc Martens stood a few feet away, then a pair of bare feet with red-painted toenails, then a third pair of shoes he could not place at first: soft, dove-grey, ankle-high, the cashmere catching the light like brushed silk. Taylor's new thigh-highs.
His testicles cramped at the sight of them. A small, involuntary clench, the body bracing before the mind caught up.
He pushed himself up onto one elbow. Nicole stood with her arms crossed, boots planted, watching him with that flat, appraising look she wore when she was deciding whether he had anything left to give. Amber leaned against the desk, arms folded, one Louboutin heel hooked on the edge of a drawer, her green eyes tracing the tremor in his forearm. Taylor stood nearest, weight on one hip, one hand smoothing the fabric at her thigh, the cashmere hugging the curve of her calf down to the ankle. She had not said a word since he had promised Amber ten knees. She had watched him take every one of them, and every one of Nicole's kicks after, and her lips had curved the whole time.
Jim cleared his throat. It came out rough. "Taylor."
She tilted her head. "Director."
The word landed in his chest, strange and warm, even now. He looked at her shoes again, then up at her face. "You're wearing them."
"You gave them to me."
"I know." He swallowed. "I want to see what they can do."
Nicole's eyebrow lifted a fraction. Amber's mouth curved, but she said nothing, only watched, a predator content to let the prey choose the direction of the chase. Taylor's smile widened, slow and genuine, and she turned on the spot, one full rotation, so the cashmere caught the light. The thigh-highs stopped just under the hem of her workout shorts. They looked almost innocent. That was the trick of them.
"How many?" she asked.
"Ten," Jim said. "Full force."
Taylor's eyes flicked to Nicole, then to Amber, quick and checking, the way a hound checks the pack before it breaks from cover. Nicole gave a single, deliberate nod. Amber simply watched, her heel scraping once across the drawer front.
"Get on your back," Taylor said.
Jim rolled onto his back. The floor was hard and cold and he did not mind it. Above him, the ceiling tiles held a water stain shaped like a curled hand. He heard the shift of fabric, the soft whisper of cashmere, the click of a heel on tile as Amber pushed off the desk. Then Nicole's shadow fell over him, and she was kneeling, swinging one leg over his chest. She settled her weight across his sternum, her boots braced flat on the tile on either side of his shoulders. The pressure squeezed the breath out of him in one long, controlled exhale. He could not expand his ribs. He could only take small, shallow sips of air from the top of his lungs.
"Hands," Amber said.
He lifted his arms, and Amber caught both wrists in one hand, pinning them above his head against the floor with a grip that ground his knuckles against the tile. She knelt across his shins, her knees pressing his legs flat, one sharp heel of her hand resting on his thigh just above the knee. Her weight was not crushing, but it was absolute. He could not draw his legs up. He could not twist his hips. He could not do anything but lie there, chest pinned under Nicole, legs pinned under Amber, arms stretched above him like a man already bound to a rack.
The position opened him. That was the point of it. His hips were tilted, the base of his spine flat to the floor, everything between his legs presented up into the open air, helpless and utterly exposed. He felt the cold first, a kiss of air against skin that had been tucked and protected his whole life. Then the dull throb again, the deep, bruised ache that had not stopped since Amber's last knee.
Taylor stepped into his view. She stood over him, feet apart, one thigh-high on each side of his hips. From below, she was a tall, clean line of muscle, the cashmere a soft grey column rising from ankle to thigh. She looked down at him the way a gardener looks at a stubborn root.
"You want them full force," she said.
"Yes."
"Say it properly."
Jim wet his lips. His mouth was dry again, and the words came out slower than he meant them to. "Taylor, I want you to stomp on my balls ten times. Full force. In your new thigh-highs. Please."
Her smile deepened. "Good."
She raised her right foot. He watched it rise, the cashmere stretching taut over the arch, the shadow of her sole falling across his scrotum. His whole body tried to brace, but there was nowhere to brace to. Nicole's weight held his chest. Amber's hands held his wrists. He could only lie there and feel the air change as the foot came down.
The first stomp landed flat.
