Chapter 3: The Messages
Carol reached for the phone with a hand that still shook. Two messages from the unsaved number.
He knows where I am right now. The thought landed before the words did.
The first read: Physio room, back corridor. Grey door. You picked a busy afternoon. The second, sent four minutes later: Don't rush off. Kirk has better stamina than I do, and I'm on my way. I'll be watching the car park by four.
She turned the screen toward Kirk without meaning to. He leaned over her shoulder, still naked on the mat, and read it twice. Then the grin spread slow across his jaw.
"He's been here the whole time?" she said.
"Probably. Or he's guessed. With Caolain you never find out which, and that's the fun of it." Kirk rolled onto his side, propping his head on one thick arm. "You understand what this is now, don't you? The two of us. It's a game. The prize keeps changing hands."
"And what if the prize doesn't want to play?"
Kirk looked at her, at the red silk bunched on the mat, at her flushed face in the mirror. "Then he goes home and I go home and nobody says a word. That's the other rule." He tapped the screen where the second message sat. "But you're still holding the phone. You haven't deleted anything. So."
Carol looked at the message. I'll be watching the car park by four. Her thumb hovered, and did not delete.
"Get dressed," Kirk said, gathering his vest off the floor. "You've got forty minutes."
*
The hotel was ten minutes from the gym, all dark wood and low lamps, the kind of bar where business men took women who were not their wives. Carol had said nothing to Chatura beyond that she was meeting a friend for a drink. He had nodded at his laptop. Ten years of nods.
Caolain was already at a corner table, black turtleneck again, a whiskey untouched in front of him. His grey eyes moved over her face the way they had in the ballroom, unhurried, cataloguing.
"You read the messages," he said, standing.
"You're a frightening man."
"I'm a precise man. Sit." He pushed the chair out for her. "How is Kirk's stamina?"
"Bragged about, apparently."
He laughed, a short quiet sound, and ordered her wine without asking what she drank. They talked for twenty minutes about nothing, about Leeds, about the party, about the way Chatura laughed with his head thrown back, and the whole time his attention never wavered, and it felt like being the only lit window in a dark street.
Then he set his glass down. "I have a room upstairs. It's quiet, and the bar is starting to fill, and I'd rather have you somewhere the waiters can't count how many times you look at my mouth."
Carol's wine stopped halfway to her lips. "Just you?"
"Just me." He met her eyes and did not blink. "Whether anyone else is up there is a different question, and you can ask it when we reach the door."
Her pulse was already climbing. She put down the glass. "Then take me to the door."
The lift rose in silence. His hand lay at the small of her back, and this time it was touch, real touch, heat through the fabric of her dress. The corridor was carpeted and dim. He slid the keycard, and the door swung open onto a room with one lamp lit and a big bed, and Kirk sitting on the edge of it in a clean shirt, hands on his knees, waiting like a man who had been promised something.
"Evening, love," Kirk said.
Carol stood in the doorway. Caolain's chest pressed warm against her back.
"You said just you."
"I said you could ask at the door." His mouth was at her ear. "Kirk's here because I want to watch him again, and because he wants to watch me. And because you've spent two weeks thinking about us both. That was never a guess, Carol. It's the only thing you think about now. So." His hand slid around her throat, light, no pressure at all, just there. "Ask me what you want to ask."
She looked at Kirk on the bed, at the lamp burning low, at the door she could still walk out of. Her heart was a fist against her ribs.
"Both of you," she said. "At once. Is that what this is?"
"If you say yes." Caolain turned her face toward his and kissed her, slow and deep, while Kirk rose off the bed and closed the door behind her.
They undressed her between them, unhurried, four hands peeling the dress down over her hips, the red silk beneath drawing a low sound out of Kirk. "She wore them again," he said, and Caolain answered, "She always will now."
They laid her on the bed on her back. Caolain knelt by her head and Kirk between her thighs, and she reached for both of them at once, one hand closing around each man, unable to choose. Kirk's mouth went to her breast. Caolain's fingers slid down her stomach and inside her, and she was wet already, shameless, her hips lifting off the sheets.
"Show us," Caolain said. "You came here wanting something. Touch yourself. Show us what you want."
The words burned through her. She slid her own hand down over his, then past it, fingers finding herself, circling, and she did it in front of them both, in the lamplight, a married woman touching herself on a hotel bed while two men watched her with dark, fixed attention. Kirk groaned and pressed his mouth lower, his tongue joining her fingers, and she cried out and pressed harder, chasing it, and came with her back arching off the mattress, her whole body shuddering while Caolain held her throat and whispered yes, again, again.
They gave her no time to come down. Kirk knelt up and drove into her in one long stroke, bare, thick, and she wrapped her legs around him. Above her, Caolain turned her face and pressed himself to her lips, and she opened her mouth and took him, tasting salt and skin, sucking him slow while Kirk pounded into her, the two rhythms pulling her apart in the best way.
"I want more," she gasped when she could speak, pushing at Kirk's chest. "I want both. Together."
The men looked at each other over her body, and something passed between them, some old fluency.
"Say it plain," Caolain said.
"Both of you. At the same time. Inside me."
Kirk withdrew, and they rearranged her like something precious. Caolain lay back on the bed and pulled her astride him, and she sank down onto his cock with a long, broken moan, taking him deep. Then Kirk knelt behind her, and she felt his oiled fingers working her, opening her, one and then two, patient as he always was.
"Relax," he murmured against her shoulder. "Tell me to stop whenever."
"Don't stop."
The blunt head of him pressed against her, and the stretch was enormous, impossible, and then it gave and he pushed slowly in, both of them inside her at once, Caolain's length in her body and Kirk filling her from behind, the pressure so total she could hardly breathe. Caolain swore under her, his hands locked on her hips. For a moment they were all three still, joined, her body stuffed and shivering between them.
"Move," she whispered. "Please. Move."
Caolain thrust up as Kirk drew back, and the counter-rhythm found itself, slow at first, then faster, every stroke dragging against every part of her at once. She was sobbing with it, moaning into Caolain's neck, held between the two of them, full past anything she had ever known.
"I'm going to come," she heard herself say. "I'm, oh God, both of you, I'm coming."
She shattered between them, clenching around both cocks, and they kept moving her through it, and when Caolain groaned and spilled deep inside her she felt Kirk follow seconds after, both of them pulsing, filling her, her body holding everything they gave.