The world went white at the edges. Her full weight came through the cashmere, through the soft sole, down into his testicles, pressing them against the unyielding tile beneath his hips. There was a split second of pure, blinding pressure, then the pain arrived, a deep, spreading detonation that rolled up through his groin and into his stomach. He heard himself make a sound, not quite a scream, a strangled grunt that Nicole's weight cut short.
Taylor lifted her foot. "One."
He gasped. Air came back into him in a ragged rush. Between his legs, the ache had multiplied, a second heartbeat layered over the first. He looked up at her, and she was already raising her foot again.
"Two."
The second stomp found the same tender ground. This time he felt the individual shape of her sole, the heel digging into the base of his scrotum, the ball of her foot crushing the top. His hips jerked, but Amber's knees held them flat. His vision blurred at the edges.
"Two," Taylor said, softer, almost fond.
"Thank you," Jim managed. The words scraped out of him.
She smiled down at him and stomped again. "Three."
By the fifth, he had stopped counting the pain as separate events. It was one long tide now, rising with each impact and never quite receding. Nicole's weight on his chest kept him from curling around it. Amber's grip kept him from reaching down. He could only lie open and receive it, which was, he understood now, always the point. The agency did not train you to take a blow. It trained you to stay still while it landed.
Between the sixth and seventh, he heard Amber say something to Taylor, low and amused, a comment he could not parse through the ringing in his ears. Taylor laughed, a light, musical sound, and shifted her stance, finding a new angle. The seventh stomp caught him differently, her heel first, then the full sole grinding down after, and he saw stars, actual stars, bursting behind his eyelids like fireworks in reverse.
"Seven," Taylor said. "You're doing so well."
He wept a little then, not from the pain alone, but from the words. He could not help it. His face was wet and his chest was pinned and his legs were pinned and his testicles were flattened under her foot, and he was exactly where he had chosen to be. That was the thing that undid him. He had asked for this. He had put the shoes on her himself. He had made her promise.
"Eight."
The eighth was worse than the seventh. He heard his own voice break on a sob and did not try to swallow it. Nicole shifted her weight, leaning forward slightly, and her hand came down to rest on his forehead, cool and dry, holding him steady against the floor. It was the first gentle touch he had felt all day, and it almost undid him again.
"Nine."
He did not know how he was still conscious. The tile against his back was wet with sweat, and the ache between his legs had become a country he lived in now, with its own weather and its own tides. Taylor raised her foot one last time, and he watched it hang there, the cashmere soft and elegant, the woman above it patient and kind in the way that only a woman with absolute power can be kind.
"Ten," she said, and brought it down.
The last stomp was the hardest. He felt something inside him give, not break, but surrender, a final, complete yielding of muscle and nerve and will. The pain crested and then, strangely, receded, leaving behind a heavy, ringing numbness, like a bell struck and left to hum. He lay there, breathless and damp and pinned, and he did not want them to get up.
Above him, Taylor lifted her foot and set it down beside his hip. She looked at the others. Nicole rose, and the weight came off his chest, and he could breathe again, great heaving gulps of air that tasted like clean tile and sweat. Amber let go of his wrists and sat back on her heels. He curled slowly onto his side, hands coming down to cup himself, and the touch of his own palms was almost more than he could bear.
Taylor crouched beside him. She smoothed a strand of hair off his forehead with one finger. "Ten," she said. "And you thanked me after every one."
He nodded, cheek against the cool floor.
"Good boy," she said, and stood, and the three of them stood over him in a loose, patient ring, waiting to see what he would ask for next.
He was still on his side when his hands moved. They came down off his ribs, off his hip, and settled flat against his face, palms over his eyes, fingers pressed into his temples, as if he could shut the world out long enough to find a manageable version of himself inside it. His own cradling had been a mistake. The instant his palms had pressed inward, the gentlest pressure, nothing more than the soft weight of his own hand against his own body, his testicles had fired off a fresh and vivid alarm, a bright lance of ache that shot straight up into his lower belly and made him draw both knees up and hiss against the tile.
So his hands went to his face instead. It was a trade, and a bad one, because now he could not see them, and the three of them were still standing over him in their triangle, and he could hear their breathing and the small tick of Amber's heel on the tile and the buzz of the fluorescents and his own rough breath behind his fingers. He lay there with his palms over his eyes like a boy hiding from thunder, breath shallow, jaw clenched, sweat cooling along his hairline.
"I can't," he said, muffled. His voice was thick. "I can't even hold them."
Nobody answered at once. Fabric shifted. He heard Taylor's weight settle onto the balls of her feet, the cashmere whispering.
"What do you mean?" Nicole said. Her voice was level, the same voice she used for mission briefings.
"I mean it hurts to touch them," Jim said, still behind his hands. "My own hand. Just cupping myself. It was too much. I couldn't." He swallowed. The words that came next cost him more than the ten stomps had. "Would you check? Please. Just check on them. Make sure they're okay."
The room held still. He could feel the three of them considering it, the small silence that was not hesitation so much as the packing of a decision. Then Nicole crouched at his shoulder. When she spoke, the flat appraisal was gone, replaced by something quieter and more exact, the tone of a woman reading a damage report and deciding it was her problem now.
"Hands down," she said.
He lowered his hands. His face was wet and his eyes were red, and he did not try to hide either. Nicole looked at him for a long beat, then looked past him at the others.
"On your back," she said. "Knees up, feet flat, let them fall open."
He rolled onto his back. The tile was cold and wet where his shoulder had been. He brought his heels up and set his feet wide on the floor, bending his knees, and the position opened him again, the same helpless presentation as before, only this time he was not braced for violence and the difference was enormous. His testicles lay in their sac against the cool floor, swollen now, the skin tight and darkening. Even the air moving across them felt like a hand.
Nicole moved first, settling onto her heels between his bent legs, forearms resting on her thighs. She looked down at him for a moment without touching. Clinical. Then she reached out and laid the backs of her fingers, very lightly, against his scrotum.
He flinched anyway.
"Still," she said.
"I'm trying."
"You're doing fine. Breathe."
She turned her hand over and cupped him, slow and deliberate, the way a physician scoops a sleeping animal. The contact was warm and impossibly gentle and it lit up every nerve he had. His hands came off the floor and hovered, useless, and Amber, still at his head, pressed a palm flat to his sternum and pushed him back down.
"Let her work," Amber said. Her other hand found his wrist and folded it back to the tile.
Nicole's fingers moved through him with the methodical patience of a woman who had done this before, which of course she had. She lifted the left testicle on three fingers, thumbing the surface, turning it slightly in its sack, feeling along the back where the cord met the body. Jim's breath whistled between his teeth. It was not pain exactly anymore. It was something adjacent to pain, a raw sensitivity that ran along every nerve like a struck wire, so that the lightest touch registered as a shout. Her thumb slid down the seam and he made a sound he did not recognize.
"Swelling's significant," Nicole said to no one in particular. "But no crepitus, no click, so I don't think anything's ruptured." She paused, fingers still gentle. "You've had it worse. It'll bruise like a plum and you'll be miserable for a long while, and then it'll be fine."
"Can you tell that from that?" Taylor asked, crouching at Jim's other shoulder. She had a genuine, bright curiosity in her voice, the same curiosity she brought to technique drills.
"Partly. The rest is pattern recognition." Nicole adjusted her grip, lifting both now, rolling them together in her palm. Jim's vision grayed at the edges and cleared again. "Here. Feel."
Taylor reached in. Her fingers were smaller and quicker than Nicole's, and she touched him with the lightest pressure she had used all day, which was to say that her lightest touch was still a great deal more than he wanted. She handled him the way she handled equipment she meant to keep, attentive, interested, careful. She turned the left testicle in her fingers and made a small sound of understanding.
"It's firmer than it should be on that side," she said.
"Right. That's the swelling I mean." Nicole withdrew her hand and let Taylor have him a moment longer. Taylor cupped him, lifted him, set him down again with a tenderness so thorough that Jim had to close his eyes. When she let go, the loss of her hand was its own small grief.
Then Amber's hand came down.
She did not scoop. She laid her palm flat over the whole of him and pressed, lightly at first, just enough weight to feel the shape of what she had spent the morning dismantling. Jim's hips lifted off the tile and Amber pushed them down again with the flat of her other hand on his thigh, unhurried, and she watched his face the entire time with her green eyes and her faint, satisfied mouth.
Amber's palm stayed where it was, flat and settled, and the pressure of it was so deliberate and so patient that Jim understood, in the way you understand weather, that she had not finished with him. Her thumb moved once across the top of the sac, a slow, exploratory stroke, and his breath broke apart in his throat.
"You know," she said, to nobody in particular, "I don't think that's a thorough examination."
Taylor looked up from Jim's shoulder. "No?"
"Mmm." Amber withdrew her hand and sat back on her heels, wiping her palm once down her own thigh. "Nicole did a fast check. You did a fast check. Nobody's properly looked at both." She tilted her head, considering Jim the way a jeweller considers a stone he intends to cut. "He asked us to make sure they're okay. I'd hate to send him to medical and have them find something we missed."
Jim lay flat with his knees up and his feet wide and his heart hammering somewhere up in his throat. He knew that voice. He had heard that voice all morning in the gym, before the bat, before the black. It was a voice with a pleasant surface and nothing underneath it but appetite.
"You don't have to," he said. His mouth was dry. "It's fine. Nicole said it's fine."
"Nicole said she doesn't think anything's ruptured," Amber said. "That's not the same as fine. You're the director now, Jim. You can't go into an undercover assignment nutless because we were careless. Protocol's protocol."
Nicole had risen to her feet and stepped back, arms folded, boots planted at the edge of the light. She said nothing. That was her answer and Jim read it perfectly: it was his office, and his body, and she would not save him from a thing he had not asked her to save him from.
Taylor shifted onto both knees beside him. She caught his eye, and there was no cruelty in her face at all, only that bright, technician's interest, which was worse.
"Left or right?" she said to Amber.
"You take the right." Amber settled herself between Jim's bent legs, mirroring Nicole's earlier position, and pushed his knees a little wider with the flat of one hand. "I'll do the left. We'll do it slow, so it's properly examined. Then we'll do it again fast, to check for a reflex."
Jim's hands came up off the floor, reaching for something, he did not know what, and Amber caught both wrists without looking and pinned them flat over his head again, one hand closed around both, and this time there was nobody sitting on his chest, nobody holding his legs, and yet he found he could not move at all, because if he moved they might stop being gentle and start being something else, and he hated himself for the calculation even as he made it.
Nicole watched from the wall. Amber released his wrists. Jim left them where they were, over his head, open, as if he were the one who had put them there.
"Breathe," Taylor said, and reached down.
Her fingers found the right testicle and closed around it, not cupping, not lifting, just holding, the whole orb seated in her palm with her fingertips curved beneath the cord. Across from her, Amber's hand slid under and took the left the same way. She gripped it the way you would grip a doorknob you intended to turn.
The two of them held him.
And Jim breathed, and breathed, and could not get enough air. It came shallow and fast and high in his chest, a bird flapping against a window, and he heard it happening to himself from a small distance, the ragged whistle of it, the way it never quite reached the bottom of his lungs because the bottom of his lungs was where the pain lived and the pain was where their hands were.
"Look at him go," Amber said, pleased.
"Steady," Taylor said, quieter, to Jim. "Just steady. It's only a hold."
His hips were trembling. Both his heels had lifted off the tile and he could not put them back down. He could feel the hot pulse of his own blood against the inside of their palms, feel every separate finger like a bar of iron, and none of them had squeezed at all yet.
"Count of three," Amber said, "like a proper exam. Then we'll see how the reflexes are."
"No," Jim said. It came out as a whisper and he did not know if it was a refusal or a request.
"One."
"Please."
"Two."
His voice cracked. "Please, I already said thank you, I said thank you for all of them, I did what you asked, I promised you the knees, I promised you."
Amber watched him with her green eyes and her faint, satisfied mouth and said, "Three."
And then she squeezed.
And Taylor squeezed with her.
For the first second it was only pressure, a deep, total, evenly-distributed pressure, the two of them taking up all the space his body had, and Jim's breath stopped clean in his chest. For the second second it was everything. They turned their wrists as they closed, both of them, the same motion, so that the pressure rolled rather than crushed at first, and then it did not roll anymore, it simply kept going, deeper, deeper, past the point where his body had ever thought there was a floor, deeper than the boots had gone this morning, deeper than the mallet, deeper than the bat that had put him out cold, because the bat had been fast and this had no bottom to it at all.
He screamed.
The sound came up out of him and hit the ceiling and did not stop coming. It changed shape halfway through, broke, went thin, and kept going, one long continuous note pulled like wire out of a spool. His heels drummed on the tile. His hands tore free of the floor and closed on Taylor's forearm and Amber's wrist and he could not unmake them and he was not really trying. Neither of them let up even a fraction. Taylor's knuckles were white and her jaw was set and she was watching his face with that same bright attention, and Amber was smiling outright now, resting her free hand on her own thigh, squeezing on and on and on.
Nicole did not move from the wall.
Time went strange. It stretched and pooled and Jim lost his grip on it. He was aware only in pieces: the wet sound of his own breath coming back after each scream, the flapping of the blinds somewhere above him, the fact that his voice was already going, sanding down at the edges, turning cracked and airy. Then Amber took a slow, deliberate pause, held him at the bottom of it, and squeezed again, harder, and Taylor matched her without being asked, and Jim's scream broke apart into something hoarse and raw that no longer sounded like a voice he knew.
By the end his throat was scraped hollow. He was making noise and no sound was coming out, just breath and shape and salt running down his temples into his hair. His eyes were open and he could not see anything but the ceiling tiles and the curled hand of the water stain.
And then, all at once, they let go.
The relief did not come. Jim had expected something, a flood, a loosening, only air where there had been iron, but his body had gone past the place where names for things still applied. Both his testicles settled back against the cold tile, swollen and full and hot, and he lay with his knees up and his heels down and his mouth open, hauling at the air in shallow, broken pulls, and the pulling was enough. The pulling was all he asked for in that moment. One breath, two, the slow climb down from the ceiling where his voice had left him.
Nicole moved before the second breath was done.
She had not crossed the room. She had been standing at the edge of the light with her arms folded the entire time, and now she simply put one foot forward, unhurried, and brought the steel-toed boot down directly between his legs.
There was no windup. No warning shifted in her weight. The toe of the boot came down flat on his scrotum, on both testicles at once, and Jim's body came apart at the seam and reassembled wrong.
Whatever was left inside him after the squeeze, whatever reserve of nerve and voice and will had survived those last two hands, the boot found the floor under all of it and pressed through. The pain did not arrive; it detonated in place, a hot white bloom spreading outward from the center of him through his pelvis and into his lower belly and up his spine in a single instant, and every nerve below his ribs lit on fire at once.
His scream cut off before it began, strangled down to nothing, a hook of breath stuck in his throat. His back arched clear of the tile, hips striking up into the boot, which was the worst thing he could have done and he did it anyway, and Nicole did not lift her foot. She kept it planted, let him push against it, and then, when the first spasm spent itself, she pressed down with the full weight of her leg.
He came apart. There was no other word for it. Something in the center of him tore open, and it was not the flesh but something above it, the small room where he kept his composure and his rank and his reasons, and that room went down with the pain and everything in it.
Then she stepped off.
Jim did not get up. He could not have gotten up if the building had caught fire around him. What he did instead was roll.
He rolled onto his side and curled. He rolled back the other way and straightened. He rolled onto his stomach and dragged himself two feet across the tile by the elbows, elbows and forearms, hips rotating, thighs clamping, legs scissoring in the air behind him. He was making a sound that did not stop, a wet, open, keening sob that came up from somewhere under his sternum, and he kept making it, one continuous note like an alarm with no one to answer it. His hands moved down to himself and then flew away again because his own touch was unbearable, and then came back and then flew away, four times, five times, until his arms gave out and he lay on his side with his hands curled useless above his hips, six inches from where they were needed and unable to close the distance.
"Look at that," Amber said.
"I see it," Taylor said. Her voice had changed. The bright technician's interest was gone from it and there was something underneath now, softer and less sure. "Nicole, was that. That was a lot."
"He had a reflex to check." Nicole's voice was level as a ruler. "Now we know. The reflex is intact."
Jim rolled again. He put his forehead on the tile and ground it there, grinding a wet smear of sweat and tears against the floor, and his hips pumped once, twice, a dry, animal motion against nothing at all, and he heard Amber laugh, low and warm and genuinely delighted.
He got onto his knees. He did not know why. Somewhere in the wreckage of him the old wiring still fired, the wish to be upright, the wish to be a man on his knees rather than a body on the floor, and he pushed himself up onto all fours and then onto his knees and then he fell forward again, chest hitting the tile, arms splayed, because the motion of drawing his knees together had dragged something inside him across something else and the resulting flash of pain was so bright he lost the shape of his own hands.
The office was quiet except for him. The blinds ticked against the glass. Down the corridor the maintenance cart rolled on, indifferent. His sobs were the only real sound in the room, loud and ragged and without dignity, and he could not stop them, could not even slow them. He wept the way a child weeps, without reserve and without end.
He curled onto his side once more. This time his knees came up and his hands finally closed where they needed to go, cupped loosely and carefully around himself, doing nothing, offering nothing, only cradling, and the cradling was bearable now only because every nerve he had was so saturated with signal that the next touch barely registered above the roar.
"Jim." Nicole's voice, from somewhere above his shoulder.
He shook his head against the tile. Kept shaking it. It was the only part of him that still obeyed.
"Jim. Look at me."
He turned his head. His cheek was wet and stuck to the floor and lifting it hurt, and he looked up through strands of hair plastered flat across his eyes and found three faces above him in the grey office light. Taylor knelt closest, and there was something in her face now, a kind of aghast respect, the look you give a thing you have seen survive more than it should. Amber stood with her arms folded, one heel still hooked on the desk, her green eyes bright with something close to hunger, her mouth curved around a small, private satisfaction. Nicole crouched down to his level at last, elbows on her knees, and looked at him the way she looked at a mission report that had come back unusually expensive.
"Well," she said.
Jim tried to answer. What came out was a long, thin whine, no words in it, and he gave up on the trying and laid his cheek back down on the tile and let the sobs have him again. They rolled through him in waves, each one carrying a fresh pulse of pain up from between his legs, and there was nothing to do but ride them and wait and hope that, eventually, the tide would turn.
Above him, the three of them stayed exactly where they were, and none of them made any move at all to help him up.
At length Nicole uncrossed her arms and stood. She did not offer a hand. She looked down at the wet, wrecked shape of her new director and made a small sound through her nose that might, in another woman, have been pity.
"Taylor," she said. "Pull the blinds."
Taylor crossed the room and did it, cord rattling, and the office went dim and private. Amber had already retrieved her mallet from the desk and was turning it over in her hands again, patient as a woman at a bus stop. She had not stopped smiling since the first squeeze.
Somebody's shoe nudged Jim in the shoulder. Amber's, by the red sole.
"Say it, Jim. Say it out loud."
He was still curled on his side, hands cupped and useless over himself, cheek against the tile. It took him two tries to find his voice, and when he found it, it was a thread.
"Say what."
"Say we're just weak little girls," Amber said. "You were very clear about that an hour ago. Big strong man. Didn't hurt that bad. I believe the exact words were, you were just pretending."
Taylor laughed, short and bright. "He did say that."
"He did."
Jim shut his eyes. The tile under his face was cold and his own breath came back at him off the floor, warm. He knew the shape of the trap. It was the same trap he had built himself, this morning, on purpose, gift bags and red soles and a grin he had practiced.
"I was lying," he said.
"Say it properly."
He turned his face up off the floor, hair plastered flat, eyes swollen, and looked at the three of them standing over him in the dim room. He was the director. He had an office and a desk and a medical clearance and a name on a door, and none of it meant one thing on this floor, and he understood that now the way you understand gravity.
"You're not weak little girls," he said. "You broke me this morning, and then you did it again this afternoon, and you'll do it again tomorrow, and I lied when I said it didn't hurt, because it hurt more than anything has ever hurt me, and I liked it, and I would let you do it until I die. That's the truth. It was the truth the whole time."
Amber's smile widened by one degree, which was how much she allowed her face to move when she was genuinely pleased.
"See," she said to the others. "He can be taught."
Nicole had not moved from the edge of the light. She had her arms folded and one boot planted flat, and she watched the exchange the way she watched everything, reading it forward and back. When she spoke, it was to the room, not to Jim.
"Here's the problem," she said. "He embarrassed us. In his office, in front of his staff, on his first day, and he did it deliberately, and he had a reason, and the reason was that he wanted his balls obliterated. So we've given him what he wanted. Which means we've given him nothing." She tipped her head at the miserable shape of him on the tile. "Look at him. He's getting exactly what he asked for. That's not a punishment. That's a reward with extra steps."
Taylor glanced down at Jim, then back up. "So what do you want to do about it."
"I want him to earn it." Nicole walked a slow half-circle around him, and her boot heel struck the tile in two even beats. "He owes all three of us. Not for the lying. For the paperwork, and the gifts, and the grinning. That was disrespect, and disrespect isn't paid off with his own pain. It's paid off with ours."
She stopped at his head and looked down.
"Jim. You're going to use your mouth."
He lay very still. His heart was already going too fast.
"One at a time," Nicole said. "Each of us. You'll get one of us off with your tongue, and while you do, the other two will be doing what they do. I'm not going to tell you they'll be gentle. They won't be. Amber's mallet is right there and I have these boots and neither of us is interested in your comfort. You can stop whenever you want. But if you stop, you don't get to keep any of it, and we go home unhappy, and tomorrow you're a director in an office with three women who owe you nothing." She crouched down to his level, elbows on her knees, and looked into his face from a foot away. "Or you finish all three, and we walk out of here and we're even. Your call. Are you in."
He looked at her for a long moment. The ache between his legs had settled into something duller now, a low, heavy throb, and it was the kind of pain you could carry if you had to. He thought about the desk, and the bags, and the knees, and the count he had said out loud ten times. He thought about how much he wanted, more than anything, to be the reason any of these women made the sound he was about to try to make.
"I'm in," he said. "Taylor goes first."
Taylor's eyebrows went up. "Me?"
"You brought the socks," Jim said. "You should get them dirty."
Taylor looked down at her own feet, at the pale cashmere sheathing her calves, and something crossed her face that he had not seen there all day, a flicker of real unhappiness about the state of the socks and then, riding right behind it, an interest that swallowed the unhappiness whole.
"Oh," she said. "All right."
They did not give him much time to prepare. Nicole and Amber hauled him up off the tile by the elbows and set him on his knees, and this time they did not pin his arms, because both of them needed their hands for better work. Nicole crossed to the door and fetched something from the drawer of his own desk, a rolled leather kit, and laid it open on the blotter without ceremony, though she did not appear to need the mallet; the mallet was already in Amber's hand. Taylor pulled her cashmere down her legs and, for reasons only she knew, put them back on.
"Sit," Nicole told her, and nodded at the low chair in the corner.
Taylor sat. Jim was positioned between her knees on the floor, and when he looked up the long line of her from there, she was looking down at him with an expression that was half curiosity and half something softer, and she reached down and smoothed a strand of hair off his forehead, the same gesture she had used on him after the ten stomps, and he leaned into it before he could stop himself.
"Not yet," Nicole said. "Amber, behind him. I'll take the first shift. When I'm done, you're up."
Amber settled herself behind Jim's shoulders and hooked an arm under his chest, drawing his back up against her and leaning him forward so that his hips tilted back and everything between his legs hung free and swinging in the space behind his heels. She had her forearm braced across his sternum, and with her free hand she took hold of the back of his neck, low and firm, and pressed down.
"Go on, Director," she said into his ear. "Earn it."
He bent forward.
Nicole lifted the mallet off the desk. The first blow arrived before his mouth had even reached her, a heavy, flat, cushioned strike across the whole of his scrotum that made him jerk awake all over, and Amber's arm was the only thing that stopped him folding forward onto his face. The pain was not the wild bright thing of the knee or the boot. It was dense and deep and low, like being punched in the gut through his groin, and he made a short, strangled sound, and then he did what he had said he would do.
His mouth found her, and her hand came down into his hair, and behind him, patient and even and utterly unhurried, the mallet fell again.